Polish Modernism and Jewish Identity

Modernist painter, socialist realist, Holocaust survivor, and student of the Parisian Avant Garde, Jewish-Polish artist Henryk Streng was extraordinary for his aesthetic innovation during the two major traumas of 20th-century European history, the Holocaust and Stalinism. Yet his legacy in the development of European modernism is rarely acknowledged. In this book, inspired by the 2021 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Piotr Slodkowski demonstrates that the work of Streng disrupts established notions of 20th-century Polish art, connecting local Polish art history with wider 20th-century artistic movements and styles.

Traversing the 1920s Académie Moderne, hubs of creativity in interwar Poland, Nazi concentration camps, and the Polish People’s Republic under Soviet influence, this book reveals the changing artistic phenomena of Poland between the 1920s and 1950s, illustrating how Streng drew on his Jewish-Polish identity and the legacy of genocide in his work. Rather than deferring to the French Avant Garde, Slodkowski sheds light on regional expressions of modernism and emphasises the complexity of identity and creativity in 20th-century Poland. In doing so, this book brings Streng out of the shadows and into wider considerations of modernist European art and its development.

Piotr Slodkowski is Assistant Professor in the the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. He was curator of Henryk Streng/Marek Wlodarski and Jewish-Polish Modernism at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. His research focuses on Polish interwar art and art after 1939, with special attention to complex relations between the Holocaust, modernism, “engaged” art and socialist realism.

Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USA, having received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages from Columbia University, USA. Her research on culture in state socialist Eastern Europe has been published in journals such as Slavic Review.