This text is a presentation of the project of a revisionist history of feminist art in Poland. In its first part, I draw attention to the fact that the conceptual frameworks that shape the narratives of the relationship between art and feminism, both global and local, have proved to be extremely durable. In the next two sections of the article, I present a revisionist history of feminist art in practice with brief analyses of three works: Banner-Corset and Cover for My Lover by Maria Pinińska-Bereś (both 1967) and Consumer Art by Natalia LL (1972–1975).

The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, most famously outlined by Galileo, and subsequently supported, inter alia, by Descartes and by Locke, has widely been considered one of the crucial factors in the development of modern idealism. In its contemporary form, the distinction identifies some of the perceived properties as mental phenomena due to their content and structural dependence on the mind. However, this account of the primary/secondary distinction is largely different from its original version developed by the above-mentioned philosophers, within whose work the mental being of the perceived qualities was demonstrated objectively, from the conceptually-derived nature of matter, and not subjectively, by referring to the mind’s participation in the cognitive process. It was only at the next stage of the early modern subjectivisation of sense perception, best exemplified by such philosophers as Arnold Geulincx and Richard Burthogge, that the creative role played by the mind in sensation and, consequently, the mind-dependency of the sensible qualities was recognised – a turn influenced by the reinterpretation of Aristotelian philosophy offered by Jacopo Zabarella and the Paduan school, as well as by anti-Aristotelianism of the kind developed in Netherlands. Furthermore, the two different approaches to the primary/ secondary distinction can be linked with two main types of post-Cartesian idealism, i.e. Berkeleian and Kantian – a claim for which illustrative evidence from British philosophy, namely from Berkeley’s and Burthogge’s respective theories, can be drawn.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the meaning of the Old Polish lexeme gędźba, which was inherited from the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba against the background of its equivalents in Old Bohemian and Old Russian. The inspiration was the text of prof. W. Boryś on the Proto‑Slavic musical vocabulary. Semantic analysis has shown that in Old Polish, Old Bohemian and Old Russian languages, the continuants of the Proto‑Slavic * gǫdьba had a meaning limited to playing a specific type of instrument, as in Proto‑Slavic. So the words did not refer to the notion of music in the general sense, but only to a certain part of it. This testifies to the absence of a general notion of music in the Middle Ages in the Polish language area and is a continuation of the original Slavic state. But the old concept, which was called gędźba, had some characteristics that have been transfered to the later concept „music”, called a new word borrowed from the Latin.