In 1932, Jan Brzekowski, born in Wisnicz Nowy on the 18th of December 1903, who studied in Cracow and in Paris, and in 1924, together with Tadeusz Peiper, Julian Przybos and Jalo Kurek, formed the so-called ‘Cracow avant-garde’ group of poets, publishes a reproduction of Katarzyna Kobro’s Spatial Composition (5) as an example of Unism in his book on modern art published in Budapest in Esperanto.
Esperanto is a non-native language, without any connection to any special territory, or any native speakers. It has a sing song quality. And more than most other languages, it relies on sound in making sense.
Almost all of Kobro’s oeuvre was destroyed in 1939, when the Nazis ransacked her studio. Ten works have survived, including one oil painting on glass. Six others have been reconstructed from photographs, in one case using a recovered fragment. The surviving works are in the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, and circulated in an exhibition, Constructivism in Poland, during the 1970s.
I read in a book recently loaned to me by Geert that the vowels of the Esperanto alphabet are pronounced as follows: the a as in ‘far’; the e as in ‘fiance,’ or like the a in ‘fate’; the i as in ‘machine,’ as in ‘I am a machine’; the o as in ‘toll,’ ‘it tolls for thee,’ or like in ‘for’; the u as in ‘rude’ or ‘rudimentary.’
It is, she thinks sometimes, and now she writes, the gesture that is the primary thing. Feeling my body, the weight of my body, my hand on this sheet, the way I cover it over with a tangle of words, my far too often illegible scrawl, though later I may read it into the recorder, though later I may type it up, looping versus angular strokes, my letters coiled and linked and sometimes torn in the downstroke or the upstroke as I begin to veer, I don’t know where I’m going, somewhere else, or even if I am, or what I am constructing. Something. She thinks of it as her constructivism in New York.
Katarzyna Kobro believed that the task of spatial composition is the shaping of forms that can be translated into life.
Kobro discarded the idea of isolated form. Her sculptures merge with the surrounding space, rather than dividing themselves against it. She wishes that she could do this with her life, determining its rhythms and divisions. It seems to her a way of absolving the world. It seems, she writes, benevolent and open, though, especially given how Katarzyna will wind up, it is also probably naïve.
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