Loin de Moscou
In 2014, a monumental painting by the French painter Gérard Singer, Le 14 février 1950 à Nice, was rediscovered in the Szczecin Museum' reserves in Poland. How did this work end there? Szymon Piotr Kubiak sets out to find out.
Through a rich narrative, he brings together the Communist artistic and cultural milieus of France and Poland, rarely brought together by art history in the second half of the 20th century. Historical hindsight enables him to reveal the transformations that took place in the analysis of artistic practices during the Stalinist era in Poland.
The author invites us to reflect on the long silence surrounding art in Communist countries when it was not part of the avant-garde. Overcoming political differences and geographical borders, Kubiak weaves links across Europe cut in two by the Iron Curtain, and makes the art of Communist countries appear as part of the backdrop against which the plastic arts of the capitalist space developed. The book encourages us to think about the interdependencies between East and West, to revisit the Europe Cold War in a new light.
