The aim of my paper is to examine the practices of remembering and of forgetting about socialist realism after 1954, the date which marked the end of this style's domination in Poland. I will explore the ways in which those practices were shaped by the changing ideological regimes (socialism through decades of Polish People's Republic transforming into capitalism) using the case of Helena Krajewska's work and biography. Krajewska (1910-1998) was an iconic figure of Polish socialist realism, painter and art critic, who never renounced socialist realism. Her involvement in this style became a stigma, through which she, as well as the entire formation of socialist realist artists, has been remembered since 1954. The paper aims to answer the following research questions: how has the transformation of "symbolic capital" (Bourdieu 2005) into "stigma" (Goffman 2005), associated with commitment to socialist realism, occurred? How has the cultural memory on one of its main propagators been shaped in the Polish art field? Based on the content analysis of press articles, the paper reveals the successive dominant paradigms of speaking about Krajewska's art projects and political involvement in which the artist's biography became rewritten and subjected to selective mnemonic practices depending on changes in the dominant doctrines. Overall, the paper shows relations between the texts concerning Krajewska, the dominant ideology and wider socio-political processes. It contributes to the research on socialist realism by combing the memory studies and historical sociology perspective and shows how the socialist realism has become an empty signifier (Laclau 2009) functioning within the Polish art field until today.
