Wystawa Zdobnictwa Ludwisarskiego – Lwów 1920
Exhibition of Bell-Making Decorations, Lwów 1920

Summary/Abstract: Exhibition of Bell-Making Decorations, Lwów 1920 At the end of 1914 and in early 1915, the German concept of blitzkrieg on the western front failed, while on the eastern front, the latter exceptionally long, as stretching from the outlet of the Neman up to the Carpathians, the situation had stabilized. At that moment, the generals on both sides realized that the fights would go on for longer than they had anticipated. They swiftly prepared terrain for the planned war activities: troops were being regrouped, recruits called up, arms and strategic resources stored, civilians evacuated, major factories moved, cultural goods taken away, etc. At that point, the action of bell requisition was launched; during a war bells, once melted, could provide material for the production of guns and ammunition. It was for the first time in the military history that the demand for high-grade metals was so pressing, and such a large-scale logistically complex project of making lists of, accumulating, and transferring of some dozen or maybe even some hundred thousands of bells on the European territory was conducted. This complex operation involved central state institutions, as well as regional ones, and many civic organizations. War requisitions on the Polish territories occurred almost simultaneously on those of the three partitions. Begun already in 1915, they climaxed in the autumn of 1916. During the evacuation, social collections, and the bell requisition, the clergy and historians came across numerous historic items: ‘quite many priests had an opportunity to realize for the first time and see from so close that they had to do with a lot of precious specimens’. The distinguished art historian and monument conservator Tadeusz Szydłowski in the introduction to his study dedicated to bells, and published in 1922, lamented over the fact that no inventory had been made of them before the War, as then it would have been easier to protect the historic ones against the requisition. The Poles involved in the transportation of the bells across the territories of the three partitions as well as lovers of the antiquities organized bells’ listing, so that later the demand for the return of specific items or for compensation could be made, this actually in compliance with the existing legal regulations. Held at the Lwów Museum of King John III, the Exhibition of Bell-making Decoration launched on 10 July 1920, constituted the outcome of the collection of high-grade metals ordered several years before by all the armies fighting in WW I. It was for the first time on the Polish territory that accomplishments of this branch of artistic craftsmanship were presented, and this may have been the only such large-scale display ever organized in Polish museums. A historian of literature by education, Karol Badecki, PhD, a Lwów archivist, was the Exhibition’s originator and Curator. The requisitions prompted him to take interest in the bells from Galicia Catholic and Orthodox churches. With time, he was appointed a ‘bell conservator’ responsible for the proper implementation of the instruments’ requisition. While documenting the requisitioned bells, Karol Badecki and people around him observed the following challenges: the urgency to restore in the Galicia churches the same number of bells as before the War; the need to improve the quality of their casts; the creation of real capacities for the revival of bell-making; as well as the preparation of documents meant to facilitate the war reparations and compensations. The majority of claims were voiced by Badecki in the article ‘For the Sake of Our Future Bell-making’, published in instalments in the ‘Nowa Polska’ periodical and in the appeal: ‘Let Us Create Our Native Bell-making’ sent out to many Polish magazines. ‘The Exhibition of Bell-making Decoration’, whose range in the course of the preparation was extended to all metal-cast everyday objects, was meant not only to demonstrate the output of Galicia’s bell-making and the incurred losses: it was to factually support the idea of establishing a Lwów bell foundry and of the revival of this craftsmanship. The Lwów display, prepared already during the Polish-Soviet War, was successful, which cannot be said of the initiative to launch a modern artistic bell-foundry in the city. Following the Exhibition’s closure, some exhibits remained with the Curator, who tried in vain to transfer them to different institutions. In the statements made by the individuals involved in the war register of bells (K. Badecki, A. Borawski, J. Remer, M. Morelowski, M. Brensztejn), and recorded before 1923, claims to conduct some professional research into bell-making can be heard. In later Polish campanological writing of the inter-war period the issue of establishing an all-Polish programme for bell records was not retackled. Following the intense cataloguing of bells during WW I such research was given up. The crowning of Karol Badecki’s works was to be found in the publication he was preparing for print in 1933. What has been preserved of it is the draft layout of its title page: ‘Epigraphics and Ornaments of Lesser Poland (Poland’s Southern Territories) Bells in the 17th Century on the Grounds of the Cataloguing Materials of the Author Collected in the War Years 1916-17 and Kept in the Collection of the Lwów Historical Museum, with 12 plates and 200 illustrations in the text in Lwów in 1933’. To-date its manuscript has not been found, however recently material containing several thousand pages, and related to the requisition of bells in Galicia has been collected; a substantial part of it is made up of the documents produced by Karol Badecki and present in the 1920 Exhibition. Plans have been made for the material to be used in the history of bell-making prepared by the Campanological Unit at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

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