Ewa Toniak (2 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Scarce small-format cloth hardcover 17 x 12 cm, English version, 67 unnumbered pages, illustrated with b&w and colour photos, NOT ex-library. No ISBN. A touch of minor age-discolourations on the front endpapers, else clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Boards sunned along the edges. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This catalogue to a 2010 exhibition explores the British sculptor Henry Moore's role as chairman of the jury for the International Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial competition, held between 1957 and 1959. The volume highlights this often-overlooked episode in Moore's career and the profound challenges of memorialising the Holocaust through art. The competition, launched by the International Auschwitz Committee, sought a monument for the Birkenau site that would serve as a permanent warning to future generations. Moore oversaw a jury that reviewed 426 proposals from 36 countries. He famously remarked that the tragedy of Auschwitz was so overwhelming that only a master like Michelangelo or Rodin could have portrayed it literally; this belief led him to favour abstract designs over figurative ones. After initially rejecting all entries, the jury narrowed the field to three finalists, including a radical "The Road" (counter-monument) by Polish architect Oskar Hansen. Ultimately, disagreements over Hansen's design - which Moore respected intellectually but felt lacked sufficient emotional impact - meant the winning project was never realised in its original form. During his visit to the site in April 1958, Moore took a series of haunting, evocative photographs, some of which were featured in the exhibition materials for the first time. The exhibition and its catalogue demonstrate how Moore's signature artistic philosophy intersected with complex post-war politics and the trauma of the Holocaust, marking a pivotal moment in the history of 20th-century public art. -- The publication was released to coincide with the exhibition at Tate Britain (8 March - 13 June 2010), organised by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in cooperation with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. -- Contents: Foreword / Agnieszka Rudzinska & Richard Calvocoressi; There is nothing less visible in the world than a monument / Ewa Toniak; 'His sculpture King and Queen is, for me, unacceptable': Moore, Hansen and the Auschwitz Counter-Mounument / Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius; Traversing Monumentality: Successive Designs for the Auschwitz Monument / Agata Pietrasik; List of illustrations; About the authors.

Softcover, 224 pages; in English and Polish; as new condition; clean and crisp; no internal marks. Foreign shipping may be extra.