ARTMargins Online

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: socialist art

Andrzej Wróblewski, Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues, 1956, oil, canvas; 140 × 200 cm, National Museum, Warsaw ⓒ Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation / www.andrzejwroblewski.pl

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Magdalena Anna Nowak ·

Suspension in Time: Transatlantic Explorations of “Waiting”

Two paintings with the same title. Both executed in the second half of the 1950s, but on the opposite sides of the Atlantic and within two different ideological systems. They are visually akin—not through overt mimicry, but by a repetition of forms and an atmosphere of claustrophobia. Can a chance juxtaposition of Andrzej Wróblewski’s Waiting Room I, The Queue Continues (Poczekalnia I, Kolejka trwa, 1956) and George Tooker’s Waiting Room (1959) disclose something important or inspiring?

Wróblewski’s painting is one of the most famous works of postwar Polish art and belongs to the collection of the National … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Maja Fowkes, Aïda Adilbek, Aziza Kadyri, Aigerim Kapar, Anel Rakhimzhanova, Saodat Ismailova ·

Visualizing the Transformation of Nature in Central Asia: Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) Roundtable

This roundtable brought together Aïda Adilbek, Aziza Kadyri, Aigerim Kapar, Anel Rakhimzhanova and SAVA Creative Fellow Saodat Ismailova to discuss the environmental transformation of Central Asia during the Soviet period and its contemporary ramifications through the lens of artistic, curatorial and academic research. Held at UCL on May 29, 2025, the conversation was led by Maja Fowkes, and attended by SAVA Team members Reuben Fowkes, Makar Tereshin, and Sorcha Thomson.

Maja Fowkes: I’m a Croatian-British art historian, I was born in Socialist Yugoslavia and my grandma used to make me a tea I loved, which she called Russian tea. When

… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Karolina Kolenda ·

Earth, Matter, Rhythm: Władysław Hasior and the Socialist Anthropocene

Recent years have brought significant developments in the research on the neo-avant-garde beginnings of environmental art in Poland.(Among them is an upcoming book by Magdalena Worłowska on the beginnings of environmentally engaged art in Poland. See: Magdalena Worłowska, Początki sztuki ekologicznie zaangażowanej w Polsce (Warsaw: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, 2025).) The scholarly interest in the rise of ecological awareness in the country at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s—and its reflection in art—comes together with the perceived need to rewrite the history of Polish culture so as to illuminate its multiple … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Maja and Reuben Fowkes ·

The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts: Online Special Issue Introduction

This special issue spanning ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal derives from the ERC/UKRI supported project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) that foregrounds the contribution of environmental art history and research-driven contemporary ecocritical art to the interdisciplinary inquiry and epistemic endeavor of the Socialist Anthropocene.(The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) project is led by Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies; see: www.sava.earth.) The Socialist Anthropocene denotes a field of collective inquiry into the sociopolitical, geoeconomic, biocultural, and ecological ramifications of changing relations with nature under socialism. Resisting the tendency to … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Forum

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 by Constanze Fritzsch, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Jitka Šosová, Gregor Taul ·

Rereading Socialist Realism: Podcast on Comparative Perspectives on Socialist Art

In recent years, US scholarship has succeeded in establishing a new perspective on the art of the ex-GDR that overcomes the dichotomy between so-called “dissident art” on the one hand, and “official art,” on the other. Rather than cementing this dichotomy, scholars of this new trend in art historical research points out and study the interconnections and entanglement between official and non-official art. At the same time, they have developed a discourse that subjects the well-established narrative of Socialist Realism as the Great Other of 20th century art history to a long-overdue reevaluation.  Conferences such as “Was Socialist Realism Global? … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Constanze Fritzsch ·

The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR

Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene. Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR [The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR] (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2019), 408 pp.

In 2019, German art historian and curator Angelika Richter published her doctoral thesis The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR, in the German language. This book is worth reviewing even three years after its initial publication due to its meticulous research and … Read more

Room within the Henryk Stażewski exhibition displaying works of sculpture and graphic design.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kristian Handberg ·

New approaches to art and life in the Polish People’s Republic: Henryk Stażewski at Muzeum Sztuki

Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) had a long artistic run in two different versions of his home country: first as a pioneer of the avant-garde in the Polish Republic between 1918 and 1939 and then his later, but no less experimental career in the communist Polish People’s Republic founded in the post-war world order after 1945. It is the latter that is the subject of the exhibition Henryk Stażewski: Late Style at the Muzeum Sztuki Lodz – to many known as a legendary institution with a pedigree as an avant-garde museum (including the colorful interior of the Neo-Plastic Room for abstract art) … Read more

cover of exhibition catalogue

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Júliusz Huth ·

Beyond the 3 Ts: Promote, Tolerate, Ban – Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary

Cristina Cuevas-Wolf and Isotta Poggi, eds., Promote, Tolerate, Ban: Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary (Getty Publications, 2018), 160 PP. 

The curators of the Getty Research Institute and The Wende Museum of the Cold War undertook a difficult task with an exhibition in Los Angeles, entitled Promote, Tolerate, Ban – Art and Culture in Cold War Hungary,(Eastern European regimes operating before 1989 were not, in fact, communist states. In my view, even the ‘state socialist’ adjective is inappropriate for the Kádár regime, especially since the mid-1960s, but the now increasingly common term ‘state capitalism’ is not yet … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Caterina Preda ·

The Role of the Romanian Artists’ Union in the Production of State Socialist Art

During the establishment of the new socialist regime in Romania, “in order for visual artists to be it was felt necessary to create a new form of organization, a new organism that [would] become an active factor in the work of culturalization of the masses, and for the development of creation.”(“Introductory remarks for the future Country Conference of the Romanian Artists’ Union (UAP) of the Romanian Popular Republic (RPR),” File 1/1950, Fund UAP, The Central National Archives of Romania (ANIC), f. 1.) This article is an adaptation of part of a forthcoming book about the role of the … Read more

postcard image

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Johana Lomová ·

Forms of Involvement: The Czechoslovakian Artists’ Union and Its 1964 Congress

During the past decade, contemporary artists in Central and Eastern Europe have renewed their interest in Artists’ Unions, and have begun to self-organize.(This article is based on a study by Johana Lomová and Karel Šima, “Sjezd Svazu československých výtvarných umělců v roce 1964. Poznámky k úspěšnosti performance,” (The Conference of the SČSVU in 1964. Notes on the Success of One Performance) in Umění a revoluce (Art and Revolution), ed. Johana Lomová and Jindřich Vybíral (Praha: UMPRUM 2017), 512–545.) After years of what scholar Piotr Piotrowski termed “anti-communism,”(Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: … Read more