Colorful yet claustrophobic figuration by postwar Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski Published for a 2020 exhibition at the Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Waiting Room gathers paintings from the last years of Polish figurative painter Andrzej Wróblewski's (1927-57) short life. Characterized by strong, vivid colors and claustrophobic atmospheres, these late paintings capture a striking panorama of postwar Poland.

Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.

By placing emerging artists in their political and social contexts, this book attempts to confront the activist scene that has arisen in the Russian art world during the past years. The recent explosion of protests in Russia is a symptom of a fundamental change in culture heralded by Vladimir Putin's second election (2007). While much of what is emerging is too new to be completely understood, this volume seeks to bring to light the important work of Russian artists today and to explicate the political environment that has given rise to such work. Post-Post-Soviet features both criticism by writers and scholars, as well as dialogues with artists which are preceded with an extensive timeline of artistic and sociopolitical context.

This volume, edited by Éva Forgács, with contributions from art historians from across Europe and the Americas, analyzes the artistic initiatives of the short time span between the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In this moment, a new internationalism was anticipated by retrieving pre-war modernism, as well as creating the new era's new artistic lingua franca. The chapters include in-depth case studies that analyze the complex, often interconnected, projects throughout the world—South America and Eastern and Western Europe—that were soon ended by the Cold War.

Communism Unwrapped is a collection of essays that unwraps the complex world of consumption under communism in postwar Eastern Europe, featuring new work by both American and European scholars writing from variety of disciplinary perspectives. The result is a fresh look at everyday life under communism that explores the ways people shopped, ate, drank, smoked, cooked, acquired, exchanged and assessed goods. These phenomena, the editors argue, were central to the way that communism was lived and experienced in its widely varied contexts in the region. Consumption pervaded everyday life far more than most other political and social phenomena. From design, to production, to retail sales and black market exchange, Communism Unwrapped follows communist goods from producer to consumer, tracing their circuitous routes. In the communist world this journey was rife with its own meanings, shaped by the special political and social circumstances of these societies. In examining consumption behind the Iron Curtain, this volume builds on a new field of study. It brings dimension and nuance to our understanding of the communist period and a new perspective to our current analyses of consumerism.

Physics was the leading science of the twentieth century and the book retraces important discoveries, made between 1895 and 2001, in 100 self-contained Episodes. Each is a short story of the scientists involved, their time and their work. The book is richly illustrated by about 600 portraits, photographs and figures.

The Red and the White: The Cinema of People's Poland takes a fascinating look at the history of post-war Polish cinema, and how it was affected by the political, social and cultural upheavals throughout the period 1947-89. This timely study re-evaluates the legacy of Socialist Realism, the representation of the war, cinematic portrayals of national myth and cultural history, literary adaptation and surrealism, and discourses of exile and national identity. Although paying particular reference to the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Andrzej Wajda, this book considers the contribution of a wide range of filmmakers, including Jerzy Skolimowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieska Holland, Andrzej Munk, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Wojciech Has and Roman Polanski. The volume also includes unique primary archival research into the role of state-sponsored censorship, and coverage of Polish-Jewish representations in film. Among the many films discussed are A Generation, Eroica, Ashes and Diamonds, Family Life, The Promised Land, The Hour Glass Sanatorium, Hands Up!, Decalogue 8, Europa, Europa and The Double Life of Veronique.

"One of Poland's preeminent postwar artists, Andrzej Wróblewski (1927-1957) created a highly individual and prolific form of abstract and figurative painting. During his short life, Wróblewski was torn between political involvement and artistic experimentation. His output reflects the original solutions he devised to address the personal and public issues of his time, in ways that are very relevant today and continue to inspire artists. This volume, with contributions by a team of international scholars, presents a thorough re-evaluation of his work and its legacy, in the context of a globalized art history."--Back cover.

This book concerns building an idealized image of the society in which the Holocaust occurred. It inspects the category of the bystander (in Polish culture closely related to the witness), since the war recognized as the axis of self-presentation and majority politics of memory. The category is of performative character since it defines the roles of event participants, assumes passivity of the non-Jewish environment, and alienates the exterminated, thus making it impossible to speak about the bystanders’ violence at the border between the ghetto and the ‘Aryan’ side. Bystanders were neither passive nor distanced; rather, they participated and played important roles in Nazi plans. Starting with the war, the authors analyze the functions of this category in the Polish discourse of memory through following its changing forms and showing links with social practices organizing the collective memory. Despite being often critiqued, this point of dispute about Polish memory rarely belongs to mainstream culture. It also blocks the memory of Polish violence against Jews. The book is intended for students and researchers interested in memory studies, the history of the Holocaust, the memory of genocide, and the war and postwar cultures of Poland and Eastern Europe.