Reparacyjne strategie przetrwania. Losy i wojenne prace Henryka Strenga/Marka Włodarskiego
Reparative strategies of survival: the destinies and wartime artworks of Henryk Streng, aka Marek Włodarski

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the wartime experience of the Polish-Jewish avant-garde painter Henryk Streng, aka Marek Włodarski. In the first part of the paper Słodkowski reconstructs or re-writes Streng as a Jewish artist deeply engaged in the Polish-Jewish artistic culture of Lviv. Thus Słodkowski polemicizes with the traditional discourse of Polish art history, which duplicates modernistic universalism and thereby artificially cuts Streng off from his Jewish roots. Next, Słodkowski presents close readings of drawings, gouaches and watercolours that Streng/Włodarski created between 1940 and ’45. However, Słodkowski interprets these wartime works not as traditional “artworks” but as historical testimonies of war, and, above all, as traces of reparative strategies of survival (Hanna Segal), as practices of resistance and as material carriers of memory. These readings illustrate a re-definition of the artist’s identity.

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