18

In Poland, “avant-garde” movements actually appear only after 1918. This late birth largely explains the syncretic nature of Polish poetry after the First World War in comparison to the “avant-garde” in Germany, Italy, Russia or France. The major influence was the French one, especially with the cubist revolution, which worked as a booster for Polish painters and... poets. In view of these facts, the author analyzes the pictural analogies between the poetical works of Apollinaire and Cendrars and those of Czyzewski and Przybos. The French and the Polish “avant-gardes” joined together by virtue of their common “ophtalmocratic” trends, even though their objectives were different, as they could not escape from the cultural preconditions. In Poland, artists were eager to free themselves from the Romanticism Legacy: consequently constructivists trends prevailed over Surrealism, though it crops up in the works of the most creative artists like Aleksander Wat or Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz.