the revival of popular art in poland

International African Institute

The Revival of Popular Art in PolandAuthor(s): Antoni PlutynskiSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Oct., 1943), pp.200-208Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1156487 .

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THE REVIVAL OF POPULAR ART IN POLAND

ANTONI PLUTYNSKI

A a rule the effort to revive the vanishing art of the people in European countries has met with failure. Popular artistic handicraft is the result of the native

material needs of the folk, as well as of their spiritual need for expression in the

production of beautiful things. When the life of a tribe which has achieved through the centuries a harmonious equilibrium and unity becomes violently disturbed by outside influences, the chances of preserving the original manual arts are diminished or indeed lost.

The influences of tribe on tribe, of nation on nation, of continent on continent have always existed; but such infiltration has normally taken place so slowly that the

community has had time to integrate new things, new forms, new conceptions into the complex of its own life and environment. Foreign elements are then assimilated and adapted to the local material and artifacts, and to the needs and tastes to such an extent that it is often hard to distinguish their real derivation.

The coming of steam and electricity and the present age of the airplane have

brought such a wholesale inundation of foreign manufactured articles from distant continents that native crafts have been imperilled. The more skill and invention demanded in the facture of hand-made objects and the nearer their approach to a

high aesthetic standard, the more they are threatened by the low prices of articles

produced in mass in the modern factory. Original tribal craft in Europe, as in other continents, has gone through centuries

of constant change and perfecting of method, until at last there has emerged a certain

technique and usage admitting of no other-a certain form and design acknowledged by the people of a given locality as final, unalterable, and as sacred as prayer and ritual. Man, like Nature, by a process of persistent selection, arrives at the type of

thing he finds to be good. Respect for the efforts of long lines of ancestors, aesthetic need, feeling and sym-

pathy for those from whom an international civilization has taken what was theirs and given them instead the work of foreigners, resulted in an ideological movement to save the vanishing crafts of the rural community. In England this idea took root in Ruskin's time, and in Poland a little earlier, in the time of Norwid, in the forties of the nineteenth century. Such attempts to rescue this original and beautiful art of the people, on the verge of disappearing for ever, were not confined to the

assembling of the finest examples in State or private collections, but embraced an effort to revive and support workshops, to found new ones, to organize a demand for the articles, and to disseminate propaganda. Much energy and enthusiasm were invested in this work. But, on the whole, the results were negligible, in part because of the general conditions and in part because of the insufficient preparation of the

organizers. Whoever undertakes the initiative in reviving popular art in any country should

acquaint himself first with the history of the efforts made in other parts of the world; for in principle the problem is always the same everywhere, and routatis multandis



FIG. I. Modern reversible tapestry FIG. 2. Detail from reversible tapestry

FIG. 3. Tapestry showing wedding procession; date woven in left-hand corner



FIG. 4. Grodno tapestry by hamlet craftsman

FIG. 5. Embroidery (stylized) FIG. 6. Flower motif



THE REVIVAL OF POPULAR ART IN POLAND one may profit by the experience of others, and at least avoid repeating without end the same mistakes.

As one of the founders and for many years the chairman of a co-operative society in Warsaw known as Lad (a Polish word having the significance at once of 'order' and 'beauty') I had occasion to observe the various methods of work of my own and other societies, from which experience I was able to deduce certain principles.

The Society of Lad was formed by students of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in the year I926, with the participation and under the direction of a group of professors who back in I900 had formed the first society of its kind in Krakow. This was at the time when the peasants and sons of peasants had entered in a mass into the Polish national struggle for independence. Their activities were interrupted by the first World War.

At the beginning the purpose of Lad was to open workshops for student craftsmen, especially for weaving, carpet-making, wall and window drapings, ceramics, fur- niture, for metal-work and interior decoration, and to run them without any reference to the designs and traditions of the folk. It was only later that a small group of educated craftsmen began to organize the work in the villages, with exceptionally favourable results.

By way of initiating the reader into the difficult question of what to do and what not to do in stimulating a renaissance of popular art, I will cite two concrete examples.

In one of the American welfare organizations established in Warsaw was a Mrs. Pontifrac, who had chanced to see in the home of acquaintances some beautiful serviettes of white linen embroidered in colour, principally with red, rose, brown, and beige floss. She was told that these serviettes came from a district east of the river Bug. This lady had the idea that perhaps she might augment the funds of her institution by selling such serviettes in the United States. She bought the linen, had it appropriately cut, and packed it in her Ford with a store of coloured floss. At the first village she came to, in the district indicated beyond the river Bug, she stopped, and there she found some twenty girls and a few shepherd boys who agreed to embroider the serviettes by the dozen and to bring them on a stated market day to the nearest town. The youngsters chose their own floss. They were to embroider them as they liked, provided they were done in sets of a dozen each, all to match or just slightly differing one from the other. The only condition was that they were all to be beautiful. In this way Mrs. Pontifrac canvassed one village after another and sold the serviettes in America by the thousand.

This is the simplest method and a good one. The practical American woman did not attempt to teach the shepherds what they themselves knew how to do well. She did not give them any designs from women's fashion books. She did not ask them to embroider on canvas when they were in the habit of working directly on the linen. To be sure, not all the colours of the embroidery floss bought in the city shops were of the prettiest; but the ugly ones were left in the Ford, for no child with healthy eyes would choose them, and the second time the lady knew what to purchase.

Mrs. Pontifrac deserves the highest commendation for having accomplished that most difficult thing, namely to do what she knew how to do. Others have gathered

o

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together, in the best faith and with consecration and enthusiasm, the embroiderers

potters, weavers, &c., from the country-side and taken them to the city for several

years of study, only to wonder finally that the results of the work were less satis-

factory than before they had studied at all. For these pupils were like men who had

forgotten their native language and had not yet learned to speak in any other. And here is the second example: Professor Dr. Hamm, of the University of Berlin and Director of the Volkskultur-

anstalt, is ihe author of a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated work, Die

Ostpreufpischen Bauernteppiche (The East Prussian Peasant Tapestries). The making of these tapestries required a technique peculiar to itself, inasmuch

as a double loom was employed, upon which were woven at the same time two woollen textiles, the upper one of one colour and the under one of another; but a

portion of the colour of the upper one penetrated through to the lower one and vice versa. The result was a reversible tapestry with a design in a contrasting colour, one side having for instance a white field with a black figure and the other a black field with a white figure (Figs. i, 2).

Professor Hamm had collected a considerable number of the most beautiful

examples of these tapestries from German museums and had stated that without doubt, comparing them with the imprints in the clay of the Nordic graves of twelve thousand years ago, such woven tapestries as these had been used to wrap the bodies of the dead, and that they represented a special and probably the oldest weaving technique of the Nordic race.

By a strange coincidence all the tapestries found by the professor, dating for the most part from the end of the eighteenth century and also from the first and second decades of the nineteenth, came from the region of Olsztyn (Allenstein) and Elk

(Euk), inhabited by Poles. All without exception bore the dates woven in Polish, for example Roku I783 (Year I783).

In view of these facts Professor Hamm determined not only to acknowledge in his book the Polish origin of the tapestries, but even to go to Warsaw and lecture on these last treasures of their kind in the hall of the university there.

The professor was received in 1937 by Madame Jedrzejewiczowa, Professor of

Ethnology in the University of Warsaw. During the dinner, at which the Polish

professors and students were present, as well as Madame Eleanora Plutynska of Lad, Professor Hamm explained in detail the meaning of the symbols on the East Prussian

tapestries, i.e. the sun and the fish, and about the custom of weaving into the right- hand border of that used to cover the table the animals brought by the groom as a

nuptial endowment, and on the left side those representing the bride's dowry. But of what use was this vanished pre-Nordic technique which could never be resurrected ?

After dinner the hostess led the guests to the drawing-room; and there the astonished professor beheld a score of beautiful new tapestries spread out over the chairs and hung on the walls-tapestries woven with this same ancient Nordic

technique, which had been for ever lost! 'Who made them?' he exclaimed. 'This is the work of my friends, the village artists near Grodno', replied Madame Plutynska.

So in the face of this revelation, the Director of the Volkskulturanstalt was obliged to amend the last sentences of his lecture the following day. He related: ' In my book I stated that the technique of the reversible tapestry had been irretrievably lost.

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THE REVIVAL OF POPULAR ART IN POLAND 203

Yesterday to my utter amazement I ascertained that it still exists in Poland and is developing splendidly. What would my country not give to have revived this technique of the pre-Nordic spinners! But that can never be; for in Germany no countrywoman has such fresh eyes, nor could there be found among the artists any one capable of conducting such work.'

The reason why the technique of the reversible tapestry did not disappear from the world was because at the end of the eighteenth century there lived in Poland a powerful magnate from the Baltic family of Tyzenhaus, who loved so much the fine old Polish sashes, tapestries, kilims, and embroideries that he devoted his whole fortune to the founding of workshops and the encouragement of the village craftsmen,

Later there arose in the vicinity of Bialystok a great industry of cheap blankets, for which the manufacturers mobilized all the skill of the country weavers of the region. They made reversible bed-spreads or blankets of wool that had been machine- spun and badly dyed, with extraordinarily hideous patterns, and of course for the lowest wage. After many years of such production, always with the same dictated design, came the intervention of the artist craftsmen from Warsaw. Thanks to their encouragement some of the most talented men and women weavers learned how to work otherwise-in the old manner of their forebears.

Sheep were sheared once a year only, in order that the wool should be longer and more springy. It was spun by hand on the spinning-wheel, for in the winter there was plenty of time, so that it was no dearer than factory spinning. Thus the wool was not torn, lustreless, and monotonously even, but knotty and irregular, which gave it life. It was dyed only with natural colours imported from Skilbeck Brothers, Upper Thames Street, London, who have been engaged in this commerce for several hundred years. Every weaver had to learn to do his own dyeing, according to the recipe of Miss Wanda Szczepanowska of Lad, who in the course of fifteen years had made about 25,000 tests, from which only a few hundred were considered successful after six months' exposure to sun and rain. Each weaver chose his own shades of colour, deep or pale according to his fancy, but always fast.

Of course there was no question of preliminary sketches on paper or anything of the sort. A tapestry was composed by the weaver himself directly on the loom according to what was suggested to him by the process of the weaving itself. The educated artist from the city did not act as either teacher or master, but only as guide to the village craftsman, and his technical aid in the finding of his own creative way.

After he had already found himself, it was permissible to show him something; but only the best of the best: an old Polish museum piece, a Persian or Turkestan rug, an Abyssinian tapestry in a good reproduction. These things might be shown and discussed, but never left for long. The purpose was to awaken the instinct of competition, not the impulse to imitate.

Only those who have respect for popular art in general and for the individualism of the man of a given tribe and a given region in particular are capable of working in this way. The regional peculiarities are subtle but deep. The expert recognizes the derivation of a thing beyond the shadow of doubt by slight changes in colour combination or in the pattern of a woven design. If he ventures to alter or improve it according to his own feeling, he risks obliterating the original value of the work-a




thing to be avoided. On the other hand, it is well for the people of the same region to look over and discuss one another's work. The majority will always pronounce judgement as to what is sanctified by tradition. At the same time craftsmen will be found who will follow the tradition to a certain extent and yet produce something a little differently conceived, but which will meet nevertheless with the approval of the group. At such a moment popular art begins to breathe, live, and grow. It is the moment of the resurrection of the craftsman.

Volumes could be filled with records of the successes and failures of the efforts to aid popular art in Poland. As many as 90 per cent. of them failed indeed, and swallowed up millions of shillings of government funds, while only harming the cause. Here is one bad example.

In the epoch of the prehistoric Thracian civilization the mountaineers of the Eastern Carpathians and also the people of the contiguous lowlands used to make

geometrical kilims. We have an ancient record of one of these, which appears across the shoulder of a Thracian rider, imaged upon an Etruscan vase, dating from 3,000 years B.C. Similar also to these kilims are those still seen on the American Indian reservations, although much less subtle in colour and more restless in design. People from communities whose culture is highly developed, such as Sweden and Holland, started buying the old original kilims in Poland and paying good prices for them. In response to these favourable commercial conditions societies like the

People's Bazaars and small private dealers took up the mass production of imitations of the original kilims, made from wool badly spun by machine and coloured with the worst chemical dyes.

Those pretended ' authentic folk kilims ' sold to Sweden became dirty, faded, and

frayed after a few years, so that at length no one in the North would look at a Polish kilim. Then the home market was inundated with these forgeries, selling more and more cheaply and in the end at a loss. It was of no avail that the mountaineers themselves, dressed in their native costumes, brought them to the cities and peddled them from house to house. No one wanted to buy them. Village weavers were

completely demoralized by the tawdry and inferior work in the little towns.

The economic and social effect of the additional earnings of the peasant craftsmen depends in large measure upon the spirit that animates the entire work. The

village of Stradecz on the Bug, which was the largest centre organized by Madame

Plutynska, had a population of about 3,500. It was a relatively poor hamlet, for, like nearly every part of Poland except Pomerania and Poznania, it was over-

populated. Here under her guidance the villagers made woollen homespuns, special hand-woven linen textiles for women's clothing, embroideries, and linen table runners and wall hangings, the original technique of which was said to have come from Constantinople. They were decorated with an embroidery which was not

superimposed afterwards upon the linen field but woven into the material. After four years of uninterrupted work the standard of living increased to such an extent that the whole district was sold out of sheep's furs, so that the peasants had to go to the neighbouring district to buy them. Eventually in the season when there was no work in the fields, three hundred women of this village earned through their weaving

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THE REVIVAL OF POPULAR ART IN POLAND 205 about a shilling and a half a day each. Even this proportionately small quota of twenty pounds a day for half a year had the effect of completely altering the economic status of the village, especially when it came to live stock.

The Polish peasant is a devoted breeder of animals, and would go in far more for this except for the taxes and other demands which force him often to sell immature stock. The additional ready cash earned by the Stradecz peasants was enough to feed and completely pay for the keep of their beasts and cattle until the selling price had reached its highest level. The raising of sheep immediately increased; for every woman engaged in weaving preferred to make her homespuns from her own wool instead of purchasing it from someone else. But as linen material was really the chief output of the region the whole community set about to raise flax, in order to have the best possible quality of linen thread.

The community life of the village also underwent a great change. Above all, far more importance and respect were granted to the older women, not only because they worked more skilfully than the young girls but because they remembered from the times of their youth various ways of weaving and even secrets of dyeing. One of our workers in Antonowka in Polesia was an aged woman of 105.

In order to encourage the people to gather and make use of their own plants, which contained a much lower percentage of colouring matter than tropical plants, Miss Szczepanowska made for the firm of Len Wilenski a series of colour tests with these local plants according to an ancient book; and just before the war the weavers had begun to use them regularly. In fact it was found possible to combine the growing of them with the cultivation of medicinal herbs so much in demand in Poland.

Life in the village took on a new significance. The wool and flax had to be pre- pared for the inspection of the lady from Warsaw, who would come in two weeks' time to inspect the dyeing, to give out the new work, and pay for the finished material. A race to outdo one another took the place of the former petty quarrels and gossip. In the evenings the old spinners would get together. No matter if they burned the lights. Now there was money to pay for them. Over the spinning-wheels they told tales and sang old songs. Someone would read aloud. Soon all the neighbouring villages began to envy the new movement in Stradecz and to hold consultations as to how and in what direction they might compete with it. The instructors in agri- culture, gardening, and apiculture, who had not held a particularly high opinion of this vicinity, suddenly observed the general stimulation. New co-operatives arose and the turnover of the old ones was on the increase.

It became evident that the most important thing in the pursuit of prosperity is to rouse the people from a state of apathy into a movement of activity and progress. Often such an effort, no matter how slight, if conscientious and well directed, releases a whole succession of other serious possibilities tending to raise the standard of living.

A curious phenomenon touching the psychology of fashion was presented by the fact that those same young women who made the homespuns, adopted everywhere in the great cities of Poland for women's costumes, or the linen materials that adorned the elegant world in summer, had no thought of returning themselves to the use of these stuffs which had clothed their grandmothers and had already been abandoned




by their mothers. The arbiters of the mode were, let us say, the daughter of the chemist from the nearest village and her dressmaker. As long as that young Miss has not gone to Warsaw to see with her own eyes what is happening, as long as she has not convinced her dressmaker that the stuffs made in the stupid little village of Stradecz are really fashionable, these very girls who weave the marvellous linens will consider them nice but queer and old-fashioned, good for the grandmothers, but not for the girls, who must wear the modish percales printed in L6dz.

No one in our country has tried thus far to struggle with the fashions of the

peasant women. It would have been a battle lost in advance. We must wait until the wave of the feminine mode returns from the capital to the village in the normal course of events.

Experience in Poland has proved that nothing unites and awakens mutual confidence, nothing deepens the friendship between people of different environments so much as work for a common ideal of beauty, which, like an ideal of good, is an attribute of the Creator. This confidence is the deeper and the more sincere because the educated craftsman does not go to the strange tribe in order to impose foreign truths upon them. No. He comes to these people of the jungle, the desert, the steppes, or the mountains and says: ' See what beautiful things your fathers, grandfathers, or

great-grandfathers used to make, how much better they are than the things you are

making now. I know from the books, by magic, and by my good spirit how they made them. Let us try to do it together. Your fathers' spirits will help you. You will make them yourselves. You must make them by yourselves. My hand will not touch your work. I shall only tell you if you do it well or badly, and pay you money for your finished work.'

Penetrating the mysteries of the old techniques is not an easy matter, but an effort to come to the proper use of the material, the tools, accessories, means, and methods must be made through collective work, in which pupils, experts, naturalists, chemists, artists, craftsmen, and amateurs of art all participate. This introductory work may bring a rich harvest, both scientific and ethnological, for the investigation of the

genesis and development of the craftsman's technique is as good a key to the solution of the scientific problems of the past as the study of the language and legends, rituals and religions, traditions and ceremonies.

In principle, a common understanding in this artistic work does not depend upon knowledge of the native language. The Chinese using different dialects understand one another by means of their ideological writing. I am convinced that white artists could come to an understanding through working together with black craftsmen, for the technique of the craftsman stands as an absolute value outside the realm of man's speech.

On the whole, to the trained craftsman, the finding of the proper environment for his work does not present any difficulties. In Poland it was like this:

An artist planned to take over a new region, where, from evidence gleaned from the museums, she had learned that interesting things had been made a few decades before. She discovered the next market-day of the town, or a great holiday in one of the parishes which would attract the people from the entire region. With her valise in hand she penetrated into the multi-coloured throng, or sat at the crossways

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looking carefully about her. Suddenly she caught sight of an old woman wearing a blouse of curious material. 'Excuse me,' she said, 'but who made the material of your blouse? ' 'What do you mean? I wove it myself when I was young.' 'And would you know how to weave so beautifully now ? ' ' Of course I could do it if I had the right wool, and if someone would dye it for me.' ' And who dyed this for you ?' ' My grandmother dyed it, but she has been dead a long while.' ' And what if I should dye the wool for you-take me to your hut and I will pay you for everything.' 'Would this old blouse be worth all your trouble? But my sleigh is small and my hut is not nice enough for a person from the city like you. Come with me and we shall ask my neighbour if he could drive you in his big sleigh. It is a good piece of road.'

In the big sleigh the artist from Lad met with a warm welcome, a big sheep-skin and a blanket to cover her knees-a little torn, for it must have been as old as the life of a man, but of interesting design. In this way she gathered new clues to further discoveries and research, and further successes or failures in the business of reviving the old traditions.

And now comes the principal question. How far can one go in the reconstruction of that which has been lost? Let us return to the example of those old pre-Nordic reversible tapestries. Only a hundred and fifty years ago in East Prussia the tradi- tional pagan symbols of the gods, the country, or the tribe, which amounted to the same thing, were still woven into them. The symbols are now obsolete in the memory of the people and have lost all real significance. To suggest to the village weavers, in leading them back to the ancient art, that they introduce into their tapestries the figures of the sun or of fish is obviously nonsense, as it would be a purely artificial thing to do. Likewise the starry constellations would be out of place to-day as we have ceased to measure the year by the signs of the zodiac. Following the old custom of recording on the table-cover the live stock added to the family property by the bride and groom would have small importance, as the principal contribution to the dowry now consists in the amount of ground subscribed by the pair; and this it is not necessary to register since it is filed in the archives of the district clerk.

There would be nothing artificial, however, in weaving in the date of production, and in fact no weaver would be willing to leave it out. For him the date has great value. One might suggest to him too that he invent a sign of his own to place discreetly in a corner of his tapestry. It is quite sure that other signs will be found and spontaneously adopted, signs similar to the ancestral symbols, like mysterious voices from the nation or the tribe (Fig. 3).

The resurrection of the old technique of popular art does not involve any limitation in the choice of plastic motifs nor the measurement of objects according to the old tradition. Measurements, forms, and designs are dictated to the present-day craftsmen by the personal and communal interests of the tribe on the one hand and by the changed necessities of life on the other. The goal before us is the preservation of the wealth of tribal features inherent in forms and colour harmonies, which should be as precious for humanity as the preservation of the forms and colour harmonies of nature.

If the weaver is enamoured of flowers, a tapestry with flowers for motifs makes its

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appearance. Another weaver is enchanted by birds. So on one branch sits a chubby little bird with drooping wings, preparing for a struggle with an unseen rival. The next one makes his toilet, arranging his ruffled feathers, and a third looks up and sings. In the virgin forests of Bialowierze lives a bird called batallion. Up to the present time no two of this species have been found with the same colouring. It is just so with the birds woven by the Polish peasants. No two, imagined and created by these craftsmen are alike, and all are different from any birds that ever lived (Fig. 4).

Sometimes it turns out quite otherwise. The village boy carves out his menagerie. A stranger, inspecting his wooden rabbits, will see that each one is a little different, but to the boy they are all his actual acquaintances. Here is the old one that always sits on the edge of the wood. This one in the middle eats cabbage under the trees of Johnny's field, and the third one only warms himself in the sun and will sit there beside the furrow until the fox eats him. This boy corresponds to the portrait sculptor or painter.

Again it happens that the development leads so exclusively in the direction of colour combination that all such motifs are rejected in favour of the triangles, squares, and rectangles of the Thracian, Indian, and African blankets or the old kilims of Podolia and the Carpathians (Figs. 5, 6).

The preservation of the living tribal features of popular art is the more important now because of the menace to beautiful things caused by the crisis through which the whole civilization of the white race is passing. The energy of that race has for years been released in the single direction of overcoming the limits of time and space. The white man has used speed only to acquire wealth or for transportation from

place to place, to rob the treasures accumulated by nature, or to destroy the results of ages of work accomplished by past generations. We are nearing the last limits of

possibility. After passing these limits we shall arrive by the law of reaction at the

hunger for peace, contemplation, and beauty. It is significant that the keenest collectors of the artistic products of Lad, or of

the organization known as Len Wilenski, which markets the products of village craftsmen, were the young technicians and pilots, the radical adherents of the last word in technique and the fetish of speed.

We must wait for the finish of the greatest race for speed that the world has ever known, when once again the beautiful things that surround us will become for each of us a vital necessity, as they were in past cycles of human civilization.

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the revival of popular art in poland

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