The History of Alina Szapocznikow’s Oeuvre Catalogue

Catalogue for Alina

The mock-up of the catalogue of Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptures, made by Roman Cieślewicz at a scale of 1:1, has visual value in itself. Prepared by analogue means, it offers the satisfaction of looking at a unique object, a testament to the design practice of the pre-digital era. The author’s handwritten notes, added on tracing paper in red marker, contain typical technical instructions for the printer used in publication layout in the 1970s, such as “reproduce as line”, “plate directly from the mock-up”, “retouch at the bottom of the photo”, “thin fillet all around”.

The publication’s guiding colour, marked on the inside pages of the cover, is a shade of cobalt blue. Arrows indicate the distances between elements. For texts in two language versions, Polish and French, there are instructions on typeface, size, leading and column division. The plain, sans-serif Helvetica was chosen. The spreads have a precisely drawn grid of typographic lines. Cieślewicz filled the empty fields with the titles of the sculptures and numbers from 1 to 419. The page count is “17 sixteen-page signatures” plus one blank sheet kept in reserve.

On 30 May 1975 Cieślewicz sent the mock-up by airmail from Paris to Łódź. It weighed 13 kg and contained 500 photographs. The value of the parcel declared on the customs form was 5,000 French francs. The shipment was intended for the Museum of Art in Łódź, which was organising an exhibition of the sculptures of Alina Szapocznikow, who had died in 1973.

The First Posthumous Exhibition and the Last Photograph for the Catalogue

The retrospective exhibition of Alina Szapocznikow’s sculptures, held from September to October 1975 at the Museum of Art in Łódź, was not the first posthumous exhibition honouring the artist’s work. A few weeks after her death in 1973, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (ARC – Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) showed selected examples of “Tumours” and the entire “Herbarium” cycle, made up of 14 polyester casts of body parts. Cieślewicz included a negative from the documentation of that exhibition as the last page of the oeuvre catalogue, which gathered the full body of Szapocznikow’s sculptural work. It depicts a full-scale cast of the body of the artist’s son, Piotr Stanisławski, made from clay, plaster and polyester. The sculpture “Piotr – Full Nude” rests on a low, white plinth in the centre of a tall room.

Joint Exhibition and Catalogue

Work on the exhibition and the catalogue began in parallel. It started in spring 1973 with gathering information on the artist’s sculptures and drawings held by institutions, museums and private individuals. Numerous requests were sent for paid reproductions of the photographic documentation of the sculptures in their possession. Radio broadcasts and newsreel recordings about Szapocznikow were also sought, to be included in the bibliography. Detailed correspondence was conducted by the then director of the Museum, Ryszard Stanisławski, who was to be the curator of the exhibition.

According to the original schedule, the opening was planned for March 1975. In May the exhibition was to have a second showing at the National Museum in Wrocław. From the outset, the museum made its participation conditional on the exhibition being on view while the AICA congress was taking place in Wrocław in May 1975, which carried “prestige” value for the institution. Unfortunately, “for technical reasons” the opening had to be moved to September, which led the National Museum in Wrocław to withdraw from further work on organising the joint exhibition and catalogue, limiting its role to lending works from its collection. This decision may have contributed to the failure to publish Cieślewicz’s project, which was initially to be financed by the National Museum in Wrocław.

The full text accompanying the exhibition is available for download in the attachment below.

Editorial and content collaboration: Maciej Cholewiński, Marta Skłodowska, Marcin Stasiewicz.