Let’s take a look at the sculptural group Bronze Crowd by Magdalena Abakanowicz.

Cover photo: Bronze Crowd, 1990-1991, bronze, by Magdalena Abakanowicz, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, United States (2021). Photo by DannyWithLove.

Today is the birthday of the late artist Magdalena Abakanowicz. Born in 1930, just before WWII, she would have been 91 years old. Born into Polish aristocracy, Abakanowicz and her family were forced to flee their estate once the Soviet Union took control of the Eastern European nation.

Abakanowicz went on to study at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1954. While painters were encouraged to create works in the state-approved style of Socialist Realism, Abankowicz found creative freedom in textile work. In the 60s, Abakanowicz began creating her Abakan tapestries, lending her family name to the creations.

In the 70s, she began to explore figurative work, specifically crowds, which would become a recurring motif. Let’s take a look at her 1990-91 sculptural group Bronze Crowd here in the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

A crowd, like an army, stands at attention. Yet the figures are headless. They are also hollow and quite literally spineless. Consisting of 36 figures, the army is enormous and really quite imposing. These figures are just slightly larger than life. Even without their heads, they’re taller than I am.

This sculpture is inspired by her fear of crowds. Together, according to Abakanowicz, humans can be quite stupid, even dangerous. She argued, “A crowd is the most cruel because it begins to act like a brainless organism.”

The headless flat-chested figures are both anonymous and androgynous. Abakanowicz created them “naked, exposed, and vulnerable, just as we all are.” Visitors to the garden often walk amongst the crowd, becoming part of the work. In this way, Abakanowicz is considered the “godmother of installation art.”

Upon close inspection, every figure here is in fact unique. The textures and patterns of each form are different. Her background in fiber arts is obvious. This group was originally made in burlap and then cast in bronze. The distressed surfaces appear both hard and soft, conveying the contradiction between individuality and community.

Abakanowicz stated, “I feel overawed by quantity …. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features.”

While her crowds may be read as political commentary, Abakanowicz never made such interpretation explicit, even after the fall of Communism in Poland. Instead she critiques humanity in total. Nevertheless, the violence of World War II clearly permeates her work. 

Alongside Tamara Łempicka (1898-1980) and Igor Mitoraj (1944-2014) Abakanowicz is one of few Polish artists to achieve international acclaim. Abakanowicz died at the age of 86, leaving behind a prolific career spanning five decades.