Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann: the Bulgarian Episode (from the Perspective of a Slavist)
Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann: the Bulgarian Episode (from the Perspective of a Slavist)

Summary/Abstract: Maria Hiszpańska-Neumann (1917–1980) belonged to a group of Polish artists who had experienced both the trauma of Nazi concentration camps (she was an inmate at the women’s camp in Ravensbrück) and the hard life under the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. A graphic artist, illustrator and painter, she created a large body of work which has recently been carefully edited and annotated. A large part of her output forms an artistic reaction to her personal experiences and creative transgressions. This is borne out by a group of close to eighty under-researched artworks on Bulgarian themes which she created during two study visits in socialist Bulgaria at a time when the cult of personality was on the wane in that country (1954 and 1955). To date, that part of her artistic output has not received the critical attention it deserves. In my article I look for new ways to reflect on the so-called Bulgarian breakthrough in Hiszpańska-Neumann’s work based on the artworks themselves as well as previously unexplored source material, including the Neumann family archive. I retrace Hiszpańska’s itinerary in Bulgaria. The focal point of this article is an exhibition of her drawings and graphic works held in Sofia, as well as its reception in the Bulgarian press and the surviving sources of its public reception. The present reflections on the reception of her work in Bulgaria and Poland involve an effort to trace the connections between the artist’s foundational limit-experience in the camp and her ways of seeing and interpreting the world as an artist. Analysed from the diachronic perspective, her artworks reveal a technical complexity and homogeneity that stems from two competing discourses, memory (metonymy) and history (metaphor).

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