Przemyslaw Strozek

This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin.

During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel.

This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.

Polish-Moroccan artistic relations during the Cold War are part of
a broader historical phenomenon of the political and cultural rapprochement
between the countries of the Eastern Bloc and those
of the Global South. Ahmed Cherkaoui in Warsaw is a chronological
overview of these relations, initiated by the arrival of Farid Belkahia
in Warsaw in 1955. The book focuses on Moroccan artists who studied
at art schools in Warsaw and Kraków, as well as the Film School in
Łódź. Ahmed Cherkaoui was the first student from the independent
Kingdom of Morocco at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw to receive
scholarship. The book reconstructs his ‘Warsaw period’, offers insight
into the milieu of other Moroccan art students in Poland, as well as
Roman Artymowski’s collaboration with Moroccan artists and students
in Asilah. The publication focuses on socialist art of the 1950s,
matter painting and abstract art of the 1960s, as well as academic
art, experimental film, conceptual practices and the graphic art of
the late 1970s against the background of the artistic and political
transformations of the global Cold War.

This essay explores the presence of Eastern Bloc artists at the Olympiad of Art in Seoul (1988) at a time when there were no diplomatic relations between South Korea and the socialist/ communist states in Europe. In the wider geopolitical context, the promotion of Eastern European arts was in line with Nordpolitik (Northern Policy): the South Korean government brought Eastern Europe to its side and isolated North Korea from its allies. The essay discusses the political uses of the 1988 Olympic Games and the Olympiad of Art as a groundbreaking event that contributed to the establishment of bilateral cultural relations between South Korea and the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Both the Olympic Games and the Olympiad of Art (1988) also contributed to a refreshing image of Eastern Europe in South Korea. Moreover, they foreshadowed a commencement of the new line of artistic exchanges when diplomatic relations between both regions in 1989-1991 were established.

This article focuses on conceptual practices by Moroccan artist Abdelkader Lagtaâ, whose early 1970s work, created as a part of Polish conceptual milieus in Łódź and Warsaw, remains undocumented in art-historical scholarship. The author rediscovers Lagtaâ’s practices as part of conceptual strategies in Eastern Europe and discusses his work in relation to Okwui Enwezor’s article “Where, What, Who, When: A Few Notes on ‘African’ Conceptualism.” The author argues that while Enwezor and, later, other scholars, including Olu Oguibe and Salah M. Hassan, critique the work by African conceptualists to and through conceptualist strategies prevalent in Africa and the West, Lagtaâ’s work was almost entirely situated in the linguistic, performative, new media, and mail art experiments characteristic of Eastern Europe. While the work of conceptual artists from the African continent identified by Enwezor remained on the margins, outside of international and noninstitutional artistic circuits, Lagtaâ’s work was an intrinsic part of the early 1970s collective experiments and transnational networks of artistic exchange between Eastern Europe and other geographical regions.

The aim of this article is to connect the history of Red Sport International (RSI) with the history of Constructivist Art in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the years of 1921–1928. It investigates the various ways in which avant-garde artists were engaged in promoting worker sports. It shows then how it differed from traditional sport-themed artworks as Constructivists intended to reject museums and galleries in favour of creating art for proletarian masses. Architectural sketches, photomontages, postcards, photography, film, sport, and artistic magazines were the means by which artistic propaganda of RSI in Russia and Czechoslovakia up to the 1st Spartakiad in Moscow and the 2nd Spartakiad in Prague (1928) evolved. Showing a range of artistic projects made by Constructivists from Vkhutemas school in Russia and Devětsil members in Czechoslovakia this article shows that the ideas of fighting for socialism promoted by RSI took place not only in the field of sports, but also in the artistic field – in the field of physical and visual culture alike.

This text explores deliberations on sport and art in French, Polish and Czech Avant-garde Magazines after the World War I and before Paris Olympics in 1924. It shows, how Parisian Magazine L'Esprit Nouveau influenced Devetsil circle in Czechoslovakia as well as Zwrotnica circle in Poland, when looking at relationships between sport and art. In this context it intends to link the research on the avant-garde magazines with the history of sport. This allows to show a wider perspective on how sport shaped the avant-garde aesthetics and influenced avant-garde artists that began to rec­ ognize the importance of sport in cultural and socio-political contexts.

Drawing on artistic experiments by Hugo Ball, the Berlin Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, T. Lux Feininger, Fortunato Depero, and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, this article investigates the relationship between photography and performance in the context of avant-garde approaches to staged photography. Utilizing the category of the theatrical as proposed by Philip Auslander, the author argues that Dadaist experimentations with photography hinged on the replacement of a live audience with the camera. This artistic activity also involved an understanding of this medium as a site facilitating the construction of one’s identity, a sentiment echoed too in the performative portraits of Witkacy and Depero. Photographs thus served to document the performing Self. However, the latest scholarship and curatorial practice have tended to categorize these photographs as avant-garde portraits in order to create a linear history of staged photography that overlooked the problematic relationship between photography and performance. The contribution this article therefore makes is to reread the significance of avant-garde approaches to photography and performance in light of this problematic, providing an overview of the distinct uses of photography and performance across a range of avant-garde practices and in the work of distinct avant-garde artists.

This study is dedicated in its major part to visual representations of footballers in Soviet Russia prior to World War II. It discusses the stylistic transformations that ccurred in artistic praxis in Avant-garde and Socialist Realist art through the lens of football. Football served to represent modernity and new political agendas, and was clearly an intrinsic part of the cultural revolution connected to physical culture propaganda.
This study analyses footballer motifs in works by Kasimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova, Aleksandr Rodchenko and the October group, Gustav Klutsis, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Samokhvalov and Aleksandr Deineka. Its aim is to open up broader perspectives for future studies of football in Avant-garde art and Socialist Realism in other regions of Eastern Europe.

This essay examines the relationships between football and art in Poland since the launch of the first 1921 Polish Football Championship until 2012, when the European Cup was held in Poland and Ukraine, testifying to a veritable craze for the national game, and cementing football’s place in cultural discourse. From pre-war painterly references to football, through Neo-avant-garde tendencies in the 1970s, to young Polish art, football has signified multiple meanings within national/transnational and gender discourse. Through the lens of artistic references to football this paper aims to comment on the cultural and social conditions around masculinity and star culture, and to reflect the broader social and political currents of contemporary Poland.

GINA SEVERINIEGO POCIĄG PANCERNY W AKCJI " Wojna obecna jest najpiękniejszym poematem futurystycznym, jaki się dotychczas ukazał " 1 – mówił Filippo Tommaso Marinetti w jednym z wywiadów w lutym 1915 r. Wojna, nazwana już w Manifeście futuryzmu " jedyną higieną świata " 2 , realizować się miała nie tylko w sferze kulturalnej w postaci walki o nową literaturę i sztukę, lecz również bezpośrednio w czasie rzeczywistych operacji wojskowych. Mari-netti uczestniczył jako korespondent lub wolontariusz we wszystkich niemal operacjach wojennych Italii: w konflikcie zbrojnym z Turcją o Libię w 1911 r., podczas pierwszej wojny bałkańskiej (1912–1913), w okupacji Fiume (1919–1920), na froncie w Etiopii (1935–1936) oraz w dwóch wojnach światowych. To wojna była w jego przekonaniu najczystszą i prawdziwie dynamiczną sztuką futuryzmu. Była czymś w rodzaju futurystycznej sztuki totalnej, łącząc w sobie teatr, muzykę, architekturę, poezję i sztuki pla-styczne 3. W manifeście Estetica futurista della guerra z 1935 r. Marinetti zaznaczał: " Wojna jest piękna, ponieważ ogień dział, kanonady, przerwy w oddawaniu ognia, perfumy i odór rozkładu jednoczy w symfonii. Wojna jest piękna, ponieważ stwarza nowe architektury, jak architektura wielkich czołgów, geometryczne formy eskadr lotniczych, spirale dymu unoszące się z płonących wiosek " 4. Wojna powoływała ponadto do życia człowieka mechanicznego, karmionego ideami męskiego heroizmu oraz " ewangelią czynu ". Zroś-nięty z nowoczesnymi maszynami wojennymi: czołgami i samolotami, miał przezwyciężyć tradycyjny sentymentalizm i dekadentyzm charakterystyczny dla zachodniej cywilizacji. Wojna była dla Marinettiego nie tylko kategorią estetyczną, ale również środkiem, mającym zapewnić zwycięstwo w politycznych rozgrywkach. Idee militaryzmu, imperializmu i " panitalianizmu " 5 od samego początku zawierały się w jego politycznym programie. Dlatego też nie bez powodu wieść o wybuchu wojny została przywitana przez futurystów z ogromnym entuzjazmem. W sierpniu 1914 r. jako pierwsi

The article is an attempt to answer the question to what degree a group of people associated with the Polski Theatre in Warsaw was interested in introducing an Italian Futurist drama into the theatre's repertory. Popularity of mechanical ballets in Europe and the ubiquitous ideas of fusing man and machine on the stage had, in the case of Italian Futurism, reached its highpoint in the drama by Ruggero Vasari, L'angoscia delle machine (1925), which talks about a conflict between men-machines and women, the last human beings in existence. The play gained considerable fame and was translated into several languages, including Polish. The Polish translation was completed by Irena Krzywicka, and letters by Krzywicka, Vasari and Jalu Kurek kept in Polish and Italian archives testify that there were plans to stage the play at the Polski Theatre in Warsaw in the season of 1926/27. Based on this body of correspondence, the article describes Krzywicka's and Szyfman's preparations for the premiere and Vasari's contacts with the literary and artistic circles in Poland. It analyses the factors that led Szyfman to abandon the production which could have become the world premiere of L'angoscia. In the end, the premiere took place at the Art et Action Theatre in Paris in 1927.

Tegoroczna edycja marokańskiej wystawy prowokuje do licznych pytań wokół współczesnego świata/rynku artystycznego. Jakie ma znaczenie taka forma działalności dla samego miasta i lokalnych społeczności? I czy jest ono rzeczywiście znaczącym głosem o obliczu newralgicznych problemów o globalnej skali?