Academy of Fine Arts

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On December 6, 1945, among the ruins of post-war Gdańsk, a school of fine arts was created and granted a state artistic academy's status. Although the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk was initially located in Sopot and socially thought of as the "school of Sopot," in September 1955, now as the State Higher School of Visual Arts, it was moved into the Great Armoury – the Arsenal. The vertices of the western façade evidence the initial purpose of this building – obelisks and statues, ferrule-like decorations, and most of all the orbs, exploding with tin flames. In the 1920s, a shopping arcade occupied the ground floor of the Armoury. It was there that the mother of the three-year-old Oscar from the novel by Günter Grass bought the red-and-white drum, which in the hands of the rebellious boy became a tool to make statements about the surrounding reality.
The academy's doyens were a group of artists guided by their need to contribute to the rebuilding of the ruins of post-war Gdańsk and to animate its artistic life. Their coinciding views on creation corresponded with stubbornness, passion, and consistent actions, thus promoting the realization of their mission to search for the place of art in society. Fulfilling the Positivist ideal of work at the grassroots, they created an ideologically homogeneous, vibrant circle of pedagogues and artists. This feeling of community, demonstrated by respect for traditional aesthetic values, correlated with the increasing rank of this artistic academy, the activities it promoted, and the undertaking of other, though conservative, initiatives.
What is characteristic is that this group of artists, among whom most exhibited moderation and distrust towards transformations, a quality so criticized by the then avant-garde, was inspired by the idea of not disturbing others. Like the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, they noticed the need not to deny any artistic discipline the right to express itself in its way. The harmony of the world resides in its freedom, objective manifoldness, multiformity, and variedness. Imitating others is undemanding, but it is an art to create according to one's poetics. Nature provides man with wings, and the role of pedagogues is to help him to spread them. It was not long until these attitudes found response. The professors' experience and the passion of youth soon bore first fruits, noticed on different latitudes.
Contemporarily, the historical Arsenal in Gdańsk receives a new function as it becomes the Armoury of Art. It is supposed to attract the attention of a complete circle of viewers, contributing to the increasing participation in culture in the metropolis of Gdańsk, and satisfying the ambitions to teach and promote art and culture. The Academy of Fine Arts, as the school is called since 1996, is a home in which art is being born and lives under the patronage of Minerva, who supports the building of a positive image of the demanding profession of an artist in the contemporary world.
With their works, the pedagogues, graduates, and students of the Gdańsk academy shape the image of Tricity. In the 1950s, they contributed to the old-town Gdańsk, returning splendor and charm to its monuments. At the beginning of the 1960s, they experimented by clashing poetry and visual art, which found reflection in the students' theatres' activities. From year to year, the identity of the Coast changes. These processes and transformations do not occur automatically. To a great extent, the credit goes to the alumni of the school – painters, sculptors, graphic artists, architects, ceramists, industrial designers, fabric designers, and others.
More and more frequently, the viewer is being invited to engage in discussion with the creator – culture is supposed to function in the open public space, and the viewer is its indispensable element, first critic, and, sometimes, co-creator. The effect of the artists' joint efforts will be the cycle of workshops, planned to take place in autumn 2017, which will draw on the utopian ideal of the interpenetration of artistic disciplines, their unity, and common source. Over the 70-year history of the academy constitutes proof that in art, impossible is only that about which we are unable to ask.
For us, an art academy with over seventy years of history, culture signifies the mission and responsibility connected with young artists' education. For us, the students are the most important – it is for them and thanks to them that the Academy functions and our work make sense. The incredibly talented graduates of MA studies can develop their artistic, design, or scientific interests during the Cross-Faculty Doctoral Studies. The rich program, scholarships, and cooperation with outstanding artists and researchers open before them completely new horizons, enabling them to look at their chosen discipline from a broader perspective.
It would be difficult not to mention every researcher's crucial need to access a rich book collection. The Library provides it, a part of a unitary library and information system of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Its structure is comprised of the Reading Room, Lending Library, and Information Office. The profile of the book collection corresponds with the majors offered by the academy. It constitutes a response to the students' research needs, faculty members, and visitors of the academy. In particular, it encompasses literature from the field of history and theory of art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, industrial design, interior design, and furniture making, graphic art and applied graphics, fabric, clothing, ceramics, glass, artistic craftsmanship, photography, folk art, as well as theatre, aesthetics, philosophy, social sciences, history and theory of culture, and global and regional history – in total, more than 20 thousand volumes. The Reading Room offers access to national and foreign journals. The Library belongs to the Tricity Library Complex and participates in the project Pomeranian Digital Library.
Equally important is the other face of culture – open, functioning in the public space, based on dialogue, co-created by artists and viewers. This is why, with attentiveness and engagement, we prepared a diverse cultural and educational offer aimed at all lovers of the art of all ages.

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