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“Splice experts”. Women of the Lviv avant-garde Małgorzata Radkiewicz
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In Lviv, programmes and manifestos did not seem necessary, because intellectual and artistic cooperation was based on intensive social contacts, ensuring a sense of co-belonging and community.

In February 1933, the Avant-garde Film Club was founded in Lviv, bringing together local enthusiasts of cinema: academics, intellectuals, publicists and artists. The founders of the Club were: Stefan Kawyn, Bolesław Lewicki and Tadeusz Hollender, later joined by such people as Stanisław Skoda, Adam Lenkiewicz, Otto Hahn, Zofia Kawynowa, Zofia Lissa and Danuta Morawiecka; the group of cinema enthusiasts also included Wanda Diamand, a photographer running an art salon in her studio, and Margit Reich-Sielska, a painter and co-founder of the “Artes” Association of Artists together with her husband Roman Sielski. Both women, active in the artistic and social spheres, certainly shared the club members’ commitment to culture, expressed in the first issue of the “Avant-garde” magazine they founded: “We do not proclaim new programmes, we do not preach new slogans and truths of life – we want to fight an independent struggle for truth, for an objective rendering of things going on in theatre, cinema and radio […]. It is about creating our own new and separate culture – with the emphasis on culture.” The creative activity of Diamand and Reich-Sielska can be considered an original contribution to this new and separate culture which allowed women to express themselves freely and achieve self-fulfilment. Equally avant-garde in their activities were other Lviv women who did not belong to the Film Club, but remained within the sphere of influence of modernist visions and ideas: dancer and choreographer Bela Katzowa and artist-photographer Janina Mierzecka.

In Lviv, programmes and manifestos did not seem necessary, because intellectual and artistic cooperation was based on intensive social contacts, ensuring a sense of co-belonging and community. Before a permanent headquarters was found, meetings of the Avant-garde Film Club took place in Wanda Diamand’s photographic studio, where members could meet the “Artesans” hosted there: Bruno Schulz and his friend Debora Vogel. The importance of Vogel in the cultural and intellectual landscape of pre-war Lviv is evidenced by the fact that she inspired the exhibition “Montaże” [Montages] which took place at the Łódź Art Museum in 2017 as part of the celebration of the Polish avant-garde centenary. The exhibition was devoted to the “new legend of the city”, i.e. the newly interpreted Lviv avant-garde milieu, in which multicultural biographies and various professional careers intersected.

The metaphor of film editing or montage reflects the character of Vogel’s work, who wrote essays and poetry in Polish and Yiddish, but also the kind of avant-garde creative attitude she was fascinated with, which sometimes took the form of collage. She wrote about modern paintings in her reflections: “And yet art shows reality, but not naturalistic reality. Because what would art be needed for if it offered nothing more than a reflection of the already known, ordinary reality?” These views were shared by Margit Reich-Sielska, who belonged to the group of so-called Lviv “surrealists”, who composed their paintings from motifs and scenes observed in Galician everyday life. She herself, apart from painting, was particularly passionate about photomontages, using fragments of photographs and press illustrations, as well as fabrics of various textures. Employing juxtaposed, often contrasting elements, she created her own visions of well-known motifs, which, thanks to the diversified surface of the image, literally gained a new dimension. In her work “Ewa” [Eve, 1934] she invoked a biblical motif, but her heroine, holding a large apple in her hand, resembles a contemporary woman whose image could be found in adverts for cosmetic products. The female figure, probably cut out of a press reproduction, was “modernised” by the artist with make-up and lush hair glued to the photo. Small elements of the composition demolished the myth of sinful femininity and moved it to the times of emancipation, in which the boudoir context, signalled by a fancifully attached fragment of lace in the background, acquired a new, rather humorous meaning.

As a member of the Film Club, Margit Reich-Sielska was certainly familiar with the achievements of the Soviet avant-garde, based on the idea of montage of attractions, i.e. juxtaposing frames of high aesthetic power and/or emotional intensity. This type of film editing required creativity, thanks to which the most prosaic situations and concepts gained a new appearance and meaning on the screen. It seems that the Lviv artist was particularly attracted by the ironic and critical potential of improvised juxtapositions of images, which allowed her to take a distanced look at the tradition of art and the conventions of representation, for example of the female body. In the collage “Akt” [Nude, 1934] the central place was occupied by a photograph of a naked woman lying on a draped fabric. And although her pose invokes well-known paintings, for example by Amedeo Modigliani, the composition of the painting is at odds with the stereotypical approach to this theme. The background is formed by wire mesh, creating a kind of curtain or fence, behind which there is a figure towards which two hands, a man’s and a child’s, are directed.

For Reich-Sielska, although she did not work with film, editing procedures as a creative tool remained as important as for directors. Her collages reflected Vogel’s philosophy propounded in a text about genealogy and the possibilities of photomontage: “The legend of modernity is a ‘fact’. […] The question arises for art: which facts are important? […] We must venture an opinion that facts become authentic only in a specific frame and at the same time in a certain interpretation of the raw material of life.” The author of the essay did not stop at theoretical reflection and she analysed the works of the “Artesans” in the Lviv magazine “Sygnały”. In the photomontage “Żaglowiec” [Schooner, 1934] Reich-Sielska saw the following: “A very painterly montage, consisting of a painted part and grey forms (the ship), and coloured photographic forms. The choice of different materials and textures of paper, and the introduction of fabrics expresses the contemporary tendency to worship the material, the consistency of the materials.” Vogel summed up this short analysis with a statement that the work resembles cubist paintings and sculptures composed of pieces.

The idea of montage was also taken up by the dancer and choreographer Bela Katzowa, whose biography can be recreated only partially, on the basis of advertisements published in the Polish-language Jewish daily “Chwila”. In the early 1930s she advertised there her workshops and classes at the Karol Szymanowski Conservatory of Music in Lviv. In her advertisements she mentioned her professional education gained during courses in the Vienna “Bodenwieser”, and emphasised the originality of her dance concept, the so-called “rhythmoplasty”. The workshops must have been popular, because Katzowa was commissioned to prepare choreography for the “Revue of Artistic Dances and Illustrated Song”. Invitations to the show at the “Nowości” (Colosseum) theatre were published by “Chwila” in May 1933. The costumes and decorations were designed by Ludwik Lille, an artist certainly familiar with the avant-garde idea of “rhythmoplasty”, especially as he was the chairman of the “Artes” Association. The effects of combining stage choreography and rhythmic visual composition by Katzowa are illustrated in the photographs published in an illustrated supplement to “Chwila”. The first one, showing her arrangement of Chassidic dances, presents a group of women in stylised costumes invoking both male gabardines and the Art Déco fashion in graphic design. The dancers perform their arrangement with panache, emphasising the plasticity of figures and gestures with every movement. The second photograph, probably taken during the performance, shows a group in a situation where both the dancers in futuristic costumes and a fragment of the stage design are visible. The whole is reminiscent of the German Expressionist style used in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927). Both photographs prove that Bela Katzowa not only fully mastered her concept of rhythmoplasty, but was also able to translate it into practical work with the body and into original dance productions.

No wonder that Katzowa’s achievements were closely followed by “Chwila”, edited in 1923–1939 by its co-founder Henryk Hescheles (pseudonym and cryptonym: Jerzy Zglicz, Henryk Trejwart). As an editor, he actively participated in the public (he was a city councillor) and cultural life of Lviv, commenting on political and social facts, but above all reporting on artistic and literary events. He was particularly passionate about theatre, and followed with unbridled enthusiasm the achievements of women, about whom he wrote extensive reviews. In Sprawa Dantona (The Danton Case, 1931) by Stanisława Przybyszewska he saw the most important work of the last decade, and he considered the controversial play “Sprawa Moniki” [The Monika Case, 1933] by Maria Morozowicz-Szczepkowska to be the most powerful voice since Gabriela Zapolska’s times.

The curators of the exhibition “Montaże” particularly highlighted the magazine “Sygnały”, underlining that it brought together members of the Lviv’s cultural milieu regardless of their ethnic origin and nationality. The most important was the community of interests and artistic and social goals, subordinated to modern concepts. Chwila had similar opinion-forming and culture-forming ambitions; under the leadership of Hescheles the daily promoted avant-garde ideas in art and in the approach to social issues. The most important Lviv events, including the opening of the Avant-garde Film Club, meetings of the “Artes” group and performances of Bela Katzowa, were recorded. The section “Z wydawnictwa” informed about new publications, including the publication of Debora Vogel’s new volume of poetry “Manekinen” [Mannequins, 1935] by the “Tsushteyer” journal. A short review added that her works were characterised by “an extraordinary ability to grasp life, its colours, movements and problems in plastic forms, hot with their breath and bold in concept”.

Similarly expressive were photographs by Wanda Diamand and Janina Mierzecka, which appeared in a special edition of “Chwila – Illustrated Supplement”. We know how Diamand looked mainly from the photograph taken by Aleksander Krzywobłocki, a frequent visitor of her art gallery, who portrayed her in the “Artes” style, standing in front of a mirror. The result is a multiplication of frames – the camera frame, the mirror frame, frames of pictures hanging on the walls – which gives the whole work a cubist character. The photograph mutates into a collage of many portraits and spaces, to some extent reflecting the character of the place – a studio which functioned as a venue for artistic meetings and discussions. Taking pictures, Diamand focused less on composition and more on the subject and the dynamics of events. The reproductions published in “Chwila” concern the Jewish tradition to a large extent, including street scenes, as in the series “Pictures from the Jewish district”, featuring a photograph of Orthodox Jews passing by the building with inscriptions in Polish and Yiddish, as well as Judaica.

The most interesting, however, are the photographs taken by Diamand in the streets of Lviv, showing its everyday life and customs, ordered by the cycle of seasons. In the photograph that illustrates the holiday issue, a crowd of children is queuing up for ice cream. You can only see the shop window and the ice cream shop’s signboard, with the window frame and inscriptions forming a composition that resembles the paintings of the “Artesans”, who painted Galician scenes. In the winter scenery, the photographer captured a scene of snow being taken away by huge trucks and thrown into the sewers – interestingly, not in the suburbs, but in St. Mary’s Square in the city centre. Both photos prove that Diamand did not part with her camera during walks and kept using it to capture the situations and people she encountered. From the perspective of women’s lives in interwar Lviv, the most interesting is the photograph captioned “The first holiday colony of the ‘Working Girls Club’ from Lviv, in Trostyan near Mykolaiv on the Dunajec”. This comprehensive description provides not only information on where the girls went for their holiday, but also to which social class they belonged. First of all, it shows that young working women constituted a large group within the city structures, and second, that they received support from organisations such as the Club, which provided them with summer outdoor recreation. From the notes in Chwila it appears that Diamand supported not only artists but also Jewish women from the working class, where it was not always easy for them to gain education and professional independence.

Lviv landscapes return in the photographs by Janina Mierzecka, who prepared whole cycles for the illustrated supplement to Chwila. The first one, entitled “From the life of the Jewish quarter”, depicts scenes from the marketplace, from shops and from streets filled with people. Penetrating Lviv’s backstreets with a camera fascinated Mierzecka so much that she once again went to the poorest districts to document the everyday life of children eating in the soup kitchens of the “Schronisko” (Shelter) charity, and at the same time, despite the difficult conditions, finding energy to ride a sledge. These observations were certainly useful to her in the “Working Hand” project, in which she combined the social and the artistic aspects of photography. Her contribution to the research carried out by her husband, a dermatologist Henryk Mierzecki, was to photograph the hands of labourers, physical work leaving its mark on them. Her photographs document diagnosed cases and at the same time show the toilworn hands in an extremely plastic form, like abstract sculptures.

Mierzecka was an active member of the Lviv Photographic Society and a collaborator of Henryk Mikolasch, with whom she ran a photography studio at the Lviv Polytechnic – a place for experiments with various photographic materials and photographic styles. As an artist, she believed that apart from experimentation, the most important goal of her pursuits was “unrestricted work in the field of artistic photography”. The proof of Mierzecka’s professional consistency is her participation in international and domestic exhibitions, including the 12th Exhibition of Polish Photography covered by “Chwila”. She presented her picture “Fisherman’s Port”, capturing flashes of light and reflections of boats on the surface of the water, giving the illusion of double exposure. Similar “painterly” shots can be found in the spring issue, where the artist published her impressions from the Lviv Market Square, filled with stalls selling spring vegetables, and from suburban areas – “permeated with blooming buds and spring clouds rushing headlong”.

Mierzecka’s passion, developed after the Second World War in Wrocław, was to photograph historical monuments and architecture. No wonder, then, that the most famous – and most controversial – building of modernist Lviv, the eight-storey Sprecher’s Office Building, as it was popularly called, appears in her camera frame. She also managed to portray the owner of the building, in a photo captioned “A small man for big business. Mr Jojne Sprecher in the company of his builder, Mr Kassler”. For Mierzecka, regardless of the subject matter, the individual style of photography was the most important part: “In no art discipline can the direction imposed from outside be maintained in the long run. It causes distortion of style and form, it produces a work that is dead, unexperienced, soulless. Art must come from the depths of our self, but it must be connected with life and use its possibilities.”

The lifestyle and achievements of the female artists from Lviv discussed here show how great was the contribution of Lviv’s women to the promotion of avant-garde ideas and their practical implementation in cultural and social life. Their artistic careers reflect the avant-garde fervour that reigned in interwar Lviv, which the magazine “Sygnały” considered to be “a city of constant communication, mixing of various elements, that is, a place which is constantly renewing itself”. Members of the Galician melting pot, between the West and the East, that is Vogel, Reich-Sielska, Katzowa, Diamand and Mierzecka, can be regarded as representatives of the “concept of inclusive, hybrid culture open to various traditions”, created in Lviv despite the growing anti-Semitic and chauvinist sentiments. Their biographies reflect in various ways the dynamics of the modern era, in which the avant-garde actions of women took place not only in art, but also in the sphere of personal choices and in social life.

Translated from the Polish by Tomasz Bieroń

Małgorzata Radkiewicz - graduate of film studies, works at the Institute of Audiovisual Arts at the Jagiellonian University. She deals with the issues of cultural identity in visual culture and contemporary cinema. She conducts research on women’s work in cinema, photography and art. Her interests are expressed in her publications: “W poszukiwaniu sposobu ekspresji. O filmach Jane Campion i Sally Potter” (2001) and “Władczynie spojrzenia. Teoria filmu a praktyka reżyserek i artystek” (2010). She also wrote |”Derek Jarman. Portret indywidualisty” (2003), “Młode wilki polskiego kina. Kategoria gender a debiuty lat 90.” (2006) and “Oblicza kina queer” (2014). She publishes in exhibition catalogues, anthologies and magazines















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