Biuletyn Historii Sztuki

The Kilim Rug Design at the School of Decorative Arts and Artistic Industry in Cracow during the Inter-War Period

2025-07-16T10:00:47+02:00

The article contains a discussion of the activity of the kilim rug design atelier at the Textile Department (Weaving Department) of the State School of Decorative Arts and Artistic Industry in Cracow (State Institute for Fine Arts). It analyses the kilim-making course curriculum, demonstrates how students gained practical training in this field, states the characteristics of the students’ work, determines the concept of a kilim as adopted at the Cracow school, and discusses the ways in which the kilim-making atelier was promoted. In addition, the article traces the connections of the State School of Decorative Arts and Artistic Industry in Cracow with other kilim-making ateliers, as well as with other schools training students in this field. Another area of interest are the further professional paths of the graduates. The most essential source of knowledge about the kilim rug design at the Cracow school are the archival materials held in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw, the National Archives in Cracow and the Archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Designs by the students of the State School of Decorative Arts and Artistic Industry are known owing to the designs themselves and their photographs held in the collections of the Jagiellonian University Museum, the National Museum in Cracow, the Historical Museum of the City of Cracow, the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, and the National Digital Archive. Szkoła Sztuk Zdobniczych i Przemysłu Artystycznego w Krakowie, Państwowy Instytut Sztuk Plastycznych w Krakowie, kilim, tkanina, projektowanie, polskie rzemiosło artystyczne dwudziestolecia międzywojennego, polskie szkolnictwo artystyczne dwudziestolecia międzywojennego.

Ukrainian Students of the School of Fine Arts/Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the Years 1922–1939 in the Light of Archival Materials

2025-07-16T10:00:46+02:00

The article attempts to systematise the list of Ukrainian students of the School of Fine Arts/Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the years 1922–1939. On the basis of personal files from the archives of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and materials held in the Special Collections of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, it has been possible to determine who studied there, when, and under which professors, as well as what awards they received. On the basis of an analysis of documents from the personal files of Piotr Megik, Piotr Chołodny, Włodzimierz Pobuławiec and Wacław Waśkowski, their biographies from their Warsaw period were clarified and supplemented. The article presents, for the first time, information on the works of Ukrainian students recorded on negatives held in the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.

The Wrocław Dreamers? Reflections on the New Proposal for Writing the History of Urban Planning and Urban Architecture

2025-07-16T10:00:38+02:00

On the Need of Researching the „Polish Cathedrals”. In Reference to the Book Archiwizacja polskich kościołów w USA by Irena Rolska and Jacek Kęsik

2025-07-16T10:00:35+02:00

Recalling Tadeusz Mańkowski, a Scholar and Museologist

2025-07-16T10:00:36+02:00

The History of Photography. New Research Areas

2025-06-04T19:15:04+02:00

Preface

Contributions to the History of Photography in Lithuania until the End of the Wet Collodion Period (1839 – ca. 1890)

2025-07-16T10:00:39+02:00

Research into the history of photography in Lithuania in recent decades has added new facts and phenomena to our knowledge of the early photography in Lithuania. New names have appeared; hitherto unknown photographs have been found. This article attempts to introduce the Polish public to new facts that influenced the development of photography in Lithuania from 1839 to the end of wet collodion period.

“The Indispensable Convergence of the Word with the Demonstration”. Slide Projection in Teaching Art History at the Jagiellonian University (ca. 1900–1950)

2025-07-16T10:00:44+02:00

The introduction of slide projection as a method of illustrating lectures is considered an important moment in the development of art history, as it established the value of photography as a fundamental research tool and teaching aid of the discipline. The aim of this article is to present the circumstances under which this method was implemented at the Department of Art History of the Jagiellonian University and how its collection of lantern slides came into being. The first Cracow art historian to use a projector device during his lectures was Feliks Kopera at the beginning of the 20th century. However, it was not until the early 1930s that this tool was used on a wider scale, when, on the initiative of Tadeusz Szydłowski and Julian Pagaczewski, two epidiascopes were purchased and lantern slides began to be collected. By the outbreak of the Second World War, the collection had already reached a few hundred. New conditions for its development emerged after the war, when a large and varied set of lantern slides was acquired from the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Universität Breslau; this made it possible to create a set of reproductions that provided a comprehensive overview of works of medieval and modern art. The period under analysis in this article ends with the establishment of the photographic atelier of the Department of Art History at the Jagiellonian University in 1950 and the beginning of the in-house production of slides.

The Forgotten Photo Library of the Manuscript Department of the Prussian State Library: Investigating German Photographic Archives in Polish Collections

2025-07-16T10:00:43+02:00

In focus of this article is the photographic archive of the Manuscript Department of the former Prussian State Library (Preußische Staatsbibliothek), which was recently rediscovered among the holdings of the National Museum in Warsaw. The origins and complex history of this collection serve as a starting point for a broader examination of the under-researched issue of German photographic archives preserved in Polish memory institutions. Moving beyond a Polish-German perspective, the article analyses these collections through the wider lens of international scholarly cooperation. In addition, the article demonstrates that the Prussian State Library’s photographic archive served similar functions in Warsaw as it had previously in Berlin. In interwar Germany and postwar Poland, both marked by economic crises and limited international contacts, it became a tool for scholars to restore the international status of their research. Furthermore, the article posits that the informal archive available to Polish art historians in the postwar years may have contributed to the prominence of iconographic research within Polish art history.

Coffee-Table Books and the 19th-Century Culture of the Drawing-Room Book

2025-07-16T10:00:37+02:00

The fashion for displaying books on tables of all kinds has a long history, as has the book itself as a decorative object. In the 19th century, drawing-room books – the historical equivalent of today’s coffee-table books, the lavishly illustrated, large-format books designed to be viewed and browsed through rather than read – served both a decorative and a social function, delighting guests and providing entertainment. They included illustrated books, music albums, photographic albums, almanacs and fashion magazines, as well as non-illustrated books such as tastefully bound editions of the Bible, historical works, classic novels, and poetry. In the article, I try to show that in the 19th century, unlike in coffee-table books of today, neither illustration – e.g. photographic illustration – nor general aesthetic value alone turned a publication into a book for salons, that is, a book that was displayed outside the places traditionally assigned to it, such as a bookcase, desk or library. The article introduces a new research topic – the popular 19th-century book as a table and drawing-room ornament, and draws attention to the importance of this type of publication in broader research on the culture of the period.

Photographic Modernisation of the Press in the Second Republic of Poland

2025-07-16T10:00:45+02:00

The development of reportage photography, the activity of photographic agencies and the system of international exchange of photographs, which had been progressing since the early 1920s, as well as the growing technological potential for reproducing photographs in print, brought about a fundamental transformation of the illustrated press. The article discusses these changes, its first part focusing on the interest that their direction aroused among artists associated with the Modernist avant-garde, and on the models for modern methods of using photographs in the popular press championed first by the German weekly “Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung” and then by the French weekly “Vu”. Against this background, the second part of the article describes the process of photographic modernisation of the main Polish weeklies, monthlies and dailies. The third part presents the culmination that this proces found in the montage forms of handling photographic material on the pages of the weeklies of the Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny press concern.

The Temptation of Advertising. Around Polish Advertising Photography in the Second Half of the 1970s

2025-07-16T10:00:42+02:00

The aim of this article is to present one of the most forgotten and academically disregarded themes of the 20th-century history of Polish photography, namely, the Polish artists’ interest in advertising photography. Despite an extensive historical introduction, the text is mainly devoted to exhibitions held in the period 1977–1979, which were the culmination point in the development of advertising photography in the People’s Republic of Poland. These were the exhibition Polska Fotografia Reklamowa (Poznań, 1978) and the advertising photography displays at the “Złocisty Jantar” Polish Photography Competition in Gdańsk (1977 and 1979). In addition, the article contains an analysis of three radical ways of practising advertising photography, proposed by Małgorzata W. Borowska, Tomek Sikora, Marcin Mroszczak and Stefan Wojnecki, exemplifying the aspirations of the art of persuasion at the time.

More than a Series. The Multi-Image Practices of Polish Polaroid Photographers

2025-07-16T10:00:40+02:00

The article concerns the history of instant photography (Polaroid, Fuji Instax) in Poland, recounted in the context of the issue of seriality (photographic series). Works by widely differing artists, such as Leszek Brogowski, Teresa Gierzyńska, Marcin Giżycki, Janusz Leśniak, Rafał Milach, Wacław Nowak, Igor Omulecki, Karol Radziszewski, Zbigniew Tomaszczuk, Andrzej Wajda, and the Minilabist group (Marek Mielnicki, Joanna Miklaszewska-Sierakowska, Radek Spassówka), were used to discuss various categories of multi-image work. In addition to the paradigmatic model dominant in Polish practice, which was based on the archivistic function of photography and the practice of collecting various types belonging to the same subject category, the subject model (corresponding to a series of photographs concerning the same subject), the sequential model, taking into account the issue of time, and the multi-image (panoramic or mosaic) syntagmatic model were also defined.

Andrzej Grzybkowski (1935–2025)

2025-05-15T23:23:38+02:00