- From the publisher : When we think about the painting of the inter-war years in Poland, a crowded swarm of artistic groups with various programs, a dense tangle of divergent tendencies, passes before our eyes. In a short period of twenty years, certain processes took place within the avant-garde movement , stylistic tendencies matured and took on various forms, the Polish color school was established, and finally, individual talents were born and flourished. The shortness and intensity of the period and the tumult of artistic affairs discourages one from following the threads of chronological courses, forcing the historian to look, as it were, from above at the emerging layers, blocks and lines of power. On the other hand, the multitude of artistic groups emerging in the years 1918-39 often created the temptation for researchers to draw up a kind of administrative map, which did not always coincide with the actual patterns of pictorial phenomena. In order to register their actual topography, it would be necessary to distinguish broader trends , some of which were diminishing tendencies of artistic thinking at that time, which, like no other time before, experienced a deep moral and intellectual crisis. Perhaps this state of inflamed consciousness , known throughout Europe, the breakdown of well-established ideological certainties, combined with the special political situation of the newly reborn Polish state, contributed to the emergence of such a surprisingly large number of artistic groups: both painters and literary writers.