How does one become an international artist? This question seems to have accompanied Maria Jarema throughout her career. An avant-garde artist, activist, painter and sculptor whose work compellingly captures the tension between an individual artistic language and global ambitions, she stood at the centre of cultural and social life in both the interwar and post-war periods, co-creating the Kraków avant-garde while continually seeking new modes of expression.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo Alicja Szulc, courtesy of the Museum.
Like many artists of her time, Jarema aspired to an international presence. From the beginning, she engaged with modernism and drew on international influences, while maintaining a distinctly individual perspective. In 1958, she represented Poland at the Venice Biennale, and after her death, her work was presented at the São Paulo Biennale of Contemporary Art in 1961.
This year, her work embarks on a significant European tour, starting with the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, titled Cracked Modernism. Running from 20 March to 28 June, the exhibition features over forty of her works, including her most critically acclaimed series of dynamic monotypes. Visitors are invited to engage with key themes in Jarema’s practice, including abstraction, movement, and the intersections between art and activism. To explore the exhibition further, we spoke with Éric de Chassey – French art historian, director of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and co-curator of the exhibition – about Jarema’s international perspectives, her dialogue with other artists, and the ideas shaping Cracked Modernism.
Éric de Chassey, photo by ©Jack Shear, courtesy of Éric de Chassey
Julia Gorlewska: Let us begin with the title – Cracked Modernism. What does this title signify?
Éric de Chassey: The title Cracked Modernism reflects Maria Jarema’s specific way to articulate her ambition to position herself as a modern artist within an international context. This was true both in the 1930s and in the post-war period. She consistently resisted being confined to a purely local framework. Instead, she engaged in the international language of modernism, the contemporary artistic vocabulary of her time. She navigated and reshaped it through its transformations. This language implied unity, harmony, and resolution, yet she never abandoned her own voice. She worked within this international language while remaining true to her personal, political, and social situation.
Her most compelling works ask questions rather than provide answers, acknowledging contradictions instead of resolving them.
The combination of these two dimensions makes her modernism inherently “cracked,” marked by gaps and ruptures that are never fully resolved. Not because she was incapable of resolution – some works do achieve it, but those are not the ones we chose to emphasise.
Her most compelling works ask questions rather than provide answers, acknowledging contradictions instead of resolving them.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo: Robert Głowacki, courtesy of the Museum.
JG: Let’s talk about the structure of the exhibition: an ascending scale from the individual, to the couple, the family, and the multitude, and how it reveals social tensions through the body.
ÉCH: Whenever a body appears, it is never monumental. From early on, it is fractured, perforated, and suffering. This relates to her life, as it has often been said, but focusing exclusively on biography is oversimplifying. While this fragmentation can be linked to her illness, it cannot be reduced to it, because she was ill only at the end. It emerges from her lived experience, particularly as a woman. That’s why the body became the central subject of the exhibition.
As for the structure of the exhibition, we considered several options. One was a thematic approach, but in fact, there is only one subject running through her work: embodiment, or more precisely, the embodiment of the self. It spans figuration, abstraction, surrealism, and modernism alike. Even in fully abstract works, you still sense their grounding in bodily experience.
Another option was a strictly chronological display. But we found it unconvincing. The works from the 1930s are quite small – except for her sculptures, of which few examples still exist – so the exhibition would have begun with small pieces and ended with larger ones. This would have created a misleading progression, especially in large museum spaces.
The third option, which we adopted, was to structure each room as a kind of mini-retrospective focused on a single aspect, moving from singularity to complexity.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo: Robert Głowacki, courtesy of the Museum.
JG: Each room functions as a sequence?
ÉCH: Exactly, this helps guide the viewers. By the final room, devoted to multitudes, they are no longer disoriented, but accustomed to thinking in terms of embodied experience. Some works in that final room may appear fully abstract and maybe a bit tame, but are in fact very powerful. Take Penetration from Łódź, for example, a real masterpiece. What we try to show is why: not simply because of its colour harmony, but because of its capacity to contain contradictions in a very particular way.
The structure of the exhibition reflects different modes of bodily experience: as an individual, in relation to another, within a group, and finally within a multitude. The second stage involves pairs – sometimes couples, sometimes friendships – which were very important to her. The next stage, “family”, goes beyond the nuclear model to include groups sharing affinities, or even forms that relate to one another.
She refused to submit to socialist realism and was very vocal about it. She openly opposed it, even claiming to be “more communist” than those enforcing it.
The final section, “multitude”, introduces the possibility of disintegration. There is an attempt to form a collective, but it never fully succeeds. In one work, titled Theatre, she might have represented a “stage”, but what we see is a crowd compressed between two large triangles that seem to crush the figures, even cutting into their limbs. It may be theatre, or the theatre of life, perhaps reflecting what life was like for her in the early 1950s. She refused to submit to socialist realism and was very vocal about it. She openly opposed it, even claiming to be “more communist” than those enforcing it. As a result, up until the Thaw, she worked privately: her works were not exhibited beyond a close circle, and she lived in very difficult conditions. Only later, after the political thaw, did she return to the public sphere and gain recognition, exhibiting internationally, including in Venice and São Paulo.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo: Alicja Szulc, courtesy of the Museum
JG: For the first time in exhibition history, Cracked Modernism brings together works from all periods of Jarema’s career while also reconstructing her intellectual background – from her personal library to her network of artistic relationships. Was your aim primarily to offer a new interpretation of Jarema’s work, or rather to revise the way she has been presented in art history so far?
ÉCH: The contextual works, the rooms devoted to her social network in Krakow, and the library are essential for understanding her position within the art world. She always wanted to be part of a European context, not only a Polish one.
For me, making exhibitions is also a way of understanding the work. By presenting her intellectual context – the books she read, the magazines she received (often sent by her brother from Rome and Paris when she could not travel), her networks and political commitments – we offer a more complete picture.
We also show the artists she engaged with. She believed one develops through dialogue by challenging admired artists and aiming to match or surpass them. There is a strong competitive element in her thinking.
From the outset, it was clear that this exhibition needed contextualisation. Without it, viewers cannot fully grasp the work. At the same time, it remains an exhibition, not a text. You may read if you wish, but you can also simply look and understand. For example, when two works are placed side by side, you see both what they have in common and, more importantly, how they differ. I am opposed to exhibitions that present works without context.
We also wanted to move beyond simplified narratives. The idea that she was entirely marginalised is not accurate. She was highly respected by her peers; artists such as Kantor considered her the strongest among them. By the end of the 1950s, she was even promoted as the leading artist of her generation. This does not mean there was no sexism; her work addresses it, but the situation is more complex than a simple narrative of exclusion. Placing her in an international context is therefore essential. If you come across an artist you did not previously know and recognise their strength, it becomes important to show how the work relates to others internationally. This is something I have pursued for a long time, for example, placing Wróblewski alongside Pollock and Rothko.
More broadly, the aim is to contribute to a more global, integrated history of art – rather than fragmented, purely local narratives. Ideally, her work should also be more widely represented in international museum collections. It is excellent that so much remains in Poland, but it deserves a broader audience.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo Alicja Szulc, courtesy of the Museum.
JG: Let’s talk about these contexts. The exhibition also presents works by Polish, French, Swiss, and Italian artists with whom she remained in a kind of polemical dialogue: André Masson, Henri Matisse, and Victor Vasarely. Could we talk about these mutual influences? How do you see these inspirations?
ÉCH: Seeing her work in this broader context reveals clear relationships. In relation to Matisse, for example, one can see both influence and difference. She sometimes adopts similar colour combinations, even those known only through reproductions, but to very different ends. In Matisse, there is harmony. In her work, even a reclining nude in a lush setting appears unstable; the surrounding elements seem almost to disintegrate.
It is as if she strives towards harmony but cannot fully achieve it because she remains true to her own experience. Rather than masking this or forcing resolution, she acknowledges the contradiction. The strength of the work lies precisely in this unresolved tension. I do not think she saw contradiction as a weakness – on the contrary, she embraced it.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo Alicja Szulc, courtesy of the Museum
JG: So the divergence is as important as the influence?
ÉCH: Exactly. Take Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) from 1907. The original is in Baltimore, and she never saw it, likely not even a reproduction. I’ve tried to trace this, but found no evidence in her collection. The similarity is therefore probably coincidental.
At the same time, she is clearly thinking through Matisse, exploring what she can do with it, how far she can push that harmony he achieves. In her case, the forms become sharper, more unsettling.
Her work can also be seen in relation to Victor Vasarely – there is a certain compositional tension, but also a strong sense of freedom.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo: Robert Głowacki, courtesy of the Museum
JG: Would you say that freedom is central to her practice?
ÉCH: Yes, I think freedom is indeed key. I hadn’t formulated it in those terms before, but you’re right, it becomes especially visible in works like these. But it is freedom with all its costs, including artistic ones. What I admire in her life, and above all in her work, is that although there are compromises in some pieces, in most, and certainly in those we selected, she never compromises. She was truly modern.
As a woman, as an artist, it is striking. You can also see this in the image she projects of herself, even in the few photographs that remain.
What I admire in her life, and above all in her work, is that although there are compromises in some pieces, in most, and certainly in those we selected, she never compromises. She was truly modern.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo Robert Głowacki, courtesy of the Museum.
JG: Maria Jarema is another artist from the Kraków art scene whose exhibition you are curating. How did organising the exhibition of Andrzej Wróblewski in Warsaw in 2015 differ from working on such a project more than a decade later? Both Jarema and Wróblewski were active in roughly the same period. Despite the obvious formal differences, do you see any similarities between them?
ÉCH: A lot has changed politically since 2015, and the context in which we are working today is different. At the same time, the international art scene still does not fully recognise these artists, so I am very happy that this exhibition will be shown in Munich after Warsaw. The Wróblewski exhibition, of course, was also presented abroad, for example, in Madrid, so there were already important steps in that direction.
In Jarema’s case, there is also the question of the two sides of her works, but this functions very differently from Wróblewski’s. It is linked to the monotype technique she began using around 1949, something practical.
We still do not fully understand how she worked. In many cases, she seems to begin with a preliminary composition in pencil and then reverse the sheet. But the drawings themselves, often overlooked, are works in their own right. Some are extraordinarily beautiful. There is, for instance, a small drawing of a woman at the entrance to one of the rooms, related to costumes for Matwa by Witkiewicz. The pencil drawing and the monotype are completely different.
In the drawing, the body is more ambiguous than in the monotype: the belly appears as a circle, almost a hole, containing something that could be a foetus, a tumour, or even a flower. It is unclear, and the expression of the face is also very different from the monotype. This suggests that she was paying attention to the drawing itself, not simply using it as a step towards the monotype.
What we do know is that this use of both sides is closely tied to her technique. We spoke with her son, who witnessed her working, but even he did not remember whether the drawings were made before or after. He did recall that she often worked on the floor.
Maria Jarema, “Cracked Modernism” at Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, photo: Magda Pawluczuk, courtesy of the Museum
JG: Today, many exhibitions focus on rediscovering women artists who were overlooked in art history. Do you see this exhibition as part of that broader curatorial trend?
ÉCH: I am interested in feminism, but not in essentialist feminism: the idea that something happens simply because you are a woman, that you are somehow assigned a role. That, I think, needs to be questioned. At the same time, I make exhibitions about artists who move me, who matter to me. It happens that a lot of them are women. For example, I have been looking closely at the work of Miriam Cahn, writing about it. It is very important that she is a strong feminist, and that this is visible in her work, but not in an essentialist way.
I do think that some artists should be better known simply because they are great and still not sufficiently seen. Someone should do a major retrospective of Mary Kelly, for instance. I have shown some of her works myself, but we are still not quite there.
We have not made as much progress as one might think; in writing, yes, but less so in exhibitions, if you consider Linda Nochlin’s seminal essays and exhibition from the 1970’s. Of course, it is important that women artists are shown more and better. I am very glad that several exhibitions of women artists are currently taking place at the same time at MSN, each from a different perspective: for example, Alison Gingeras’ show The Woman Question 1550–2025. They create a strong context together, but I did not approach this exhibition in those terms. I never work with quotas.