Authors

Discussion

This paper discusses how sculptor and art theorist Katarzyna Kobro (1898-1951) brought out her art to the public sphere in Poland and abroad, participating in the Polish avant-garde’s broader effort to promote modern art in state institutions. Kobro emigrated to Poland from Russia in 1921, following her husband and artistic collaborator Władysław Strzemiński. Her position as a foreign woman who did not speak or write fluent Polish presented personal and professional obstacles in a new country. Still, she actively contributed to avant-garde periodicals, formulated and published her own art theories, networked with artists abroad, and participated in founding the International Collection of Modern Art in Łódź. After World War II, she maintained agency over her legacy by donating her oeuvre to the Museum of Art in Łódź. 

This paper will analyze how Kobro engaged with state institutions and exhibitions, used printed media to circulate the reproductions of her work, and argued her art theories in writing. It will also highlight some archival gaps and recent archival discoveries that explain how her achievements were first obscured and then mythologized in the twentieth-century historiography.