Sala Neoplastyczna (Neoplastic Room) is a permanent exhibition space at Muzeum Sztuki in à Âódà º originally designed by the Polish avant-garde artist Wà Âadysà Âaw Strzemià Âski in collaboration with the director of the museum Marian Minich in 1948. It was intended to showcase the works by European avant-garde artists of the interwar period, including Katarzyna Kobro, Theo van Doesburg and Henryk Berlewi, among others.
The idea for the Neoplastic Room emerged in the aftermath of World War II when the director Marian Minich, who had been leading the institution since 1935, expressed a desire to create a dedicated space for displaying works by European interwar avant-garde artists from the museum's collection. It was conceived for the museum's new location at the Poznaà Âski family palace on WiÃÂckowskiego Street.
The Neoplastic Room was designed in 1948 by Wà Âadysà Âaw Strzemià Âski, one of the pivotal artists associated with Polish Constructivism and a co-founder of the a.r. group, which formed the core of the museum's pre-war collection. Strzemià Âski's project for the room was based on a 1931 manifesto he wrote together with his wife Katarzyna Kobro, titled Composition of Space: Calculations of Space-Time Rhythm.
Intended to achieve a "balance of harmony of space", the Neoplastic Room and its name were inspired by the ideas and visual vocabulary of the Dutch Neoplasticism movement originally established by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The space, "divided into planes based on strict mathematical calculations and painted with basic colours (red, blue, and yellow)", was augmented by vertical and horizontal arrangement in white, gray, and black.The Neoplastic Room originally featured works by Berlewi, van Doesburg, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Vilmos Huszár, Jean Hélion, Henryk Staà ¼ewski, and Georges Vantongerloo.In addition to displaying paintings, the room showcased abstract sculptures by Kobro called Spatial Compositions (Kompozycje Przestrzenne), which were placed on custom-designed glass pedestals.
The Neoplastic Room survived only until October 1, 1950, when it was shut down due to the imposition of the Socialist Realist doctrine in Stalinist Poland. This followed the firing of Strzemià Âski from the à Âódà º Academy of Fine Arts earlier that year by the deputy minister of culture and arts Wà Âodzimierz Sokorski. The space was painted over and the works were moved to warehouses, as modernism and avant-garde ran counter to Stalinist cultural policies. The room was reconstructed in 1960 by Bolesà Âaw Utkin, following the 1956 Khruschev Thaw and subsequent liberalization of cultural policies across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. A student of Strzemià Âski, Utkin based his reconstruction of the Neoplastic Room on preserved photographs. Since then, the room has been renovated multiple times and has become the most prominent permanent exhibition space at the museum.