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In 1929, the artists Katarzyna Kobro, Henryk Stażewski, and Wladyslaw Strzemiński, together with the poets Jan Brzękowski and Julian Przyboś, founded the a.r. group. “a.r.” stood for artyści rewolucyjni (revolutionary artists) or awangarda rzeczywista (real avant-garde). Dedicated to the search for new Constructivist forms in language and print, the group launched an ambitious publishing enterprise: seven numbered volumes in the Bibljoteki “a.r.” (a.r. library) were published between 1930 and 1936. Strzemiński’s striking cover of the first book in the series—Julian Przyboś’s volume of poetry, Z Ponad—is pictured above. Kobro and Strzemiński moved to Łódź in 1931. In May 1932, they organized the exhibition, Modern Printing (Drukarstwo nowoczesne) at the Institute of Arts and Propaganda in Łódź, in which their work was presented alongside that of international colleagues including Walter Dexel, César Domela, Theo van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, Franz Seiwert, and Jan Tschichold (see brochure below). Kobro and Strzemiński were instrumental in establishing Łódź as a center for Polish Constructivism and in assembling there one of the first public collections of abstract art in Europe (see our previous newsletter: Jan Brzękowski: Taking Stock of the Avant-Garde, 1929–1933).
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