Dorota Jarecka’s book is an important contribution to the knowledge of Polish art history ‘just after the war’. The author draws on contemporary methodological proposals in psycho-analytically and critically and feminist-oriented art history, as well as on the achievements of the new humanities. She captures historical relationships not within binary oppositions, but complex networks (rizomatic) and shuffling layers or planes (plateau). The relativisation of the relationships between Marxism, realism and surrealism, captures the innovative character of the work, which, in place of an event-driven history, posits a discursive (critical) history destabilised in the political field by elements of the system under study: ideology, aesthetics, art.
This is an outstanding work. It reads the momentous area of Polish culture through the prism of art and art criticism, and is consciously and integrally multidisciplinary. It reflects the multidirectional wanderings of notions and images in the milieu of the artistic left. The accepted understanding of Surrealism as, above all, a mental, intellectual and artistic formation, approving of a free repertoire of values rather than a style, is of fundamental importance. The network structure makes it possible to place a multitude of facts, events and works, allows for a far-reaching game of associations, and at the same time raises questions about the criteria for their selection, about boundary conditions, about limits. It is open to the neighbourhood - literary criticism, the emerging Marxism in art research, the consequences of the war trauma, the challenges of the new political situation, the relations and dependencies between aesthetics and politics. The key to the new approach is to overcome the sharp separation of the new era just after the war from the wartime catastrophe and the pre-war years. By bracketing the magical, disjunctive dates, it is possible to restore cultural continuity and mark change.
publisher: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN
