Kobro & Strzemiński: New Art in Turbulent Time

The story of KatarzynaKobro (–) and Władysław Strzemiński (–), two of the most prominent artists of the Polish avant-garde, embraces many central aspects of early modernism and abstraction. This is reflected in the exhibitionNewArt inTurbulent Time at Moderna Museet in Malmö. The “turbulent time” the exhibition title refers to contain the complex issue of national identity, visible in the biographical story of the two artists, presented in a wall text at the exhibition entrance. A summary of both this and central concepts were also presented in the free booklet. Both artists were born in Russia: Strzemiński to Polish parents in Minsk in Belarus, Kobro to a German/ Latvian father and a Russian mother in Moscow. During the First World War, Strzemiński served in the Russian Sapper Army until he got heavily wounded in , eventually leading to him losing an arm and a leg. He moved to Moscow, where he met Kobro when studying art at the Free State Art Workshops (SVOMAS). They became a pair and moved to Smolensk where they ran the local branch of UNOVIS (“advocates for the new art”). In the shift – they fled the USSR’s increasingly hardened cultural climate that among other things, led to the closing of UNOVIS for Vilnius, which then was a part of the recently resurrected nation state of Poland. Being born to Polish parents, Strzemiński could claim citizenship. Kobro, on the other hand, had to enter as an illegal refugee and was compelled to move to Riga while waiting for the marriage to become valid in Poland, only to become, in time, a central part of the Polish avant-garde. When following how the story of Kobro and Strzemiński unfolds in the exhibition and catalogue, one is also struck of how emblematic it is of the early avant-garde. First, the struggling artists had to fight for recognition of their new art through self-organized exhibitions. In this case, we find the New Art Exhibition in Vilnius in , organized by Strzemiński with other Polish and Lithuanian artists. When moving to Warsaw, Strzemiński and Kobro formed the art group Blok, which had their first exhibition in an automobile showroom. Second, the internal turmoil that followed led the artists to regroup in other constellations, and third, the artists formed a theoretical position of their own, including a new concept: Unism. First discussed by Strzemiński in relationship to painting in the small book Unism in Painting, published by Praesens, the second group the two artists belonged to. Unism was later developed in the essay “Composing space: calculating space-time