Piotr Slodkowski is Assistant Professor in the the Faculty of Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. He was curator of Henryk Streng/Marek Wlodarski and Jewish-Polish Modernism at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. His research focuses on Polish interwar art and art after 1939, with special attention to complex relations between the Holocaust, modernism, “engaged” art and socialist realism. Eliza Rose is Assistant Professor and Laszlo Birinyi Sr. Fellow of Central European Studies at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USA, having received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages from Columbia University, USA. Her research on culture in state socialist Eastern Europe has been published in journals such as Slavic Review.

• List of Illustrations Part I: Modernism1. So far, so near: Streng’s regional modernism2. Where is modernism? From centers and peripheries to a network of localitiesPart II: Socially engaged art3. Factorealism in fragments4. Barricades and the margins of socialist realism in PolandPart III: Identity5. Life and Work in Wartime6. Streng/Wlodarski’s Postwar IdentityConclusion: Back to the artists and their works BibliographyIndex

Piotr Slodkowski skilfully exposes the issues that make Central European Modernism such a vital field for revisionist art history today: he tackles, head-on, the fluidity of cultural identities in the region and rewrites the relationship between Modernism and Socialist Realism.