The Shadow of Modernism

Title: Cień modernizmu
Author: Piotr Juszkiewicz
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznań
Publication date: 2013
Pages: 224
ISBN: 978-83-232-2577-5
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The main topic of the present study is the genealogy of the twentieth-century modernism and its significance for the interpretation of ideas and practices of Polish artists in the late 1950s and 1960s. The search for this genealogy draws on these characteristics of modernity which stressed a specific combination of demythologization and mythmaking, the emancipatory zeal and parallel enthusiasm for strict regulation of human freedom, humanist postulates and anti-humanitarian practices, and particularly an allegedly necessary and desirable anthropological revolution. The manifestations of that revolution, which aimed at regenerating the world physically, spiritually, and morally, are identified by the author in the ideas of urban planning, projects of the artistic organization of urban space, and films of the "Polish Film School.” In this respect, the study challenges the myth of modernism usually opposed to propaganda, mass culture, and the ideologies of totalitarianism, instead pointing at the problematic character of the modernist distinctions and features.