Wojciech Fangor (1922–2015) was an artist of many faces. While a great deal of well-deserved attention has been given to his abstract work, much less is known about other important periods of his rich, ever-changing artistic career. This book is dedicated to the crucial early phase between 1945 and 1958 that begins at the end of World War II, which marked the onset of the latent ideological and economic occupation of Poland by the Soviet Union, and concludes in 1958—the year of Fangor’s groundbreaking Study of Space, which catapulted him into the ranks of great international artistic innovators.

The MSN’s curator at large, Alison Gingeras writes in her thoughtful essay on Fangor’s socialist realist works and his sophisticated struggle with the oppressive communist system. Written from a broad perspective on the international political and social conflicts of the time, the essay positions Fangor among other artists who shaped the early canon of post-war Polish art. Maciej Harland-Parzydło and Julia Majewska explain in their in-depth research how Fangor’s public projects, in which the artist combined architectural elements with visual art (1949–1955), allowed him to experiment with modern forms outside the obligatory stylistic and iconographic doctrine of Social Realism. This experimentation, in turn, paved the way for his later environments and spatial works. Previously unpublished archival material helps to illuminate both the bravery of these projects and the complexity of the times.

Between these two essays, which redefine Fangor’s contribution to the development of post-war European art, Fangor himself speaks about this period in his memoirs and loose notes drawn from the family-owned archive that is overseen by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. This broad academic and personal perspective, accompanied by images of paintings and drawings as well as unique archival material, reveals a context full of twists and turns that made Fangor’s later work so conceptually and artistically compelling.