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“Today is always more complicated than yesterday,” wrote the Polish poet Jan Brzękowski (1903–1983) in 1929. “This is because today is still alive and difficult to grasp.” But capturing and classifying the international art of the present day was the task Brzękowski and Wanda Chodasiewicz-Grabowska (later Nadia Léger) set for themselves in publishing the French-Polish journal L’Art Contemporain / Sztuka współczesna (Contemporary Art) in three issues of 1929 and 1930. Picking up where Arp and Lissitzky’s Kunstismen (The Isms of Art) of 1925 had left off, each issue of L’Art Contemporain contained an installment of Brzękowski’s article “Kilométrage” (milage), which traced the development of modern art from 1908 to the present. In 1931, Brzękowski consolidated these essays in his book Kilométrage de la peinture contemporaine 1908-1930 (Milage of Contemporary Painting; Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1931), which was illustrated with thirty plates—beginning with Monet and ending with De Chirico. 1931 also saw the opening of the Museum Sztuki in Łotz, Poland, one of the first museums devoted to the history of modern art. Founded by members of the a.r. group, including Brzękowski, the Museum shared the taxonomic ambitions of Kilométrage. Brzękowski assisted in building the Museum’s collection by procuring works directly from artists in Paris. In 1933, Bzękowski’s Kilométrage appeared in yet another iteration, this time translated into the artificial language of Esperanto under the title Pri l' moderna arto (On Modern Art). Co-edited by Salomon Grenkamp-Kornfeld and published in Hungary, this book included over seventy plates—beginning with Cézanne and ending with Joaquín Torres-Garcia. As fascism and resurgent nationalism took hold in Europe, Pri l' moderna arto returned Brzękowski’s project to the realm of the utopian.
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