Łotewska Łotwa? Sztuka łotewska w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej
Latvian Latvia? Latvian Art in the Second Republic

Summary/Abstract: The article discusses the critical reception of an exhibition of contemporary Latvian art opened on 28 March 1936 in the showrooms of the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Zachęta). The Latvian show was part of a sequence of official art exhibitions of national states, which during the interwar decades functioned faultlessly and linked the central and peripheral centres of the Old Continent into a thick network of exchange. Its reception by Polish authors of reviews exemplified a striving characteristic for the cultural discourse of the 1930s, aimed at capturing in the fine arts certain symptoms of national identity. The presented text is based on a confrontation of several viewpoints concerning the exposition: the perception of Warsaw commentators unfamiliar with the details of transformations transpiring at the time on the Latvian art scene, reflections by Latvian theoreticians of art during the 1930s, and narrations by contemporary historians of Latvian art. An analysis of the exhibition scenario (determined by the cultural policy of the then recently politically constituted Baltic country) and the semantic and morphological qualities of the works on show at the Zachęta defines “national art” and “national style”, and verifies the possibilities of translating critical-theatrical rhetoric into purely art values.

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