Post-war Polish art criticism sustained fundamental elements of modernist concepts of artistic form, which artists and theoreticians put up around two quintessential modernist postulates: 1. an artist should take part in general revitalization movement, 2. the value of artistic form depends on its ability to bring off or to stand for a social change and in particular to contribute to creation of the New Man.

The paper presents several concepts of artistic form, which appeared in the postwar Polish artistic and critical discourses as reactions to these modernist imperatives. The presentation includes in chronological order several models of artistic form, which were worked out in a few Polish artistic milieus. The paper starts from the concept of the “realistic metaphor” distinctive of the late 1940s and 1950s, which was to have the potential to reveal the higher truth of marxist palingenesis. The following models shows how Polish art critics tried to shift the evaluation criteria of artistic quality from the form and the content of the work of art to the creative subject as the dominant factor of the creative process and consequently to shift the transcendent meaning of a work of art from history to anthropology.

In the end of the 1950s and in the 1960s, the new model of artistic form dominated Polish critical discourse in which the historical as well as the subjective dimension of the work was placed in the domain of an artistic medium understood as the universal resource of material artistic solutions, that came in to being in the past and which is diachronically accessible to the artists. This model of artistic form functioned mainly as a way to define the essence of particular kind of art and its boundaries. In the same time, Polish artists and critics expressed the sense of the crisis of models of the artistic form of the past and tried to overcome it, calling for abandonment of the category of form at all in the favour of an unmediated message or intellectual experiment, again using modernist pattern: i.e. to seek the regenerative perspectives to rejuvenate, to revitalize art and its relationships with life.