Global Modernism

The Crystalist group proposed completely new directions for art in Sudan in the 1970s. This essay for MoMA's Post (written as a promo for the co-edited volume Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents) situates the group's 1976 manifesto--published in the Khartoum newspaper al-Ayyam--within the artistic, cultural, and political contexts of the time. It also summarizes the historiography of the group and corrects the bibliographic record of its writings and exhibitions.

In 1946, Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959), an eminent art collector active in the heyday of Modernism in Paris, was asked to send part of his admired collection for an exhibition planned to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For reasons unknown, the exhibition never took place. However, Roché’s list of entries for the exhibition remains an extraordinary document and a reliable insider’s assessment of the modernist canon. Comprising fifty paintings, the list includes two by Braque, four by Picasso, two or three by Duchamp, one by Modigliani, and one by Pascin. Ranked among the sparingly selected works of these paramount modernists are four by Chang Yu or Sanyu (1901-66), a Chinese painter who enjoyed some fame in Paris around 1930 and who is only now being rediscovered. If the number amounts to any measure of significance, it suggests Roché’s high esteem of Sanyu whom he placed on a par with Picasso. This is all the more striking considering the acrimony between Roché (Sanyu’s agent from 1929 to 1932) and Sanyu resulting from their growing mutual distrust. Viewing Sanyu’s works now, one is struck by how much they register the distinct modernist sensibility borne out of the heady vortex of the Parisian art
world in the 1920s and 1930s. It is hardly surprising that Sanyu fits into the group of the canonically enshrined modernist masters in Roché’s list. However, what kind of modernist Sanyu was remains an intriguing
question.

Collectivity, economics, gender, and spirituality converge in art historian Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol's meticulous reading of Philippine modern artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho's painting, In the Marketplace. Skirting the ease of performative, atomized, or biographical takes on the subjects at hand, the writer primes instead a broader proposal for latency.

This essay is a review of art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015). The book offers a chronicle of artistic theories, practices, and institutions during Nigeria's independence years (1957–67) amid the historical frames of Third World liberation, African decolonization, and Cold War realpolitik. The essay explores in particular how Postcolonial Modernism revisits and explores the thematic of “national culture”—the concept presented by Frantz Fanon in 1959, with long-lasting impact on theories of postcolonial arts—in the (decentralized) Nigerian art world, with a focus on the synthetic studio practices of members of the Zaria Art Society. Fanon's “two-fold becoming” model of national culture, which implies catalyzing links to international liberation movements, impacts not only Okeke-Agulu's narrative of a generational opposition to the preceding cultural paradigms of Negritude, but also—the essay argues—the writing of global modernist history at-large.

Ce mémoire de master 1 replace l’exposition Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, tenue en 1974 au Grand Palais à Paris, un projet souhaité et soutenu par Léopold Sédar Senghor, dans le contexte de la coopération entre la France et le Sénégal. Après un bilan historiographique du sujet (chapitres 1&2),  J’ai retracé la genèse de l’exposition, à partir d’archives inédites (chapitre 3), en analysant la façon dont ce projet d’art africain contemporain fut à l’époque reçu par les institutions françaises. J’ai notamment souligné les aspects diplomatiques qui encouragèrent sa tenue comme les réticences de la France face à cet art nouveau. Une part du travail est ainsi consacrée à l’étude de la terminologie (art "contemporain" vs. art "d'aujourd'hui"), révélatrice des négociations entreprises par le Sénégal pour exister sur la scène internationale et française, et des réserves émises par les français.

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity.
Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a “constellational modernism” for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

This is the concluding chapter from One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash (Mapin, 2021). It makes the case for rethinking the epistemologies of modernism as a global construct using the writings of Karen Barad as a major reference for thinking. -------

One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash documents and contextualizes the work of one of the most prolific of the first generation of Indian modernists. Prakash was an architect, an urban planner, a painter, sculptor, set-designer, furniture designer, academic, theatre director, and actor, as well as an occasional poet. The first publication devoted solely to Prakash's work, the objective of this book is to introduce scholarly and general audiences the diversity of his work, to locate it in terms of its local, national, and international contexts, and to build a narrative that describes the motivations of the work. The "continuous" in the title refers both to Prakash's fascination with the possibilities of generating form using a single line, and to his search for synergy between the various disciplines. The book focuses on Prakash's efforts to re-think Le Corbusian idea through Indic forms and imperatives.

Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between traditional cultures, competing concepts of modernization, and rivaling Cold War blocs. As a result, it produced a diverse body of architecture that defies easy classification and blurs the lines between the established categories of modernism. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the strategies architects used to mediate different—sometimes directly opposed—concepts of culture and architecture. Surveyed here is a wide range of topics: from city building and state representation, to the typologies of everyday life. Also discussed is the work of Yugoslavia’s leading architects, who transformed their in-betweenness into a new quality: Edvard Ravnikar’s seamless blending of such varied influences as Jože Plečnik, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner; Bogdan Bogdanović’s war memorials, which filtered deep-seated cultural archetypes through the lens of Surrealism; Juraj Neidhardt’s efforts at forging a modern identity for Bosnia based on the vernacular Ottoman heritage; and Vjenceslav Richter’s neo-avant-garde experiments, which provided some of the most convincing representations of Yugoslav socialism. Wolfgang Thaler photographs document these and many other stand-out achievements.

This chapter proceeds with two aims. Firstly, it tracks correspondences between the early novels of Albert Wendt—Sons for the Return Home (1973), Pouliuli (1977) and Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979)—and a limited set of passages in the work of James Joyce. Developing narrative and structural techniques from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and incidental motifs from the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses (1922), Wendt mobilises Joyce in a number of key ways: in his portrayal of the Pacific artist coming into literary consciousness, in his challenge against the distortions of colonial history, and in his depiction of the rebellious young man confronting the mechanisms of colonial power. Demonstrating specific consistencies between the source material and patterns in Wendt’s methods of adaptation, the chapter claims a relationship between the two authors that has gone unnoticed in Wendt scholarship. Tracing these connections improves our understanding of both the textual dynamics of Wendt’s early novels, and the range of material that the author referred to in the creation of a modern Samoan literature.

Secondly, however, the chapter reflects upon what is at stake in making these connections at all. Emphasising Wendt’s connections with European antecedents risks deemphasising his connections with Samoan and other Pacific texts and traditions, and while Wendt insists that the two are not mutually exclusive, he also insists that they are not equal, given the long history of outside agencies claiming Pacific space and material for a falsely neutral global modernity. Finding defence against critical appropriation in Wendt’s idea of indigenisation, the chapter ends by considering ways in which Wendt converts outside influences into self-determining drivers of cultural growth and adaptation, adding to the ‘inheritance’ of his literary ‘descendants’.

In recent years, an emerging body of scholarship has emphasized the connection between the early Japanese modernists and the pure film movement (純映画劇運動, Jun'eigageki undō). In particular, a renewed awareness of this intrinsically modern mode of visual storytelling has rejuvenated interest in the early novels of Nobel laureate and sometime-screenwriter, Kawabata Yasunari (川端 康成, 1899-1972). Deeper study of a series of major works, however, reveals an ongoing fascination with extra-visual forms of aesthetics, and an interest in alternate modes of perception and cognition. Kawabata uses this distinct blend of sensual poetics to combine experiences of both the abject and the sublime in an aesthetic mode he referred to as the "makai" (魔界).

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art.

Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences.

An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

In the mid-1950s, China conducted robust cultural exchange with the Third World in tandem with a parallel political program to influence non-aligned nations in contestation to the Soviet Union and Western powers. This article examines this underrecognized facet of Maoist-era art through the international engagements of two Xi'an artists, Shi Lu (1919–1982) and Zhao Wangyun (1907–1977), who traveled to India and Egypt as cultural attaché of the Chinese state. By tracing the travels of the two artists in light of their artistic and theoretical formulations, this article argues that contact with decolonizing spheres of the Third World inspired Chinese artists to embrace forms of indigenous Chinese art like ink painting in rejection of Euro-American modernism. In solidarity with other non-Western art spheres that developed similar nativist responses to the hegemony of Western modernism, Chinese artists belonged to a global postwar movement to assert political independence through artistic autonomy and national style.

This paper interprets the context and implications of a little-known but consequential ideological feud that emerged between rival "regionalist" and "modernist" camps of architectural practitioners in the South Indian state of Kerala in the 1970s. Beginning with a comparative analysis of the private residences of the key protagonists-the expatriate British Gandhian, Laurie Baker, and J.C. Alexander, an influential modernist and doyen of the architectural profession in post-independence Kerala-the paper explores the contrasting views of both camps as they debated the idea of the modern house. Turning to the architectural historiography of modern India, the over-representation of one camp and the relative invisibility of the other is then examined in the context of the radical cultural and political climate of the 1970s in Kerala. The paper considers how Baker's rise to wider recognition and impact by the end of the 1970s can be understood only by understanding the "function" that Baker satisfied in Kerala society. The paper concludes that the complex network of influences and actors that appear in this specific case study, drawn from the assumed margins of India's modern architectural history, make the case for a flatter ontology of history rejecting the existing "diffusion" model and enabling buildings and context to speak in equal measure.

Gulammohammed Sheikh is one of the most important contemporary Indian painters. He is also an acclaimed writer, an art historian and critic, and a poet in Gujarati (Athwa). In this conversation, which took place on August 13 and November 3, 2015, he discusses the centrality of Bombay for writers and artists of his generation, and his own connection with the city. He also reflects on the influence of poetry and translation, and on the transactions between poetry and painting which are both emblematic of his own work and of little magazines like Vrishchik, which he started in 1969. Retracing the history of Vrishchik and of " Group 1890 " , he recalls his formative years at the Baroda Faculty of Fine Arts, and his lifelong engagement with the bhakti tradition, especially with the figure of Kabir. He also discusses the way modernity was reinvented in India, and the extraordinary cosmopolitanism of his generation of modernist artists, and of the Bombay they inhabited.

Critics largely interpret Death and the King's Horseman as a representation of a particular cultural trauma: African secularization under colonial modernity. If, however, the nation-state presupposes a political theology, then colonization is not secularization, but a transition into a new order of the sacred. I argue that Horseman stages this process as a cosmological trauma emerging through a transfiguration of sacrifice. As an indigenous death rite transfigures into an imperial possession rite, incarnating the political theology of colonized life, the cyclic time of Yoruba cosmology assumed within the drama becomes entangled in the sequential time of colonial modernity. Beyond representing this trauma, Horseman ritualizes it, providing a passage into modernity by aesthetically mediating that which it laments and, moreover, offering a new vision of community. This process bears implications exceeding Horseman criticism, addressing the discourses of biopolitics, political theology, cultural trauma theory, postcolonial studies, and tragic theory.

Im späten 19. Jahrhundert setzte die neu erfundene Bildreklame alles in Szene – Bilder bewarben Massenprodukte und erfuhren erstmals selbst massenhafte Verbreitung. Vor allem Bilder ›exotischer‹ Körper, mit denen für Produkte wie Kaffee oder Kakao geworben wurde, dienten als visuelles Spektakel, das massenhaft konsumiert werden konnte. Dadurch verschob sich die Rezeption des ›Anderen‹ grundlegend: Das ›exotische‹ Produkt und der ›fremde‹ Körper, mit dem es beworben wurde, verschmolzen zu immer noch wirksamen Stereotypen.
In der Analyse von Inszenierungen ›exotischer‹ Körper in früher Bildwerbung wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie exotistische Werbebilder um 1900 gefasst werden können. Kunsthistorische Traditionslinien der Imagination des ›Exotischen‹ spielen dabei ebenso eine Rolle wie die Frage nach der zeitgenössischen Rezeption der Bilder im Kontext einer radikalen Veränderung der Sehkultur im 19. Jahrhundert.

The essay explores how the Syrian artist Adham Ismaʿil (1922­–63) linked his modernist painting strategies to the activism of the Baʿth political movement during Syria’s independence decade through a conceptual reworking of the “arabesque”—the rhythmic pattern of unending line and pure color that Orientalist scholars considered a product of the Arab and Muslim episteme and French modernist painters adopted as a fresh compositional device. It draws on a new archive of correspondence, writings, and sketches, supplemented by political memoirs detailing Ismaʿil’s experience of displacement after the 1939 transfer of his native Alexandretta to Turkey, to uncover his efforts to forge new aesthetic unities as a mechanism for Arab activation and rebirth. Ismaʿil and his comrades accorded a radical charge to the concept of vital Arab energy in particular; once manifested in the sensory experience of line and color, it promised to assemble audiences in new collectivities and to help topple the Syrian status quo. The essay thus analyzes Ismaʿil’s radical Arab painting as evidence of not only the complexity of the intellectual debates in the Middle East but also the generative fragmentation of modernist tenets under the (not quite) postwar, postcolonial world order. 


This event looks at the role modernism plays within today’s art museums and galleries. It asks can, how and why should such institutions challenge and repurpose established modernist histories and what this means for the future of art museums and galleries.

International curator Katya García-Antón, Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and editor of Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation and Criticism (2018) is the speaker for the Friday evening talk, exploring urgent questions surrounding the role of museums of modern art today in relation to ideas around indigenous art.

Artist Lubaina Himid – the winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, current artist-in-residence at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, and who most recently curated the Invisible Narratives exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance – will speak as part of the symposium on Saturday in conversation with artist Evan Ifekoya. Himid’s participation is supported in kind by the Borlase Smart John Wells Trust.

The Saturday symposium will also feature a fascinating range of doctoral and early career curators, artists and art historians. Convening sessions that explore ideas around diaspora, migration, indigenous art and curatorial practices in relation to modernism are early career curators Biung Ismahasan and Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf.

Biung Ismahasan is a Bunun Nation (one of the sixteen Nations of Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples) independent curator, artist and researcher. He is working on his practice-based PhD in Curating at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, School of Philosophy and Art History at the University of Essex and the Institute of Ethnology, Taiwan Academy of Sciences (Academia Sinica), Taipei.

Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf is a curator, film producer and programmer of contemporary art with a focus on performance, audio and moving image in non-gallery contexts. Her MA dissertation in the department of Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art investigated the formation of artistic counter-publics of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in post-war Britain.

PROGRAMME (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

Friday
Film for Friday
15.00–16.00
Free with admission

A series of short films exploring questions of modernism, indigeneity, ecology and decolonisation, with an accompanying discussion by the symposium’s co-convenors.

Talk
18.00–19.30
£5

Katya García-Antón explores indigenous art, curation and criticism in relation to curating modernism.

Saturday
Symposium
10.00–17.00

Combined ticket for Friday (including Keynote Talk & admission) and Saturday symposium: £20 / £15 concessions (includes lunch on Saturday)

Alongside artists Lubaina Himid and Evan Ifekoya, the day includes contributions by Liisa-Rávná Finbog (PhD researcher, University of Oslo), Jonty Lees (artist and curator, Pool School Gallery, Cornwall), Vera Mey (PhD researcher, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Naomi Polonsky (curator and art writer, New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge), Mercedes Vicente (curator, writer and researcher) and Franziska Wilmsen (PhD researcher, Loughborough University), with morning and afternoon sessions chaired by Biung Ismahasan and Nephertiti Oboshie Schandorf.
Lunch is provided.

The symposium is followed by an optional trip to see Invisible Narratives, with an introduction to the exhibition by Lubaina Himid, at Newlyn Art Gallery (transport will be provided).

Supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust

Book tickets: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/conference/global-communities-curating-modern-art-today

This chapter addresses the overlapping experiences of two modernist painters, Gerard Sekoto and Skunder Boghossian, both resident in Paris in the post-war era and claimed as pioneering modernists in new African nations, from which they lived in exile. It fundamentally questions how we write histories of the circuitous and constellated relations that characterized modernity at mid-century. Despite years of theoretical challenges, understandings of post-war European art are only just beginning to register the presence and intellectual labors of these artists. On the other hand, the tight nationalist focus of emerging narratives on African post-colonial modernisms threatens to obscure or erase the depth of cosmopolitan modernist networks to which these artists belonged. It is time to re-imagine these pioneers as great observers of postwar French culture and shapers of pan-Africanist discourse—who, through their practices, delineated the complicated site of black modernity within the Hexagon and on the continent.

Ce mémoire de master 2 fait suite à un premier travail de Master 1, consacré à l’exposition Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, tenue en 1974 au Grand Palais à Paris. 
Ce mémoire retrace et analyse les échanges culturels entre la France et le Sénégal dans le contexte de la décolonisation et de la coopération. Un échange d’oeuvres d’art opéré dans les années 1960, témoigne ainsi à la fois des négociations entreprises par le Sénégal pour exister sur la scène artistique internationale et décentrer un monde politique et artistique organisé autour de l’Occident (chapitre 1). Ce mémoire se concentre plus particulièrement sur les expositions tenues à Dakar sous la présidence de Léopold Sédar Senghor (1960-1980). J’y explore plusieurs lieux d’exposition à Dakar, comme le Centre culturel français qui organisait alors de nombreuses expositions didactiques. Le Musée dynamique, inauguré dans le cadre du premier festival mondial des arts nègres, avait d’abord accueilli des expositions historiques (Témoins des temps passés, Fresques du Tassili) (chapitre 1). Les années 1970 marquent un tournant dans cette politique d’exposition. Senghor, souhaitait organiser des expositions d’artistes français modernes. Secondé dans cette entreprise par le conseiller culturel français Gérard Bosio, Dakar ambitionnait de recevoir de grands artistes et avait choisi les artistes « officiels » de la France : Chagall, Picasso, Soulages (suivis d’Alfred Manessier et André Masson). Senghor accompagnait ces expositions de discours d’inauguration, de colloques internationaux, cherchant ainsi à créer l’évènement et à négocier avec la France sur le terrain des arts, poursuivant toujours le but de voir advenir la Civilisation de l’Universel et un monde nouveau (chapitre 2).

During the twentieth century, US interventions in the hemispheric American South introduced a reemergence of empire that expanded the inter-imperial nexus already constituted by the remaining influence of French, Spanish, and British metropoles in the region. This context, which established the geopolitical preconditions of the Latin American boom period, motivated Alejo Carpentier to think hemispherically through experimental narrative form and, in doing so, pose a timely historical problem for which an alternative, "untimely" temporality was needed. This peripheral modernism, which ultimately inspired the experimentation of magical realism, lays bare a little-discussed problematic about the overlapping and recurring imperial formations that are intimately linked to an equally under-studied relation between literary form and the perceived form of history. Carpentier asks us to rethink modernism through the global register of the hemispheric American South, if only to reconsider how modernity itself might be reconstituted for and from the periphery.

This article examines Big Bird (1965) by Frank Bowling in the context of its first-prize victory in the category of painting at the exhibition Tendances et Confrontations. This juried display of contemporary work by African-descended artists appeared at the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, a celebration of Black creativity held in Dakar in the name of Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor’s theory of negritude. I argue that the context of Tendances et Confrontations granted Big Bird a site-specific capacity to critique the social, racial and intellectual connotations accompanying representational and non-representational art, respectively.

This article’s contributions are twofold. First, it intervenes in prior literature examining works created during Bowling’s time in London, which have primarily been understood with reference to the artist’s biography. This essay argues, however, that by strategically deploying visual tropes associated with well-known American abstractionists, Big Bird and other works that Bowling created in the mid-1960s engage in critical appropriation and institutional critique.

This article also contributes to discussions linking negritude theory to the visual arts. Whereas prior literature has worked to identify the visual transposition of negritude theory through iconographical and stylistic analysis, this article suggests that a more substantive relationship between negritude theory and the arts can be accessed by examining artistic operations, such as strategic appropriation and recontextualization.

This essay examines the connection between body, history, and nation in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1993). The novel dramatizes and responds to questions concerning national belonging and community, while at the same time it longs to escape or transcend nation and history. The dialectical push and pull of this desire to escape and return is animated through the way that The English Patient imagines the body as a contested and contesting space, a conduit into the past and the means through which that past might be reclaimed. As a consequence, I hope to nuance political assessments of the novel and of Ondaatje’s contribution to historiographical metafiction more broadly, as well as his dual status as both a postmodern and postcolonial writer.

While one often thinks that creative art, that which is valued as original and new, is completely unique to a particular culture, time and place, it is as a rule not the case at all. All great and small artists, and cultures for that matter, have been inspired in some generative degree by those that came before or from afar, nourished by inspirational images, ideas and techniques, a continual process of adaptation, internalization and externalization. This is the true value of history, archaeology and anthropology for the study of art in the context of a scientific institution as I see it. I will illustrate this today by comparing instances of this principle in modern art in Indonesia and Zimbabwe and show how they are directly linked in the case of the Batuan and the Cyrene painters. These examples have larger consequences for revisiting the great past debates in the anthropology of art, specifically in terms of the much outdated polarities of diffusionism versus local genius.

"Is Modernism Really Transnational?" uses the communion between Stephen and Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses as an allegory for the debate surrounding new cosmopolitan theory and the transnational/global turn in modernist studies that relies on this theory. The essay begins by drawing a parallel between the Irish Literary Revival and the Celtic Tiger as cosmopolitan movements that served colonial and neocolonial ends. In Bloom, however, Stephen encounters a new form of cosmopolitanism, one analogous to that offered by new cosmopolitanism. However, the failure of this communion, the essay argues, undermines the distinction between the cosmopolitanism offered by Bloom and new cosmopolitan theorists and that offered by the Irish Literary Revival and the Celtic Tiger. Thus, the essay concludes that transnational encounters mediated through cultural exchange lead to the very exploitation the modernist critic seeks to combat and provoke the defensive localism the critic seeks to transcend.

The avant-garde movement Estridentismo (Stridentism) erupted in 1921, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, with the distribution of the poet Manuel Maples Arce's subversive manifesto Actual No. 1, which disparaged local art and literature as retardataire and outlined an aesthetic plan based on models from Futurism and Dada. As a result of dialogues between artists – including Mexico's first generation of mural painters – and writers over the course of the 1920s, Estridentismo eventually expanded its original proposal, increasingly embracing socially responsible causes and allying itself with radical politics. It became emblematic of the complexities of avant-garde thought in Latin America, torn between formal innovation and social relevance, cosmopolitan dreams and local concerns. This paper uses the example of Estridentismo and its offshoot movement ¡30–30! to shift the geography of modernism, assessing how such movements upset Eurocentric narratives and force us to recognize the importance of other locales to the production of knowledge.