Kantor Was Here. Tadeusz Kantor in Great Britain

Co-edited by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Natalia Zarzecka
Contributors: Wiesław Borowski, Krzysztof Cieszkowski, Richard Demarco, David Gothard, Jonathan Holloway, Klara Kemp-Welch, Jo Melvin, Sandy Nairne, Veronika Sekules, Nicholas Serota, Sarah Wilson, Noel Witts, Natalia Zarzecka
Published by Black Dog Publishing, February 2011

Kantor Was Here is the most ambitious book on the revolutionary Polish artist, set designer and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor to be published in the English language to date. Known for founding the Independent Theatre during the Nazi occupation of Poland, Kantor, who is to Poland what Andy Warhol is to America also served as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, and as a director of experimental theatre. After the war, his avant-garde work in stage design, which included stages that extended out into the audience, and the use of mannequins as real-life actors, would change the complexion of theatre.  

This major monograph focuses on the impact of Kantor’s work on the British art scene between the 1970s and 1980s through to the present day, including previously unpublished documentary material and photographs of the artist’s work at the Edinburgh Festival and Riverside Studios, his exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1976, as well as the artist’s drawings and previously unseen works from private collections.  

Co-edited by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Natalia Zarzecka, Kantor Was Here profiles the charged critical debate surrounding Kantor’s work through a collection of essays. These essays, by exponents of the British art scene who personally co-operated with Kantor during his stays in the UK, as well as reviews by eminent British curators and critics, address the wider impact of Kantor’s artistic career. All of these essays are published here for the first time.  

The scope of Kantor’s engagement with a variety of practices, as well as this volume’s contribution to the studies of relations between Britain and Eastern Europe, makes Kantor Was Here a fascinating account and essential reference for art students, professionals specifically engaged in this field of study and anyone interested in contemporary British and Eastern European artistic practice.  

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius is Deputy Director of the National Museum in Warsaw and Reader in the History of Art at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.

Natalia Zarzecka is Director of the Center for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor: Cricoteka.    

Paperback 
192 pages 
147 colour and b/w ills 
26 x 21 cm / 8.5 x 10 in 
ISBN: 978 1 907317 32 3 
UK: £19.95
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