The Woman Artist as Polygamist: On Mewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska
It would be easy to describe the Polish artist Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska (1895–1967) as having been ‘forgotten’ or even ‘overshadowed’ by her cohabitant, Henryk Stażewski – one of the most famous twentieth-century Polish artists. A photograph reproduced in a 1995 catalogue for an exhibition commemorating her one hundredth birthday could be seen as symptomatic of this erasure. In the foreground are Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska’s out-of-focus, blurry legs in high heels; in the background, coming into focus, one of Stażewski’s paintings from 1958. It appears that Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska had been once again placed in the shadow of her cohabitant, a pair of disembodied limbs, rendered feminine through the choice of footwear, framing the all-important work of male genius. And yet, the unusual composition of the image tells us more about Mewa’s practice than it does about Henryk’s. The image conceals a not-so-subtle clue about Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska’s craving to reorient the relations within the artist studio – which she occupied in a symbiotic love triangle with Stażewski and her husband – and to think through the dynamics of desire and asymmetry traditionally associated with it. In order to counter the tendency to position women artists as overlooked figures, my talk will consider Łukniewicz-Rogoyska’s polygamous position as disruptive to the very paradigm of heteronormative memory and legacy.