Competitive artworks and their fates. Two Warsaw religious art competitions in the early 1980s

Abstract

In 1982, the Archdiocesan Museum in Warsaw hosted the exhibition “Painting and graphics from the closed competition for a work of art on the 600th anniversary of the presence of the icon of Our Lady at Jasna Gora”. It was one of the first large exhibitions organized under the auspices of the Catholic Church in Poland in the 1980s, during artists’ boycott of official cultural institutions of the Polish People’s Republic. The formula adopted for the competition meant that among the submitted works there were no sacral paintings, i.e. ones that could find their place in churches and serve religious purposes.Therefore in 1983, a small, closed competition was organized for a painting depicting the theme of Annunciation, inviting the authors of the works awarded in the previous competition: Marzanna Wroblewska and Irena Snarska, as well as two other artists: Teresa Pagowska and Antoni Falat, who had also participated in the Jasna Gora exhibition in the Warsaw Archdiocesan Museum. While the works awarded in the first competition were purchased for the museum’s collections, interesting paintings made for the second competition have been scattered. The aim of the paper is to recall these works as an unknown but interesting episode in the work of their authors – outstanding contemporary Polish painters.