This paper investigates the evolution of Polish Socialist Realism during the Stalinist period by using the case study of early post-war work by Felicjan Szczęsny-Kowarski. Kowarski’s distinctly figurative oeuvre – hailed by the officials as a paradigm of “humanism” – was to serve as an example for new art, one which would privilege social engagement and promote the notions of ideological and physical reconstruction in war-decimated Poland.

My case study focuses on Kowarski’s famous painting titled “Pstrowski Coal Miner” from 1949. I investigate the question of “form and content” – two characteristics of Socialist Realism as outlined by the Soviets – to think more expansively about what that doctrine entailed outside of the USSR at the time it was being imposed in Soviet satellite states. While the work ostensibly glorified the proletariat, the work’s propagandistic potential was in fact oblique. Detached from the act of labor, Pstrowski exuded a sense of social and cultural refinement that seemed to contradict the Socialist Realist engagement with class struggle. In other words, the painting remained a work of fiction.

I suggest that much like many Socialist Realist paintings that were to follow, Pstrowski’s portrait introduced multiple realities – the lived reality and the fictitious reality – which were to guide contemporary viewers into the idealized vision of new Poland that the state apparatus was hoping to transmit.