Magdalena Abakanowicz. The splendid artist of the 1960`s

“My sculpture is free of the function of glorifying any doctrine, any religion, any individual. It is not décor for any interior, a garden, a palace, or a housing development. It is not a formal aesthetic experiment nor an interpretation of reality…[…] I transmit my experience of existential problems, embodied in my forms built into space.“

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1987^[1]

According to this quotation by Magdalena Abakanowicz it is already clear that we have to look at an extraordinary artist, somebody who´s scale of work, of different techniques, ways of expression is really grand and widespreaded. It is an artist influenced by a dramatic and often tragic background and lived through different political tensions in Poland, so that also the political, psychological background is important for the understanding of the work of Abakanowicz. In this essay only a short overview can be given, but the spectrum of her work is much more extensive.

Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in 1930 in Falenty, a small town, 100 kilometres east of Warsaw. She grew up in a privileged family who had a lot of landproperty and lived a solitary childhood in the forest and countryside of her parents` estate.<sup>[2]</sup> She was nine years old when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, after which her family lived in constant fear. In 1943 the German soldiers stormed her family`s estate and she had to watch as her mothers arm was shooted. In 1945 she moved with her family to Warsaw.^[3]

In her autobiography “Portrait ´ 20” (1982) she describes how these experiences influenced her live and work. She also describes the half-legendary past of his father, who traced his lineage to Abaka-Khan, one of the leaders of 13th century Mongolia. This, for a young girl very fascinating story, should also take an influence on her work. She also tells us, that her mother was descended from Polish nobility.^[4] A further step to understand Abakanowiczs work is, to understand her fascination for nature. Even as a young girl she did spend hours outside, in the landscape, in the forest. There she found her own rhythm and solace.

When Poland was liberated from the Nazis and the Communists took over, a deep shadow was casting over the Abakanowicz family, during the period of political repression and civil war in Poland, that lasted until the mid-50s. Her uncle Piotr fighted in the Resistance movement (Narodowe Sily Zbrojne/National Armed Forces), was later arrested by the Communist secret police, sentenced to death for his actions against the Soviet occupation. His sentence was later commuted to fifteen years in prison, but he was killed in jail by a guard in 1948.^[5] From that time, the family had to hide their past and their identity. After her graduation from The Liceum in 1949, she entered the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts, located in the nearby resort town of Sopot. She wanted to study sculpture in Sopot, but was denied this opportunity, because her sculpture instructure, Adam Smolana, declared that she “did not have a feeling for form” and relegated to study other disciplines.^[6] In Sopot she deeply became engaged in the study of textile design. But she was also disappointed, so she recalled: “I was encouraged to study art, but when I began, I discovered it had nothing to do with what I made as a child or young girl. The established art philosophy didn` t fit mine.”^[7] She stayed at the Sopot school for one year, then in 1950, she transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The Sopot experiences had taught her, that she has to break the rigid disciplinary boundaries and that she has to think of art as a free and flexible process, in which she can move from one medium to another.^[8] But the fifities were the time of Social realism and not open-minded for artists like Abakanowicz. In that time art had to reflect the ideology of the Communist Party and in a style that was not based on Western cultural influences

Abakanowicz found the Warsaw Acadamy shockingly rigid and conservative. In many ways this school faithfully attempted to implement the doctrines of the Regime. At that school, she also was engaged in drawing but even there she had to follow the communistic rules: “I liked to draw, seeking the form by placing lines, one next to another. The professor would come with an eraser in his hand and rub out every unnecessary line on my drawing, leaving a thin, dry contour. I hated him for it.”^[9]

Abakanowicz`s earliest known works were some paintings, drawings, gouaches and watercolors on paper and sewn-together linen sheets, painted between 1956 and 1959.^[10] These paintings show the strong influence of nature on her, especially clear visible in biomorphic, organic and brightly colored forms that evoke plants and butterflies, like also the titles of the paintings tell us: Fish (1956-57), Iris (1957), Butterfly (1958). She originally showed these early paintings as textile designs at various group exhibits and as fabric designs intended for interior decoration. For this works she received recognition and awards for these early projects and was perceived as an exceptionally talented and dynamic figure in this environment.^[11]

After 1958, under the impact of Constructivism, her works show stricter compositional principles and in the late 1950s Abakanowicz turned her attention to weaving as another possibility for realizing her goeals. She returned to the studio of her former teacher at the Warsaw Academy, Eleonora Plutyńska, to learn more complex weaving techniques. She also made friend with painter, Maria Ewa Lunkiewicz and Henryk Stażewski, one of the leader in geometric art. At first she was transferring her Constructivist paintings into Goblins and also copied one Henryk Stażewski, but later she started to produce small weaving with organic motifs and geometric forms that already showed her own style.^[12]

In the early 1960s her work made a major breakthrough at the tapestry exhibition in Lausanne, using fiber as her primary medium of artistic expression, like her work, Composition of White Forms. At the second bienniale, her Desdemona created a scandal. Flat, but with elements of relief, they contradicted the traditions of that medium and the well-established patterns like in the work by the french artist Jean Lurcat.^[13]

In 1965 she received the Grand Prix at the 8th Sao Paulo biennial of art in recognition of her inventive approach to textiles and in the same year she also received an official distinction from the Ministry of Art and Culture and was awarded a faculty position in the Department of Weaving at the Academy of Fine Arts in Pozńan. In the mid-60s the government made it more easily for international recognized artists, such as Abakanowicz, to receive support and sponsored them, as a confirmation of the success and ideology of the Communist regime.^[14]

In 1965 Abakanowicz in an event, called the First Bienniale of Spatial Forms in the city of Elbląg. There she constructed her first freestanding twenty-foot-tall metal sculpture, called Untitled (fig. 1). It consists of a thick tubular stern with numerous open-ended pipes welded to it, resembling a tree in its general structure.^[15]

She became one of the leaders of international fiber art movement when she transformed her weavings from flat wall hangings into monumental sculptural forms called Abakans. Taking human forms, the Abakans showed already expressive figuration, later manifested in the Postminimalistic art.

The Abakans are made almost entirely from sisal and were produced with the help of two studio assistants. The Abakans have three types of shapes – rectangular, oval and garmentlike. The rectangular pieces are often arranged around a metal ring, creating a tubelike construction (resembling the Elbląg sculpture). The oval type, for example Abakan Red-Orange (1967-70, fig. 2), consists of one round shape, modified by cuts and openings or folds. The garmentlike Abakans (like Brown Coat, 1968 or Sister, 1969-74) are often made of three separate parts sewn together, hanging on a metal rod. With the combination of hard and soft forms, smooth and rough surfaces, the Abakans are not clear–cut and can be seen as many things at once. Its possible to see them as dark caves, hollowed-out trees, masses of hides, totems or ceremonial robes. In this works the organic motifs evoke body fragments, fiber becomes a metaphor for internal organs, muscles, veins, and viscera. Abakan Violet (1968), for instance, looks like a human tongue. Turquoise Abakan (1970, fig. 3) evokes an image of elastic lungs linked by a network of large pulmonary blood vessels. The form of Abakan Brown evokes flayed skin or thick layers of epidermis covered with lymp channels or nerve endings, protecting the underlying tissues and organs. A large number of these works make clear references to female genitalia. Abakan Yellow (1967-68) and Red Abakan I (1969-70) include openings, labialike folds and dark enclosures.^[16]

These motifs, very feminine and erotic, were mostly understood in that way, that Abakanowicz is a feminist artist; but she neither understood nor sympathized with the feminist agendas. She was influenced by the promoted Communist ideology, she learned to believe in gender equality.

She started to use rope permanently from 1970 to 1973. The most provacative work she did with rope, appaered at the 6th tapestry biennial in Lausanne in 1973, where she presented her Wheel and Rope installation, which consisted of an enormous ready-made wooden utility spool wound with sisal rope, looking like a magnified bobbin. This piece reminds in a work by Edward Krasiński (one of the leading conceptual artists in Poland), called The Wheel.^[17]

Through her rope experiment she clearly reflected the tendencies of Postminimalistic art. Abakanowicz agonized over the fact that in her own country she was constantly perceived only as a weaver and never seriously treated as a sculptor. Its paradox, because especially Abakanowicz revolutionized the art scene, founding new ways in weaving and breaking the distinction between “art” and “craft”.^[18]

By the early 1970s, Abakanowicz felt, that she had exhausted all possibilities in weaving and began to search for a new way to express herself and for the subject she was interested in – the human body and its relation to nature and the larger environment.

Abakanowicz changed her style in creating sculptures and adopted forms and techniques that connected her more directly with mainstream contemporary sculpture, which became obvious, when she exhibited five mannequins covered in burlap at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf in 1972. By 1973 she launched a new series of figurative works from soft but ready-made materials such as burlap, cotton and gauze. She also reduced the size of her work to human scale and began to create groups of gray, headless, hollow figures that should become a trademark of her style. Between 1973 and the early 1980s, she produced four main groups of these figures entitled Heads (1973-75), Seated Figures (1974-79, fig. 4), Backs (1976-82) and Embryology (1978-81, fig. 5) and as well variations which she called Alterations. Throughout the 80s she continued creating sculptures of the human form in numerous groupings of headless crowds, occasionally in singular pieces, sometimes enclosed in a cage or metal wheels.^[19]

[...]

^[1] M. Abakanowicz, p. 86

^[2] N. Miller, Figuratively speaking - drawings by seven artists, p. 14

^[3] Ibid, p. 15

^[4] J. Inglot, The figurative sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz, p. 12

^[5] Ibid, p. 18

^[6] Ibid, p. 24

^[7] N. Miller, Figuratively speaking - drawings by seven artists, p. 15

^[8] J. Inglot, The figurative sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz, p. 25

^[9] Ibid, p. 28

^[10] N. Miller, Figuratively speaking - drawings by seven artists, p. 16

^[11] J. Inglot, The figurative sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz, p. 31

^[12] Ibid, p. 35-37

^[13] C. Iles, Art at the edge, p. 11-12

^[14] J. Inglot, The figurative sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz, p. 54

^[15] Ibid, p. 55/56

^[16] N. Miller, Figuratively speaking - drawings by seven artists, p. 17

^[17] J. Inglot, The figurative sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz, p. 69

^[18] Ibid, p. 70

^[19] Ibid, p. 71