After the revelations about the government’s plans to privatise higher education there was a storm of debate on the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza – no, not about education, about something called the Hausner plan. Unless I miss my guess this is the second plan to be named after this Hausner person. This one concerns public […]
There was a stick but there was carrot too. Among the ways in which the Communist authorities in Poland tried to keep writers and creative types in line was by introducing in 1978 a tax free allowance of 144,000 zł per annum for them. This at a time when the average monthly wage was 4 […]
There’s a painting I particularly wanted to see so I took myself down to Kraków to have a look, spending a few days in the old place. I picked up a copy of the local paper and was dismayed to find that the good people of the newspaper are obssessed with Wrocław. How much money […]
Last week’s Polityka has an article on that most intrusive of the arts: architecture. Like their fellow members of the ??e-elity at the Gazeta Wyborcza, they seem think it a terrible shame that Poles are so backward looking. They just don’t appreciate the efforts made by thrusting, forward-looking engineers — errr, I mean architects of […]
It must be great to be an artist. You get to puncture pretentious ideas about art and literature and no one has any come back because you’re the one doing the art, not just talking about it. Here is Beksiński in conversation with Henryk Brzozowski: Zna Pan na pewno te wszystkie komunały, które od lat […]
Socialist Realist art (or “socrealizm”) was official dogma in Poland in the late 40s and early 50s and elsewhere for longer. Paintings, architecture and sculptures of the period glorify the working class and the achievements of socialism. Kitsch would be a kind word for much of it. Also striking is the resemblance to fascist art: […]
