Edward Krasiński's "Overhead Sculptures": A Manifestation of Modernity

Krasiński's composition was suspended in air, it was floating by a miracle of levitation—above the grass, on which it left its red splashes, initially it moved vertically upwards, then, turning suddenly in a horizontal direction, it visibly gained a force through a length, that faded from black to white; then, after losing its continuity, it imposed itself after an interval (full of the expectation of a stroke) with its sharp, more and more red spike piercing the horizon. The creation caused me to exclaim with surprise: that is an "aerial creation," newness. When I came closer, I understood the miracle of levitation: Krasiński stretched his "spear of the atomic age" … on the thin wires strung between the trees. But the wires were invisible, the speeding spear had, in the eyes of the viewer, its own gravitational field.

Julian Przyboś, "Overhead sculptures"¹

Polish poet and art critic Julian Przyboś (1901–1970) drew upon interwar avant-garde ideas to apply the concept of "overhead sculptures" to the linear sculptural compositions entitled Dzidy (The Spears), by the artist Edward Krasiński (1925–2004), who presented his work at the second (1964) and third (1965) Koszalin Plein-air exhibitions in Osieki (Poland).² The epigraph, which refers to a significant moment in Krasiński's oeuvre, captures the purpose of this article: to present the cycle of the artist's "overhead sculptures" as a manifestation of modernity.

Polish modernism originated in the concepts of artists connected with the prewar group "a. r." from Łódź (Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Julian Przyboś). The political and artistic situation in the post-World War II Polish People's Republic in which Krasiński lived and worked serves as a background for discussing the commonalities between Krasiński's art and ideas of interwar avant-garde art and postwar theories, thus emphasizing the idea of modernity in the title "overhead sculptures."³ There are heretofore unappreciated connections between interwar avant-garde experiments and Krasiński's works, especially his Spears compositions, which are based in the cultural reality of a postwar East European country.

Krasiński was born in 1925, in Lutsk in Volhynia (today's Ukraine), to an aristocratic family. During World War II, he studied interior design and graphics at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, established by the Germans in occupied Kraków (1940–1942). From 1945 to 1948, he studied painting at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts. In 1954, Krasiński moved to Warsaw, where he began making press illustrations. From the start, Krasiński was involved with the "galerie autorskie" environment—the independent, to a limited extent, art galleries, like Warsaw's Krzywe Koło, founded by artists and critics during the communist era.⁴ Following the gallery's closure in 1966, Krasiński teamed up with art critics (including Wiesław Borowski, Hanna Ptaszkowska, and Mariusz Tchorek), as well as the artists Zbigniew Gostomski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Henryk Stażewski to cofound the Foksal Gallery.⁵ In the 1950s, his paintings could be seen as surrealistic poetics. In the early 1960s, Krasiński began making relief and spatial painting-objects out of slats, hinges, and wire. The next stage of his artistic activity was marked by "Spears"—sculptural compositions which, exposed in an open space thanks to almost invisible wire, gave the impression of movement. Line, a leading form of expression in Krasiński's spatial "interventions," was primarily shaped with rigid materials such as wire, plastic, or wood (which the artist exchanged for soft cable coil at the end of the decade).⁶ At this time too, Krasiński began marking the space with blue strip—Scotch-Blue tape that appeared independently from surrounding objects. This technique gave unique conceptual form to his works and has become Krasiński's "trademark."⁷ It also set him against the official art supported by Polish communist authorities, for whom Krasiński's work appeared to clash with the acceptable artistic landscape.

Although much has been published about culture and art in the Soviet satellite countries, important aspects regarding...