e-flux and Muzeum Sztuki are pleased to announce the release of Theory of Seeing, the first English translation of the radical and influential theory of art by Władysław Strzemiński, a leader of Poland’s avant-garde.
After World War II, socialist realism became the official state doctrine of art in Poland, with abstract works deemed counterrevolutionary and forbidden from public view. Władysław Strzemiński, a leader of the Polish constructivist avant-garde, developed a treatise of visual consciousness as a foundation for progressive art, emphasizing art’s autonomy. His application of Marxist aesthetics to the physiology of seeing is expressed in Theory of Seeing, which was published posthumously in 1958 by his students from notes collected from his lectures.
Preceding the comparable perspectives developed by Jacques Rancière, David Hockney, and John Berger, and even the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing introduces the radical and groundbreaking ideas of one of Poland’s most important artists to English-speaking audiences for the first time.
Printed and distributed by The University of Minnesota Press, this volume features a text by Daniel Muzyczuk that precedes the translation by Klara Kemp-Welch and Wanda Kemp-Welch. Theory of Seeing can be purchased here.
Paperback, 312 pages, 7 x 10 inches, 217 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 9781517920814
“Abstract art needed no excuse after World War I, still less after World War II: those were the years when it acquired purpose. Abstract art became the ever more refined messenger for a modern world that might be seen beyond appearances, it announced new orders of vision, it gave the future something more than an image, it invoked its form. Władysław Strzemiński was one such abstract artist.
A host of fellow travellers in the avant-gardes of Europe and the new Soviet Union went to work on parallel tracks and produced not only a new foundation for modern art, film and design, but also a literature of aesthetics which is still read avidly, as various and aspirational as it is rich (the list typically begins with Walter Benjamin, then László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Roger Fry, Kazimir Malevich, Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, Sergei Eisenstein, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, Alexander Dorner, Henri Focillon, and on and on). The industrial revolution finally had appropriate cultural expression but it was marked by dim, slippery, competing forking paths. No matter, artists and writers headed out to find vision again.
Strzemiński also wrote. He was not the first to emphasize the realism in the quest. In his last, unfinished book, Theory of Seeing, Strzemiński instinctively turned to embrace the entire history of art, to see through appearances at the scale of world historical change. At the same time he articulated a theory for vision, by which he meant its mysterious purpose. With each passing year, seeing through appearances with realism had been ever more critical. It still is. That Strzemiński’s book has come in English translation seems fated: in its gist this is a book for our times.”
—Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair, Vassar College
“Posthumously published in 1958, Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing is a crucial exemplar of what is required today. While enduring Stalinist oversight, Strzemiński managed to produce a book that reveals the relationship between visual perception, art production, and historical cultural ideology. Its incompletion is part of its power. Today’s reader is obliged to push forward from Strzemiński’s insights and begin their own forensic examination of the way in which today’s art manifests in relation to new subjectivities and political fragmentation. Art changes. There is no idealistic aesthetic. Strzemiński’s proof is our provocation.”
—Liam Gillick