Magdalena Abakanowicz.

In this first monograph devoted to the art of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Barbara Rose introduces her as a canonical artist of the 20th century who merits a place next to such giants as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The premise, perhaps more politically incorrect than historically frail, would be less problematic had Rose examined the incongruity of Abakanowicz's place as a peripheral artist (and a woman) who has been broadly recognized in the West as the leading voice of contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Instead, Rose relies on a more established paradigm, treating Abakanowicz as a solitary figure marked by the dramatic experience of surviving World War II and the ensuing forty years of totalitarian oppression.

The monograph is most useful where Rose discusses Abakanowicz's artistic lexicon and shows how it evolved through experimentation toward a powerful self-referential expression with universal dimensions. By developing a limited vocabulary, Abakanowicz has created a contermaniera that refers to the materiality of the conventional language of sculpture and successfully challenges the prolixity of many contemporary artistic practices. Rose skillfully surveys Abakanowicz's career, from the early '60s, when her rather crude 20-foot-tall oval cylinder punctuated by smaller protruding tubes was included in the Biennial of Three-Dimensional Forms in Elblag (a provincial town near Gdansk), to the early '90s, when she was selected as a finalist in an urban-development competition for the Great Axis of Paris on the basis of her eccentric forest of houses resembling gigantic trees (which she dubbed "arboreals").

But Rose's view of Abakanowicz's art is ultimately limited, even within the parameters that she establishes. She connects Abakanowicz's works with the socioeconomic and political conditions of Poland in the last fifty years and portrays the artist in large part as a victim of harsh circumstances. Paradoxically, the argument could be made that Abakanowicz's rising success in the West was on several instances facilitated rather than hampered by the Polish authorities. Rose's observation that at one point the Polish government recognized the artist's significance and stopped interfering with her career needs to be illuminated by a discussion of the complexities of state patronage in postwar Poland, a system that in {act occasionally benefited Polish artists.

More important, Rose's emphasis on the artist as a solitary figure may have led her to omit mention of a number of prominent Polish artists with whom Abakanowicz has affinities. Although the book briefly refers to Tadeusz Kantor, Henryk Stazewski, Stanislaw Zamecznik, and a few others, nothing is said of Magdalena Wiecek, Alina Slesinska, or Alina Szapocznikow, three of the women sculptors whose impact on Polish art in Abakanowicz's formative years was crucial. Taken together with Abakanowicz's art, their work suggests the presence of a unique tradition of sculpture by women artists in post-World War II Poland.

Though valuable as a source of information about Abakanowicz's impressive and fecund career, the monograph fails to adequately contextualize the artist's work in terms of place and time, and to explore its complexities fully. Ultimately, it misses the opportunity not only to become an insightful study devoted to an Eastern European artist who has drawn inspiration from her local heritage, but also to examine closely the cultural heritage of the countries once referred to as "behind the Iron Curtain."

Marek Bartelik regularly reviews exhibitions for Artforum.