Asamblaż z lat sześćdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku w polskich kolekcjach muzealnych. Problem dokumentacji

The article undertakes the topic of the correct terminology for assemblages from the 1960s in the collections of the Polish National and Regional Museums. When analysing the situation of objects from the collections, the author tried to show that museum strategies which do not follow the creation of new terminology caused the works to be assigned to three earlier defined categories – painting, sculpture and graphics. Therefore three-dimensional post-modernist works were treated the same way as modernist, which allowed their inclusion in the collection. This situation, which is also sporadically and inconsequently used in the literature on the subject caused the term assemblage to be almost crossed out from the museum collection cards. Only in the case of Władysław Hasior, whose art is recognisable through the use of “tacky” items of low rank, the name assemblage was accepted. Even though neither the author of the term Jean Dubuffet (who included dried butterflies in his works) nor the key exhibition which sanctioned the use of it (The Art of Assemblage, 1961) did not use the criterion of the item of a low rank. It was rather about the creation of a work through “setting one thing beside the other without connective”, “collecting, gathering, merging” and the formal and technological development of the formula of a flat collage. Accepting such a definition allows us to see assemblages in the works of Teresa Rudowicz (with the use of lace), Danuta Urbanowicz (in which she used a fragment of a wall), Tytus Dziedzuszycki (in works with the use of metal and wood), Bronisław Kierzkowski (connecting metal and plaster) and others. In reference to the work of Tadeusz Kantor one may try to translate a term “combine painting” taken from Robert Rauschenberg’s works because the usage of traditional paint is so clear that it is used equally with other artistic materials.