Non-subjective composition

Kazimierz Podsadecki is one of the most important representatives of the Polish artistic avant-garde of the interwar period. A graduate of the Faculty of Decorative Arts at the Industrial School in Krakow (1923), he collaborated as a graphic artist and typographer with the local, national magazines: Zwrotnica, Na Szerokim Świecie and Światowid. In publishing projects, he became a pioneer of the photomontage technique in his native land. When exhibiting his paintings with the Constructivists gathered around the Warsaw group Praesens, he was distinguished by his original formal language close to Italian Futurists. He also used it in theatre decorations, in which he drew on the sceno-dynamic solutions of Enric Prampolini. Together with another Cracovian, Janusz Maria Brzeski, Podsadecki was involved in promoting international new media artists. He organised the 1st Exhibition of Modernist Photography at the Industrial Museum (1931), establishing the Polish Avant-Garde Film Studio (1932). The aftermath of Podsadecki and Brzeski's collaboration was the experimental short film Beton [Concrete] (1933), Kompozycja bezprzedmiotowa [The Non-objective Composition] (1933) from the Szczecin collection shows a slow withdrawal from the extreme avant-garde painting attitudes of the previous years. Contrary to its name, used after Kazimierz Malewicz's theory as an equivalent of abstraction (German: ungegenständlich, gegenstandslos, from Russian: bespredmetnyj), it contains explicit references to the real world. However, through the choice of motif - classic still life - it comes close to the subject matter dominant in the Kraków environment of the 1930s, dominated by colourism. Podsadecki gravitated towards it in the second half of the decade, stylising bowls, vases and fruit in a way reminiscent of the achievements of French purists. At the same time, he retained his favourite set of abstract solutions - the independence of linear contours and spots, mutually overlapping geometric planes of colourful filters, and decorative amoeboid figures.

Szymon Piotr Kubiak