Dr habil. Maria Hussakowska

Some time ago I was invited to look at Stefan Krygier’s art through the lens—or from the perspective—of my experience of Minimalism. An intriguing challenge, provided we obviously reject the procedures of applying yardsticks and judging according to criteria developed within American discourse.

In the taxonomy of Polish art history, Stefan Krygier is above all a pupil and continuator of Władysław Strzemiński, an artist in dialogue with the Master and the avant-garde. He was the most faithful of the pupils, and his academic career at the State Higher School of Fine Arts has, to some extent, sometimes been treated as a form of ‘recompense’ for the Master’s tragic fate. Nika Strzemińska also emphasised this aspect in a sense, writing in a posthumous essay not only of the close friendship between her father and the Krygiers, but also of the—symbolic—mothering she expected, after Katarzyna Kobro’s death, from almost every woman who was friendly with the family, and which she received precisely from Krystyna Krygier.

Stefan Krygier, Window, 1946, oil on canvas, 84 × 75 cm, collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź

Though perhaps less theoretically correct, it is tempting to borrow a phrase from Andrzej Turowski¹ and write about Krygier’s art as seen through his friendship with Strzemiński. Despite its lack of precision, this far from commonplace expression broadens our understanding of the Krygier–Strzemiński relationship. Turowski’s Avant-Garde Margins is a book that will be invoked here repeatedly. It offers an extraordinarily insightful view of the possible readings and explorations of such ‘scaffolding’ in the discourse of contemporary art history as the concepts of centre and margin, the avant-garde, and the symptoms of derivativeness and innovation. Written from a revisionist position—including towards the author’s own achievements—reconciled to the waning dominance of successive certainties and making no effort to construct new ones, it nevertheless opens the perspectives of our discipline to areas that John Ashbery called modernism’s ‘Other Traditions’. These clearly disrupt the binary opposition between modernists and traditionalists. By identifying apparently thoroughly researched areas in twentieth-century Polish art and confronting them with situations, works or artists marginal to the mainstream, Turowski calls their earlier categorisation into question and reveals uncharted components of modernism.

This is not the only book spread open on my desk; another inspiring read is Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind². Her devices as a writer prompted me to reflect that my writing of every text likewise requires a chorus of cheerleaders—in other words, helpful sentences and quotations; that other people’s words matter, not merely as a means of outlining the state of research. Immersing oneself in texts is more than acquiring a certain body of knowledge. I proceed like Smith: ‘The desk on which I write is covered with open novels (in my case, not only novels). I read to immerse myself in a certain kind of sensibility, to strike a particular tone, to impose discipline upon myself… to gain verbal freedom’³.

Recently, and particularly since Krygier’s death, the discourse seems to have been dominated by an interweaving of the theme of personal relationships with a second, fundamental theme concerning art—its theoretical foundations and historical grounding. This tendency is aptly characterised by exhibitions as well as texts, including the paper delivered by Grzegorz Sztabiński at a conference of art historians in Łódź: Władysław Strzemiński and His Pupil: Stefan Krygier’s Conception of Art. The author emphasises the role of permanent dialogue within this relationship, concluding that ‘such a dialogue, direct at first and then continued through repeated attempts to interpret the oeuvre of the creator of Unism, proved fruitful in every respect’⁴. At different stages of Krygier’s practice, his works also contain other references that are no less radical in relation to the ‘Albertian’ image and to relief understood as a subgenre of sculpture: conscious responses to the dialogues unfolding in the art of his time.

My attention was drawn to the changes in approaches to space that took place during the 1960s—spectacular in the reliefs and culminating in the Centres of Condensation of Form (which displayed themselves to striking effect in the artist’s family garden). These works in space, distinctly non-sculptural in character, refer to model constructions, linking them to almost the entire generation of artists working ‘around 1960/70’. For the Minimalists, the most attractive models were borrowed from other, non-artistic systems, because they guaranteed a ‘pure’ presence free from the temptation to confer meanings. Krygier’s Centres were different. Although the models refer to mathematics, they produce a Surrealist effect even upon first encounter. This suggests that, in the open game and unlimited space offered by the artist, art and its systems nevertheless remain important.

The question of Minimalism in the context of Unism has been asked several times. Strzemiński’s words on the self-sufficiency of the work—and therefore its complete autonomy, stemming from the fact that ‘a painting is an object, like all the other objects in its surroundings’—have been juxtaposed with Frank Stella’s question, crucial to Minimalism, concerning the material reality of the visual phenomenon: ‘My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object… What I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see’⁵. What they share is the asemic nature of the painting, yet each of these artefacts—self-sufficient and self-referential paintings—possesses its own map of references. Within the Minimalists’ field we encounter, with no difficulty at all because it is ubiquitous, the whole of geometric abstraction in Alfred Barr’s historical, ‘Americanised’ edition. For many years, this naturally excluded awareness of the Central European avant-garde. One of the leading themes in Minimalist strategies is held to be the dismantling of the modernist cube, and hence the (de)construction of the utopias erected by successive avant-gardes that drew upon the language of geometry. Acts of evoking one story or another through quotation or montage sometimes create the rather insistent impression that a certain narrative has been displaced in time (although this is not the place to develop the otherwise fascinating trail of George Kubler, whom the Minimalists read attentively).

Still other readings influenced the conviction in the historicity of art professed not only by Donald Judd, who remained Meyer Schapiro’s faithful pupil in this respect. Judd’s many texts reveal a belief that art is moving somewhere, in a certain direction, and will not disappear like ice cubes dropped into boiling water. To the end, Judd also believed that sense and meaning resided in the objects themselves—and Stefan Krygier thought similarly. He repeatedly wrote of the need for a creative confrontation between knowledge of art, its historicity and practice: ‘Many (…) contemporary critics and theoreticians of art work without an artistic background of their own, thereby offering an incomplete view of the work of art’⁶. He believed—again like the Minimalists and many avant-garde artists—that an artist had to be both critic and theoretician. As a lecturer, he lamented the state of knowledge and visual culture, invoking Strzemiński, for whom ‘the achievements of all art constituted a workshop for inquiry and analysis. The specific form of his works emerged from a synthesis resulting from a scholarly and intellectual process as well as from sensitivity and visual culture’⁷. Krygier himself ‘turned towards art history and, by analysing it, sought his own artistic conception. (…) He did not seek form in the abstract, but by referring to the perception of earlier works. In the manner in which their arrangement was received, he wished to find the foundations of his own art’⁸. This was also what he taught his students. In their recollections, both Jerzy Treliński and Grzegorz Sztabiński emphasise the theme of a ‘true history of art’⁹ —one proceeding naturally from A Theory of Vision and basing its system of evaluation upon an in-depth analysis of works.

The similarities to Minimalist procedures are obvious. The Minimalists combined the art history of their favourite teacher, Meyer Schapiro, with the version of art history hung by Barr Jr in MoMA’s galleries. In texts that frequently connected the art of distant eras with the present, Schapiro argued that a genuinely critical attitude on the part of the avant-garde towards the system was possible, and that this constituted a striving for the highest value sought by art: freedom.

Schapiro’s theories were a kind of final barricade for the intellectuals of the New York Left—and above all for avant-garde painters—who were seeking foundations for an individualism intended to be utterly different from the unanimously condemned bourgeois individualism. The appeal of Schapiro’s texts, not only among professionals, lay in their originality: he was the first to study intriguing Romanesque arabesques in relation to the contemporary abstract art of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. By introducing current art into the discourse of art history—which was then a genuine rarity—he made a significant breach, and the academic discipline gained immensely in the eyes of artists.

One cannot avoid mentioning a fundamental conflict: in Strzemiński’s modernist world of rationalist society, there is—to put it mildly—no room for an apotheosis of freedom. What was Krygier’s attitude towards social unification, individual privileges and even the author’s individuality, and how did it change? As we know, he preferred to work as an architect in a design office rather than accept the rigours of Socialist Realism as an artist. Refusal, however, meant marginalisation, which is why his activity in the group of artists gathered around Konrad Swinarski in what was then Stalinogród (ST-53) formed an important link.

Before that, perhaps we should finally turn to Krygier’s art itself. First, in the context of A Theory of Vision, because critics associate at least two periods of his creative explorations with interpretations of the method of architectonisation. The first, centred upon Egyptian art—or, more precisely, its perception—consisted in tracing possible ways of linking diverse shapes. The impulse for the next stage came from a journey to Egypt and an encounter with the originals: the possibility of directly entering spheres of light and darkness, and of tracing the modification of a single form in ways not limited to sight. The artist himself wrote of his inspiration from the Valley of the Kings in Luxor: ‘Paintings with a strongly modelled texture of multiplied elements in the sphere of light and darkness. This conception is continued in compositions in metal; for example, a polished aluminium plate covered with a large number of elements varying in size makes it possible to construct spatial planes—to emanate space’¹⁰. Yet these are only the consequences of the encounter in Luxor with space emerging ‘in spheres of light and darkness’¹¹, fixed in the artist’s memory. In asking about the experience of ‘that’ space itself, Krygier’s enigmatic statement might be expanded by invoking Robert Morris’s description of an experience: ‘In Central and South America, courtyards, temple platforms and various constructions such as the Mayan observatory open onto the sky in the same way. Heights differ, perspectives are disrupted. Behavioural responses differ, being less passive than those elicited by normal architectural spaces. The physical acts of seeing and experiencing these eccentric structures become more fully a function of time (…)’¹². The body in motion is the key Morris offers not only to the reading of his own art. The distinction he invokes in the reception of space between the ‘object self’ and the ‘subject self’—with their cultural moorings—leads him to conclude: ‘The dimension of time separates the “subject self” and the “object self”. In the relatively direct perception of objects—an encounter followed by assessment and judgement—there is little displacement or gap between these two models. Spatial experience, requiring physical movement and continuity, invariably introduces extension between them’¹³. The prehistoric architecture of the Maya and Peru, and the still mysterious Nazca Lines, revealed this particularity to Morris. The stay in Egypt, entering between ‘spheres of light and darkness’, seems to have made Krygier realise that this experience demanded a consideration of space extending beyond Strzemiński’s conceptions, and that the eye might not be the final authority. ‘Architectonisation understood in this way ceases to be a consequence of the afterimage, whose role Strzemiński emphasised. It becomes the result of a deliberate construction based on the considered modification of forms added to one another’¹⁴, Sztabiński observes.

I cannot agree with Bożena Kowalska, who treats Krygier’s Egyptian fascinations as something exceptional at a time preoccupied with modernity¹⁵. For obvious reasons, many longed-for confrontations with historical art—in pursuit of a ‘different’ space—did not and could not take place among progressive Polish artists. Yet the search for the canon in the achievements of past centuries motivated many. Anna Baranowa writes: ‘Piotr Potworowski sought the canon in Neolithic art, Nowosielski in Byzantium, and Ewa Kierska in Giotto’^16. Krygier, however, was not concerned with tracing the canon; and even if he was, entering the space of Luxor seems to have proved more important. Artists from other circles, meanwhile, travelled extensively in the 1950s and 1960s. The most obvious example was Ad Reinhardt, who spent his holidays travelling ‘to see it all with his own eyes’, then showed 500 slides from India, China or Cambodia during his lectures. The future Minimalists took part in these classes, and he infected them with this need (as I have written more extensively on several occasions). Robert Mangold, in turn, explored the flatness of the painting in relation to the three-dimensional context of architecture by referring to Cimabue and other Sienese masters¹⁷. Looking beyond this circle, one must mention several European artists: alongside Yves Klein’s Blue Buddha Exploring the Void, there is Lucio Fontana, slashing the canvas in a gesture of catching space, which Morris believes is defined more precisely by the present tense¹⁸; and there are others.

Robert Morris observes: ‘Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Minimalism was the fact that it was the only art of objects (apart from the obvious example of architecture) ever to attempt to mediate between the notational knowledge of flat issues (such as systems, the schematic, the logically constructed and distributed, the assumed) and issues of objects (the relativity of perception in depth). Mediation, however, is a delicate and often short-lived state of affairs’¹⁹.

Collineations is a term Krygier borrows from geometry. The dictionary definition is: ‘a one-to-one mapping of a geometric space onto itself in which the image of a straight line is a straight line. In other words, collineations preserve the collinearity of points. A collineation can be defined in any geometry in which the concept of a straight line, and thus collinearity, can be meaningfully defined—for example, in the Euclidean plane, Euclidean space (of any finite dimension), affine space and projective space (of any finite dimension).’ In works bearing this title—operations on a plane focused on analysing transformations of form—the artist investigates how far modification may be taken without disrupting the unified character of the arrangement. The departure from the plane also appears intriguing: working with reliefs and their ‘strange’ space. At times, the simplicity of the arrangement and the visual operation from top to bottom that it compels prove deceptive, disturbing our ‘natural’ seeing and thinking about symmetry. Forms covered in a strong monochromatic colour—nitrocellulose enamel, with a character inseparable from that period—and frequently employing a sharp contrast of red and black create the impression of models for exercises.

The lost Conflicts of 1968 are constructed upon a white spatial lattice mounted against a dark background. A soft form flows down from several apertures, as though arrested in process—gravity makes itself felt. It is difficult to dispel a sense of discomfort: the relationship between hard geometry, the grid as an iconic figure of modernism, and a biomorphic form that is neither bud nor growth demonstrates a clear mismatch. Yet nothing is accidental; taking in the work at a glance, we sense its construction. This emphasises the different objecthood of these artefacts—it is easier to see what they are not than to find the proper category.

The composition Conflicts VIII of 1970 is a rhombus. Its form derives partly from Mondrian’s Neoplastic experiments and partly from Stella and other painters of shaped canvases, who differentiated their supports. The title compels us to remember the celebrated conflict between Mondrian and Van Doesburg. It may also concern the clash between the rhombus and the rectangle, which is always more systemically correct, and therefore justified. What is crucial for the artist is ‘the mutual responsiveness of shapes and colours’²⁰. Each time, in every variant, the space of the relief is important as an active element, producing this kind of relationship founded upon a sharp contrast of red and black, and sometimes blue. Colours cover, rather than fill, certain simple forms of negligible volume, introduced into an arrangement of channels—distinctive separators—that imposes order. The height of the sides seems to objectify space, yet what we see and how we experience this object contradict the suggested dimensions.

In other works, with horizontal arrangements, the impression is similar. In a shallow yet indeterminate space, geometric and biomorphic forms—‘set in conflict’ at the beginnings of the avant-garde, then reconciled by Peggy Guggenheim’s gesture and Jean Piaget’s structural approach—clash with one another.

I have not seen the Centre of Condensation of Form. I know it only from descriptions, photographs and films, yet I shall risk tracing the transformation of space in this most monumental of Krygier’s works. The structure itself repeats certain earlier solutions: there is a large white lattice upon and around which collineations of forms unfold. Some of the organic forms, known on a smaller scale from earlier works, burst the structure apart. ‘These rounded forms, extracted by the force of aggression, were the wombs of black, red and red-and-black balls that set out to conquer the beach and residential surroundings of Osieki’²¹, wrote Kowalska, a great admirer of these works, in a somewhat Young Poland idiom.

The singularity of this structure—and of its variants—remains striking today. Visually, it is plainly of its period (colourful, cheerful, concrete and dynamic), while simultaneously intriguing through its ambiguous relationships with place and space. It can be read in various ways, and the aspect of conceptual interventionism need not necessarily be the most important. There is also the Structuralism mentioned by Baranowa²², which provided intellectual support to Minimalism during its early phase of initiation. Jack Burnham, the American theorist and artist—somewhat overlooked today but widely read at the time—wrote several books exploring the methodological possibilities of new research based on structural tools²³. In his visual works, he also employed ‘the notational knowledge of flat issues’, materialised in space through aluminium strips and fluorescent tubes²⁴.

In the case of the Centre of Condensation of Form II, this ‘Morrisian notational knowledge’ operates in three systems. The physical literalness of the white lattice, whose module is more complex than before, resonates with an arrangement of soft, ribbed forms—chaotic only in appearance and, to me, reminiscent of Miró—with a characteristic indentation, sometimes filling the fields and sometimes virtually bursting them apart. There are more possibilities: some of the antithetically positioned forms expel small elements into space, in which a combination of hard angles and soft curves likewise predominates. Nothing is balanced, once again confirming the model—that is, demonstrative—character of the construction. The white skeleton is also scaffolding with pronounced contours, which exerts a powerful visual effect. Elements flung into space form certain constellations, compelling us to consider the rules governing the arrangement. Krygier would probably have agreed with Morris: ‘It is not especially surprising that art moving towards greater concreteness and away from illusionism should have become associated with the fundamentally idealistic imagery of the geometric. Among things that can be conceived and experienced, both the symmetrical and the geometric are most readily retained in the mind as form’²⁵. This is why we readily identify the ‘centre of condensation’ with ‘white cubes’ (even forgetting their allegorical meaning). Intense, unmodulated colour—belonging, until recently, more to things than to art—has the quality Donald Judd called ‘high-content’, ‘self-referential’ colour. Understood in this way, colour co-organises objects²⁶. Here matters are different, but does our sense of the elements’ structuring in relation to one another and to what surrounds them—that is, space—vanish as we observe the parts moving away from their source? Do we distinguish the geometric framework, the majestic forms and the elements scattering in every direction each time? Is imagination more useful in recognising the structure, or would the artist have preferred cool reflection? Generalising descriptions of the art of that decade assume a departure from intuitive reception in favour of structurality and, as a result, the intellectualisation of perception²⁷. Did the artist envisage a psychosomatic effect in this instance? If we follow this trail, size will be important.

Georg Simmel wrote of the aesthetic problem of quantity: ‘from the purely artistic conditions concerning the visibility of things on the one hand, and from our psychophysical structure on the other, arise demands concerning the quantitative aspects of the work of art; from the inner significance of things, from their spiritual meaning, and from irresistible associations of content arise other demands’²⁸. Although I know of no references to Simmel, the Minimalists treated this thought with extraordinary seriousness. In the 1990s and later, they operated on a monumental scale described as ‘Wagnerian’, while Morris sees this as ‘an attempt to recover transcendent Puritan values’²⁹. Rosalind Krauss nevertheless still believes that ‘to discover the system of this art, one must enter a world deprived of its centre, a world of blind spots and transformations in which nothing is justified by revelations of the transcendent’³⁰.

Krygier’s dialogue in the Centres of Condensation with Strzemiński and the avant-gardes also reached an almost Wagnerian scale. The object can be treated as a reworking of forms and codes developed by the avant-gardes and subsequently invoked in the construction of a model visual pun, full of irony and self-irony (when the manufactured ping-pong balls landed in the artist’s eye sockets, perhaps not blinding him but provoking him to recall an icon of modernism—Giorgio de Chirico’s Portrait of Apollinaire)³¹. While a Constructivist work ought to investigate or introduce rational order into the reality of the world, the forms condensed in Krygier’s centres may either enact the utopia in mockery by setting out to conquer the Cosmos, or demonstrate the empty meanings of forms circulating in space. Let us not forget collineation: according to the dictionary, its Latin root—collineo—means to hit the mark.

1. A. Turowski, Na obrzeżach awangardy [On the Margins of the Avant-Garde], in A. Turowski, Awangardowe marginesy [Avant-Garde Margins], Warsaw 1998, p. 185.
2. Z. Smith, Jak zmieniałam zdanie. Eseje okolicznościowe [Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays], Kraków 2010.
3. Ibid., p. 133.
4. G. Sztabiński, Władysław Strzemiński i jego uczeń. Koncepcja sztuki Stefana Krygiera [Władysław Strzemiński and His Pupil: Stefan Krygier’s Conception of Art], in Sztuka w Łodzi.Materiały sesji naukowej zorganizowanej z okazji 45 rocznicy Łódzkiego Oddziału Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki w 575. rocznicę nadania Łodzi praw miejskich [Art in Łódź: Proceedings of the Academic Conference Organised on the 45th Anniversary of the Łódź Branch of the Association of Art Historians and the 575th Anniversary of Łódź Being Granted Municipal Rights], Łódź 2000, p. 45.
5. Frank Stella, in Questions to Stella and Judd by Bruce Glaser (1966), quoted in M. Hussakowska, Minimalizm w sztukach wizualnych. Demitologizacja pojęcia awangardy w amerykańskim środowiskuartystycznymlatsześćdziesiątych [Minimalism in the Visual Arts: The Demythologisation of the Concept of the Avant-Garde in the American Art World of the 1960s], Kraków 2003, p. 20.
6. S. Krygier, Wspomnienia [Memoirs], in Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych im. Władysława StrzemińskiegowŁodzi1945–1995 [The Władysław Strzemiński State Higher School of Visual Arts in Łódź, 1945–1995], ed. G. Sztabiński, Łódź 1995, p. 46.
7. S. Krygier, Władysław Strzemiński – artysta i pedagog. Wspomnienia [Władysław Strzemiński—Artist and Teacher: Memoirs], in Władysław Strzemiński. In Memoriam, ed. J. Zagrodzki, Łódź 1988, p. 42. Quoted in G. Sztabiński, Między percepcją a formą. Koncepcja sztuki Stefana Krygiera [Between Perception and Form: Stefan Krygier’s Conception of Art], in Stefan Krygier /1923–1997/, ed. K. Knapik, exhibition catalogue, Museum of the History of the City of Łódź, Łódź 1999, p. 20.
8. G. Sztabiński, Między percepcją a formą. Koncepcja sztuki Stefana Krygiera [Between Perception and Form: Stefan Krygier’s Conception of Art], op. cit., p. 22.
9. See the interviews recorded in the film from the exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery in Łódź in 2009.
10. S. Krygier, (autobiographical sketch), in B. Kowalska, Twórcy – postawy. Artyści mojej galerii [Creators—Attitudes: Artists of My Gallery], Kraków 1981, p. 111.
11. Ibid.
12. R. Morris, Czas teraźniejszy przestrzeni [The Present Tense of Space], in Uwagi o rzeźbie.Teksty [Notes on Sculpture: Texts], ed. S. Titz, C. Krümmel and K. Słoboda, Łódź 2010, p. 77.

13. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

1. G. Sztabiński, Między percepcją a formą. Koncepcja sztuki Stefana Krygiera [Between Perception and Form: Stefan Krygier’s Conception of Art], op. cit., p. 22.
2. B. Kowalska, Stefan Krygier – dzieje twórczości [Stefan Krygier—The History of an Oeuvre], in Stefan Krygier. Otwartość formy [Stefan Krygier: The Openness of Form], ed. M. Krygier and B. Świerkowska-Jóźwiak, exhibition catalogue, Municipal Art Gallery in Łódź, Łódź 2009, p. 7.
3. A. Baranowa, Widzieć i oddziaływać. O twórczości Stefana Krygiera [Seeing and Affecting: On the Art of Stefan Krygier], in Stefan Krygier. Otwartość formy [Stefan Krygier: The Openness of Form], op. cit., p. 7.
4. N. Princenthal, A Survey of the Paintings, in R. Shiff, R. Storr and A. C. Danto, Robert Mangold, London and New York 2004, p. 224.
5. This is a conception to which Robert Morris repeatedly returns (see R. Morris, Czas teraźniejszy… [The Present Tense…], op. cit., p. 6983. The similarity of Lucio Fontana’s actions is discussed, among others, by B. Buchloh, Structure,Signand Reference in the Work of David Lamelas, in Neo-Avangarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955–1975, An October Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London 2000, p. 309.
6. R. Morris, Polinii Nazca (Aligned with Nazca, 1975) [Along the Nazca Line], in Uwagi o rzeźbie. Teksty [Notes on Sculpture: Texts], op. cit., p. 67.
7. S. Krygier, Stefan Krygier. Otwartość formy [Stefan Krygier: The Openness of Form], op. cit., p. 13.
8. B. Kowalska, Stefan Krygier – dzieje twórczości [Stefan Krygier—The History of an Oeuvre], op. cit., p. 11.
9. A. Baranowa, op. cit., p. 7.
10. J. Burnham, The Structure of Art, Braziller, New York 1971; J. Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century, Braziller, New York 1973;

J. Burnham, Systems Aesthetics, in Great Western Salt Works, Braziller, New York 1974, pp. 15–25.

1. For example, Two Four – Unit Modular Tapes of 1968.
2. R. Morris, op. cit., p. 42.
3. The separateness of Judd’s objects consists in the principle, identified in Specific Objects and repeatedly reiterated, of operating with an indivisible whole, without the possibility of extracting, juxtaposing or contrasting its parts. For Judd and many others, the assertion that ‘there are no relations between the parts’ was axiomatic. G. Guerico, Art as Existence: The Artist’s Monograph and Its Project, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2006.
4. B. Schröder, Konkrete Kunst, Mathematisches Kalkül und programmiertes Chaos, Berlin 2008, p. 43.
5. G. Simmel, Ilość estetyczna [Aesthetic Quantity], in Most i drzwi. Wybór esejów [Bridge and Door: Selected Essays], trans. M. Łukaszewicz, Warsaw 2006, p. 147.
6. R. Morris, Rozmiar ma znaczenie [Size Matters], in Uwagi o rzeźbie… [Notes on Sculpture…], op. cit., p. 93.
7. R. Krauss, Le Witt in Progress, October, no. 6, 1978.
8. See Fotografia autorska [Authorial Photography], CCF I, 1970, in Stefan Krygier. Otwartość formy [Stefan Krygier: The Openness of Form], op. cit., p. 18.
9. See Fotografia autorska [Authorial Photography], CCF I, 1970, in Stefan Krygier. Otwartość formy [Stefan Krygier: The Openness of Form], op. cit., p. 18.