‘On the eve of liberation, 22 April 1945, Käthe Kollwitz dies, not living to see how a new democratic Germany, the Germany for which she fought with the whole heart of a progressive artist, arises with the support of the Soviet Union,’ Stanisław Hen writes in his review of the presentation held in the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA).

The "Exhibition of Works by Soviet Artists" in Zachęta CBWA was the first large official exhibition of Soviet art in the Polish People’s Republic and the second large exhibition of its kind in Warsaw. The first one was organised in the Second Republic of Poland , in a different historical reality, at the Warsaw Institute of Art Propaganda in March of 1933.

The organisation of this exhibition (Ogólnopolska Wystawa Architektury Wnętrz, hereafter OWAW) — as well as the subsequent three editions of the National Art Exhibitions (starting in 1950) and the Universal Exhibition of Architecture in 1953 (n.b. almost all of them took place at Zachęta) — was a manifestation of the centralism typical of the Stalinist organisation of artistic life in Poland.

The exhibition at the CBWA filled six rooms and featured paintings, sculptures and graphics (74 paintings, 35 sculptures, 157 drawings, fabrics and tapestries.) Apart from professional art, folk art has also had its place at the exhibition. In line with the organisers’ assumptions, the audience could explore the history and everyday life of Romania in recent years on the basis of the presented works.

The exhibition of 46 works by Renato Guttuso (1911–1987), consisting of 30 paintings and 16 drawings, occupied two big rooms at Zachęta. A poster advertising the show reproduced one of the pieces, The Fighter, a strongly expressive work of art which brings to mind The Bomber (2004), the contemporary sculpture of Anna Baumgart. Guttuso was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Italy (since 1951), the World Peace Council, and a former partisan.

The preparation of the exhibition of works by Katarzyna Kobro (1898–1951) and Władysław Strzemiński (1893–1952) was a complicated affair with a number of surprising turns of events. As a result of the efforts undertaken by the organisers, it eventually took place in December 1956 at the Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Łódź. Even in September 1956, moving the exhibition to Warsaw was all but impossible.

Compared to the first edition of the exhibition, the decision was made to place greater emphasis on taking up ‘problems of contemporary interior design, which aims to best meet the needs of the broad masses’

‘For the first time we have the opportunity to get more closely acquainted with drawings, prints and watercolours from the United States. Therefore, the exhibition in “Zachęta” crucially supplements our limited knowledge of the art of this country and provides us with the basis for making judgements, even if very fragmentary, as to its unique character,’ Ignacy Witz wrote in a review of the American Graphic Art exhibition, opened in the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA) in December 1957.

Reviews of this exhibition from August 1958 highlighted the fact that it was an ‘artistic sensation of Warsaw’and that ‘Teofil Ociepka and two of his painter friends, Paweł Wróbel and Paweł Stolorz, truly became a revelation in Warsaw’.The first such an extensive exhibition of naïve — or non-professional — art at the CBWA .

The exhibition, held under the auspices of the foreign ministers of both countries, was one of the comprehensive reviews of the art of a capitalistic country that rarely took place in the 1960s. Although the exhibition was a response to the show of Polish abstraction organised in Copenhagen in 1959, it did not limit itself (contrary to the title) to the latest art.

The exhibition at Zachęta was a big show of contemporary French architecture and the applied arts. Since the second half of the 1950s, cultural exchange between France and Poland had gradually intensified, which manifested itself in state-supported exhibitions. The curator of Forms was a famous interior and furniture designer, René Herbst, a co-founder of the French Union of Modern Artists (L’Union des artistes modernes, UAM) established in 1929, and from 1950 to 1966, head of Formes utiles, a UAM section dedicated to industrial design.

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950 and 1954. She initially engaged in painting; however, she quickly gave up the medium in favour of textiles. Her first individual exhibition took place in 1960 at Kordegarda in Warsaw. Two years later, she showed her works at the Biennial in Lausanne, which influenced the crystallisation of the Polish school of textiles.

The author of the concept for the Contemporary Trends. Paintings from the Collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven exhibition, and its initiator, was Edy de Wilde (1919–2005). The opinions of this charismatic museologist left their mark on the character of the whole exhibition. De Wilde was the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1946–1963) and then of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1963–1985). Therefore, he presented works which he mostly bought for the museum collections himself.

The retrospective exhibition of Stanisław Witkiewicz, also known as Witkacy, which opened at Zachęta on 9 October 1967, featured 130 works by the artist, including 97 paintings and 33 drawings. Among the presented paintings, only 9 oil canvasses were showed alongside 88 pastel works.

Despite the protests that engulfed the streets of Warsaw on the 8 March 1968, the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions presented the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space — a famous sculpture by Umberto Boccioni. The list of artists, whose works were presented at the Contemporary Italian Art. 100 Works from Futurism to the Present Day exhibition featured numerous artists, including Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico, Enrico Prampolini, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Michelangelo Pistoletto, as well as American artist Cy Twombly, who lived in Rome at the time.

Contrary to the large Danish art exhibition organised by the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in 1961, this exhibition covered only the works of the young generation of Danish artists. Its context, as well as the source and authorship of the concept remain elusive.

In the introduction to the catalogue of the 1968 Exhibition of Contemporary French Painting, deputy commissioner Maurice Allemand stated ‘We hope that the collection of works represented here will not be a source of disappointment’. By reviewing the press mentions regarding the exhibition, one may come to the conclusion that the reality did not live up to his expectations.

In the 1960s, photo exhibitions at the Zachęta CBWA became more and more frequent. Interest in photography stemmed not only from an increasing artistic emancipation of this ‘new’ medium, which began to occupy an important place in the modernist artistic practice and reflection on the visual arts, but also its educational and propaganda potential.

1969 saw two simultaneous exhibitions, held from 19 September to 10 October. The first was titled 25 Years of the Polish People’s Republic in Photography, while the second was the exhibition in question — Warsaw 1945 in the Photography of Leonard Sempoliński. Both exhibitions were later showcased outside Warsaw and widely commented on in the national papers.

‘Representative exhibitions of Polish art, sent abroad, should be shown after returning home. The discussion will help the artists, and it will be useful to the exhibition organisers in their work — being a specific kind of social control in relation to the important period in the artist’s life that is today’s cultural exchange’.