A.r.
a.r. (artyści rewolucyjni; awangarda rzeczywista). Polish group of avant-garde artists that flourished between 1929 and 1936. Its members were the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, the painters Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Henryk Stazewski, and the poets J. Brzekowski and J. Przybos. It was founded by Strzeminski after he, Kobro and Stazewski left the Praesens group. The group’s programme chiefly reflected the views of Strzeminski. In two leaflets entitled Kommunikaty a.r. (‘a.r. bulletins’) the group declared itself in favour of a ‘laboratory’ version of Constructivism and an avant-garde art that influenced social life in an indirect and gradual manner. It opposed the politicization and popularization of art, which it regarded as a debasement of artistic expression, but the group also believed that rigorous, formal discipline, the organic construction of a work, its coherence, effectiveness and economy of means, made art somewhat synthetic or contrived. From 1933 the group’s announcements regarding its programme appeared in the Lódz art magazine Forma.
In 1931, the group founded Europe’s first museum of modern art, Muzeum Stucki in Lódz, only two years after the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Through donations from artist friends and acquaintances around Europe the group acquired a substantial collection of avant-garde works, which they in turn donated to the city as the a.r. International Collection of Modern Art. In so doing they altered the cultural topography of the whole continent, putting Lódz on the map as a link between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow. Equally radical was the idea of a museum based on international exchange between artists. The museum now houses a collection of works by Kobro and Strzeminski in a space designed by the couple in 1948, the Sala Neoplastyczna. While Strzeminski has been credited as a spokesperson for the Polish avant-garde, Kobro still has not received the recognition she deserves as one of the outstanding abstract sculptors in the history of Modernism. [1]
