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82 BOOliS The question of The Future of Culture: the ‘End’ of ‘Culture’? is raised in the title of the final section, which offers no clear answer. It starts with a detailed examination of contemporary drama, mostly European, in an essay called ‘Culture, Property and the Theater’ by Hans Mayer, who left a post in East Germany, following criticism by the Communist Party, to teach in Hanover. At considerable length, Stefan Morawski, once professor of aesthetics at Warsaw University and now associated with the editor in developing a work on Marxist aesthetic thought, attempts to define ‘What Is a Work of Art?’ Referring largely to recent avant-garde developments in the plastic arts, he asserts that: ‘Awareness of the problematic aspect of all phenomena . . .at the beginning of our century ...cast every long-preserved world-view into doubt . . . . The anti-mimetic trend [of art] categorically [how about that, professor Kettle? L.R.] overthrew the principle, accepted by the European tradition since the Renaissance, that the existence of art was founded on the imitation of reality.’ He proceeds from the Nabis and Matisse, CCzanne and the Cubists, to report favorably in detail on ‘a world of imagination’ created by their successors , ‘which however did not lack references to reality, and was in no sense barren of all objectivity and spaciousness ’. Baxandall contributes a concluding article on ‘Spectacles and Scenarios: A Dramaturgy of Radical Activity’, embodying his somewhat cryptic counsel for the future in two pseudonymous fabrications, one purporting satirically to be a speech by a public relations expert, called a ‘Spectacle Manager’, to a meeting of the Rand Corporation . The recommendations of the second, ending with endorsement of Fourier’s ‘cabalism’ (which may be as unfamiliar to most readers as it is to this reviewer) as one of the ‘best previsions of universalized scenarism’, are too highly concentrated and depend on too many references to esoteric antecedents for judgment in a cursory examination . A broad perspective is offered in this collection, which will agree and disagree with each reader’s preconceived opinions but is bound to extend them in considerable degree. Some essays, however, will have little meaning for those who lack familiarity with relatively esoteric or parochial sources in foreign literature and worldwide radical ideology. Constructivism in Poland, 1923-1936. Museum of Fine Arts, Lodz, Poland, 1973. 206 pp., illus. Paper. Reviewed by Alfred Werner* Constructivism is often believed to be, and even desscribed as, a predominantly Russian phenomenon. Yet, as the present book (an exhibition catalogue, with texts in English, Dutch and German, issued by the Museum Sztuki (‘The Arts’) at Lodz for shows in 1973 at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and at the Rijksmuseum Kroeller Mueller, Otterlo) convincingly demonstrates, the Polish innovators did not lag behind Russian ones, such as Gabo, Lissitzky, Malevich, Pevsner and Tatlin, and, indeed, developed along parallel lines in the direction of nonfigurative art. Around 1920, Constructivism was ‘in the air’. Some Polish artists broke with the prevailing bland imitation of Impressionism and Art Nouveau as early as 1913. The first constructivist exhibition occurred on Polish territory only a decade later, when seven artists, among them Henryk Stazewski and Wladyslaw Strzeminski , staged a group show that indicated a complete turn in aesthetics. The program of the group encouraged the use of new elements for construction, the employment of hitherto neglected materials, such as iron, glass and cement: ‘There is nothing in a picture except what is there: direct interaction of plastic forms organized into a single whole’, was the credo of the seven pioneers. *‘Pantheon’, 230 West 54th St., New York, NY 10019, U.S.A. This was one of the countless manifestos issued by unconventional artists in Poland during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Many of these statements by constructivists are reproduced in this catalogue, yet with a caution by one of the scholars who assembled the book against ‘expecting any neat and consistent aesthetic theory’. With disarming frankness, Piotr Graff adds: ‘Those people were practical artists and not sophisticated academic theory-mongers. Striving to evolve a system of what they believed to be a philosophy of art and life, they drew, sometimes awkwardly, from the most sundry and often incompatible sources...

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