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In 1982 the Polish American artist Jan Sawka executed an extraordinary painting, 15 Strange Things on the Clean Morning Sky. Contradicting the title, the sky depicted is covered with sketches and cryptic writing. This suggests a common hallucinatory experience had by pilots navigating an empty sky, the ganzfeld effect. When vision encounters any undifferentiated field, such as total darkness, it will create something to see, in the form of hallucinations. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has asserted that hallucination is an integral part of visual perception: it is a kind of preseeing, which Jacques Lacan calls the screen. For Lacan, the screen is a "locus of mediation" between actual perceptions and the expectations or models that shape our seeing; it works without any conscious awareness on our part. This is not so with the "15 strange things" of Sawka's title: small, framed images in a dusky cluster near the top of the painting. Their subjects reflect three modes in which conscious thought is conceived out of the torrent of visual impressions: diagrams, words, and clouds. Sawka plays with the screen in various ways, making it visible in other works of his. His preoccupation with the nature of seeing is not confined to images from the material world but has implications as well for memory, fiction, and painting itself—since a canvas is also a screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper strives to characterize the circle of Polish visual artists who left for the United States in the late 20th century and settled in New York City, where they continued their careers. For the purposes of the paper, the subject matter has been focused on an excerpt from an ample research problem i.e. the analysis of the history of the Polish American Artists Society (PAAS,) operating in New York from 1986 through 1995. Their activities form the basis for the analysis and constitute a database to construct a more profound picture of the organization. Therefore, the years in which PAAS operated shall also constitute the paper's framework. To foster simplicity, the term 'artist' and 'artists' shall be used to refer to visual artists born in Poland who came to New York City mainly in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, permanently resided in the United States, and worked as visual artists, regardless of the technique they adopted, be it painters, sculptors, photographers, graphic artists, illustrators, performers, artistic fabric weavers, or video artists. The paper uses their micro-stories to illustrate the phenomenon behind the prolific community of Polish artists in New York City from 1986 through 1995. It is based on research on PAAS, which has become the basis for a monographic book about the Society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polish modern art was collected by leading figures within America's cultural vanguard. Most prized the art's stylistic innovation; they were likely unaware of the ideological charge that animated modernism's makers. By the end of the 1930s, numerous exhibitions of Polish art had been mounted in the United States; however, few concentrated on strikingly innovative works, preferring instead traditional themes, genres, and styles. Nonetheless, Poland's modernist efforts garnered popular success at the New York World's Fair of 1939. The modern art from other central and eastern European nations was actively promoted by its makers, who had immigrated to the United States. Poland's modern art did not benefit from a similar presence, its modernists having mostly elected to remain in their native land. The paucity of Polish artists in 1930s America compromised their chance to exercise an influential role just as the United States was consolidating an international canon of modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the voluntary social marginalization strategy of post-communists in Poland. It explores how the Polish artists and writers search the complexity of human nature and the historical taboos which were restrained by the communist regime. It also highlights the increased number of quasi-autobiographical novels whose central theme is the recollection of childhood and adolescent's experiences in Soviet-occupied Poland. In addition, the lists of Polish initiation novels concerning the country's political trend are offered.