Szif 45 Stefan Sebastian Maftei Review [628568]

45 – 2014
Uniwersytet Warszawski Instytut Filozofii
Wydawnictwo Naukowe Semper®

advisory board
Arnold Berleant, Andrzej Bronk, Alicja Kuczyńska (przewodnicząca), Jerrold
Levinson, Iwona Lorenc, Andrzej Półtawski, Władysław Stróżewski, Grzegorz
Sztabiński, Irena Wojnar, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska
editorial staff
Ewa D. Bogusz-Bołtuć, Magdalena Borowska, Kamilla Najdek,
Bogna J. Obidzińska (sekretarz redakcji, [anonimizat]), Piotr
Schollenberger (redaktor naczelny), Małgorzata A. Szyszkowska, Anna
Wolińska (z-ca red. naczelnego)
reviewers
Ewa Bogusz-Bołtuć, Wolfram Bergande, Magdalena Borowska, Simon Fokt,
Krzysztof Guczalski, Peter Mahr, Michael Rings, David Schauffler,
Piotr Schollenberger
contact
Instytut Filozofii UW, Zakład Estetyki
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www.sztukaifilozofia.uw.edu.pl
special issue editor
Bogna J. Obidzińska
proofreading of texts in English
Matthew E. Gladden
graphic design
Jan Modzelewski
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ISSN 1230 – 0330
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Published with assistance from the NCN grant K/SPD/000002
of Bogna J. Obidzińska (2012-2015).

table of Contents
Editorial …………………………………………… 5
Articles
CREATION BETWEEN ONE AND MANY
Mara Miller: I let the piece sing its own stories: Post‑Modern
Artistic Inspiration ………………………………. 7
José Miranda Justo: Singularity, Universality and Inspiration
in their Relation to Artistic Creation ………………… 28
Derek Whitehead: Inspiration, Kenosis , and Formative Thinking
about Art ……………………………………. 40
CREATION BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT
Randall E. Auxier: Image and Act: Bergson’s Ontology and Aesthetics … 60
Maarten Doorman: The Inescapable Inspiration of the Artist: Imagination 78
Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei: Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the
Romanian avant‑garde: The First Two Years of the
Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923) ……………… 86
Short Research Contributions
Aleksandar Kandić, Predrag Milosavljević: World as an Artwork:
Aesthetic, Artistic and Mathematical Aspects of Plato’s
Cosmology ………………………………….. 100
Magdalena Lange: Artists in White. The Bio‑Creation of Art ………. 108
Reviews and Notes on Books
Peter Mahr: Televisionary Moholy‑Nagy. A Review of the Reprint of
telehor from 1936 …………………………….. 116
Piotr Schollenberger: Traces of Real Presence. Jean‑Luc Marion on the
Origins of Courbet’s Painting …………………….. 125

Piotr Toczyski: The “Re‑Mythologizing” of Wisdom: on the Margins
of the New Edition of Hanna Malewska’s “The Tale of
Seven Wise Men” …………………………….. 132
Ewa Kofin: Radio Music Lessons with Piotr Orawski …………… 137
Contributors ……………………………………… 140
Notes for Contributors ………………………………. 142

Editorial
Contemporary philosophical definitions of “art” or “creativity,” which refer
to a variety of human practices arising between antiquity and this day, seem
to encounter two major obstacles: anachronism (institutional definitions and
aesthetic definitions) and the indeterminacy of what was actually constitutive
as the motivation behind such activity (e.g. Levinson’s “intentional” definition).
This situation reflects a general methodological problem with art that appears
whenever we use this term, namely the elusive character of its subject. However,
regardless of whether we take ancient Greek poetry, or Tuscan and Venetian
painting, or theatre of the Siglo de Oro, or Victorian arts and crafts, or North
American sculpture and architecture, or music anywhere, every form of “cre –
ative” production has usually declared a source – one that would legitimize,
first of all, a qualitative value of its produced artifacts or performed activities
and, secondly, their role as models to be followed by other activities, through
mimesis or induction.
As one will easily recall, early Twentieth-Century artists accentuated the
implosion of the privileged position of the art of their time by tearing it away
from its presumed relation with those superior points of reference that the
legitimizing, inspiring agents had assumed. Thus a hundred years ago, the arts
broke away from the concealed powers that their authors and commissioners
had used in the Nineteenth Century to impose and secure their own social po –
sitions. Apparently, art became autotelic, self-aware, and free from what was
not art – free to serve a pedagogical purpose that was to be its own.
Done and dusted. Or was it? The main question that we asked philosophers
and aestheticians for this issue (i.e., if contemporary self-sufficient, post-con –
ceptual, socially engaged art recognises what sort of inspiration is standing
at its origin or, if it finds none, how it can explain its transgressiveness) seems
hardly to have echoed among those thinkers who proclaim a pedagogical mis –
sion of the new arts geared toward liberating unenlightened audiences from
undesirable norms, prejudices, and references. While the pedagogical mission
exposes contemporary arts’ clearly transcendental position, performing artists,
immersive artists, and theorists of engagement art and of other arts successful
at dismantling people’s commonplace views in the name of amelioration have
not responded to the posed question.
On the contrary, the problem of art’s inspiration is mostly addressed here
by thinkers who see that artists rather follow pre-existing reality and join it in
re-instituting it in their works, and not the other way around. Perhaps surprisingly
in this context, it is Rorty’s imperative to aestheticise philosophy that brought
about an analysis of Bergson’s ontology, which is the subject of Randall Auxier’s
article and reverberates through José Miranda Justo’s work – the former one
devoted to the founding constitution of image in the perceptual flux and the
latter one focused on the experience of the singularity and universality of the
creative act. Romantic imagination that awakens or misleads artists struggling
with balancing its evolving structures and a post-traumatic dreaming which,
being a harvest of collective memories, can become a source of individual

emanation are presented in contributions from Maarten Doorman and Mara
Miller, respectively. The concept of kenosis as a specific attitude is explored by
Derek Whitehead in the thought of Meister Eckhart and Martin Heidegger, for
the sake of determining the cognitive conditions that enable creation. A ret –
rospective of the concept of cosmopolitanism as a driving factor for creative
activity is presented by Ștefan-Sebastian Maftei in the context of the Romanian
avant-garde movement expressed in the Contimporanul journal.
The presented articles seem to be not questioning art as a peculiar type of
human activity that not only forces the artist to invent and learn new means of
expression but also moves beyond the cognitive mechanisms accessible through
his or her reflective powers. The original unknown which through the creative
process is allowed by the artist to reveal itself in or through an artistic form
makes this form evoke particular, definite, though not single, interpretations.
The more difficult to pin down the source of the creative act, the more accurate
the interpretations. This seems to be juxtaposed to another unknown , namely
one that followers of the contemporary movement place at the other end of
the creative act – in its interpretation, which in the case of their art remains
indefinite and rather too widely open.
Although this seems to be a predominant note that plays throughout the
texts presented below, the editor is certain that a more careful reader will also
find in them if not responses, then other significant philosophical questions
about the art of our day.
Bogna J. Obidzińska

86
45 – 2014
Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:
The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)1
Abstract
The study focuses on two major points. The first point – considering that our major
thesis is that cosmopolitanism as an explanatory framework seems to offer a new way of
interpreting the social, political and aesthetic transformation within the modern artworld
at the beginning of the 20th Century – seeks to put to work new theoretical paradigms
of cosmopolitanism in order to explain the history of the avant‑garde. The second focal
point of our research will apply the theory of creative cosmopolitan imaginary to the
cosmopolitan milieu of the Romanian interwar avant‑garde group “Contimporanul”. We
consider 1922 and 1923 as the period of the highest aesthetico‑political development
of the Romanian avant‑garde.
Keywords : cosmopolitanism, avant‑garde, creativity, Romania
Introduction. Cosmopolitanism as an Elusive Concept
A standard view on cosmopolitanism is that it generally supports the idea that
all human beings should be “citizens in a single community”2. Nevertheless,
it seems that cosmopolitanism, when put to the test, is quite an elusive con –
cept – at least historically or politically, if not theoretically3. Some historians4
agree that the roots of cosmopolitanism as a notion are Greek and Roman,
and that Antiquity understood it as mediating “the tension between global and
local, universal and particular”5. Throughout modern history, the concept of
cosmopolitanism has been historically and politically related to the emergence
1 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Romanian are my own. Fragments of this text
have appeared in my “Is Cosmopolitanism a Feasible Paradigm for Understanding Modern Art? A Meth ‑
odological Proposal”, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 149 (2014), 513‑17. I would also like
to thank the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments during the early stages of
the writing of this paper.
2 P . Kleingeld, E. Brown, “Cosmopolitanism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online , accessed
2.07.2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/.
3 See Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies”, in Theory, Culture and Society
19‑2002, 17‑44, which will be discussed in the following.
4 Michael L. Miller, and Scott Ury, “Cosmopolitanism: the end of Jewishness?”, in European Review
of History – Revue européene d’histoire , vol. 17 no. 3 (June 2010), 337‑59.
5 Miller and Ury, Cosmopolitanism: the end of Jewishness , 340.

87Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
of the nation-states. From the 19th Century onwards, “cosmopolitanism” has
been explained as the opposite of nationalism within the political life of the
European nation-states; it was just a side in the conflict between the universal
(cosmopolitan) and the particular (national).
Many twists and turns took place with cosmopolitanism in the political arena
of 19th- and 20th-Century Europe. Historians, such as Friedrich Meineke in his
Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1907), explained cosmopolitanism as
a “necessary step” towards nationalism. At the beginning of the 19th Century,
the national state was considered to be an end in itself and also a safeguard of
cosmopolitan values. Precisely at the same time in history, the more and more
aggressive anti-Semitism of the European elites began to associate cosmopol –
itanism with a “Jewish” political view. The concept became a political weapon
of the anti-Semitic propaganda arsenal in the Nazi occupied Europe but also
in the Soviet Union after 19496.
It is immensely difficult, even nowadays, to agree upon a definition of “cos –
mopolitanism”. One of the leading voices of the “new cosmopolitanism”, the
German sociologist Ulrich Beck7, acknowledges that cosmopolitanism is rather
explainable as a  process than as an outcome, using the term “cosmopolitaniza –
tion” instead of “cosmopolitanism”. He stands for a “de-territorialization” of
cosmopolitanism, stating that “cosmopolitanism is another word for disputing
about cosmopolitanisms”8, thus eliminating the ideological paradox of cosmo –
politanism, the “-ism”, from “cosmopolitan”. He concludes, that “there are no
generalizable characteristics which allow it to be clearly distinguished” from
other notions, such as multiculturalism, and that, in the end, the “vagueness
and equivocalness of [its] definition”9 gives it a positive advantage.
Cultural Diversity, Modern Art, the “Cosmopolitan” Artworld and Beyond
It appears that that the influence of the cosmopolitan way of life upon the
modern arts began around the start of the 19th Century. With the impact of
international trade and international travel, different cultures, styles and ways
of life exerted a powerful influence upon the metropolitan life of major cities,
especially in the case of nations that had large colonial empires overseas, but
not exclusively10. The birth of a  social and cultural cosmopolitanism is generally
connected with the European imperialisms of the 19th Century and with the
6 Ibid., 347.
7 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies”, 17‑44.
8 Ibid., 35.
9 Ibid., 36.
10 Cosmopolitanism is specific to all imperial capitals of the 19th and early 20th Centuries: Paris,
London, Vienna, Berlin, and also New York, Istanbul or Saint Petersburg. On the subject of cosmopoli ‑
tanism in the literature of the Victorian age, see T. Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan
Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011). On the subject of cosmopolitan Paris and the adoption of “foreign modernisms” in art,
see Ihor Junyk, Foreign Modernism. Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Style in Paris (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2013).

88Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
development of the metropolitan cities in Europe which were also capitals of
empires, such as Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin11.
Recent studies12 have emphasized the presence of an “aesthetic” or “cultural”
cosmopolitanism in our contemporary globalized societies, a cosmopolitanism
located “at the individual level”, defined as a “cultural disposition involving an
intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness towards peoples, places and expe –
riences from different cultures, especially those from different ‘nations’ (…) or
as having taste for ‘the wider shores of cultural experience’”13. This attitude of
openness will transform the political idea of a  cosmopolis into a cultural idea,
a “place or political space that encompasses the variety of human culture. It
promises [emphasis mine ] the potential to meet and become acquainted with
all the strands of cultural diversity. The cosmopolitan is therefore someone who
can cope with unpredictability [e.m.]. Cosmopolitans know what is expected
in different cultural settings and can move between them with confidence and
assurance”14. This cosmopolitan view effectively tells us that the terms culture
and cultural identity must be read anew, methodologically differently, in a “glo –
cal world” (Roland Robertson) whose realities are transforming, perceptibly or
not, our major ways of looking at it. It is what I would define as an application
of Beck’s idea of “cosmopolitanization” to the field of culture. The example of
Motti Regev,15 discussing the “ethno-national uniqueness” or “authenticity” of
a local music as (paradoxically) a phenomenon of aesthetic cosmopolitanism,
is a good example of dismissing the distinction (exclusion) between “our own
culture” and the cultures of “others”16.
We may see a cosmopolitan lifestyle as informing modern art in a fundamental
manner starting from the Industrial Revolution onwards. Certain features that
may be seen as cosmopolitan will circulate from the social and cultural sphere
to the subsphere of the modern arts. Ihor Junyk17 sees hybridity , transience ,
metamorphosis and openness as cosmopolitan features relevant to the Parisian
artistic works of the avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th Century. These
developed, within the French culture, a version of “foreign modernism” that
is marked by an increasing tendency towards inter -cultural hybridization and
towards challenging the prerequisites of a traditional French academism. Junyk
would observe the same tendency in other cases, such as Rainer Maria Rilke’s
prose and poetry18, whose “uncanny” modernism adopts classical, historical
11 On the issue of colonial empires and culture, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (NY:
Vintage, 1993).
12 Cf. Motti Regev, “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”, in European Journal of
Social Theory 10 (1), 123‑38; Nikos Papastergiadis, “Glimpses of Cosmopolitanism in the Hospitality of
Art”, in European Journal of Social Theory 10 (1), 139‑52; David Chaney, “Cosmopolitan Art and Cultural
Citizenship”, in Theory, Culture and Society (2002), vol. 19 (1‑2), 157‑74; Mica Nava, “Cosmopolitan
Modernity. Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference”, in Theory, Culture and Society (2002),
vol. 19 (1‑2), 81‑99.
13 Regev, “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”, 124.
14 Chaney, “Cosmopolitan Art”, 158.
15 Regev, “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”, 124 ff.
16 Ibid., 125.
17 Junyk, Foreign Modernism , 7 ff.
18 Ihor Junyk, “‘A Fragment from Another Context’: Modernist Classicism and the Urban Uncanny in
Rainer Maria Rilke”, in Comparative Literature 62:3, 262‑81. Rilke is another example of the cosmopolitan

89Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
themes and tropes precisely in order to challenge not just the classical model,
but also the modern one, defined by Baudelaire as “ephemereal, fugitive and
contingent”, yet sometimes too unilaterally confined to its own values, themes
and styles19.
This challenging of the mainstream, traditional notion of culture by these
localized yet cosmopolitan cultures20 goes hand in hand with a shift in the
appreciation of culture by the modern public. Thus, due partially to social and
economic transformations, partially to the impact of technology and science,
the modern public will begin to associate authentic cultural value with novelty
and not with tradition anymore: what has been disseminated ever since by the
“cultural industries” and the “systems of scholarly knowledge” will emphasize
the “novelty” over the “traditional”21. However, the impact of the cosmopoli –
tan lifestyle in the arts is not to be related to the myth of the autonomous or
independent artistic creation, which has informed the image of the modern
“artworld”22. The individual artistic creativity thesis pertains to an essentially
non-cosmopolitan worldview: it emphasizes the stark identity, the authenticity
of the artist, continuing to uphold the basically conventional view that there
is a certain inclusion/exclusion mechanism that functions inside the subfield
of art, and that the artworld legitimizes itself through its alleged aesthetic
autonomy (Kant)23.
The emergence of a cosmopolitan “heterogeneity” of tastes within the art –
world during high modernity is only a small part of a larger picture. If we follow
the cosmopolitanization thesis thoroughly (Ulrich Beck), the cosmopolitan trend
has everything to do with the constant challenging of the notional divisions/
exclusions in relation to the artworld in modernity. These delineations have
kept the modern notion of the artworld within its known confines: national/
international, European/non-European, art/non-art, artistic/non-artistic objects,
aesthetic/non-aesthetic objects, artist/non-artist, creative activity/non-creative
activity, informed/non-informed spectator. Yet, from the 19th Century on,
modern art constantly kept challenging and changing its own identity. The
intellectual. He represents the typical “uncanny” foreigner of high modernity. He saw himself as “strange
to everyone, like one dying in a foreign land, alone, superfluous, a fragment from another context”
(quote in Junyk, op. cit., 273).
19 Quote, in Junyk, “A Fragment from Another Context”, 263. Baudelaire himself challenged the
glorifying view of modernity as a historical epoch by arguing that “every old master has had his own
modernity” (idem, 277).
20 There are interesting analogies between the situation in early 20th‑Century avant‑garde cultures
and the contemporary status of cultures. cf. N. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globaliza ‑
tion, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), chapt. “The Deterritorialization
of Culture”; “The Limits of Cultural Translation”, 100‑45.
21 Regev, 133.
22 I use the term “artworld” as a mindful reference to Arthur Danto’s theory, to the fact that the
modern work of art is to be seen not as the unique, single embodiment of its meaning, but in the
context of an “interpretive community” (Stanley Fish) pertaining to the artwork, a community which
is comprised of the artwork itself, the artist, the critic and the public in general. On the subject of the
birth of the modern public and the role of the public and the critic in shaping an aesthetic public sphere
in the 18th Century, see J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 31 ff.
23 On “autonomy”, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , transl. P . Guyer, E.
Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27‑28; 164, 187, 195.

90Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
advent, on one hand, of new artists, new establishments, new publics, and, on
the other hand, of new genres, new subjects, new styles, new techniques and
new foreign influences in the modern arts has transformed the very nature of
the artistic subfield and challenged its identity. It seems that the presence of
a process of cosmopolitanization in the arts themselves is much more pervasive
than the “banal”24 cosmopolitanism of different cultures, different subjects or
different styles mixed into and captured by the same artwork25. Thus, our thesis
about the cosmopolitanization of the Avant-gardes goes beyond considering
the avant-garde as a mere side-effect of 19th-Century cultural circulation.
Although the historical political and social conditions for the development
of a cultural and artistic cosmopolitanism cannot be overlooked, since these
shaped the background on which arts and their cosmopolitanism flourished26,
avant-garde seems to be more than just this. Nikos Papastergiadis27 speculates
upon the possibility that aesthetics itself provides us with an “imaginary con –
stitution of cosmopolitanism through aesthetic practices”, i.e. “a cosmopoli –
tan worldview produced through aesthetics”28. Appealing to the concept of
a “cosmopolitan imaginary”, he stresses that “the process of world making”
itself is a “radical act of the cosmopolitan imaginary”. He views imagination
as a “faculty for both representing and creating realities through the form of
images”29. This reliance on the imaginary gives art the faculty of not only cre –
ating out of its own cosmopolitan images new “orders of politics”30 but, we
suspect, also of transforming itself during the process of creating new images.
This idea of “cosmopolitan imagination” is to be found and explained fur –
ther in Gerard Delanty’s The Cosmopolitan Imagination31, where the author
emphasizes the reading of cosmopolitanism that envisions it as a critical and
self-critical perspective pertaining to the processes of self -transformation that
appear in the encounter with the Other. Delanty speaks of self -transformation
as the explanatory paradigm of cosmopolitanism, a process where the Self and
the Other co-exist, both being transformed during the process of cosmopolit –
anization32. The encounter between the Self and its Other is neither “nativism”
nor the “adoption of the culture of the Other”. It is a “self -transformative”
24 Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies”, 28.
25 A development in a different direction of this thesis appears in my “Is Cosmopolitanism A Fea ‑
sible Paradigm for Understanding Modern Art? A Methodological Proposal”, in Procedia – Social and
Behavioral Sciences 149 (2014), 513‑17.
26 Theda Shapiro, Painters and Politics. The European avant‑garde and Society, 1900‑1925 (New
York: Elsevier, 1976). Theda Shapiro, in her comprehensive survey of the contacts between politics and
the European avant‑garde of the early 20th Century, admits that anarchism, pacifism, collectivism and
humanitarianism were tendencies embraced by almost all the members of the pre‑war and post‑war
avant‑gardes (with the exception of the Futurists) and that a common transnational humanitarianism
proliferated in their art. Cf. Shapiro, 114 ff.
27 N. Papastergiadis, “Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”, in: Gerard Delanty (ed.), Routledge Handbook
of Cosmopolitanism Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012), 220‑32.
28 Papastergiadis, Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism , 221.
29 Ibid., 221, 229.
30 The thesis appears in Jacques Rancière’s Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (2000) ,
which Papastergiadis quotes.
31 Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press), 2009.
32 Ibid., 11.

91Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
moment that distinguishes it from “a simple matter of diversity or transnational
movement”33. Thus, creativeness becomes the synonym for cosmopolitanism in
this context, since cosmopolitanism could only be a “creative” cosmopolitanism
“entailing the opening up of normative questions within the cultural imagi –
naries of societies. In this sense, cosmopolitanism refers to an orientation that
resides less in a specific social condition than in an imagination that can take
many different forms depending on historical context and social circumstances.
Conceived of in terms of an imaginary, it is not then a matter of an ideal that
transcends reality or a purely philosophical or utopian idea but an immanent
orientation that takes shape in modes of self -understanding, experiences,
feelings and collective identity narratives. The imaginary is both a medium of
experience and an interpretation of that experience in a way that opens up
new perspectives on the world”34.
In another text35, Papastergiadis acknowledges that the cosmopolitan imag –
inary which is at work in the artfield is not a ready-made frame for the cosmo –
politanism of contemporary arts: “a cosmopolitan imaginary is not an abstract
ideal, a speculative vision of the future, nor even the necessary illusion that
spurs contemplation of a better life. The cosmopolitan imaginary is the prop –
osition of new forms of worldly existence. These forms are not bound by the
outcomes imposed by the regulative mechanisms of globalizing forces, nor are
they produced through the corporatised assemblage of transnational exchang –
es. The form of the cosmopolitan imaginary starts with the creative ideas and
critical attitudes that artists and ordinary people use in their daily reflections
and worldly engagements. Therefore in the beginning of globalization there is
also a cosmopolitan imaginary”36. Art serves as the benchmark for funneling
future political and ethical equality. It does not, however, create this equality
by itself; it only stimulates it within its imaginative spectrum. Because Papaster –
giadis does not find cosmopolitanism in the arts as a project of a social order
proposed by the artists’s work, he only identifies several “tendencies” that are
“shaping the trajectories of contemporary art”: denationalization, reflexive
hospitality, cultural translation, discursivity, and the global public sphere37.
Yet, the tool for this imaginative projection of the arts to their public and to
the world eventually is the realm of the aesthetic itself, through the aesthetic
feelings which are “shareable to others”. As a consequence, cosmopolitan
imagination is a product of the whole artworld as an interpretive community,
not just a vision projected from an artwork. Because art always “translates its
own singularity into the form of universality”38, it also energizes the possibility
that these tendencies may become active. These aesthetic potentialities also
enhance ethical potentialities in the artworld, because feeling is the basis for
the grasping of moral and eventually political equality.
33 Ibid., 13.
34 Ibid., 14.
35 Papastergiadis, Nikos, “Cosmo‑Aesthetics”, Online at: http://www.sommerakademie.zpk.org/de/
fruehere‑akademien/2010/reader.html, accessed 1.11.2014.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.

92Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
The Cosmopolitanism of the Romanian Avantgardistic Journal Contimporanul
Following this line of argument, we speculate that the early 20th-Century Ro –
manian avant-garde known as the “ Contimporanul group ”, forged in a small
but cosmopolitan milieu of former émigré artists, of which a large part were
Jewish intellectuals, proposed an art where self‑understanding, experiences,
feelings and collective identity narratives (Gerard Delanty) articulated an early,
not globalized, yet highly creative, cosmopolitan imagination. Some of the
tendencies which are clearly visible today in our contemporary artworld, such
as denationalization, reflexive hospitality, cultural translation, discursivity (Nikos
Papastergiadis) were signaled by the works and deeds of that avant-garde. We
also argue that this cosmopolitan imagination at the beginning of the 20th
Century was energized by at least two aspects: the relation of these avantgardists
to the kind of humanistic, early 20th-Century cosmopolitanism which was so
common to the avant-gardes in Europe at that particular time, but also the ways
in which artistic practices were harnessed within the small but highly dynamic
community. As such, we considered that the cosmopolitan tendencies present
within the world of this particular group are best describable under the idea of
a “cosmopolitan imagination” that synthesizes local and international cultural
elements in a local yet internationalized artistic sphere, fosters hybridity and
cultural translation, rejects nationalization, and encourages reflexive hospitality,
being highly critical of both the “Self” and the “Other” as kept apart in a mere
relation of cultural diversity.
Starting out around the middle of the 19th Century, with the return to the
home country of the first generation of Romanian intellectuals schooled at
the universities and art academies of the West, Romanian artistic modernism
in literature and visual arts was rather uneventful, marked at first by the imita –
tion and assimilation of Western models and styles39. On the other hand, the
contact with the West sparked a revolt of the intellectuals against the shallow
imitation of Western models. This effect created the nationalistic vibe inside
Romanian literature and visual arts at the end of the 19th Century. The nation –
alistic intellectuals contributed, directly or not, to the emergence of a distinctive
type of idealized cultural nationalism that had a tremendous impact upon early
20th-Century Romanian politics40.
The first signs of Romanian avant-gardistic modernism appeared around
1912, with the publication of the symbolistic journals Simbolul (Symbol ) and
Chemarea (Call), in 1915. The names associated with these journals are those
39 For analyses of Romanian visual, architectural and literary modernisms during late 19th and early
20th Centuries, see: Erwin Kessler (ed.), Culorile avangardei. Arta în România 1910‑1950 /Die Farben der
Avantgarde. Rumanische Kunst 1910‑1950 /Colours of the Avantgarde. Romanian Art 1910‑1950 , Institutul
Cultural Român, 2007; S. A. Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art in Romania”, in The
Art Bulletin vol. 80, no. 3 (Sep. 1998), 534‑54; Tom Sandqvist, Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret
Voltaire . (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006); Roland Prügel, Im Zeichen der
Stadt. Avantgarde in Rumänien 1920–1938 (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2008).
40 On the origins of cultural nationalism and autochthonism in Romania and its history throughout
the 20th Century, see Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism , University of California Press,
1991; Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania: Regionalism, Nation Building, and Ethnic
Struggle, 1918‑1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

93Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
of Sami Rosenstein (later known as Tristan Tzara), Ion Iovanaki (pen-named Ion
Vinea), and Marcel Janco (Marcel Iancu). It is also widely known that the Roma –
nian avant-gardes of the 20th Century were peopled regularly by “foreigners”
(Germans, Macedonians, and Hungarians) and particularly by Jews. The Jewish
artists were a large presence inside the small circles of “avant-garde” artists
that were active in Romania before and after the War of 1914-1918. Staying
in Zürich during the War, Tzara and the brothers Janco met Hugo Ball, Richard
Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann and others and staged
in 1916 the first Dada s oirées . In short, Tzara, Marcel Janco and others became
the co-founders of European Dada. Their contribution of hybridizing Romanian
and Jewish cultural motifs with, at that time, cutting-edge modernism, is present
throughout the Dada productions in poetry, drawings, costumes, and masks41.
After the First World War, some of these Romanian Dadaists relocated to the
“Greater Romania” – now comprising the historical regions of Transylvania, Banat,
Bucovina, and Bessarabia. The Dadaists were joined by other Romanian emigrés
from France and Germany, such as Max Herman Maxy, Corneliu Michăilescu,
Hans Mattis- Teutsch, and Milița Petrașcu. However, the atmosphere in the home
country was far from favorable to them. Their progressive views were set on
a collision course with the establishment’s cultural nationalism. After the end of
WWI, Romania embarked on a process of forging a new sense of its own iden –
tity through an extensive campaign of cultural ethnic nationalism. This cultural
nationalism virtually ignored the other minority cultures. On the same course
with ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism grew rapidly into an official cultural and
political doctrine42. The political and cultural elite of Romanian nationalists, even
before WWI, viewed “modern civilization” as “urban, fragmented, mercantile,
materialist, capitalist, liberal, rationalist, individualist, selfish, atheist, cynical,
cosmopolitan [emphasis mine ], internationalist, Bolshevik, estranged, uprooted,
improvised, sterile [e.m.], prosaic, artificial, ignoble, sinful, illegitimate, disloyal,
sick, and ugly”. The opposite, obviously, was “national culture”, deemed as “ru –
ral, communitarian, unitary, autarchic, idealist, agrarian, conservative, intuitive,
collectivist, altruist, profoundly Christian, traditionalist, rooted in country soil,
creative [e.m.], poetic, noble, virtuous, brave, loyal, healthy, beautiful”43. Some
nationalists advocated a cultural “national offensive” or a cultural “revolution”,
which was to be considered as an anti-bourgeois, autochthonistic revolution.
Their aim was to fight the “contagion” of sterile, liberal, progressive modernism
that had crippled the “soul” of the true “Romanian culture”44. Nationalists saw
“cosmopolitanism” as a word of opprobrium and used it as a political weapon.
To the Romanian avant-garde artists, this ethos was the official ideology of
a proto-fascist, authoritarian State. Thus, not unexpectedly, the founders of
41 For a comprehensive description, see Tom Sandqvist, Dada East. The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire .
42 On the development of ethnic nationalism and Anti‑Semitism in Romania before and after World
War I, see Răzvan Pârâianu, Culturalist Nationalism and Anti‑Semitism in Fin‑de‑Siècle Romania , in: Marius
Turda and Paul J. Weindling (eds.), “Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central
and Southeast Europe , 1900–1940 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007), 353‑73.
43 Răzvan Pârâianu, Culturalist Nationalism and Anti‑Semitism , 359.
44 Ibid., 361.

94Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
the new journal Contimporanul (Present Time), Ion Vinea and Marcel Janco,
turned their progressive modernism into an aesthetic and political fronde . In
the first years of Contimporanul , writers and artists, such as Tristan Tzara, Ion
Minulescu, Beniamin Fundoianu (Benjamin Fondane), Ilarie Voronca, Panait
Istrati, Felix Aderca, H. Mattis‐Teutsch, Constantin Brâncuși, M.H. Maxy, Arthur
Segal, Camil Petrescu, Tudor Arghezi, Eugen Filotti, Andrei Braniște, and Dem.
Theodorescu would contribute to the journal with texts and illustrations.
The first two years of Contimporanul (1922-1923) were probably the golden
years of the newly born Romanian avant-garde. After 1918, these artists would
turn the interwar capital Bucharest into an “international capital of modern –
ism” (Mansbach). The writers of Contimporanul supported moderate socialist
views and contested the authoritarianism of Bolshevism, although the Russian
avant-garde45 was highly praised, as well as the idea of a socialist Revolution46.
The name Contimporanul recalls the name of a leftist publication that appeared
in the 19th Century47. The journal appeared irregularly, and had 103 numbers,
from 1922 to 1932.
Contimporanul started as an active forum against autochthonistic politics,
corruption and anti-Semitism. The political texts of 1922 attacked, for example,
the government’s imposition of constraints on press freedom and the disorga –
nized and corrupt administration of the newly gained territories of Romania48.
Other texts criticize the Statist measure of nationalizing Romania’s soil by the
government, as a sign of corruption49. One text by Eugen Filotti50 criticizes the
politicians’ discriminatory and duplicitous treatment of religious minorities
(in this case, the Romanian Greek-Catholic religious minority in Transylvania).
A particular attention is given to the suppression of minorities and the discrim –
ination against the Jews. Titles such as Minorii și minoritățile (Minors and the
minorities) (no. 32, Feb. 24, 1923)51, Numerus clausus (no. 32, Feb. 24, 1923),
45 See “Avantgarda rusă” ( Russian avant‑garde ), in Contimporanul (June 10, 1923, no. 42).
46 See Crysaor, “Constituția orbilor” (The Constitution of the Blind ), in Contimporanul (no. 29, Feb.
3, 1923): “The small states crumble into bankruptcy. And, over the emerging chaos, we hear Lenin’s
invincible laughter. In Romania, a group of politicians are building, in preparation for the coming storm,
a bureaucratic fence made of printed, sanctioned and promulgated paper. Irrra!”; see also “ Sărbătoarea
Revoluției ” (The celebration of the Revolution), Contimporanul (no. 41, May 6, 1923).
47 S.A. Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art”, 552.
48 H. St. Streitman, “Libertatea presei” ( Freedom of the Press ), in: Contimporanul , no. 17, 11 nov.
1922; I. Vinea, “Politicienii, presa și ziariștii” ( Politicians, Press and the Journalists ), no. 6, 8 July 1922.
49 I.C. Costin, “Brătienizarea subsolului” ( The nationalization of the soil under the rule of Brătianu ),
in: Contimporanul , no. 6, 8 July 1922.
50 Eugen Filotti, “Ortodoxie” ( Orthodoxy ), in Contimporanul , no. 16, 4 Nov. 1922: “(…) Mr. Iorga
persists in saying that the Orthodox denomination can be confused with the Romanian nation and the
Romanian State. (…) The Greek‑Catholic Church does not recognize Orthodoxy as a State religion, and
asks for a full equality of religious rights among all the religious denominations (…)”.
51 St. Antim, “Minorii și minoritățile” ( Minors and the Minorities ): “In 1866, when the Jewish
question had been first debated, there were beatings, there were windows smashed, a synagogue
had been demolished. In 1879, when the issue has been revived by the talks around the amendments
to the Constitution, there were Anti‑Semitic crimes again. Nowadays, when a new Constitution is be ‑
ing debated, the mob in the streets shouts once more. The only difference – probably demanded by
progress – between then and now is that, at the moment when there were not enough students in
our Universities, the shouting was done by the populace in the streets; but today, when we are blessed
with large numbers, tens of thousands, in our Universities and colleges, our generous today’s youth
has embraced the cause of yesterday’s mob, with all the blood boiling in their heads. In a sinister vein,

95Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
Profesorii antisemiți (Anti-Semite Professors) (no. 35, March 27, 1923), Evreii
și huliganii (Jews and Hooligans) (no. 33, March 3, 1923), În jurul unei cauze
(About a Cause) (no. 29, Feb. 3 1923), Cultură și anti‑Semitism (Culture and
anti-Semitism) (No. 30, Feb. 10, 1923), and Et in Arcadia Fasciae (no. 42, June
10, 1923) show particular concern for the fate of the Romanian Jews in the
troubled times of interwar anti-Semitic campaigns.
Analyzing the perils for Europe’s democratic life also meant including a con –
demnation of the emergence of a young Italian fascism, already in 1922, when
Mussolini came to power in a coup against the Italian king. The article Holera
fascistă (Fascist Cholera ), signed by H. Verzeanu and published in Contimporanul
no. 16 (Nov. 1922) states:
“(…) The Italian Fascism (…) seems to be a chauvinistic-terrorist movement, and it is dangerous
not only to Italy. Keeping in mind its strengths and its capabilities, we have reasons to believe
that Europe and especially the countries which were defeated in the War have all the motives
to fear Fascism. It is thus not completely unexpected that the Hungarians organize Fascism in
their own country (…) and let us not be content with the fact that the Germans, which are, for
the moment [1922 – translator’s note ], in a lot of trouble, do not act. Fascism is a mirage, full
of temptations, as well as Bolshevism. Mussolini has explained, in a recent vehement speech,
what do the Italian Fascists want and how do they see things (…) The leader of the Italian Fas –
cists chooses carefully his own people, and he is certain that the ‘vague and hesitating public
opinion’ will be easily drawn to the Italian Fascism. And the danger is as great as Mussolini
has declared that the issue at stake is an issue of force. Fascists will need to prevail even if
they will have to resort to violence alone. (…) If D’Anunzio succeeded in taking Fiume, without
serious opposition, and if Mussolini has succeeded in overthrowing the Italian government by
force, thus taking the King prisoner, is it surprising that the Fascist cholera will try to spread
throughout the entire Europe? War has accustomed us to so many surprises; it would not be
absurd for us to expect something like this. And a paradox: Fascism will never be an interna –
tional movement, as Bolshevism is. Taking a very bizarre form, the Fascism will be national in
all countries. Of course, the reality of the danger depends on the will and determination of our
‘vague and hesitating public opinion’”.
The almost astounding clarity of vision and the impressively unshaken
belief in values, such as democracy and cosmopolitanism, are visible again in
a review, N. Coudenhove Kalergi: Pan Europa , signed by Dr. Kurt Jarek (no.
61, Oct. 1925). The text addresses a theme of cosmopolitan politics, which
was relatively known to the intellectual circles in Europe at the time: Nikolaus
Coudenhove Kalergi’s famous project of a  Pan Europa , a political study envi –
sioning the project of a Pan-European Union. The text from Contimporanul is
a comment on Kalergi’s book:
“Vienna 1923 (…) Europe has lost, in the last quarter of a century, her undisputed political
hegemony; facing the four future world empires: the British, the Russian, the American, the
Asian, Europe is able to become more visible only through unification. We must end with the
small states in Europe. Coudenhove represents the idea of a ‘small Europe’. Pan Europa should
form itself without England, not against England; the English Empire would be ‘overwhelmed’
and should undoubtedly act pacifistically, since it has nothing to win, but everything to lose!
The Russian problem is troublesome: Russia is the ‘Macedonia of Europe’: its natural resources
it started out with bodies, then cheerfully it has moved forward to the numerus clausus and, finally, it
fell at the foothills of Article 7 [of the Constitution]. Thus, however commonplace the sentence ‘History
repeats itself’ is, it still remained true. Every Constitution with its vandalisms, its beatings, its flaws and
its anti‑Semitic scandals”.

96Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
and riches should be exploited; this would give Russia the opportunity to overthrow Europe
at a certain moment. Especially Germany should be forced to enter an alliance with Russia, if
Europe remained disunited. The Russian-German alliance would be only a matter of time. If
Germany did not want to become the ‘limit of Europe’, Germany should enter an agreement
with France – and France would have to stop acting against Europe. Only a united Europe could
defend itself against the Russian hegemony and invasion. A European customs’ union would be
a counterweight to the economic agreement with Russia. The mediator between Pan Europe and
Pan America would be England. During the Middle Ages, the idea of the unity of the West was
particularly strong; then, nations emerge, as spiritual communities between ‘the elites and the
people’. Yet, Coudenhove goes against this idea; he seems to envision a mixing of the nations
inside the Pan Europa . A war against the idea of nation would be a war against culture. (…)
Pan Europa will be a community created out of need; out of the need for self -defense against
foreign economic and political superiority; for the people, which have been and still are the
guardians of culture. This is the survey of Coudenhove’s comprehensive study (…) What needs
to be added (…) is the idea of a vital Pan Europa (…) The merit of Coudenhove is that he found
the precise, appropriate expression for ideas which were widely known; the basics of his ideas
are well established, well dressed into historical and economic science, a little bit rationalistic,
a little bit less literary. Coudenhove is the person who has found the most appropriate formula
for expressing these ideas in a popular way, at the same time serving the cause. (…) There are
other important issues here, issues to which Coudenhove pays little attention. He is exactly like
the scientist proud to be ahead of his time. This book is dedicated to all artists and intellectuals
and to all others who create and live not for ‘utility, but for prosperity’. Because only in a world
which is prosperous will the artists, scientists and intellectuals, those who do care about the
world about as much as the world cares about them, be able to dream, think and verify”.
A text from 1923 announces the rebirth of the Human Rights League in Paris
in 192252. The author of the text praises the optimistic universalistic humanism
promised by this European human rights enlightenment after WWI and also
laments the moral decay of Romanian society after the war:
“The human optimism is undoubtedly of divine descent. We could not otherwise explain the
eternal turmoil that gave us, the human race – the apostles, the martyrs or the heroes, the rebels
against tyranny, the rebels against faith or against political order, the martyrs of the arenas, of
the barricades, or those burnt at the stakes, the famous or the unknown, the glorious or the
ignominious, the fighters or the humble ones, the meek and the terrible – yet invariably and
eternally representing the consciousness of Man, the divine spark hidden in the thick mud of
which man is made – Humaneness. For Humaneness is Justice itself – immanent Justice – su –
preme Justice in its eternal and pure form – a Justice in which the executor is itself a tool. To
this impetuous reaction of active consciousness of this people we owe the rebirth of the League
for Human Rights , known to us even before the War in the person of Georges Lorand, who
counted many friends among us, the Romanians. Yet the significance of this rebirth is another
one, and more today than at any time in history we have to pay tribute to the saying: organ
follows function. Never before has our country passed through such a disastrous moral crisis as
it does nowadays. To the decay produced by the post-war restratification of society, the ruining
of the old classes and the enrichment of a new, brutish and barbarian one, unprepared for its
stereotypic role in society, one adds a long series of local phenomena. The economic anarchy,
fraud and the state’s bankruptcy; the high-level corruption, encouraged as a corrective of land
reform and the general vote, implemented without the necessary preparations; the discrediting
of the State’s authority, the Parliament’s state of demoralization, the state of emergency intro –
duced under the pretext of border defense, military abuses and crimes, the sabotage of cultural
life by the diabolical protection of professional instigators – all these patronized by an odious,
demagogic regime, known only by its supreme cult of incompetence and by the cynicism of
placing the national interest outside the Constitution and the rule of law; a sectarian, biased
and impassioned regime – this is the chaos in which we have been living for seven years, this
52 Șt. Vidran, “Liga pentru drepturile omului” ( The Human Rights League ), in Contimporanul, no.
42, June 10, 1923.

97Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
is the vast desert in which the voice of the Human Rights League speaks, as did once the voice
of the Prophet, speaking to those who are hungry for power and to the unfortunate alike:
“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” [John 2:19]”.
On the other hand, the aesthetic activity of the Contimporanul group is well
documented53. The aesthetics of Contimporanul is complex and it develops in
different phases. The first phase, the aesthetic- revolutionary phase, is influenced
by Dadaism, Constructivism and Expressionism, and peaks with the “Activist
Manifesto to the Young” (no. 46, May 1924) that is the programmatic mani –
festo of the first period of Contimporanul . The manifest is written in a Futurist
vein and reminds us of the aesthetic anarchism of the first phases of European
avant-gardes. Here, the traditional concept of “art” is questioned in an activist
way and art is put to the test of its social utility. Also, “art” itself is seen as a tool
in the progress towards a “great industrial-activist stage”54.
As an artistic group, Contimporanul produced manifestoes, pamphlets,
and also encouraged and publicized the artists of the Romanian Avant-garde.
With the “First International Exhibition of Modern Art” organized between
November and December 1924, at Bucharest’s hall of the Artists’ Union,
where the entire Romanian avant-garde participated, alongside with famous
international names, such as Lajos Kassak, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, Paul Klee,
Karel Teige, Tereza Zarnower and Mieczysław Szczuka, Kurt Schwitters, and
Viking Eggling, the movement demonstrated its strength as a fully-fledged
European avant-garde, comparable to the other European avant-gardes. Besides
encouraging the development of an independent avant-garde in the country,
the Contimporanists published manifestos and publicized works from all the
major Western and Central European avant-gardes (Hungarian, Polish). They
published reviews, texts, poetry or letters from major international artists
they were in contact with55. One announcement from 192356 to their readers
53 S.A. Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art”; P . Cernat, Avangarda românească
și complexul periferiei. Primul val , (București: Cartea Românească, 2007); Erwin Kessler (ed.), Colours of
the Avantgarde. Romanian Art 1910‑1950 , Institutul Cultural Român, 2007.
54 Quoted in S.A. Mansbach, “The ‘Foreignness’ of Classical Modern Art”, 538.
55 For example, Huelsenbeck’s report on the city life in Berlin after the War: “The Germans are suf ‑
fering a terrible defeat. The moral and spiritual blow is even harder than the political one. The weakened
Germany nowadays does not have any spiritual zest for life. Art is almost gone. The German Revolution
was merely a farce. Our compatriot’s heads are filled with stupidity and greed. Germany is a thick fog,
a cumulation of evil instincts. Women are selling themselves without any grace. The utter bankruptcy is
here. Berlin is a dead city. People: soulless creatures, driven by money and greed. The public of the theatres
is comprised of the same butchers and bakers. In the streets, you can feel a harrowing sadness. In the
cafés, you are a ghost, watched by hostile eyes. The poets are the most despised nowadays. Speculation
is thriving. The dancing halls are choke‑full, the cinemas abused. Berlin is the most barbarian city in the
world. The city of kitsch, not even a glitter of spirit. The city of ordinary faces”. Richard Huelsenbeck,
Scrisori din Germania: Agonie (Letters from Germany: Agony), in Contimporanul, no. 42, June 10, 1923.
56 Contimporanul , no. 34, March 10, 1923, “Pentru Contimporani” (To the readers of Contimpo ‑
ranul ): “Contimporanul goes to great pains in looking for and asking celebrities of the artworld to visit
Bucharest. Our assiduous exchange of letters, information, newspapers, our continuously rising visibility
abroad caught the attention of our fellow artists from the West. Many of them say in their letters that
they are convinced of our intellectual elite’s capacity not only to catch up with the real trends in our
contemporary world – speed, movement, force – but to become real artists, authentic creators, and
spiritual leaders in our backward East European societies. (…) After good signals came from artists such
as Marinetti and Prampolini, the Danish Hans Richter responded to our invitation and informs that he
will travel here personally to present his Abstract Film, the most developed form of modern art yet seen.

98Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei
shows their relentless efforts in establishing contacts with international artists
and organizing exhibitions through a cosmopolitan network of fellow artists.
Their journal already contained dozens of reviews and announcements of
avant-garde events throughout Europe, as well as the artists’ own accounts
on the events (often publicized directly in their native language, German or
French). The journal was actually a real melting pot of styles, theories, poetry,
prose, images – a seemingly chaotic amalgam of opinions, languages, people
and texts. One such aesthetic manifest was Mieczysław Szczuka’s account of
the avant-garde Polish group BLOK:
“[M. Szczuka], ‘The Artistic Movement in Poland’ [on the same page: an illustration of Guitar
by Juan Gris, Paris]
1) The most common feature of Polish art is its highly developed sensitiveness and the lack of
purely formal problems.
2) In pre-war Poland, art was the only asylum for the national spirit. The artist was reviving the
past: decline and grandeur, imitating folk art, creating national art.
3) The great discoveries of Impressionism were resounding in Poland also. Afterwards, they
degenerated into naturalism and went into the hands of the sentimental searchers for the
‘beautiful Polish landscape’.
1) The last years before the war and the years after independence have brought significant
changes.
2) At the same time, in Warsaw and Krakow appeared the modernistic movements called
‘Formists’. The Formists of Krakow, more radical, represented Futurism and Expressionism, the
ones in Warsaw remained Cubists and Expressionists.
3) Until 1920, the Formists were very active: new editions, conferences, exhibitions. The society
reacted differently: hostility, indifference, benevolence. Then, the new postulates ended up by
being accommodated to the popular taste.
1) From 1920 on, the movement fades. New tendencies appear: a return to classicism. The
Formists were losing ground. Exile begins: many emigrate, not able to cope with the hostile
atmosphere. Alas! The eternal fate of the Polish artist is finding success and development away
from his native homeland. In Poland there is no place for them. The same thing happens even
to those who have already found success and acknowledgment in Europe: K. Malewicz. (The
Ministry of Culture refused his return to Poland). Marcoussis, Halicka, Lipchitz, Kissling , etc.
The others mingle with the Classicists, Cézanists, moderate Impressionists within the ‘Rythm’
group. After 1922, the paintings and the sculptures of the ‘Formists’ would be rare in Warsaw’s
exhibitions. The Formist movement, although not without flaws, brought many new things.
They have explained, publicly and for the first time, the formal problems related to art. Their
flaws are: an insufficient construction, lack of order and moderation, lack of a solid program,
too much sentimentalism.
(In other words, expressionists):
1) The merit of the [artistic group] BLOK is that they gave a precise and clear definition of
avant-garde postulates.
2) BLOK’s programme was a new thing to Polish society. A totally different phenomenon com –
pared to what the Polish public thought it knew.
3) From BLOK came the signal: methodic work, intellectual, collective .
4) BLOK put forward in its program the indivisibility of art problems from social problems. We
have fought for the radical Left in the social movement.
1) Even when they were Formists, the current members of BLOK were in opposition, accusing the
others of being moderate. In 1923, initiated by Teresa Żarnower and Mieczysław Szczuka a group
was formed, joined by others, W. Strzemiński and H. Stażewski. Exhibitions were organized.
2) In 1924, following Żarnower’s initiative, we have organized and edited our first publication.
Theo v. Doesburg, the editor of De Styl, will give a few lectures during his visit and will exhibit his most
famous works in Bucharest. His wife, a famous musician, will travel with him and will perform some of
her concerts here. Henry Walden from Berlin will also pay a visit to us and exhibit some of the Sturm
works (…)”.

99Cosmopolitanism and Creativity in the Romanian avant‑garde:The First Two Years of the Contimporanul Movement (1922‑1923)
3) The results are already obvious: everywhere, we hear our postulates being repeated and
observe in others the influences of our activity.
Warsaw, 1924”57.
Conclusion
Contimporanul is the venue of a fully mature and non-imitative avant-garde,
where novelty and transformation are part of the modern process of producing
artworks (literary and visual). In the end, the avantgardistic artwork that emerges
at the juncture between aesthetics and politics (at least in the first phase of
Contimporanul ) is the site of a development in cosmopolitan imagination that
fosters not only the self -becoming of the avant-garde itself, but also the promise
of a future political and moral liberation provoked by the deeds of the artfield.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Babeș-Bolyai University grant GTC_34051/2013
(Young Researchers’ Grant Scheme) Avantgardistic Cosmopolitanism.
stmaftei@yahoo.com
57 M. Szczuka, Mișcarea Artistică în Polonia (The Artistic Movement in Poland), in Contimporanul ,
no. 48, October 1924. Numbering original.

140Contributors
Randall E. Auxier – PhD in philosophy, professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois
University Carbondale. In addition to many articles and essays, he is author of Time,
Will and Purpose (2013) and co-author of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s
Radical Empiricism (forthcoming). He edited seven volumes of the Library of Living
Philosophers and was the Editor of The Pluralist and its predecessor The Personalist
Forum for fifteen years.
Maarten Doorman – PhD, is a historian of ideas and a philosopher of culture at the
Universities of Amsterdam and Maastricht. He held the Literary Criticism Chair at Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam (2000-2004) and the Chair of Criticism of Arts and Culture at
the Media Studies Department of the University of Amsterdam (2004-2014). His major
publications are: Art in Progress. A Philosophical Response to the End of the Avant‑Garde
(2003), De romantische orde (2004), “Sculpture’s location in the midst of the real”, in:
Sculpture Journal , 17 (1) (2008), pp. 94-100; Rousseau en ik (2012).
José Miranda Justo – PhD, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and member
of the Research Centre for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon, specializes, extensively
lectures and publishes on Philosophy of Art, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Herme –
neutics, Translation Studies and Kierkegaardian Studies. His latest publication is “Esthetic
Experience and Artistic Creativity: Knowledge, Affects, Imagination and Language”, in:
Creative Processes in Art , Lisbon: CIEBA (2014).
Aleksandar Kandić – PhD candidate and research trainee at the Institute for Philosophy,
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. His main fields of interest are philosophy
of nature and philosophy of mathematics, as well as Plato and ancient social theories.
He published papers in Greece, Italy and Russia; among others “Plato, Hegel and the
Pythagorean Tradition”, in: Skepsis Journal , 23 (2013).
Ewa Kofin – PhD in Music from the Frederic Chopin University of Music in Warsaw under
Zofia Lissa; professor in the Institute for Cultural Studies of the University of Wrocław;
active music critic; author of hundreds of reviews and articles in leading Polish music
journals, among others Ruch Muzyczny and Odra ; and co-author of fourteen programs
for the international festival Wratislavia Cantans . Author of four academic books, among
others Semiologiczny aspekt muzyki (The Semiological Aspect of Music ) and Muzyka
wokół nas. Studium przeobrażeń recepcji muzyki w dobie elektronicznych środków jej
przekazywania (Music Around Us: A Study of the Transformation of the Reception of
Music in the Era of Its Electronic Transmission ).
Magdalena Lange – PhD candidate at the Department of Aesthetics in the Institute of
Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, researching the aesthetical and philosophical
implications of bio-artistic practices. Studied the history of art, biotechnology and
medicine. Actively participated in international conferences concerning aesthetics, art,
bioethics and genetics. Co-author of, among others, “Isolation and in vitro proliferation
of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells – technical aspects”, in: Edukacja Biologiczna
i Środowiskowa 3 (2014) and “Werner syndrome and mutations of the WRN and LMNA
genes in France”, in: Human mutation 27 (7) (2006), pp. 718-719.
Ștefan‑Sebastian Maftei – PhD in philosophy at Babeș-Bolyai University, in Cluj-Napoca,
where he currently lectures in philosophy. His main research areas are philosophy of art,
rhetoric, hermeneutics, and philosophy of culture, and he currently focuses on German
aesthetics, avant-garde aesthetics, and contemporary rhetorical theory. He has published
articles in, among others, Rivista di Estetica , The African Yearbook of Rhetoric , and

141Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies . He recently authored the book “The
Artistic Genius”. Nietzsche and the Problem of Artistic Creation. Between Romanticism
and the Avant‑Garde , Cluj: Casa Cărții de Știință Publishing House, 2010.
Peter Mahr – Dr. phil. habil. is a philosopher based at the Department of Philosophy of
the University of Vienna, where he obtained his Habilitation in philosophical aesthetics
in 2006. In 2010/11 he was visiting professor at the Bauhaus University Weimar. He
specialises in aesthetics, philosophy of media, and history of philosophy. His recent
monographs include Einführung in die Kunstphilosophie. Das Ästhetische und seine
Objekte (2003) and Philosophie von Bacon bis Freud (2015). He is currently completing
a book on television aesthetics. www.petermahr.net
Mara Miller – PhD from Yale University; teaches humanities at Hawaii Tokai International
College; writes and gives workshops internationally on arts/aesthetics, selfhood, and
feminist, East Asian, and environmental philosophy. She is author of book The Garden
as an Art (Suny Press, Albany 1993); her articles appear in, among others, Philosophy
and Literature , The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Oxford’s The Encyclopedia
of Aesthetics , and The Oxford Handbooks of World Philosophy and of Japanese Phi ‑
losophy . She is now finishing two books: Terrible Knowledge (philosophical reflections
on teaching and thinking about the atomic bombings) and The Philosopher’s Garden .
Miller’s paintings, exhibited in New York City, Honolulu, and Philadelphia, are in collec –
tions in fifteen cities.
Predrag Milosavljević – PhD, is a secretary of the Department for History and Philosophy
of Natural Sciences and Technology, University of Belgrade. His areas of interest involve
theory of proportion, ancient Greek philosophy of nature and Pythagorean-Platonic phi –
losophy. Author of, among others, “Geometrical Aspects of Chronos: Ancient Teachings
about Time and Cosmic Order” (with Aleksandar Kandić), in: The Concept of Divine in
its Diachronic Dimension , Adamopoulos, A. and Katsimitses, M. (eds.), Athens: Olympic
Center for Philosophy and Culture, 2011.
Piotr Schollenberger – PhD in philosophy, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of
Aesthetics in the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. He is chief editor of
Sztuka i Filozofia /Art and Philosophy and a member of the board of the Polish Association
of Phenomenology. His research interests include phenomenology, phenomenological
aesthetics, philosophy of art, and modern art theory. He is author of the book Granice
poznania doświadczenia estetycznego (The Limits of Cognition of the Aesthetic Experi ‑
ence, Warszawa: Semper, 2014), as well as several book chapters and articles, including
“Idleness and the Contemporary Art. On the Problems Concerning Taking One’s Time”,
in: Art Inquiry. Rechereches sur les Arts XII (2010).
Piotr Toczyski – PhD in sociology, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology of Grzegorzewska APS and chief research specialist of the National Information
Processing Institute’s interactive technologies laboratory, author of the book Jak mit
jednoczy Europę? (How Does Myth Unite Europe? Warsaw: Collegium Civitas Press, 2013).
Derek Whitehead – PhD from the University of Sydney, studied Visual arts, Ancient
languages and Continental Philosophy in Australia and Great Britain. Having taught in
the secondary and tertiary education sectors, he is a writer and researcher in the area
of aesthetics and philosophy, and is a practicing visual artist with works in public and
private collections in Australia and Europe. He has published, among others, “Martin
Heidegger’s Technites , Paul Klee’s Gestalt , and starting from the very beginning”, in:
Modernity: Critiques of Visual Culture , 4 (2005), and “Artist’s Labour” in: Contemporary
Aesthetics , 5 (2007). http://contempaesthetics.org

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