New Narratives of Russian and East European Art, 2019
The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western... more The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.
In the past couple of decades, “real existing socialism” (as the political system of the Soviet U... more In the past couple of decades, “real existing socialism” (as the political system of the Soviet Union and its satellites was often known), has been transformed from the most polarizing aspect of global politics to a distant memory. In 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution provoked multiple reflections on the Russian Revolution and its legacy. Only two years later, in 2019, the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to complementary, if more muted, d...
Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article... more Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article traces the frictions between two related, yet separate endeavors during the first postwar decades: on the one hand, the historicizing of modernism as a specifically European story; and on the other, the constitution of an all-encompassing concept of “World Art” that would integrate all periods and cultures into a single narrative. The strategies devised by exhibition organizers, analyzed here, sought to maintain the distance between World Art and modernism, and thus deferred the possibility of a more geographically expansive view of twentieth-century art. Realist art from the Soviet bloc and elsewhere occupied an uneasy position in such articulations between World Art and modernism, and its inclusion in exhibitions of modern art often led to the destabilizing of their narratives. Such approaches are contrasted here with the prominent place given to both realism and non-Euro-American art...
New Narratives of Russian and East European Art, 2019
The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western... more The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.
In the past couple of decades, “real existing socialism” (as the political system of the Soviet U... more In the past couple of decades, “real existing socialism” (as the political system of the Soviet Union and its satellites was often known), has been transformed from the most polarizing aspect of global politics to a distant memory. In 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution provoked multiple reflections on the Russian Revolution and its legacy. Only two years later, in 2019, the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to complementary, if more muted, d...
Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article... more Focusing on a series of exhibitions of modern art from the 1950s to the early 1970s, this article traces the frictions between two related, yet separate endeavors during the first postwar decades: on the one hand, the historicizing of modernism as a specifically European story; and on the other, the constitution of an all-encompassing concept of “World Art” that would integrate all periods and cultures into a single narrative. The strategies devised by exhibition organizers, analyzed here, sought to maintain the distance between World Art and modernism, and thus deferred the possibility of a more geographically expansive view of twentieth-century art. Realist art from the Soviet bloc and elsewhere occupied an uneasy position in such articulations between World Art and modernism, and its inclusion in exhibitions of modern art often led to the destabilizing of their narratives. Such approaches are contrasted here with the prominent place given to both realism and non-Euro-American art...
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