International Yearbook of Futurism Studies

The Primitive as a cross-disciplinary and cross-geographical feature of the historical avant-garde established new aesthetic models that functioned as alternatives to the standards taught in the academies at the time. Amongst many other things, this led in Europe to the ‘discovery’ (or rather: ‘creation’) of ‘tribal’ art. In Central and Eastern European countries, the Primitive was sought less frequently in the exotic domain than in hitherto neglected cultures of peasants and mountain dwellers. This is especially true for Poland, risen from the ashes of three Empires at the end of the First Word War. The present essay deals with three different approaches to this construct in Polish Futurism (and partly in the closely related artistic group of Formists). What distinguished the Polish Futurists was that they did not, on the whole, operate using a geographical concept of ‘otherness’ (as in the case of the art of Africa or Oceania), or take any inspiration from a temporal past (as with prehistoric or medieval art). Instead, their primitive model was a social construct (as with folk art). In Poland, the distance could also be projected onto the future, as was the case with the Warsaw Futurists when they rejected the whole of national culture in the name of a primitive-to-come, or onto a mythic past, as in Aleksander Wat and Julian Tuwim’s literary Ur-Sprache created in the spirit of Russian zaum’.