Chewing Gum, Plaster Bellies and Other Sculptural Byways

One of the 20 images of chewing gum in “Photosculptures,” a 1971 portfolio by the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow.

The history of art is always growing, but this year has brought some especially outstanding expansions. New York has been the beneficiary of two large exhibitions of Latin American modernism, a revelatory presentation of early Modernist photography from Central Europe and a survey of the paintings of Richard Pousette-Dart, an artist previously lost in the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism.

Los Angeles did more than its bit with “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” arriving at P.S. 1 on Feb. 17. (And the Brooklyn Museum chimed in with “Global Feminisms.”)

And then there was the revisionist sensation of “Documenta 12,” the latest version of the immersive international exhibition staged every five years in Kassel, Germany. Packed with startling juxtapositions and unfamiliar artists whose work stretched back to the 1950s and beyond, this thrilling show opened all sorts of new doors to the past and, thus, to the future.

Through one of the doors awaited a tantalizing glimpse of a little-known Polish artist named Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) in the form of “Photosculptures,” 20 grainy black-and-white photographs from 1971. Each showed a wad of used chewing gum set on a tiny shelf after being stretched this way or that to form a little abstract sculpture. The pictures instantly earned Ms. Szapocznikow a place in the history of postmodern photography.

Now the venturesome New York art gallery Broadway 1602, established a few years ago by Anke Kempkes, a former museum curator from Germany, is offering a wider, if far from comprehensive, view of Ms. Szapocznikow’s work. It includes the chewing gum photographs, about 30 drawings from the late 1940s to 1973, and a handful of sculptures in cast polyester resin and polyurethane from the late 1960s and early ’70s. Also on hand is a detailed catalog of an exhibition in Poland in 2004.

Together, the art and the book outline a career that seems to have functioned as a kind of synopsis of postwar European sculpture styles: academic, Social Realist, Expressionist, biomorphic abstraction, found-object, Nouveau Realist/Pop, much of it with an implicit feminist undercurrent. The only previous New York appearance of Ms. Szapocznikow’s work was in “Art Concept From Europe,” a group show at Galeria Bonino in 1970.

Her career, just over two decades long, seems to have been driven by a surfeit of talent and ambition, regardless of the circumstances. In Warsaw in the 1950s Ms. Szapocznikow submitted work to competitions, including one for a statue of Stalin, and realized a public commission for a work titled “Monument to Polish-Soviet Friendship.” In Paris in the mid-’60s she was an early experimenter with polyester-resin body casts and the use of photography in sculpture.

Her life was similarly full of twists and turns. She was born to a family of Jewish doctors in Kalisz, Poland, in 1926. (Her artistic generation includes Marisol, Niki de Saint Phalle, Nancy Spero, Lee Lozano, Yayoi Kusama and Magdalena Abakanowicz.) During World War II she endured the horror of incarceration in two Polish ghettos and three concentration camps, mostly with her mother, a pediatrician, who also survived. In 1946, at 20, she began studying art, first in Prague and then in Paris, where she met her first husband, a Polish art historian, and endured a bout of tuberculosis.

Back in Poland in 1951, she and her husband adopted a son, and she continued her studies, apparently excelling in all sculptural mediums: clay and plaster, stone carving and bronze casting. In 1962 she had a solo show in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. By 1963 she was living again in Paris, where she became friends with the art critic Pierre Restany, who introduced her to many artists. Told she had breast cancer in 1968, she began making her “Tumors” sculptures, using resin, gauze, crumpled newspapers and photographs. She died in 1973, at 46.

Somehow it is not surprising that photographs of Ms. Szapocznikow show a beautiful, dark-haired woman only slightly plainer than Ava Gardner. She exudes, almost unfailingly, what can only be called a strong life force.

The work at Broadway 1602 moves around a lot, making it hard to differentiate originality from susceptibility. But the mix is utterly fascinating. One minute you’re looking at tinted polyester-resin casts of female lips on wire stems or a plate piled with similar casts of breasts. Art Nouveau and Allen Jones’s naughty sculptures of garter-wearing women from the 1960s come to mind. Yet there are drawings that suggest the anguished forms and distorted figures of Reuben Nakian or Louise Bourgeois.

Then there are small polyester-resin doll-like figures, and some drawings for a work from 1965, now lost, titled “Goldfinger I,” which angrily combined part of a weapon with casts of female body parts. Near these is a pile of polyurethane casts of a woman’s belly that were intended for mass production as pillows. They’re from 1968, the year Ms. Szapocznikow also carved a giant version of that same belly, doubled, in marble. And finally there is a series of small, crude drawings of a woman writhing on a hospital bed or standing before us, kouroslike, revealing a long mastectomy scar.

The show begins with the chewing gum photographs from the Documenta show. There is no mistaking what they are, or the way they poke fun at artistic pretentiousness while also being artful and abstractly inventive. They are particularly intriguing given the similarly playful and modest setup photography that was prevalent in the late 1970s and early ’80s. James Welling’s suggestive black-and-white images of crumpled aluminum foil, for example, come to mind.

Did Ms. Szapocznikow intend her stretched and contorted bits of gum to satirize the angst often found in postwar European sculpture, including some of her own? Probably not. In a collaged text that is part of the “Photosculptures” portfolio, she tells of taking a break from the tiring task of polishing a marble sculpture of a Rolls-Royce, and suddenly focusing on the gum she was chewing.

At first her statement struck me as pure poetic fantasy, similar to the definition of Surrealism as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella. Not so. In addition to everything else she was up to, Ms. Szapocznikow carved miniature Rolls-Royces in pink Portuguese and white Carrara marble in 1970.

This show introduces a career that should be sorted out as soon as possible.