Marian Bogusz

Marian Bogusz (1920, Pleszew - 1980, Warsaw) was a painter, art theorist and one of the most important animators of Polish artistic life after the war. After his school-leaving exam he took part, as a volunteer, in the September 1939 campaign, and in 1941-1945 he was imprisoned by the Germans in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he met Zbigniew Dłubak. After the war he settled in Warsaw and until 1948 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, under Jan Cybis among others.

Already during his studies he became an organiser of artistic life: he co-created the Club of Young Artists and Scientists (1947-1949), the first post-war centre of avant-garde art in Warsaw, and co-organised the groundbreaking First Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków (1948/1949), at which he showed paintings, drawings and spatial forms.

He developed most fully, however, as a creator of institutions. In 1955, together with Dłubak and Kajetan Sosnowski, he founded Group 55 - an ideological and artistic counterweight to the „Arsenał”, dominated by Colourism and Expressionism. A year later he co-created the Krzywe Koło Gallery of Modern Art, active from 1956 in the Warsaw Old Town Community Centre, which he ran until 1965, making it the most important centre of the „modern” movement. His idea was to build a permanent collection of the Polish avant-garde - that collection later entered the modern art collection of the National Museum in Warsaw.

He carried his animator's energy across the whole map of the country. He was the initiator of the plein-air events in Osieki (from 1963), the First and Second Parade of Modern Art and the First Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg (1965) - an event that gave rise to Polish art in public space - as well as the Wrocław '70 Symposium and the Lublin Artistic Meetings. He understood art uncompromisingly: the picture was for him „a sum of visual signs”, a provocation meant to force the viewer to think.

In his own painting he combined, at first, the expressive deformation of figures and objects and flatly applied, sharp colour with a striving for metaphorical meaning. In the 1960s he abandoned allusiveness in favour of matter painting, foregrounding texture and the autonomous values of the work, while creating spatial forms in parallel. His works are held, among others, in the Zachęta - National Gallery of Art and the National Museum in Warsaw. Although as a painter he is sometimes underrated today, without Marian Bogusz - founder of galleries, groups and symposia - it is hard to imagine post-war modernity in Polish art.