New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms 9780367140847, 9780367140854, 9780367721541

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Figures
Contributors
Introduction: Toward a New Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art
The Postwar: A Short History
Notes on Multiple Modernisms
On the Structure of This Book and Its Contribution
Notes
Bibliography
1 Prologue: Art History’s Work-in Pro(re)gress – Reflections on the Multiple Modernities Project
Mainstream Modernism
Radical Revisionism
Modern, Modernism, Modernist
Minor, Global, Planetary, Situated
Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity
Notes
Bibliography
Part 1 Crossings and Encounters: Retracing Artists’ Itineraries
2 Expression for All: Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and the Art of Cobra
Primitivism
Minoritarian Cosmopolitanism
Feminist Humanism
Resistance to Violence
Notes
Bibliography
3 Origins and Brinks: Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London
Decentralization: Elective Affinities and Missed Encounters
Discrepant Bones: A Case Study
Notes
Bibliography
4 Multiple Resistances to the Concept of Modernism: The Emergence of Artistic–Poetic Networks between Eastern Europe and Latin
Multiplying the Modernist Project
Anti-Aesthetics: Toward the Criticism of Western Modernism
Self-definition as Arrière-garde Artists
Multiple Resistances to the Concept of Western Modernism
Notes
Bibliography
5 Urban Folklore: Marta Minujín’s Postwar Assemblage and the Modern City
Urbanscapes
Environmental Assemblages
La Menesunda and the City
Urban Folklore
Notes
Bibliography
6 Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist: An Artistic Trajectory as a Model for Understanding Postwar Art
Boat Trip
Kusama in Europe
Polka Dot Love Room
Migration Aesthetics
Notes
Bibliography
7 The Overworked Ground: Franz Erhard Walther in New York
Notes
Bibliography
Part 2 Against the Norm: Decentering and Resisting the Canon
8 Blinded by Mao: The Challenge of Seeing Modernism in Art of the People’s Republic
Can We Use the M Word?
The Yan’an Talks
Pan Tianshou/Fu Baoshi
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
9 “Iranian Modernism” and the Idea of Indigenous Art: Translations, Adoptions and (mis)interpretations
Persian Art History and the Reconstruction of National Identity
Avant-Gardism and/or the Indigenous Figuration
The Local–Global Binarism and the Saqqa-khaneh Movement
What Was Modernism in Iran?
Notes
Bibliography
10 Camouflaged Dissent – A Plastic Umbrella and Transparent Balloons: “Happenings” in South Korea, 1967–1968
The First “South Korean Happening”: A Plastic Umbrella
Happenings at the Music Café, C’est Si Bon in May 1968: Art or Scandal?
Notes
Bibliography
11 A Postcard from Addis: Ethiopian Modernism(s) in the World
Ethiopia in the World
Afewerk Tekle as Patriot and Diplomat
The Interstitial Works of Skunder Boghossian
1967: High Points and New Complexities
Notes
Bibliography
12 The Cultural Politics of Négritude and the Debates around the Brazilian Participation in the First World Festival of Negro A
Arts Nègres, Black Arts
Continuities and Ruptures of Négritude in Black Brazilian Art
Unofficial Mobilities and Black Solidarity
Notes
Bibliography
13 An Index of Modernity: Feminist Furniture by Teresa Burga and Beatriz González
Feminism in Latin America: An Overview
From Modernity to Modernism: Burga and González’s Semiotics of the Living Room
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Part 3 Collecting Modernisms – Exhibiting Modernisms
14 Traveler’s Tales: Alfred Barr, the Soviet Union and International Modernism in the Postwar Period
Notes
Bibliography
15 Displaying Whose Modernity?: The Bardis and the Museum of Art of São Paulo
Notes
Bibliography
16 Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art: The Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale, 1956–1968
“Insalata Russa”: Soviets in Venice
On a Mission to Venice: The 1968 Exhibition
A Cold Reception at a Heated Biennale
Into Oblivion – Space Debris in Venice
Notes
Bibliography
17 All That Jazz: Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Rise of Abstraction in Postwar Italy
Palma Bucarelli: The Joan d’Arc of Parisian Modernisms
Arte astratta e concreta in Italia
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

i

New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era

This book maps key moments in the history of postwar art from a global perspective. The reader is introduced to a new globally oriented approach to art, artists, museums and movements of the postwar era (1945–​ 70). Specifically, this book bridges the gap between historical artistic centers, such as Paris and New York, and peripheral loci. Through case studies, previously unknown networks, circulations, divides and controversies are brought to light. From the development of Ethiopian modernism, to the showcase of Brazilian modernity, this book provides readers with a new set of coordinates and a reassessment of well-​trodden art historical narratives around modernism. This book will be of interest to scholars in art historiography, art history, exhibition and curatorial studies, modern art and globalization. Flavia Frigeri is an Art Historian and Curator. She is currently Curator for Missing Narratives on Women at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Kristian Handberg is an Art Historian. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Cover image: Postcard from Elmira Bier to Marjorie Phillips, 1967, depicting Afewerk Tekle: Africa: Past, Present and Future, located in Africa Hall, Addis Ababa. The Phillips Collections Archives.

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Studies in Art Historiography Series Editor: Richard Woodfield, University of Birmingham

The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past it also encourages rethinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression “art history” and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches. Messerschmidt’s Character Heads Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History Michael Yonan Time in the History of Art Temporality, Chronology, and Anachrony Edited by Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey New Narratives of Russian and East European Art Between Traditions and Revolutions Edited by Galina Mardilovich and Maria Taroutina Making Art History in Europe after 1945 Edited by Noemi de Haro-​García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo Millard Meiss, American Art History, and Conservation From Connoisseurship to Iconology and Kulturgeschichte Jennifer Cooke New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era Multiple Modernisms Edited by Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/​Studies-​in-​Art-​ Historiography/​book-​series/​ASHSER2250

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New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era Multiple Modernisms Edited by Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Frigeri, Flavia, editor. | Handberg, Kristian, editor. Title: New histories of art in the global postwar era: multiple modernisms / Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg. Description: New York: Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043917 (print) | LCCN 2020043918 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367140847 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367140854 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Art) | Art and globalization–History–20th century. Classification: LCC N6494.M64 N49 2021 (print) | LCC N6494.M64 (ebook) | DDC 700/.4112–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043917 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043918 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​14084-​7  (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-72154-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​14085-​4  (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of Figures  List of Contributors  Introduction: Toward a New Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art

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1

F L AV I A F R I GE RI AN D KRISTIAN H AN DB E RG

1 Prologue: Art History’s Work-​in Pro(re)gress –​Reflections on the Multiple Modernities Project 

12

TE R RY   S M I TH

PART 1

Crossings and Encounters: Retracing Artists’ Itineraries 

25

2 Expression for All: Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and the Art of Cobra  27 K A R E N K U R C ZYN SKI

3 Origins and Brinks: Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London 

43

G I U L I A   S M I TH

4 Multiple Resistances to the Concept of Modernism: The Emergence of Artistic–​Poetic Networks between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the Late 1960s and 1970s 

57

K ATA R Z Y N A  CYTL AK

5 Urban Folklore: Marta Minujín’s Postwar Assemblage and the Modern City 

70

E L I Z E M A Z ADIE GO

6 Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist: An Artistic Trajectory as a Model for Understanding Postwar Art  M A R I E L A U RB E RG

82

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7 The Overworked Ground: Franz Erhard Walther in New York 

96

S TE P H A N I E STRAIN E

PART 2

Against the Norm: Decentering and Resisting the Canon 

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8 Blinded by Mao: The Challenge of Seeing Modernism in Art of the People’s Republic 

113

K A R E N   S TO CK

9 “Iranian Modernism” and the Idea of Indigenous Art: Translations, Adoptions and (Mis)Interpretations 

127

C O M B I Z MO USSAVI-​A GH DA M

10 Camouflaged Dissent –​A Plastic Umbrella and Transparent Balloons: “Happenings” in South Korea, 1967–​1968 

138

SOORAN CHOI

11 A Postcard from Addis: Ethiopian Modernism(s) in the World 

149

K ATE C O WCH E R

12 The Cultural Politics of Négritude and the Debates around the Brazilian Participation in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, 1966) 

164

S A B R I N A   MO URA

13 An Index of Modernity: Feminist Furniture by Teresa Burga and Beatriz González 

178

S O F I A   G O TTI

PART 3

Collecting Modernisms –​Exhibiting Modernisms 

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14 Traveler’s Tales: Alfred Barr, the Soviet Union and International Modernism in the Postwar Period 

193

M A S H A C H L E N O VA

15 Displaying Whose Modernity? The Bardis and the Museum of Art of São Paulo  C A M I L A   MARO JA

208

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Contents  vii

16 Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art: The Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale, 1956–​1968 

220

K R I S TI A N H AN DB E RG

17 All That Jazz: Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Rise of Abstraction in Postwar Italy 

232

F L AV I A F R I GE RI

Index 

244

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Figures

1.1 Jaakko Pallasvuo: Art Since 1900, diagram posted in 2015 on the artist’s now-​defunct Tumblr blog dawsonscreek.info. By permission of the artist 2.1 Ernest Mancoba: Composition, 1940. Oil on canvas. 59 x 50 cm (23.2 x 19.7 in). Collection Wendy Fisher, A4 Foundation, Cape Town 2.2 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Fugl med unge (Bird with Young), 1935. Plaster, h: 53 cm. Private collection. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg 2.3 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War), 1939. Plaster, 36.5 x 28.5 x 13.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg 2.4 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One), 1951. Plaster, 32 x 26.5 x 25.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg 2.5 Shinkichi Tajiri, Prisoner, 1950–​51. Iron, height: 51 x 19 x 25 cm. Collection Giotta and Ryu Tajiri. Photo ©Egon Notermans. ©Pictoright, The Netherlands 3.1 Paintings by Emilio Scanavino exhibited in the Group 4 exhibit, This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1956), photography by John Maltby. ©RIBA 3.2 Emilio Scanavino, Evoluzione (Evolution), 1958, oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm. ©Museo del ‘900 3.3 Emilio Scanavino and Sarah Jackson posing inside Sarah Jackson Emilio Scanavino, Galerie Apollinaire, London (1951), photographer unknown. ©Naomi and Timothy Jackson ©Archivio Scanavino 3.4 Sarah Jackson, Pterodactyl, 1952, plaster of Paris, dimensions unknown, photographer unknown. ©Naomi and Timothy Jackson 3.5 Graham Sutherland, The Origins of the World, 1950–​51, oil on canvas, 425.5 x 327.7 cm, Photo: ©Tate © The estate of Graham Sutherland 3.6 Aubrey Williams, Death and the Conquistador, 1959, oil on canvas, 83.3 x 133.8 x 2.2 cm, Photo: Tate ©The estate of Aubrey Williams 4.1 Luis Felipe Noé, Antiestética, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Van Riel, 1965. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Luis Felipe Noé, Buenos Aires 4.2 Graciela Carnevale, Acción Encierro/​The Enclosure Action, 1968. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Graciela Carnevale, Rosario

13 30 33 34 36 38 48 49 50 51 52 53 60 61

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Figures  ix 4.3 4.4 4.5

5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 7.1

7.2

7.3

Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski, SIEĆ/​NET, 1971. Poznań: Samizdat. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Jarosław Kozłowski, Poznań Paweł Petasz, Imitations I, Elbląg: Arrière Garde Edition, 1979. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Paweł Petasz, Elbląg Bálint Szombathy, Lenin in Budapest, 1972. In Clemente Padín, Hacia un lenguaje de la acción, Montevideo: Samizdat, 1976, p. 10. Collection and photo credit: Archivo de Clemente Padín, en el Archivo General de la Universidad de la República, Área de Investigación Histórica, Montevideo Marta Minujin: Movimiento Interior (1960), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery Marta Minujín with box (1962), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery Marta Minujín: La Menesunda (1965), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s solo exhibition Driving Image Show at Richard Castellane, New York, 1964. Copyright: Yayoi Kusama Nul exhibition, Stedelijk Museum 1965. Yayoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), mixed media, 60 x 265 x 130 cm. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Installation view from the exhibition The inner and outer space, Moderna Museet, 1965. Photo: Lennart Olson/​Moderna Museet-​Stockholm Yayoi Kusama: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 1963, as installed in Weiss auf Weiss, Kunsthalle Bern, 25 May–​3 July 1966. Photographer: Balthasar Burkhard Kusama performing for the opening of the exhibition Signalement ‘67 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1967. Photo: Theo van Houts. Courtesy 0 archive Stills from Méthamorfoses –​L’ecole de New York (17/​02/​ 1965), directed by Jean Antoine. Extract with Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Sonuma-​RTBF archive images Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnungen (Work Drawings), various dates. Installation image, Franz Erhard Walther: DRAWINGS –​ Frame/​Line/​Action/​Drawn Novel, Drawing Room, London, 2012. Image courtesy Drawing Room, London; artwork © Franz Erhard Walther Franz Erhard Walther, Gehstück, Sockel (Walking Piece, Plinth), Single Element, No. 2, 1. Werksatz (First Work Set), 1964, strong canvas, dark green; foam rubber slabs, wooden balls, cords, plastic tube, metal eyes, zip fastener, 10 x 88 x 60 cm (3 7/​8 x 34 5/​8 x 23 5/​8 inches), Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther Franz Erhard Walther, Blindobjekt (Blind Object), Single Element, No. 12, 1. Werksatz (First Work Set), 1966, light canvas, brown;

63 64

65 72 73 75 84 85 86 87 88 89

97

101

x

x Figures

7.4

7.5

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 9.1 9.2 10.1 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3

foam rubber, 212.7 x 99.7 x 2.2 cm (83 3/​4 x 39 1/​4 x 7/​8 inches), one of five individual examples, Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnung (Work Drawing), [recto], related to No. 12, First Work Set, 1969, graphite, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 29.6 x 21 cm (11 5/​8 x 8 1/​4 inches), signed recto lower right: “Walther 69”; signed verso lower right: “Walther 69.” Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnung (Work Drawing), [recto], related to No. 12, First Work Set, 1966, graphite, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 29.6 x 19.6 cm (11 5/​8 x 7 3/​4 inches), signed recto lower right: “Walther 66”; signed verso lower right: “Walther 66.” Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther Fu Baoshi: To Li Shuyi: Poem of Mao Zedong, 1958, ink and color on paper Fu Baoshi, Ode to Yuhuatai, 1958, ink and color on paper Pan Tianshou: Transporting Iron Ore by Sailboat, 1958, ink and color on paper. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum. By permission of the artist’s son Pan Tianshou: Dominant Overlook, c. 1964, ink and color on paper. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum. By permission of the artist’s son Jalil Ziapour: Ey Amir, Amir, 1958, oil on canvas, 122 x 207 cm. Courtesy of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) Hossein Zendehroudi, Untitled, 1967, oil on cardboard, 120 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) Kang-​ja Jung, Kuk-​jing Kang and Chan-​seung Chung: Transparent Balloons and Nude, C’est Si Bon, Seoul, South Korea, 30 May 1968. Hangook Ilbo, 2 June 1968 Postcard from Elmira Bier to Marjorie Phillips, 1967. The Phillips Collections Archives Silk scarf featuring Afewerk Tekle’s window design. Collection of the author Skunder Boghossian: “Night Flight of Dread and Delight,” 1964, Oil on canvas with collage, 143.8 × 159.1 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh Léopold Sédar Senghor gives his speech at the National Chamber of Deputies, Brasília (23 September 1964). Source: Agência Nacional Humberto Castelo Branco receives Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Alvorada Palace, Brasília (23 September 1964). Source: Agência Nacional Brazilian section at the exhibition Tendances et Confrontations, at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar. Some of the personalities in the photograph include Raymundo de Souza-​Dantas, Heitor dos Prazeres, Clarival do Prado Valladares, among others (April 1966)

104

106

107 120 120 121 122 131 133 144 150 154 157 165 166

170

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Figures  xi 13.1 Teresa Burga: Untitled, 1967, Installation view of the exhibition Objetos, Galería Cultura y Libertad, Lima. Image published in the magazine Caretas 356 (Lima, 14–​24 July 1967, p. 46). Courtesy of the artist 13.2 Teresa Burga: Untitled, 1967, 80 x 108 x 208 cm (bed), 383 x 280 cm (curtain). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Thumm and Pinault Collection 13.3 Beatriz González: La última mesa [The Last Table], 1970, Enamel paint on metal table, 105 x 205 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern 13.4 Beatriz González: Naturaleza casi muerta [Nature Almost Dead], 1970, 125 x 125 x 95 cm. Photo by Jairo Betancur modified by Laura Jiménez. Courtesy of the artist 13.5 Teresinha Soares with Ela me deu bola (Camas) [She Hit on Me (BEDS)] installed at Municipal Park, Belo Horizonte, 1970. Courtesy of the artist 14.1 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Is Modern Art Communistic?” The New York Times, Sunday Magazine (14 December 1952), p. 22 14.2 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Sculpture –​geometry, motion” in Amerika no. 47 (September 1960), pp. 56–​7 14.3 Visitors at the American National Exhibition. Sokolniki Park, Moscow (25 July – 4 September 1959). Viewers looking at Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral (1947) (right) and Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’ Fable (1939) (left) 14.4 Visitors at the American National Exhibition. Sokolniki Park, Moscow (25 July –​4 September 1959). Viewers examining Ibram Lassaw’s Galactic Cluster #1, (1953). Reproduced in Vladimir Kemenov, Protiv Abstraktsionizma; V Sporakh o Realizme (Leningrad: Khudozhniki RSFSR, 1969) 14.5 Alexander Marshack “The Art of Russia that Nobody Sees” LIFE Magazine (28 March 1960): 60–​61 Reproductions: left page: Visitors in the Russian Museum in front of Vladimir Serov’s Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power in 1917, 1954; right page: Anatoly Zverev’s Self-​Portrait, 1950s 15.1 View of the exhibition Acervo em Transformação, which displayed Lina Bo Bardi’s famous crystal easel arrangement for the Pinacoteca, 2015. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. MASP Research Center 15.2 View of the picture gallery exhibition area at MASP’s first venue with Pietro Maria Bardi in the foreground, 1947. Unknown photographer. MASP Research Center 15.3 View of the picture gallery exhibition area at MASP on Avenida Paulista, c.1969. Unknown photographer. MASP Research Center 15.4 View of the restaging of the exhibition A Mão do Povo Brasileiro 1969/​2016, 2016. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. MASP Research Center 16.1 Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov drawing a sketch on the Voskhod-​2 Spaceship in 1965. Photo: ITAR-​TASS News Agency/​Alamy Stock Foto

182 183 184 185 186 196 199

201

202

203 209 210 211 214 224

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xii Figures 16.2 Alexey Leonov: Cosmic Dawn, oil painting on canvas, 1966. Soviet postcard from the 1960s. Collection of the author 16.3 Alexey Leonov: Above the Black Sea, oil painting on canvas, 1968. Image: Sputnik/​Alamy Stock Photo 16.4 Cover of exhibition guide to the pavilion of the USSR, La Biennale di Venezia 1968. Image: @ Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia –​ASAC

226 227 228

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Contributors

Masha Chlenova (PhD, Columbia University) is a New York based art historian and curator specializing in modern art with a focus on the Russian avant-​garde and Soviet Museology. She worked in curatorial departments at the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim and MoMA, where she worked with Leah Dickerman on a major survey of abstraction entitled Inventing Abstraction, 1910–​ 1925. Among exhibitions she organized in New  York was Russian Revolution:  A Contested Legacy at the International Print Center NY. Recently she served as a project-​based curator at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and is currently preparing a major exhibition of Russian and Soviet art for the Munch Museum in Oslo. Her writing appeared in the journal October, in edited books, and in exhibition catalogs published by the Guggenheim, MoMA, Tate Modern, Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou and Muzeum Sztuki among others. She teaches art history at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at, The New School in New York. Sooran Choi received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY), with an emphasis on contemporary East Asian art, global art and postwar transnational networks in art. Her dissertation, “The South Korean ‘Meta-​Avant-​Garde,’ 1961–​1993:  Subterfuge as Radical Agency” was awarded the 2018 College Art Association (CAA) Professional Development Fellowship in Art History. She is currently in the process of transforming it into a book manuscript. Her scholarly interest in cross-​cultural studies and alternative postcolonial global perspectives has informed her teaching as an adjunct faculty member at various campuses of the City University of New York, New York University, FIT and MoMA (New York). Kate Cowcher is a lecturer in art history at University of St Andrews. She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 2017 and is currently working on a book about art, the politics of “seeing” and international exchange during Ethiopia’s revolutionary years (1974–​91). Her research interests include modern and contemporary art in Africa, African cinema, collections of African art and heritage in the UK, and the cultural productions of the global Cold War. Prior to taking up her position at St Andrews, she was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Katarzyna Cytlak (PhD, University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne) is a Polish art historian based in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Poznań, Poland. Her research is centered

vxi

xiv Contributors on Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa, with a focus on conceptual art, radical and utopian architecture, among other topics. Between 2015 and 2017, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Argentina (CONICET) and at the University of San Martín, Argentina. She has written journal articles in Telón de Fondo, Third Text, the RIHA Journal. Flavia Frigeri (PhD, University College London) is an art historian and curator, specialized in postwar Italian art and feminist art practices globally. Between 2016 and 2020, she taught in the History of Art Department at UCL. Previously she was Curator, International Art at Tate Modern, where she co-​curated the groundbreaking exhibition The World Goes Pop (2015–​16) and worked on Henri Matisse: The Cut-​Outs (2014), Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013). Her research is published in books, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. She is currently curating exhibitions for Dia Art Foundation, New York and MACBA –​Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Sofia Gotti is specialized in Latin American contemporary and feminist art practices in South America and Italy. Currently, she is the Newton Trust/​Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge where she is working on a monograph about alternative art practices and craft in South America. She has previously taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art and at Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan. As a curator, she has worked with organizations including The Feminist Institute, Castello di Rivoli, FM-​Centre for Contemporary Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Her research is published in edited books published by Wiley Blackwell and Courtauld Books, as well as academic journals and magazines including ArtMargins, n.paradoxa, Revista Hispanica Moderna. Kristian Handberg (PhD, University of Copenhagen) researches exhibition histories of the postwar era and the contemporary musealization of modernism. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen, where he is responsible for the research projects Curating the Contemporary (2019–​ 20) and Exhibiting Across the Iron Curtain (2021–​). In 2015–​18 he was a postdoctoral associate at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Publications include Conquering the present in the Long Sixties (2019) and articles in On Curating, Stedelijk Studies, Journal of Art Historiography, and Konsthistorisk Tidsskrift/​ Journal of Art History. Karen Kurczynski is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA. She is the author of The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn:  The Avant-​Garde Won’t Give Up (Routledge, 2014) and Reanimating Art: The Cobra Movement in Postwar Europe (Routledge, 2020), and curator of the exhibitions Human Animals: The Art of Cobra (NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, 2016) and Expo Jorn: Art is a Festival (co-​curated with Karen Friis Herbsleb, Museum Jorn, 2014). She has published widely on Asger Jorn, the Cobra movement, the Situationist International and contemporary art. Her current research focuses on drawing, politics, activism and race in art since the 1990s. Marie Laurberg is Curator and Head of Research at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. She is an expert in the work of Yayoi Kusama and has curated the major retrospective Yayoi Kusama  –​In Infinity held at Louisiana Museum of Modern

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Contributors  xv Art, Moderna Museet, HOK and Helsinki Art Museum in 2015–​16. Most recently she has researched the Moon, as symbol and image in western art and imagination. This resulted in the acclaimed exhibition The Moon –​From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, shown at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2018) and Henie Onstad (2019). Camila Maroja (PhD, Duke University) is Assistant Professor at California State University, Fullerton. Before, she was an assistant professor at McGill University and the Kindler Distinguished Historian of Global Contemporary Art at Colgate University. She has held fellowships at the Getty Research Institute and in International Humanities at Brown University. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript, Framing Latin American Art, which examines how artists and critics in Brazil have mobilized the tropes of earlier generations. Her additional research interests include exhibition histories, cultural interchanges between South and North, and localized forms of avant-garde art. She has published essays in Stedelijk Studies, Arts, and ArtMargins, among others. Elize Mazadiego (PhD, University of California, San Diego) is a Marie Skłodowska-​ Curie fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she also co-​ coordinates the research group:  Global Trajectories of Thought and Memory:  Art and the Global South. Her fields of interest include postwar neo-​ avant-​garde art, conceptualism, performance and Latin American art since the 1950s in a transnational context. She is the editor of a forthcoming volume titled Charting space: the cartographies of conceptual art and is completing a monograph titled Dematerialization and the social materiality of art, Experimental Forms in Argentina 1955–​1968. Sabrina Moura (PhD, University of Campinas) is a researcher and curator based in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2020, she received a prize from the State of São Paulo for her exhibition Arqueologia da Criação. In 2016, she was a visiting researcher at Columbia University, with a grant from the Connecting Art Histories Program supported by the Getty Foundation. She edited the book Southern Panoramas: Perspectives for other geographies of thought and has developed public programs for the Goethe Institut, Videobrasil, World Biennial Forum, among others. Combiz Moussavi-​Aghdam is a researcher in the fields of modern art history, philosophy of art and science, queer theory and contemporary Iranian art. In 2009 he received his PhD from Manchester University, with a thesis on the physical concept of entropy and its application to modern art and culture, especially contemporary Iranian art. Since 2011 he lectures at the Art University of Tehran. One of his main concerns in both teaching and research is the application of new art historical methodologies to the Iranian context today. Giulia Smith is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, where she is working on a research project titled “Landscape, Identity and Belonging in Post-​imperial Britain.” Previously, Giulia was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (2018–​19) and the Getty Research Institute (2016–​17). In 2016, she received her PhD from the History of Art Department at University College London. She has published in British Art Studies, Sculpture Journal, Oxford Art Journal, Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Art Monthly and the Wellcome Trust Blog.

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xvi Contributors Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is also Lecturer at Large, Curatorial Program, School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). He is the author of numerous edited volumes, journals and books including most recently Art to Come:  Histories of Contemporary Art (2019). He is currently Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and member of the Advisory Board of the Biennial Foundation, New York. Karen Stock is a professor of art history at Winthrop University, South Carolina, USA and received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She has presented papers on modern and contemporary art at numerous conferences and her essays have appeared in a number of peer-​reviewed publications. These include articles on Félix Vallotton and the French interior, Maurice Denis and the Byzantine revival, as well as domesticity and the Modernist dollhouse. Stephanie Straine (PhD, University College London) is Senior Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Previously she was Curator of Exhibitions and Projects at Modern Art Oxford (2016–​19), where she realized exhibitions of artists including Rose Finn-​ Kelcey, Lubaina Himid, Cinthia Marcelle, Aleksandra Mir, Nicolas Party, Hannah Ryggen and Johanna Unzueta. From 2012 to 2016 she was Assistant Curator, Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool, and previously worked as Exhibitions Organizer at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2006–​9). She co-​curated the first UK solo exhibition of Franz Erhard Walther at Drawing Room, London in 2012.

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Introduction Toward a New Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg

This volume is concerned with the existence of not one modernism but multiple modernisms. In recent years, the discipline of art history, as well as its objects and methods, has seen a significant shift aimed at expanding the canon beyond a Western-​ centric narrative largely premised on the problematic notion of one dominant “center” and many dominated “peripheries.” Intensive academic scrutiny and reconsideration have challenged the monolithic narrative of modernism –​understood as a European-​ North American project  –​by drawing a new awareness to the thresholds between modernisms and in so doing helped identify circulations and connections that the canon had long masked. The specific histories of local modernisms have thus come to the fore, and with them an understanding of the singular ways in which they each confronted, embraced, mediated and opposed bourgeoning forces of modernization. This has resulted in a global topology, shaped by multiple modernisms, which are at once interconnected and yet widely divergent in their ambitions and manifestations. By advancing global understanding and cross-​cultural awareness within art history, the project of decentering modernism has also thrown into sharp relief a number of correlated critical debates around gender and identity; race and racism; migration and diaspora; transnational interactions; ecologies and environmental politics. Building and expanding on these burgeoning discourses, this volume is specifically concerned with the currents and flows, cultural centers and artistic networks, which uphold the existence of multiple modernisms advancing art history toward an authentically global discipline. When decentering modernism, the first challenge lies in defining modernism itself, which has long defied firm categorization. Broadly speaking modernism is understood in the context of the visual arts, as a set of artistic strategies engendered by social modernity. The responses to the process of modernization have however differed in both assumption and mode, enhancing the fluidity of what counts as modernism. Famously Charles Baudelaire affirmed in 1863 that by modernity he meant “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”1 The transience and originality invoked by Baudelaire, joint with an emphasis on uniqueness, have been widely acknowledged as signature virtues of modernism. This has in turn led to varying and slippery overlaps between modernism and the avant-​garde, firmly grounding the story of modernism around few select centers of production –​namely Paris and New York –​and regarding the adoption of modernist concerns elsewhere as purely derivative.2 Naturally this is not the case. And equally the orthodox lineage for modernism traced by Clement Greenberg, starting with Édouard Manet and triumphally espousing the heroics of Abstract Expressionism, has long

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2  Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg been challenged.3 In fact, the movement has in recent years undergone somewhat of a revisionist effort aimed at reintegrating women artists and practitioners from minority backgrounds which had systematically been excluded from Abstract Expressionism’s canonical history and by consequence from modernist discourses altogether. While this volume is not strictly concerned with Abstract Expressionism, or for that matter any specific movement, it arguably speaks to the recent efforts to unpack contradictory patterns of incorporation and exclusion made in relation to both pre and postwar movements. Here, we counter the centripetal pull of modernism, by examining how artists have adopted, adapted and transformed ideas that circulated throughout a system of exchange, which often bypassed the canonical center. What kind of agendas might be encoded in these varying associations and overlaps? And how do they inform a global perspective on modernism? How can we account for the distinctive concerns and values of local modernisms? And is it productive to discuss under the rubric of modernism artists and artworks which assigned themselves different names? From the broadness of these questions, it may already be apparent how the concept of modernism, even in the acceptance of its multiplicity, is prone to many differing arguments and interpretations. In acknowledging this we acknowledge that we will not supply definitive answers with this volume, but rather our intention is to provide readers with a set of coordinates that can help reframe the geographies of modernism, its conceptual contours and its motivations. The global emphasis –​made explicit in the title of this volume –​is central to this project. However, in adopting a term and ostensibly a framework so closely linked to discourses around globalization inevitably poses a challenge. Specifically, the stake here lies in the assumption of the postwar moment as a nurturing step in the formation of the global turn, which has generally been associated with contemporary art practices starting in the 1980s and most forcefully emerging in the wake of 1989. Such an understanding has been postulated across different platforms –​both scholarly and curatorial –​often making the question of globalization coincide with that of globalizing art history. Exemplary is the thesis set forth by the curators of the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989 (ZKM, Karlsruhe 2011)  –​who supported the claim for a globalized contemporaneity, by stating that the: “way in which globalization, both with its pervasive mechanisms of the market and its utopias of networking and generosity, impacts upon the various spheres of artistic production and reception.”4 And by a similar account, art historians have proposed ways of understanding the global condition of contemporary art production. For instance, both Charlotte Bydler and Caroline A. Jones see in exhibitions and biennials critical conduits for the globalization of art.5 This volume furthers these assumptions, arguing for the postwar period as a crucial prelude to the transnational cultural connections of our contemporary moment.

The Postwar: A Short History If, as Andreas Huyssen suggested:  “European modernism arrived at the threshold of a not yet fully modernized world in which old and new were violently knocked against each other, striking the sparks of that astounding eruption of creativity that came to be known only much later as ‘modernism’ ” this became a global condition after 1945, when modernizing agents left a lasting cultural, social and political mark.6 World War II and its aftermath ushered in a series of drastic global upheavals, which

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Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art  3 in many cases led to the unraveling of existing hierarchies and systems. On the one hand, a new world order centered on unity was invoked through the creation of new intergovernmental organizations and agreements, such as the United Nations (UN) and the European Economic Community (EEC). Specific to the cultural realm was the establishment of the UNESCO the UN’s agency for cultural cooperation and the preservation of cultural heritage formed in 1945, ICOM (International Council of Museum) set up in 1946, and AICA (Association International des Critiques d’Arts) founded in 1950 to promote a cross-​national critical forum. On the other hand, the postwar moment was privy to tensions, divisions and insurmountable differences. As Richard Wright noted, the zero hour of 1945 meant something different outside of Europe, where it was not understood as the restoration of a destroyed high culture in the wake of war ravages, but rather as the start of a struggle to fight the “color curtain.”7 The East-​West division, which most notoriously gripped postwar politics, was described by Odd Arne Westad as a “Global Cold War,” a notion making the global ramifications of this polarized setup explicit.8 Technology played a central role in the unraveling of postwar tensions. From the first satellite-​based transmission in 1962, to the live streaming of man’s landing on the moon in 1969, the postwar era was variably referred to as the “Jet Age” (late 1940s), “The Atomic Age” (coined in 1945), and the “Space Age” (following the successful launch of the Soviet “Sputnik” satellite in 1957)  suggesting the primacy of technological advances in the collective imaginary. Contemporaneously, the all-​ encompassing threat of atomic annihilation and the fiercely competitive space race were at once powerful political tools but also critical conduits for an increasingly globalized world. A few words should be spared now to outline what we mean by “postwar.” The cultural history of the postwar shows that World War II was the first war to lend currency to the term, as it emerged as a shorthand to denote a hopeful future in the war’s aftermath. However, the postwar happened at different times in different places, characterizing it as a nonsynchronous event. For instance, 1939 marked the end of the Civil War in Spain and the start of the postwar there. Whereas North Africa entered the postwar moment in 1943, Japan came to it in 1945. By a similar account, the extent of the postwar era has been subject to varying interpretations. Some would limit it to the war’s aftermath, until civil order took over from the state of emergency. And along similar lines, others see it bracketed between the end of the war and the establishment of the Cold War blocs. By contrast, the historian Tony Judt lent to the postwar a more expansive connotation, by taking it to encompass the period 1945 to 2005.9 Okwui Enwezor, the curator of Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–​1965 (Haus der Kunst, Munich 2016), maintained a similar stance when he framed the exhibition’s temporal scope. As part of it, he also made a claim for the postwar era as “a truly global condition:  the increasingly interlocked and interdependent nature of the world itself as a single entity, as emphasized by new political and technological realities.”10 The expanded geographical and temporal scope of Enwezor’s show closely resonates with our volume. However, unlike Enwezor or Judt for that matter, we are not singling out a start or an end date for the postwar. In keeping with its original meaning, we see it as a nonsynchronous moment, with varying roots and temporal extents. Likewise, no singular timeframe for modernism is offered here. Rather, we acknowledge modernism’s nonsynchronous development, which goes hand in hand

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4  Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg with the geographical expansion and the conceptual rethinking that underpins this book’s focus on multiple modernisms, in place of a singular hegemonic one. This makes room for the ambiguities and complexities of the postwar era, described by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht as a “maze,” like the patterns found in Jackson Pollock’s paintings, where the “strange presence of a past that won’t disappear” is competing with the yearning “to move into the future faster.”11

Notes on Multiple Modernisms The notion “multiple modernities” was first proposed by sociologist Shmuel N. Eisenstadt in 2000 to denote: “a certain view of the contemporary world –​indeed of the history and characteristics of the modern era –​that goes against the views long prevalent in scholarly and general discourse.”12 Eisenstadt’s opposition to normative discourses set the tone for a different kind of modernity and its different pathways. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar expanded on the possibilities of modernism vis-​à-​vis globalism with the notion of “alternative modernities,”13 while the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai in his (re)configuration of cultural modernity attempted to make sense of the ubiquitous effects of globalization by honing on the local as a means of conceptualizing the global.14 Dipesh Chakrabarty instead challenged Western hegemony by claiming: “European thought is at once indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experience of political modernity in non-​Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought  –​which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all –​may be renewed from and for the margins.”15 Chakrabarty advocated for a process of renewal that hinged on a change of perspective, with Europe becoming the province and the margins becoming the center. Collectively, these authors exposed the shortcomings of a monolithic modernity and played a critical role in bringing to the fore the dynamics, implications and structures underpinning the “multiple modernities” project. Scholarship on multiple modernisms in art history developed in the mid-​2000s, a somewhat tardy entrance to the field, even though postcolonial critical debates were already well underway and a poststructuralist emphasis on the construction of gender, identity, politics were proving instrumental in expanding the disciplinary remit. A critical stepping stone in the establishment of a decentered perspective in the discipline was represented by Kobena Mercer’s edited series Annotating Art’s Histories:  Cross Cultural Perspectives in Visual Arts (2005–​ 8). Mercer covered the arc of the twentieth–century across four volumes, which set out to probe how “modernist attitudes took shape in different national and cultural environments” in a “dynamic interplay between different cultures”16 and should thus counterbalance the prevailing “de-​historicized outlook that tends to identify cross-​cultural aspects of the visual arts to the limited shelf-​life of ‘the contemporary.’ ”17 The cultural diversity promoted by Mercer’s volumes paved the way for a number of studies focusing on individual artists, groups or movements, which similarly challenged longstanding notions of modernism by revealing its multifarious roots. Partha Mitter called for a “decentered modernism” which undermined the hegemony of the Western avant-​ garde, addressing its limitations and contesting its linear narrative.18 In doing so, the validity of projects such as Art since 1900 (2004) –​jointly authored by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-​Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh –​was called into question. And as Mitter stated: “…perhaps because my own work has dealt with artists in the

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Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art  5 periphery, I would have liked to have seen the authors filling more of the gaps in our knowledge of world art.”19 Since then, it has been of paramount importance to recuperate the artistic modernisms of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia. For instance, the collective volume Modern Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (2013) furthered the questions of culture and modernity in light of the displacement of the old paradigm of Western impact and non-​Western emulation.20 Jill H. Casid’s and Aruna D’Souza’s anthology Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014) was moved by a similar premise, in that, it readdressed the fallacies of old art historical narratives in light of the global turn, offering “new models to comprehend cultural flows and exchanges; and issues of temporality that attend to such geographical shifts.”21 While such a statement suggests a conceptual proximity to this volume, the focus is substantially different. The imaginings of the global proposed by Casid and D’Souza are, in fact, mainly concerned with the contemporary moment. Whereas this volume returns to the postwar era as a critical moment in which the rise of multiple modernisms promotes a global shift in perception and vice versa. In addition to the above a number of studies considering modernism’s manifold roots in relation to specific geographies, individual artists and movements have also contributed new perspectives on art history’s embeddedness in a global field. Globalizing East European Art Histories:  Past and Present (2018) offered a transnational perspective on East-​Central European art and its entanglement with the wider world.22 Piotr Piotrowski’s articulation of horizontality as an imperative for Eastern European art in his book In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-​garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–​1989 (2009) also represented an important stepping stone in debunking Western assumptions concerning the former Eastern Bloc.23 Hiroko Ikegami’s The Great Migrator. Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (2010) reframed Robert Rauschenberg’s activities abroad drawing attention to previously unmarked cross-​cultural networks.24 Exhibitions and permanent collection displays dedicated to questioning the roots of modernity, its centers and its discourses have also played a fundamental role in furthering the multiple modernities cause. In the late 1970s the Centre Pompidou mounted a series of exhibitions which took as a starting point Paris and explored the city’s international relationships with New  York (Paris-​New  York 1908–​1968, 1977)  Berlin (Paris-​Berlin 1900–​1933:  rapports et contrastes, 1978)  and Moscow (Paris-​Moscou 1900–​1930, 1979). While still primarily rooted in the hegemonic centers these exhibitions nevertheless pioneered a trans-​national approach, which brought to light cultural and artistic transfers. A decade later Jean-​Hubert Martin’s now much discussed Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Pompidou and Grande Halle at Parc de la Villette, Paris, 1989) gathered works by more than 100 artists from 50 countries ushering a postcolonial reckoning in exhibition-​making. A significant and yet less widely acknowledged contribution had already been made by Robert Farris Thompson with his exhibition African art in motion: icon and act in the collection of Katherine Croyton White (UCLA/​National Gallery, DC, 1974) which made the case for the reappraisal of African art on its own modernist terms. Since the 2000s, exhibitions have played a more instrumental role in breaking down the paradigmatic pattern around the centers of power. Okwui Enwezor’s documenta11 (Kassel, 2002) was in his words focused: “on themes of global transformation and post-​colonialism…[which] allow us to look at contemporary art in a more complex

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6  Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg way, rather than reducing it to the Western museum model; not to negate it, but to confront it with a new set of imperatives.”25 Indeed, documenta11 is now hailed for its radical decentering of artistic practices and the concurrent establishment of a new set of parameters addressing themes such as migration and the postcolonial experience. The 50th Venice Biennale (2003) conceived and led by artistic director Francesco Bonami and titled Dreams and Conflicts  –​The Viewer’s Dictatorship was also informed by a global approach which encouraged visitors to explore the exhibition’s archipelago and take in the work of an expanded network of artists representative of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in addition to the usual suspects. A significant shift in institutional collecting was made manifest in the reappraisal of permanent collection displays starting in the late 2000s at Tate Modern and reasserted in 2013 by Modernités plurielles, the Centre Pompidou’s radically revised collection rehang. At this time, a number of exhibitions also contributed to the project of decentering modernism. As mentioned above Okwui Enzwezor’s Postwar art:  art between the Pacific and the Atlantic (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016–​17) treaded new ground both in terms of a reappreciation of the postwar moment and the multifarious outputs it engendered globally. A series of exhibitions held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt under the aegis of Kanon-​Fragen were also seminal in pushing the postwar discourse past a Western hegemonic center. Of these, Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017–​18) tackled the question of modernism from the global dimension of politics during the Cold War era. The last two decades have also seen the rethinking of canonical movements such as Conceptualism, Pop art and Surrealism through a new set of global and non-​western parameters as made manifest by exhibitions like Global Conceptualism:  Points of Origin, 1950s-​1980s (Queens Museum and tour, 1999), International Pop (Walker Art Center and tour, 2015), The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, 2015)  and Art et Liberté:  Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–​1948) (Centre Pompidou and tour, 2017–​18).

On the Structure of This Book and Its Contribution At the core of this project is the 2017 conference “Multiple Modernisms. A Symposium on Globalism in Postwar Art” (hosted under the umbrella of the Multiple Modernities research project).26 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk, Denmark) was the venue of this intensive three-​day exchange, engaging with current critical debates and new research on global modernism(s).27 The resulting conference presentations and the additional chapters included here collectively consider how the arts, artists, museums, mechanisms and movements of the period 1945–​70 are at once locally and globally reoriented as a consequence of the theoretical rethinking around modernity and its histories. Yet –​as already evinced above –​it would be a mistake to assume that the varying engagements with modernism(s), no matter how similar they may look on the surface, responded to the same historical and aesthetic constellations. Thus, each case study should be treated as a constellation of its own with many more possible ramifications to be drawn from it. The consequences of aesthetic form are, in fact, linked here to varying sets of specific aesthetic, cultural, political and personal histories, conditions and relations. As a result, one could ask if “global” is even the right word, to draw together a group of chapters grounded in particular places and problems. Our collective effort is to suggest the possibility of a conceptual locus, encompassing the global, as well as the transnational and cross-​cultural, in which each

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Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art  7 contributor negotiates these potentially competing aims in different ways. It should be mentioned that given the sheer vastity of subjects and objects that have come to the fore in the wake of the burgeoning multiple modernities project, New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms does not aspire to be comprehensive, both in terms of geographical and thematic reach. Questions as well as regions are inevitably left out, as the process of chartering multiple modernisms is subject to constant evolution and is too extensive to be mapped onto one anthology alone. Our hope is, in fact, that in the same way that this volume builds on existing studies of multiple modernisms, more publications will come out in response to it. Ultimately, in confronting the reconsideration of modernism(s) from a global perspective we are not limiting ourselves to a process of geographical addition, but we are through each writer’s contribution identifying charged nodal points, which recognize the global in the postwar moment as intrinsically mobile and continuously provisional. For years now, Terry Smith has advocated for art historical writing that is more alert to local cultural contingencies and to cultural traffic. We were thus lucky to enlist his help with the prologue, in which Smith interrogates the notion of multiple modernisms vis-​à-​vis global contemporaneity. The questions he poses in relation to these topical issues offer a useful starting point to ground, but also challenge the kind of art historical investigations that we have included in this volume. The first cluster “Crossings and Encounters:  Retracing Artists’ Itineraries” underscores the role played by artists in mobilizing modernism(s) through their peripatetic lives and alternative networks of exchange. Shuttling between local experiences and large-​scale visions, these chapters collectively throw into sharp relief the systems of circulation and the multidirectional flows that radically redefined the way in which the modernist project was mobilized globally. In the first chapter, Karen Kurczynski examines the critical legacy of artists marginalized in the Cobra movement’s history but newly central to our understanding of it: Sonja Ferlov, Ernest Mancoba and Shinkichi Tajiri. By developing a comparative perspective, she reevaluates the movement’s claims to populism, radical experimentation and spontaneous expression as a form of counter-​culture. In Chapter  2, Giulia Smith replaces the notion of a singular art world with a cross-​sectional view of London’s multiple artistic scenes in the 1950s, demonstrating the existence of a polyvocal modernism. Building on the principles of “decentralization” and “discrepancy” Smith adopts an associative iconographic approach to examine anew the outputs of artists Magda Cordell, Sarah Jackson, Emilio Scanavino and Aubrey Williams. With Katarzyna Cytlak’s and Elize Mazadiego’s chapters connections are drawn between Europe and the Global South. From the vantage point of the Southern Cone, Mazadiego considers burgeoning discourses around urbanization and the experience of the modern city, by focusing on the postwar oeuvre of Argentinean artist Marta Minujín. In her chapter, Cytlak offers yet another perspective on Minujín’s practice by analyzing it in relation to the artistic exchanges between Latin America and Eastern Europe in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. As part of this, the author reconsiders cultural transatlantic relations by proposing a more horizontal and less unilateral vision of modernity, one that highlights the specificity of the periphery and its independent relations. Marie Laurberg’s chapter frames the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama as a peripatetic agent moving between multiple centers and navigating local articulations of modernism through her performative practice. In the last chapter of part one, Stephanie Straine further opens up the relationship between centers of

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8  Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg production by examining Franz Erhard Walther’s drawing practice of the 1960s in light of the “New York-​Rhine Land axis.” Part two, “Against the Norm: Decentering and Resisting the Canon,” illuminates the topicality of local artistic developments by engaging in a double movement of decentering:  on the one hand it acknowledges previously neglected modernities by resituating them in relation to larger cultural contexts and on the other hand, it considers the local specificity of individual modernism(s) often redeployed in a subversive manner aimed at pushing against the grain of hegemonic state narratives. While the subversive quality of avant-​garde and neo-​avant-​garde practices vis-​à-​vis totalitarian regimes is hardly a new topic of discussion, the interfaces with state culture are revisited and substantially complicated in a number of contributions here. By posing the accent on the distinctiveness of the political and social concerns expressed in these chapters, it becomes apparent how the resistance to a canonical modernism is inevitably married with contextual specificity. In their respective chapters, Karen Stock, Combiz Moussavi-​Aghdam and Sooran Choi challenge the misconception that dogmatic governments maintained a fierce grip over cultural production in the postwar era. As the three contributors aptly demonstrate the matter was far more nuanced than it appeared to be during the Cold War era, when arguably ideology was at its strongest. Karen Stock focuses on the years of Mao Zedong’s rule, largely characterized by Western scholars as a period of artistic sterility which is in contrast to the laudable elements found by Chinese scholars. By combining a historiographic exploration of the Western scholarly bias with a formal analysis of works created from 1949 to 1966, Stock promotes the idea here that ink painting (guohua) –​as seen in the works of Fu Baoshi and Pan Tianshou  –​can be framed as an expression of a native and more nuanced modernism that balanced tradition and innovation. Combiz Moussavi-​Aghdam’s chapter addresses the vexed question: “What was modernism in Iran?” during the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–​79), when attempts to form a new Iranian identity through artistic means were substantially torn between a “non-​Western ancient” legacy and a “progressively modern” yearning. Sooran Choi concentrates instead on the social and political tension between military dictatorships and the opposition in the form of an artistic avant-​garde, by focusing on a group of political dissidents comprised mostly of artists, students and intellectuals active in South Korea in the late 1960s. By examining various manifestations of performative and conceptual art, Choi argues that South Korean artists appropriated and repurposed Euro-​American practices such as Conceptualism, Fluxus, Environmental art and Happenings, to mask their social and political critique and to evade censorship and torture by the military juntas. The radical displacement of orthodox views associated with modernism(s) is central to Kate Cowcher’s and Sabrina Moura’s chapters, which once again seek to map previously unmapped networks of exchange. In both cases, however, the agency of modernist modes of expression runs parallel and intersects with national and international political aspirations. Cowcher documents the very multiplicity of Ethiopia’s modernist moment, by emphasizing the distinct manner in which Ethiopian artists were sent out into the world (from London, to Paris, to Warsaw, to Moscow) in the 1950s and 1960s. These educational sojourns were prefaced on a desire not simply to learn new skills, but to share Ethiopia’s talents with the world and contributed to a modernist moment that was inherently diverse or “multiple,” and which

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Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art  9 encompassed a wide range of expressive modes from surrealist abstraction to industrial art to Soviet academic realism. Sabrina Moura’s chapter draws attention to the Afro-​Atlantic axis of collaboration and its role in challenging the vision of African modernity as intrinsically anachronistic, derivative, mimetic and out of step with contemporary developments. Closing part two, Sofia Gotti examines how political and cultural feminism converged in Latin America, by explaining how the furniture artworks by the Peruvian Teresa Burga and the Colombian Beatriz González recast the domestic arena as a space of resistance. The book’s final section “Collecting Modernisms  –​Exhibiting Modernisms” underscores the prominent role played by exhibition-​making, collecting and alternative institutional settings as crucial mediating agents in the spread of cultural ideas and practices consolidating the existence of not one, but multiple modernities. Louisiana itself is a product of the burgeoning internationalization of the art world in the postwar era. Founded in 1958 by Knud W. Jensen Louisiana Museum of Modern Art came out of a rapidly growing demand for a space where the radical dynamics and the reconceptualization of contemporary art could find a nurturing home. At the time, Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1958) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam were also spurred by a new curatorial vision and framework of action; mostly made manifest in now-​landmark temporary exhibitions such as Bewogen Beweging (1961) and Dylaby (1962) at the Stedelijk and Hon –​en katedral (1966) at Moderna Museet. In recent years, these projects have attracted growing scholarly attention, signaling the importance of exhibition histories in the understanding of postwar art and its objects and methods.28 Here, we draw attention to a series of exhibitions and collecting strategies that have thus far received little or virtually no attention in critical writings on the topic. Masha Chlenova examines Alfred Barr’s ties to the USSR during the postwar period as a case study of transnational approach, showing how Barr’s dedication to the international language of modernism went beyond the political agendas of any one country. Camila Maroja’s chapter is centered on the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) and unpacks the relationship between European imported narratives and Brazilian modernity by analyzing the collection and display strategies implemented by the then-​director Pietro Maria Bardi. In his chapter, Kristian Handberg traces the oft-​forgotten history of the Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale by mapping the conflation of socialist realism, western high modernism and neo-​avant-​garde discourses. In the last chapter of the volume, Flavia Frigeri examines the role played by Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) in realigning the discourse of Italian art to an international modernist one in the wake of World War II. To conclude, to posit the existence of one modernism would be at best reductive, at worst destructive. As a result, this volume invokes the existence of multiple modernisms by providing a range of perspectives on the topic, whether by identifying points of convergence and exchange or by reconsidering afresh well-​known figures and movements. Accordingly, the roadmap of modernism invoked here is informed by a concentration on single locales and topics of contention, which throw into relief what is at stake in addressing the project of modernism from a global and increasingly expansive approach. This book does not aim for finality, rather it should be understood as furthering the question of multiple and alternative modernisms, by presenting readers with an array of new critical and theoretical concerns.

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10  Flavia Frigeri and Kristian Handberg

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Baudelaire (1863) 1964, 12. See, for example, Arnason 1969; Buchloh, Guilbaut, Solkin 1983. Greenberg 1965. Buddensieg and Weibel eds. 2011. Bydler 2004; Jones 2017. Huyssen 2007, 190. Richard Wright qtd. in Busch and Franke eds. 2015. Westad 2016. Judt 2005. Okwui Enwezor qtd. in n.a. 2016. Gumbrecht 2013, p. 1, 168. Eisenstadt, 2000, 1. Gaonkar 2001. Appadurai 1998. Chakrabarty 2000, 16. Mercer 2005, 8. Mercer 2008, 7. Mitter 2008. Ibid., 531. O’Brien et al. 2013. Casid and D’Souza eds., 2014, vii. Hock and Allas eds. 2018. Piotrowski 2009. Ikegami 2010. Enwezor 2011, 50. “Multiple Modernities: Dream Worlds and World Images in Art and Culture, 1946–​1972” was a joint research project between Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and the University of Copenhagen funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation, 2015–​18. Its aim was to research the postwar era as a frame for art’s globalization and discuss new art historical approaches to the era. 27 Multiple Modernisms, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Videos of the conference are available at: https://​research.louisiana.dk. 28 Both the edited volumes Exhibition Histories (Afterall, 2010–​) and the online journal Stedelijk Studies are central to the process of re-​evaluation of exhibition histories.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. 1998. Modernity at Large:  Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Arnason, H.H. 1969. A History of Modern Art. New York: Thames & Hudson. Baudelaire, Charles. (1863) 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Edited and Translated by Jonathan Mayne. New York: Phaidon: 12–​15. Bydler, Charlotte. 2004. Global Art World, Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art. Upsala: Upsala University. Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., 1983. Serge Guilbaut and David Solkin eds. Modernism and Modernity. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Buddensieg, Andrea and Peter Weibel. 2011. The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989. Karlsruhe: ZKM/​Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Busch, Annett and Anselm Franke. 2015. After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration since 1945. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

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Understanding of Globalism in Postwar Art  11 Casid, Jill H. and Aruna D’Souza eds. 2014. Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe:  Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eisenstadt, S.H. 2000. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1, Multiple Modernities, Winter: 1–​29. Enwezor, Okwui. 2011. “Curating Beyond the Canon; Okwui Enwezor interviewed by Paul O’Neill.” In Curating Subjects. Edited by Paul O’Neil. Amsterdam: De Appel. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Greenberg, Clement. 1965.“Modernist Painting.” Art & Literature. vol. 4, Spring. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2013. After 1945:  Latency as Origin of the Present. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press.Hock, Beáta and Anu Allas eds. 2018. Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present. New York: Routledge. Huyssen, Andreas. 2007. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World” in New German Critique, no. 100, Winter: 189–​207. Ikegami, Hiroko. 2010. The Great Migrator:  Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press. Jones, Caroline A. 2017. The Global Work of Art. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. Mercer, Kobena ed. 2008. Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2007. Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2006. Discrepant Abstraction (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2005. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Annotating Art’s Histories). Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press. Mitter, Partha. 2008. “Modernism:  Art History and Avant-​Garde Art from the Periphery Author.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 90, no. 4, December: 531–​48. n.a. 2016, Haus der Kunst 2016 program, E-​flux, 16 December 2015. O’Brien, Elaine et al. eds. 2013. Modern Art in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell. Piotrowski, Piotr. 2009. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-​garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–​1989. London, Reaktion Books. Westad, Odd Arne. 2016. The Global Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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1  Prologue Art History’s Work-​in Pro(re)gress –​ Reflections on the Multiple Modernities Project Terry Smith

A diagram entitled Art since 1900, devised by Jaakko Pallasvuo, a Finnish artist, was posted online on April 15, 2015. In its evident provisionality, and jokey irony, it is a provocative evocation of the questions that face us when we try to map the larger, longer historical flows that seem to shape modern and contemporary art (see Figure 1.1) Art historical research into art made during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is no longer dominated by what we might call the “mainstream modernism” narrative. It has been replaced by a “multiple modernities” picture of art evolving differentially at various art-​producing sites around the world that have varying degrees and kinds of connections with the major locales. These may act as centers in their own region, or operate mostly according to their own necessities. This picture is driven by a desire for recognition on the part of the agents currently active in, or writing on behalf of, places that were, during modern times, provinces and peripheries. That is to say, a desire for acknowledgement as having been then what they insist on being now: genuine, coeval contemporaries. These are worthy impulses and goals. But they remain, I will suggest, a work in progress, one that sometimes entails regression to earlier modes. To me, the key question about the multiple modernities project, therefore, is whether it is sufficiently developed as yet to serve as the best account of the modern art that precedes the emergence of contemporary art, as this art is seen from the most viable art historical perspectives.1

Mainstream Modernism The once-​heroic narrative of dynamic progress from avant-​garde modernism to mainstream modern art has become a quaint orthodoxy. Let us recall it briefly, as it will highlight how much understandings of modern art are changing these days. A locus classicus is the chart mapped on the cover of Alfred J. Barr’s 1936 catalogue for the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New  York. Thanks to Richard Myer and others (such as Masha Chlenova in this volume), we know that Barr and many of his fellow curators had a much more nuanced vision, and a more flexible curatorial style, than the narrow channels that are tracked on this famous flow chart, which shares a reductive rationality with the orthodox story.2 Chapter 2 in this story is that, during and after World War II, New York became the leading center of modern art’s mature development, the core of which was eventually named “modernism,” most influentially by Clement Greenberg. Subsequently, during

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Prologue  13

Figure 1.1 Jaakko Pallasvuo:  Art Since 1900, diagram posted in 2015 on the artist’s now-​ defunct Tumblr blog dawsonscreek.info. By permission of the artist.

the 1960s and 1970s, artists active in the United States and Europe effected major transformations in art practice, purpose and the use of materials. Earlier modernisms were undermined, leading to what some historians name the “neo-​avantgarde” or “late modernism,” others the beginnings of contemporary art. Surveys such as the Italian publication, The Birth of Contemporary Art, 1946–​1968, which features on its cover a Jasper Johns painting of overlapping US flags, remind us that the story of modern art has been, often, an “American Century” narrative, and that this story has been deeply internalized within Europe.3

Radical Revisionism The “new art history” that has been an ongoing enterprise of disciplinary self-​criticism since the 1970s has complicated this orthodoxy in significant ways, critiquing it from social, political, feminist, psychological and semiotic perspectives, while, arguably, sustaining the overall narrative structure.4 To me, this approach has always seemed to be less a matter of a “new art history” than one of “radical art historical revisionism.” It is devoted to exploring the roots of the art that it studies  –​the psychic, sexed, social, economic, cultural and political embedment of art, including art’s critique, or othering, of its own situatedness. It does so in the name of the need to radically transform the disabling inequities of these situations as they have evolved within capitalist modernity, statist socialism, patriarchy, racism and feudal fundamentalism. Further,

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14  Terry Smith it seeks always to test the critical theoretical approaches, and the political strategies, that have emerged to pursue such transformations. It is, therefore, committed to constantly revising the frameworks within which critical art writing is undertaken, including art historical practice. It is at its best in the work of Linda Nochlin, T.J. Clark and Griselda Pollock, for example, all of whom have offered substantial revisions of canonical modernist art, such as that of Cézanne. The so-​called October group –​led by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-​Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh and Hal Foster –​ developed a parallel, but less passionately political version of this approach during the same period, notably in their volume Art since 1900.5 This is the book that Pallasvuo had in mind when making his amusing diagram. It is now the prevailing orthodoxy for modernist art studies in the United States, but it is operating as a default, passively resisting other, more contemporary paradigms. As a result, it is becoming increasingly attenuated. In contrast, some scholars from the peripheries made important revisionary contributions during these decades: for example, Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, and Bernard Smith’s Modernism’s Histories, especially in the latter’s compelling arguments for the impact on the centers of artistic initiatives from the peripheries.6 I continue to believe that radical revisionism –​precisely because it so incessantly updates itself  –​remains the most appropriate approach to the history of avant-​ garde and mainstream modernist art created in Europe and the United States, up to and including the 1950s. Late modernist art continues to be made today, notably by artists whose major breakthroughs occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, so aspects of this approach remain relevant (for example, Peter Osborne’s identification of the “post-​conceptual” character of a major neo-​modernist stream within contemporary art).7 But radical revisionism has not been flexible enough to encompass the study of modern art when viewed on a worldwide basis, an optic required by globalization itself. Its place has been taken by the “multiple modernities” project.

Modern, Modernism, Modernist Since the 1980s, and especially since the 1990s, researchers in museums and universities all over the world have been exploring the local and regional arts made during the modern period, in greater depth, and in less prejudicial ways than before. Practices described as vernacular, alternative, counter or other to the Euro-​American mainstream have become valued on their own terms, and more highly in comparative terms, however much modernization in the West constituted, as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt puts it, “the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point.”8 These questions have also been posed within literary theory and historiography, with somewhat more variety than within art history. Susan Stanford Friedman’s concept of “polycentric modernisms” in world literature is matched by few art historians, an exception being Béatrice Joyeux-​Prunel, who applies data-​collection methods to explore the contents of exhibitions throughout Europe to show that these were widely distributed, not centered in Paris, and were calibrated to local audiences and markets, not imposed upon them. She argues that a similar network operated during the interwar period, above all through circulated magazines.9 This work is currently confined to Europe, but in principle is applicable to networks anywhere. The “multiple modernities” project in the visual arts seeks both local and international acknowledgment of the modern art created in the colonies and former

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Prologue  15 colonies of the Western powers, and in the countries that, while not formal colonies, remained peripheral to them during the modern era. The struggles of many of these countries for independence, their efforts at nation building and their fight for a non-​ aligned place within the Cold War political and economic order have been definitive of their decolonization, especially since 1945. Artists, writers, educators and some politicians learnt from their own steadily accumulating experience that, in each country, the visual arts had specific roles to play in forwarding postcolonial critique, in perpetuating traditions and useable pasts, in creating new national cultures, in building bridges to other cultures with similar histories and in negotiating cultural relationships with the still dominant powers. For many, the questions became: How might histories of these changes be written? Can these developments be seen to have occurred during the decades prior to decolonization, that is, throughout the entire history of each society’s relationships with Western modernity? Finally, how might such histories help accelerate these developments within each society, or at least help them find a viable place within the globalized world (dis)order that prevails at present?10 It is interesting that these histories have been written, mostly, from the presumption that the overriding and somehow natural priority for every social formation was to modernize itself –​that is, to move toward the social, political and economic structures of the Western market democracies, and to integrate into a world that was dominated by those structures. The persistence of national narratives during periods of imperialism and more recently globalization remains an important topic for art history as an academic discipline as it does for art museums, many of which continue to be substantially nationalist in orientation, or, if they are “universal” survey museums, still divide their collection displays according to national schools of art.11 Whichever form of nationality each society forged, and however frequently that form changed, the presumption underlying the multiple modernities project is that each society modernized, or negotiated a relationship to Western-​style modernity, in its own complex, internally competitive way, and that its visual artists did the same in their relationships to their local inheritances and to prior and concurrent developments in modernist art in Euro-​America. Alert readers will have picked up the shift from “modern” to “modernist” here. This is a pivotal step. It risks eliding the two, opposing kinds of meaning that, in English usage, adding the suffix “ist” to a noun can evoke: that which intensifies the essence of the subject, and that which names something merely approximate to it. Inside the dominant discourse, “modernist” names the extreme, more-​modern-​than-​ modern questioning by certain European artworks since the 1860s of modernity’s ways of seeing itself. Outside this setting, however, “modernist” identifies art that looks like European modern and modernist art, or, perhaps better, behaves like this art, albeit in ways calibrated to its own situation. The brutal exclusiveness of the high modernist narrative of what counts in modern art is visible here, without disguise. For many, this was, and remains, a position to be held, without apology.12 Its effect is to confine modernism in the strong sense to just some of the art produced in the Euro-​American centers. At the opposite extreme, design historians and curators of historical collections –​such as Christopher Wilk at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London  –​are increasingly taking a more open approach, one that sees modernism as simply the design style apparent in the fine and decorative arts between the two world wars and up to the 1960s.13 But this is only an apparent opposition. While one extreme celebrates the worldwide diffusion of an aesthetic (actually, a style), the

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16  Terry Smith other cares only for what counted in the center, or, more accurately, what was made to count in and by certain kinds of art made there. This game of few winners and many losers persists today, even as the modern centers fight against their inevitable supersession. The multiple modernities project is, however, inspired by a broader, more inclusive conception of what counts as the game of art. Indeed, implicit in this approach is its imagined, eventual sublation: the appeal to a “cosmopolitan modernism,” by Kobena Mercer, among others.14 This suggests that an emphasis on what was distinctive about art within the distant peripheries, and in the peripheral domains within and around the centers, must be matched by acknowledging the modernizing impulses that these artists shared with artists in the centers, and with other, de-​centered artists –​including the dream of transcending both situations and arriving at a utopic state, a cosmopolis, beyond the colonial system. Utopias aside, this broader perspective shows us that, in any given situation, in every art-​producing center wherever it is in the world, there are likely to be several different kinds of art being made at the same time, some of which are modernizing to varying degrees, others not. It also follows that artistic value is established from inside the tendency within which the artist worked, or is working, not in the terms that obtain within other tendencies, however immediately adjacent or distant they may be. This recognizes that artistic decision-​making is as much a matter of choice, of acceptances and refusals, of adaptations and transformations, as it is of local and external determinations. We glimpse a kind of art historical valuation that does not turn centrally on the degree of modernization. Instead, it is open to the dynamics of proximate differentiation, the actualities of coexistence –​in a word, it is contemporary in its perspective. Much groundwork remains to be done:  an exemplary project is the mapping of usages of the terms “modern,” “contemporary” and “art” in the vernacular languages of South Asia by a team of scholars working in these languages.15 The metropolitan/​provincial, or center/​periphery picture often presumes that the power relationships established by geographic distance were relatively fixed, but what of the fact that many of the most innovative artists in the centers came from the peripheries and pursued long and productive careers at the center? Movement across cultural space, of course, goes in many directions. Reversing the usual flow, historians of multiple modernities are noticing something that has been obvious to artists for decades: that the initiating energy so vital to modernist avant-​gardism came as much from artists who traveled from the colonies, or from otherwise dependent cultures, to the metropolitan centers as it did from artists native to them. In his The Politics of Modernism, speaking mainly of literature, Raymond Williams noted that it was in “a generation of ‘provincial’ immigrants to the great imperial capitals that avant-​ garde formations and their distanced, ‘estranged’ forms have their matrix,” an idea developed for the visual arts in Bernard Smith’s Modernism’s History.16 Ex-​colonial artists can be found at every point of avant-​garde rupture in Europe and the United States. Start with Lucien Pissarro, go on to Pablo Picasso, add Diego Rivera, and the list grows and grows, and will be endless.17 A different kind of leveling is sought by those who believe that if you trace enough of the connections that actually occurred between artists throughout the world during the modern period you can build up a picture of shared concerns, roughly equitable exchanges, and mutually productive differences that constitute networks that so dense, so thick in all dimensions, that the top-​down, hierarchical picture of

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Prologue  17 metropolitan dominance (Paris, then New York) and provincial dependence (everywhere else) is swamped. A field on which the specifics and singularities of each artist’s practice, along of course with their learning from other artists (as artists have always done), comes into view. The extractions, exclusions, inequities that actually prevailed in the structure itself were vitiated by the quantity of these accommodations to it. We can now see, the argument hopefully goes, that these artists were not subjugated: they were contemporaries, like us.18 A parallel development is that, for some time now, the art history of the great metropolitan centers of modern art is being vigorously rewritten such that they no longer seem citadels of high modernism.

Minor, Global, Planetary, Situated Scoping outwards to the overall picture of many modernities unfolding in parallel in different places, at different rates, and in different ways, larger questions remain unresolved. For example, is the modern art being made now in many parts of the world, notably South East Asia and the Middle East, a belated modernism or an element within contemporary art? In many ways, is it not both at once? Indeed, the comments already made show that it can be both, and continue to renovate traditions, at the same time. Okwui Enwezor attempted to systematize these layerings in his proposal that no less than four kinds of modernism subsist in contemporary circumstances: supermodernity (Marc Augé’s term for the dominant Western modernity); andromodernity (the hybrid modernities being trialed, at speed, in Asia); speciousmodernity (the mostly failed attempts to modernize and secularize the Middle East), and aftermodernity (the as yet to be realized world to come after the limits of supermodernity have been reached –​a modernity to come, he believed, from Africa).19 This was an effort to outflank Nicolas Bourriaud’s unfortunate conflation, altermodernism, which he took to be a “leap” out of the postmodern period, one that would “give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-​colonialism.”20 We are still waiting:  Black Panther, unfortunately, did not get us there. These attempts at overviews have proven even less clarifying than the recent discussion of “global” and “world” art –​terms again with obvious contemporary currency that have been back-​projected to earlier periods. Such terms are the visual arts equivalent of anthologies of mainly literary theory such as Geomodernisms:  Race, Modernism, Modernity or The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms.21 There are convergent anthologies such as The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-​First Century.22 This “turn” was signaled in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s call in 2003 for “the planetary to override the global,” a call that she has pursued with little vigor since.23 Susan Stanford Friedman has since pushed the idea of modernization away from presuming its origins in Europe, or in the colonization projects of several European countries, towards its recurrence across the longue durée of human history.24 While a call to a planetary consciousness is essential to any possibility of managing our current drift into the Sixth Extinction, channeling it towards a past universality invites over-​generalization, to put it mildly. In contrast, Simon Knell’s preference for “situated modernisms” within the context of past local and international modernities, and within the present day “global contemporary,” offers an insightful resolution of several of the conundrums sketched above. Using the striking example of how various modernisms arrived in Mongolia

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18  Terry Smith from the USSR, were infused with local imagery, then went out into a global artworld (via the 2015 Venice Biennale), he proposes that: Without abandoning cosmopolitan influence or the importance of the avant-​ garde, the idea of multiple situated modernities permits all art, including the figurative and the realist, to be considered an aesthetic expression of the “continual constitution and reconstitution” of modernities.25 We are slowly, via this array of trials and errors, making our way towards contemporary kinds of historical accounting of art’s many modernities, and of the many other tendencies that flourished, or struggled, alongside them during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is obvious that they continue to resonate within our multiplicitous, but also situated, contemporaneity.

Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity Contemporary art is created in centers of various kinds all over the world today. It is distributed widely through globalized formats such as biennials and the Internet. The metropolitan-​provincial, center-​periphery distributions of political, economic, and cultural power have shifted from those that prevailed within the modern world order. Today’s global connectivity has increased awareness of its earlier forms, including those developed during modern times. In mirror, contemporary values have histories, including histories in art. Those histories are what we should be establishing in order to find the best answer to the question with which I began: Does the “multiple modernities” picture of modern art evolving differentially, yet with some connectivity, at the various art-​producing sites around the world during the past two centuries accurately identify the major art historical causes of the densely networked globality, multiplicity, and diversity evident in contemporary art? Does this picture articulate adequately the complexities of the worldwide move, in recent decades, into contemporary art? The frank answer to these questions has to be:  not as yet. When a paradigm is shifting, you know it, and can feel the whole earth moving. But you can, most of the time, see only the changes that are close to hand, or at odd, random distances. What is hardest to see is the chaotic, contingent coherence of the change. More visible are the tremendous efforts that institutions committed to the previous paradigm put into resisting it, the regression within the signs of apparent progress. Anyone walking through the exhibition rooms of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, after the 2004 rebuilding aimed at making the museum as contemporary as it had (traditionally) been modern, was struck by the persistence of a modernist curatorial style. In particular, the “contemporary” galleries were filled with works that comfortably continued the narrative of mainstream modernism or were shoehorned into doing so.26 Even after yet another renovation in 2019, MoMA continues to struggle with the contradiction of maintaining fundamentally modernist perspectives while at the same time trying to be a museum of contemporary art. Nevertheless, it has devoted considerable resources to its C-​Map project, and to the publication of invaluable anthologies in its Primary Documents series.27 In contrast, several other museums have been ahead of the art historians whose efforts I have been mapping in exploring what various alternative narratives of modern art and its shift into contemporary art might look like. Outstanding among these are the Moderna Galerija and Metelkova

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Prologue  19 in Ljubljana, led by Zdenka Badovinac, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, led by Charles Esche and Barbara Fletcher, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, led by Manuel Borja-​ Villel, and the Museum Sztuki, Lódz, led by Jaroslaw Suchan.28 In solidarity with these efforts I  have for many years been offering a set of hypotheses  –​perhaps amounting to a theory  –​about how contemporary art arises in the conditions of contemporaneity, most recently in Art to come:  Histories of Contemporary Art.29 Let me briefly summarize how I  tackle the questions I  have raised, beginning by citing the conclusion to a 2010 article in The Art Bulletin on “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art”: Place making, world picturing, and connectivity are the most common concerns of artists these days because they are the substance of contemporary being. Increasingly, they override residual distinctions based on style, mode, medium, and ideology. They are present in all art that is truly contemporary. Distinguishing, precisely, this presence in each artwork is the most important challenge to an art criticism that would be adequate to the demands of contemporaneity. Tracing the currency of each artwork within the larger forces that are shaping this present is the task of contemporary art history.30 This is the essence of my approach, which pinpoints, I think, the core demand that the times are making on artmaking, art criticism, and art history. My reference to “currency” aimed to highlight the mobility of contemporary artworks: their inherent heterochronicity, their movement through time, space and place. Thus my core art historiographical suggestion: that three broad currents may be discerned in art today, each quite different in character, scale and scope. They are, I argue, the manifestations in art practice and discourse of the major currents in global geopolitics, cultural exchange, human thinking, and geophysical change. They have taken distinctive forms in the many art-​producing centers throughout the world since the 1950s, thus patterning the shift from modern to contemporary art that, in my view, is the defining art historical fact of the recent past, the present, and the near future. The first current prevails in the metropolitan centers of modernity in Europe and the United States (as well as in societies and subcultures closely related to them) and is a continuation of styles in the history of art, particularly modernist ones, in the form of various Remodernisms. The second current arose from movements towards political, economic, and cultural independence that occurred in the former colonies of Europe, and on its edges, and then spread everywhere. Characterized above all by clashing ideologies and experiences, this “transnational transitionality” leads artists to prioritize the imaging of both local and global issues as the urgent content of their work, to make artworks as acts of unwarranted translation. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of artists working within the third current explore concerns  –​about self-​ fashioning, immediation, precarity, futurity, and climate change (more acutely, global warming) –​that they feel personally yet share with others, particularly of their generation, throughout an increasingly networked, politically fissured, and physically fragile world. Taken together, I suggest, these currents constituted the contemporary art of the late twentieth century, and their unpredictable unfolding and volatile interaction continues to shape art in the early twenty-​first.31 In a paradox typical of our contemporaneity, the time line for locating the origins of contemporary art has, since 2000, been pushed backwards in time, decade by

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20  Terry Smith decade, from the 1980s to the 1970s, the 1950s/​60s and now to the 1940s, and from indicative dates such as 1989, 1975, 1968, 1955, to (one hopes finally) 1945. As a spate of recent exhibitions (by no coincidence, many of them in Germany) and several contributions to this volume attest, the postwar has become the primal scene of the present.

Notes 1 My subtitle invokes Cuauhtémoc Medina’s curatorial concept for the 2018 Shanghai Biennale –​which takes up a neologism coined by poet e e cummings in 1931 –​in order to “teasingly criticize the Western enlightenment narratives that abide by progressivism, meanwhile suggesting the ambivalence and anxiety of the early 21st century.” See http://​ shanghaibiennale.org/​en/​page/​detail/​308cw.html. An earlier version of these thoughts may be found in Erjavec and Miller 2014. An even earlier treatment may be found in my entries on “Modernism” and “Modernity” in Smith 1996. 2 Meyer 2013. Sybil Kantor shows that Barr’s diagram was, at the time, intended to be specific to this one exhibition, yet it became an “icon” of Barr and the Museum’s “idealistic” and “teleological” understanding of the evolution of modernism. See Kantor 2003, there were, over time, at least three versions. 3 Terraroli et al. 2008. 4 Rees and Borzello eds. 1986. 5 Foster et al. 2016. 6 Guilbaut 1983; and Smith 1998. 7 Osborne 2013. 8 Eisenstadt 2000. This essay is the locus classicus for the sociological theory of multiple modernities, and should be read alongside earlier, but too often Euro-​centric, macro-​scale theorization since Karl Marx, and alongside other anti-​capitalist world picturing including that of world systems theorists such as Emmanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and others, as well as the tracking of cultural “flows” within modernity by Arjun Appadurai. 9 Stanford Friedman 2001, 495–​513; Joyeux-​Prunel 2015, 41–​62. In a similar vein, a conception of “translocated modernisms” has been used to trace the experiences of Canadian writers and artists who, during the first half of the previous century, spent shorter or longer periods in Paris. Taking it to be “the capital of the twentieth century,” their experience there remained a measure of avant-​garde achievement for these writers throughout their careers, even as they developed practices shaped significantly by their home cultures. See Ballantyne, Dvořák and Irvine eds. 2016. 10 For example, Dadi 2010; Tiampo 2010 and Okeke-​Agulu 2014. 11 See Knell 2016 and Langford ed. 2017. 12 For example, Pippin 2014, 64. He is commenting on Michael Fried’s and T.J. Clark’s writing on Édouard Manet, among other related topics. 13 Wilk ed. 2006. 14 Mercer ed. 2005. 15 Chotpradit et al. 2018. 16 Williams 1989 and Smith 1998. 17 Carrier sketched a broad framework for this approach in his 2008. The 2008 CIHA conference was devoted to it, see Anderson 2009. Anthologies include: Sheriff ed. 2010; and Rycroft ed. 2013. The online journal Atl@s Bulletin is devoted to detailed studies of “transnationality” in art; ARTMargins to the critical, postcolonial studies that are driving the multiple modernities project most effectively. 18 Butler and Donaldson 2012 and their essay 2017. The first essay responds to my 1974, the second to my 2017.

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Prologue  21 9 Enwezor 2009, 25–​40. See also Augé 1992/​1995. 1 20 Bourriaud 2009, 12. 21 Doyle and Winkeil eds. 2005; Wolleager and Eatough eds. 2012. For the visual arts, see, Bydler 2004; Weibel and Buddenseig eds. 2007; Zijlmans and van Damme eds. 2008; Belting and Buddenseig eds. 2009 and Belting, Buddenseig and Weibel eds. 2013. 22 Elias and Moraru eds. 2015. 23 Spivak 2003. 24 See Stanford Friedman 2010 and her 2015. 25 Knell 2019, 31. Knell is careful to emphasize that he is mapping the “constructions” of modernism by museum curators, not the currents within art practice itself. The convergence between these two kinds of construction grew during the late modern period, and it is a feature of contemporary art. Knell’s is the essay closest to mine as an effort to track these historiographic issues, and their current configuration. 26 See “Remodernizing Manhattan,” ­chapter 1 in Smith 2009. 27 The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-​ MAP) project, initiated in 2009, brings scholars, artists and curators together with MoMA staff, see www.moma.org/​ research-​and-​learning/​international-​program/​global-​research. Eight volumes have been published to date in the Primary Documents series. They are Art and Theory in Post-​1989 Central and Eastern Europe (2002); Argentine Art of the 1960s (2004); Modern Swedish Design: Three Foundational Texts (2008); Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art 1912–​1974 (2008); Contemporary Chinese Art (2010); From Postwar to Postmodern:  Art in Japan 1945–​1989 (2013); the writings of Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa (2016); and Modern Art in the Arab World (2018). 28 As argued persuasively by Bishop 2013. 29 Smith 2019. 30 Smith 2010, 366–​83. 31 Smith 2012 maps out these currents in its structure and each chapter. Further thoughts on their relationships to the current of contemporary geopolitics and world thinking may be found in Smith 2016.

Bibliography Anderson, Jaynie. 2009. Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. Arnason, H.H. 2012. History of Modern Art. 7th edition. Updated by Elizabeth C. Mansfield. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Augé, Marc. 1992/​1995. Non-​Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Paris/​London: Editions du Seuil/​Verso. Ballantyne, Emily, Marta Dvořák, and Dean Irvine eds. 2016. Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost Generations. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Beecham, Amanda, Robin Mackay, and James Wiltgen eds. 2017. Cold War/​Cold World. Urbanomic: Falmouth. Belting, Hans and Andrea Buddenseig eds. 2009. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddenseig, and Peter Weibel eds. 2013. The Global Contemporary: The Rise of New Art Worlds after 1989. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for ZKM, Karlsruhe. Bishop, Claire. 2013. Radical Museology, Or, What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Keonig Books. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2009. “Altermodern.” In Altermodern: Tate Triennial. Edited by Nicolas Bourriaud. London: Tate Publishing. Butler, Rex and A.S. Donaldson. 2017. “Was Australian Art Ever Provincial?” ArtMargins 6, no. 1, February: 6–​32. https://​artmargins.com/​was-​australian-​art-​ever-​provincial/​.

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22  Terry Smith _​_​_​_​. 2012. “Against Provincialism: Australian-​American Connections 1900–​2000.” Journal of Australian Studies 36, no. 3: 291–​307. Bydler, Charlotte. 2004. Global Artworld Inc.:  On the Globalization of Contemporary Art. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Carrier, David. 2008. A World Art History and Its Objects. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Chotpradit, Thanavai et  al. 2018. “Terminologies of ‘Modern’ and ‘Contemporary’ ‘Art’ in South Asia’s Vernacular Languages: Indonesian, Javanese, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Myanmar/​ Burmese, Tagalog/​Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese,” Southeast of Now, 2, no. 2, October: 65–​195. Dadi, Ifitkhar. 2010. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South East Asia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkeil eds. 2005. Geomodernisms:  Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eisenstadt, S.N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities,” Deadalus, 129, no. 1: 1–​29. Elias, Amy J. and Christian Moraru eds. 2015. The Planetary Turn:  Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-​First Century. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Enwezor, Okwui. 2009. “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence.” In Altermodern:  Tate Triennial. Edited by Nicolas Bourriaud. London: Tate Publishing: 25–​40. Erjavec, Ales and Tyrus Miller eds. 2014. “Rethinking Modernism and Modernity,” Filozofski Vestnik, XXXV, no. 2: 271–​319. Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-​Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, David Joselit eds. 2016. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, 3rd ed. London: Thames & Hudson. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar ed. 2001. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Joyeux-​ Prunel, Béatrice. 2015. “Provincializing Paris. The Center-​ Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in the Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches,” ARTL@S Bulletin, 4, no. 1, Spring: 41–​62. Kantor, Sybil. 2003. Alfred H. Barr Jr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Knell, Simon. 2019. “Modernisms:  Curating Art’s Past in the Global Present.” In The Contemporary Museum:  Shaping Museums for the Global Now. Edited by Simon Knell, 13–​36. London: Routledge. _​_​_​_​_​. National Galleries: The Art of Making Nations. London: Routledge, 2016. Langford, Martha ed. 2017. Narratives Unfolding:  National Art Histories in an Unfinished World. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-​Queens University Press. Mercer, Kobena ed. 2005.Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for InIVA. Meyer, Richard. 2013. What Was Contemporary Art? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Okeke-​Agulu, Chika. 2014. Postcolonial Modernism:  Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-​ Century Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All:  Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Pippin, Robert B. 2014. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rees, A.L. and Frances Borzello eds. 1986. The New Art History. London: Camden Press. Rycroft, Daniel J. ed. 2013. World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence. Farnham: Ashgate. Sandler, Irving. 1970. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. New York: Praeger.

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Prologue  23 Sheriff, Mary D. ed. 2010. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Smith, Bernard. 1998. Modernism’s Histories:  A Study in Twentieth Century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Terry. 2019. Art to Come:  Histories of Contemporary Art. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. _​ _​ _​ _​ _​ . 2017. “The Provincialism Problem Then and Now.” ARTMargins, vol. 6, no. 1, February: 6–​32. _​_​_​_​_​. 2016. The Contemporary Composition. Berlin: Sternberg. _​_​_​_​_​. 2012. Contemporary Art: World Currents. London: Laurence King, 2011; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/​Prentice Hall. _​_​_​_​_​. 2010. “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” The Art Bulletin, XCII, no. 4, December: 366–​83. _​_​_​_​_​. 2009. What is Contemporary Art? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 1996. “Modernism” and “Modernity.” In Dictionary of Art. Edited by Jane Turner. London: Macmillan. doi: https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​gao/​9781884446054.article.T058785. _​_​_​_​_​. 1974. “The Provincialism Problem.” Artforum, XII, no. 1, September: 54–​9. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. The Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Stanford Friedman, Susan. 2015. Planetary Modernisms:  Provocation on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press. _​_​_​_​. 2010. “Planetarity:  Musing Modernist Studies,” Modernism/​modernity, 17, no. 3, September: 471–​99. _​_​_​_​. 2001. “Definitional Excursions:  The Meanings of Modern/​Modernity/​Modernism,” Modernism/​Modernity, 8. no. 3, September: 495–​513. Terraroli, Valerio et  al. 2008. The Birth of Contemporary Art, 1946–​1968, The Art of the Twentieth Century, volume III. Milan: Skira. Tiampo, Ming. 2010. Gutai: Decentering Modernism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tomii, Reiko. 2016. Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. _​_​_​_​. 2009. “‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond.” Japan Review, no. 21: 123–​47. Wagner, Anne M. 2012. A House Divided: American Art since 1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Weibel, Peter and Andrea Buddenseig eds. 2007. Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Wilk, Christopher ed. 2006. Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–​1939. London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Williams, Raymond. 1989. The Politics of Modernism. London: Verso. Wolleager, Mark and Matt Eatough eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zijlmans, Kitty and Wilfred van Damme eds. 2008. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz.

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PART 1

Crossings and Encounters: Retracing Artists’ Itineraries

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2  Expression for All Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and the Art of Cobra Karen Kurczynski

The Cobra group existed officially from 1948 to 1951, but its artistic impact lasted much longer. The movement began in Paris in November, 1948, when Belgian poets Christian Dotremont and Joseph Noiret, Danish artist Asger Jorn and the three Dutch painters Constant, Corneille and Karel Appel signed a short manifesto rejecting the theoretical polemics of the Revolutionary Surrealist group. Its manifesto declares “an organic experimental collaboration that rejects all sterile and dogmatic theories.”1 This was an open-​ended call for a transnational movement dedicated to the renewal of collective experimentation after the violent nationalism and fragmentation of World War II. Cobra never had a membership roster, and over 40 artists were affiliated with its various manifestations; accounts of the movement, however, have focused narrowly on its male European founders, and thus limited our understanding of the movement’s significance. Cobra artwork expressively transforms popular and mythic imagery through an emphasis on the material aspects of art –​often in a direct or brutal way. Typical Cobra paintings depict animal motifs in a manner both aggressive and childlike, addressing not just the traumatic experience of World War II, but also the ongoing nature of political violence during the Cold War and colonial independence movements. The childlike animals of Cobra art express both the brutality of human society, on the one hand, and exuberance and play on the other, as a conscious choice to look toward a new start. Cobra paintings by Constant, Appel or Jorn often appear “savage,” although no specific subject is more than suggested in their semi-​abstract flux. Even as they respond to earlier modernist primitivism in the work of artists like Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, they resist the specific fetishization of people from other cultures. Cobra proposed that all art be recognized as popular art. They admired non-​ Western art along with ancient art from Europe as outsider creations that stood for a spontaneous, anonymous expression. Their statements, writings and art works claimed populism, artistic experimentation and spontaneous expression as forms of resistance to political power and technocratic ideology. The experience of artists affiliated with Cobra but often overlooked in its histories, Sonja Ferlov (Danish), Ernest Mancoba (South African) and Shinkichi Tajiri (American), relativizes those claims. Their stories have been overshadowed by the discussion of the Cobra founders whose artistic provocations conformed to common expectations of European avant-​ garde strategies aligned with aggressive tactics culturally coded as masculine. The apparent primitivism of art works by the “men artists” of Cobra (a term that sounds deliberately awkward as a riposte to the normalized discussion of “women artists”) is

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28  Karen Kurczynski complicated by the counter-​cultural critique implicit in works that mobilized brutality as a comment on Western, not other cultures. More important for this discussion, non-​ Western and women artists within the movement were not recognized for the same level of cultural critique or resistance to dominant values. Their own investigations of non-​Western art were coded differently, as explorations of a shared cultural heritage rather than exoticized primitivism. Their works propose a minoritarian and cosmopolitan humanist approach that complements the Cobra founders’ emphasis on savagery to produce a richer understanding of the movement’s artistic perspectives. Cobra art rejects skill in favor of spontaneity and exuberance as a dialectical response to the violence and inhumanity of an inequitable society. The Cobra artists sought in their own work what Sonja Ferlov called an “alment gældende udtryk,” literally a “generally applicable expression” or just, “expression for all.” Ferlov notes that such expression is always precarious: “there will always be critics who make it into a special individual and fantastic expression instead of an expression for all.”2 Cobra declared art to be inclusive rather than exclusive, common rather than elite, and intuitive rather than rational. It attempted to produce a personable expression rather than a personal expression, meaning one potentially open to anyone, not just privileged or talented individuals, based on a simple transformation of materials into symbolic forms. Its expressions of these forms relate to people’s experience as part of a community rather than the work of individuals set apart. The Mancobas upheld an abstract, idealized concept of collective humanity in repeatedly quoting the Xhosa saying “Umuntu ngu’ muntu nga ‘banye abantu,” or “a person is a person through and because of other people.”3 The three artists addressed here share direct experiences of political incarceration and racism. Their perceptions of social inhumanity were formed by their own experiences of war, racism and occupation. Ferlov’s views were shaped by her experience as a woman artist married to a black South African artist in a time when it still had to be argued that she, too, was an artist and he, too, was a man. They initially channeled these experiences into expressions of vulnerability and outrage. Later, all three artists developed a more potentially universal expression of global humanity based not on anything innate, but rather on parallel experiences of overcoming adversity. While the Cobra founders’ anti-​humanist art works reveal the heroes to be brutes, these artists replace heroes with survivors. All three artists have been tokenized in historical Cobra exhibitions.4 Mancoba’s work has recently sparked global interest amid fervent efforts to decolonize art history as a discipline.5 Ferlov has been recognized in Danish art history but remains almost completely unknown abroad.6 The recent interest in Mancoba demonstrates that brilliant outsiders are still understood to be characteristically male. Discussions still tend to focus on identifying the movement’s stars, even though the artists were explicitly against such an approach. They championed the minoritarian, inherently political perspective of people ignored or dismissed in the dominant, purportedly apolitical but effectively masculine and Euro-​American, liberal humanist discourse of the 1950s.

Primitivism Mancoba’s marginalization in the Cobra movement was overdetermined by the colonialist assumptions underlying modernist primitivism, which prevented many white

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  29 Europeans from viewing the full significance of a black artist’s contributions at the time. As Mancoba took up primitivism as an artistic method, he confronted the opposition inscribed in Western culture between primitivism and humanism. The two terms were historically defined in opposition to each other, but their authority was fading in the face of global independence movements that made clear the limitations of both discourses as Eurocentric constructs.7 Cobra’s populism suggests a critique of colonialism, but its responses to the racial politics of primitivism varied widely. Some artists –​like Karel Appel, who declared his desire to be “more primitive than Picasso”8 –​uncritically appropriated expressive forms they considered more “authentic,” especially children’s and outsider art. The Danish artists of the pre-​Cobra group Linien (1934–​9), however, critiqued primitivism already in the 1930s. Ferlov was the first in her circle to relocate to Paris from Denmark in 1936, moving into a studio next to Alberto Giacometti. She and the Danish artists who visited her, along with Mancoba who arrived in Paris in 1938, were enthusiastic about the more culturally balanced ethnographic displays at the newly opened Musée de l’Homme.9 The Danish artists explicitly rejected the racist frameworks taking over Europe at the time, founding the journal Helhesten in 1941 as a “magazine for degenerate art” in defiance of Nazi ideology.10 They proposed that “Europe no longer appears as the highest and only [culture], since we are still learning new things about other and wholly different cultures.”11 The war and occupation –​by a Fascist regime that assumed the Danes were just like them –​inspired in these artists an important recognition of the brutality at the heart of European culture. Mancoba was born in South Africa just before the institutionalization of Apartheid. For a black, ethnically Fengu artist coming of age in 1920s South Africa, the only available path to studying art was at a segregated Anglican teacher’s college, where he learned wood carving. His renowned African Madonna from 1929 presents a postcolonial Christian icon: a figure of the Virgin based on a black model and carved out of indigenous yellowwood.12 Mancoba would refuse the offer of a position carving “native art” for tourists. He realized that his future was limited in his home country, where Apartheid would become official a decade later.13 Mancoba’s understanding of west African art and masks came just as it did for the other Cobra artists, through a European lens. Enthused by his reading of Paul Guillaume and Thomas Munro’s 1926 book Primitive Negro Sculpture, he went to Europe. In Paris, he developed a new approach to abstract sculpture that synthesized modernism and primitivism, fusing the methods of Brancusi, Arp and Giacometti with West and Central African inspirations he saw at the British Museum and then at the Musée de l’Homme. Artistically he reached a major breakthrough; but socially, he had reached an impasse. He recalls: “Only a few were ready to draw the consequences of their admiration for African art, in the more general consideration of the one who made them:  the African man.”14 He found authentic dialogue difficult, apart from a few new friends who also spoke English. These were the Danish Linien artists. Through ceramist Christian Poulsen, he met Ferlov and painter Ejler Bille, who he later describes as a “brother in spirit.”15 When the war broke out, Ferlov and Mancoba tried to return to Denmark together, but the Danish government refused to allow Mancoba to enter the country.16 Ferlov returned home briefly, but soon went back to occupied Paris to marry Mancoba while he was interned in a camp. He was placed there as an enemy non-​combatant, since Britain controlled South Africa at the time. After the war, they went to Denmark

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30  Karen Kurczynski

Figure 2.1 Ernest Mancoba: Composition, 1940. Oil on canvas. 59 x 50 cm (23.2 x 19.7 in). Collection Wendy Fisher, A4 Foundation, Cape Town.

together and joined the Høst exhibition society, a mixed group with whom the former Linien artists showed. They were part of Høst when the Dutch artists of the newly formed Cobra group first exhibited alongside the Danes in 1948, but within a year they left the movement to live an isolated life outside Paris. The lack of artistic solidarity in Høst, which led the group to dissolve in 1949, was one reason the Mancobas left Denmark. Mancoba’s early Composition of 1940 (see Figure 2.1), painted in Paris soon after he met the Danish artists, recalls both modern painting and traditional African art that he encountered in European collections:  Kuba masks from Congo, Kota reliquaries from Gabon and Xhosa beadwork from South Africa.17 Rasheed Araeen argues that this painting exemplifies the significant contribution of African modernism in pushing the global discourse of modernism in new directions.18 He observes in it the innovations of expressionist brushwork combined with abstract references to geometric symmetries inspired by African traditions. He calls it an “allover” compo­ sition that collapses pictorial space into a synthetic, optical field seven years before the breakthrough of Abstract Expressionism. Araeen deliberately attempts to frame the painting as ahead of Abstract Expressionism in the grand narrative of modernism. Equally fascinating, however, are the new and multiple lineages of modernism and contemporaneity that it opens up. It doesn’t so much predate the American movement, in fact, as parallel it with a different emphasis. It is comparable, for example, to Mark Rothko’s early work in his “mythmaking” phase, but without Rothko’s classical references.19 Mancoba’s painting shares Rothko’s emphasis on pattern and symmetry referencing traditional modes of

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  31 artmaking, as well as the active questioning of mythic narratives. Each artist expresses ambivalence toward a shared cultural heritage. Mancoba’s composition boldly responds to African art, prying open the social implications of traditional Congolese masks in particular as totems of collective identity. His aggressively flattened, vividly colored composition makes the mask into a subjective expression, questioning the very possibility of art’s symbolizing any kind of shared cultural identity. Instead, the identity it proposes is cosmopolitan and transnational, composed of a synthesis of diverse African and European references. Rather than a single collective identity, it presents real cultural unity as artificial if not foreclosed, along the lines of Jean-​Luc Nancy’s description of the “inoperative community.”20 This search for a now-​inaccessible idea of community becomes especially politically charged for artists of color attempting to establish recognition for their own precarious or marginalized communities. Mancoba’s painting is indebted not just to African art, but also to the abstract painting of Ferlov and her Linien colleagues, which aspired more toward a revisionist humanism than primitivism, attempting to create a basic or “common” (almen) human expression through spontaneous abstract form. Ferlov was a pioneer of the Linien movement that predated Cobra and introduced Surrealism and organic abstraction to modern Danish art. Her paintings and drawings from the 1930s depict abstract marks and symbolic shapes in vivid colors, in dialogue with Mancoba’s 1940 Composition, possibly his first expressive oil painting. His Composition links modern and traditional, African and European modernist signifiers, to suggest transnational human connections. Cobra proposed multiple forms of minoritarian or “personable expression” as a response to the dominant liberal humanism of critics like André Malraux, who framed art from the colonized world as individual expression based on western ideas in his “museum without walls.”21 Cobra art foregrounds instead a blunt or raw, spontaneous and expressive interpretation of symbolic forms. It uses symbols and methods once dismissed as “primitive,” but now reframed as basic human expressions, their very bluntness or rawness a form of resistance to their appropriation or recolonization by the critics and institutions of modern art. The art of Ferlov and Mancoba presents a new claim made in solidarity with colonized peoples denied access to Western notions of universal subjecthood. Their search for a humanist abstraction at once timeless and postcolonial contradicted the anti-​humanist emphasis on the savage and animal among Cobra artists like Appel, Constant and Jorn, whose brutal images instead attack colonialist notions of universal subjectivity embodied in purely abstract gestural painting. Yet both tactics replace the colonialist framework of humanism with a counter-​discourse. Because the Cobra artists held divergent perspectives toward the antagonistic ideologies of primitivism and humanism, Cobra is a key movement in registering their breakdown in the period of decolonization. After World War II, as colonial subjects demanded independence, non-​ Western art was increasingly collected and studied in Europe, and the idea of primitivism began to lose its appeal. Europeans began to recognize Western humanism as a colonialist idea: “Our old humanism believed that its values were universal. But this does not distinguish it from other cultural myths.”22 The independence movements in Africa and Southeast Asia combined with primitivism’s attack on Western hegemony led to a greater recognition of non-​Western cultural production on its own terms in the 1950s. In the wake of the particularly

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32  Karen Kurczynski violent Algerian war of independence from France (1954–​ 62), philosopher Paul Ricoeur recognized the possibility “that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others.”23 The colonialist ideology of humanism, as an individualist discourse founded on the classical heritage and a false sense of universalism, was outmoded, and global modernism opened the way toward more complex, multicentric, minoritarian and cosmopolitan practices.

Minoritarian Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism –​the ancient Greek idea that people should be viewed outside of national or cultural divisions as “citizens of the world” (kosmopolitês)  –​has been associated with privileged European intellectuals since the age of Enlightenment.24 The work of Ferlov and Mancoba suggests a revisionist or “minoritarian cosmopolitanism,” which foregrounds connections among various cultures while recognizing the colonial histories of violence that result in the subjugation of certain peoples.25 Their art work is minoritarian in its celebration of embattled identities and values, cosmopolitan in that it transforms traditional motifs from cultures to which the artists felt personally connected, both including and beyond their own national origins. Ferlov’s enigmatic abstract sculpture conveys “expression for all” by means of organic abstract forms spontaneously developed but referencing their cosmopolitan inspirations, in a restrained aesthetic that resists the aggressively masculine expression of the more well-​known Cobra artists. Growing up in Copenhagen, she had studied African and Oceanic art extensively in the home of collector Carl Kjersmeier, a family friend, and she shared Mancoba’s passion for traditional African art.26 Her early sculpture Bird with Young of 1935 (see Figure 2.2) was inspired by a Baga bird mask in the Kjersmeiers’ apartment. Ferlov radically abstracts the image of the waterbird with two baby birds on its shoulders into a dramatic pairing of parent and chick, locked compositionally together. Its striking, pointed forms face off against each other, imbued with weaponlike power.27 The sculpture comments on the potential for brutality within us all. In dialogue with the investigation of heterosexual relationships and power in her friend Giacometti’s sculpture at the time, she depicts a power struggle between parent and child  –​a topic rarely recognized by male artists of her generation. Ferlov’s pairing suggests a relationship not only of potential compassion and support, signaled in the mirrored poses, but also mutual aggression and struggle. The composition recalls the work of Melanie Klein, whose psychoanalytic interpretations describe the inherent aggressions of mother-​child relationships in potentially feminist ways.28 Ferlov’s abstraction of the African nurturing bird sculpture into a mirrored dyad of parent and child suggests the potentially antagonistic relationship between mother and daughter, which Sigmund Freud famously overlooked and Klein actively investigated. At the same time, Ferlov’s sculpture does not identify the parent’s gender, defying traditional gender assumptions. Ferlov’s early sculpture Owl from 1936 was reproduced by Jorn in the first issue of the Cobra journal in 1949. The sculpture began as a spontaneous transformation of material into a symbolic image. Starting with an abstract bottle form, she recalls, “then I  made this sharp wing jutting out, it was so wonderfully aggressive.”29 The formal aggression was a breakthrough, I would argue, because it cuts through any potential associations with feminine beauty in the “bottle” form. Only by appropriating the masculine language of avant-​garde aggression could Ferlov push her work

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  33

Figure 2.2 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Fugl med unge (Bird with Young), 1935. Plaster, h: 53 cm. Private collection. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg.

toward a more universal abstract humanism –​just as Jorn and Constant developed their own expressions by transforming the traditionally feminine discourses of affect, intuition and kitsch. The male Cobra artists, in the tradition of historical Expressionism, incorporated affect and intuition in order to develop spontaneous and brutal expressions that critique the masculine norms of instrumental reason. Ferlov’s work suggests that for a female sculptor to be taken seriously it was necessary to do the opposite: to modulate the expressive organic aesthetic with elements of clarity, strength and impermeability. As the war shut down artistic experimentation across Europe, Ferlov would move away from the aggression of her 1930s work toward something more monumental and timeless (see Figure  2.3). Her solid sculptures and masks seem almost threatening, manifesting a “resistance and life’s will.”30 Between the geometric and the biomorphic, her forms seem to call us from ages past, so that we might remember parts of ourselves we may have forgotten. “The artist interprets the eternal reality of human nature,” Ferlov writes, “which once sang but no longer expresses the voice of the whole people, reduced to silence by our individualistic and materialistic society.”31 Primitivist in its quest for authentic expression through cultural forms that persist over the centuries, her work seeks to uncover hidden dimensions of human connection, even as it rejects the racist characterization of colonized people. Ferlov represents the human through gender-​neutral forms, using rectilinear contours that recall African carved headrests as well as Mexican stone sculptures. Dotremont aptly describes the “powerful, dramatic forces […] at work underneath the smooth, precise, and perfect surfaces” of Ferlov’s sculpture.32 He captures

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Figure 2.3 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Maske: Krigens udbrud (Mask: Outbreak of War), 1939. Plaster, 36.5 x 28.5 x 13.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg.

an internal contradiction that is crucial in understanding her work. Her sculpture combines symbolic abstract shapes inspired by modernist, west African or pre-​ Columbian art with natural processes. She fuses her forms into a subtly expressive synthesis, rather than blasting them apart in a burst of expressionist energy, like Jorn and Appel. In its contradictory evocation of strength and intimacy, her sculpture suggests a distinctly gendered response to the masculinist aggression of modernist primitivism. After the war, Ferlov and Mancoba returned to Denmark and exhibited with Høst. Although they made attempts to connect to other artists, Ferlov and Mancoba never found their place socially or artistically in postwar Denmark. By all accounts they isolated themselves, partly in response to the isolation they experienced as an interracial couple. Mancoba recalls a “silent opposition” to his presence in Høst and his relationship to Ferlov, and a feeling that he was “in their eye, some sort of ‘invisible man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist.”33 Mancoba felt at the time that the European artists did not take him seriously because they did not know what to make of a subject considered secondary in his own country. As Chika Okeke observes, “modern artistic subjectivity is linked to political independence.”34 No political state existed at that time, however, that would regard the two artists as equals, the way they saw themselves. The Høst group split up in 1949 over arguments among representational and abstract artists, while the Cobra founders continually argued among themselves. While not excluded from Cobra, neither did the Mancobas relate to the movement’s

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  35 combative aesthetic politics. They returned permanently to France in 1952, living in isolation for nine years with their son Wonga (1946–​2015). The intimacy of the family seems to have become for them a microcosm of the human connection they sought to express in their art. Mancoba emphasizes that it was his and Ferlov’s “very conception of mankind and of art that not only contributed to our isolation from some in the group, but that invalidated us in the appreciation of the official art world.”35 Not until curator Troels Andersen approached Ferlov in the early 1960s did they start to exhibit their work again. Ferlov’s and Mancoba’s work explored the possibilities of symbolic abstraction to convey a broad, humane expression, culminating for Mancoba in the abstract images of Ancestors he produced from the 1950s until his death in 2002. Inspired by west African Kota reliquaries and other traditional figures, these were a visual manifestation of Mancoba’s claim that “my people are the people of the whole world.”36 Mancoba was affiliated with the Pan-​African movement in Paris, writing in 1953: “The world has become more and more of a single entity, to such an extent that we have to reconsider all our views and opinions on racial distinctions because they have become obsolete and dangerous.”37 Ferlov later proclaims that “What really matters is not the sculptures, but the spirit of fellowship which one tries to express.”38 These views convey the artists’ dedication of their life and work to ideals of generosity and collegiality, in a framework of minoritarian and cosmopolitan humanism.

Feminist Humanism Ferlov’s later sculptures Man and Woman from 1958 are often confused by critics because their abstract forms are unexpected in traditional gender terms: the female figure stands on two legs, while an elongated triangle roots the male figure to its base.39 One wonders if Ferlov was responding directly to Giacometti’s rigid gender binary in his own later figures, where the men walk and the women rigidly stand. In both cases, a textured surface suggests a quietly expressive aesthetic, a kind of “personable expression.” Yet where Giacometti’s sculptures were framed in Existentialist terms as tragic images of wounded humanity, Ferlov’s are more abstract, modest, odd-​looking partially-​formed beings. Made of symbolic forms that swoop out and curve inward, they seem to reach and respond calmly to the world. Ferlov’s sculpture combines expression with restraint in what could be termed a feminist humanism. Only such an oxymoron –​a critical revision of humanism as a discourse, a parallel idea to “minoritarian humanism”  –​captures the tensions inherent within it. These tensions only become apparent upon consideration not only of the sculptures’ final form but also of the artist’s experiences and the critical discourse surrounding both. The bronze sculpture The Little Careful One from 1951 (see Figure 2.4) presents an abstract head tucked slightly toward one shoulder, with a textured surface and a compact solidity. Small bits of clay cover the surface like “scales” in a rhythmic pattern. These traces of Ferlov’s presence appear restrained, recalling the aged stone surfaces and indented eyes of the Aztec sculptures she admired at the Musée de l’Homme.40 The sculpture’s solidity and diminutive monumentality suggests an ancient and mysterious presence as much as a contingent subjectivity. The work’s Danish title Den lille nænsomme was mistranslated as “Sweet Little Girl” in the 2008 Cobra exhibition in Brussels, imposing a gendered reading on the work not inherent to either its form or its original gender-​neutral title. The

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36  Karen Kurczynski

Figure 2.4 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Den lille nænsomme (The Little Careful One), 1951. Plaster, 32 x 26.5 x 25.5 cm. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Anders Sune Berg.

mistranslation is typical of discussions of women artists. Modern criticism tends to frame their explorations of the childlike and the spontaneous as manifesting qualities of the childish and the inexperienced, qualities that become implicitly attached to the artist. The gender-​neutral title in Danish is no more suggestive of femininity in particular than that of Jorn’s 1957 painting Le timide orgueilleux, or Timid Proud One, a painting that may also depict a little girl, but which Guy Atkins describes as a “monolithic, arrogant, Mussolini-​like face [with] a startling simplicity and monumentality.”41 Such recognition of the substance and individuality of the depicted figure was not accorded to Ferlov’s work in Brussels. Instead of the gentleness of conventional femininity, she actually proposes something more radical: gentleness or carefulness as a common human value, one implicitly threatened by contemporary social conditions. The intimacy and mute solemnity of her sculpture, combined with Ferlov’s personal reticence and reluctance to exhibit, and compounded by a notable gender bias in her international reception, all contribute to her relative invisibility outside of Denmark. Ferlov proposes an intimate sympathy with human complexity and frailty in the face of the political aggressions of the Cold War. This resistance to overpowering or aggressive aesthetics in favor of values of generosity and solidarity was a profound feminist statement in the 1950s, equivalent to that made by other women artists internationally. Lee Krasner’s work was equally dismissed by critics for its “stress on discretion and restraint, quietude and harmony.”42 Inasmuch as these are alternative values that reject masculine power and aggression, they make the works feminist regardless of the artist’s identifications. In Denmark, Ferlov was described

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  37 as a key player in the Danish avant-​garde by fellow artists as well as male critics, in striking contrast to her minimal reception abroad.43 Danish critics praised her work’s “strength,” “vitality” and “clarity.”44 Yet in international histories of Cobra, her work is discussed in passing if at all.45 At the same time, male artists whose work conveys a comparable restraint and profound, arguably feminist human sympathy through abstract form, such as Cobra artist Eugène Brands, are praised rather than dismissed for these qualities. It seems that the impact of gender was as decisive as the politics of race for Mancoba in keeping the two artists on the margins. In contrast to the contentious energy commonly associated with Cobra, Ferlov’s work could be described as “slow sculpture.” The very impersonal aspects that made the work more “universally” expressive to Ferlov and Mancoba made it appear a less spectacular political outcry against the inhumanity of the war and its aftermath to others. It is in part because of the more aggressive and outspoken artists who defined the movement that Ferlov and Mancoba have been marginalized in discussions of Cobra. Yet to dismiss the role of Ferlov would not only limit our understanding of Cobra, but also adhere to a larger pattern of marginalization of women artists in the postwar period, when the revival of expressive abstraction in both Europe and the United States was so frequently described in terms of masculine aggression.

Resistance to Violence Shinkichi Tajiri’s sculpture was foregrounded in the two key Cobra exhibitions in Amsterdam in 1949 and Liège in 1951, but his work has not been examined for the way it, too, exemplifies Cobra’s countercultural and postcolonial critique. As the sole Asian and American artist in the movement, he is often discussed in isolation. Tajiri’s totemic sculptures convey a pacifism resulting from his own experiences of political brutality. His family was interned in a camp for Japanese Americans in Arizona during the war, so he entered a segregated United States army unit in order to escape imprisonment by his own government. Returning home after the war, he faced continuing racism at the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned to Paris, where he developed a new, energetic sculpture improvised from scrap metal, in addition to experimental films and other projects. As with Ferlov and Mancoba, Cobra was only a brief phase of his long career. Tajiri’s sculpture appears typically Cobra in its experimental and aggressive aesthetic. His Cobra-​period work reflects the modernist abstraction he studied in the studio of Ossip Zadkine in Paris, but also harrowing memories of internment and war. He had been wounded in battle in 1944 and was later assigned to sketch displaced persons from the German concentration camps. Asked what he took away from his military service, he responded: “Sense of survival and desire for peace.”46 His process making “one-​day sculptures” of scrap metal on the banks of the Seine in 1949 recalls children playing in the wartime ruins. These works embody Cobra’s interest in the spontaneous transformation of materials into symbolic forms, their animalistic features often symbolic of adult aggressions. They have a post-​apocalyptic quality referencing not only Tajiri’s own experiences as a soldier, but his sympathy with the Japanese victims of the United States atomic bombs. Tajiri’s sculpture Prisoner (see Figure  2.5), related to his Warrior and Sentinel sculptures, combines insectoid anatomy and biomorphic forms with parts that evoke both modern weapons and samurai armor. These works suggest both masculine

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Figure 2.5 Shinkichi Tajiri, Prisoner, 1950–​51. Iron, height: 51 x 19 x 25 cm. Collection Giotta and Ryu Tajiri. Photo ©Egon Notermans. ©Pictoright, The Netherlands.

aggression and wounded, precarious figures and like Ferlov’s sculpture, they express an emotional reserve related to their lack of faces and heads. They stand as anonymous sentinels, ill-​equipped to protect the citizens they presumably serve. The prisoner is a universal image, the victim of unnamed political violence, but also a reference to Tajiri’s own internment. Tajiri, whose lineage dates back to a samurai clan, sets the abstract shapes and colors of Japanese armor in dialogue with technological, organic, and fragmentary found forms. These sculptures present a typically Cobra expressive transformation of popular and traditional imagery, as well as the modern military imagery of guns and barbed wire. They become an abstract exorcism of the experience of war and excoriation of a society that continues to believe in heroes. Tajiri writes, “By giving form to these nightmares and demons I  have hoped to rid myself of their constant presence.”47 Christian Dotremont observes that, “Tajiri’s aggression is at once the expression of our age –​[…] that era of which Hiroshima was one of the major events –​and, at the same time, a response to that age.”48 Tajiri’s art parallels Jorn and Constant’s attempts to symbolize for a broad audience the trauma of war but also human resilience, in an aggressive but also playful aesthetic. Tajiri critiques rational ideas of progress, technology, heroism, and nationalism by animating scrap materials in forms resembling wounded creatures or toy soldiers, in his own form of minoritarian cosmopolitan expression. Tajiri became dissatisfied when the public misread his “warriors” as glorifications of violence, so in the 1960s he turned to a series of “knot” sculptures. The knots present an open-​ended, poetic metaphor, not unlike the later abstractions of Ferlov

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  39 and Mancoba, except more able to be successfully translated into sleek monumental forms symbolic of public ideals of universal humanism.49 All three artists moved from early, more aggressive abstractions responding to the inhumanity of racism, internment, war and colonialism to a broader, multifaceted, but still personal expression. Tajiri produced more versatile work and he was more strategic about exhibiting it than the Mancobas. He was also more extroverted, leading a productive artistic life in the Netherlands with his wife, Dutch sculptor Ferdi. It may be that his experiences as an American GI who rejected American politics led Europeans to regard him with a certain respect. Unlike that of Mancoba, his presence did not threaten the colonialist order or call to mind the extreme challenges that the African independence movements brought to European identity. Reconsidering Ferlov and Mancoba alongside Tajiri in relation to Cobra foregrounds the movement’s openness to diverse aesthetic perspectives. As Constant wrote to Jorn in 1951, “The world is tired of misery and war. All of that must change to create the atmosphere in which a universal style can come into being.” Constant was willing to work with all artists who shared “a positive position towards humanity.”50 Unfortunately at that point, the definition of humanity, even in the avant-​garde, did not unequivocally include Mancoba. As Wonga Mancoba later observes to his father: “You tried to make these young Europeans aware that humanity is not only the north, it is also the south.”51 Only a minoritarian viewpoint “from the South” could speak sympathetically for –​or rather, with –​the rest of humanity, but the North could not recognize it as universal. That is, until now –​when few still believe in the possibility of universality at all. For these artists marginalized by patriarchal and Eurocentric narratives, Rasheed Araeen argues that it is not enough to blame the West for their marginalization. “What we need,” he writes, “is a body of new philosophical ideas capable of not only exposing and confronting the inhumanity of Eurocentric vision, but which can also present a new interpretation of modernity so that it becomes a toll for the liberation of humanity, not only in Africa but also universally.”52 To hear Araeen extol the modernist discourse of liberation and universality is striking, as these values have been heavily critiqued in the contemporary period as modernist “grand narratives.” They are often dismissed as meaningless, failed, or coopted by global capitalism. Nevertheless, Araeen’s terminology captures the ideals of the Cobra artists –​and of anyone who believes that another world is possible. The abstract ideas of liberation and universality remain important aspirations, even if we can no longer discuss liberty without also critiquing the radical inhumanity of the ways modern society has denied it to certain subjects. Universality seems an impossible goal, tainted by its colonialist history. And yet, the idea of connecting with people different from ourselves remains a fundamental contribution of art. Ferlov, Mancoba and Tajiri modeled this openness in their personal lives as well as their art. Mancoba’s Ancestor paintings and Ferlov’s and Tajiri’s sculptures approach the universal as subjective responses to particular experiences that have political parallels elsewhere in history. Modern art is recognized for its importance to the degree that it reaches a broad and diverse audience. There may be no such thing as universal significance, but the more audiences respond to art, the more significant it may become. The histories of Ferlov, Mancoba and Tajiri now seem essential to the story of Cobra, as a collective of singular perspectives united only by a fundamental belief in the potential of abstract art to liberate people from social oppression. Like the more

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40  Karen Kurczynski well-​known animalistic examples of Cobra art, Mancoba’s Ancestors and Ferlov’s and Tajiri’s sculptural totems speak to both popular and intellectual, majority and minority audiences, to children and to adults. The recognition of their relationship to Cobra broadens the works’ audience and amplifies their significance. Considering these works in dialogue with each other and with parallel currents of global modernism underscores their resonance as minoritarian humanist interventions. They promote a radical solidarity among people with different experiences of marginalization and oppression –​toward a plurality of oppositional voices rather than a simplistic universalism.

Notes 1 Original French typescript reproduced in Lambert, Cobra, 25. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2 Ferlov Mancoba 2003, 44. 3 Mancoba 2000, 17. 4 Ferlov and Mancoba were presented in Cobra exhibitions starting with the 1966 show that traveled to Louisiana from the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Alison Gingeras consciously foregrounded the work of Ferlov, Mancoba, and Tajiri in the 2015 Cobra exhibition “The Avant-​Garde Won’t Give Up” at Blum & Poe Gallery. 5 Araeen 2005; Smalligan 2010. 6 See also Kurczynski 2019 –​the first Ferlov retrospective to travel to Paris. 7 See Kurczynski and Pezolet 2011. 8 K. Appel, letter to Corneille, 1947 qtd. in Birtwistle 2003, 25–​7. 9 Bille 1939, 117. 10 P.V. Glob, qtd. in Shield 1984, 116. 11 Mathiesen 1941, 82. 12 Miles 1994, 20. 13 Mancoba 2003, 14. 14 Ibid., 18. 15 Mancoba 2000, 17. 16 Andersen 1977, 30. 17 See Thompson ed. 2006, 85; Miles 1994, 24; and Miles 1994 (b), 39. 18 Araeen 2005, 415. 19 For example, Mark Rothko, The Omen of the Eagle, 1942, oil and graphite on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 20 Nancy 1991, 1–​42. 21 Malraux 1967. 22 Girard 1957, 57–​8. 23 Ricoeur 1965, 278. 24 Robbins and Cheah, eds. 1998. 25 Pollock et al. 2000, 582. 26 Barbusse 2003, 73. 27 Ibid. 28 Klein 2002. On the significance of Klein’s theories for feminism, see Sayers 1987. 29 Ferlov qtd. in Andersen 1977, 18. 30 Andersen 1977, 30. 31 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, typed manuscript page in French, undated. Courtesy of the Mancoba Estate. 32 Dotremont 1950, n.p. 33 Mancoba 2003, 20.

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Ferlov, Mancoba, Tajiri and Art of Cobra  41 4 3 35 36 37

Okeke 2001, 29. Mancoba 2003, 20. Thompson, ed. 2006, 13. Mancoba, excerpt of a 1953 letter published in LeMusée Vivant, translated in Thompson, ed. 2006, 54. 38 Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, 1970, translated online at www.museumjorn.dk/​da/​sonja_​ferlov_​ mancoba_​_​100_​aar.asp. 39 Ferlov, Mand and Kvinde, 1958. Bronze, 40 cm and 38 cm tall, respectively. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba Skulpturer, Cat. 32 and 33. 40 See for example the Anthropomorphic Head, 1350–​1521, volcanic stone, 22 x 19 x 25 cm, Musée du Quai Branly (former Musée de l’Homme collections), Paris, accession number 71.1932.62.1. 41 Atkins 1977, 45. 42 Wagner 1989, 55. 43 Dahlmann Olsen 1971, 28. 44 Ibid. 45 Stokvis 2017, 52; Lambert 1983, 29–​30. Michel Ragon and Edouard Jaguer do not discuss Ferlov or Mancoba at all in their writing on Cobra. 46 Tajiri qtd. in Robinson 2015, 75. 47 Tajiri qtd. in Vercauteren 2007, 23. 48 Dotremont, L’arbre et l’arme, 1953, translated in Lambert 1983,143–​6. 49 His fiberglass Friendship Knot of 1972, for example, was installed in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, in 1981. 50 Constant, letter to Jorn, June 1951, qtd. in Hummelink 2002,114. 51 Ernest Mancoba, interview with Wonga Mancoba, 2000, digitized audio tape, band 46 side 2, courtesy of the Mancoba Estate. 52 Araeen 2005, 415.

Bibliography Andersen, Troels. 1979. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. Copenhagen: Borgen. —​—​—​. 1977. Ernest Mancoba: En retrospectiv udstilling. Copenhagen: Kunstforeningen. Araeen, Rasheed. 2005. “Modernity, Modernism, and Africa’s Place in the History of Art of Our Age.” Third Text 19, no. 4, July: 411–​17. Atkins, Guy and Troels Andersen. 1977. Asger Jorn, The Crucial Years, 1954–​1964. London: Lund Humphries. Barbusse, Marianne. 2003. “Sonja Ferlov Mancoba’s African and Pre-​Columbian Sources of Inspiration.” In Sonja Ferlov Mancoba: Sculptures/​Skulpturer. Edited by Anne Christiansen, Folke Kjems and Nino Hobolth, 58–​75. Odense: Fyns Kunstmuseum. Bille, Ejler. 1939. “Nyaabnet afdeling af gammel amerikansk kunst i ‘menneskets museum.’ Trokadero, Paris.” Nyt tidskrift for kunstindustrie 12: 117. Birtwistle, Graham. 2003. “Behind the Primitivism of Cobra.” In Cobra: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. Edited by Peter Shield. London: Hayward Gallery. Dahlmann Olsen, Robert. 1971. Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. Vor Tids Kunst 72. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Dotremont, Christian. 1950. Sonja Ferlov. Cobra Bibliothèque:  “Artistes libres” Series. Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard. Ferlov Mancoba, Sonja. 2003. Ingen Skaber Alene:  Breve 1960–​ 1984. Copenhagen: Anagram. Girard, René. 1957. “Man, Myth, and Malraux.” Yale French Studies 18, Special issue: “Passion and the Intellect, or: Andre Malraux”: 55–​62. Guillaume, Paul and Thomas Munro. 1968. Primitive Negro Sculpture. New York: Hacker.

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42  Karen Kurczynski Hummelink, Marcel. 2002. Après nous la liberté: Constant en de artistieke avant-​garde in de jaren 1946–​1960. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Klein, Melanie. 2002. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–​1963. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kurczynski, Karen. 2019. “Expression for Everyone: Ferlov, Mancoba, and Cobra.” In Sonja Ferlov Mancoba:  Mask and Face. Edited by Mikkel Bogh, et  al. Copenhagen:  Statens Museum for Kunst. Kurczynski, Karen and Nicola Pezolet. 2011. “Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence: Cobra and Post-​Cobra.” Res 59/​60, Spring/​Autumn: 282–​302. Lambert, Jean-​Clarence. 1983. Cobra. Translated by Roberta Bailey. New York: Abbeville. Malraux, André. 1967. Museum Without Walls. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Mancoba, Ernest. 2003. “An Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 18, Spring–​Summer: 14–​21. _​_​_​_​_​. 2000. “Ejler Billes halvfemsårs fødselsdag.” In Ejler Bille 90 år, 9–​17. Silkeborg: Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. Mathiesen, Egon. 1941.“Hvad moderne kunst er.” Helhesten 1, no. 3, September: 82–​6. Miles, Elza. 1994. Ernest Mancoba, A  Resource Book. Johannesburg:  Johannesburg Art Gallery. _​_​_​_​_​. 1994 (b). Lifeline Out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau. Nancy, Jean-​Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Edited by Peter Connor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Okeke, Chika. 2001. “Modern African Art.” In The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–​1994. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, 29–​36. New York: Prestel. Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2000. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture 12, no. 3: 577–​89. Ricoeur, Paul. 1965. History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Robbins, Bruce and Pheng Cheah, eds. 1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, Greg. 2015. “Shinkichi Tajiri and the Paradoxes of Japanese American Identity.” In Shinkichi Tajiri: Universal Paradoxes. Edited by Helen Westgeest, Giotta Tajiri, and Ryu Tajiri. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Sayers, Janet. 1987. “Melanie Klein, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism.” Feminist Review 25, Spring: 23–​37. Shield, Peter. 1984. “Spontaneous Abstraction in Denmark and Its Aftermath in Cobra, 1931–​ 1951.” PhD Dissertation, Open University. Smalligan, Laura M. 2010. “The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba:  Africa and Europe at the Crossroads.” Third Text 24, no. 2: 263–​76. Stokvis, Willemijn. 2017. Cobra:  The History of a European Avant-​ Garde Movement. Rotterdam: NAi. Thompson, Bridget, ed. 2006. In the Name of All Humanity: The African Spiritual Expression of Ernest Mancoba. Cape Town: Art and Ubuntu Trust. Vercauteren, Rick. 2007. De Wachters van Shinkichi Tajiri. Venlo, Netherlands: Gemeente  Venlo. Wagner, Anne M. 1989. “Lee Krasner as L.K.” Representations 25, Winter: 42–​57.

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3  Origins and Brinks Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London Giulia Smith

Today, the scholarship on mid-​twentieth century British art is undergoing sorely needed revision. A renewed emphasis on cosmopolitanism, migration and diaspora means that the existing literature is being critiqued for its monolithic focus on geographically centered movements and events. With respect to London, the stylistic categories that have shaped the reception of the period include Neo-​Romanticism, Constructionism, Brutalism and Pop. Their leading representatives  –​artists like Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, Anthony Hill, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton –​dominated the field for decades. Now, however, the wind is changing. In 2012, Tate Britain mounted an overdue, but nonetheless generative display documenting the activities of four London-​based galleries that in the 1950s stood out for their experimental and transnational outlook:  Gallery One, Indica, Signals and New Vision Centre Gallery.1 The event signaled a general reassessment of the field, though its contents would have been no revelation to those who, starting in the 1980s and 1990s, drove the postcolonial critique of art institutions in the United Kingdom and internationally.2 In contrast with this earlier moment, the recent literature is not centrally preoccupied with questions of coloniality and racialization, but adopts broader terms that accommodate multiple migratory pathways and identities, in keeping with the cosmopolitan aspirations of the mid-​twentieth century period. An example of this is London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–​80, a multiauthored volume devoted to uncovering “the extraordinarily rich and underexplored networks of international artists and art practices that emerged in and around Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.”3 As signaled by the plural in the title, the book replaces the notion of a singular art world with a cross-​sectional view of multiple artistic scenes active in London across a period of twenty years. I want to apply a similar principle to the 1950s.

Decentralization: Elective Affinities and Missed Encounters In the middle decades of the twentieth century, London was seen, at least in Europe, as a safe haven and a place of refuge. Swaths of artists fled to the British capital when fascism took hold of the continent in the 1930s. Among them were Walter Gropius, Naum Gabo, Lázló Moholy-​Nagy and Kurt Schwitters. These figures left an indelible trace on the local artistic landscape. Yet, at the end of the war many chose to leave, either to return to their native countries or to start a new life in the United States. In spite of its professed openness, England was perceived by many newcomers as resisting truly experimental attitudes to art making. The “provincialism” of its

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44  Giulia Smith cultural institutions would continue to preoccupy art critics well into the 1960s, with at least four distinct internationalist camps forming around the leading voices in the field:  French-​dominated continentalism (David Sylvester), Soviet Realism (John Berger), transatlantic Americanism (Lawrence Alloway) and Third World modernism (Guy Brett).4 Clearly, the field of mid-​twentieth century British modernism was a polyvocal one. Not everyone, however, enjoyed the same level of institutional support. The resistance encountered by artists like Gabo and Moholy-​Nagy paled in comparison to the obstacles faced by those who arrived in London from countries in the southern hemisphere of the Commonwealth. Formalized in 1949, the Commonwealth of Nations (as opposed to the British Commonwealth of Nations) emerged on the back of India’s independence, an event that symbolically marked the beginning of the fall of the British Empire. Combined with the urgent demand for cheap manpower for deployment in the reconstruction effort (bearing in mind that Britain had been heavily bombarded during World War II), the onset of political decolonization resulted in an unprecedented influx of Commonwealth citizens arriving in London from areas including the Anglophone Caribbean and South Asia. Against this background, new cultural venues emerged whose outlook was pointedly transnational. Among them was the New Vision Centre Gallery (1955–​65), an exhibition space that supported art that was, “fiercely non-​figurative, violently tachiste, remarkably international,” three categories that were actively ostracized by the institutional British art world.5 The gallery operated under the direction of three painters: Denis Bowen, born of British parents in South Africa; Halima Nalecz, from Poland; and the British artist Frank Avray Wilson. Together, they introduced a program that in hindsight appears extraordinarily far-​reaching, both aesthetically and geographically. Exhibitors came from as near as Wales, Italy, France, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and as far as Australia, Asia, Canada, Africa and the Caribbean.6 The New Vision Centre Gallery was not an isolated case. Rather, a multiplicity of modernist platforms flourished in postwar London, with individual artists typically moving between them to maximize their chances of public exposure. In an attempt to recapture a sense of the fluidity and idiosyncrasy of this cultural landscape, this chapter stages speculative encounters between four artists who lived in the British capital for a substantial period of time in the 1950s. These artists are Sarah Jackson (nèe Sherman), Emilio Scanavino, Magda Cordell (nèe Lustigova) and Aubrey Williams. All four painted, though Jackson was first and foremost a sculptor. Formally, their works share an expressionist style that resonates with elements of Tachism, Informel and American Action Painting; though each one brought a distinct set of cultural references and technical challenges to the field of postwar abstraction. Crucially, none of them was native to Britain. Jackson was originally from Detroit, but had lived in New York, Colorado Springs and Mexico City before arriving in London in 1949 via Paris. Scanavino came from the coastal region of Liguria, in the north-​west of Italy. Cordell was a Jewish-​Hungarian refugee. After losing her family to the Holocaust, she escaped to London via Palestine and France. In a matter of years, she became affiliated with the Independent Group (1952–​5). Williams hailed from Georgetown, then the capital of British Guiana (the country became independent Guyana in 1966). An agricultural scientist by training, soon after arriving in the UK in 1952 he decided to prioritize his art practice. Such different backgrounds stand as a testament to the variety of migratory routes that intersected in London in the aftermath of World War II.

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Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London  45 For the most part, the four artists considered in this chapter navigated separate universes. In London, Jackson secured some of her earliest exhibitions:  a two-​men show (with Scanavino) at Galerie Apollinaire in Covent Garden (1951); multiple solo shows at the New Vision Centre Gallery (in 1956, 1962 and 1963); and an important collaboration with Scanavino and the English architect Timothy Jackson (to whom she was married) for the landmark exhibition This Is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Gallery, 1956). The event is chiefly remembered for the contributions of the Independent Group, with both the primary and secondary literature downplaying the display’s internal heterogeneity in favor of a teleological argument according to which the informally denominated “Pop pavilion” (by Richard Hamilton, John McHale and Frank Cordell) and “Brutalist pavilion” (by Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson) dominated the horizons of British modernism.7 In the summer of 1956, while her Independent Group peers basked in the glory of their success at the Whitechapel Gallery, Cordell hung her first solo show at the Hanover Gallery, an influential institution whose roster of artists included Francis Bacon.8 Scanavino too had wanted to exhibit there, but nothing came of it. Jackson, with whom the Italian painter had developed a friendship, wrote to him in 1956 suggesting that he consider the New Vision Centre Gallery instead. “I can only arrange for you at a new small gallery run by artists,” the American sculptress wrote.9 The exhortation appears to have yielded no results. Scanavino does not feature in the records of the gallery, though Jackson does, multiple times. As does Williams. After a first solo show at the Archer Gallery, the Guyana-​born artist had no less than three, highly successful one-​ man exhibitions at the New Vision Centre Gallery (in 1958, 1959 and 1960). In 1964, he went on to win the Commonwealth Prize for Painting, following his participation in the First Commonwealth Biennial of Abstract Art (1963) at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, London. That these artists could travel along parallel and only occasionally intersecting paths is indicative of the decentralized nature of the art world in mid-​twentieth century London. The benefit of proposing an associative study based on spatial proximity rather than stylistic continuity is that it circumvents the linear logic of genealogical development. Indebted to an enlightened conception of history as evolutionary progression, this genealogical framework kept a firm grip on Western art criticism throughout the middle decades of the twentieth-​century. Clement Greenberg’s publications from the 1950s and 1960s are perhaps the most influential examples of a widespread conception of the history of modern art as an “ineluctable” progression of “phases.”10 His work is also characteristic of a field that was marred with universalizing overtones, with authors as diverse as Pierre Restany in France and Herbert Read or David Sylvester in Britain systematically overriding issues of identity and territory in favor of questions of aesthetic form. In an effort to move away from the formalist language that dominated the international reception of postwar expressionism, some of the best recent scholarship has focused on the political context of the Cold War, with special attention paid to the crucial role that scientific imagery played in shaping the field of mid-​twentieth century abstraction worldwide.11 Although this body of work represents a welcome change of direction, it is also prejudiced by a tendency to replace the transcendentalism of abstract form with the discourse of universal freedom. This “new orthodoxy,” David Craven writes, “treats art as a monolithic expression of Cold War ideology,” in the assumption that expressionist painters and sculptors all over the world were attuned to the outlook of American freedom fighters like Greenberg,

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46  Giulia Smith who notoriously associated the gestural technique of Jackson Pollock with the liberal values of Western democracy.12 Much more attentive to questions of dislocation is the work of Kobena Mercer, whose edited volume on the topic of “discrepant abstraction” remains among the most sophisticated attempts to rebuke the Cold War fantasy of a universal liberal subject whose lingua franca was Abstract Expressionism.13 This study follows the principles of “decentralization” and “discrepancy” espoused by both Craven and Mercer. By associating Jackson, Scanavino, Cordell and Williams, I aim to cut across the official narratives of British art history as a field that greatly depends upon the centralizing efforts of national collections. To this day, no major public institution in Britain holds works by Jackson, nor is she featured in the principal literature on postwar modernism. She is one of countless female artists (along with Cordell) who enjoyed visibility and even success in the 1940s and 1950s, but whose legacy was not promptly secured through museum acquisitions. This historic prejudice continues to fuel the erroneous belief that the field of postwar modernism is unquestionably male-​dominated.14 Scanavino spent less time than Jackson in the UK, yet he is better represented in the country, albeit primarily in private collections. But what is truly exasperating is the way in which museums operating under a national framework have failed to respond to Williams’ legacy. Despite his achievements as a painter, this artist is yet to be celebrated in the country where he spent the best part of his working life with a full-​scale retrospective. At a time when the Windrush Scandal (2018) has exposed the extent to which the Anglo-​Caribbean community continues to be delegitimized and discriminated against, this ongoing lack of recognition on behalf of cultural institutions appears complicit with a political system that is riddled with colonial hangovers.15 Today, the UK is grappling with a surge in nativist forces emboldened by the ascent of the far-​right within the sphere of mainstream politics. In this context, the mandate to decolonize art history is felt with renewed urgency.16 As the era of multiculturalism gives away to the insular rhetoric of Brexit (a development that is less accurately portrayed as a dramatic break with the past than as the outcome of deeply entrenched narratives of Anglo-​Saxon exceptionalism that have subsisted in the aftermath of Empire), historians of British modernism are compelled to reassess their field of specialism in a cosmopolitan spirit, drawing as much as possible on the insight of postcolonial theorists who have long been working in this mode. Not only must we look at alternative combinations of artists and venues, but it is important to mobilize aesthetic categories that cut across conventional modernist narratives. Mercer insists on this last point, arguing that “the question is not one of patching up in the gaps, but rewriting narratives of postwar abstraction as a whole.”17 In a bid to do so, the following pages offer an example of what an associative iconographic approach might achieve, in the belief that, to quote George Didi-​Huberman, “to invent a knowledge-​montage in art history means to renounce evolutionary  –​ and theological –​schemata in place since Vasari.”18 Specifically, I will focus on the different valences held by the osseous (a category that encompasses dismembered bones, skeletons and fossils) in the work of Cordell, Scanavino, Jackson and Williams, as well as drawing on one painting by Graham Sutherland. With powerful associations to questions of origins, identity and inheritance, the study of this motif offers an ideal vantage point from which to deconstruct the fiction of a single modernism unfolding along a teleological axis.

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Discrepant Bones: A Case Study The 1950s were deeply preoccupied with extinction. Only one year after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill had warned, in his famous “Iron Curtain” speech, of a possible descent into prehistory. As the Cold War settled in and the threat of nuclear warfare became established, the ex-​Prime Minister cautioned: “The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction.”19 Having birthed the H-​bomb, the new science of quantum physics pointed simultaneously to a future of unrivaled technological progress and to the end of the world. In this context, the threshold between evolution and extinction appeared extraordinarily thin. With equal purchase in the realms of political diplomacy and popular culture, this dialectic played a key role in shaping the modernist imaginary of the 1950s. Cordell was one of many artists whose work simultaneously appealed to the futuristic and the prehistoric. The gynomorphic figures that dominate her paintings from the 1950s are inspired by Paleolithic statuettes recovered at the turn of the twentieth-​ century in central and southern Europe and erroneously believed to represent fertility idols. The most famous example was found in 1908 in Willendorf, Austria and promptly renamed Venus of Willendorf. Elsewhere I  have argued that Cordell encountered this artifact inside Amedée Ozenfant’s Foundations of Modern Art.20 In 1948, Herbert Read had used the same book as the premise for a highly popular exhibition titled 40,000 Years of Modern Art: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern (ICA, London).21 Like Ozenfant, Read positioned the work of modernist masters of the caliber of Pablo Picasso in a line of direct continuity with the anonymous craftsmen of the Paleolithic era. In this way, an evolutionary and deeply Euro-​centric argument was made for the history of art. Another version of the same theory appeared in Helen Rosenau’s book Woman in Art: From Type to Personality. Herself a Jewish refugee to England, Rosenau charted the development of artistic form from the Venus of Willendorf to Barbara Hepworth’s abstract effigies, correlating this visual history with the evolution of the female sex from “mere biological phenomenon” to an individual “with a mind and a will of her own.”22 Cordell’s paintings can be seen as tapping into this proto-​feminist imaginary, but they also cast a dark shadow on the future accomplishments of the human race. Take Figure 59 (1958). An incandescent red skeleton painted in thick polymer resin against the background of a gestural muddle of soft body-​parts, the canvas conjures a radiographic vision of the female body undergoing nuclear combustion. By creating imagery of this kind, Cordell –​who, let us not forget, had narrowly escaped the fate of being interned in a Nazi concentration camp –​hoped “to prevent the repetition of the inhuman and unseemly past.”23 The prehistoric was equally prominent in the work of Jackson and Scanavino. By the time of his participation to This Is Tomorrow in 1956, Scanavino had shifted from a post-​cubist figurative style to an apocalyptic vocabulary of abstract pictorial explosions (see Figure 3.1). Two years later, partly under the influence of Bacon and Sutherland, Scanavino made Evoluzione (Evolution, 1958)  (see Figure  3.2). The canvas is a flat expanse of gray paint traversed along its vertical axis by a spindly assemblage half way between an insectile exoskeleton and a technological antenna. Compared to Cordell’s X-​ rayed anatomies, Scanavino’s artworks appear devoid

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Figure 3.1 Paintings by Emilio Scanavino exhibited in the Group 4 exhibit, This Is Tomorrow, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1956), photography by John Maltby. ©RIBA.

of radioactive warmth, conjuring instead a stripped-​ down metallic atmosphere. Arguably, Evoluzione matches the costal landscape of Liguria as seen through the lens of the poet Eugenio Montale, whose influential poetry collection Ossi di seppia (The Bones of Cuttlefish, 1920–​7) eulogized a “pale” and desolate twilight zone animated only by “crackling scrubland” and “hissing snakes.”24 Crucially, after a period of time spent traveling between Genoa, Milan, Paris and London, at the end of the 1950s Scanavino moved back to Calice Ligure, the small village where he was born. “I have returned to the center of the world because I have returned to the center of my world,” he said.25 For this artist, the apocalypse was a thoroughly ancestral affair. In his paintings, the root of civilization coincides with the infancy of the artist, his sense of home. Photographic documentation of the exhibition that Scanavino shared with Jackson in 1951 at Galerie Apollinaire shows them standing to the side of two hanging sculptures whose internal shapes range from the mandibular to the coralline (see Figure  3.3). These forms are typical of the artworks that Jackson was making at this time. Her signature technique entailed molding plaster of Paris around a “skeleton” (her words) of cloth-​covered wire.26 Sometimes, the final object would be cast in bronze. Other times, the plaster model would be painted in bright hues, perhaps in an attempt to evoke the geological landscapes that had captivated Jackson during her travels across Central America. Often, however, she left her sculptures white. These specimens resemble eccentric bone structures from a surreal museum of natural

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Figure 3.2 Emilio Scanavino, Evoluzione (Evolution), 1958, oil on canvas, 146 x 114  cm. ©Museo del ‘900.

history. Indeed, the artist was clear that her primary theme was “EVOLUTION.”27 With titles ranging from Fish to Bird Embryo, Ribs and Female Form (c. 1951), her creations run the gamut from the aquatic to the vertebrate and the maternal. Art historians have typically related this repertoire to wartime trauma. “In the aftermath of the death camps and Hiroshima,” Sarah Wilson argued in her seminal account of postwar existentialism, “the idea of a reversal of evolution, the degeneration of the human through mammal and bat to bird and insect forms was a powerful metaphor [. . .] of regression to a more bestial universe.”28 Yet, for Jackson, who had little direct experience of warfare, the same range of subjects was tied to a vitalist conception of the artwork. In a letter to her husband, the American sculptress compared her artistic process to the workings of biology. Just as the human embryo recapitulates within itself the history of the species, her finished sculptures were imagined as bearing the material traces of a progression going from conceptual idea to biomorphic shape. “The final digestion retains its own birth,” she wrote.29 Elements of Read’s “genetic conception of art” underpin this formulation of the artwork as living matter.30 The English critic used evolution to account for the development of artistic form across millennia as well as within the lifespan of a single artwork. Key to his brand of art criticism was the idea that the work of art –​specifically sculpture, and Henry Moore’s at that –​was not just an analogy for life, but a veritable act of organic transmutation.31 Jackson openly appealed to this interpretative framework by choosing to associate her sculptures with

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Figure 3.3 Emilio Scanavino and Sarah Jackson posing inside Sarah Jackson Emilio Scanavino, Galerie Apollinaire, London (1951), photographer unknown. ©Naomi and Timothy Jackson ©Archivio Scanavino.

embryos, bones and fossils. Take Pterodactyl (1952) (see Figure 3.4) A four-​feet-​long skeleton of interlocking white folds whose elongated shapes evoke the ghosts of fins morphing into wings, the sculpture retains a strong sense of the metamorphic properties of plaster, framing abstraction as a process of sculptural becoming. Importantly, Pterodactyl was inspired by a sketch by Sutherland. The drawing, which Sarah and Anthony Jackson acquired in 1952, portrays a pterosaur cranium and is one in a series of studies for a much larger canvas titled The Origins of the Land (1950–​1) (see Figure 3.5). The painting was created expressly for the Land of Britain Pavilion, one of the exhibition venues erected on the South Bank on occasion of the Festival of Britain (1951). Contextualizing this display is crucial to understanding the patriotic narratives that in postwar Britain determined the reception of modernist artworks appealing to geological and paleontological motifs. Indeed, the Festival of Britain was conceived as a nationalistic celebration of the centenary of the Great Exhibition held at Crystal Palace in 1851. Historians have stressed how this epoch-​ defining event was caught between two competing temporalities, on the one hand paying homage to the former glories of the Empire, and on the other hand promoting a forward-​looking attitude intended to boost the morale of a nation in decline.32 The Britishness of each and every aspect of the project was so important that the walkaways connecting the various exhibition halls erected on the South Bank were made out of a blend of autochthonous materials including fossil fragments, ash layers from

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Figure 3.4 Sarah Jackson, Pterodactyl, 1952, plaster of Paris, dimensions unknown, photographer unknown. ©Naomi and Timothy Jackson.

Ordovician volcanoes, a Devonian coral reef and Jurassic scampi burrows.33 W.J.T. Mitchell has characterized “fossilism” (the use of fossils as cultural metaphors) as a way of “naturalizing revolutionary human history,” so that political actions, “come to be seen less as a matter of human agency and control than as a product of inhuman, impersonal forces.”34 In the context of the Festival of Britain, the logic of fossilism contributed to naturalizing the ascent of a nation whose defining revolutions  –​the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution –​were predicated upon a violently extractive relationship to the human and nonhuman resources of the globe. Beyond being materially represented, the geological soil of the country commanded its own exhibition space, the Land of Britain Pavilion. The stated aim of this hall was representing the land’s dual quality as “an embodiment of Britain’s geological history and a source of future wealth.” The Origins of the Land was the first thing the audience saw upon entering the venue.35 Sutherland structured the image in the manner of a geological cross-​section, with a horizontal line in the uppermost portion of the canvas marking the crust of the earth. Beneath it, the artist placed a cascade of violet-​ tinged bones, minerals and tunnels stacked up against an acid yellow background. In the top-​right, just below the surface, he painted a fossilized pterodactyl. Although the canvas was criticized for its non-​naturalistic colors and dystopian overtones, it was also broadly understood as equating the tentative recovery of the nation with the very emergence of life on earth.36 Seen through this lens, the pterodactyl that inspired

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Figure 3.5 Graham Sutherland, The Origins of the World, 1950–​51, oil on canvas, 425.5 x 327.7 cm, Photo: ©Tate © The estate of Graham Sutherland.

Jackson’s sculpture was not a cipher of Jurassic extinction but an emblem of the evolution of “planet England.”37 “Geology,” Kathryn Yusoff writes, “is a mode of accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on what side of the geologic color line you end up on.”38 This insight helps with situating the work of Aubrey Williams in a position of resistance against aesthetic idioms that were directly or indirectly tied to hegemonic modes of accumulation. His Death and the Conquistador (1959) sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Festival of Britain’s glorification of the land as a source of national wealth (see Figure 3.6). As indicated by the title, this painting takes as a brink point not the extinction of the dinosaurs, but the far more controversial annihilation of the indigenous populations of the Americas at the hand of European colonialism. The biomorphic shapes that dominate his canvas are references to Guyanese petroglyphs, ancient rock carvings made by the first nation people of this land (locally known as Amerindians). With colors ranging from white to black, maroon and smoky yellow, the abstract landscape of Death and the Conquistador evokes scorched earth and mineral formations, as well as conjuring a muddle of dried up body parts in the long aftermath of a sun-​blazed massacre. Seen in this light, the white shapes in the foreground resemble bone fragments, matching the subject of canvases like Bone Heap, also made in 1959. Rather than assuring a sense of quintessential belonging, here the metaphorics of the osseous –​of blood and soil, even –​ provides a model for the predicament of the colonized. Almost 30 years later, in an

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Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London  53

Figure 3.6 Aubrey Williams, Death and the Conquistador, 1959, oil on canvas, 83.3 x 133.8 x 2.2 cm, Photo: Tate ©The estate of Aubrey Williams.

interview with Rasheed Araeen, Williams drew on a comparable scene to describe a specifically colonial kind of trauma: “It’s the smell of old blood,” he said. “It’s the smell of the presence of the conquistadores. It’s the smell of a loss, and a replacement of less than what was destroyed. It’s a quality coming out of forced change, a displacement of identity.”39 This sense of loss and displacement stands in stark contrast with the sense of rootedness and psychological comfort experienced by Scanavino upon returning to his birth place. As Mercer points out in his analysis of Death and the Conquistador, the painting resonates with what the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris called “fossil identity,” by which he meant the survival of deep-​seated historical trauma within the Caribbean psyche.40 This take on fossilism goes a long way toward describing what distinguishes Williams from his European counterparts. While the latter were “responding to traumatic events within their own lifetime,” Williams “was metaphorically leaping back in world-​historical time, inviting us to imagine the cataclysmic advent of 1492  –​ Europe’s arrival into the New World –​from the point of view of those whose ancestral homes were about to be decimated by the incoming colonists.”41 It is not enough, then, to generalize and say that the primordial and the paleontological punctuated the field of mid-​twentieth century modernism in direct response to the events of World War II and, later, the Cold War. Rather, we must acknowledge the coexistence of multiple origins and brink points with distinct heritages and agendas. Some of the artists featured in this chapter enjoyed an unbroken relationship to the discourse of evolution, moving seamlessly between the registers of natural history and modernist aesthetics. In stark contrast, Williams retained an embattled relationship to this analogy. A politicized artist even before he became involved with the Caribbean Artist

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54  Giulia Smith Movement (CAM, 1966–​72), from the outset he was adamant about circumventing Western influences, in an effort to decenter the modernist canon. Throughout his career, he upheld Amerindian cosmologies as the most radical epistemological system he had ever encountered. Appealing to a completely different set of origin stories, his work highlights the narrowness of Eurocentric interpretations of postwar expressionism along teleological lines.

Acknowledgment This chapter was written with support from a grant awarded by the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.

Notes 1 Gallery One, New Vision Centre, Signals, Indica, Tate Britain, London, 2012, exhibition. 2 Crucial here is the work of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), a London-​based organization founded in 1994 with the express aim of recuperating, promoting and supporting the work of British-​born and British-​based artists of the Asian and African diasporas. 3 Applin, Spencer and Tobin 2018, 3. 4 For a detailed analysis of the emergence of these factions refer to Hyman 2001. On the question of provincialism see Wainwright 2012. 5 Garlake 1984, 7. 6 Among the artists who exhibited at the New Vision Centre Gallery were Carla Accardi, Giulio Turcato and Piero Manzoni (Italy); A.J. Shemza and Ahmed Parvez (Pakistan); Frank Morris and Camille Souter (Ireland); Halima Nalecz (Poland); Otto Piene (Germany) and Peter Blake (England). 7 For the latest iterations of this trend refer to the articles included inside October 94, Foster and Buchloh eds. 2000; and October 136, Kitnick ed. 2011. 8 n.a. 1956. 9 Sarah Jackson, letter to Emilio Scanavino, 29 May 1956. Estate of Emilio Scanavino. 10 These terms are prevalent in Greenberg’s writings from the 1950s and 1950s. See in particular “Modernist Painting” in Greenberg 1993, 85–​93. 11 See for example Petersen 2004 and Curley 2013. 12 Craven 2006, 31. 13 Mercer ed. 2006. 14 This belief was recently reiterated by Potts in 2013, 19. 15 The Windrush Scandal broke in 2018, exposing years of erroneous deportations and denied legal rights at the hand of the Conservative Home Office. Among those who were most affected were British subjects who had arrived in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly from Caribbean countries as members of the “Windrush Generation.” See Hall 2020. 16 For a sense of the current debate around cultural decolonization refer to Kassim 2018. For a case study of the decolonizing efforts made by museums in the 1950s see Wintle 2013. A useful overview of the aims of the movement for the decolonization of British universities is offered in Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018. 17 Mercer 2018. 18 Didi-​Huberman 2004, 12. 19 Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” speech, Westminster College, Fulton, MO, 5 March 1946. 20 See Smith 2015. For more on Ozenfant and Darwinism see Parkinson 2009, 237.

5

Multiple Modernisms in Postwar London  55 1 Read 1948. 2 22 Gooch 1944. 23 Magda Cordell, untitled statement, in Robbens 2000, 190. 24 Montale (1916), “Meriggiare pallido e assort.” Unless otherwise noted translations author’s own. 25 Scanavino qtd. in Delfino and Viola 2005, 121. 26 Jackson qtd. in “Southend Has Helped Sculptress a Lot,” press cutting, author and journal unknown, c. 1953. Estate of Sarah Jackson. 27 Jackson, letter to Anthony Jackson, 13 June 1949. Estate of Sarah Jackson. 28 Wilson 1993, 42. 29 Jackson, letter to Anthony Jackson, 27 June 1949. Estate of Sarah Jackson. 30 “I was given to read the latest Herbert Read introduction to an artist by M. Roche last week. Once again the term ‘vital art’ meets my approval.” Sarah Jackson, letter to Anthony Jackson, 31 May 1949. Estate of Sarah Jackson. 31 Read 1964, 163. 32 n.a. 1976. 33 Atkinson 2012, 76. 34 Mitchell 2001, 176. 35 Cox 1951, 11. 36 Atkinson 2012, 80. 37 I borrow this formulation from Robert MacFarlane, “Introduction,” Hawkes, A Land, xi. The book was written whilst Hawkes served as the convenor for the “People of Britain” pavilion at the Festival of Britain. See Atkinson 2012, 90. 38 Yusoff 2018, location 175. 39 Williams 1987–​8, 44. 40 Mercer 2006, 197. 41 Mercer 2018.

Bibliography n.a. 1976. A Tonic to the Nation. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, Exhibition brochure. n.a. 1956. Paintings and Drawings by Magda Cordell. London: Hanover Gallery. Exhibition catalogue. Applin, Jo, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin, eds. 2018. London Art Worlds:  Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–​80. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.Atkinson, Harriet. 2012. The Festival of Britain: A Land and Its People. London: I. B. Tauris. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2018. Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press. Cox, Ian. 1951. The South Bank Exhibition: A Guide to the Story It Tells. London: Exhibition brochure. Craven, David. 2006. “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-​Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art.” In Discrepant Abstraction. Edited by Kobena Mercer, 30–​51. London; Cambridge, MA: inIVA and MIT Press. Curley, John J.A. 2013. Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and the Art of the Cold War. New Haven: Yale University Press. Delfino, Stefano and Gianni Viola, eds. 2005. Emilio Scanavino & Co. La leggenda degli artisti di Calice Ligure. Genoa: De Ferrari. Didi-​Huberman, George. 2004. “Foreword.” In Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Edited by Philipe Alain Michaud, 7–​19. New York: Zone Books. Foster, Hal and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh eds. 2000. “The Independent Group.” October 94, Autumn.

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56  Giulia Smith Garlake, Margaret. 1984. “The British Context in the 1950s.” In New Vision 56–​66, 7–​22. London: Bede Gallery. Greenberg, Clement. 1993. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969. Volume 4.  Edited by John O’Brian. London:  Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press. Gooch, G.P. 1944. “Foreword.” In Woman in Art: From Type to Personality. Helen Rosenau. London: Isomorph. Hall, Catherine. 2020. “Mother Country,” London Review of Books 42, no. 2, 23 January. www.lrb.co.uk/​the-​paper/​v42/​n02/​catherine-​hall/​mother-​country Hyman, James. 2001. The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold War, 1945–​60. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kassim, Sumaka. 2018. “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised,” Media Diversified, November. https://​mediadiversified.org/​2017/​11/​15/​the-​museum-​will-​not-​be-​decolonised/​ Kitnick, Alex ed. 2011. “The New Brutalism.” October 136, Spring. MacFarlane, Robert. 2012. “Introduction.” In A Land. By Jacquetta Hawkes. London: Collins. Mercer, Kobena. 2018. “Aubrey Williams:  Abstraction in Diaspora,” British Art Studies 8, Spring. _​_​_​_​_​. 2006. “Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling.” In Discrepant Abstraction. Edited by Kobena Mercer, 182–​205. London; Cambridge, MA:  inIVA and MIT Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 2001. “Romanticism and the Life of Things:  Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Autumn: 167–​84. Montale, Eugenio. (1916) 2016. “Meriggiare pallido e assort.” In Ossi di Seppia. Milan: Oscar Mondadori. Kindle edition, location. 435–​42. Ozenfant, Amédée. 1931. Foundations of Modern Art. Translated by E. Allen Ashburn. London: John Rodker. Parkinson, Gavin. 2009. “Emotional Fusion with the Animal Kingdom: Notes Toward a Natural History of Surrealism.” In The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinism and Visual Culture. Edited by Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, 262–​87. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Petersen, Stephen. 2004. “Explosive Propositions: Artists React to the Atomic Age,” Science in Context 17, no. 4, December: 579–​609. Potts, Alex. 2013. Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Read, Herbert et  al. 1948. 40,000 Years of Modern Art:  A Comparison of Primitive and Modern. London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts. Read, Herbert. 1964. A Concise History of Modern Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson. Robbens, David ed. 2000. The Independent Group:  Postwar Britain and the Aesthetic of Plenty. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press. Smith, Giulia. 2015. “Painting That Grows Back:  The Art of Magda Cordell, 1956–​1961,” British Art Studies 1, Autumn. Wainwright, Leon. 2012. “Varieties of Belatedness and Provincialism:  Decolonization and British Pop,” Art History 35, no. 2, April: 442–​61. Williams, Aubrey. 1987–​ 8. “Conversation with Aubrey Williams,” interview by Rasheed Araeen, Third Text 2, Winter: 25–​52. Wilson, Sarah. 1993. “Paris Post-​War: In Search of the Absolute.” In Paris Post-​War: Art and Existentialism 1945–​55. Edited by Frances Morris, 25–​52. London: Tate Gallery. Wintle, Claire. 2013. “Decolonising the Museum: The Case of the Imperial and Commonwealth Institutes,” Museum and Society 11, no. 2, July: 185–​201. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN:  The University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition.

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4  Multiple Resistances to the Concept of Modernism The Emergence of Artistic–​Poetic Networks between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the Late 1960s and 1970s Katarzyna Cytlak

From the perspective of Eastern Europe and Latin America, the response to the question posed by Keith Moxey, “Is Modernity Multiple?” remains negative.1 As the concept of plural and multiple modernisms is seen as Eurocentric and Western-​ centric and not minorized, multiplied and disseminated. In the so-​called non-​Western peripheries, modernism  –​understood as a phenomenon intrinsically related to modernity  –​was perceived as a universalist project that originated in Europe and imposed itself over the rest of the world. Authoritarian in character, it set up hierarchies and ignored local sociocultural contexts, which were considered derivative and outdated. Thus, responses to modernism cannot be described as cultural translations2 but as cultural resistances; aesthetic and intellectual moments of disobedience to modernist norms and rules. By examining the artistic exchanges between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s, my chapter reconsiders cultural transatlantic relations proposing a more horizontal and less unilateral vision of modern art, that highlights the specificity of the periphery and its independent relations. As part of this, I will trace how non-​Western artists approached the concept of modernism in the 1960s, and how this, in turn, informed their own inscription in the contemporary art world. In doing so, I will address how Western art3 and Western categories have been perceived and discussed in other, non-​Western cultural contexts by focusing on examples of artistic and institutional strategies developed in Eastern Europe and in Latin America. Specifically, I  will focus on the emergence of artistic–​poetic exchanges by analyzing how artists, curators and independent editors gradually started to express their need to achieve a critical distance from the so-​called West, addressing the following questions: Why was the establishment of non-​Western (North American and Western European) artistic networks crucial to artists active in the so-​called cultural peripheries? How did artists situated in a “peripheral” or “marginal” position in respect to habitual cultural centers such as Paris, New York and London formulate their aesthetic and artistic goals? How did they discuss in their art –​which became an object of non-​Western artistic exchange –​the Western (European) concept of modernism?

Multiplying the Modernist Project In September 1964, the Argentine artist Marta Minujín was awarded the Premio Nacional Di Tella (National Di Tella Prize) for her interactive environment

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58  Katarzyna Cytlak ¡Revuélquese y viva! (Roll Around and Live!) making her the third laureate and the first woman artist in the history of the prize. The Torcuato Di Tella Institute was a private institution founded in Buenos Aires in 1958 with the objective of encouraging artistic, cultural and scientific developments. Opting for an inclusivist model –​ that of integration with Western canonical art  –​it quickly became a platform for the Argentine neo-​avant-​garde of the 1960s. Jorge Romero Brest, an established art critic with an international profile, was the director of the Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Di Tella (Visual Arts Center of the Di Tella Institute) between 1963 and 1969. While he established links with emerging international artistic milieus,4 he also encouraged Argentinean artists to inscribe their art within Western trends, such as environment, Happenings and video art.5 Inviting critics like the American Clement Greenberg or the French Pierre Restany to be part of the jury of the Di Tella Institute’s international and national awards was symptomatic of Romero Brest’s aspiration to gain international recognition for both the Argentine neo-​avant-​garde and his artistic institution.6 Minujín, who studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-​Arts in Paris in 1961 and 1962 and also lived in France from December 1962 to June 1963, was an artist who matched Romero Brest’s criteria. Her assemblages of Colchones (Mattresses, 1963), Happenings and environments were seen as local responses to Western movements such as Pop art or Nouveau Réalisme.7 This ambition was confirmed by the collaborations established by Minujín with Western artists. For instance, the project Three Country Happening (1966) realized simultaneously on three continents with Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell challenged geographical distances by exploiting the possibilities offered by radio, TV, telephone and the telegraph. In Buenos Aires Minujín photographed and filmed spectators, who became “captives of the communications media”8 during her Simultaneidad en Simultaneidad (Simultaneity in Simultaneity) event, Kaprow in New  York and Vostell in Berlin proposed their own series of interactions with their audiences.9 The two influential Western artists not only treated the Argentinean as their equal, but they also recognized how integral her work was to their search for new artistic idioms, confirming both Minujín’s “internationality” and her “cosmopolitanism,” and reaffirming the status of Buenos Aires as “una Nueva York austral” (“a southern New York”).10 The year 1966 saw the establishment in Warsaw of Foksal Gallery, a noncommercial exhibition space founded by young art critics (Wiesław Borowski, Anka Ptaszkowska, Mariusz Tchorek) and the most important artists of the Polish neo-​avant-​ garde: Henryk Stażewski, Edward Krasiński, Roman Owidzki, Zbigniew Gostomski and Tadeusz Kantor. Similarly to the Di Tella Institute, the aim of the gallery was not only to promote the artistic production of the local neo-​avant-​garde scene, but also “the creation of an international perspective for Polish art and the development of direct contacts with foreign artists and artistic centers.”11 Publicly funded Foksal Gallery, maintained a large degree of freedom in terms of its exhibition program, becoming one of the most important artistic institutions in the People’s Republic of Poland. Taking advantage of both the more liberal cultural climate experienced in Poland after Josef Stalin’s death and benefitting from the relatively minor interest in the visual arts among the local censorship apparatus, artists and critics associated with Foksal Gallery were able to freely develop their curatorial projects. The Swedish sculptor Lars Englund was the first Western artist to exhibit at Foksal Gallery in 1967 and thanks to his Volumes exhibition the curators (Ptaszkowska, Borowski and Tchorek) were able to establish a dialogue between the Polish and the Western art

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Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  59 scenes. Artists and curators were instrumental in reaching out to their international peers and institutions either via post, or by relying on the network of Polish artists like Kantor who had exhibited abroad and was traveling regularly to Western Europe and the United States. Similarly, Stażewski –​a member of the Parisian Cercle et Carré group of abstract painters founded in 1929  –​facilitated connections with foreign artists. Foksal Gallery soon emerged as the only institution in the region that regularly exhibited established artists from outside the Eastern Bloc, including Robert Barry, Englund, Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Craig-​ Martin, Arnulf Rainer and Victor Burgin.12 As in the case of Di Tella, the Gallery’s activity helped initiate productive long-​lasting artistic collaborations, such as those between Henryk Stażewski, Edward Krasiński and the French artist Daniel Buren, who first visited Poland in 1987.13 As Koji Kamoji, a Japanese artist based in Warsaw stated: “For numerous artists of the Soviet bloc, Galeria Foksal was the window to the West.”14 Like the Di Tella Institute, Foksal Gallery promoted high-​quality local art created in response to international tendencies:  object-​based Pop assemblages, abstract geometrical painting, Happenings, environments, performance art, photography and conceptual art projects. The gallery’s flyers and manifestos were translated into French and English, as evinced by Żywe Archiwum/​The Living Archives/​L’Archive vivant. This curatorial manifesto, signed by Borowski and Andrzej Turowski, which transformed Foksal Gallery into a place that “keeps thoughts isolated,”15 and was a reaction to “artistic, nonartistic, and antiartistic phenomena,”16 was formulated first in French, then in Polish in August 1971 and finally in English in September of that year.17 The strategy devised by the gallery’s founders was not only aimed at championing Polish experimental art both locally and abroad in international (Western) contexts, but also guaranteed worldwide recognition to Foksal Gallery. Two members of the Art & Language group who exhibited at the Gallery in 1975 –​ Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden –​valued “the transituational ‘objectivity’ of Polish interpretations”18 and considered it of integral importance to their art. Only occasionally exhibitions of foreign, non-​Western artists were organized at the Gallery, as was the case with a show of contemporary Hungarian art in May 1972.19 Polish art exhibited at the Gallery was contextualized in Western terms and the Gallery itself was modeled after Western artistic institutions devoted to the promotion of experimental art. In the late 1960s, it still seemed legitimate to speak of plural modernisms, when considering the Argentinean and Polish modernisms promoted by the Di Tella Institute and the Foksal Gallery.

Anti-​Aesthetics: Toward the Criticism of Western Modernism In 1965, immediately after his return to Buenos Aires from a stay in New York, the Argentine painter Luis Felipe Noé published his book Antiestética (Anti-​Aesthetics) (see Figure 4.1). In this publication, the author contemporaneously criticized imported models of Western European art, as well as Argentinean artistic production that denied its cultural contexts and roots.20 Noé observed certain proximities between the concept of modern art developed in the West and Argentinean artistic production. He stated that “in a way we are Europe”21 despite defining “Western civilization” as a closed civilization, one with a “total worldview” oriented toward the future and yet threatened by the crisis of this very future.22 Noé maintained this oppositional stance by favoring

06

60  Katarzyna Cytlak

Figure 4.1 Luis Felipe Noé, Antiestética, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Van Riel, 1965. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Luis Felipe Noé, Buenos Aires.

an “open civilization,” one with an “organic worldview,” or “of disorder” and claiming that this civilization was constructed, by a “nondetermined society” that he identified with Argentinean society of his time. In his book, Noé announced the death of European art.23 He evoked “our fear of taking steps without permission from Europe” which Argentinean artists needed to surmount.24 Noé’s Antiestética advocated a redefinition of cultural relations with the West, and an assertion of Argentina’s own marginal or provincial position in the world of modern art. The book assumed the self-​marginalizing strategy developed subsequently in Latin American and Eastern European art of the 1970s, marked by both resistance to Western patterns and the assumption of localism. In that decade, being non-​Western started to be perceived as a privilege, and not as the source of an inferiority complex. Radical gestures, whose objective was to break with the model of Western modern art, began appearing very clearly in the artistic production of both regions by the end of the 1960s. After this point, French Nouveau Réalistes’ Yves Klein and Arman preformed respectively their Le Vide (The Void, 1958) and Le Plein (The Full-​Up, 1960) to question the concept of the art object, the gallery, the place of the spectator, and the laws of the art market. Arman’s Le Plein –​an accumulation and action of archiving ordinary objects that totally filled the space of the Gallery Iris Clert in Paris was a response to Le Vide –​the emblematic exhibition performed in the same gallery’s empty rooms by Klein in 1958. In 1964, the Czech artist Milan Knížak first showed his Krátce trvající výstavy (Short-​Term Exhibitions) –​accumulations of

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Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  61

Figure 4.2 Graciela Carnevale, Acción Encierro/​The Enclosure Action, 1968. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Graciela Carnevale, Rosario.

ordinary and personal objects not in the gallery space, but on the streets of Prague.25 In 1968, the Argentine Graciela Carnevale organized her Acción Encierro (The Enclosure Action) (see Figure  4.2). The artist trapped her audience in the gallery space, without prior notice or explanation, forcing them to break the common rules of spectatorship and literally break the physical structure of the gallery (one possibility was to exit by breaking a window’s glass) in order to escape.26 This invitation to the public to take the initiative acquired not only an aesthetic, but also a political meaning.27 This was especially true in the case of Latin American artists, like the Uruguayan Clemente Padín, who proposed the abandonment of the idea of the aesthetic or mimetic function of art, as well as that of the art object, and invited the audience to act directly and immediately on reality, that is, to use art as a critical tool for protest against the current political system and mobilization for democracy and human rights.28 The end of the 1960s was also marked by a change in attitude on the part of Western art critics. In the mid-​1960s Restany went to Buenos Aires to promote his own artistic ideals, while in 1968 the American art critic Lucy Lippard returned to America from her first short trip to Argentina with vivid impressions of the local scene. She described her contact with the Rosario Group (Juan Pablo Renzi and Carnevale) and their collective initiative known as Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns, 1968) as “a revelation.”29 Lippard’s statement was symptomatic of the progressive decentralization and de-​Westernization that were taking place in the art world in the late 1960s.

26

62  Katarzyna Cytlak These changes were promoted by artists who participated in the creation of artistic nodes, in part through literary and artistic magazines devoted to experimental and visual poetry, as well as via mail art networks. These included not only Latin American, West European and North American participants, but also their counterparts in the Soviet Bloc. By the end of the 1960s, Latin American artists and poets had created a network of literary and poetry publishing houses and magazines devoted to experimental and visual writing, which included Diagonal Cero(1962–​1968) edited in La Plata, Argentina by Edgardo Antonio Vigo; the Mexican literary reviews Pájaro Cascabel (1962–​1965 and 1965–​1967) and El Corno Emplumado (1964–​1969); Ovum 10 (1969–​1972) founded in Montevideo by the Uruguayan artist and poet Clemente Padín; and the publishing house Mimbre (1963–​1973), headed by the Chilean artist Guillermo Deisler. They started by making contact with artists and poets from the Eastern Bloc, more specifically from the satellite countries of the Soviet Union, where censorship was less severe. The “Expo/​Internacional de Novísima Poesía/​69” (International/​Exhibition of the Newest Poetry/​69)  –​an exhibition of experimental poetry organized in Buenos Aires by Edgardo Antonio Vigo included artworks sent to Argentina via postal mail by four Czechoslovak artists: Ladislav Novák, Josef Honys, Jaroslav Malina and Jiří Valoch.30 “Última exposición internacional de artecorreo’75” (last international exhibition of artecorreo’75), organized six years later by Vigo with his colleague and artist Horacio Zabala, included 11 Eastern European artists from Czechoslovakia (J.H. Kocman, Ján Sketlík, Jiří Valoch), Hungary (István Haász, Endre Tót), Poland (Henryk Bzdok, Bogdan Kisielewski, Marek Konieczny, Andrzej Partum) and Yugoslavia (Bogdanka Poznanović and Miroljub Todorović).31 Bulgaria was represented by Deisler, the previously mentioned Chilean artist and director of the Mimbre publishing house, who after the Chilean coup d’état in 1973 lived in exile in the city of Plovdiv (Bulgaria). In 1971, two Poles –​the artist Jarosław Kozłowski and the art theorist Andrzej Kostołowski –​launched the project SIEĆ/​NET, which advocated for the direct and unrestricted exchange of artistic ideas.32 This project was meant to have a permanently mutating rhizomic structure that rejected any hierarchy and any attempt to locate art in a physical place.33 The manifesto helped to establish exchanges of artistic projects, photographs, postcards, stamps and drawings between Eastern European and Latin American artists, including Padín, Zabala and Deisler (see Figure  4.3). Thanks to NET, Kozłowski also initiated artistic collaborations with two Mexican artists, Carlos Amorales and Juan Luis Diaz, and two Brazilians, Antonio Dias and, in particular, Ângelo de Aquino. In February 1973, the latter had a solo show at the Akumulatory 2 gallery, in Poznań, Poland, headed by Kozłowski.34 Artistic exchanges between Eastern Europe and Latin America, two regions in which colonial domination had not featured in the history of their mutual relations, were based on the idea of horizontality: that of a nonhierarchical trans-​Atlantic cultural dialogue. These could be specified by “antiaesthetic” and anticolonial gestures, both of which went largely unnoticed in the West.35 The artists’ objectives were to distance themselves from Western European and North American artistic canons and cultural models and to claim their own locality.

Self-​definition as Arrière-​garde Artists Eurocentric concepts of modern art and Western art systems were explicitly fostered by Latin American and Eastern European artists only in the late 1960s and 1970s,

36

Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  63

Figure 4.3 Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski, SIEĆ/​NET, 1971. Poznań: Samizdat. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Jarosław Kozłowski, Poznań.

at a time when they acknowledged the advantages of being provincialized and marginalized. A debate on Western and Non-​Western art scenes was carried out via mail art networks between artists in both regions. In the mid-​1970s, the Polish mail art artist Paweł Petasz launched Arrière-​Garde Edition, an independent publishing house based in the city of Elblag in North-​East Poland. It was devoted to artists’ books and to Commonpress Magazine (1977–​1992), a migrant mail art periodical “edited by common effort,” with each of its hundred issues directed by a roster of editors based in different countries, including Latin American artists like the Mexican Ulises Carrión and the Brazilian Paulo Bruscky.36 The logo of Arrière-​Garde was a rubber stamp representing two dogs, one black and one white, engaged in sexual intercourse (see Figure 4.4). The black dog, symbolizing the artistic peripheries, was the active side, while the white dog, embodying the Western art system, was depicted in the position of the receiver. This image symbolically illustrated a shift in the art world of the 1970s from the center to the periphery. It illustrated the way in which artists from the peripheries were departing from Western canons. No longer treated as followers of Western trends, they were represented as legitimate and active actors in the global artistic landscape thanks to their critical confrontation of Western paradigms. Cultural actors from Latin America and Eastern Europe came to instrumentalize certain clichés of the provincial artist, whose production in the modernist system was seen, as Partha Mitter observed, as “derivative works, based on cultural misunderstanding,”37 or as “simply bad imitations”38 of the canon. Statements

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Figure 4.4 Paweł Petasz, Imitations I, Elbląg:  Arrière Garde Edition, 1979. Collection and photo credit: Archive of Paweł Petasz, Elbląg.

like “I am Duch, not Duchamp” by the Brazilian artist Leonhard Frank Duch, or the Mail Art project Red-​Y-​Made (1979) by the Polish artist Tomasz Schulz, were symptomatic of the position taken by peripheral artists of the time, who openly confronted “high” Western art and canonical figures in the history of art. Both Duch and Schulz responded to Marcel Duchamp’s legacy from a non-​Western perspective, reaffirming their own provinciality and articulating their own counter-​ vision of hegemonic art. In 1972 the concept, and more specifically, the position of the Western avant-​ garde artist in society was being contemporaneously questioned by the Hungarian-​ Yugoslavian artist Bálint Szombathy and the German artist Joseph Beuys. In a life-​size photographic portrait titled La rivoluzione siamo noi (We are the Revolution) Beuys presented himself as an avant-​garde artist advancing resolutely and ready for action.39 While Bálint Szombathy performed Lenin in Budapest, an action that consisted of walking alone in the streets of Budapest bearing a panel with a portrait of Lenin on May Day (see Figure  4.5). The performance took place just after the official parades organized by the Hungarian State on the occasion of the workers’ day. As the Serbian artist and theorist Miško Šuvaković observed, Szombathy sought to juxtapose Lenin’s image with the “trivial daily life of a real-​socialism,” in order to underscore the contrast between the way in which propaganda promoted life under Socialism and what life was truly like in the Soviet Bloc.40 The performance had two dimensions: it expressed the artist’s political criticism, while also appearing as a

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Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  65

Figure 4.5  Bálint Szombathy, Lenin in Budapest, 1972. In Clemente Padín, Hacia un lenguaje de la acción, Montevideo: Samizdat, 1976, p. 10. Collection and photo credit: Archivo de Clemente Padín, en el Archivo General de la Universidad de la República, Área de Investigación Histórica, Montevideo.

private and unauthorized political demonstration that bypassed state-​controlled collective celebrations. While Szombathy’s work was realized the same year as Beuys’s La rivoluzione siamo noi, it does move from the same standpoint. Szombathy, who, like Beuys, embodies the figure of the artist, does not present himself as a visionary guiding the people; he follows the crowd, trailing behind it and performing in the wake of its passage, a Lumpen manifestation. Contrary to Beuys’s upright and ready for action posture, and his confident gaze, Szombathy is portrayed as a stooped wanderer, clad in old garments, whose gaze is vague and questioning. He becomes an Arrière-​garde artist, unable to direct or encourage anyone, although unlike Beuys, he stands alongside the people and therefore at the heart of social reality, that of truly existing socialism. Beuys’s self-​mythologization and his understanding of the artist’s singular role in society (which could lead to a certain cult of personality) were as foreign to Szombathy as to Latin American artists. Photographic documentation of Szombathy’s performance was widely disseminated in Latin America via mail art networks. Through his work, Szombathy participated in a Mail Art project to create a collective poem about revolution initiated by the Mexican group Colectivo Revolución (Aarón Flores, Araceli Zúniga, Bianca Noval Vilar, César Espinosa). It was also published by the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín in his book Hacia un lenguaje de la acción (toward a language of action) from 1976.41

6

66  Katarzyna Cytlak Padín’s booklet presented different types of artistic actions (“process/​poems,” “poetic actions,” “poem action,” “poetry action”) promoting the idea of ​​the direct involvement of art in politics and social struggle. For Padín, Szombathy’s criticism of the figure of the avant-​garde artist embodied by Joseph Beuys was crucial, as he himself had questioned the German artist’s position in his very ironic Omaggio a Beuys (Homage to Beuys) from the same year.42 For both Noé, who in 1964 stressed that “the artist is not an abstraction, an entelechy, but a man placed in context,” and Padín, the position of the artist was defined especially by the local context, in his case, that of Uruguay’s civic-​military dictatorship (1973–​1985).43 He pointed out the naivety of Beuys’s utopian, universalist and idealistic approach toward society, his idea of pacifist social and political engagement, and his position of leadership in social struggle.44

Multiple Resistances to the Concept of Western Modernism In examining the artistic debates and productions emerging from exchanges between Eastern Europe and Latin America we are confronted with two major problems: Is any alternative vision of modern art possible? And should we speak in this case about the repetition and multiplication of the Western European and North American modernist project? Walter Mignolo, the key thinker of the Latin American Modernity/​ Coloniality/​Decoloniality network, defined the concept of modernity as a European dominant narrative that is intrinsically linked with the project of European colonization. Following the Peruvian thinker Aníbal Quijano,45 Mignolo observed that the “coloniality of power” –​the structures and practices of power, control and hegemony that were developed during colonialism –​are an inherent part of the modernist project:  modernity and coloniality are two faces of the same coin.46 While the idea of “multiple modernities” seems attractive from the perspective of the hegemonizing centers, as the repetition of cultural patterns and schemes provides a key to the understanding and control of art in remote and unknown peripheries, it was not perceived as such by the peripheries themselves. As Mignolo observed, the idea of “global modernities” implies “global colonialities.”47 In other words, a plural version of the concept modernity does not signify pluriversal and democratic translations of the modernist project –​as Mignolo has stated, this is not the nature of modernity as such –​but local articulations of this same system of control and imperialism, merely adjusted to different contexts. The debate launched in the 1970s by artists whose production was perceived as peripheral from within the canonical narratives of modern art, was not on how to participate in the modernist project, or how to create local (multiplied) answers to Western artistic trends, as it had been in the mid-​1960s. Artists such as Noé, Padín and Szombathy had lost the devotion of a provincial artist toward the art of the centers, and they had stopped being inspired by Western patterns and artistic canons. However, we can observe in their art several attempts to respond to the concept of modernism and the image of the modern artist generated and controlled by hegemonic Europe and imposed upon other parts of the world. The development of independent artistic and poetic networks connecting the East and the South also became a very important strategy for Latin American and Eastern European artists, as contacts between both regions were deprived of the liabilities of colonial domination in their mutual relations. More so, these contacts offered a

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Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  67 chance to establish a more horizontal and dialogical transatlantic cultural exchange. By addressing the Western concept of modernism in their art, East-​South networkers searched for a counter-​definition differing from that generated by the cultural centers. They also reaffirmed their own provinciality as a crucial and determining factor in their artistic production. But above all, they questioned the concept of a colonial imperialist and hegemonic modernity. The aforementioned strategy of redefining themselves as arrière-​garde artists was meant to provide a pointed critique of the idea of progress inextricably tied up with the concept of modernity. For these reasons, the artistic debate established between Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1970s became decolonial  –​as it proposed an overturning of the habitual relations of power between the center and the peripheries, and above all, between Europe and Latin America. Artistic production resulting from or being an object of East-​South exchanges generated an upheaval within modern art. Consequently, its study could contribute today to a break with the idea of replicating the modernist project in peripheral contexts that still privilege art configured in Western cultural centers and redeploying Western European apparatuses and canons.

Notes 1 Moxey 2012, 50–​57. Eisenstadt 2000, 1–​29. 2 Bhabha 1994. 3 In the context of the Cold War period, the West encompasses especially the Capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America: Canada and especially the United States. 4 As María José Herrera observed, the Di Tella Institute established relations with the most influent European and US theoreticians and art critics of the moment: Giulio Carlo Argan, James Johnson Sweeney, Jacques Lassaigne, William Sandberg, Pierre Restany and Clement Greenberg. José Herrera 2014, 154. 5 Giunta 2001, 60. 6 Ibid., 273–​275. 7 Restany 1965, 119–​129. 8 Minujín 2015, 82–​87. 9 Due to the financial and technical problems, the direct contact between three artists that was supposed to happen via satellite connection, did not take place. See Shanken 2003, 56. 10 Restany 1965, 119–​129. Author’s translations from French, Spanish and Polish. 11 “stworzenie międzynarodowej perspektywy dla polskiej sztuki i rozwijanie bezpośrednich kontaktów z artystami i placówkami sztuki za granicą.” “Informacje. Wystawa “Myśli odizolowane. Archiwum Galerii Foksal 1966–​ 2016, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw,” artmueseum.pl, [Last modified April 26, 2017] https://​artmuseum.pl/​pl/​wystawy/​ mysli-​odizolowane. 12 Kemp-​Welch 2016, 68–​80/​130–​139. 13 Dirié and Przywara 2019. 14 “Interview with Japanese artist Koji Kamoji” qtd. in Kemp-​Welch 2016, 130. 15 Borowski and Turowski 1971. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Art & Language, “Brainstorming –​New York,” qtd. in Bailey 2016, 87. 19 n.a. 1972. 20 Noé (1965) 2015. 21 Ibid., 168. 22 Ibid.,  47–​48.

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68  Katarzyna Cytlak 3 Ibid., 51. 2 24 Ibid., 177. 25 n.a. 1986. 26 Carnevale et al. 2015, 152, 193–​194. 27 Ibid., 194. 28 Padín 1975. 29 “I returned belatedly radicalized by contacts with artists there [in Argentina], especially the Rosario Group, whose mixture of conceptual and political ideas was a revelation.” 1973, ix. 30 n.a. 1969. 31 Zabala and Vigo 1975. 32 Kozłowski and Kostołowski 1971. 33 Ibid. 34 Piotrowski 2015, 149–​165. 35 Noé (1965) 2015. 36 Petasz 1977, n.p. 37 Mitter 2007, 7. 38 Ibid. 39 This photograph was presented for the first time in April 1972 at Incontri Internazionali d’Arte (International Art Encounters) in Rome. It was taken in Capri, in 1971, by the Italian collector Giancarlo Pancaldi. 40 Šuvaković 2005, 178. 41 Padín 1976b, 10. 42 Padín 1976a. 43 Noé2015, 55. 44 Cytlak 2016, 346–​367. 45 Quijano 2010, 22–​32. 46 Mignolo 2009, 39–​49. 47 Ibid., 39.

Bibliography n.a. 1986. Milan Knizak. Action as a Life Style. Auswahl der Aktivitäten 1953–​ 1985. Hamburg-​Altona: Dingwort. n.a. 1972. st. jauby –​jovanovics –​lakner –​miklós –​pauer –​tot. Warsaw: Galeria Foksal. n.a. 1969. Expo/​Internacional de Novísima Poesía/​69. Buenos Aires: Centro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella. Bailey, Robert. 2016. Art & Language International:  Conceptual Art between Art Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press Books. Bhabha, Homi K.1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Borowski, Wiesław and Andrzej Turowski.1971. The Living Archives. Warsaw: Galeria Foksal. Carnevale, Graciela, Marcelo Expósito, André Mesquita and Jaime Vindel eds. 2015. Desinventario. Esquirlas de Tucumán Arde en el Archivo de Graciela Carnevale. Santiago de Chile; Madrid: Ocho Libros; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Cytlak, Katarzyna. 2016. “La rivoluzione siamo noi. Latin American Artists in Critical Dialogue with Joseph Beuys”. Third Text. Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 30, nos. 5–​6, August: 346–​367. Dirié, Clement and Andrzej Przywara. 2019. Mapping Krasiński’s Studio. Zurich: JRP Ringier Kunstverlag. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1, Winter: 1–​29.Giunta, Andrea G. 2001. Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política. Arte argentino en los años sesenta. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

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Resistances to the Concept of Modernism  69 José Herrera, María. 2014. Cien años de arte argentino. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. Kemp-​Welch, Klara.2016. “Galeria Foksal i stosunki międzynarodowe /​International Relations at the Foksal Gallery.” In Galeria Foksal 1966–​2016. Edited by Michał Jachuła and Justyna Wesołowska, 68–​80/​130–​139. Warsaw: Galeria Foksal. Kozłowski, Jarosław and Andrzej Kostołowski. 1971. SIEĆ /​NET. Poznań: samizdat. Lippard, Lucy R. 1973. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972; A Cross-​Reference Book of Information on Some Aesthetic Boundaries. New York: Praeger. Mignolo, Walter D. 2009. “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity.” In Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism. Edited by Sabine Breitwieser, Cornelia Klinger and Walter D. Mignolo, 39–​49. Barcelona: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona. Minujín, Marta. 2015. Marta Minujín: happenings y performances. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Cultura del Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Mitter, Partha. 2007. The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-​garde 1922–​ 1947. London: Reaktion Books. Moxey, Keith. 2012. “Is Modernity Multiple?,” Revista de história da arte, no. 10: 50–​57. Noé, Luis Felipe. 2015. Antiestética. 1965 Reprinted. Buenos Aires: De la Flor. Padín, Clemente. 1976a. Omaggio a Beuys. Friedrichsfehn: International Artists Cooperation Central Office. _​_​_​_​. 1976b. Hacia un lenguaje de la acción. Montevideo: samizdat. _​_​_​_​. 1975. De la représentation à l’action. Marseille: Nouvelles Éditions Polaires. Petasz, Paweł. untitled. 1977. Commonpress, no. 1, December: n.p. Piotrowski, Piotr.2015. “The Global NETwork. An Approach to Comparative Art History”. In Circulations in the Global History of Art. Edited by Béatrice Joyeux-​Prunel, Catherine Dossin and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, 149–​165. Farnham: Ashgate. Quijano, Aníbal. 2010. “Coloniality and Modernity /​Rationality”. In Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 22–​32. London: Routledge. Restany, Pierre.1965. “Buenos Aires y el Nuevo humanismo,” Planeta, no. 5, May/​ June: 119–​129. Shanken, Edward A. 2003. “From Cybernetics to Telematics:  The Art, Pedagogy and Theory of Roy Ascott”. In Telematic Embrace. Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Edited by Roy Ascott and Edward A. Shanken, 2–​95. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Šuvaković, Miško. 2005. “Performing of Politics in Art–​Transitional Fluxes of Conflict”. In Szombathy Art. Edited by Nebjoša Milenković. Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina. Zabala, Horacio and Edgardo Antonio Vigo. 1975. Última exposición internacional de artecorreo’75. Buenos Aires: Arte Nuevo. Galería de Arte.

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5  Urban Folklore Marta Minujín’s Postwar Assemblage and the Modern City Elize Mazadiego

For the 1962 exhibition Pablo Curatella Manes et Trente Argentins de la Nouvelle Génération (Pablo Curatella Manes and 30 Argentines of the New Generation), at the Galerie Crueze in Paris, participating artist Marta Minujín presented Le chien mort (The dead dog), a three-​dimensional precarious structure assembled from warped cardboard boxes collected from Parisian streets.1 The formal ambiguity of her work drew a level of bewilderment among Parisian critics who found these objects “difficult to classify” and at best at the “intersection between sculpture and painting.”2 The visual tendency with which Minujín’s works could be associated with was a protean form, emerging in Argentina and France, that was variously called “assemblage,” “destructive art” and “new realism.” The 1961 exhibition Arte Destructivo (Destructive Art) at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires showcased junk materials, such as a battered umbrella, a disintegrating wicker chair, fragmented doll parts assembled together, a stained bathtub, a torn chair and partially melted wax heads as art, while a loosely formed group of French artists known as the Nouveaux Réalistes shared an aesthetic sourced from discarded or purloined objects.3 Arman’s method in particular, involved the selection, preservation and transformation of debris culled from personal trash bins and Parisian streets into assemblages. Minujín was a young artist transplanted to Paris, first by an invitation to participate in the Argentine delegation to the 2nd Paris Biennale, followed by a series of grants awarded by the Fondo Nacional de las Artes and the French government. She considered Nouveau Réalisme as “the only thing new and really different in Paris.”4 In her letter written from France to Hugo Parpagnoli in 1962, Minujín informed the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires (MAMba) of an “advent of a new brutal and realistic period,” with “many, many young people following this tendency and deserving attention.”5 The practices of assemblage and junk art were indeed a focus in 1961 with William Seitz’s Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art who featured the work of Nouveau Réalistes.6 Echoing Lawrence Alloway’s observation that contemporary assemblage was a form of “city art” made from fragments of the urban environment, Seitz’s catalogue essay for the exhibition noted this work as being deeply attuned to the “multifarious fabric of the modern city.”7 In very similar terms, Pierre Restany, who formed the Nouveau Réalistes, claimed their assemblage works were transcriptions of French modernization and more specifically the “material of urban sociology.”8 According to the artist Arman, his Poubelles, Colères and Accumulations were visualizations of modernization’s

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Urban Folklore  71 “cycle of production, consumption and destruction.”9 Indeed, Arman’s throwaway materials maintained their material and temporal traces in order to specify their association with a postwar economy of waste. Minujin’s lightly painted objects similarly left areas of commercial print legible, thereby retaining enough of the object’s original markings to make reference to the material’s life as commodity. However, the broken and crumpled condition of the boxes inflects its end stage as consumed products and scraps of urban waste. Assemblages such as Minujín’s constructions convey a sensibility to a modern culture of consumption and the material reality of the changing urban environment –​a trait that international critics identified in many assemblages from the late 1950s and early 1960s. This chapter focuses on Minujín’s experimentation with assemblage as it developed and expanded into environmental forms following her sojourn in Paris, and its particular relation to the city of Buenos Aires. If assemblage was the emerging art form to make visible the concrete reality of a new and accelerating modernity, the city was a central trope. Minujín’s work figures in the international exploration of this theme, yet renders the modern city sensuous, composed of a multitude of smells, sounds, textures and sights that are also locally specific.

Urbanscapes The neo-​ avant-​ garde’s opening up of the pictorial field to material taken from modernity’s cityscape was evident in artists’ collages associated with Argentina’s Informalismo, including Kenneth Kemble and Alberto Greco. Kemble’s Tregua (1957), for example, was an untidy layering of oil paint, cut burlap and cloth on canvas. Its use of nonartistic materials coupled with a thick impasto of monochromatic colors echoed the stylistic tendencies of Art Informel and Neo-​dada assemblage that Kemble was likely exposed to while studying in Paris between 1951 and 1954.10 In the case of Kemble, he claimed to be “inspired by the makeshift houses constructed with the same found materials” that were cropping up on the margins of Argentina’s biggest cities.11 Named Villa Miserias (loosely translated as Towns of Misery), these informal settlements expanded near railroads and highways under the Revolución Libertadora and modernization projects initiated by President Arturo Frondizi.12 Kemble’s incorporation of these banal materials offered a reflection on Argentina’s modernizing process by giving attention to an uneven socioeconomic development. As a young artist associated with this group, Minujín similarly turned to the city as a subject in her work in the way she claimed to “transfer the [street] wall to the canvas stretcher.”13 Minujín’s Infomalist works, produced between 1960–​1, were large textured surfaces of opaque extra-​ artistic materiality whose cemented and weathered appearance evoked a deteriorating exterior facade or as Michaela de Lacaze notes the “density of concrete sidewalks” (see Figure  5.1).14 The illusion of use and degradation, like Kemble’s collages, projected a contrasting vision to the smooth abstract architecture that personified the “urban growth,” largely concentrated in Buenos Aires’ city center. Minjuín’s Cajas (Boxes), such as the one presented in the 1962 exhibition in Paris, demonstrate a sustained interest in the city, with an emphasis on its ruins and refuse, that originates in her Informalist experiments.

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72  Elize Mazadiego

Figure 5.1 Marta Minujin: Movimiento Interior (1960), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery.

Environmental Assemblages Minujín continued making her assemblages upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1962 where they were exhibited at the Galería Lirolay. Photographs of Minujín enclosed in the collapsing composite of cardboard anticipate her immersive environmental structures of assemblage, known as Colchones (Mattresses), which she would develop in 1963 and 1964 (see Figure 5.2). Her brightly colored three-​dimensional constructions made of soft pillowy fabrics, titled Eróticos en Technicolor (Erotics in Technicolor, 1964)  and Revuélquese y viva! (Wallow Around and Live!, 1964), won the favor of Pierre Restany and Argentine critic Jorge Romero Brest, resulting in an award for the Premio Nacional Instituto Di Tella.15 Minujín’s disjointed spatial structures were covered in a vibrant pattern of white, yellow, green, magenta and red that was reminiscent of the standard television test signal composed of vertical color bars, while the title makes reference to the Technicolor process developed to give motion pictures a highly saturated color. While Eróticos en Technicolor was suspended from the ceiling allowing the viewer to move around and peek through the droopy sculpture, Revuélquese y viva! was a large-​scale rectangular enclosure covered in woven together cushions with various openings for viewers to enter into. The dynamic color coupled with the title directing you to “wallow around” invited the viewers to animate its languid shape in a playful interaction with the pliable material and mobile parts, while the vernacular meaning of the lunfardo word “revuélquese

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Urban Folklore  73

Figure 5.2  Marta Minujín with box (1962), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery.

(wallow)” implied a more sensuous indulgence.16 Minujín evoked a level of intimacy shared with the object in the way she described an “embraceable mattress,” a mattress being a “vital material” where we are “born,” “love” and “die,” and Revuélquese y viva! was the space where the public could “relax and dream.”17 Assemblage prominently figured in Di Tella’s International competition that year with one of Arman’s Accumulations (1964) made of multiple identical or similar objects arranged in a transparent case and Jasper Johns’ Fool’s House (1962) composed by everyday kitchen objects –​a broom, cup and towel –​affixed to a painted canvas. In contrast to the static typology of junk art that defined the international selection of assemblages, Minujín stitched together and repainted materials into abstract, mobile sculptural forms. What distinguished Minujín’s work among her contemporaries presented in the national and international competition was the formally expanded sense of sculpture and assemblage that largely centered on her transgression of boundaries between object and viewer or as she claimed “shortening the distance between.”18 In his 1958 essay “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art,” American artist Allan Kaprow’s formulation of a “total art” extended the possibilities of painting, sculpture and assemblage into actual space. Kaprow explained, “we do not come to look at things. We simply enter, are surrounded and become part of what surrounds us.”19 In this sense Minujín’s freestanding immersive work is the environmental “surround” that enables a totality of experience. For Minujín Revuélquese y viva! was both “art object and experience” that solicited the viewer to enter the work. Its close enclosure

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74  Elize Mazadiego of malleable and tactile material constructed an aesthetic of physical play: “action and sensory stimulation.”20 For Kaprow his environments were activated and continuously shaped by this sort of “engagement” between work and visitor. For Minujín, who claimed the artwork was not in the object, but the “instant when the individual lives,” was primarily concerned with the effect the “engagement” had on activating the embodied subject, which moved and felt its way through the space of the work, placing emphasis on a phenomenological experience.21

La Menesunda and the City The following year Minujín collaborated with assemblage artist Ruben Santanonín, known for his Cosas (Things)  –​artistic objects and forms made from everyday materials, such as rags, cardboard, plaster, wire –​and Pablo Suarez, David Lamelas, Rodolfo Prayon, Floreal Amor and Leopoldo Maler. Both Santanonín and Minujín shared a vision in producing art that was lived and not merely observed, which materialized in an elaborate synaesthetic labyrinth of 16 interconnected installations consisting of incongruous objects, noise and lights within the Instituto Di Tella’s Center for Visual Arts (CAV).22 The artists appropriated the local lunfardo language to title the work La Menesunda, meaning “mixture” or “the mix” –​an apt name to describe the disorienting and messy fusion of elements. Visitors entered the environmental assemblage through an opening in a transparent wall, in the shape of a human figure that led one into a dense tunnel of bright neon lights in odd shapes and lines (see Figure 5.3). The visual clutter was compounded by a cacophony of noise emitted from blaring televisions sets. In the following environment, the artists recreated a bedroom, complete with a living shirtless man and a woman in a nightgown lying together in bed while a vinyl album played on the record player. A  second tunnel of multiple blinking lights juxtaposed with a recording of street noises continued a flux of sensorial assaults. In this instance, the disorientation generated from such incursions was akin to the commotion likely encountered daily in the street. Apart from purely bombarding the senses, the artists deliberately sought to confuse them, thereby heightening the viewers’ bodily awareness in relation to their surroundings. For example, the simple act of navigating the stairs was flustered by a spongy railing and heavy scent of perfume or a passageway was endowed with an elastic floor and malleable walls. One environment featured a narrow pink room where a make-​up artist and masseuse attended to you. The maze-​like circuit followed into a mysteriously dark room permeated by the smell from a dentist’s office, a space with freezing temperatures and carbon snow, and a mirrored environment of flickering lights, fans and fluttering confetti.23 La Menesunda evolved from Minujín’s early immersive environments of supple tactility into a complex of strident multi-​sensorial incursions that elicited both dissonance and pleasure. Areas of soft, malleable surfaces were juxtaposed with sharp odors, shifting planes, glaring lights and intense sounds, heightening the physicality of the artwork. Resembling 1960s trends in environments, La Menesunda bears affinities to the works that Susan Sontag bracketed under the term “happenings,” referring to a new, albeit abstruse “genre of spectacle” developing internationally.24 In particular Minujín and Santononín’s work shared the features of a “dense object-​ clogged” material structure, in addition to Artaudian elements drawn out by Sontag, such as the “emphasis on spectacle and sound, and disregard for the word” and “aim

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Figure 5.3 Marta Minujín: La Menesunda (1965), Courtesy of Marta Minujín Archives and Herlitzka + Faria Gallery.

to assault the audience.”25 La Menesunda achieved this through its turbulent network that imparted a deluge of physical shocks, reinforcing disorientating sensation. Evidence of its effect was articulated by the press who reported seeing visitors exiting the environment visibly nervous, distressed and overall confused.26 In speaking to the effect of La Menesunda, the publication Careo commented that it made one “Locos. Locos. Relocos (Crazy. Crazy. Very crazy).”27 Fortunately, wrote the journalist, the Di Tella was situated along the city center’s main pedestrian artery Calle Florida, where on exiting the environment, the visitors encountered “normal” life and thereby were able to regain their sanity.28 According to the press, the abrupt juxtaposition between the environment and the street had the effect of recuperation and recovery of oneself. While the critics as Careo suggest a return to everyday life and normalcy, the passage from La Menesunda to the city was transformative and more akin to an awakening. Andrea Giunta notes that in Santanonín’s initial plans for another environmental assemblage, Arte-​cosa rodante, an element of perceptual agitation would “excite dormant elements within the spectators.”29 Crucial to Minujín, from the creation of Revuélquese y viva!, was the experience of revival, an art that results in “impacting the viewer, shaking [him] up, removing [him] from inertia.”30 Returning to Sontag, the Artaudian sensorial assault was “designed to stir the modern audience from its cozy emotional anaesthesia.”31 Art historian Nadja Rottner reads La Menesunda’s “defamiliarization, exaggeration and juxtaposition with experiences of nature” as the mechanism that provoked a “conscious self-​reflection” in the visitor.32

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76  Elize Mazadiego In this sense, the visitor would return to the everyday context with renewed sensibility to their surroundings. As Rottner suggests, the boundaries between La Menesunda and the street were not so conspicuously in contrast but rather “exaggerations […] of nature.”33 Indeed, the distorted funhouse that was La Menesunda was deeply rooted in the physical realities of porteño life. The material minutiae that filled and structured the labyrinthine environment –​neon lights, sponges, fans, televisions –​were objects from Buenos Aires’ everyday contexts. More broadly each of the 16 installations simulated various fragments and locales of Buenos Aires, with evocations of public and private spaces of urban life. According to Minujín, the influence for the work was taken directly from the urban environment in which she and Santanonín lived and worked. She recalled that “everyday Santatonín and I would walk down La Valle and Florida streets, and we would think about what abstract sensation we could convey in a limited space within the Insituto Di Tella.”34 The neon tunnels and scent of fried food, Minujín claimed, was a distillation of Lavalle Street, whereas the city’s congested avenues were mirrored in the saturated corridors. The overall lack of a central logic offered the experience of a vertiginous urban environment. Minujín and Santanonín’s recreation of Buenos Aires was chaotic, clamorous and intensely energetic. The effect of dislocation and disruption of its visitors, as reported in the press, can be read as the disorientating experience of navigating a modern city. In addition to giving form to Buenos Aires’ physical environment, the copious presence of television sets in La Menesunda seems to make reference to contemporaneous changes in urban culture, primarily the proliferation of new media.35 The installation of a private bedroom, occupied by a heterosexual couple in bed listening to the sounds of the Beatles hinted at shifting urban social values, such as the liberalization of sexual mores.36 While a developing urbanism emerged in Buenos Aires’ under Perón in the 1950s, the erratic rhythms and shifts in urban life grew to new proportions in the 1960s which La Menesunda appears to capture. By 1965 Happenings and environments represented the “new concrete art,” that focused on the city as a relevant space and material to reflect on modern life.37 La Menesunda is not unlike Allan Kaprow’s proposal to “become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life,” by “the vastness of Forty-​second street,” precipitating a rediscovery of Buenos Aires’ urban texture.38

Urban Folklore The city of Buenos Aires left an indelible mark on Pierre Restany who outlined his impressions in a series of essays following his visit in 1964.39 He championed the experiments of Minujín, participating in her work and writing about it, while also tracing how the local art scene negotiated its avant-​garde trajectory. Scholars have duly noted his enthusiastic praise for the city and its artistic production in the frequently quoted article “Buenos Aires y el nuevo humanismo.”40 Among his many assertions, Restany was attracted to Buenos Aires’ “urban phenomena, the dimension of both its physical and psychological cosmopolitanism.”41 In another essay the critic turned his attention to the happening in Argentina as an expression of an “urban folklore,” a term that once described the Nouveau Réaliste’s figuration of France’s modern urban

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Urban Folklore  77 culture.42 The artists bracketed under the term inflected Restany’s claim that “the reality of everyday life has now become the factory and the city.”43 In the critic’s view, the new realist sensibility was a “celebration of the modern everyday,” although many works can be read as more critical than celebratory.44 Restany recognized in Minujín’s work a “poetic recycling” of urban reality in a local vernacular idiom that constituted its own version of “urban folklore.”45 Minujín quickly adopted Restany’s term, including herself among those who make “urban folklore” while defining its origins in modernization’s most salient features:  “massive industrialization” and “overcrowding.”46 Minujín’s characterization points to the reshaping of Buenos Aires’ cityscape brought on by urban renewal and modernization projects after 1955. As architectural historian Mariana Waisman observed, within Buenos Aires an “eruption of Miesian-​ influenced towers” were part of a wave of imposing commercial buildings built by foreign companies between the early to mid-​1960s.47 Constructions such as the French Peugeot’s skyscraper, the Italian Fiat and Olivetti buildings were towering, linear glass structures that had created a new sense of scale and altitude. These material changes expanded into the surrounding neighborhoods, where in Barrio Norte and Palermo a boom of high-​rise apartment clusters known as conjuntos (working and middle class multifamily housing structures) were hastily developed to accommodate the influx of residents to Buenos Aires. Indeed, the continued migration of immigrants from the provinces to the city added its own layer of density. While symbolic of Argentina’s progress and modernization in the post-​Perón period, sociologist Juan José Sebreli regarded the monumentality and accelerated pace at which the city was being redesigned as a cancer, transforming Buenos Aires into an “anonymous city, impersonal, massified” and “visually chaotic.”48 The radical changes in the built environment led to a preoccupation with the city not only in the visual arts, but also in film and literature.49 One other arena in which Buenos Aires is a central subject is the seminal sociological study written by Sebreli in 1964 Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación (Buenos Aires, daily life and alienation). In what Sebreli described as an “urban sociology” and “sociology of the architecture,” the author embarks on an ambulatory exploration of the city, inspired by the archetype of the flâneur whose wandering through the streets of Buenos Aires is a mode of observation and discovery of existing, yet unknown environments and populations to his own, but also “the keys to society and its changes.”50 Situating himself within an international tradition of intellectuals-Erving Goffman, Henri Lefebvre, Gilberto Freyre and Walter Benjamin-Sebreli argues for the importance of the city as a critical axis of modernity. For Sebreli, the geography of Buenos Aires structured by its different neighborhoods and class divisions is his entry point into the everyday lived practices of its inhabitants. Echoing Lefebvre who argued everyday life’s apparent banality revealed “something extraordinary in its very ordinariness,” Sebreli’s attention to the “everyday” was to “show the hidden significance behind the apparent insignificance of quotidian banalities and reveal human expression behind simple acts and gestures.”51 From the “popular class on Constitución” where he grew up to the train station where he encountered an “unknown underworld” of the socially marginalized, Buenos Aires was a “setting with infinite possibilities for drama and adventures, with its mysteries, its hidden corners and secrets to reveal.”52 He maps out the bourgeoisie

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78  Elize Mazadiego in Barrio Norte, the middle class in Flores, San Carlos, San Cristóbal, Balvanera, Concepción and Monserrat and the “lumpen” near Retiro, detailing each group’s distinct customs and habits, such as modes of diversion, dress, speech and sex. Despite the fragmentation and nuances across the city, the street emerges as the link between them and a principal contact zone where Sebreli, an admittedly middle class porteño (people from the city of Buenos Aires), could encounter Buenos Aires’ physical and social diversity not just as a subject of study, but approached from the perspective of a participant.53 In some sense Sebreli’s flânerie experience bears resemblance to the visitors’ peripatetic itinerary through La Menesunda’s varied environments, ultimately leading to a renewed sense of its own city. Both works also map out a transforming city, registering its changing profile as a consequence of the country’s ensuing modernization projects. Unlike the sociological study, La Menesunda is less a detailing and theorization of the urban environment as it is an attempt to reconstitute the sensorial experience of Buenos Aires’ modernization, familiarizing the visitor with the city and its everyday encounters. Minujín is neither rejecting nor embracing modernization’s chaos, massification and alienation, but endeavors to transfer and create its reality via phenomenological experience. Despite the unique, local textures of Buenos Aires and the city’s transformation that are inherent in this work, Minujín’s assemblages and environments were part of an international artistic language in the 1960s that shared a concern for the changes that modernization was imparting on urban sensibilities. In the case of Minujín in dialogue with Restany and the Nouveaux Réalistes, there is an alternately local and transnational context that shaped this work, making it a subject of Argentine art in a global post-​1945 art world.

Notes 1 The exhibition was curated by Argentine sculptor Pablo Curatella Manes with his wife and art critic Germaine Derbecq and held from 9 February to 30 March 1962. 2 n.a. 1962a. 3 Among those working with junk was Jean Tinguely, Jacques de la Villeglé, Daniel Spoerri and Arman. 4 Marta Minujín, to Hugo Parpagnoli, 22 March 1962, Parpagnoli Papers, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires archive, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires. 5 Ibid. 6 Among them were:  Arman, César, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques de la Villeglé and Jean Tinguely. 7 Alloway 2006; Seitz 1961, 73. 8 Restany 2000, 37. 9 Arman, qtd. in Martin 1973, 31. 10 According to Kemble’s biography, the artist would have seen the exhibition Véhémences confrontées, curated by Michel Tapié, at Galerie Nina Dausset in Paris, March 1951. See López Anaya 2003, 129–​45. 11 Kemble Smith 1961, n.p. 12 The Villa Miserias appeared as early as the 1930s but swelled in size during and after World War II due to decreased agricultural production, increased industrialization, causing an influx of the country’s rural population to urban cities: Buenos Aires and Cordoba. See Podalsky 2004. 13 Minujín and Noorthoorn 2010, 270. 14 de Lacaze 2017 17.

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Urban Folklore  79 15 The third juror, the proponent of Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg voted for Emilio Renart’s biomorphic sculpture Integralismo Bio-​cosmos n º3. American abstract painter Kenneth Noland won in the International category. 16 Read Arias’ reading of Minujín’s sexually-​charged works in Brest, Gímenez and Arias eds. 2006, 221. Lunfardo had a history as a language spoken by lunfardos (thieves) and more generally associated with Buenos Aires’ lower classes, but by the early 20th century the language was appropriated by writers, tango musicians and theater producers interested in representing this demographic in their work. By the 1920s the middle and upper social classes adopted lunfardo as a specifically Porteño (Buenos Aires) “street” language. Despite lunfardo’s integration into areas of elite culture and society, it maintains its status as a popular language. 17 Minujín 2015,  34–​6. 18 Glueck 1966. 19 Kaprow 2003, 11. 20 Glueck 1966. 21 Minujín 2015, 45. 22 Giunta 2007, 159–​60. 23 Glusberg 1986. 24 Sontag 1982, 263–​74. 25 Ibid., 273. 26 n.a. 1965a. 27 n.a. 1965. 28 Ibid. 29 Giunta 2007, 160. 30 Minujín 2004, 59. 31 Sontag 1982, 273. 32 Rottner 2012, 122. 33 Ibid. 34 Minujín 2010, 26. 35 Podalsky notes the multiplication of TV ownership by 1957. See Podalsky 2004, 70. 36 Ibid.,  67–​8. 37 A number of art historians have examined the city as a central trope in the work of American artists Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg. See Rodenbeck 2011; Rottner 2012, 173–​206 and Shannon 2009. 38 Kaprow 2003, 1–​9. 39 Planète was reprinted in Spanish in Buenos Aires after Louis Pauwel’s visit to the city in 1964. 40 See Alonso and Herkenhoff eds. 2012; Jose Herrera ed. 2010, Trelles-​Hernández 2002. 41 Restany 1965, 122. 42 Restany 1965. 43 Restany 1962, n.p. 44 Cone 2000, 63. 45 Restany 1990, 76. 46 n.a. 1964. 47 Waisman 1980, 9. 48 Sebreli 2011. 49 For a rich perspective on the literary and filmic texts on Buenos Aires in this period see Podalsky 2004. 50 Sebreli 2011. Prologue. 51 Lefebvre 1971, 37. 52 Sebreli 2011. Prologue. 53 Sebreli writes “Se refiere a una ciudad donde he vivido y abarca un periodo que ha sido una parte considerable de mi existencia: soy a la vez espectador y actor.” Ibid.

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Bibliography n.a. 1962a. “Actualité de l’art Argentin,” Les Beaux-​Arts á Paris, February 23. n.a. 1962b. The New Realists. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery. n.a. 1964. “Gente en Primera Plana” Primera Plana, November 10. n.a. 1965a. “Algo para locos o tarados,” Careo, June 2. n.a. 1965b. “Arte Vivo o arte de los vivos?” Atlántida, August. Alloway, Lawrence. 2006. “Junk art.” In Imagining the Present:  Context, Content and the Role of the Critic. Edited by Richard Kalina, 78–​9. London: Routledge. Alonso, Rodrigo and Paulo Herkenhoff eds. 2012. Arte de contradicciones. Pop, realismos y política. Brasil-​ Argentina 1960. Buenos Aires:  PROA.Brest, Jorge Romero, Edgardo Gímenez and Alfredo Arias. 2006. “El Grito Pop”, La cultura como provocación. Buenos Aires: Edición Edgardo Gímenez. Cone, Michèle C. 2000. “Pierre Restany and the Nouveaux Réalistes,” Yale French Studies, 98: 50–​65. de Lacaze, Michaela. 2017. “Remembering Marta Minujín’s Informalismo:  Memory and Politics in the Art of Post-​Peronist Argentina.” ICAA Documents Project Working Papers, no. 5, December: 14–​22. [Accessed 10 December 2018] https://​icaadocs.mfah.org/​icaadocs/​ Portals/​0/​WorkingPapers/​ICAAWorkingPapers5.pdfGiunta, Andrea. 2007. Avant-​garde, Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties. Durham: Duke University Press. Glueck, Grace. 1966. “From Safari to Senegal,” New York Times, February 6. Glusberg, Jorge. 1986. Marta Minujín. Buenos Aires: Gaglianone Establecimiento Grafico S.A. Jose Herrera, Maria, ed. 2010. Pop! La consagración de la primavera. Buenos Aires: Fundación OSDE. Kaprow, Allan. 2003. “Notes on the creation of a total art.” In Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, 10–​2. Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press. _​_​_​_​. 2003. “The legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, 1–​9. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kemble Smith, Kenneth. 1961. Kemble. Buenos Aires: Galería Pizarro. Lefebvre, Henri. 1971. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. López Anaya, Jorge. 2003. Ritos De Fin De Siglo: Arte Argentino y Vanguardia Internacional. Buenos Aires: Emece Editores. Martin, Henry. 1973. Arman; or Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in a Pie; or Why Settle for Less when you can settle for more. New York: Abrams. Minujín, Marta. 2015. Marta Minujín: Happenings y Performances. Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Cultura del Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. _​_​_​_​_​ and Victoria Noorthoorn. 2010. Marta Minujín: Obras: 1959–​89. Buenos Aires: MALBA. _​ _​ _​ _​ _​ . 2004. “Destruction of my works.” In Listen, Here, Now!:  Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-​Garde. Edited by Ines Katzenstein, 59–​61. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Podalsky, Laura. 2004. Specular City:  Transforming Culture, Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Restany, Pierre. 2000. “Les Nouveaux Réalistes.” In Pierre Restany: Avec le Nouveau Réalisme sur l’autre face de l’art. Nîmes: Editions Jacqueline Chambon. _​_​_​_​_​. 1990. 60/​90 –​Trente ans de Nouveau Réalisme. Paris: Èditions de la Différence. _​_​_​_​_​. 1965. “Buenos Aires y el nuevo humanismo,” Planète 5, July. _​_​_​_​_​. 1965. “Les happenings en Argentine:  Buenos Ayres à la decouverte de son folklore urbain,” July. Pierre Restany collection, Archives de la critique d’art. _​_​_​_​_​. 1962. “A Metamorphosis of Nature.” In The New Realists. New York: Sidney Janis Gallery.

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Urban Folklore  81 Rodenbeck, Judith. 2011. Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rottner, Nadja ed. 2012. Claes Oldenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2004. “Marta Minujín and the Performance of Softness,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/​ Journal of Art History 83, no. 2, March: 110–​28. Sebreli, Juan José. 2011. Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación. Buenos Aires: Sudamaericana. Seitz, William. 1961. Art of Assemblage. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Shannon, Joshua A. 2009. The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1982. “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition.” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Octagon Books. Mercedes-​ Trelles-​ Hernández. 2002. “The Contested Object:  Pop Art in Latin American (1964–​1974).” PhD diss., Harvard University.Waisman, Mariana. 1980. “Introducción.” In Architecture: Baudizzone, Erbin, Lestard, Varas. Paris: Presse International.

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6  Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist An Artistic Trajectory as a Model for Understanding Postwar Art Marie Laurberg

With studies of nihonga painting in Kyoto as her artistic training, Yayoi Kusama made her debut on the fringes of the Japanese art establishment in the 1950s. In 1957, she was one of the first postwar artists to leave Japan for the US, where she engaged with the New York avant-​garde scene for the next 15 years. In her autobiography, Infinity Net (2012), Kusama vividly describes the journey as a fragile situation marked by exile’s uncertainty and happenstance, with dollar bills stuffed into her shoes, silk kimonos for sale and works on paper in her suitcase.1 This was the economic and artistic currency that would gain her entry into the New York art world, as encouraged by her oft-​cited correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe, who reluctantly advised the young artist in her precarious endeavor. The story of Kusama’s journey from Japan to the US is more than just a biographical curiosity. It expresses a wider cultural and historical trend, the veritable exodus of Japanese artists and intellectuals who left behind a society still bearing the marks of totalitarianism, in order to pursue their practices in the US and Europe. This trend invites us to consider the postwar avant-​garde in a new and geographically broader light. Specifically, it involves reconsidering the entrenched translation of ideas and artistic strategies from centers in Europe (Paris) to the US (New York). Recent scholarship has proposed thinking in terms of “multiple modernisms,” focusing on exchange, travel, multiple centers and local articulations of modernism.2 As this chapter argues, a closer investigation of Kusama’s mid-​1960s art practice adds a new and important piece to the postwar avant-​garde story. It demonstrates how Kusama’s institutional engagements and artistic itineraries offer a model for the understanding of a broader art system that was network-​oriented, ramified, transnational and marked by dawning globalization. This by no means suggests that the access to institutions and galleries was a horizontal and nonhierarchical affair. Kusama’s role as an outsider is often literally addressed, investigated and deployed in her artworks. The marked delay of her inscription into the art historical narratives propagated by established institutions is a case in point. In the mid-​1960s Kusama developed a number of artistic motifs and strategies that she would repeatedly come back to throughout her oeuvre. By drawing on a number of exhibitions and previously unmapped archival material this chapter charts the artist’s experimentation with performance and installation which, while referencing the Japanese, European and American contexts, also made manifest a new and distinct aesthetic vocabulary.3 Kusama was one of many artists who left Japan in the late 1950s to pursue opportunities in New  York, where they played an instrumental role in the development

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Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist  83 of performance and transmedia art.4 For women artists like Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota, the journey can be seen as an attempt to escape certain expectations of male-​ dominated Japanese culture and gain an international reception –​a Woolf-​ian room of their own. Male artists sought similar opportunities. Masami Teraoka, whose early work explicitly deals with the relationship between the US and Japan, settled in Los Angeles, while Ushio Shinohara and On Kawara moved to New York, where they crossed paths with Kusama. In New York, Kusama became part of the avant-​garde scene in and around the Greenwich Village, as several accounts have demonstrated she established connections with Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Cornell.5 A  stylistic reading of Kusama’s art, highlighting these connections, would clearly place her work somewhere between Minimalism, Surrealism and Pop. Kusama, however, has always categorically refused to link herself to any artistic group or -​ism, and while the artistic language she developed in the 1960s may share points of contact with all these movements the essence of Kusama’s work cannot be fully captured by any of them.

Boat Trip The routes along which Kusama’s work was geographically disseminated in the mid-​ 1960s testify to a network-​oriented, mobile and connected art system transporting artists and works to new cities and exhibitions,6 with each context offering a new interpretative framework. Kusama’s appearance in various locales shows how she jumped at any opportunity to exhibit her works and how fellow artists were crucial middlemen, facilitating exhibitions and introducing her to new working partners. By tracing the route of a single work by Kusama, a rowboat adorned with her signature soft, white phallic figures, will make it evident that Kusama’s practice did not rely on one center, New York; but on an international network. Now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the work Aggregation: one Thousand Boats Show (1963) was first shown in the exhibition of the same title at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New  York, from December 1963 to January 1964. In this exhibition  –​ significantly representing the first instance of installation art in Kusama’s oeuvre –​the boat was displayed in a room whose walls were covered in posters with photographs of the boat. The wallpaper produced an immersive, shimmering effect, that gave the impression of standing in the middle of a shaky photograph. The all-​over, spatial device introduced at the Gertrude Stein Gallery was given even more loaded form in the Driving Image Show exhibition at New York’s Castellane Gallery, in 1964. There, Kusama created a universe tightly packed with white, phallus-​covered furniture and other objects, including a sofa, a dressing mirror and a mannequin covered in macaroni. Macaroni were also scattered on the floor and crunched under the gallerygoers’ feet. An installation shot shows the rowboat standing upright in the middle of the room, like a strange craft emerging from the floor (see Figure 6.1). At the Stedelijk’s big, generation-​defining exhibition Nul (1965), Kusama showed the same version of the work as at the Gertrude Stein Gallery, but the immersive character of the installation was emphasized here by papering both floor and walls (see Figure 6.2). Installed in a separate room, the boat, with its fleshy body and surreal effect, stood out among the otherwise cool, minimal or machine-​based works. A soft, inflated sculpture by Akira Kanayama, one of several Gutai artists to participate in the exhibition, was shown in a room with works by the recently deceased Yves

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Figure 6.1 Installation view of Yayoi Kusama’s solo exhibition Driving Image Show at Richard Castellane, New York, 1964. Copyright: Yayoi Kusama.

Klein, offering what could read as a point of contact for Kusama’s soft sculpture and yet her work remains singular in this context, because of its emotional and psychological resonance.7 Conversely, the serial, monochrome and machine-​like focus of the other works on view speaks to the inclusion of printed matter in her installation. Photographs from the opening show Kusama wearing a shiny Japanese gold kimono surrounded by men in suits. One can infer that by exoticizing herself she is consciously playing with her image, a posture she often maintained during this period in order to capitalize on her otherness in the game of institutional politics. Kusama never made an appearance in Stockholm when she participated in Inner and Outer Space, a group exhibition held at Moderna Museet in 1965. In a letter from the artist to then museum director Pontus Hultén dated 15 November 1965, New York, Kusama expresses her uncertainty as to whether her work will be included in the exhibition, having learned that it will open as early as December of that year. “I received some time ago a letter from the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam saying you asked Mr. De Wilde about borrowing my boat. I immediately wrote you a letter about this, but I  have received no answer.”8 The Stedelijk’s director Edy De Wilde had informed Kusama of Moderna Museet’s interest in her work. In the Moderna Museet letter, Kusama repeats her offer from a previous letter, which is not known to have been received: “In my letter I suggested that if transportation was too expensive I would pay for it. I also said that I would send you the posters to be used as wall paper on the walls around the boat.”9 This letter documents not only the fragile

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Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist  85

Figure 6.2 Nul exhibition, Stedelijk Museum 1965. Yayoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963), mixed media, 60 x 265 x 130 cm. Photo: Stedelijk Museum.

means of communication in the early stages of globalization but also the financially tenuous position of many neo-​avant-​garde artists vis-​à-​vis the big, newly established museums of modern art, and this without significant income from gallery sales.10 A later passage in the letter is crossed out but is still clearly legible: as an alternative to the boat, Kusama is offering to give Moderna Museet the big sofa from the Driving Image Show if the museum will pay for the shipping costs.11 It seems that Kusama both wants to make the offer and rescind it at the same time. She makes her intention clear in a final passage, which was not crossed out: “I am writing you this letter because it would mean very much to me for Stockholm to have an important example of my work.”12 In a Post Scriptum added with a different pen, she writes that if the boat cannot be displayed with posters on the walls it can be shown alone. As an installation photo from the exhibition shows (see Figure 6.3) the museum ended up responding to the addendum and exhibiting the boat without posters making it look like a sculpture in a classic white-​cube presentation, surrounded by works by Mark Rothko, Judd and others.13 The exhibition also featured Kazimir Malevich and Naum Gabo, as well as Kusama’s peers from the European Zero group and the American Pop and Minimalist movements including: Yves Klein, Sam Francis, Donald Judd, Mark Rothko, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker, Herman de Vries and many others. Tellingly, of the 38 artists Kusama was the only woman. Did the postwar advent of these new museological practices, in fact, establish a glass ceiling for the careers of women artists reinforcing their omission from the canon? This apparently seems to be

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Figure 6.3 Installation view from the exhibition The inner and outer space, Moderna Museet, 1965. Photo: Lennart Olson/​Moderna Museet-​Stockholm.

the case, as the museum institution was not ready to embrace the immersive and theatrical elements that Kusama was exploring at smaller, independent galleries around this time. In 1966 the boat’s journey continued with its inclusion in the group exhibition Weiss auf Weiss curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern. Like Moderna Museet’s display of Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, this one too featured the boat acting as a standalone sculpture without posters. Ostensibly the work was chosen for the exhibition because of its white monochrome nature and was presented alongside works by Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Sam Francis, Lucio Fontana, to name a few (see Figure 6.4). The extent to which theatrical elements are at play in Kusama’s practice in the mid-​ 1960s is underlined by a set of recently rediscovered photographs documenting her activities in Europe at the time. For instance, a photograph by Dutch photographer Theo van Houts, which only recently resurfaced as part of a portfolio of installation views of Kusama’s Polka Dot Love Room (1965), shows how her approach to art was subject to constant reinterpretation. The photo (see Figure 6.5) captures Kusama performing at the Stedelijk Museum at the opening of the experimental exhibition Signalement ‘67. As documented by these images, on this occasion Kusama displayed her boat in yet another configuration, by sampling several of her basic motifs: paper dots on the walls and floor, the boat in the middle and, as a backdrop of sorts, a

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Figure 6.4 Yayoi Kusama:  Aggregation:  One Thousand Boats Show, 1963, as installed in Weiss auf Weiss, Kunsthalle Bern, 25 May–​3 July 1966. Photographer: Balthasar Burkhard.

projected slide of herself reclining in Phalli’s Field.14 This 1965 spatial installation, which covered the floor of the Castellane Gallery in soft, polka-​dotted phallic forms, infinitely multiplied in mirrors on the walls, was readapted and turned into a theatrical backdrop for a new spatiality centered around the rowboat. The newspaper Het Parool covered the event and in a short article published on 22 November 1967 Kusama received a mention for her action painting the bodies of naked young people with glowing dots and flowers, which was also documented in a series of photographs. Thanks to this striking and all-​encompassing version of her universe, the boat made a spectacular entrance into the Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection. The boat’s long journey exemplified how Kusama’s international network served her in the creation of a new migratory framework for her artwork. The boat’s changing appearance demonstrated how it could not be framed as an autonomous, definitive work but its meaning and multiple configurations were subject to constant reinterpretation and local theatricalities. There is a sense of “making do” about this form of presentation, which in part speaks to the financial and institutional foundations on which Kusama’s exhibition practice rests, from trendsetting galleries and public museums, to the underground scene. There is a version of the boat for them all. The theatrical logic underpinning Kusama’s practice is made manifest and with it the role of the exhibition as a medium in its own right.15

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Figure 6.5 Kusama performing for the opening of the exhibition Signalement ‘67 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1967. Photo: Theo van Houts. Courtesy 0 archive.

Kusama in Europe In February 1965, a few short months after her pioneering Driving Image Show, Kusama appeared in Méthamorfoses  –​L’ecole de New  York a program produced by the Belgian TV station RTBF (see Figure 6.6).16 Offering an in-​depth report from New York’s experimental art scene, the TV crew visited the studios of Jim Dine, Lee Bontecou, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Marisol, Georges Segal  –​and Kusama. Each artist had a “chapter” in the program and yet when Kusama’s turn came the agenda palpably changed. While the other artists were interviewed and conventionally filmed as they went about their artistic processes, Kusama transformed her studio into a theater stage. The segment opened with a shot of Kusama, in a white leotard, perched sphinx-​like in front of the white, phallus-​covered sofa from the Driving Image Show and with a huge white Infinity Net as a backdrop. While Kusama slowly combed her hair in front of a dressing mirror covered in white phallic forms and pill bottles a voiceover repeated stories of obsession, white, and infinite rooms that the artist had provided the interviewer with. Kusama is presented here as a performer, inhabiting her own fantastical universe. The TV clip is also relevant because it shows how closely linked the early history of performance is to the distribution of art through new media channels. For Kusama, the television show offered an opportunity to enhance the performative angle of her work. The same held true for the posters, opening cards and photographic material

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Figure 6.6 Stills from Méthamorfoses –​L’ecole de New York (17/​02/​1965), directed by Jean Antoine. Extract with Yayoi Kusama. Photo: Sonuma-​RTBF archive images.

that she produced in conjunction with her exhibitions at this time. Instead of viewing these as mere marketing stunts they should be understood in the context of a growing tendency to “perform for the camera,” to use a more recent term.17 The transience of performance was tackled by pre-​emptively conceiving and staging its documentation in photography and film and like many of her peers, Kusama worked with photographers. These included Eiko Hosoe, himself an established artist, Harry Shunk who photographed some of the most iconic performances and happenings of the time, as well as photo journalists Marianne Dormisse and Harrie Verstappen, all of whom followed Kusama’s instructions and carefully documented her staged events.18 In this period, Kusama established herself as an important figure in Northern Europe. In 1959 the German curator Udo Kultermann invited her to show a painting from her distinctive, early series of Infinity Nets in the exhibition Monochrome Malerei, to be held in Leverkusen, West Germany, the following year. She and Mark Rothko were the only two New  York based artists to participate. On this occasion Kusama met Fontana, and around the same time, she began corresponding with the Dutch artist Henk Peeters –​a key member of the Dutch Nul group –​who invited her to participate in a 1962 exhibition at the Stedelijk, which she eventually declined.19 Through Peeters, Kusama was also introduced to the avant-​garde gallery Orez established by Leo Verboon in The Hague in 1960. The gallery counted on a solid financial backing thanks to the involvement of Albert Vogel, the husband of

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90  Marie Laurberg Shell heiress Liesje van Hasselts.20 The name Orez was a reverse reference to the German art movement Zero. From the outset, the gallery represented the group’s Dutch offshoot, Nul. Kusama had links to both Zero and Nul through artists like Klein, Fontana, Peeters and Günter Üecker. Photos of Kusama’s exhibition at Orez gallery feature works associated with the Driving Image Show including a suitcase covered in macaroni and women’s shoes adorned with phallic forms. Sculptures made out of jackets, dresses and trousers hung on hangers, covered in macaroni and dipped in paint they acted as stiff, silhouette-​ like forms, which treaded the fine line between image and objects. All the works were made in Holland and collectively they marked a farewell to the white monochromatic aesthetic spearheaded by the Driving Image Show and its contemporary works. It may seem natural to view Kusama’s incorporation of clothes, and commodities like macaroni, as a Pop related comment on consumer culture. However, as her practice evolved, these elements were increasingly emancipated from their connection to a consumer universe and incorporated instead into a distinctly Kusama-​esque fantasy universe, a charged psychological space confronting the audience with twisted and modified versions of the kind of objects that are generally kept close to the body. Clothes, accessories, furniture and food, when coated in paint, were transposed to a fantasy zone, a surreal universe poised to become increasingly performative in the following years. Mannequins acted as substitutes for bodies, or for the body that Kusama herself inserted into her work, as evinced by several staged photographs showing the artist theatrically inhabiting her own installations. Arguably, Driving Image, the title of Kusama’s white universe at the Castellane Gallery anticipated the many trips the artist would embark on in the 1960s. In 1966 the universe toured Europe and was shown at the Naviglio Gallery in Milan and the M.E. Thelen Gallery in Essen. Aside from basic staples, like furniture, macaroni and mannequins, the format of Kusama’s installations had completely changed. Everything now was painted in bright colors including the artist’s iconic nets, patterns of small, interconnected semicircular forms derived from her abstract paintings of the late 1950s. That same year, marked Kusama’s participation in the Venice Biennale with her installation Narcissus Garden. The work consisted of a large number of mirrored balls scattered around the Biennale grounds, reflecting their immediate surroundings and the sky.

Polka Dot Love Room For her second solo exhibition at Orez Gallery Kusama created one of her most remarkable early installations the Polka Dot Love Room (1967). On this occasion, the artist converted the gallery space into a polka-​dot universe introducing what would go on to become a signature motif of her work after the 1990s. Five mannequins, painted in fluorescent colors –​deep orange, green and bright yellow –​were covered in dots, which were either painted or attached as little round stickers. The dummies’ joints were hidden by the polka-​dot fabric wrapped around their waists like bandages. The dots continued on the gallery’s walls and floor forming big circles cut out of paper and painted in the same bright colors. The mannequins were posed in a dance-​like formation, and the large window overlooking the street was covered with a black curtain acting like a theatrical backdrop. The work was documented in various photos and TV footage. For instance, the Dutch music photographer Harrie Verstappen, with

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Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist  91 whom Kusama stayed over two extended periods in the 1960s, documented the work in a series of photographs in which Kusama was blatantly performing for the camera. Wearing a red leotard, red stockings and sporadically affixed paper dots, Kusama stood among the mannequins, stretching out her arms to join the dance and holding hands with two of the dummies. As in other such performative photographs, Kusama visualizes here the fantasy of merging with her work, a posture tying in with her call to self-​obliteration. At the same time, it indicated her ambition to dissolve boundaries and maximize the sensory effect of the work for her audience. The photographs, however, do not show the installation’s most striking effect, that is, the dark room’s ultraviolet black lighting.21 The optical effect must have been spectacular. The conjunction of black light and fluorescent paint gave, in fact, the impression that the dots and mannequins were separating from the background and hovering like autonomous brightly colored elements. In the darkened room, the mannequins and the gallerygoers’ bodies optically merged. Van Houts’s photos documenting the making of the exhibition show Kusama in a Japanese kimono painting dots on the mannequins. This action can be understood as a prefiguration of the so-​called body-​paint festivals that she carried out in The Hague in conjunction with the exhibition. A Dutch television clip that aired during the run of the exhibition shows Kusama with paper dots fluttering in her hair, echoing the paper dots covering the walls, floor and mannequins. In the interview, the artist announces that she will be throwing Holland’s first “naked party” that evening, where gallerygoers will paint each other’s bodies inside what she calls her “infinity polka dot room.”22 Next, a few minutes of footage from the party show Kusama painting people’s nude bodies, including the artist Jan Schoonhoven in the same pattern as the mannequins –​a situation merging artwork, performance, music and party. The boundlessness, liberation and intermingling of art forms and bodies implied by this psychedelic scenario is epitomized by the polka dots, a new and essential artistic motif that, like the net pattern in Kusama’s paintings from the 1950s can be infinitely expanded and applied to practically any surface –​walls, floors, objects, people –​fusing distinct spheres into one cosmic, erotic whole. The works presented a directionless, psychedelic universe dissolving boundaries between the body, the mannequins and the room; between interior and exterior. Gallery-​goers were invited into a parallel reality, a fantasy universe made physical and real, as they moved their darkened bodies among the glowing mannequins and the fluorescent dots, which seemed to peel off the walls and float weightlessly around them. The progression toward a more performatively intensified art experience that marks Kusama’s work in the 1960s finds its culmination in Polka Dot Love Room’s effect-​filled scenography. Although Polka Dot Love Room is all but absent from the reception of Kusama’s work in the 1960s, it has not received sustained attention in more recent accounts. Key to the understanding of her increasingly colorful style, it was lost for many years and only rediscovered in the attic of Orez Gallery by Albert Vogel’s stepdaughter after his death. More so, the work was never shown in New York where the first art historical accounts of Kusama’s work were forged; leaving it out of the artist’s mainstream narrative. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is the monochromatic works and the more simplified aspects of her practice that make a connection to Minimalism and Pop art possible, placing her in a canon determined by white, male, postwar American artists with which she was long forced to reckon. Polka Dot Love Room is anything but that.

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Migration Aesthetics Kusama was a central figure in the development of what in art history has been described as the expanded concept of art in the 1960s, a term embracing a host of experiments by which artists in the period went beyond painting and sculpture opening art to all the things around it: space, popular culture, politics and society. In America Minimalism is singled out as a crucial force in the development of that narrative. As an art movement whose stringent objects, made from industrial materials and placed in tightly organized series, Minimalism dismantled the idea that the artwork “represented something” –​it was something, a specific object sharing a space with the viewer.23 In turn, the viewer’s body entered the work in a new way, a condition that was often emphasized also in relation to Kusama’s use of mirrors. The artist’s ties to Minimalism were also enhanced by her close friendship with Judd. For a period, starting in 1961 they both had studios in the same building. However, a comparison between their work makes it apparent how the engagement with the body was of an entirely different nature. Unlike the neutral and cool aesthetic of Minimalism, which addressed the body as a physical fact, Kusama’s work speaks to an entirely different kind of bodiliness:  a body of desires and fantasies, a gendered body, an eroticized body, a body with an emotionally loaded relationship to its surroundings. In this respect, her work also stands dramatically apart from American Pop, which cultivated the surfaces of commodity culture. In Kusama’s work, repetition is deployed to intensifiy the artistic experience, whereas Pop artists like Warhol used repetition as a strategic device to empty painting of the psychological and spiritual connotations that Abstract Expressionism had invested it with. As Warhol famously proclaimed in an interview with Art News in 1963: “I want to be a machine.” Such cool and detached artistic strategies informed canonical narratives of 1960s American art. But if this is the main track, are we then, with Kusama, on the wrong track? The answer, of course, is that there is not just one but several tracks. In her book Visualizing Feeling, Susan Best addresses the role played by emotions and affects across a range of experimental practices of the 1960s, including the work of Lygia Clark, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Annette Messager, Francesca Woodman, Gego and Cecilia Vicuña.24 Unlike the psycho-​biographical tradition linking the artist’s biography and emotions to the expression of the work, Best focuses on the affective as an effect emerging from the meeting between work and viewer. The emotions are thus not the artist’s own but are inherent to the artworks themselves and the way they are experienced depends on the person looking. When the focus is on the emotions, it is hard to draw a clear line between the work and the viewer. Best writes, “When a work of art is moving, I am moved.”25 Best’s book is just one example of a broader trend in both current art theory and contemporary art revolving around the existential experience tied to a specific, gendered position in the world, an alternative to the notion of existence as all but a “neutral” view on the world. Kusama’s work speaks directly into that trend. But her artistic kinships may just as well be sought on the other side of the Pacific, in Japan. Based in New  York, Kusama stayed sporadically in touch with Japan. In a generational perspective, Kusama belongs to what the Japanese critic Tōno Yoshiaki has designated the “post-​ Hiroshima generation,” artists whose work is molded by Japan where “the rubble, the smell of death and the social confusion of the post-​war era had constituted their

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Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist  93 everyday environment. The ruins were their playground and this state of absolute void became necessarily the foundation for their art.”26 Postwar Japan is characterized by a strong American influence that was extended when Japan in 1960 failed to oppose the renewal of the American-​Japanese Anpo security treaty. This political situation is the backdrop for a number of anti-​authoritarian movements among artists and intellectuals, who oppose the conservatism of modern Japanese culture and critically address the cultural and political dominance of the West. Feelings of alienation, dehumanization and loss of identity, broken ties to nature and to spirituality, are at the heart of a number of artistic avant-​garde movements, the best known of which is the Gutai movement. Founded in 1954 by Shozo Shimamoto and Jiro Yoshihara as an internationally oriented movement, Gutai rejected traditional art techniques in favor of body-​based formats and transient processes. While Kusama sporadically exhibited in the same context as some of these artists, in Europe, she was never part of any movement. Even so, her work can be viewed in the context of contemporary postwar Japanese art that art historian Alexandra Munroe calls “obsessional art,” a singular artistic sensibility revolving around themes such as deviant psychic states, deformity, self-​destruction and spirituality –​existential themes linked to personal traumas and social crisis.27 Several Japanese artists of the time thematize psychological obsessions as both a mental state and an aesthetic style, in works revolving around repetition, fragmentation and irrationality. Tetsumi Kudō, who left Japan and settled in Paris in this period, developed a singular and dystopian artistic universe in sculptures centering on repulsive effects: splintered human bodies and grotesque accumulations of body parts, everyday objects and plant parts as an image of the destructive effects of modern humanity’s blind faith in progress. Kudō’s artistic project had a healing agenda: all its repulsiveness would spur the viewer to seek the truth. Tomio Miki is another artist of the period, for whom obsession, as in Kusama, guides both the aesthetics of the work and the artistic process. From 1963 until his death in 1970, in an unbroken chain reaction, Miki produced a staggering series of sculptures and drawings of ears. In this highly idiosyncratic project, the possible symbolic meanings of the ear are entirely subordinate to the obsessive need to repeat the same subject over and over again. In a famous artist’s statement from 1968, Miki relates how, on a train ride, he suddenly found himself surrounded by hundreds of ears that wanted to attack him –​an experience that triggered his obsession with this specific subject. As he writes, “I can hardly say I chose the ear. More precisely, isn’t it that the ear chose me?”28 Originating in a migrant experience that did not become a prominent theme in art until the globalization of the 1990s, Kusama’s work can inspire a wider understanding of the intercultural dialogues that helped shape postwar art. But the migrant’s otherness is also a theme in some of Kusama’s works from the time. In Walking Piece (1966)  –​a performance documented in a series of slides photographed by Eikoh Hosoe  –​Kusama walks through a gray and deserted industrial neighborhood of New  York, wearing a pink kimono and carrying an umbrella decorated with colorful flowers. Walking through a city, finding one’s routes and feeling its textures, is a way of conquering the streets, of inhabiting a place, but Kusama’s walk emphasizes her position as an outsider. Never blending in with her surroundings, she focuses on the friction between her outsider identity and the place, lingering on the existential experience of being strange.

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94  Marie Laurberg Instead of pigeonholing Kusama in the myth of the mad genius, it is more relevant to see her as an artist who gets her material from personal experience at the threshold between different cultures. The impact of globalization on the artistic landscape of the 1960s art scene has been a vanishingly small factor in histories of art of the period. However, Kusama was one of many artists who traveled across continents, producing aesthetic innovation and artistic exchange. Her work cannot be contained in a Western canon but must be conceived under the narrative of “multiple modernities” –​that has come to the fore in more recent globalization studies –​raising awareness to the fact that modernity is not a phenomenon invented in the West and exported to all other modernizing societies, but that, on the contrary, several simultaneous, locally rooted modernities evolved as a result of specific cultural and historical contexts.29 Kusama’s work is neither Japanese nor American or European, but draws simultaneously on the aesthetic vocabularies of each of these cultures. From her position as a non-​Western, female artist, Kusama created a distinct artistic vision encompassing references drawn from both the East and the West. Concurrently she occupied a space in-​between, which allowed her to mediate between: art and popular culture, the experimental realm and the establishment, art and society.

Notes 1 Kusama 2012. 2 See Eisenstadt 2000. 3 I wish to thank those archives, individuals and institutions that supported my research, among them: Yayoi Kusama, Yoriko Tsuruta, Ena Morita, Etsuko Sakurai, Kusama Studio, Tijs Visser, 0-​institute, Caroline de Westenholz, Jo Widoff, Moderna Museet and Harrie Verstappen. 4 Yoshimoto 2005. 5 This reception largely builds on research relating to museum exhibitions in an Anglo-​ American context, see: Karia 1989 and Morris ed. 2012. 6 This condition is not specific to Kusama alone but can be understood as the result of a proto-​globalized art world of the time. See Ikegami 2010. 7 Installation shots and accounts of Gutai artists performing can be accessed online. See Henk Peeter’s archive: www.henkpeetersarchive.info/​about-​gutai.html 8 Kusama 1965. 9 Ibid. 10 For a study of this new type of European museum the new role assigned to temporary exhibitions, see Handberg 2019. 11 The sculpture, Accumulation no. 2, 1962, is now part of the collection of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. 12 Kusama 1965. 13 Exhibition view of Inner and Outer Space, 1965, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 14 See Applin 2012. 15 I am referring here to Michael Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” published in 1967. In contemporary art this has now entered mainstream thinking, see Butt ed. 2005. 16 The clip can be accessed at: www.sonuma.be. 17 Baker ed. 2016. 18 Ibid. 19 de Westenholz 2015. 20 For a historic account of the Orez Gallery, see de Westenholz 2016.

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Yayoi Kusama as a Migrant Artist  95 21 Described by Kusama in an interview conducted in conjunction with the 1967 exhibition at Orez gallery. The clip is available via the 0-​institute: www.vimeo.com/​103922163. 22 Ibid. 23 See Foster 1996. 24 Best 2011. 25 Ibid., 8. 26 Yoshiaki 1986. 27 Munroe 1994. 28 Ibid., 190. 29 Eisenstadt 2000.

Bibliography Applin, Jo. 2012. Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli’s Field. London: Afterall Books. Baker, Simon ed. 2016. Performing for the Camera. London: Tate Publishing. Best, Susan. 2011.Visualizing Feeling:  Affect and the Feminine Avant-​ garde. London:  I.B. Tauris. Butt, Gavin ed. 2005. After Criticism:  New Responses to Art and Performance. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. de Westenholz, Caroline. 2016. Higher that Level! A  History of Orez International Gallery 1960–​71. Uitgeverij Lias. _​_​_​_​. 2015. “Yayoi Kusama i Holland og Europa 1960–​70,” Louisiana Magasin, 43: 8–​15. Eisenstadt, S. N. 2000. “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1: 1–​29. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Handberg, Kristian. 2019. Conquering the Present in the Long Sixties. Antipyrine. Hoptman, Laura. 1998. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–​1968. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ikegami, Hiroko. 2010. The Great Migrator:  Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art/​Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Karia, Bhupendra. 1989. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective. New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts. Kusama, Yayoi. 2012. Infinity Net. The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. _​_​_​_​. 1965. Letter to Pontus Hultén, 1965. Archive Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Laurberg, Marie. 2015. “Yayoi Kusama –​In Infinity.” In Yayoi Kusama. Edited by Marie Laurberg, Lærke Rydal Jørgensen and Michael Juul Holm. Humlebaek: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Morris, Frances ed. 2012. Yayoi Kusama. London: Tate Publishing. Munroe, Alexandra. 1994. Scream Against the Sky. Japanese Art After 1945. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Yoshiaki, Tōno. 1986. “Neo-​dada et anti-​art.” In Japon des avant-​gardes 1910–​1970. Paris: Centre Pompidou. Yoshimoto, Midori. 2015. Yayoi Kusama –​Inventing the Singular. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2005. Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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7  The Overworked Ground Franz Erhard Walther in New York Stephanie Straine

Franz Erhard Walther trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1960s, studying alongside Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter during Joseph Beuys’ tenure as the academy’s Professor of Monumental Sculpture. While Walther was never formally taught by Beuys during his studies (being a painting student), there was a certain fractious teacher-​student dynamic to their relationship.1 There is even a picture of Beuys wearing the “Vest” component from Walther’s 1. Werksatz (First Work Set) at a performance evening in 1966. And yet, Walther has always emphasized the negative aspects of their association, claiming in 1976 that: Beuys didn’t interest me until Wuppertal … An artistic father-­​­figure  –​which might have been nice  –​is something I’ve definitely never had … In Düsseldorf I  was more or less totally isolated. The dialogue with fellow-​artists, providing constructive criticism, wasn’t there. I had to carry on like that for years on end –​ it wasn’t easy. I don’t know … whether the works have in them this element of isolation, of having to manage without criticism … The indifference sprang above all from the lack of points of comparison. This was one of the things that made me decide to go to New York.2 Walther explicitly links his personal and critical isolation in Düsseldorf to the manifestation of various conceptual iterations of isolation that appear in the 1.Werksatz (First Work Set), a set of 58 wearable canvas objects devised as prototypes for the artist’s theory of sculpture, produced between 1963 and 1969. Accompanying the 1.Werksatz is a suite of Werkzeichnungen (Work Drawings) that extends to over 3,000 sheets (see Figure  7.1). Although the artist labeled this group specifically as work drawings, this type of production certainly does not adhere to the concept of the “working drawing” proposed by Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art (School of Visual Arts, New York, 1966), and its erosion of drawing’s “unique” autography, courtesy of Xerox duplication and office ring binder presentation.3 Walther certainly would have been aware of the impact of this exhibition, staged the year before his arrival in New York.4 The reason for this difference is temporal as well as visual:  whereas Bochner describes the working drawing as “the place where the artist formulates, contrives and discards his ideas,” for Walther his work drawings are never a place to formulate.5 The drawing is produced not before the wearable sculpture to aid in its conception and making, but afterward, to reflect back upon the thing already made (but never simply to record it). These are not, therefore, work drawings

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The Overworked Ground  97

Figure 7.1 Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnungen (Work Drawings), various dates. Installation image, Franz Erhard Walther:  DRAWINGS  –​ Frame/​Line/​Action/​ Drawn Novel, Drawing Room, London, 2012. Image courtesy Drawing Room, London; artwork © Franz Erhard Walther.

in the sense of precursory studies to think through concepts or aid the construction of a “finished” work of painting, sculpture or installation. Instead, they are made after the construction and testing of the 1. Werksatz’s canvas components. They materialize a motion of going back, of returning to an extant work in order to rethink and reimagine its conceptual foundations. To avoid confusion with Bochner’s concept, Walther’s work drawings are here referred to un-​translated, as Werkzeichnungen. Why did I come to America? This question is simple and complex at the same time … after a while there was an accumulation, a mixture of reasons to go to New  York. (Strange, I  never thought of going to another American city.) […] Europe at that time had no attraction to me and I felt it would be good to leave it behind for a certain time. I can’t say that I was attracted by the American art-​ movements. It was rather than I  hoped to find a situation, which gives me the opportunity, to formulate, to explain my claims and demands. Europe seemed busy with other things.6 Feeling frustrated with the reception of his work in Düsseldorf, Walther moved with his young family to New York in May 1967 for a crucial six-​year period that advanced his practice through his involvement in major exhibitions and artistic dialogues. Walther’s Munich gallerist Heiner Friedrich’s deep-​rooted knowledge of New  York

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98  Stephanie Straine played a large part in the young artist’s ability to access the city’s art world. Friedrich would eventually shift his commercial gallery operations from Germany to a space in SoHo in 1973. Friedrich also cofounded the New York-​based Dia Art Foundation in 1974; Dia:Beacon presented Walther’s 1.Werksatz and related Werkzeichnungen (all completed in New York) as a permanent collection display from 2010 to 2012 –​ Heiner Friedrich having secured the works for its founding collection before Walther returned home. This chapter focuses on the transformations within Walther’s drawing practice during this exposure to New  York’s art scene of the late 1960s, to argue that his American sojourn (living and working in a midtown loft that he took over from another German émigré, curator Kasper König) was directly responsible for his participation in era-​defining exhibitions such as Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern and touring, 1969)  and MoMA’s first installation group show Spaces (1969–​70), curated by Jennifer Licht. It will also consider the relative failure of New York to help Walther “explain [his] claims and demands,” which is to say, to overcome his perception of artistic segregation from his peers. During his six-​year residency in New  York, Walther returned frequently to Europe for exhibition opportunities and was also a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künst in Hamburg (HFBK) during the winter term of 1970–​71. A permanent job offer from the Hochschule was the catalyst for Walther’s permanent return to Germany in 1973. The 1. Werksatz, Walther’s most sustained and theorized body of work, was completed two years into his New York stay. All 58 components of the 1.Werksatz were pattern-​ cut and sewn by Johanna Walther, the artist’s first wife.7 Walther (together with friends depending on the work in question) then wore the component, moving around and experimenting with the interaction of fabric work and body/​ bodies, as mini-​tableaux of the objects in use. Walther’s 1. Werksatz articulates a practice centered on an involvement of the body, often that of the unsuspecting exhibition visitor. As Michael Klein explains: “Each piece is a designator for separate functions –​ some physical in nature, others mental or contemplative … Each object is a lesson in thinking, moving and behaving, alone or with a partner.”8 The components are made available during demonstrations without instructions, the artist if present directs participants on how to use them; their bodies becoming sculptural in the process. Early photographs by Timm Rautert document each piece in action, often outdoors. These were originally published by Walther in Objekte, Benutzen (Objects, for Use) in 1968, whilst in New York, a guidebook of sorts for the-​then incomplete 1. Werksatz.9 The intention to publish an English translation never materialized. The role of drawing within this apparatus can be understood in these terms: the Werkzeichnungen reflect back on the sculptural articulation of the 1. Werksatz and its activation by individual and collective bodies through a combination of text, color, free-​flowing abstraction and pictographic drawing, both figurative and geometric. The A4 paper is a cheap material in limitless supply, and it is always the same. No element of preparation, planning or thought needs to enter into its selection or use. Working with the page, Walther embraces its flat confines unthinkingly, producing drawing to a consistent format that is anything but unthinking in its image content (in fact, the complex content often verges on cryptic). “To formulate, to explain” could be understood as the impulse behind this out-​scaled drawing production, as well as Walther’s reason for leaving Europe. His comments in 1976 impart a deeper

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The Overworked Ground  99 significance to his departure for New York, underscoring the importance of the links between postwar Germany and the United States that made such a transatlantic move relatively straightforward –​particularly the commercial and conceptual connections between Düsseldorf, Cologne and New York. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, New  York was the site for a concentration of new approaches to drawing as a medium, underpinned by Minimalism and the diagrammatic impulse, alongside the emergence of process-​and installation-​ led practices.10 Drawing was opened up to a wider spatial construct and given an architectural dimension as well as a temporal one: together these factors brought drawing into a more public realm, away from the private, meditative act of a single person and a single sheet of paper. This transition was seen at the time to have dislodged the subject-​as-​center, registering as crucial for the post-​Abstract Expressionist landscape. Drawing-​specific art history and theory over the last 20  years has been dominated by this type of work, centered on autographic negation, the concept of the working drawing, the generally non-​figurative languages of geometry, process enacting mark-​ making and the expanded legacies of minimalist seriality. Walther recently claimed that the 1. Werksatz’s emphasis on “shifting materiality” led him back to drawing in the late 1960s, after some time spent away from it, developing the initial canvas structures.11 This statement echoes the wider artistic interest in drawing at this time, and sets up what I want to pose as Walther’s temporal adjustment of drawing’s role, as it is situated within his practice as a whole. Many artists operating along the New York-​Rhineland axis first showed their work abroad rather than at home, with German galleries and dealers in particular encouraging American artists to exhibit in Germany. In the reverse direction, many artists (such as Hanne Darboven) traveled from Germany to reside in New York for significant periods of time. When looking at conceptual drawing practices of the 1960s and 1970s, it is impossible to separate out America and Germany into wholly distinct entities, given the degree of collaboration, travel and exchange of ideas artists were undertaking between the two countries.12 This geographic instability provides the base for my analysis of Walther’s peripatetic manifestation of drawing. In New  York, Walther forged links with Joseph Kosuth and other American conceptualists.13 Interestingly, Kosuth explicitly rejected the legitimacy of the Werkzeichnungen, telling Walther that they were a “step backward” from the conceptual potential of the 1. Werksatz itself.14 This is another kind of temporal shift, of course. From Kosuth’s point of view it is entirely legitimate to critique the drawings’ lush appearance, given how jarringly they contrast with the stark calico simplicity of the 58 components they relate to. They go against the grain of what was just then being codified, by Kosuth amongst others, as the rigorously deductive aesthetic of conceptual art. As Sophie Richard has demonstrated, the year in which Walther left Germany for New York, 1967, marked “the first showings of Conceptual Art works in Europe, via exhibitions first organized by Paul Maenz in Frankfurt and the opening of Konrad Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf.”15 Just as Conceptual art was advancing on Germany, Walther made his exit. The Rhineland-​New York axis of travel enabled both continuities and ruptures in his practice. The fleeting and yet fixed encounter that characterizes visitors’ interactions with the 1. Werksatz aligns with the fleeting, halting encounter of Walther with New York. Reconfiguring and responding to drawing’s expanded field as it was being worked through in New York at this time, Walther’s idiosyncratic and overworked ground of

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100  Stephanie Straine drawing is expressed through a potentially endless body of works on paper, arranged in a manner that is visually interlinked but chronologically nonlinear. I am interested in the unseen nature of the Werkzeichnungen during the artist’s time in New York; the fact that they remained as un-​exhibited ciphers throughout this period of excessive production. What does it mean for drawing to operate as a secretive discursive space in which an artist reflects upon and self-​critiques another aspect of their practice? This is the space Walther reaches with his later phase of Werkzeichnungen, begun shortly before his departure for New York. Walther’s critical isolation in Düsseldorf led him to the refuge of drawing as a portable, itinerant medium, not subject to geographic limitations and capable of unfolding a discourse not reliant on intermediaries of any kind. Walther’s Werkzeichnungen are only part of the vast store of works on paper produced by the artist during the period 1964–​73, within which there is a distinct classificatory system, as the artist explained: I have chosen to call drawings that are more like notations Diagramme. They are work sketches. Werkzeichnungen can also be sparing but the aspect of notation is embedded in their pictorial character. In the sixties and seventies, the Diagramme seemed up to date and the Werkzeichnungen more anachronistic. This perception was a conflict for me. The changed view of painting from the end of the seventies also freed the gaze for this type of drawing again.16 I am interested in these “anachronistic” drawings: the more distinctive and overworked Werkzeichnungen that seemed out of step with the diagrammatic direction of drawing in the late 1960s. The nonconformist status of the Werkzeichnungen simply failed to “fit” in New York, and Walther recognized this, keeping them hidden. More specifically, I want to think about how their sheer mass, together with their “pictorial character” and painterly attributes, relate to the physical endeavor of the 1. Werksatz. This is an occasion when drawing assumes a posture against clarity, expediency or direct visibility of intent. As Walther would on another occasion report: The only encouragement I received came from the climate created by conceptual art and its use of language. However, my drawings were too individual for that, had too much aroma and too much color to them. As Joseph Kosuth once said about them, “Too much sentimentality.”17 A vast collective of interdependent works on paper, these “sentimental”  –​near aberrant –​drawings demonstrate a conception of the ground of drawing as both surface and score: as both material plane and conveyor of information, however occluded that information appears to be. The Werkzeichnungen chart, through brightly colored graphic layouts of hand-​ and typewritten text, geometric shapes, gestural washes and schematic figural representations, an abstraction negotiating its relationship to the body. In the drawing “I am the Sculpture”  –​Sculpture Manifesto (1965/​69), begun in Düsseldorf and completed in New York, the individual is simply schema, merely functional representation. Related to component Walking Piece, Plinth (see Figure  7.2), in it we see the human body through Walther’s eyes: a generic, nonsexual and non-​individuated outline. The body is depicted pictographically; it is a basic visual symbol, standing

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The Overworked Ground  101

Figure 7.2 Franz Erhard Walther, Gehstück, Sockel (Walking Piece, Plinth), Single Element, No. 2, 1. Werksatz (First Work Set), 1964, strong canvas, dark green; foam rubber slabs, wooden balls, cords, plastic tube, metal eyes, zip fastener, 10 x 88 x 60 cm (3 7/​8 x 34 5/​8 x 23 5/​8 inches), Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther.

in for a much wider discourse (and debate for the artist himself) around how the body can be made use of. In these drawings the meaning of the body is constantly shifting, forever subject to revision and amendment. Perhaps Kosuth’s verdict that these works were “sentimental” can be understood in relation to their lack of fixity, their skittishness when it comes to assuming a position relative to flesh. During this phenomenological turn of the late 1960s, why was the body made such a focus for Walther, or rather: why was the loss of the body feared? His approach braids together a physical event with a subsequent material production in drawn form, however interrupted (and distorted by memory) the path between them may be. The drawings’ reverse narratives look back upon an action (perhaps multiple demonstrations of it) and its object/​sculpture: in the case of many Werkzeichnungen this can happen years after the sculpture’s initial conception and construction. There is a time lag, then, between conception, event and the related drawing(s). This strangely distended temporality for drawing (mirroring Walther’s own geographic relocation) provided an ever collapsing and expanding framework for the artist, with the works on paper remaining both marginal to and constitutive of the practice as a whole. Walther anticipates the afterlife of the work as it is imaginatively encountered through drawing. In a very real sense, he could be said to overinterpret his work,

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102  Stephanie Straine veering dangerously close to a parade of impenetrable jargon while also constantly self-​editing. This is the antagonistic impulse in his drawing practice both to communicate and to obscure: these works on paper are potentially misleading commentaries on the 1. Werksatz, while also creating a substitute space for it, just as New  York became a temporary substitute space for Walther himself. Jarringly dislodged from any kind of chronological alignment, here there is repetition without the minimal impulse. The gap between Walther and contiguous New York-​based art movements becomes a relapse of his proximate separateness to Fluxus’ flourishing in Düsseldorf. While the Werkzeichnungen were not exhibited at all during Walther’s time in New  York, they did feature in his contribution to Szeemann’s now iconic group exhibition Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form: Works –​Concepts –​ Processes  –​ Situations  –​ Information that ran from 22 March to 27 April 1969 at Kunsthalle Bern (touring to Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld and the ICA, London later that year), alongside ten components from the 1. Werksatz (at that point referred to simply as Objects, dated 1965–​68). Walther’s work was shown in the north galleries of Kunsthalle Bern, alongside works by Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Fred Sandback, and nearest to Mel Bochner’s Thirteen Sheets of 8 ½ inch Graph Paper (1969) and Hanne Darboven’s Six Books on 1968 (1968) in vitrines that divided the space.18 Walther’s positioning within the exhibition layout reflects the impact that his association with New York had on his artistic reputation back in Europe, after little more than two years stateside. Walther was separated out from the overbearing presence of Beuys, as well as material-​and process-​led American sculptors like Bill Bollinger, Eva Hesse and Keith Sonnier, who were all located in the Kunsthalle’s main hall. He was instead situated in the “dematerialized” zone of the exhibition that prioritized conceptual, diagrammatic and notational visual languages. In the summer of 1969, Walther was also invited by curator Jennifer Licht to take part in MoMA’s group exhibition Spaces (30 December 1969–​1 March 1970), often cited as the first major museum interpretation of then-​nascent installation art. Alongside Walther, Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris and an experimental light and sound collective, Pulsa, were asked to develop single-​room installations for Spaces. The only non-​American in this line-​up, Walther was also the sole contributor whose work directly involved physical “activation” or audience participation. The prevailing concern shared by the other Spaces artists was a focus on the phenomenological effects generated by architectural, environmental or sonic conditions. By comparison, Walther’s work was far more interior –​and individuated –​ in character. Walther exhibited components from the incomplete 1. Werksatz in a glazed ground-​ floor gallery fully visible from the street. He used the collective title Instruments for Processes, dated 1962–​69, and also listed individual titles, some later revised, without any of the related drawings. Julie Reiss has provided some details of Walther’s contribution: During the hours when the artist was not present, visitors could only look into the room, but not enter or use anything. Walther had written to Licht before the exhibition opened: “It is necessary to show the use of the objects to the public. That could be done for two hours on each day … During the remaining hours the objects are just exposed along with informations and explanations about the use/​employment of things … For certain reasons I want to show and explain the

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The Overworked Ground  103 function of the things by myself.” Even when Walther was present, one could not just walk in: in order to avoid having the space become too crowded, the artist invited people in at his discretion. In this piece, participation was only under the explicit direction and supervision of the artist, who controlled [my emphasis] the action.19 Many critics have pointed to this aspect of control, chief among them artist Peter Halley, who makes the valid point regarding the Werksatz’s “purified aesthetic of controlled bodies in space,” that “after Foucault, it was impossible to accept the neutrality or objectivity of the formal and phenomenological investigations of minimalism or conceptualism.”20 Walther himself has always denied this interpretation of sole author-​orchestration for the demonstrations. He maintains that it is a very liberating process for those involved, but Halley’s observation is nevertheless a reminder of the negative implications of instrumentalisation; the exploitative undercurrent of his attempts to impose order on the essentially un-​orderable. In measuring by and through the body, the individual in effect disappears through a process of substitution. Halley’s Foucauldian invocation of bodily discipline and punishment thematizes the tropes that inhabit the margins of Walther’s work –​and in never being articulated by the artist, it exists as a kind of ghost discipline, seeping into the Werkzeichnungen by proxy. Perceptively anticipating this strand of Walther’s art-​historical reception, Licht wrote in the Spaces exhibition catalogue that his objects “operate in a space that we have almost always regarded as inviolable and as ours alone to control,” concluding that Walther’s art “undermines our autonomy over personal terrain.”21 As Caroline Lillian Schopp recently remarked of Blind Object, number 12 in 1. Werksatz (see Figure 7.3): The activation involves being stifled and blinded, at once concealed and vulnerable, camouflaged and exposed. It is in this way that Walther’s early work might be understood to be political –​not because it is liberatory, but because it is not.22 I would further argue that together the 1. Werksatz and Werkzeichnungen can be understood as radically anti-​anthropomorphic, taking into account the cloaking of the human body in the canvas components and the equivalent obscuring of the individual subject within the vast drawing output. The artist has repeatedly emphasized the significance of the Werkzeichnungen to the 1. Werksatz. The comment below helps somewhat to clarify his intentions behind these drawings: This is an important realization: that you can never get the conception and the reality to agree. If I describe this spatial relationship … through a drawing, then it forms part of the work. Recording on paper is the reconstruction of situations perceived in reality, and of conceptions. When I  draw the memory image, it becomes a reality.23 Articulating the ever-​present gap between its conceptual imagining and the reality of a situation in space and time, Walther here seems to suggest that drawing is the means by which he attempts to bridge this gap, by producing what amounts to an afterimage on paper. As a memory of the work, these after-​drawings come to seem all the more shifting and unreliable, while in this uncertainty weaving themselves still further

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104  Stephanie Straine

Figure 7.3 Franz Erhard Walther, Blindobjekt (Blind Object), Single Element, No. 12, 1. Werksatz (First Work Set), 1966, light canvas, brown; foam rubber, 212.7 x 99.7 x 2.2 cm (83 3/​4 x 39 1/​4 x 7/​8 inches), one of five individual examples, Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther.

into the very fabric of the Werksatz. As attempts to translate between concept and reality, we can see an outline of Walther’s own attempts to translate the German and American contexts and comprehensions of his practice. The Werkzeichnungen are the unavoidably chaotic residues, the leftovers that fail to conform to the “dematerialized” trajectory Walther initially followed by positioning the 1. Werksatz as a transitory action-​situation, aligning himself with the Conceptual art currents of New York. Rather, Walther succeeded in fragmenting the idea of the work. The actual bodies of people wearing the piece are less important than the space that the work as a whole defines, but their dispersed, unpredictable agency means that the situation never exists simply at a theoretical level. Walther considers that with the work piece he has not made an object. He sets the conditions; he gives a demonstration. He thinks that the people in the work piece are their own audience; it’s not necessary for anybody outside of that piece to act as viewers. To be involved with the Werksatz pieces such as Blind Object requires participants to relinquish any self-​consciousness and to make completely unscripted decisions regarding what to do with their bodies, their movements. The artist, in devising these work situations, extracted information from how they unfolded; information he then used to make the diagrams, flow charts and drawings both integral to and separate from that central “experience.”

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The Overworked Ground  105 Walther’s Werkzeichnungen are a collective, organized yet over-​spilling drawing production, setting in motion questions of what it means to produce a surplus; what the end result is when there is simply too much information on display. Unlike many other artists of the time who were producing and displaying drawings or photographs in vast quantities (in Germany Hanne Darboven and Bernd and Hilla Becher are just the most obvious examples), Walther’s reams of paper production lack the “aesthetic of the administration,” with its mathematical and calendric models or mechanical reproduction.24 What there is instead is sheer material overload –​pencil, pen, crayon, collage, ink, watercolor and occasionally coffee are used as drawing materials; their staining effects particularly prized as the drawings are all double-​sided. Together these drawings enable an unfolding of the work: they are “containers for the experience of the 1. Werksatz,” as the artist puts it. With the Werkzeichnungen Walther tests his own hypotheses, not with a specific outcome in mind, but rather with the intention of throwing into question his own initial understanding of the work. There is circularity and there is build-​up, but then there is also a breaking point, a moment of undoing in which the loop is degraded by the constant presence of uncertainty. This is one of the major issues raised by Walther’s approach to drawing: as viewers we must deal with the distance and doubt engendered by these kinds of working methods. This Werkzeichnung (1969) (see Figure 7.4) is related to Blind Object. It is both a painterly quasi-​impression of the piece in use and an imaginative deviation from its instructional reality. Any attempt at diagrammatic analysis or planning is waylaid, to be replaced with double-​sided staining effects suggestive of a body both contained by sculptural mass and in the process of disintegrating from within it. This abstraction of corporeal matter is somewhat unnerving. Another Blind Object-​related Werkzeichnung (see Figure  7.5), dated three years earlier, 1966, captures in murky watercolors the sensation of encroaching enclosure and suspension of sight. Its descriptive duality of inside/​outside space also serves to remind us that these sculptures are folded and two-​dimensional when not in use, and able to occupy three-​dimensional space only when activated. As Clément Dirié writes of Blind Object and its relationship to the related Werkzeichnungen:  “… it constitutes another potentiality, a different interpretation, attesting to the open work that is Walther’s practice.”25 The spreading, endless mass of Walther’s paper workings epitomizes the fractured, plural ground of drawing: that which is split, doubled and self-​reflective; an endless mass that we might even relate to postwar plenitude, to Western overproduction and consumption, as Germany swiftly followed America’s lead in matters of capitalist consumer culture. Walther’s grounds incorporate superimposition, layering and working across both recto and verso. The Werkzeichnungen’s depth of content and material duality emphasize the ground of drawing’s lack of a singular face or surface membrane. Together, the Werkzeichnungen epitomize the idea of constant work, a continuous stream of ancillary notations manifested as drawings. The never-​throwing-​anything-​ away approach means that waste and retrieval are together implicated in a cycle of labor and over-​production. It is quite impossible to argue that drawing is the artist’s central concern, and yet it has the feel of a strange, compulsive necessity, produced and gathered together in volumes so great they could never be exhibited as a body

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106  Stephanie Straine

Figure 7.4 Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnung (Work Drawing), [recto], related to No. 12, First Work Set, 1969, graphite, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 29.6 x 21 cm (11 5/​8 x 8 1/​4 inches), signed recto lower right: “Walther 69”; signed verso lower right: “Walther 69.” Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther.

of work in its totality. In volume they overwhelm the 58 Werksatz components, and yet they remain still marginalized: ghosts of concepts, of ideas, executed in coded and often clipped textual and visual languages that fail always to illuminate fully or provide direct equivalence to the Werksatz. They are literally a puzzle: an artist producing thousands of drawings that are only ever ancillary to his main working concern. Walther, discussing the art scene in New York c. 1968, commented: I watched it all attentively and viewed a large number of artists as allies, but it never had any direct influence on me because I  was pursuing a completely different idea of the artwork, through my concept of defining actions as works, which had yet to have a future. […] Donald Judd said: “I like your pieces but without people.” Since my concept of the action was capable of absorbing a lot of things, I didn’t have to close myself off to them.26 Yet again, Walther demonstrates his double-​sided expression of distance; he recognizes both his palpable estrangement from and receptiveness to the milieu of his time. This spatiotemporal instability relates to the geographic instability that conditions Walther’s peripatetic manifestation of drawing. Ultimately, the inconsistencies of

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The Overworked Ground  107

Figure 7.5 Franz Erhard Walther, Werkzeichnung (Work Drawing), [recto], related to No. 12, First Work Set, 1966, graphite, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 29.6 x 19.6 cm (11 5/​8 x 7 3/​4 inches), signed recto lower right: “Walther 66”; signed verso lower right: “Walther 66.” Courtesy the artist and Peter Freeman, Inc. © Franz Erhard Walther.

New York gave Walther the ability to forge a network that was global, not regional. If “Europe was busy with other things,” then drawing for Walther became a means of translation, not only between the sculptures, public demonstrations and their experimental “writing up,” but also between the difficult dialogues of his artistic training ground, and the unfettered spaces of New York that contained still an echo of earlier resistance and “the struggle for identity.”27 Within this huge amount of works on paper completed by Walther over this relatively short period of time, in every instance the individual drawing is cast out from the artist in a state of experimentation, of not really knowing the end result, despite it coming at the end of a process of making, testing and wearing the Werksatz object. This underscores the displaced status of drawing in Walther’s practice, and his experiential displacement to New  York. His strategy of accumulation (“an accumulation of reasons” being his phrase to describe his impetus to leave for New  York) perhaps doesn’t persuade us of its legitimacy, but only himself, in his isolation, to keep going. If we take drawing here to be the working through of the work, then these overworked after-​drawings become a kind of productive waste material: a series of illusory, false bottoms and shifting commentaries that continually encircle something that isn’t really there, that exists only momentarily –​in use.

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108  Stephanie Straine

Notes 1 This essay is revised and updated from an unpublished PhD chapter, Straine 2013. The PhD research was supported by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. Walther in a letter to Yve-​Alain Bois revealed that Beuys “was always very opposed to me and my work –​at times it rather looked pathological.” 17 May 1970, New York rpt. in Verhagen and Walther, 63. 2 Walther in Jappe 1976, 65. 3 In a key 1969 short text, Bochner declared that “in much recent art, drawing has been held in disrepute,” particularly because of its “autographic nature.” Bochner (1969) 2008, 61. 4 Bochner and Walther both showed with Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich in the 1960s. 5 Bochner (1969) 2008, 61. 6 Walther, letter to Yve-​Alain Bois, 17 May 1970, New York, rpt. in Verhagen and Walther 2017, 64. 7 There is a similarity here to the production of Claes Oldenburg’s early soft sculptures in the 1960s, whose patterns were sewn by Oldenburg’s first wife, artist and poet Patty Mucha. 8 Klein 1983, unpaginated. 9 Walther 1968. 10 On this terrain, see Lovatt 2019. 11 Franz Erhard Walther, Transforming Time, Making Space symposium, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London, 27 November 2010. 12 Richard 2009, 39. 13 Kosuth contributed to a 1988 exhibition catalogue of Walther’s work. See Crone, ed. 1988, unpaginated. 14 Author’s interview with the artist, 14 October 2011, Drawing Room, London. 15 Richard 2009, 37. 16 Walther (1997) in Koettering 2000, 29–​30. 17 Walther qtd. in Verhagen and Walther 2017, 139. 18 This information alongside more detailed visual analysis of the exhibition’s layout is cited in Rattemeyer et al. 2010. 19 Reiss 1999, 91. 20 Halley 2011, 60. 21 Licht 1969, unpaginated. 22 Schopp 2018, 172. 23 Walther in Jappe 1976, 66. 24 Buchloh 1990, 105–​43. 25 Dirié 2016, 34. 26 Walther in Filipovic 2016, 77. 27 Walther in Verhagen and Walther 2017, 145.

Bibliography Bochner, Mel. 2008. “Anyone Can Learn to Draw” (1969). In Solar System and Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965–​2007. Edited by Mel Bochner, 61. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Buchloh, Benjamin. 1990. “Conceptual Art 1962–​1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” October, vol. 55, Winter: 105–​43. Crone, Rainer, ed. 1988. Franz Erhard Walther. New York: John Weber Gallery. Dirié, Clement. 2016. “Franz Erhard Walther’s Drawings from 1957 to 2009: An Annotated Chronological Portfolio.” In Franz Erhard Walther –​The Body Draws. Edited by Luis Croquer, 34. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington.

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The Overworked Ground  109 Filipovic, Elena. 2016. “Interview with Franz Erhard Walther.” In Franz Erhard Walther –​The Body Draws. Edited by Luis Croquer, 76–87. Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. Halley, Peter. 2011. “Franz Erhard Walther: Close Encounters of Three Kinds.” Flash Art, no. 278, January–​February: 58–​61. Jappe, Georg. 1976. “Interview with Franz Erhard Walther.” Studio International, vol. 192, no. 982, July–​August: 59–​61. Klein, Michael. 1983. Sculpture from Germany. New York: Independent Curators, Inc. Koettering, Michael, ed. 2000. Franz Erhard Walther:  Sites of Origin –​Sites of Influence, Exhibitions 1962–​2000. Nordhhorn: Stadtisches Galerie Nordhorn. Licht, Jennifer. 1969. Spaces. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Lovatt, Anna. 2019. Drawing Degree Zero:  The Line from Minimal to Conceptual Art. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Rattemeyer, Christian et al. 2010. Exhibiting the New Art: ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ and ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ 1969. London: Afterall Books. Reiss, Julie. 1999. From Margins to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. Richard, Sophie. 2009. Unconcealed: The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967–​ 77:  Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collections. Edited by Lynda Morris. London and Norwich: Ridinghouse. Schopp, Caroline Lillian. 2018. “Active Duty.” Artforum, vol. 56, no. 6, February: 167–​73. Straine, Stephanie. 2013. “The Over-​Worked Ground: Franz Erhard Walther’s after-​drawings,” The Ground of Drawing: Graphic Operations in the 1960s and 1970s. PhD diss., University College London, 86–​126. Verhagen, Eric and Walther, Susanne, eds. 2017. Franz Erhard Walther: Dialogues. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Walther, Franz Erhard. 1968. Objekte, benutzen. Cologne and New York: Gebrüder König.

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PART 2

Against the Norm: Decentering and Resisting the Canon

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8  Blinded by Mao The Challenge of Seeing Modernism in Art of the People’s Republic Karen Stock

Julia Andrews observes that by 1980 China and the United States, on either side of the cold war’s bamboo curtain, had developed standards for art that were in almost complete opposition, standards that had been so thoroughly canonized and absorbed into the tastes, emotions, and worldview of their respective citizenry that … an aesthetic gulf remains, even today, and even at the most elevated levels of society.1 Even though the Cold War is over, the Bamboo Curtain that separated East from West has left an indelible mark and may still exist on the level of an art historical “disciplinary unconscious.”2 In recent years, Western scholars have shown an increased interest in twentieth-​century Chinese art. However, the years of Mao’s rule (1949–​1977) are uniquely problematic with the art of the People’s Republic of China being dismissed by a Western audience as propaganda.3 The scholarship of twentieth-​ century Chinese art is progressing but the Maoist era remains particularly difficult for Western viewers. Mao is referenced in the title of this essay as a symbol for the ideological distortions of the Cold War era and the biases that to some degree still linger. Mao Zedong (1893–​1976) is a mythic figure in the Cold War narrative who has been cast in many different roles. Shifting perceptions of Mao depend on the storyteller and whether their story was that of liberating revolution and historical progress or one of communist expansion and destructive violence […] Mao has appeared in the role of nationalist unifier, peasant rebel, Red Emperor, knockoff Stalin, humane modernizer, model of third world revolution, or leading political murderer of the twentieth century.4 Each of these roles is inflected by a web of political and cultural factors. The Cold War was a way of “seeing the world” or an “ideological lens [that] transformed complex constellations of global and local events into a manageable framework.”5 I investigate how this ideological lens effects art historical discourse and question the privileging of Euro-​American modernism. I propose that a variant of Chinese modernist art existed during the Maoist era in the form of brush-​and-​ink painting (guohua). Guohua can be translated as Chinese painting, native painting or national painting but is largely defined by the medium of ink on paper or silk.6 The term guohua only came into use in the early

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114  Karen Stock twentieth-​century when traditional art was challenged by an influx of Western culture. Before this time there was no need to have a specific term because brush-​and-​ink painting, either with or without color, was the only form of painting. Ink painting had been effectively “de-​centered or relativized by the increased awareness of Western artistic culture.”7 The ramifications of this decentering can hardly be overestimated. The need to specify guohua, to add a qualifier to an art form that had previously simply existed as art, connoted the relativizing of China in the global aesthetic realm. Ink painting was associated with elitism, imperialism and individual expression; but over the course of the twentieth-​century, guohua took on shifting ideological dimensions as tradition itself was seen alternately as a burden to be cast off or a heritage to be treasured. This particular burden of medium specificity is uniquely Chinese and has no corollary for the Western artist.8 The language of ink painting, with its elegantly expressive application of black ink on paper, had been developing for over a thousand years. This tradition, however, is hardly an inert mass; rather, it is a “field of dynamic conflict and active discursive construction, the necessary antagonist and field for modernity.”9 Both the style of guohua as well as the critical discourse was reactive to the issues of each respective decade. After experimenting with Western art in the 1920s and 1930s, prominent artists who had advocated oil painting found that “the foreign solution” was lacking, and they “turned back to their national heritage for inspiration.”10 The experimentation with Western media and techniques seemingly reinforced a dedication to guohua as the means to move Chinese culture forward. These artists were making a conscious and informed choice to remold guohua –​ not to return to the past, but to pave the way for the future of Chinese art in the larger process of modernization.11 With the founding of the People’s Republic, artists who practiced guohua were no longer in danger of being made irrelevant by Western modernism. Instead, the challenge came from the predominance of socialist realism and a modernity defined by Communist doctrine. Surviving this perilous political era, characterized by “an endless succession of shifting phases and phases-​within-​phases,” required far more than artistic talent.12 In the initial years of the People’s Republic guohua was barely tolerated while Socialist Realism was promoted. In the mid-​1950s, policy shifted to acknowledge the value of guohua and reestablish ink painting in art schools.13 The most optimistic time for traditional artists was the Hundred Flower Campaign. In May of 1956, Mao declared “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend,” and guohua was encouraged as part of the national artistic heritage. However, by the spring of 1957, the blooming became a rectification campaign. Approximately 300,000–​400,000 intellectuals were labeled as rightists and sent to the country for reeducation.14 The Great Leap Forward began in 1958, and artists were included in the drive to produce “More, Faster, Better, Cheaper.”15 Following the failure of the Great Leap officials briefly relaxed cultural controls and encouraged diversity in art. The People’s Liberation Army usurped control in the mid-​1960s and thus began the Cultural Revolution (1966–​1976) which ended the creation of guohua works, shattered careers and destroyed lives.16 Throughout the Maoist era, guohua artists navigated between the lingering aftermath of the Western avant-​garde, the onslaught of Soviet Socialist Realism and the continued presence of China’s cultural tradition. They reinvented the “inherited language” of guohua to suit modern demands.17 The fundamentals of the language remained in the form of brushwork that had been passed down from earlier masters.

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Blinded by Mao  115 However, this literati vocabulary of ink and brush had to signify, not intellectual erudition, but rather revolutionary zeal. The most significant accomplishment of guohua artists “may have been to preserve the general aesthetic of literati painting while removing all the conventional signs by which it could have been identified and then condemned.”18 The works of Fu Baoshi and Pan Tianshou illustrate the validity of ink painting in an era of Socialist Realism and are discussed as evidence of a delicate negotiation between cultural heritage and contemporary ideology. Guohua painters have often “been wrongly viewed as out of date or failing to engage the formal issues of Western art.”19 These artists were neither explicitly modernist nor staunchly traditionalist. Liang Qichao’s metaphor from 1901 succinctly captures the dilemma; he describes China as “a boat that has left the bank and is adrift in mid-​stream, unable to go either forwards or backwards. This situation can be summed up by the old saying ‘stuck between two banks and unable to reach either shore.’ ”20 These two unreachable shores are comparable to the binaries between East/​West, traditional/​modern and communist/​capitalist. The two shores could be viewed as false constructs that are unreachable because they only exist in discursive narratives. The shifting middle ground is infinitely more interesting and also a better reflection of the complexities of lived experience.

Can We Use the M Word? Splintered, peripheral, transitive, alternative, multi-​local, derivative, other, secondary, provincial, double. These are some of the qualifiers used to describe Chinese modernism. This proliferation of adjectives is necessary because modernism is always implicitly Euro-​American and the progress of Chinese art is often measured against the Western template. Consequently, Westernization is implicitly presented as the most crucial factor in twentieth-​century Chinese art and the only form of positive change in this extremely volatile century. Ralph Croizier identifies two waves of Chinese modernism that coincide with Westernization. Wave one (1929–​1937) was ended by the Sino-​Japanese war, and wave two (1985–​1989) was ended by the Tiananmen massacre.21 Croizier characterizes the years between Westernization as a “long hiatus … when national crises made individualism and stylistic innovation seem like selfish luxuries.”22 The stylistic innovation that did occur was merely an “undercurrent beneath the mainstream” of Socialist Realism.23 Croizier somewhat qualifies his stance stating, “I do not want to dismiss the idea of ‘alternative modernities’ ” but if the term is stretched “to cover anything, anywhere, at any time,” then a meaningful global historical discourse is more difficult.24 In direct response to Croizier, Jerome Silbergeld argues that the period of hiatus was not anti-​modern but rather a different modernity. He also asserts that to call Maoist era art modern “is not a question of wordplay; it is a question of the hegemony of definitions.”25 The issue is one that turns, not on innate aesthetic characteristics but rather on “whose interpretative codes are to be sovereign.”26 The shifting of “interpretive codes” is a daunting task and the study of Maoist era art is hindered by real obstacles. Large numbers of artworks were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and, additionally, there is no canon of twentieth-​century Chinese art or established genealogy of influence.27 Julia Andrews identifies a less tangible impediment. She

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116  Karen Stock observes that American “children of the Cold War, my generation, were educated to assume that Communist countries did not have any art worth studying.”28 I would argue that this stigma, while on the wane, remains a factor in interpretation. China opened its doors to the West in late 1978, after being artistically invisible since 1949, and Euro-​American scholars were seeing the previous 30  years of Chinese art through the ideological lens of the Cold War. China, having focused on Socialist Realism, was out of step with Euro-​American art trends. As the West was moving into post-​ modernism, Chinese culture had seemingly missed modernism. However, the poor timing of Chinese culture is only credible if one ascribes to the Euro-​American measure of linear progress. If viewed from another perspective, it is clear that progressive innovation looked dramatically different depending on whether the artist was Euro-​American or Chinese. Ironically, the “radical mutiny” of Western modernism pushed art closer to the aesthetics of traditional Chinese art.29 As Eugene Wang explains: “The primacy of spiritual vision and anti-​illusionism that European modernism was working hard to create was precisely the burden of the literati tradition that modern-​minded Chinese radicals were trying to unload.”30 China and the West had been on opposing ends of an artistic spectrum for hundreds of years and embraced opposing “scales of value” in an alternating cycle.31 For instance, when the West valued illusionism and naturalism, China valued expressiveness and abstraction. Jonathan Hay observes that “the degree of dysphasia in favor of the Euro-​ American world rendered China’s otherly modernity invisible to Westerners.”32 Hay rehearses the idea of an early Chinese modernity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and this dysphasia is relevant to the twentieth-​century. For instance, in the nineteenth-​century, it was beneficial for Westerners to imagine China as static and trapped in the past.33 Westerners in the twentieth-​century had their own version of a mythic China to construct and cultural myths to defend. The typical discourse of the Cold War aligns the West with “freedom, rationalism, individualism, and order versus Chinese despotism, irrationality, group-​think and chaos.”34 Works of art, as well as the history of art, are entangled in these competing cultural myths. Martin Powers proposes that the West is a “rhetorical construct” rather than a historical entity, and the dichotomy between Western progress and Chinese backwardness is only supported by gross generalizations.35 This binary is founded on a double standard that is also the foundation of the standard narrative of modernity.36 The double standard, influenced by nationalism, has been a part of art historical discourse since the eighteenth century. The history of art has been used as part of the fabrication of cultural narratives that support national identity.37 The challenge for current art historians is to step out of the familiar narrative and shine a light on cultural politics. Art historians have a tendency, according to Richard Shiff, to contrast “themselves to others as if they were located outside their own culture, rather than investigating their culture as an effect of collective subjectivity.”38 He encourages a “critical self-​ reflexiveness,” which he also describes as “anamorphic” because the position of the storyteller is necessarily figured into the account.39 The anamorphic image is a fitting metaphor for the shifting perspectives on Maoist era art in relation to modernism. A particularly pointed use of anamorphosis is Gerald Laing’s 1962 work Souvenir (of the Cuban Missile Crisis Oct 16–​28 1962), which is an apparent commentary on competing political ideologies through anamorphosis. The work has no one correct vantage point. Its angled vertical slats depict both Kennedy and Khrushchev in a

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Blinded by Mao  117 propagandistic style. Whether one sees Kennedy, Khrushchev or an uncomfortable amalgam of both depends on the physical orientation of the viewer. Standing to the far right brings Kennedy into focus. If one stands to the far left, then Khrushchev is clearly seen. This physical mapping of the space is reflective of ideological divisions and “dramatizes how viewers can interpret the same painting in radically different ways.”40 Modern guohua does not exhibit literal anamorphic trompe l’oeil, but it does dramatically shift meaning depending on the ideological position of the viewer. When modern guohua gained an international audience in the 1980s, Westerners saw either propaganda or a corrupted tradition. Laing observes that “most people were aware of the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and brusquely dismissed Chinese art as pure propaganda, unworthy of serious attention.”41 On the other hand, there were those who resented the sullying of the Chinese tradition by including industrial subjects such as factories and hydroelectric stations.42 The works are neither propaganda nor corrupted tradition and this polarity is another version of Liang Qichao’s metaphor of being trapped between two banks. Critics from both sides of the division seem to look past a middle ground that would allow these works to be modern art. Politics played a large part in establishing these binaries and is essential to a more nuanced understanding of guohua.

The Yan’an Talks The Yan’an Talks of 1942 had the most lasting repercussions on twentieth-century Chinese art. At this northern Communist base, while the civil war with the Nationalists was paused in order to cope with the Sino-​Japanese war, Mao spoke passionately of a utopian future when art would serve the people and be part of one ideological machine. Part of the significance of the Talks is that Mao considered literature and visual arts worthy of his attention.43 Mao’s tone was stridently militant: “Our meeting today is to ensure that literature and art become a component part of the whole revolutionary machinery, so they can act as a powerful weapon in uniting and educating the people while attacking and annihilating the enemy.”44 Artists and writers were called to serve, not on the armed front, but on the cultural front in order to attain “unity among ourselves and win victory over the enemy.”45 Workers in literature and art, as Mao referred to them, were granted a kind of uneasy parity with soldiers. Mao called these former intellectuals “heroes without a battlefield.”46 He gave them a battlefield in the form of the peasant village where they must both serve and educate the masses. Artists and writers were thus granted a heightened esteem. There is an argument that socialist governments like China’s value their artists far more greatly than do capitalist governments … While the capitalist artist is viewed as a decorator, as a generator of consumer goods that are prized for their “surplus value,” the socialist artist is recognized as a political voice and moral force.47 However, this importance comes at a price. In order to remain a functioning cog in the revolutionary machinery, artists must fundamentally alter their sense of identity. The government mandated that artists abandon the individuality and intellectual pursuits that were central to the literati tradition. This gap was filled by devotion

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118  Karen Stock to the Chinese Communist Party. Artists now had, in Mao’s words, the “complete freedom to go among the masses, and we give them complete freedom to create genuinely revolutionary literature and art.”48 Mao also addressed the dual role of content and style. Approved content was straightforward, the life of the worker, but style was troublingly vague. Mao stated: “What we demand is the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form.”49 These broad and lofty goals left artists uncertain how to proceed. Mao did not categorically reject, or even specifically mention, literati painting: “We do not by any means refuse to use the old forms of the feudal class and the bourgeoisie, but in our hands these old forms are reconstructed and filled with new content.”50 This left a treacherous ambiguity in determining what works constituted a genuine transformation of “feudal” forms versus works that perpetuated bourgeois taste. The government encouraged Soviet Socialist Realism while other styles were passively tolerated.51 Ink painting and calligraphy, “the most important visual arts of the ‘high’ culture of Imperial China,” were not mentioned, and thus they were consigned to the dustbin of history.52 However, traditional painting would reemerge throughout the Maoist era as Communist officials reinterpreted the Yan’an Talks to suit their own political goals. The standards set by official policy were wildly mercurial, and the repercussions for artists who transgressed were extremely severe. In other words, the severity of punishment for straying outside the lines set by the CCP was in inverse proportion to the clarity and consistency of the dictates. Two artists will be discussed briefly as case studies for two distinctive ways the language of guohua was reinvented and made modern during the Maoist era.

Pan Tianshou/​Fu Baoshi Pan Tianshou and Fu Baoshi were influential artists, teachers and scholars. They made guohua politically relevant without sacrificing the unique qualities of ink painting. They rendered patriotic subjects, but the distinctiveness of each man’s style elevates the works above simplistic propaganda. Pan emphasized the strength and vitality of line while creating dramatic compositions that highlight the division between black and white, solid and void. Fu Baoshi, on the other hand, mastered the boneless technique and articulated industrial scenes with gossamer, thin lines. He excelled at creating densely textured surfaces and using ink washes to create poetic atmospheric effects. Pan and Fu began their careers in the 1920s when Western art was the model of innovation and the dominant trend. Pan Tianshou taught in Shanghai in the 1920s and was active in the May Fourth Movement. Fu spent several years in Japan (1933–​ 1936) studying Japanese art, western painting and Chinese art history. He returned to China with a renewed passion for traditional painting and published several art historical works. Both men were therefore well versed in the debate between native and foreign art styles; however, this exposure seems to have more firmly secured their devotion to guohua as the way forward for Chinese art. They championed guohua not only through painting but also through teaching and writing numerous art historical texts. Pan was open to learning from foreign art, but he cautioned against a careless mixing that would “damage the unique characteristics of both” traditions.53 Fu Baoshi also sought a judicious incorporation of foreign artistic elements. However,

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Blinded by Mao  119 with the Sino-​Japanese War (1937–​1945), Fu promoted traditional art as a weapon to combat foreign aggression.54 The connection between patriotism and traditional art was relatively unproblematic in the 1940s, but by the 1950s, guohua had a new threat. Traditional culture was excised as the People’s Republic emulated the Soviet model. The struggle to keep guohua alive was likely not the kind of battle Mao envisioned for artist workers when he gave the Yan’an Talks; however, Socialist Realism proved to be a more pernicious enemy than the Japanese. In a lecture given at Nanjing University in 1951, Fu combined a defense of China’s native artistic tradition with a diplomatic deference to the Soviet model: We have to learn from the West, the USSR in particular. Socialist realism in art and literature has provided the Chinese people and young intellectuals with spiritual nourishment […] While respecting the historical and cultural traditions of the others, we must respect our own. Otherwise, one could not claim to be a real patriot or a real internationalist. For a real internationalist cannot have nothing in his own hands.55 Therefore, Fu Baoshi struck a precarious balance between tradition and innovation. He developed an ingenious way to contextualize the visual language of guohua so that traditional brush and ink techniques could be read as Communist and modern. In 1950, Fu began creating works based on Mao’s poetry which was a variation on an ancient tradition. He admitted, “this is a perilous task for the artist,” but he was on the forefront of what became a popular and officially endorsed technique.56 The prevalence of poetry in painting of the early 1960s was possibly “one means of making an otherwise offensive subject more palatable” by providing a traditional aesthetic lens for unpicturesque industrial subjects.57 Alternately, the verses from Mao served as one defense against criticism. To Li Shuyi: Poem of Mao Zedong, 1958 (see Figure 8.1) visualizes Mao’s poem which was dedicated to a friend whose husband died during the Communist war with the Nationalists. The poem connects the grief over his lost comrade to the death of his own wife. These “good souls” are welcomed by Chang E, the moon goddess, in the ethereal realm while on earth the Communists claim victory on the battlefield. Fu depicts the moon goddess in the apparitional style that originated in the twelfth century.58 The face and hair of the goddess are delicately rendered in dark ink. Her body melts into the gentle ink wash of the sky, and the green ribbons of her garment blend seamlessly with the willow leaves falling gently to earth. Fu had frequently painted beautiful women who were inspired by the work of Gu Kaizhi –​specifically The Admonitions Scroll, c. 4th century. Fu praised the fine outlines, “the so-​called ‘gossamer threads of spring silkworms,’ and its fine transparent colors” that combine to create a surface “enriched with a quiet and gentle atmosphere.”59 Fu emulated the gentle atmosphere but the women he depicts, especially during the Sino-​Japanese War, represented resistance and the resilience of China.60 The goddess in To Li Shuyi is both a homage to Gu Kaizhi and a champion of the Communist cause. The poem on the left and the diminutive battlefield, peppered with red flags, are points of visual and ideological stability. An equally patriotic subject is depicted in Ode to Yuhuatai 1958 (see Figure 8.2). This work shows a memorial dedicated to the Communist soldiers who were executed by the Guomindang. A procession of Young Pioneers can be seen moving toward the

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120  Karen Stock

Figure 8.1 Fu Baoshi: To Li Shuyi: Poem of Mao Zedong, 1958, ink and color on paper.

Figure 8.2 Fu Baoshi, Ode to Yuhuatai, 1958, ink and color on paper.

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Blinded by Mao  121

Figure 8.3 Pan Tianshou: Transporting Iron Ore by Sailboat, 1958, ink and color on paper. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum. By permission of the artist’s son.

memorial stele as the city of Nanjing spreads out toward the right, and the low horizon is dotted with smokestacks and power lines. These industrial signifiers are rendered with “surprising abstract beauty.”61 Fu uses a traditional method of applying the ink that creates a soft texture and an aesthetically unified work. The pine boughs intermingle with the modern subjects to evoke the longevity of the Communist cause. Pan Tianshou’s works also depict modern subjects that highlight the progress of China. Pan fills his landscapes, not with gentle texture and ink washes, but with sharp angles and negative space that emphasize the vigorous brushwork. Pan believed the “robust ‘bones’ of the skeleton” supported a virtuous spirit in the artwork and in the character of the artist.62 Two seals that Pan used frequently read “Strengthen the Bone” which references both resilience of character and aesthetic characteristics. This “bone vitality” is illustrated in Transporting Iron Ore by Sailboat, 1958 (see Figure 8.3). As part of Pan’s participation in the Great Leap Forward, he visited China’s first hydroelectric power station but chose to focus on the landscape around a nearby mine.63 The colophon praises the productivity of the mine, but the ostensibly industrial subject is dwarfed by natural elements with the transport boats pushed to the lower margin. A twisting pine tree cuts across the composition and overshadows the small tower. The branch seems to push toward the viewer even as it is secured by the two-​dimensional rock. The play between depth and flatness highlights the two-​ dimensionality of the paper and makes the work “as much about the art of painting

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122  Karen Stock

Figure 8.4 Pan Tianshou: Dominant Overlook, c. 1964, ink and color on paper. Pan Tianshou Memorial Museum. By permission of the artist’s son.

as it is about transporting iron ore by sailboat.”64 The modernity of the work lies less in the apparent insertion of atypical subjects but more subtly in the way traditional elements, such as the “clenched-​fist” rock, achieve a precarious compositional harmony with the raw “graphic power of the image.”65 Perhaps Pan’s most daring works are images of animals which are both a homage to the eccentric painter Bada Shanren and an expression of modern anxiety. In Dominant Overlook (ca. 1964) (see Figure 8.4) two vultures perch at the top of this monumental ink painting whose sheer size (347.3 x 143 cm or 11.4 x 4.6 ft) asserts its modernity. Pan created a number of massive ink paintings to fill the demand for works that could be viewed by the masses. This work, however, is far from the celebratory propaganda that was expected and expresses a more personal perspective. As one carrion bird peers over the edge, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the vertiginous drop and then led back to the top by the inverted triangle of the rock. Pan’s modernity was a modernity of “anxiety, tension and threat as much as of spatial ambiguity or abstractly reshaped forms.”66 The malevolence of the birds’ piercing gazes is a raw expression of Pan’s experience living on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.

Conclusion Alternative modernities are crucial to prevent Euro-​ American modernism from becoming entirely moribund. Ideally, Western scholars would remain cognizant of

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Blinded by Mao  123 their own subjectivities, desires and ideologies as art historical narratives are written. As Clark observes, the very “inability of a Euro-​American rhetoric to find a modern art in Asia intelligible is the very sign that its subversion will open up the discourse of modernity itself.”67 Richard Vinograd promotes the idea of multiple or transitive modernities in Chinese art and muses that modernity may not “reside in a particular place but rather is a configurational effect of transitive relationships between material, social, and cultural spaces, counterparts perhaps of the intermingling of material seduction, social reflection and ideological mystifications.”68 Modern guohua, in my opinion, qualifies as an example of a transitive modernity if the West is capable of relinquishing its hegemony. Westerners “prefer to divorce modern guohua from politics whenever possible.”69 However, this Western squeamishness removes a crucial aspect of these Chinese works. The political context does not turn every work into propaganda, and the variable reaction to political pressure is essential to this era of art. The modernization of ink painting, the artist’s aesthetic choices, connected directly to their personal welfare which contrasts with the relatively trivial consequences of artistic failure in the West. Painting with ink was more than a choice, it signified personal risk in order to keep national painting alive. Fu Baoshi and Pan Tianshou adapted the volatile signifier of guohua to the needs of contemporary China while retaining their individual character. This required great political dexterity from the artist before the white surface was ever stained with pigment. Their careers are testament to the viability of a twentieth-​ century Chinese modernity.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Andrews 2009, 56. Nelson 1997, 28. Laing 1988, ix. Hayford 2010, 313. Curley 2018, 10. Andrews 1990, 556–​557. Clarke 2000, 7. Sullivan 1997b, 517. Vinograd 2001, 166–​167. Xu Beihong (1895–​1923) is perhaps the most famous example. Yang 2010, 17. Shen 2011, 29. Silbergeld 1993, 9. Roberts 1998, 84. Laing, 1988, 29. Andrews 1994, 225. Laing 1988, 53–​57. Yang 2010, 32. Andrews 2011, 53. Chung 2011, 24. Lü 2013, 16. Croizier 2009, 24. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 34. Silbergeld 2009, 16.

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124  Karen Stock 6 Clark 1993, 16. 2 27 Wong 2009, 95. 28 Andrews 2001, 301. 29 Wang 2001, 103. 30 Ibid. 31 Powers 2013, 313. 32 Hay 2008, 116. 33 Ibid. 34 Hayford 2010, 328. 35 Powers 1997, 465. 36 Ibid., 466. 37 Powers 2013, 312. 38 Shiff 1994, 584. 39 Ibid., 586. 40 Curley 2018, 11. 41 Laing 1997, 520. 42 Ibid. 43 Chang 1980, 5. 44 McDougall 1980, 58. 45 Ibid., 57. 46 Ibid., 60. 47 Silbergeld 1993, 4. 48 McDougall 1980, 67. 49 Silbergeld 1993, 8. 50 McDougall 1980, 65. 51 Chang 1980, 11. 52 Ibid. 53 Roberts 1998, 69. 54 Lee 2015, 106. 55 Chung 2011, 19. 56 Ibid., 128. 57 Laing 1988, 47. 58 Maeda 2009, 76. 59 Lee 2015, 112. 60 Chung 2011,106. 61 Andrews 1994, 257. 62 Pan 2010, 336. 63 Kim 2017, 147. 64 Roberts 1998, 87. 65 Ibid., 82. 66 Vinograd 2010, 51. 67 Clark 1993, 16–​17. 68 Vinograd 2001, 164. 69 Laing 1997, 547.

Bibliography Andrews, Julia. 2011. “The Art of Revolutionary Romanticism, 1949–​ 65.” In Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution:  Fu Baoshi (1904  –​1965). Edited by Anita Chung, 43–​56. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 2009. “Art under Mao, ‘Cai Guoqiang’s Maskimov Collection,’ and China’s Twentieth Century.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art:  Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 53–​69. Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art.

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Blinded by Mao  125 _​_​_​_​_​. 2001. “Mapping Chinese Modernity.” In Chinese Art:  Modern Expressions. Edited by Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, 284–​305. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 1994. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–​1979. Berkeley: University of California Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 1990. “Traditional Painting in New China: Guohua and the Anti-​Rightist Campaign.” Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 3, August: 555–​577. Chang, Arnold. 1980. Painting in the People’s Republic of China: The Politics of Style. Boulder: Westview Press. Chung, Anita. 2011. “Of History and Nation: The Art of Fu Baoshi.” In Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904–​1965). Edited by Anita Chung, 1–​27. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art. Clark, John. 1993. “Open and Closed Discourses of Modernity in Asian Art.” In Modernity in Asian Art. Edited by John Clark, 1–​17. Australia: Wild Peony. Clarke, David. 2006. “Abstraction and Modern Chinese Art.” In Discrepant Abstraction. Edited by Kobena Mercer, 75–​93. Cambridge: MIT Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 2000. Modern Chinese Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Croizier, Ralph. 2009. “When was Modern Chinese Art? A  Short History of Chinese Modernism.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 24–​34. Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art. Curley, John J. 2018. Global Art and the Cold War. Hong Kong: Laurence King Publishing. Hay, Jonathan. 2008. “Double Modernity, Para-​ Modernity.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture:  Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, 113–​132. Durham: Duke University Press. Hayford, Charles W. 2010. “Mao’s Journey to the West:  Meanings Made of Mao.” In A Critical Introduction to Mao. Edited by Timothy Cheek, 313–​331. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Mina. 2017. “The Embodiment of Time and Space: Political Expression of Pan Tianshou.” American Journal of Chinese Studies 24, no. 2, October: 141–​152. Laing, Ellen Johnston. 1997. “How Guohua Came to the United States.” In Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition. Edited by Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, 518–​553. Beijing: Pan Tianshou Foundation. _​_​_​_​_​. 1988. The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, Hee Jung. 2015. “Exploring Visual Modernity and National Identity in Twentieth-​Century China:  Fu Baoshi’s Self-​awareness and Critical Response during the Sino-​Japanese War (1937–​1945).” PhD diss., University of Manchester. Lü Peng. 2013. A History of Art in Twentieth-​Century China. Translated by Bruce Doar, Paris: Somogy editions d’art. Maeda, Tamaki. 2009. “Rediscovering China in Japan:  Fu Baoshi’s Ink Painting.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art:  Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 70–​81. Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art. McDougall, Bonnie S. 1980. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Nelson, Robert. 1997. “The Map of Art History.” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1, March: 28–​40. Pan Gongkai. 2010. “Pan Tianshou:  Master of Chinese Ink Painting.” In Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-​Century China. Edited by Xiaoneng Yang, 334–​343. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Powers, Martin J. 2013. “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 2, June: 312–​327. _​_​_​_​_​. 1997. “Reexamining the ‘West’: Shifting Perspectives in the Narrative of Modern Art.” In Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century:  Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition. Edited by Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, 465–​496. Beijing: Pan Tianshou Foundation.

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126  Karen Stock Roberts, Claire. 1998. “Tradition and Modernity: The Life and Art of Pan Tianshou (1897–​ 1971) East Asian History 15/​16, June/​December: 67–​96. Shen, Kuiyi. 2011. “Fu Baoshi and the Construction of Chinese Art History.” In Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904–​1965). Edited by Anita Chung, 29–​33. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art. Shiff, Richard. 1994. “Flexible Time: The Subject in/​of Art History,” The Art Bulletin 76, no. 4, December: 583–​587. Silbergeld, Jerome. 2009. “Modernization, Periodization, Canonization in Twentieth-​Century Chinese Painting.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 15–​21. Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 1993. Contradictions:  Artistic Life, the Socialist State, and the Chinese Painter Li Huasheng. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Sullivan, Michael. 1997. The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley:  University of California Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 1997 (b). “Some Reflections on Guohua.” In Chinese Painting in the Twentieth Century: Creativity in the Aftermath of Tradition. Edited by Cao Yiqiang and Fan Jingzhong, 509–​ 517. Beijing: Pan Tianshou Foundation. _​_​_​_​_​. 1996. Art and Artists of Twentieth-​Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press. _​_​_​_​_​. 1988. “Art and Reality in Twentieth-​century Chinese Painting.” In Twentieth-​Century Chinese Painting. Edited by Mayching Kao, 1–​20. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Vinograd, Richard. 2010. “Modern Passages: Chinese Ink Painting in an Era of Transformation.” In Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-​Century China. Edited by Xiaoneng Yang, 39–​51. New York: Harry N. Abrams. _​_​_​_​_​. 2001. “Relocations:  Spaces of Chinese Visual Modernity.” In Chinese Art: Modern Expressions. Edited by Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, 162–​181. New  York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wang, Eugene Y. 2001. “Sketch Conceptualism as Modernist Contingency.” In Chinese Art:  Modern Expressions. Edited by Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith, 102–​161. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wong, Aida Yuen. 2009. “What is a Masterpiece? Historiographical Anxieties and Classifications of Painting in Modern China.” In Writing Modern Chinese Art: Historiographic Explorations. Edited by Josh Yiu, 94–​105. Seattle: Seattle Museum of Art. Yang, Xiaoneng. 2010. Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-​ Century China. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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9  “Iranian Modernism” and the Idea of Indigenous Art Translations, Adoptions and (mis)interpretations Combiz Moussavi-​Aghdam

In 1958 Marco Grigorian, as the director of the first Tehran biennial, heralded an age of progress under the second Pahlavi monarch. His urge to join the pioneering art world, or what we would currently describe as, “global modernism” is reflected in his introduction to the catalogue of the First Tehran Biennial. There he stated, that Iranian modern artists after the Venice Biennale acquired “the pride for the magnificent role” they played in the first Tehran Biennial. Grigorian notes that Iranian modernists had endeavored to align their practices to modernist aesthetics, while also drawing on traditional Iranian art.1 The organization of the Tehran Biennials epitomizes the cultural policy of the Pahlavi state from the late 1950s onward, as it began to favor modernist art, and led to the development of “Iranian modernism” in the following decade. The 1960s are considered the most culturally effervescent decade in Iran’s contemporary history. It was through the art produced at this time that Iranians could gain exposure and fame in the global art market, offering a version of modern art that seemed to be both universal and “Iranian.” Today, over half a century after the development of artistic and cultural movements in 1960s Iran, there has been a renewed interest on the part of scholars, critics and international curators in the art of this period. Recently, there has been a large effort, especially in the context of the art market, to connect the new generation of Iranian artists to their predecessors in the prerevolutionary period, that is, prior to 1979. In line with the current periodization of Western art history, Iranian art flourishing in the 1960s has been labeled “modernist,” while art produced in the twenty-​first century is considered contemporary. Based on such convergences, several exhibitions in recent years have attempted to connect works by Iranian contemporary artists with those of their “modernist” or “neo-​traditionalist” forefathers.2 Needless to say, these efforts, both in theory and practice, are in accordance with the application of postcolonial theories to art historical practices, through which different versions of modernism across the globe have been formulated in recent years. Since the formation of the discourses around “other modernism” or “alternative modernism” is conceptually related to the redefinition of the modernist, the traditional, the contemporary and the avant-​garde, it is necessary to highlight the emergence, development and implications of these notions all of which partook in the modernist system of values and in relation to the formation of a new national identity in prerevolutionary Iran. These concepts and categories were mostly introduced,

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128  Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam imported or imposed by the state, as well as by the historians and intellectuals, causing a paradigmatic shift in aesthetic values, which are in turn reflected in the modes of production, reception and consumption.

Persian Art History and the Reconstruction of National Identity Since the development of the modern nation-​state in early twentieth-​century Iran, artists have produced their art in relation to the Western “other,” while also searching for indigenisation and authenticity. From the 1920s on, the writings of Western scholars, based on archaeological findings and excavated art objects, constructed the history of ancient Iran according to new historiographic methods. These introduced Iran as one of the first nations to play a pivotal role in the history of world civilisation. Under the Pahlavi monarchy, the plans for the modernization and secularization of social institutions progressed with a special emphasis on nationalist ideology, the formation of which cannot be understood independently of Iran’s narratives around ancient art history and cultural heritage. It was within this context that the paradox of being “non-​Western ancient” and “progressive modern/​contemporary” developed, playing a crucial role in shaping a new Iranian subjectivity. In the relationship between the archaeological practices and the consolidation of modern national identity in Iran, the role of American art historian Arthur Upham Pope cannot be underestimated.3 Pope’s formalist approach in the formulation of Persian art on the one hand, and his close relationship with the two Pahlavi kings on the other, cannot be overlooked as both theoretical foundation and official support for the development of modern Iranian art in later decades. As the organizer of exhibitions, lectures and events in Iran and the West (from the 1920s to 1960s)4 Pope highlighted the importance of Iranian art in a global framework, while also developing a discourse around ornamental Persian art both locally and in Western cultural centers and administrations.5 As a scholar and antiques art dealer, Pope spent his life discovering, classifying and gathering Iranian arts and crafts. He saw himself as the person who introduced Persian art to the world, praising it as unique and continuous with “persistent traits” and “recurrent motifs.”6 He set decorative art against naturalistic representation, attributing more authenticity and value to the former on the basis of formalist analysis. To develop his “decorative doctrine,” Pope referred to the persistence of the “Iranian decorative spirit” through millenniums of history.7 In his second major exhibition of Persian art, held at Burlington House, London in 1931, the long history of Iran from the Elamites to the Safavids was revitalized through a spectacular display of over 2000 pieces. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Roger Fry –​the famous advocate of formalism on whom Pope relied for his approach to Persian art –​wrote an essay in which he emphasized the continuity of the unique and complex culture of Persia, from “far back into pre-​Christian world” until today, “still [being] capable of expressing its aspirations in literature, art and philosophy [as] a continuous tradition.”8 As Fry claimed, one of the dominant characteristics of Persian art is “its extraordinary power of assimilating foreign influences and of combining them with others to make a homogenous style.”9 He then provided a summary of Iranian history, addressing the unique characteristic of religion and kingship in Persia, which according to him was much more humane than in neighboring civilizations which “come[s]‌out in the art, in a

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Idea of Indigenous Art  129 new elegance and amenity in the proportions.”10 What Fry finds distinctive in Persian art are the formal proportions, which correspond to Pope’s historical continuity in Iranian ornamental art. For Pope, neither ethnographic nor linguistic unity and political organization can account for the consistency of Persian art through ages. On the contrary, “there is an identity defined by the persistence of ideas that have creative power, of standards of value and of spiritual traits.”11 It is through these mysterious characteristics that Pope comes to a more tangible result: “[T]‌he predominance of the decorative interest, which may be accounted for the outstanding and almost unfailing characteristic of Iranian art, provides a common foundation through all changes of fashion, from prehistoric to modern times.”12 Thirteen years before the publication of the Survey, in April 1925, during his first trip to Iran, Pope gave a lecture to high-​ranking officials and intellectuals, including prime minister Reza Pahlavi, who a few months later founded the new dynasty. Pope’s emphasis on the importance of ancient Persia in the construction of modern Iran led to the central role ascribed to antiquarianism in the development of a new national identity under the Pahlavis. Correspondingly, four decades later, Mohammad Reza Shah in his foreword to the second edition of the Survey (1964), considered Persia’s loyalty to the ideal of beauty a constant characteristic of its culture, despite the historical vicissitudes leading to chaos, brutality and frustration.13 Pope’s idea of a continuous Iranian identity, particularly as manifested in its decorative forms, not only directed the cultural policies of the new nation-​state referring it to its glorious historical past, but also triggered artists to seek their modern identity in decorative forms and indigenous figures.

Avant-​Gardism and/​or the Indigenous Figuration When in the 1920s and 1930s Pope was articulating his idea of the supremacy of Persian art, Iranian artists were still unfamiliar with European modernism. It was after World War II that the first modernist movements such as the Fighting Rooster Association (Anjoman-​e Khorous Jangi) appeared in Iran. This movement challenged older styles and methods in art and literature and was committed to a modernist spirit and the dissemination of its values. The Association was founded by painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–​1999), one of the few modernist artists who attempted to articulate his viewpoint on modern art and its principles. Among the first students of art, graduating from the Fine Arts Faculty of Tehran University in 1945, he then left for France to study with the Cubist André Lhote,14 who taught artists from all over the world.15 Ziapour founded the Fighting Rooster Association after his return from Europe in 1948 and started fighting against both old school artists (including the naturalistic painting of Kamal-​ol-​Molk’s pupils and miniaturists) and the advocates of a Socialist Realist style, affiliated with the Soviet-​supported Toudeh party.16 In an important article, published in 1948, Ziapour notes that the ultimate purpose of painting is to rid itself of the so-​called “parasites,” non-​painterly elements and effects attacking painting’s purity.17 For him, the meaning of painting is intrinsic and bears no ties to “natural” and “semi-​natural” forms. Despite their endeavor to liberate themselves from “the clutches of the parasites,” Ziapour observes that none of the modernist movements since the late nineteenth-​century have succeeded in carrying out this important task.18 Integral to his invective is a review of the modernist styles

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130  Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam of painting, in which he claims that images with themes drawn from life and natural forms may be typical of literary writing, but they have no place in true painting: Today, there are enough devices to visualise various scenes of daily life and they aptly could fulfill this wish [of representing everyday life]. So, there is no reason for painting to perpetuate what it used to do in the past and perform like writing and literature […] And rather than manifesting the internal realities, takes the charge of previous tasks under social and profit-​based excuses.19 For Ziapour, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism remain in a transitory phase and fail to grasp the true essence of painting. “Till now, [these schools of modern art] have followed stories and whatever else but not painting as such. In other words, they have mainly focused on the parasites attached to painting but not on painting itself.”20 He concludes that the artist must deliberately destroy all the natural and seminatural forms in his or her painting. Ultimately, Ziapour argues that if artists can find their own specific language, freed from literary descriptions and familiar images, both artists and people will understand the beauty of art through its intrinsic qualities.21 Ziapour’s idea of a “pure” modernist painting calls to mind Clement Greenberg’s article “Modernist Painting” published over a decade later in 1961. Despite the geographical and temporal distance  –​and the unlikelihood of Ziapour’s knowledge of the American critic and his writings  –​the notion of “pure” painting put forth by the Persian artist strikingly resonates with Greenberg’s ideas. Specifically, the understanding of painting as a flat two-​dimensional non-​illusory surface filled with nonfigurative forms and colors. In Ziapour’s article, there is no reference to geometrical abstract movements such as Neo-​Plasticism, Suprematism and Constructivism developed in early twentieth-​century Europe. Moreover, despite all his urge to rid painting of its parasites Ziapour’s own work, which he described as “abstract cubism,” never reached such “purity.” Ziapour was equally drawn to “abstract cubism” and to the abstract elements found in traditional Iranian patterns, which he likened to the geometry underpinning European Cubism. Such a strategy, merging modernist aesthetics with Iranian art, mostly drawn from folk culture, did not correspond to the Fighting Rooster group’s later views. The group maintained a more radical stance in relation to the deconstruction of traditional artistic-​literary forms, that eventually led Ziapour to leave the group in 1951.22 In fact, the most frequent subject-​matter among modernist artists starting in the early 1950s was Iranian folk culture, which appeared to be still intact and static, in comparison to the ever-​changing modern urban culture. The combination of traditional motifs and modernist forms, however, did not lead to the articulation of a version of Cubism in Ziapour’s painting. As Javad Mojabi remarks, “Ziapour’s ‘cubism’ is not essentially related to European Cubism. It is more a geometric reading from the human and nature.”23 The human and natural forms referenced here, also described as “indigenous figuration,” had to be a manifestation of pastoral life, that is, nomadic or featuring rural people represented in their local customs and daily practices (see Figure 9.1). This trend toward “indigenous figuration” is easily traceable among painters of Ziapour’s generation, most of whom graduated from the Fine Arts faculty of Tehran University and whose subject matter was limited to landscapes from rural areas and traditional urban sites, such as bazars and holy shrines. There is almost

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Idea of Indigenous Art  131

Figure 9.1 Jalil Ziapour:  Ey Amir, Amir, 1958, oil on canvas, 122 x 207  cm. Courtesy of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA).

no depiction of the artists’ daily life in developing cities such as Tehran. The absence of the Baudelairean artist-​dandy, as a self-​conscious painter of modern life, in the Iranian context raises some questions regarding the point of view of these avant-​ garde artists. What makes them overlook their own urban modern life and instead reference resilient folk culture? Is this comparable with the pastoral genres and orientalist/​primitivist views developed by European Romanticism and continued in the works of modernists? There is no evidence to show that the art of these harbingers of modernism in Iran had any sociocultural implications. Nor can it be explained simply with reference to nostalgic sentiments about the disappearance of traditional culture during the Pahlavis’ speedy modernization and development of Iran. These decorative-​indigenous tendencies became dominant within the limited artistic community, defining what has come to be known as “Iranian modernism.”

The Local–​Global Binarism and the Saqqa-​khaneh Movement At the inauguration of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in October 1977, two decades after the organization of the first Tehran biennial in 1958, Karim Emami, who had coined the term “Saqqa-​khaneh school,” declared that “Iranian modernism” had finally developed, thanks to the combination of Persian motifs with universal modernist forms. In the catalogue for the exhibition of the Saqqa-​khaneh art at the newly opened museum, Emami, specifically refers to the seminal role of Houshang Kazemi, who “lectured under the broad term of ‘Decoration,’ [and acquainted] the students with the rich treasure house of Iranian ornamental ware.” Then he continues that the reason for the quick development and acceptance of “the Saqqa-​khaneh School” was

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132  Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam “the success of its members in utilizing Iranian materials and in approaching, if not exactly creating, an Iranian school of modern art.”24 The formation of the Saqqa-​khaneh movement under the second Pahlavi was related to the establishment of the Faculty of Decorative Arts in 1960, directed by Houshang Kazemi and supported with funding from the Ministry of Culture and Art.25 As Emami mentioned above, Kazemi’s, instructions for the use of Iranian decorative art were influential in the formation of the movement. Practically speaking, it was Arthur Pope’s seminal book on Persian masterpieces and the objects held in archaeological museums that proved pivotal for Saqqa-​khaneh artists, who extracted their traditional motifs and emblems from it.26 The narrative of Persian art formulated by Pope in the 1930s was applied to contemporary art, linking the country’s glorious historical past to the futuristic modern world.27 As mentioned above, the first generation of modernists in the late 1940s, including Ziapour, had endeavored to align their practices to modernist aesthetics, while also delving into traditional Iranian art. From the late 1950s onward, the State’s cultural policies began to favor the modernist current, by establishing dedicated institutions and organizing events and festivals.28 The Saqqa-​khaneh movement benefitted from this shift and unlike its predecessors it was acknowledged and supported by the State, since the artists’ effort was aligned with the cultural policies of the Pahlavi government and its ambition to shape a modern national identity. The two Tehran Biennials and the Faculty of Decorative Arts were established by the Ministry of Culture and Art, headed by Mehrdad Pahlbod. The students of the Faculty of Decorative Arts were invited to exhibit in the two Tehran Biennials having learnt by this stage how to apply local, historical motifs to their modernist works.29 Fulfilling the expectation of Marco Grigorian, the director of the first Biennial, it seemed that contemporary Iranian art could finally catch up with the progressive Western art world; and this was the claim optimistically made by critic Karim Emami two decades later in 1977, just a year before the revolution. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, today many scholars, following Emami’s argument on the triumphant development of “Saqqa-​ khaneh school,” consider the period between the early 1960s and late 1970s the period of Iranian modernism, or its heyday. Similar to Ziapour and his generation, the Saqqa-​khaneh artists searched for traditional popular culture as well as ornamental forms, with almost no indication of their own modern urban life. Perhaps the monolithic and continuous art history of Iran, formulated by art historians like Pope, gave them the right to appropriate any motif from any period in the long course of Iranian art history. The amalgamation of calligraphy and painting was one of their major innovations, though their meaning is usually ignored in favor of the modernist forms (see Figure  9.2). As Siamak Delzendeh notes, in the works of the Saqqakhaneh school, the juxtaposition [of text and image, with reference to Persian painting] significantly indicates the longstanding Iranian identity. But, since the eligibility and meaning-​based agency of the writings are challenged in their work, the references to Iranian art history is deliberately disturbed.30 Hamid Keshmirshekan also describes the Saqqa-​khaneh artists as “making a formalistic reference to tradition rather than to subliminal associations or philosophical

31

Idea of Indigenous Art  133

Figure 9.2 Hossein Zendehroudi, Untitled, 1967, oil on cardboard, 120 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA).

concepts.”31 For these artists, the pseudo-​morphic similarities between the ornamental stylization found in local Iranian visual culture, on the one hand, and globalized modernist abstraction, on the other, sufficed to construct modern Iranian art. Yet, it seems as if neither modernist visual language, nor indigenous art belonged to them as such, given their distance as Iranian artists who lived in large modern cities. Therefore, it can be inferred that the ad-​hoc redeployment of traditional Iranian motifs is the result of a lack of intellectual and historical consciousness. Focusing on the attitude of the Saqqa-​khaneh artists toward tradition, Aryasp Dadbeh challenges their practice of appropriation in a more critical way, asserting that this movement cannot be called a “school.” Unlike many scholars who locate the Saqqa-​khaneh within the rubric of Iranian modernism, Dadbeh believes that the atmosphere among intellectuals of the 1960s, most of whom subscribed to leftist ideologies, could not have led to a coherent and fruitful current in art. Starting with the term “school,” he attempts to prove that the Saqqakhaneh fails to meet the requirements of its definition. Since “school” is a historical concept in which the temporality of an age is reflected, the cultural context would be a precondition for its formation. Therefore, not all historical societies in any condition can develop a school, a style or an artistic method. Dadbeh argues that it is the consciousness of one’s current historical status that shapes a school and guarantees its transmission and continuity through its educational methods. It is also necessary for a school to respond to certain initial arguments of the time in an intellectually contradictory condition and develop its forms and motifs reflexively to determine its new relation with its existence. Therefore, the Saqqa-​khaneh movement responds to the ideologically-​charged environment of the 1960s, without any new motif to offer and is incapable to be in a meaningful dialog

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134  Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam with the past and transmit its experience to the future.32 The Saqqa-​khaneh artist, according to Dadbeh, “is like a blind person who randomly picks up some jewelry from a sack and throws it somewhere, wasting the treasure of Iranian culture.”33 Considering the socio-​ political context within which nativist trends such as Saqqa-​khaneh developed in the 1960s, Dadbeh’s analytical argument sounds reasonable and significant.34 The dominance of nativist ideologies among intellectuals, together with Marxist internationalism –​both among anti-​state figures such as Jalal-​ Ale Ahmad and Ali Shariati and pro-​state or neutral academics like Seyed-​Hossein Nasr, Ahmad Fardid, Daryush Shayegan and Ehsan Naraghi –​left no space for the development of thoughts on the basis of historical particularity.35

What Was Modernism in Iran? Scholars who want to provide a linear historiography of Iranian modernism vis-​à-​ vis the Western one, normally start with the extraordinary work of Mahmoud-​Khan Malek-​o-​Sho’ara (Saba), titled Transcription (Estensakh) (1890), which reminds us of Paul Cézanne. As Mojabi declares: Estensakh […]is presumably the first modernist painting. Like his contemporary artist Paul Cezanne, Mahmoud-​Khan started to see the world geometrically, and in a sense reached a pre-​Cubistic vision. unfortunately, given the immature socio-political context and ignorance of the audience, he later failed to follow his innovative and wise experience.36 It seems that the very fact that there are formal similarities between the works of Mahmoud-​Khan and Cézanne would suffice for calling Mahmoud-​Khan’s work modernist, and in this way the late Qajar painter miraculously reaches the same status as the father of modernism did around the same time. Such out-​of-​context comparative methods to find Iranian counterparts for Western modernists have been the major means by which the discourse of Iranian modernism has been shaped. The idea of coherency and continuity in Iranian art and culture, manifested in myriads of motifs, connected Iranian art historical discourses to modernism through formalist approaches. Hence, the claims set forth by art historians such as Pope, which in turn led modernist artists to apply such formal similarities to their artistic practice without acknowledging the content and context of these different motifs. Almost all the pioneers of “Iranian modernism” turned to their indigenous culture, so as not to be accused of imitating Western modernist styles. This view is visible in the work and thought of the pioneer of modernism, Ziapour who stated: Cubism means being geometrical. And it has been thousands of years that geometric images and motifs have functioned as ornaments on the Iranian plateau. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to introduce this style from Europe into Iran. […] I have always asserted not to imitate and become inspired by our national art.37 In a more superficial way, the artists of the following generation, the ones who were active in the 1960s and 1970s, were considered successful in their contribution to global modernism. Based on morphological taxonomy, there are Iranian equivalents to Western artists or artistic styles. Kamran Diba calls the Saqqakhaneh “Spiritual

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Idea of Indigenous Art  135 Pop Art,”38 while Fereshteh Daftari identifies Parviz Tanavoli with Andy Warhol, Behjat Sadr with Pierre Soulages and Monir Farmanfarmayan with Victor Vasarely. Even Marco Grigorian’s Abgousht Dizi becomes the Iranian equivalent of Warhol’s Campbell Soup!39 Needless to say, the development of modernism in the Euro-​American context was dependent on the rise of orientalist and primitivist views. To create new artistic forms suitable for the depiction of modern life, modernists, from Paul Gauguin and André Derain to Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Jackson Pollock, arbitrarily appropriated the art of non-​modern regions to construct their artistic form. The same logic could not be applied to Iranian artists. Iranian modernists learned and introduced the formal aspect of modernism, as an inevitable “universal” language of their time, and then attempted to give it an Iranian content, which was in contrast to their sociocultural context and daily experience. They became the advocates of orientalism-​in-​reverse. Therefore, attributing the expression “modernism” to a period in contemporary Iranian art history, usually dating from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, is not possible without certain anachronistic and ahistorical maneuvers. Modernist tendencies in Iranian art were developed by a few individual artists who either studied in Europe or were instructed by Western teachers from the late 1940s onward. From the early 1960s, the legitimation of modern art by the state gave space to these modernists, leading to the construction of a more vibrant yet elitist art scene. Iranian modernists were encouraged to refer to their own culture while learning the language of globalized modernism. However, during the Shah’s reign the growing urban middle class had already detached itself from its cultural past. Internalizing the exoticism and orientalism of the Western audience, Iranian modernists produced what I  call “tourist-​ oriented” art that could not be considered as a continuation of the Iranian tradition and in dialogue with it to solve the problems of the present. The discourse of alternative Iranian modernism fails to consider modernist attitude in all aspects of life and in response to new ontological problems raised in the modern world. It rather reduces modernism to the efforts made to join the global modernist aesthetics.

Notes Grigorian 1958. 1 2 These exhibitions include: The Other Modernism: Rediscovering Iran’s Avant-​Garde (Asia Society Museum, New  York, 2013); Unedited History:  Iran 1960–​ 2014 (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2014) and An Overview on Seventy Years of Neo-​Traditionalism (Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014). Scholars, Hamid Keshmirshekan, Shiva Balaghi and Rose Issa also divide recent Iranian art into modernist and contemporary. 3 Of course, Pope was not the only foreign scholar who formulated the Iranian art history in the early twentieth century. Archaeologists such as German Ernst Herzfeld, Russian-​French Roman Ghirshman and French André Godard played crucial roles in rediscovering the ancient history of Iran hinged on the idea of national glory. 4 The two key exhibitions on Persian art organized by Pope were held in Philadelphia (1926) and London (1931). 5 In the third edition of the book, reprinted to mark the 50 years of Pahlavi dynasty (1977) Queen Farah Pahlavi addresses the crucial role of Pope’s study on Iranian culture, remarking that “[t]‌he Survey itself is an offspring of the Pahlavi era. Its life in print spans nearly forty years of these fifty years.” F. Pahlavi 1977, vi. 6 Pope and Ackerman 1938, 11–​14.

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136  Combiz Moussavi-Aghdam 7 Ibid, 3. 8 Fry 1931, xvii. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Pope 1938, 9–​10. 12 Ibid., 11. 13 M-​R. Pahlavi 1977, v. 14 The other two artists, who graduated from the Faculty in 1945–​1946 –​Javad Hamidi and Shokouh Riazi –​also continued their studies in Beaux Arts, Paris, returning and teaching in the Faculty afterward. Hamidi was also Lhote’s pupil. In general, the members of the first generation had either studied in France or had French tutors, such as Madame Ashoub (Aminfar) and Roland Dubrulle, at the Faculty. Not to forget that the founder and first director of the Faculty was André Godard, introducing the curricula based on the Beaux Arts. In 1936, Godard, together with his fellow Maxime Siroux, also founded the National Museum of Iran, the main place to display archaeological findings. 15 For the influence of Lhote on the development of modern art in South East Asia, see Dadi 2010, 122 & 254. 16 For more information on the emergence and development of the Association in its socio-​ political milieu see: Behpour 2014, 118–​124. 17 Ziapour 1999. 18 Ibid.,  15–​16. 19 Ibid., 26. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid.,  27–​28. 22 The famous manifesto of the group, published in the second series of the journal in 1951 titled The Nightingale Butcher Manifesto, prescribes the destruction of all traditionalist attitudes in artistic practice. Ziapour’s name was not among the writers of the manifesto. See Behpour 2014. 23 Mojabi 2014, 15. 24 Emami 1977. 25 The Faculty of Decorative Arts, turned into the University of Art after the 1979 revolution, was founded to focus on applied arts as a complimentary institution for Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. While the latter’s pedagogy was based on the French Beaux Arts system in the 1940s, the former followed the curricula of Art Deco. 26 See Aali 1996, 487. Also, as Abbas Mashhadizadeh –​one of the classmates of the Saqqa-​ khaneh artists in the Faculty of Decorative Arts recalls, their history and art instructor was Assad Behrouzan, whom Arthur Pope used to call his godson. Mashhadizadeh 2017. 27 Here I  do not intend to give a detailed account of the development of Saqqakhaneh movement, as there is a fairly large scholarship on it. One of the recent survey texts is Keshmirshekan 2013. 28 Ziapour was also one of the founders of the art school for girls and boys (est. 1953), and the Faculty of Decorative Arts. He played a pivotal role in writing their statutes and curricula. Due to the development of these institutes, he was commissioned by the government for three years to travel across the country and gather and study the motifs of popular and folk culture (1953–​1956). See Mojabi 2014, 50. 29 It is important to note that not all members of the Saqqakhaneh movement were affiliated with the Faculty of Fine Arts. Oveissi and Tabatabai studied in Tehran University. Zenderoudi left the Faculty after studying there for a few months. However, Arabshahi, Pilaram, Qandriz and Tabrizi studied in the Faculty, and Tanavoli started teaching there right after its inauguration. 30 Delzendeh 2016, 332. 31 Keshmirshekan 2013, 101.

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Idea of Indigenous Art  137 2 Dadbeh 2015, 84–​86. 3 33 Ibid, 84. 34 Here, I  have only discussed the dominant trends that applied indigenous motifs to their modernist form. 35 For my view on the impact of intellectual currents on Iranian art of the 1960s see Moussavi-​ Aghdam 2014, 132–​150. 36 Mojabi 2016, 15. 37 Ziapour 1999, 47–​48. 38 Diba 1989, 153. 39 Daftari 2014, 25–​43.

Bibliography Aali, Ahmad. 1996. “Goftogou ba Ahmad Aali” [A Conversation with Ahmad Aali], Kelk-​e Farhang va Honar, no. 80, October–​February: 466–​504. Behpour, Bavand. 2014. “Introduction to ‘the Nightingale’s Bucher Manifesto’ and ‘Volume and Environment II’,” ArtMargins, vol. 3, issue 2, June: 118–​130. Dadbeh, Aryasp. 2015. “Aya Saqqakhaneh yek maktab ast” [Is the Saqqakhaneh a School], Herfeh: Honarmand, no. 57, Autumn: 84–​86. Dadi, Iftikhar. 2010. Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. Daftari, Fereshteh. 2014. “Redefining Modernism: Pluralist Art before the 1979 Revolution.” In Iran Modern. Edited by Fereshteh Daftari and Leyla Diba, 25–​43. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Delzendeh, Siamak. 2016. Tahavvolat-​e Tasviri-​e Honar-​e Iran:  Barresi-​e Enteqadi. Tehran: Nazar. Diba, Kamran. 1989. “Iran.” In Contemporary Art from the Islamic World. Edited by Wijdan Ali and E. Bisharat, 153–​158. Amman & London: Scorpion. Emami, Karim. 1977. Saqqakhaneh School Revisited. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibition catalogue. Fry, Roger. 1931. “Some Aspects of Persian Art.” In Persian Art: an Illustrated Souvenir of the Exhibition of Persian art at Burlington house London. The Executive Committee of The exhibition by Hudson and Kearns LTD. Grigorian, Marco. 1958. Catalogue to the First Tehran Biennial. Keshmirshekan, Hamid. 2013. Contemporary Iranian Art: New Perspectives. London: Saqi. Mashhadizadeh, Abbas. 2017. “Abbas Mashhadizadeh Talks History of Iranian Academic Art,” www.honaronline.ir/​Section-​visual-​4/​96791-​abbas-​mashhadizadeh-​talks-​history-​of-​ iranian-​academic-​art [Accessed 9/​9/​2019] Mojabi, Javad. 2016. Navad Sal No-​Avari dar Honar-​e Tajassomi-​e Iran. vol. 1. Tehran: Peikareh. _​_​_​_​. 2014. Sar-​amadan-​e Honar-​e No. Tehran: Beh-​Negar. Moussavi-​Aghdam, Combiz. 2014. “‘National Art’ and the Iranian Intellectuals in the 1960s,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, January: 132–​150. Pahlavi, Farah. 1977. “Foreword to the Third Edition.” In The Survey of Persian Art (vol. 1). Edited by Arthur Upham Pope, vi–​vii. Tehran: Soroush Press. Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza. 1977. “Foreword to the second edition.” In The Survey of Persian Art (vol. 1). Edited by Arthur Upham Pope, iv–​v. Tehran: Soroush Press. Pope, Arthur Upham and Phyllis Ackerman. 1938. The Survey of Persian Art: from Prehistoric Times to the Present. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Ziapour, Jalil. (1948) 1999. “Laqv-​e Nazarieh’ha-​ye Makateb-​e Gozashteh: Az Primitivism ta Surrealism.” In Kavir (October). Reprinted in Darbareh-​ye Honar va Adabiat. Edited by Nasser Hariri. Tehran: Avishan.

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10  Camouflaged Dissent –​A Plastic Umbrella and Transparent Balloons “Happenings” in South Korea, 1967–​1968 Sooran Choi

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of scholarship aimed at recontextualizing Euro-​ American art histories from diverse cultural and geopolitical perspectives. What these efforts usually share in common are the impulses to spotlight formerly marginalized global art practices and to articulate the specific ways cultural production from one place translates to another.1 Building on these recent postcolonial and art historical approaches, this chapter similarly considers questions around cultural exchange in its examination of South Korean performance art in the late 1960s. Specifically, it analyzes the emergence of “Happenings” in South Korea, during the period of the authoritarian regime of Park Chung-​hee (pr. 1963–​1979) to explore the ways in which these events represented strategic and creative appropriations of popular Western art styles of the period as forms of protection for critical resistance. Taking place in Seoul between December 1967 and October 1968, these Happenings were created by members of a collective of loosely associated artists known as The Union Association of the South Korean Young Artists’ Groups (The Union).2 These artists were not part of the “mainstream” South Korean art establishment, which was centered around painting. Instead, they represented a younger generation, whose artistic production was doubly marginalized by both the establishment and the military government’s repressive Cold War ideologies. Though Korean critics and art historians regarded their activities as the first Happenings in South Korea, and positioned their performative and participatory events as a challenge to the South Korean art establishment, they also generally dismissed their events as merely derivative of Western contemporary art trends.3 These accusations came in part from particularities of the sociopolitical context of the 1960s and 1970s. In the aftermath of the exploitation of the Japanese colonial period (1910–​1945) and the devastation of the Korean War (1950–​1953), South Korea imported not only food and raw materials to rebuild the impoverished nation, but also the cultural modes that were part and parcel of the country’s rapid industrialization and emerging market capitalism. The various military dictatorships that operated in South Korea from 1961 to 1993 were anti-​Communist, nationalistic and authoritarian, but pro-​ Western. Through the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA, 1961)  and The Korean Public Performance Ethics Committee (KPPEC, 1962) the regimes covertly suppressed political dissent, often by framing dissenters as communists and censoring the press, media, art and culture, which continued until 1979. For these reasons, South Korean cultural critics were particularly sensitive to the importation of foreign culture as a form of imperialism, while also struggling

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Camouflaged Dissent  139 with a nationalist inferiority complex influenced by the regime. However, in contrast to canonical readings of these events as bad imitations of Western Happenings, this chapter positions them as strategic appropriations of the style and discourse with specific political aims. In this chapter, I trace the various uses of the term “Happening” in South Korea, from its initial interpretation as an “exotic” Western avant-​garde art form, to its later popularization as a stylish Korean cultural trend between 1967 and 1968, in order to reveal the ways in which South Korean artists engaged in Happenings for their own subversive social and political agendas. I also underscore the key role the press and the mass media played in transforming the reception of Happenings among the South Korean public and in facilitating their popularization as a fashionable form of entertainment. While newspaper accounts and media reports have become the main sources for gauging the reception of these works, they often reveal significant discrepancies, and have been viewed as less reliable than direct recordings of the performances. However, I show that for South Korean artists, the press and mass media provided the best avenues for freely circulating their messages. Moreover, I argue that the media’s oftentimes conflicting reports of Happenings, helped to reinforce their sense of “ambiguity,” which in turn provided subterfuge to artists wishing to disseminate politically charged messages without retaliation from the repressive state.

The First “South Korean Happening”: A Plastic Umbrella On 14 December 1967, 12 members of The Union staged an event, later referred to in the press as a “Happening,” titled A Plastic Umbrella and Candlelights. This was the first time that the term “Happening” was officially used to describe a performative event taking place in South Korea.4 Staged within the gallery space of The Union Exhibition at the Central Information Center in Seoul (11–​ 17 December 1967), A Plastic Umbrella involved 11 performers encircling a woman, named Young-​ja Kim. Holding a plastic umbrella over her head, Kim was seated on a chair in the middle of an installation by Boong-​hyun Choi, comprising a series of sprawling stovepipes. While circling her, the performers also sang a traditional Korean folk song. After the conclusion of their singing, they inserted lit candles onto the top of the umbrella, as Kim rose from her seat and followed the group. Later, she sat back down as the others flocked around her, blew out the candles, tore up the umbrella and wrapped its torn remains with toilet paper and straw ropes. They finished by trampling them violently while smiling and laughing.5 Plastic Umbrella was a loosely pre-​scripted performance whose original plan was credited to art historian Gwang-​soo Oh. Oh described the umbrella as “a symbol of the nuclear umbrella [the mushroom cloud left in the wake of a nuclear bomb]” that was taken as “a metaphor for the destructive force in our material culture,” while the candles signified “hope and spirituality.”6 The final destruction of the plastic umbrella was intended to imply a proactive critique of civilization.7 Oh further noted that he had initially read about Happenings in foreign newspapers and magazines and thought it might be “a fun and productive way to stimulate a new way of thinking about art.”8 Rather than attempting to seek attention or provoke scandal, he was motivated to create the work out of a “fierce … intention to challenge the status quo,” a sentiment shared by the other participants, as well.9 According to participating artist Kuk-​jin Kang, the work was aimed at presenting “cynical actions related to the brutal

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140  Sooran Choi remnants of technological culture,” and to express “a sense of drama through the random collision of the two opposing objects of the umbrella and the candles.”10 Plastic Umbrella also contained elements that alluded to Korean folk traditions. The circling dance they performed referenced Ganggangsullae, a type of traditional Korean circle dancing that was performed to celebrate a bountiful harvest.11 And the folk song they sang was a traditional song of rebellion.12 Hence, through their dancing and singing, they staged (and represented) references to radical and communal Korean cultural histories, all under the banner of a “Happening.” The implied violence (stomping the umbrella at the end) combined with the ensuing cathartic playfulness (smiling and laughing during this act) can be understood as a theatrical, yet covert expression of liberation from the oppressive sociopolitical realities of the period. After this first event, the term “Happening” came to be used as a catchall to refer to all kinds of performance activities that these artists presented in the following years. They and other South Korean artists intuitively grasped that the loose term could be adapted to diverse ends. Neither Oh nor any of the participating artists ever overtly articulated their political messages, although they were obvious to anyone familiar with Korean history and culture. However, the artists themselves downplayed the work’s implicit political messages in their statements to the media. Instead, they emphasized its international art references, describing it as a Happening, a “Dadaist-​ inspired type of art.”13 Similarly, the December 16, 1967 issue of the Kyunghyang Daily quoted Kang, who described it as “an aesthetic activity that materializes from the intersection of acts and objects,” and added, “Please disregard any connection to reality. You are only experiencing a random act and the aesthetic phenomenon caused by an interaction between act and object.”14 Although it might seem like the artists only intended to provoke media coverage of the performance, this type of rhetoric was actually grounded in Western discourse on Happenings. For instance, the 17 December 1967 issue of the Weekly Korea featured Oh’s explanation of the origin of the Happening, and its meaning as “a new form of avant-​garde art.”15 He went on to precisely describe its art historical antecedents in the United States, including Action Painting and Allan Kaprow’s Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts, concluding that a Happening is “an uneventful method of criticizing civilization … characterized by the collective participation in physical and psychological activities.”16 Such commentary not only framed South Korean Happenings as part of Western and global avant-​garde trends, but also affirmed that The Union artists had a clear understanding of the Western origins of the genre.17 Even though Oh still avoided associating Plastic Umbrella with a political message as late as 2000 –​when he claimed the theme was chosen randomly –​I contend that he tactically used the term “Happening” to describe the work in order to mask its covert political messaging.18 His earlier comments on the history of Happenings positioned Plastic Umbrella within the lineage of global avant-​garde development and testified to South Korean artists’ knowledge of the origin of the genre in the United States. By framing their own performances as Happenings, they placed them within the rubric of the avant-​garde, intentionally appropriating and adapting the art form to the specific South Korean context, in this case as a subterfuge for political commentary. In South Korea in the late 1960s, most of the general public viewed Happenings as unfamiliar, exotic and strange (much like United States audiences). Yet, the ambiguity of the term, combined with its aura as a new Western avant-​garde style, proved useful to South Korean artists.

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Camouflaged Dissent  141 The use of vague “art” rhetoric was a recurrent tactic of these artists and critics, even when their work seemed to imply social and political criticism. This nonconfrontational approach toward critique can be tied culturally to strategic East Asian battle tactics, which do not encourage confronting a stronger opponent directly, but rather promote redirecting the opposing force to render it impotent.19 This viewpoint was expressed in an interview by artist Kang-​ja Jung (a participant in Plastic Umbrella and in successive Happenings), when she was asked if the work had any political messages: We were very careful not to directly involve ourselves with politics or criticize political issues. We knew several of our colleagues, who were suspected dissidents … and whose lives were ruined because of it … It seemed futile and even stupid to directly criticize the political system or the government officially. However, it did not mean we were cowards or complacent.20 In the late 1960s, the South Korean newspaper dailies played a significant role not only in promoting Happenings, but also in introducing all sorts of new art forms to the general public. Because South Korea did not have any locally published contemporary art magazines until the 1970s, newspaper accounts contributed significantly to reporting on contemporary art activities in the 1950s and 1960s.21 Documentation of South Korean Happenings were mainly recorded and circulated by these media and press accounts. For this reason, newspapers and the mass media propelled the South Korean avant-​garde’s first phase of public circulation and reception as an art style that challenged the cultural status quo. Artists not only relied on the press to record their messages, but the newspapers’ and tabloids’ accounts included photographs, interviews and press clippings of the artists and their audiences, and these in turn, became part of the artworks. This mediated record added to the ambiguity and conflicted records of the South Korean Happenings, necessary for their protection. And so, initially, Happenings garnered acceptance among the South Korean public.

Happenings at the Music Café, C’est Si Bon in May 1968: Art or Scandal? However, perceptions of the Happenings changed after they became more scandalous. In May 1968, three members of The Union –​Kang-​ja Jung, Chan-​seung Chung and Kuk-​jin Kang  –​continued to actively stage several more Happenings in a popular music café in Seoul called C’est Si Bon, with the intention of reaching a broader audience. These Happenings  –​A Festival of Color Vinyl, Flower Card Game, and Transparent Balloons and Nude –​were accompanied by seminars on contemporary art, an important tactic for positioning Happenings within academic and artistic contexts. On 2 May 1968, a seminar titled “Contemporary Art and Happening Night,” was held prior to the performances of the first two Happenings, A Festival and Flower Card. In the seminar, Gwang-​soo Oh lectured on contemporary art, followed by a slide presentation by Chung about the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, the 1967 Paris Biennial and the works exhibited in The Union Exhibition of 1967.22 Similarly, the third Happening, Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968), was also followed by a seminar on contemporary art. The continuous juxtaposition of Western artistic discourse with Happenings helped further consolidate the idea that Happenings were a category of contemporary art, at a time when the majority of the South Korean public

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142  Sooran Choi was still not familiar with the term. Furthermore, the academic atmosphere evoked by the seminars helped legitimize Happenings as a bonafide intellectual and artistic category. Although records of them are scarce, the first two Happenings merit analysis.23 A Festival was a group performance that utilized tubes filled with colored water. Seven participants were arranged in a circle around a woman at the center and were given six vinyl hoses, three meters in length. One end of each hose was given to the woman at the center, while the other end was held by the six participants. Each filled their hose with water dyed different colors and sealed on both ends. The participants danced around the woman, and by standing up and down created a wave with the colored hoses until the movement accelerated and became violent enough that they burst, spraying the colored water everywhere.24 The next work, Flower Card, began with four participating artists playing the children’s game Rock, Paper, Scissors. The loser produced a deck of flower cards (South Korean poker cards), and the card game was played in silence. The loser of the card game was then required to fill a bucket of water. A second round of the game was played in silence. As the loser of the second round began to put his or her head into the bucket of water, the silence was broken and everyone else threw and scattered their cards, yelling and shouting along with atonal music, while at the same time putting their heads into the bucket of water one by one. After a while, the lights were turned off, and the music and commotion stopped. After 30 seconds of darkness and silence, a spotlight was turned back on to illuminate an empty stage.25 These two Happenings offered a notable shift from the earlier Plastic Umbrella. Happenings were becoming more diversified and were beginning to incorporate specific aspects of Euro-​American discourse such as Kaprow’s idea of extending painting into the environment and the environment into theater.26 Echoing Oh’s lecture on Happenings, Chung traced the origin of the term to its initial use by Allan Kaprow in his Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts.27 Quoting Lucy Lippard, Chung defined the Happening as a form of avant-​garde art that blends visual art, music and theater, and as an environment –​the extension of painting –​that reaches out to the public, as a participatory art form.28 Plastic Umbrella was closer to conventional theater (which Kaprow’s Happenings were moving away from), with its symbolic reference to political criticism through metaphor. A Festival represented the shift away from the art object to the surrounding space and into the realm of theater by utilizing colorful water-​filled hoses as tropes of performance. While A Festival lacked Plastic Umbrella’s metaphoric references to Korean cultural history as a politicized gesture, it repeated the use of a circle dance, and incorporated the accelerated violence and destruction with ensuing catharsis, all of which were prominent aspects of the former work. But unlike Plastic Umbrella, A Festival placed a great deal more emphasis on color. The employment of bright hues was a visual device used to shift the audience’s focus away from the implicitly violent content. Flower Card, on the other hand, exemplified the art based on daily activities of John Cage, who was associated with both Euro-​American Happenings and Fluxus.29 Kaprow conjoined everyday activities and mundane acts with art in an effort to close the gap between art and life. The message was that what we experience in our daily lives may be as important and beautiful as art. Playing the flower card game was, and still is, a major family and communal activity in South Korea. However, Flower Card offered a more complicated presentation. The card game is normally played

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Camouflaged Dissent  143 enthusiastically with loud shouts, whereas in Flower Card, participants played in utter silence, perhaps subtly indicating the constraints on civil liberties in Korean society during the Cold War. Placing their heads into the water buckets may have also implied a critique of the torture methods used by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. According to Chung, the Happening was “an ordinary event expressing repressed desires and fatigue,” a vague and evasive explanation that invites speculation about its deeper content.30 Tracing its origin to Cage, one newspaper article described Flower Card using phrases like “cutting edge avant-​garde,” “an expression of a new aesthetic,” and “emphasizing the process rather than the result.”31 In addition, the May 9, 1968 issue of the Seoul Daily bore the headline:  “Happening Typhoon Landed in South Korea,” introducing Happenings as an “action painting moving out of the canvas,” and describing the South Korean artists as the “self-​proclaimed avant-​garde, pursuing action painting.”32 It offered further artistic context that legitimized South Korean Happenings in line with Western avant-​garde activity.33 Although there were no photographic records of these particular Happenings in the press, the artists continued to promote Happenings with the aid of newspapers. The continuing use of the term “Happening” in the press helped it gain currency in the South Korean cultural milieu of 1968. Although cursory, the handful of secondary accounts played multiple and significant roles when there were no catalogues, video recordings or art magazines covering South Korean Happenings. And, as I  have suggested, the explanation of Western avant-​garde art forms by the press aided the artists’ in their efforts to use avant-​garde art as a form of protection for their indirect criticism. On 30 May of the same year, Jung, Chung and Kang presented their third Happening, Transparent Balloons and Nude at C’est Si Bon café (see Figure 10.1).34 This time they created a scandal. The performance was considered outrageous due to the presence of a partially naked woman (Jung). It also differed from previous Happenings because it included audience participation as a part of the artwork. It involved 30 red balloons floating over a stage illuminated by blue, red and yellow spotlights, while concrete music (similar to that of Cage) was played in the background. Approximately 300 spectators, including members of the press, were present when Jung wearing only a pair of bloomers and a white scarf appeared on stage sitting on a chair. The spectators were given a rubbery liquid which, when blown, created translucent iridescent balloons. They then attached the balloons to Jung’s body. In the midst of this activity, Jung’s bloomers were cut off by Chung revealing her panties and bare torso. Eventually, the audience rushed to Jung and popped the balloons with their hands, after which she left the stage.35 Chung, in another ambiguous commentary, described it as “a happening that combined the body and action; light and music; and performer and audience,” resonating with the idea of “total art.”36 Transparent Balloons was followed by an art seminar titled “The Common Reality of Environmental Art,” in which the young art critic Joon-​sang Yu, lectured on “How to Appreciate Contemporary Art.”37 This was followed by a discussion between Chung and the poet Jung-​seo Gu. It is important to note that the seminar and lecture afforded this Happening an academic frame, which also provided additional protection from police surveillance.38 Transparent Balloons marks an important point in South Korean performance history on several levels:  it was the first Happening in which direct audience participation was intended as part of the performance and it was also the first occasion in which a woman was partially naked in public. Because

41

144  Sooran Choi

Figure 10.1 Kang-​ja Jung, Kuk-​jing Kang and Chan-​seung Chung: Transparent Balloons and Nude, C’est Si Bon, Seoul, South Korea, 30 May 1968. Hangook Ilbo, 2 June 1968.

of this performance, Jung came to symbolize the controversial “new woman,” who was willing to pursue her own career and desires at a time when the majority of South Korean women were expected to become wives and mothers.39 The Western theme of sexual freedom as a form of resistance against repressive sociopolitical and cultural oppression is relevant to the work. Referencing Herbert Marcuse’s assertion that that sexual repression is inextricably intertwined with political repression, Günter Berghaus, in his discussion of European Happenings in the 1960s, notes that the breaking of social and sexual taboos prepared participants for the abolition of all forms of despotism, including political, social, economic, artistic and sexual repression.40 South Korean society in the 1960s was largely under the influence of age-​old Confucian mores and there was hardly any public discourse on sexual liberation. These Happenings served as a conduit for artists, especially women, to resist the constraints they experienced, by challenging normative sexual taboos. In this context, sexual liberation readily translated into liberation in other aspects of society. The South Korean newspapers had a field day with Transparent Balloons. The 2 June 1968 issue of the Joongang Daily introduced it with the headline, “Extreme Avant-​garde Art, Seoul’s Happening Show,” and described it as a work of “action art,” in which performers put balloons on a woman’s body while the audience listened to jazz and participated.”41 A scandalous photograph accompanied the article, with a caption that read:  “the self-​described, so-​called, avant-​garde artist, Kang-​ja Jung

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Camouflaged Dissent  145 uncovered her body to the audience, as part of a collaborative effort to cover her with transparent balloons.”42 The 2 June 1968 issues of the Korea Daily described the Happening by quoting a female university student’s bold opinion that “it would have been better if she was totally nude,” and “it is not shocking enough.”43 The 9 June 1968 issue of The Korea Times, quoted Chung, who stated, “it allows for total participation –​some sort of involvement in such a way that the artist is at once the subject, the ingredient, and the appreciator.”44 This benign rhetoric of participation was followed by Chung’s more overt political comment that, “[e]‌ven if we should become forbidden to express ourselves by laws of this country, we will continue when we are so inclined.”45 In the end, while both the press and the artists gained wider audiences, the unexpected outcome was the transformation of the media’s reception of Happenings from fine art to a form of scandalous entertainment. The weekly tabloids that emerged in 1968 also fueled this transition. These changing attitudes toward Happenings would later have a detrimental effect on the reception of other avant-​garde artworks after 1969. Ultimately, while South Korean Happenings appeared similar to their Western counterparts and shared some common elements, the attempt to narrow the gap between art and life was turned on its head by South Korean artists. They all shared a sense of implied violence and playfulness, resulting from the cathartic destruction reflected in acts such as the stomping on an umbrella, the submersion of artists’ heads into buckets of water, the tearing of plastic hoses filled with water and the popping of transparent balloons on a woman’s naked body. All these actions are strongly suggestive of the forms of torture that were prevalent in South Korea during Park’s regime. Perhaps in the hope of sublimating brutality into something beautiful, these elements were mingled with an aesthetic emphasis, including color. The resulting ambiguity was, I argue, an intentional strategy for camouflaging cultural and political dissent. What made the notion of the avant-​garde and the Happening useful to these artists was the very separation of art from daily life in South Korean society at the time. Everyday life in South Korea was repressive and art distanced itself further from reality, in order to function as a sanctuary free from sociopolitical oppression.

Notes See, Ramírez 1993; Kapur 1997; Minglu 2011; and Bishop 2012. 1 2 The Union was formed in the summer of 1967 by members of three groups of young artists –​ Mu Dongin [Zero Group] (1962–​1967), Origin Don-​in [Origin Society] (1963–​present) and Shinjeon Dongin [New Exhibition Group] (1967–​1968). For further in-​depth discussions on the Union exhibition on December 1967, as well as the South Korean manifestations of avant-​garde art, and its recontextualizations of avant-​garde theory, see Choi 2018. 3 See Kim 2007, 19–​20. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations from Korean are my own. 4 Though the term “Happening” was first used by South Korean art historian Gwang-​soo Oh to describe Plastic Umbrella (1967), it came to refer to any type of performance-​based art in South Korea in the late 1960s. Oh 1995. 5 This description was first derived from newspaper accounts and photographs. In 2018, I acquired a video recording of the work that was found in the KBS broadcasting archive, which further corroborated my initial interpretation. 6 Oh 1995. 7 Ibid.

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146  Sooran Choi 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 n.a. 1967 (c). 11 Ganggangsullae is a seasonal harvest and fertility ritual popular in the southwestern part of the country, traditionally performed on Korea’s Thanksgiving Day in the eighth lunar month by dozens of young, unmarried village women in a circle under a full moon. n.a. 2009. 12 The song was titled Bird, Bird, and Bluebird. It was associated with the Donghak Peasant Revolt of 1894, an iconic revolt in Korean history in which Korean peasants resisted Japan’s corrupt feudal government and meddling in Korean affairs. 13 n.a. 1967 (d). 14 n.a. 1967 (c). 15 Oh qtd. in 1967 (a), 32. 16 Ibid. 17 This partly disputes South Korean art historian Tae-​hee Kang’s claim that South Korean artists failed to grasp Euro-​American discourse on the avant-​garde. Kang 2000–​2001, 425. 18 Kim 2007, 29. 19 Sun 2007, 25. 20 Jung, phone interview with the author, 7 September 2015. 21 The only exception was Gonggan (Space, 1966–​present), which was focused on architecture and design, not art. The first magazine specializing on art was Geagan Misul [Art Quarterly], founded in 1976. The rest of the major art magazines in South Korea, such as Wolgan Misul [Art Monthly], Misul Segae [Art World] and Gana Art, Hyundai Misul [Contemporary Art], were not founded until the 1980s. 22 Kuk-​jin Kang Archive. 23 My description relies solely on one newspaper report and Chung’s summary of the South Korean Happenings of 1967–​1969. There are no photographic records. 24 n.a. 1968 (b), 5. 25 Ibid. 26 Kaprow (1958) 1993, 10–​12. 27 Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was first performed at the Reuben Gallery in New York in 1959. Chung 1969, 4. 28 Ibid. 29 The term “Fluxus” was never circulated in South Korea until recently. It first appeared in reference to South Korean art in 1993, when the Seoul Fluxus Festival was organized by Hong-​hee Kim with the support of Nam June Paik. While newspapers sporadically reported on Paik’s art activities in Europe and the US in the 1960s and 1970s, they never used the term “Fluxus,” but did use the term “Happening” regularly. 30 Chung 1969, 4. 31 Unidentified newspaper clip owned by the artist Boong-​hyun Choi, qtd. in Kim 2007, 175. 32 n.a. 1968 (b), 5. 33 Ibid. 34 The music hall and café C’est Si Bon lasted for 17 years until its closure in November 1968. It was one of the major cultural spots in which the South Korean public was able to listen to diverse music from Pop to Jazz of different cultures. It also functioned as a place for interdisciplinary collaboration, discussion among artists, intellectuals, literary figures and politicians. n.a. 1969. 35 The detailed sequence of Transparent Balloons was reconstructed based on accounts in newspaper dailies. The increased and more detailed press coverage of this work was probably due to its scandalous inclusion of a nude woman. 36 Chung 1969, 4; 1968 (c), 5.

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Camouflaged Dissent  147 37 Joon-​sang Yu introduced and lectured on Pop Art and Op Art in the US, contemporary art in Latin America including Mexico, and Communist Social Realism. Yu also explained the Happening as part of the desire to search for human nature amidst modern alienation. Yu 1968, 7. 38 Jung has noted that the police were waiting outside ready to interrupt in case any laws (such as “social indecency”) were broken. Because her nudity was partially covered with balloons, and because it was framed as art, the police allowed it to continue without interference. Kang-​ja Jung, phone interview with author, 7 September 2015. 39 Kim 2005. 40 Berghaus 1995, 373; Marcuse 1955. 41 n.a 1968 (a), 5. 42 Ibid. 43 Jung originally wished to go completely nude, but the management at C’est Si Bon discouraged it due to police surveillance. Jung, interview with the author, 7 September 2015. Some of the participating artists were quoted as saying that they hoped Transparent Balloons would be understood as a serious form of avant-​garde art, not just as a form of sensationalism. n.a. 1968 (c), 4. 44 K.C.K. (1968), 5. 45 Ibid.

Bibliography n.a. 2009. “Ganggangsullae,” The Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) [Accessed 11 September 2015] www.unesco.org/​culture/​ich/​en/​RL/​00188. n.a. 1969. “Ganpannaerin eumaksil sesibong 17 nyeon” [Closed Music Cafe, the 17 years of C’est Si Bon: Everyone’s Frequent Place] Sunday Seoul, May 11, unpaginated. [Accessed 6 October 2015] www.seoul.co.kr/​news/​newsView.php?id=20051227550004. n.a. 1968a. “Extreme Avant-​garde Art, Seoul’s Happening Show,” Joongang Daily, June 2: 5. n.a. 1968b. “Happening Typhoon Landed in South Korea,” Seoul Daily, May 9: 5. n.a. 1968c. “Joint Realization of Environmental Art of the Union: The Combination of Light, Sound, and Space,” Korea Daily, June 2: 4–​5. n.a. 1967a. “67 Break Out–​ Art:  Young Artist Association Exhibition,” Weekly Korea, December 17: 32. n.a. 1967b. “A healthy Challenge of Bizarre Things: The Union Exhibition at the Information Center,” Joseon Daily, December 14: 5. n.a. 1967c. “An Avant-​garde Show called A Happening with Plastic Umbrella and Candlelights,” Kyunghyang Daily, December 16: 5. n.a. 1967d. “Happening Diary,” Newspaper clips, missing newspaper’s name, pages, published on December 11, Kuk-​jin Kang Archive. [Accessed 3 March 2018] http://​kangkukjin.com/​ www/​topboard/​topboard.php?tablename=rboard&mode=list&start=100. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells:  Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso Books. Berghaus, Gunter. 1995. “Happenings in Europe:  Trends, Events, and Leading Figures.” In Happenings and Other Acts. Edited by Mariellen R. Sandford, 263–​328. New  York: Routledge. Choi, Sooran. 2018. The South Korean “Meta (Zombie)-​avant-​garde,” 1961–​1993: Subterfuge as Radical Agency, PhD Diss., New York: The CUNY Graduate Center. Chung, Chan-​ seung. 1969. “South Korean Happenings,” Hongik University Gazette, December 1: 4.

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148  Sooran Choi Kang, Tae-​hee. 2000–​2001. “The Status of the Early Period of Korean Conceptual Art: focusing on ST.” In Rereading Korean Contemporary Art II: Sourcebook of Korean Art Movements in the 1960s and ‘70s, vol. 2. Seoul: ICAS: 425–​427. Kaprow, Allan. 1993. “Notes on the Creation of a Total Art (1958).” In Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, 10–​12. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kapur, Geeta. 1997. “Globalization and Culture,” Third Text 11, no. 39, June: 21–​38. K.C.K. 1968. “New Step of Art: Balloon, Nude, Beat . . . ” The Korea Times, June 9: 5. Kim, Kyung-​il. 2005. “Korean New Woman and Socialism in the 1920s–​’30s,” Korean Culture, vol. 36, March: 249–​255. Kim, Mi-​ kyung. 2007. “Performance Art of Korea, 1960–​ 70.” In Performance Art of Korea: 1967–​2007. exh. cat. Edited by Kyoung-​woon Kim, 8–​11. Seoul: National Museum of Contemporary Art [South Korea]. _​_​_​_​_​. 2003. Experimental Art in [South] Korea. Seoul: Sigongart. _​_​_​_​_​. 2001. A Brief History of Korean Contemporary Art, 1960–​1979. Seoul: ICAS. Kuk-​ jin Kang Archive, [Accessed 3 March 2018] http://​kangkukjin.com/​www/​topboard/​ topboard.php?tablename=rboard&mode=list&start=100. Marcuse, Herbert. 1955. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. Minglu, Gao. 2011. Total Modernity and the Avant-​Garde in Twentieth-​Century Chinese Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Oh, Gwang-​soo. 1995. “G[K]‌ook-​jin Kang (1965–​1974),” Printpia. [Accessed 15 September 2015] www.kangkukjin.com/​doc/​critique_​k06.html. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1993. “Blueprint Circuits:  Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America.” In Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. exh. cat. Edited by Aldo Rasmussen, 156–​169. New York: MoMA. Sun, Tzu. 2007. The Art of War. Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC. Yu, Joon-​sang. 1968. “How to Look at Contemporary Art,” Joseon Daily, June 2: 7.

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11  A Postcard from Addis Ethiopian Modernism(s) in the World Kate Cowcher

Ethiopia in the World In 1967 a postcard (see Figure  11.1) arrived in Washington from Addis Ababa addressed to Marjorie Phillips, wife of Duncan Phillips who founded America’s first museum of modern art, the Phillips Collection, in 1921.1 The postcard, from Elmira Bier, the Phillips’ first Director of Music, effused about travels in Ethiopia’s capital. “This is really a wonderful experience,” it began. [t]‌he people are gentle and many are handsome. Had lunch in the home of a young Ethiopian woman whose husband is in the diplomatic corps. Native dishes, some red hot! Friends assisting her, alert and very feminist. They have women in parliament. We had no sense of a color barrier. Saw the Emperor on Monday and heard him speak. Noting women in Ethiopian political life and positive racial relations (a contrast to the United States), the postcard provided insights into Elmira’s well-​connected travels and observations of a fast-​changing society. Its existence as an object, however, also evidenced Ethiopia’s growing international significance as a political power, a tourist destination and an artistic center. Though she did not comment upon it, her postcard featured one of the most important works of modern Ethiopian civic art:  the center section of Afewerk Tekle’s (1932–​2012), massive stained glass window, Africa: Past, Present and Future, located in Africa Hall, the site at which the Organisation of African Unity had been inaugurated in 1963. The section depicted a future-​oriented Africa, with Ethiopia as pan-​African leader; the torch-​bearing protagonists wore Ethiopian tibeb-​edged white gabi (thick, cotton cloth) and netela (thinner, gauze-​like scarf). Combining this image of national and pan-​African pride, the postcard served as cultural emissary, an image of Ethiopian cultural and political confidence sent into the world with hand-​written testimony by a Western tourist. Bier’s postcard was the antithesis of the postcards sent home from the African continent by Europeans in the colonial era, which functioned, as Annie Coombes has argued, as “cultural vehicles” for pernicious stereotypes and myths of conquest.2 Bier’s postcard asserted Addis as continental capital and Ethiopia as land of unexpected adventure and discovery. The latter concept was extensively marketed by Ethiopian Airlines, founded in 1945 in partnership with American company Transworld Airlines (TWA) as cornerstone of Emperor Haile Selassie’s broader modernization program following his return from exile in 1941.3 In the 1960s the

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Figure 11.1 Postcard from Elmira Bier to Marjorie Phillips, 1967. The Phillips Collections Archives.

airline was the first in Africa to acquire Boeing 720b fan jets and projected itself, through international advertisements, as the provider of an “unforgettable travel adventure.”4 This jet-​powered airline facilitated the Emperor’s desire to both project Ethiopia and, in his mind, its overlooked cultural riches into the world, and to bring venturesome tourists like Bier to visit. Advertisements, with the slogan “The Key to the Hidden Empire,” presented images of an ancient, once remote land, open for discovery via cutting-​edge technology. Afewerk’s window was not typically used as primary advertising material; the airline deployed images of historic Ethiopia (the rock churches of Lalibela, etc.) alongside epithets like “the land of Sheba” to entice travelers. Encountering Afewerk’s luminous window in Addis, therefore, facilitated an experience of discovery for those who, lured by images of a timeless, ancient place, found themselves confronted with the exhilarating, if more complicated realities of a capital city in the midst of transformation.5 Afewerk’s Ethio-​centric future-​oriented stained glass offered a complementary image to those of national historic heritage, but one that insisted that Ethiopia was far from some timeless backwater. This image of contrast and complexity was reiterated in Bier’s written observations. The invitation to Western tourists to visit and experience the cultural riches of Ethiopia was contemporaneous with the sending out into the world of a generation of young Ethiopian artists to gain education, but also, more importantly, to serve

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A Postcard from Addis  151 as cultural ambassadors. The leading practitioners of the 1960s, including Afewerk, Skunder Boghossian (1937–​2003), Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–​1981) and others, received postgraduate training in prestigious foreign art schools, east and west, from Chicago to Cologne, New  York to Leningrad, Moscow to Berlin. Exposure to and engagement with varied tenets of postwar abstraction, Surrealism, German Expressionism, Soviet Realism as well as other African modernisms informed distinctly diverse, even discrepant, attitudes to what modernism might mean in the Ethiopian context. Pursuing what Karima Laachir, Sara Marzagora and Francesca Orsini call “significant geographies,” this chapter explores Ethiopia’s internationalist positioning in the 1960s and the role of art within it through the divergent worldly engagements of Afewerk Tekle and Skunder Boghossian. Appraising the “significant geographies” of individual actors affronts the notion of a static “world,” with which to be engaged, emphasizing, instead, it as something subjectively produced.6 These artists engaged the world in ways that both worked with and challenged Ethiopia’s national aspirations for international recognition. Though occupied by Fascist Italy for five years from 1936–​1941, Ethiopia was never fully colonized. Marzagora’s research on the writer Käbbädä Mikael demonstrates that mid-​ century intellectuals were, nonetheless, cognizant of the geopolitical inequalities stacked against even the “biggest” of the “small” nations, as Käbbädä understood Ethiopia.7 Less encumbered, nonetheless, with the concerns of constructing new national identity than Africa’s emergent states, Ethiopia’s 1960s were occupied with the projection of the nation in the world. There are parallels with Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Senegal, which, Joshua Cohen argues, deployed the state-​sponsored art of the École de Dakar as a means of “projecting modern African culture abroad.”8 Haile Selassie’s concern, however, was specifically bound to Ethiopia’s particular status. This chapter contributes to histories of modern art in Africa that increasingly address transnational engagements, whilst also being attentive to the aspiration that Ethiopian artists’ global presence amplified their nation as a new center.9 The “significant geographies” of those who were sent, however, did not always affirm the latter and, in fact, led some to question the very myths and images that were simultaneously used to lure Western tourists.

Afewerk Tekle as Patriot and Diplomat In 1954 Haile Selassie visited the United States. Addressing Congress, he depicted his country as once (but no longer) isolated, defiant against colonialism, and “a land of expanding opportunities.”10 The Emperor refused to explain Ethiopia’s relevance solely to American interests (“that you can best judge for yourselves,” he added). Rather, he underscored her new geopolitical centrality. With “three thousand years of history” Ethiopia was a “profoundly African state.” Furthermore, it was best situated to provide links between the continent and the Middle East; modern air travel, he stressed, meant that Addis was 48 hours from Washington. He closed his speech by emphasizing Ethiopia’s acceptance of the burden of “collective security,” citing support provided in the Korean War. The Emperor reiterated the message of committed internationalism to young artists in Addis when, in 1957, he opened the Fine Art School, Ethiopia’s new center for modern and contemporary art education. In his opening speech he praised its establishment, founded by artist Ale Felege Selam who had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. The Emperor spoke not

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152  Kate Cowcher only of his hope for artistic innovation but that the school’s graduates would “send their creative works to the modern platforms of the West, letting the world know that Ethiopians are also part of the modern world.”11 Modern artists, therefore, were explicitly expected to provide a counterpoint to the image of Ethiopia as ancient and unknown, an image, nonetheless, used to entice Western tourists. A willing ambassador, Afewerk, grew up amidst the resurgent patriotism that followed the Italian occupation; his father fought for Ethiopia’s liberation. He attended a school for the children of Ethiopian Patriots and then the new Haile Selassie I  Secondary School.12 In the late 1940s, Afewerk was amongst the first of the postwar generation to have the opportunity to study overseas.13 The Ethiopian Government pushed him toward mining engineering, but he demonstrated precocious artistic talent and received permission to pursue art education. He enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, following Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, whose experience of education there was, Sylvester Ogbechie argues, deeply shaped by his relationship to the British colonial regime.14 If Enwonwu manifested concerns for acquiring the correct credentials in order to obtain employment under the latter in Lagos, Afewerk displayed no such anxieties. His confident embrace of education and conspicuous presence (he was reportedly President of the Students’ Representative Committee and the Slade Society) reflected his status as an Ethiopian and as a representative of an independent country that Britain had assisted.15 Like Enwonwu, however, Afewerk’s oeuvre was notably shape shifting. If the former, Ogbechie argues, pursued different artistic modes to strategically speak to different audiences, from the British colonial government to nationalist activists at home, Afewerk’s portfolio conveyed a young artist unencumbered by pressures to rethink a specifically “Ethiopian” modernist language and, thus, exploring variety out of personal interest. Afewerk’s seeming ambivalence contrasts with the anxieties of Sudanese artist, Ibrahim El Salahi, who enrolled at the Slade just after him. Upon return to Khartoum, El Salahi renounced the instruction he had received and the geometric abstractions he had produced in London in the late 1950s. Finding his Slade-​ informed modernism rejected at home, El Salahi pursued a voyage of rediscovery of the “Sudanese environment,” developing the elongated figures and calligraphic abstractions of the 1960s for which he is best known.16 Afewerk, by contrast, extended his European education with a “Grand Tour” of Italy, posing for photographs, sketching in such settings as the Piazza Michelangelo.17 Despite being in the land of Ethiopia’s recent occupier, Afewerk displayed no anxiety about his right to be there. His attitude echoed that of his older contemporary, Käbbädä Mikael, who published Ethiopia and Western Civilisation in 1948–​1949.18 In this text Käbbädä assessed Ethiopia as underdeveloped relative to Europe, however he stressed the specific challenges the country had faced (including isolation and colonialist aggression). As Marzagora highlights, Käbbädä never equated infrastructural underdevelopment with cultural inferiority, even going as far as to suggest ethical superiority, saying that though Ethiopia was “materially” less developed, she “may be ahead of all … when it comes to moral civilisation” as an ancient Christian nation.19 Afewerk’s presentation made manifest a national self-​confidence in the world that echoed Käbbädä’s intellectual configuration. Returning home in 1954, Afewerk opened his own studio, first in the National Library of Ethiopia’s grounds, but from 1959 in the Villa Alpha.20 His first solo show in Addis, opened by the Emperor, included cubist-​style still lives, Grand Tour landscapes

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A Postcard from Addis  153 as well as El Greco-​esque portraits of notable overseas Ethiopians. Afewerk worked to cultivate his professional identity, stressing that he wished to earn a living from his work; it was not simply a “gift to Ethiopia.”21 He was quickly recognized as Ethiopia’s foremost living artist, painting portraits of luminaries such as poet Aleka Lemma, designing a range of insignia and marketing materials, and undertaking large-​ scale public art commissions, most notably the remarkable paintings and mosaics that adorn St. George’s Cathedral.22 In 1959, he was the obvious choice for the stained glass for Africa Hall, the first of a series of striking modernist civic structures designed by the Italian architect, Arturo Mezzedimi. It was, Ayala Levin argues, the foremost “stage for the performance of pan-​African political and economic alliances.”23 Not an indigenous art form, stained glass was a decidedly new medium in Ethiopia.24 Afewerk worked with French glass cutters on a design for three panels: a past of enslavement on the left, a present of emancipation and metaphorical dragon-​ slaying on the right, and a central panel of Ethiopia-​led movement forward to the future:  Africa, yesterday, today and tomorrow. The structure consisted of a geometric jigsaw of colored and painted glass, held within a grid of square windows, but crosscut with striking diagonal strips of lead at various angles. Afewerk added painted gradations to the figures’ faces and bodies, but used the lead to cut through any sense of simple naturalism. The diagonal lines forced dynamic movement amidst colored fragments, creating a startling tableau that gravitated between more naturalistic faces and geometrically abstracted landscapes. Access to the window’s location was restricted to OAU delegates and guests, but its reputation grew through visual reproductions. The photograph on Bier’s postcard was taken at an angle, such that the work’s status as a window could be seen. The central design, however, was also reproduced as an illustration, notably appearing on a popular silk scarf, available for purchase via the in-​flight drinks menu of Ethiopian Airlines (see Figure 11.2).25 Afewerk’s window encapsulated the conflated national and pan-​African ambitions of the 1960s. If it became a readily deployable cultural emissary, its maker also gladly took up the mantle. In 1960, in the midst of his preparations for the Africa Hall window the popular women’s magazine Menen ran a profile of Afewerk claiming that “85 percent of foreign visitors” visited his studio with many purchasing paintings to send back to Europe, Asia and elsewhere.26 Afewerk also traveled internationally, notably to Moscow in 1964, where he undertook studies of Bolshoi ballet dancers in motion, his sketches drawing formally on the geometric abstractions of his stained glass.27 This trip, which included a lecture tour of the Soviet Union, ensured the appearance of his work, such as the patriotic Mother Ethiopia (1963), in Soviet art publications that celebrated then contemporary art in Africa that embraced realist representations on nationalist themes.28 Afewerk’s Soviet tour was swiftly followed by an American one, as befit the canny nonalignment that his Emperor pursued. This tour was covered by the African American magazine Ebony.29 Here photographs of Afewerk with the Ethiopian Ambassador appeared alongside reproductions of the Africa Hall windows and other works. In his interview Afewerk spoke out about what he saw as a “flaw” of the West, namely its obsession with “schools.” “Frankly,” he said. I see no difference between abstract and realistic … many artists are “modern” simply for the sake of being so … If a subject that inspires me can be treated realistically, I treat it that way. Often its impact is emotional, requiring use of figures,

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154  Kate Cowcher

Figure 11.2 Silk scarf featuring Afewerk Tekle’s window design. Collection of the author.

lines and colors that best express that personal vision. As such, it may appear “abstract.” Observers of Manet … assume that he evolved, in the course of his painting, from representationalist to abstractionist. I am certain the artist did not make that distinction. Afewerk bridled at contemporary celebrations of Manet as the inaugural modernist, implying that which divides abstraction and realism is a matter of personal choice, rather than ideology.30 He conveyed awareness of the two in oppositional position at mid-​century, but disregarded the division as irrelevant to his practice. He dismissed Pop as a “fad,” but praised José Clemente Orozco, unsurprising given his commitment to civic art projects. Importantly, though, Afewerk stated that non-​Western artists could not untether themselves from their society of origin. “We cannot afford that luxury,” he insisted, “[h]‌owever universal we may like to be, we must not forget our heritage, for it is only through this that we can contribute anything new to the world of art.”31 For Afewerk, therefore, his contribution at home and in the world was the overt projection of quintessentially Ethiopian themes in a range of new visual languages and materials. Unsurprisingly, in 1963, he was the first recipient of the Haile Selassie I Prize “for [introducing] contemporary techniques to Ethiopian subject matter and content.”32

The Interstitial Works of Skunder Boghossian Skunder Boghossian shared little in common personality-​wise with Afewerk, but his early career progression bore similarities. His father had fought against, and was

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A Postcard from Addis  155 imprisoned by the Italians. In 1955, at the age of 18, he left Ethiopia for London on a government bursary. He went first to Central St. Martins, before briefly attending the Slade, but moved to Paris two years later, to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.33 There he found himself amidst a vibrant pan-​African scene that included Wifredo Lam, Gerard Sekoto, Aime Cesaire, amongst others. Elizabeth Harney, citing Skunder’s own recollections, writes persuasively about the formative nature of time in Paris, a distinctly transnational space in the postwar era. It was this space, Harney argues, that allowed artists like Skunder to be “cocreators of a modernism that was consciously international, albeit locally framed within their diasporic networks.”34 Harney explores Skunder’s work relative to his friend, Sekoto, for whom Paris provided refuge from the racial oppressions of South Africa.35 However, in her chapter on these artists, Harney describes Skunder’s work, like Sekoto’s, as “[speaking] to the pleasures and pains of exile,” and suggests a shared experience of “displacement and migrancy.”36 Certainly Skunder was attuned to the displacements and anti-​colonial struggles of his fellow artists, but he was not exactly in exile in the 1960s; he would become officially so only after the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. His initial passage to Europe was sponsored by the government for the same reasons as Afewerk’s had been: to allow Ethiopia’s brightest and best to acquire knowledge and promote national cultural riches. Regional French press from 1960 reported Skunder serving Ethiopia in a diplomatic capacity. One article described him as an “attaché” of the Ethiopian Embassy, representing his country at such events as a trade fair that celebrated Franco-​ Ethiopian friendship.37 These reports are in the archives of the Harmon Foundation, an American philanthropic organization set up in the 1920s originally to support African American artists, but from the 1950s onward actively engaged in promoting African contemporary art.38 Letters from Evelyn Brown, Assistant Director, report that she contacted Skunder whilst making preparations “for a pan-​African fine arts exhibit to be shown at the United States’ meeting of UNESCO” in 1961.39 Skunder’s early letters expressed excitement at Brown’s invitation and emphasized his diplomatic credentials. He had been “highly encouraged” by the Emperor, he wrote, and was now “very linked” with the Embassy.40 Skunder’s relationship with the Harmon lasted throughout the 1960s, ending in 1967 when the foundation wound up operations. Over the course of the decade, his work evolved dramatically. His first solo exhibition at Merton Simpon’s New York gallery in 1962 featured nostalgic watercolors and oils which overtly invoked his homeland, with titles like Harar Tezeta (Tezeta is a traditional song of longing and Harar is the eastern Ethiopian walled city) and Tenastelign (the Amharic greeting “May God grant you health”).41 Brown referred to these recognizably “Ethiopian” works when she described Skunder’s potential to the Ethiopian Ambassador as a “helpful instrument through his art to your advancing country.”42 Skunder’s American debut was recognized, therefore, as an extension of his ambassadorial work. Between the creation of these works and their exhibition in New York, Skunder began to work on rather different themes. In a letter from Paris in February 1962 he described an encounter with the Chilean artist, Roberto Matta, who “encouraged [him] very much.”43 By the time of their encounter, Matta, though expelled from the Surrealist group, remained committed to exploring the psyche through the production of landscapes he called “inscapes,” exemplified by such works as Invasion of the Night (1941) and Years of Fear (1941).44 These abstracted, otherworldly terrains

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156  Kate Cowcher sought to both make visible unseen psychic forces and, as Miranda Lash has argued, served as an “exhortation to begin the very process of ‘seeing’ with eyes closed.”45 In June 1962 Skunder wrote again, stating that he was working on a “new direction” that “[relied] on African mythology.”46 The exchange with Matta and this new turn, perhaps inspired by his “encounter” with African art at the Musée de l’Homme, was coupled, however, with an increasingly precarious personal situation.47 In early 1963 Skunder was struggling to pay his bills. His ambassadorial work had dried up. He described taking a painting to the Ethiopian Embassy, hopeful that they would buy it and not “let a fellow countryman …[die] of hungar [sic].”48 They did not, and Skunder credits his “close friends,” including El Salahi, Es’kia Mphahlele and Ulli Beier (the latter two connecting him with the Congress of Cultural Freedom and an exhibition in Nigeria) with saving him from destitution.49 From mid-​1962 Skunder became personally dependent upon Paris’ transnational communities. As he drifted away from the diplomatic establishment, his work shifted from nostalgic, marketable paintings of Ethiopia, into more elusive, experimental and pan-​African terrain. Between 1962 and 1965 Skunder made multiple trans-​Atlantic trips. This time spent between Europe and the United States was profoundly formative. If for Afewerk, travels in the world affirmed his confidence in Addis as the center and his art as cultural diplomacy, Skunder’s sojourns involved considerable movement outward, putting his nation in perspective. Untethered from the ambassadorial apparatus, he explored, instead, the interstitial spaces of Africa and its diasporas, spaces in which he could engage histories of his continent that he, as an Ethiopian, had previously seemed detached from. In 1963 Skunder met his fiancé, an African-​ American studying in Paris, and arranged to spend the summer of 1964 at the historic black educational establishment, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where her father taught.50 This was a happy, productive summer, spent engaging West African and diaspora spiritual practices, particularly the realm of the Ju-​Jus, the darkly powerful spirits, on whose mercy the living world depended. Research into the Ju-​Jus began in Paris; in May 1964, ahead of his American trip, he described a work called Scorched Earth Ju-​Jus which had received attention in a recent Parisian exhibition. In the same letter Skunder referenced a future exhibition in New York, stating that he wished to substitute previous works held by the Harmon with “newer works which … show a more definite maturity and a personal style … in keeping with my philosophy.”51 As Scorched Earth Ju-​Jus made clear, this philosophy was steeped in diverse African spiritual practices. Once in Alabama in summer 1964, references to Ju-​Jus peppered Skunder’s correspondence, from working like a “Ju-​Ju witchdoctor” to sending the “Ju-​Jus blessings” to Brown.52 In autumn of that year two shipments of works painted in the heat of that deep southern summer were sent from Tuskegee to New York.53 Amongst them was Night Flight of Dread and Delight (see Figure 11.3). Night Flight of Dread and Delight embodies the interstitial aesthetic of Skunder’s work in the mid-​1960s. It invoked the literal experience of being between worlds. Exhibited in Philadelphia in 1966, it was purchased by Mark Kimmel. Kimmel quibbled about the price, and Brown’s correspondence sought to stress the work’s significance.54 A  large work on canvas, the composition is divided into a densely painted lower section, filled with bio-​and anthropomorphic figures and mottled patterning, out of which two piercing-​eyed, winged creatures emerged into a dark, speckled sky. It is typically seen as a manifestation of Skunder’s Surrealist interests;

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A Postcard from Addis  157

Figure 11.3 Skunder Boghossian: “Night Flight of Dread and Delight,” 1964, Oil on canvas with collage, 143.8 × 159.1 cm, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

certainly, it compares Matta’s “inscapes” of the 1940s. However, though it depicted unseen forces, its subject was not strictly Skunder’s own psychic world, but, in fact, the shared space of the dark Atlantic Ocean. Brown, reporting what Skunder had told her, wrote that [t]‌he theme of the painting was inspired by his air trip over here in 1964, when he came to be married at Tuskegee. It was a very inexpensive student flight, I believe, on a Swedish plane that hovered over the waves practically the entire distance from Europe to New York.55 Night Flight of Dread and Delight is not, therefore, a general Surrealist dreamscape, but specific representation of the sensations of a rough transatlantic flight, the contradictory feelings emphasized in the title speaking to both the fearfulness of flying and anticipated joy of Tuskegee. The gravity of the subject is underscored by the fact that Skunder also painted a work called Ghosts of the Atlantic Ocean at Tuskegee that summer. The work, now held at the Hampton University Museum in Virginia, depicts a murky submarine world with spectral eyes, heads and horns; it eerily resonates with the lower section of Night Flight. These are the tormented souls of the Middle Passage whose power and presence Skunder felt physically as the plane was tossed up and down. In this reading, the smears of red in Night Flight become more sinister, inferring blood spilled in the

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158  Kate Cowcher course of the slave trade during which approximately two million enslaved Africans died in the horrific Atlantic crossing. Though far removed from the nostalgic works of the early 1960s, Skunder still drew heavily on Ethiopian aesthetics, which were discernible, particularly in Ghosts of the Atlantic Ocean. Here a series of vertical strip-​like forms are seen, recalling the kitab traditional healing scrolls used to treat sickness through the combination of textual incantations and geometric designs. Kitab typically feature eye-​filled graphics, intended to see and entrap the source of sickness.56 In Ghosts the exorcistic power of these objects is far from clear. They appear to hover more equivocally between back-​and foreground, their geometric patterns spilling into the sea around them. The literal experience of travel between Europe and the United States seemed to thoroughly complicate Skunder’s relationship with his own cultural heritage. No longer attaché, Skunder’s sojourns pushed him to put Ethiopia’s artistic heritage into a complex perspective, one that did not merely exalt his country, but which fundamentally questioned what role it might play in unresolved histories of violence and oppression. Markedly distinct from Afewerk, therefore, Skunder’s untethered travels in the mid-​ 1960s brought Ethiopian aesthetics to bear on legacies of Black trauma. On his return to Addis, he organized a series of one-​man exhibitions between 1966 and 1969, clearly keen to showcase his complex revelations. Through these he gained a considerable reputation (and a bevy of young followers at the Fine Art School). Despite having been rejected by the Embassy just six years earlier, on his return home his bold departures into uncharted terrain ensured that he was celebrated, as Solomon Deressa noted in 1969, as “internationally the best known … Ethiopian painter.”57

1967: High Points and New Complexities Attitudes were changing. In 1965, Afewerk was subject to criticisms by Ethiopian students in the United States who, having heard him speak at Harvard University, excoriated him for painting “anachronistic mythology” and “everything but the real Ethiopia.”58 His paintings, contemporaneously celebrated in Ebony, were, Dessalegn Rahmato wrote, “frivolous” and “fanciful,” an “escape” from the poverty and sufferings of Ethiopia’s poor.59 Afewerk was chastised for peddling romantic representations removed from realities at home. In 1966, having just returned to Addis with his wife, Skunder wrote to Evelyn Brown asking not to be included in Senghor’s upcoming World Festival of Black Arts. He felt that the complexity of Ethiopia would not be well represented since the committee “of ignorants … all have that stereotype thinking.”60 It was unclear whether the committee he referenced was Ethiopia’s national committee, or the festival’s central one but the statement conveyed significant skepticism about an all-​encompassing celebration of Black art into which Ethiopia would seamlessly slot. If Afewerk’s confident, government-​sanctioned sojourns ultimately brought him criticism from his younger, more radical countrymen, Skunder’s distancing from diplomatic channels pushed him to confront the intense complexities of Ethiopia’s relationship with the rest of the continent. 1967  –​the year of Bier’s visit  –​was a fateful one. It marked both the climax of Ethiopia’s internationalist self-​promotion through its milestone appearance at the 1967 Universal and International Exposition (Expo 67) in Montreal, and the escalation of dissent from Ethiopian students at home and abroad, who denounced the Emperor’s autocratic rule. Attended by half a million people, Expo 67 was considered

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A Postcard from Addis  159 one of the most successful world’s fairs. There were 90 different pavilions, including “Africa Place,” which housed 15 African countries together. Ethiopia, however, had its own pavilion, the first, Levin notes, “to represent the country as a sovereign nation in an international exhibition.”61 The pavilion consisted of a red cone tent, evocative of historic royal encampments, surrounded by replicas of the great Aksumite stele. Here Ethiopia’s rich heritage was displayed, and an accompanying film described modern life in the country. The pavilion was a source of pride to the Emperor, who flew to Montreal accompanied by his notorious chihuahua, Lulu. In the same year, however, the protestations of students regarding Ethiopia’s enduring inequalities took a more radical turn. As Bahru Zewde documents, the rhetoric of the students who, since the mid-​1960s, had called for land reform under the slogan “Land to the Tiller” became more extremist. The 1967 Congress of the Ethiopian Students Association in North America went as far as to state that “oppression, poverty, disease, illiteracy, feudalism and imperialism cannot be eradicated from Ethiopia without a total liquidation of the existing system.”62 An ominous statement, it foretold the revolution of just seven years later. In Addis, too, images of an Ethiopia more complicated than Afewerk’s celebratory stained glass window were emerging. The artist and poet Gebre Kristos Desta, whose own “significant geography” has yet to be fully written,63 exhibited a series of canvases in 1967 that included murky, abstracted scenes of life in the Ethiopian capital. One, Small Market (1966), caught the attention of Solomon Deressa who, in his review, questioned whether the work, ostensibly depicting women crouching over their wares, was more sinister than it first appeared. Were they, Solomon mused, “drinking coffee … or concocting an upheaval?”64 Gebre Kristos had, like his contemporaries, studied overseas taking a scholarship to Kölner Werkschulen (Cologne Academy of Fine and Applied Arts) in 1957. Like Afewerk and Skunder, the experience was profoundly formative, yet markedly different. Where Skunder’s practice was shaped by his engagement of pan-​African, transnational communities in Paris and trans-​Atlantic travel, Gebre Kristos was exposed to the debates of the West German art world, where abstraction was pushed as “international” modernism and where debates about post-​trauma representation bubbled. Once back in Addis, his work was met with controversy; local audiences bristled at his introduction of uncompromising abstraction that was not recognizably “Ethiopian.”65 In 1969, Gebre Kristos rebuked Ethio-​centric attitudes by stating that those who “attach such exaggerated importance to the art of their own country … don’t realize how international art really is.”66 It was the job of contemporary artists, Gebre Kristos argued, to appreciate the acquisition of foreign artistic modes as no different to the acquisition of foreign “technology, science, education, medicine,” international tools to be freely deployed for contemporary domestic needs.67 This was a total inversion of Afewerk’s insistence on projecting Ethiopian content via Western modernist modes. For Gebre Kristos, the rawness of German Expressionism mixed with the gestural painting of Art Informel to provide the visual language necessary to make visible some of the seamier, less palatable elements of urban life in Addis. In the year of Bier’s visit, therefore, Ethiopia’s three leading modern artists, Afewerk, Skunder and Gebre Kristos, were all in Addis, digesting their various overseas experiences and pursuing distinctly different modernist projects. Afewerk remained staunchly confident in his credentials as foremost cultural ambassador, Gebre Kristos was gaining a reputation for asking provocative questions and Skunder continued

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160  Kate Cowcher his explorations into Ethiopia’s historic heritages, particularly the aesthetics of the kitab scrolls. Despite their divergent paths, all of their pursuits were facilitated by the various experiences of traveling the world, and of bringing those experiences home again. Bier’s postcard, sent in a watershed year, provides a lasting trace of this era of ambitious internationalism. It remains an important record not only for what it specifically documents, but for the program of international engagement whose apotheosis it witnessed.

Acknowledgment Research for this essay was facilitated by the 2017–2018 Postdoctoral Fellowship in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge. I thank Karen Schneider, Librarian at the Phillips, in whose archival exhibition “Women of Infl uence: Elmira Bier, Minnie Byers and Marjorie Phillips” I first found Afewerk Tekle’s postcard. I am also indebted to Perrin Lathrop for sharing Skunder Boghossian’s letters in the Harmon Foundation Archive.

Notes 1 Postcard from Elmira Bier to Marjorie Phillips, 1967, Phillips Collection Archives. The stamp in the upper right on the back of the card dates to 1967. 2 Coombes qtd. in Geary 1998, 147–​178. 3 Guttery 1998, 59–​68. 4 Ethiopian Airlines advertisement entitled “Wings over Ethiopia” in African Arts magazine. See n.a. 1969, 8. 5 Regarding Addis Ababa’s transformations and their relationship to Haile Selassie’s modernization program, see Levin 2016, 447–​468. 6 Laachir, Marzagora and Orsini 2018, 295. 7 Marzagora 2019, 124. 8 Cohen 2018, 22. 9 I am indebted to pioneering and more recent writing on African modernism(s) by: Hassan 2010, 451–​473; Okeke-​Agulu 2001, 29–​36; Oguibe 2004, 3–​9; Harney 2018, 304–​334. 10 n.a. 1954, 4. 11 For a longer translation of this speech, see Wolde Giorgis 2019, 76. 12 n.a. n.d. 13 Afewerk was not the first to study abroad. The artist Agegnehu Engida studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-​Arts in Paris in the 1920s. 14 Ogbechie 2008, 67–​72. 15 Pankhurst 1987, 49. 16 See Okeke-​Agulu in Hassan ed. 2012, 36–​37 and Ibrahim El-​Salahi in Ibid., 80–​91. 17 This photograph is reproduced in Pankhurst 1987, 41. 18 Marzagora 2019, 112–​113. 19 Ibid., 115. 20 The Villa Alpha was designed by Afewerk and incorporated multiple references to Ethiopia’s historic architecture. See Pankhurst 1987, 39. 21 Tekle 2007. 22 The photo of Aleka Lemma in the Villa Alpha appears in Pankhurst 1987, 63. 23 Levin 2016, 450. 24 Afewerk used stained glass previously in the windows of the Harar Military Academy in the late 1950s. See n.a. 1960, 32.

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A Postcard from Addis  161 25 The scarf pictured dates from the 1980s. However, an Ethiopian Airlines in-​flight drinks menu from the 1960s lists “Africa Hall scarf” for sale for $6. 26 n.a. 1960, 32. 27 Pankhurst 1987, 45. 28 I thank Nikolas Drosos for highlighting Afewerk’s paintings in the Boris V.  Veimarn’s Universal History of Art, a six-​volume global survey of art produced in the 1950s and 1960s. For further discussion of the Universal History of Art in the context of the concept of “world art” see Drosos 2019, 55–​76. Regarding Soviet encouragement of realist representation by African artists, see Cowcher 2019, 146–​166. 29 n.a. 1965, 90–​94. 30 Afewerk awareness of Greenberg’s praise for the frank flatness of Édouard Manet’s work. 31 n.a. 1965, 91. 32 n.a. 1964, 137. 33 Personal biography recorded in “SKUNDER BOGHOSSIAN: ETHIOPIAN ARTIST, June 1961,” Box 84. Letter from Skunder Boghossian to Evelyn Brown, 3 January 1961. Box 84. 34 Harney 2018, 311. 35 Harney published a remarkable photograph of Skunder and Sekoto sitting together in Paris that she found in the Gerard Sekoto Foundation. Ibid, 307. 36 Ibid, 307–​308. 37 For example, “La Journee d’amitié Franco-​ Éthiopienne,” Le Progrès, 23 May 1960; “Hier, sous le signe de l’amitié Franco-​ Éthiopienne MM. Bouvet, consul français, a l’U.N.E.S.C.O. et Skunder Boghossian on été reçus par la municipalité et le Comité de la Foire-​Exposition,” L’Echo, 23 May 1960; “Le peinture éthiopienne Skunder Boghossian a pris quelques jours de repos à Valence avant de preparer son exposition parisienne,” Le Progrès, 29 May 1960. These press clippings were sent along with English translations to Evelyn Brown at the Harmon Foundation. The handwritten dates imply that Skunder himself sent them to underscore his credentials. Box 84:  Skunder Boghossian, Harmon Foundation Archives, Library of Congress. 38 For a history of the Harmon Foundation, see Reynolds and Wright ed. 1989. Limited research has been done on the role of Harmon Foundation in promoting the arts of Africa; however, Perrin Lathrop, Jamaal Sheats and Nikoo Paydar are preparing an exhibition for the Fisk University Galleries in Nashville in 2021. 39 Letter from Evelyn S.  Brown to Ethiopian Ambassador to the USA, Berhanu Dinke. 10 August 1961. The letter also states that the UNESCO exhibit was preceded by one at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Box 84. 40 Letter from Skunder Boghossian to Evelyn Brown, 3 January 1961. Box 84. 41 “Valuation of Boghossian Paintings for Merton D. Simpson Gallery Exhibit,” 14 February 1962. Box 84. 42 Letter from Evelyn S.  Brown to Ethiopian Ambassador to the USA, Berhanu Dinke. 10 August 1961. Box 84. The letter, more broadly, requests assistance in promoting the exhibition at the Merton Simpson Gallery amongst the Ethiopian diaspora and the greater diplomatic community. 43 Skunder erroneously describes Matta as a “Mexican artist.” Letter from Skunder Boghossian (Paris) to Evelyn S. Brown, 13 February 1962. Box 84. 44 Dolin 2005, 53. 45 Lash 2009, 268. 46 Postcard from Skunder Boghossian, 26 June 1962. Box 84. 47 In a 1966 issue of Menen, Skunder described spending a year visiting the African section of the Musée de l’Homme “studying the masks, the totems and fetish dolls.” See Bekele 2004, 31. 48 Letter from Skunder Boghossian to Evelyn Brown and Mary Beattie Brady, 18 February 1963. Box 84.

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162  Kate Cowcher 9 Ibid. 4 50 Letter from Skunder Boghossian to Evelyn S. Brown, 3 June 1964. Box 84. 51 Letter from Skunder Boghossian to Evelyn S. Brown, 21 May 1964. Box 84. 52 Letter from Skunder Boghossian (Tuskegee Institute) to Miss Brady, 8 October 1964. Box 84. 53 “Paintings and Sculptural Pieces Received 29 October 1964 from Skunder Boghossian via Railway Express from Tuskegee Alabama,” 30 October 1964 and “Paintings and Sculptural Pieces Received 29 October 1964 from Skunder Boghossian via Railway Express from Tuskegee Alabama,” 10 November 1964. Box 84. 54 Letter from Evelyn Brown to Mark Kimmel, 20 October 1966. Box 84. 55 Ibid. 56 See Mercier ed. 1997, 86–​107. 57 Deressa 1969, 44. 58 Rahmato 1965, 18. 59 For a lengthier discussion of this exchange see Cowcher 2017, 65–​66. See also Cowcher 2017 (b). 60 Letter from Skunder Boghossian (Addis Ababa) to Evelyn S.  Brown, 25 February 1966. Box 84. 61 Levin 2016, 459. 62 Zewde 2014, 129. 63 For the first major study on Gebre Kristos, see Wolde Giorgis (2006). 64 Deressa 1968, 162. 65 Deressa 1969, 44. 66 Head and Desta 1969, 22. 67 Ibid.

Bibliography n.a. n.d. “Afewerk Tekle as Remembered by Richard and Rita Pankhurst.” [Accessed April 1, 2019] https://​ethiopianarchive.files.wordpress.com/​2012/​05/​afewerk-​tekle-​as-​remembered-​ by-​richard-​and-​rita-​pankhurst.pdf. n.a. 1969. “Prize/​Prix 1968,” African Arts, 2: no. 2, Winter: 8. n.a. 1965. “Ethiopian artist extols his land. Government support pays off. Ebony, June: 90–​94. n.a. 1964. “The Haile Selassie I Prize Trust,” Ethiopia Observer, 3, no. 2: 137. n.a. 1960. “The Alpha Studio: Ethiopia’s Emerging National Art Studio?” Menen, August: 32. n.a. 1954. “Text of Haile Selassie’s Address to U.S. Congress.” New York Times, May 29: 4. Bekele, Shiferaw. 2004. “A Modernising State and the Emergence of Modernist Arts in Ethiopia (1930s to 1970s) with Special Reference to Gebre Kristos Desta (1932–​1981) and Skunder Boghossian.” Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 37, no. 2, December: 11–​41, 43–​44. Cohen, Joshua. 2018. “Locating Senghor’s École de Dakar:  International and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959–​1980.” African Arts, 51, no. 3, Autumn: 22. Cowcher, Kate. 2019. “Soviet Supersystems and American Frontiers:  African Art Histories amidst the Cold War,” Art Bulletin, 101, no. 2: 146–​166. _​_​_​_​_​. 2017a. Between Revolutionary Motherland and Death:  Art and Visual Culture in Socialist Ethiopia. PhD Diss., Stanford University. _​_​_​_​_​. 2017b. “Hyphenated Modernisms as Prelude to Revolution in Ethiopia.” Talk delivered at “Multiple Modernisms. A Symposium on Globalism in Postwar Art,” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2–​3 November. [Accessed 1 April 2019]. https://​vimeo.com/​245701861 Deressa, Solomon. (1969) 2005. “Letter from Addis Ababa,” African Arts, 2, no. 2, Winter: 44. _​ _​ _​ _​ _​ . 1968. “Gebre Kristos Desta:  Sombre Colours and Incantatory Words.” Ethiopia Observer, 11, no. 3: 162–​175.

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A Postcard from Addis  163 Dolin, Bryan. “Matta’s lucid landscape.” In Surrealism and Architecture. Edited by Thomas Mical, 53–​59. Abingdon: Routledge. Drosos, Nikolas. 2019. “Modernism and World Art, 1950­7.” ARTMargins, 8:2, June: 55–​76. Geary, Christraud. 1998. “Different Visions? Postcards from Africa by European and African Photographers and Sponsors.” In Delivering Views:  Distant Cultures in Early Postcards. Edited by Christraud Geary and Virginia-​Lee Webb, 147–​177. Washington:  Smithsonian Institution Press. Guttery, Ben R. 1998. Encyclopedia of African Airlines. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers. Harney, Elizabeth. 2018. “Constellations and Coordinates:  Repositioning Postwar Paris in Stories of African Modernisms.” In Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism. Edited by Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, 304–​334. Durham and London:  Duke University Press. Hassan, Salah. ed. 2012. Ibrahim El-​Salahi: A Visionary Modernist. New York: Museum for African Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 2010. “African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 109, no. 3, Summer: 451–​473. Head, Sydney W. and Gebre Kristos Desta. 1969. “A Conversation with Gebre Kristos Desta.” African Arts, 2, no. 4, Summer: 20–​25. Laachir, Karima, Sara Marzagora and Francesca Orsini. 2018. “Significant Geographies:  In Lieu of World Literature,” Journal of World Literature, 3, no. 3: 290–​310. Lash, Miranda. 2009. “Boxed in: Imagining the Unseen in Roberto Matta’s Cube Constructions.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 55/​56. Absconding, Spring-​Autumn: 267–​278. Levin, Ayala. 2016. “Haile Selassie’s Imperial Modernity:  Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 75:  no. 4, December: 447–​468. Marzagora, Sara. 2019. “Ethiopian Intellectual History and the Global:  Käbbädä Mikael’s Geographies of Belonging.” Journal of World Literature, 4. no. 1: 107–​128. Mercier, Jacques ed. 1997. Art that Heals: the Image as Medicine in Ethiopia. New York: The Museum for African Art. Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. 2008. Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Oguibe, Olu. 2004. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Okeke-​ Agulu, Chika. 2001. “Modern African Art.” In The Short Century. Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa:  1945–​ 1994. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, 29–​ 36. München: Prestel. Pankhurst, Richard K. P. 1987. Afewerk Tekle. Addis Ababa: Artistic Printers of Ethiopia. Rahmato, Dessalegn. 1965. “Art Betrayed.” Challenge: Journal of Ethiopian Studies in North America, 5, no. 1: 18. Reynolds, Gary A. and Beryl J. Wright, ed. 1989. Against the Odds: African-​American Artists and the Harmon Foundation. New Jersey: The Newark Museum. Tekle, Afewerk. 2007. “The State of Art in Ethiopia,” lecture at the Library of Ciongress, Washington, D.C., July 27. [Accessed 1 April 2019]. www.loc.gov/​today/​cyberlc/​feature_​ wdesc.php?rec=5509. Unpublished Archival Material: Box 84: Skunder Boghossian, Harmon Foundation Archives, Library of Congress. Wolde Giorgis, Elizabeth (ed.), 2006. Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter-Poet. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University. Wolde Giorgis. 2019. Elizabeth. Modernist Art in Ethiopia. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Zewde, Bahru. 2014. The Quest for Socialist Utopia:  The Ethiopian Student Movement c. 1960–​1974. Woodbridge: James Currey.

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12  The Cultural Politics of Négritude and the Debates around the Brazilian Participation in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, 1966) Sabrina Moura

“The Senegalese capital, Dakar, is part of the usual route of impressive transatlantic cruises and jet planes that connect Brazil to Europe. It is a modern city, half European, half African,” reported the Brazilian weekly magazine Manchete, in September 1964.1 The article celebrated Dakar as an African carrefour and was written on the occasion of the first official visit of Senegalese president Leopold Sédar Senghor (1906–​2001) to the country. At the time, Brazil was living the first months of the military coup that had ousted the democratically elected president, João Goulart (31 March 1964). Yet, the advent of an authoritarian regime did not prevent Senghor from pursuing his Brazilian tour. A few days after his arrival in the country, Senghor delivered an eloquent speech at the National Chamber of Deputies (23 September 1964). On this occasion, he not only praised Brazilian miscigenation and the national developmental policies in course,2 but he also took the opportunity to exalt Négritude ideals as part of African cultural diplomacy:  “Be reassured that our Négritude is anti-​racist. It is rooted in our ancestral values of civilization, it is open to the pollens of all cultures and, most importantly, of latinité”3 (see Figure 12.1). One of the outcomes of this diplomatic endeavor was a pact of cooperation ratified between Senghor and president Humberto Castelo Branco (1900–​1967) encompassing the areas of economy and culture. The Brazilian participation in the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Festival of Black Arts, FESMAN), which would take place in April 1966, was among the statesman’s main commitments.4 The interest of the Brazilian government in the African continent emerged at least one decade before the onset of the military regime and the wave of African independencies. It started in the postwar period, and was later advanced by the foreign policies of former president Jânio Quadros (1917–​1992). During his brief presidential mandate (January–​ August, 1961), Quadros fostered strategic cooperation between Africa and Brazil. For instance, he was responsible for the appointment of the first black ambassador in Brazilian history, writer and journalist Raymundo de Souza-​Dantas, who assumed command of the country’s office in Ghana in April 1961. At the time, the local press reported: [Souza-​Dantas] personally brought to Jânio Quadros the invitation made by the African Society of Culture to the Dakar event. Now [he] is going to Senegal on a pilot mission. Brazil is crossing the Atlantic for the first time, in search of young African nations, with whom we are linked by blood ties.5

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  165

Figure 12.1 Léopold Sédar Senghor gives his speech at the National Chamber of Deputies, Brasília (23 September 1964). Source: Agência Nacional.

These political articulations undertaken at the start of the 1960s laid the foundations upon which the Brazilian delegation attended the First World Festival of Black Arts, but have been largely overlooked by most scholarly accounts of the festival.6 In this chapter, I will focus on the artistic debates that have marked this participation, while pointing to some of the controversies sparked by the different political leanings of Brazilian artists and intellectuals around the event in Dakar (see Figure  12.2). To do so, I will firstly explore the nuances of the terms arts nègres and “contemporary African art”7 under a Senghorian perspective and in light of the FESMAN. As we shall see, this conceptual contextualization makes a direct reference to the stances assumed by the artistic delegations who took part in the festival. In the case of Brazil, scholars like Clarival do Prado-​Valladares and Abdias do Nascimento were among the main voices of these debates which ultimately uncovered the racial tensions obscured by the cultural propaganda of Brazilian diplomatic bodies. Secondly, I will underscore unofficial axes of collaboration around the festival in order to retrace some of the diasporic connections that were conducive to the transatlantic mobility of black artists and intellectuals in the 1960s. As part of this, the trajectory of artists like Brazilian Wilson Tiberio and South African Gerard Sekoto are particularly relevant and highlight black solidarity in challenging the cultural cooperation agendas that were put in place at the time.

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166  Sabrina Moura

Figure 12.2 Humberto Castelo Branco receives Léopold Sédar Senghor at the Alvorada Palace, Brasília (23 September 1964). Source: Agência Nacional.

Arts Nègres, Black Arts Under the sound of drums and balafons performed by a group of interpreters at the Dakar-​Yoff airport, the festival welcomed an audience of approximately 15,000 people, of whom 2,000 were official guests. Josephine Baker (United States/​France), Duke Ellington (United States), Ben Enwonwu (Nigeria), Vicente Ferreira Pastinha (Brazil), Rubem Valentim (Brazil), Clementina de Jesus (Brazil) were among the personalities who attended the festival. Political leaders and heads of state, such as Emperor Haile Selassie (Ethiopia), led pompous parades through the streets of Dakar. To host them, Senghor modernized a significant part of the city’s urban space, this included the development of a touristic infrastructure, as well as the installation of new cultural facilities subsidized by the state, such as the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano and the Musée Dynamique.8 As foreshadowed by the Second World Congress of Black Artists and Writers, held in Rome in the spring of 1959, the presence of diverse artistic media was one of the festival’s hallmarks. During those April nights, the city of Dakar was the center of a series of music, dance and theater performances. A colloquium on cinema, literature and the visual arts complemented these presentations. The visual arts were also present thanks to two exhibitions: L’Art Nègre: Sources, Évolutions, Expansions (Negro Art: Sources, Evolutions, Expansions) –​the first major show of “traditional

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  167 African art” on the continent  –​and Tendances et Confrontations (Tendencies and Confrontations) –​which focused mostly on contemporary African production. The first exhibition, L’Art Nègre, brought together pieces from museums and collections around Europe, North America and other African countries. According to the Senegalese newspaper Dakar Matin, on 1 March 1966, “448 African sculptures on loan from four English museums [arrived] by plane accompanied by Mr. William Fagg” to enhance the exhibition. Fagg, a Keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum, was in charge of supervising the dis-​embarkment and the assembly of the pieces to be shown at the brand new Musée Dynamique.9 Scholars Eloi Ficquet and Lorraine Gallimardet have analyzed in detail the curatorship and display of L’Art Nègre.10 In particular, the authors note that the exhibition’s closing section, Dialogue avec le monde (Dialogue with the world), mapped the circulation and the exchanges of African arts with other artistic traditions. Consisting of a group of works by European artists, such as Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, this curatorial strategy elucidates what Senghor and his peers understood by arts nègres –​a concept largely forged in relation to the West.11 “Like other black intellectual engagements with racialist thinking, Négritude developed partly as a result of a complex process of appropriation and rearticulation of earlier European ideas about Africa and its peoples,” explains Elizabeth Harney.12 Indeed, the notion of arts nègres emerged in the French-​speaking context, following the primitivist wave among the European avant-​garde of the early twentieth-​century. Petrine Archer-​Shaw explains that the term was initially used to name pieces that arrived in ethnographic museums as a result of colonial looting. The author also underscores that the word fetish, a “term suggesting [the] magical potency” of the pieces, operated in a similar way.13 Here, it is worth quoting the famous passage in which Picasso recalls his encounter with these objects in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro: “The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things.”14 As Souleymane Bachir Diagne notes, in French the word nègre acquired a pejorative connotation during the eighteenth-​century when it gained currency in connection to racial theories. “Applied to a black person it had come to be charged with all the weight of racism to the point that the insult ‘sale nègre’ (dirty nègre) would be almost redundant, ‘sale’ being somehow usually understood in ‘nègre,’ ” states Diagne.15 However, among the precursors of Négritude, the term nègre was purposely used as a positive affirmation and a provocation. “As the expression of the value of ‘blackness,’ ” explains Diagne, “[Négritude] was a way for [Aimé] Césaire, Senghor, and [Léon] Damas of defiantly turning nègre against the white supremacists who used it as a slur.”16 Along the lines of Négritude, the notion of arts nègres was employed to designate works conceived by black artists, which counted on rhythm and intuition as their main aesthetic values.17 However, because of its focus on a specific type of figurative art, this notion failed to account for a significant portion of African production, like for instance that which elaborated on Islamic traditions. Consequently, the terms “arts nègres,” “African art,” and “black arts” are not as interchangeable as the official communication of the FESMAN would make us believe. The second exhibition, Tendances et Confrontations, focused on contemporary art and featured hundreds of works gathered under the direction of the Senegalese artist Iba N’Diaye. The display followed a conventional arrangement based on national representations. This choice reflected a politically driven curatorial strategy,

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168  Sabrina Moura predetermined by the festival’s official delegations. As the art critic Prado-​Valladares, responsible for the Brazilian selection, explained: “It was common in the various booths of the participating countries […] to find portraits of generals, presidents, ministers, etc., occupying the place and space which was intended for artistic production.”18 Although the curatorial ambition of Tendances et Confrontations was to establish a narrative complementary to l’Art Nègre it ended up conveying a more comprehensive view on the black arts by encompassing works from North Africa and the wider African diaspora, represented by Brazilian, French, British, Haitian and American delegations. According to Cédric Vincent this diversity occurred regardless of the organizers’ intentions and reflects the contradictions that permeated the FESMAN’s definition of a common black culture.19 To other authors, like Joseph Underwood, the conceptual divergence between l’Art Nègre and Tendances et Confrontations can be explained in terms of “conventional interpretations of art nègre/​art moderne and the fluid formulations of modern/​contemporary African art.”20 Many of the works included in Tendances et Confrontations were subject to harsh criticism, mainly on the understanding that they were belated copies of modern European art or visually inauthentic when compared to “pre-​colonial” African art. Fagg, in a speech delivered at the festival’s colloquium, characterized contemporary African production as ridden in contradictions: It is, of course, useless to try to revive a country’s tribal art within contemporary art. The two are fundamentally different in nature, and revitalization is rarely, if ever, healthy in art. On the other hand, some groups of artists go too far by rejecting any influence of tribal art; they thus imitate the “revolutionary” attitude of the first modern artists in their revolt against academism.21 Prado-​Valladares echoed Fagg’s perspective when commenting on the apparent failure of Tendances et Confrontations in advancing a new African artistic project. By rejecting tribality (to use the term proposed by William Fagg), the African lowered his aesthetic nature, which was genuine, intuitive and experiential, annulled its universal authenticity and began to produce, mimicking, the stylistic prescription already excelled by European standards.22

Continuities and Ruptures of Négritude in Black Brazilian Art As mentioned above, Prado-​ Valladares selected the Afro-​ Brazilian artists who participated in Tendances et Confrontations.23 His choices reflect his intellectual background as a white Brazilian author who interpreted the country as the cradle of racial integration and refused to take into consideration any evidence of racialized bias in the reading of the artworks. Curator and anthropologist Hélio Menezes elaborated on this, explaining that Prado-​Valladares: was concerned with stressing the effects of “syncretism” and “acculturation” of black people, as well as highlighting the “prodigious miscegenation that we [Brazilians] are.” He ended up offering an approach to Afro-​Brazilian art based on the perspective of cultural integration and mixing, without paying attention to the effects of social segregation and violence that equally cross and constitute it.24

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  169 Such a vision of art, free from any racial inflection, was apparently opposed to Senghor’s view. As previously noted, the affirmation of a black specificity in artistic creation was an argument mostly associated with a Senghorian understanding of African art. It was not by chance, therefore, that Prado-​Valladares vehemently criticized many of the principles of Négritude. In his chronicle on the FESMAN, published by Cadernos de Crítica (Rio de Janeiro, 1966), Prado-​ Valladares made a distinction between “Africans” and what he called “Africanologists,” namely, “authors from different countries deeply dedicated to the problems of Africa.” According to him, while the former were worried with “declarations of liberation, nationalist affirmations and asserting their participation in western progress,” the latter acknowledged “a black cultural world of greater breadth and depth than the one perceived and claimed by contemporary Africans.”25 From such a viewpoint, Négritude would represent a segregationist dogma, a “resource of certain African commanding elites to solidify and expand their power, often in the name of national liberation and regularly in accommodation with the old hegemonic centers.”26 A counter-​example to what the art critic called the “African lag”27 would be Brazil –​ for him, the country epitomized a singular assimilation of its African origins which gave birth to a new ethnicity, in addition to the supposed obliteration of colonialism: If the idealistic sense of blackness was to be based on assimilation and syncretism, Brazil would be the desirable result. I  do not intend to offer my country and my own ethnic background as an ideal for anyone, but, in view of what I see happening in Africa, I do not think that Négritude represents a search for peace. Today, several authors doubt and deny the Brazilian racial tranquility. There are research works, such as that of Florestan Fernandes, in which integration is conflicting in certain areas. Despite all the flaws, all the deficiencies and even the political commitment that drove Brazil away from the leadership of a tropical civilization, frustrated, this country remains the only alternative to Négritude. The only country who exercises the racial cauldron in a high formation with a new ethnic characteristic.28 [emphasis added] I argued above that Prado-​Valladares’ vision of art was apparently opposed to that of Senghor, but thus far I have only highlighted their different understandings of art and race. Now, I will consider the social theories that bring closer these two men. To highlight the communalities between Prado-​ Valladares and Senghor, it is necessary to return to the diplomatic relations established between Africa and Brazil during the 1960s, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. During Senghor’s 1964 Brazilian tour, he visited the Brazilian Academy of Letters in Rio de Janeiro, where he delivered a poignant speech on the cultural associations between Senegal and Brazil. In it, he celebrated the famous “mixture of the three races” emphasized by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in his often-​quoted book, Casa Grande and Senzala (Masters and Slaves, 1933). As Brazilian diplomat Rubens Ricupero testified, Senghor’s appreciation of Freyre’s work was quite well known at the time.29 Freyre was one of Prado-​ Valladares’ mentors and as a young scholar he had provided research assistance to Freyre and worked with him on the journal Cadernos Brasileiros. This intellectual exchange led the art critic to reinterpret Freyre’s theory of racial integration and contextualize Brazil as a racial democracy in the visual arts realm.30 To represent the country in Tendances et Confrontations (see Figure 12.3),

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170  Sabrina Moura

Figure 12.3 Brazilian section at the exhibition Tendances et Confrontations, at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar. Some of the personalities in the photograph include Raymundo de Souza-​Dantas, Heitor dos Prazeres, Clarival do Prado Valladares, among others (April 1966).

Prado-​ Valladares selected the artists Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos (1926–​ 1962), Heitor dos Prazeres (1898–​1966) and Rubem Valentim (1922–​1991).31 In spite of Senegal’s conception of arts négres –​as intrinsically associated to blackness –​and as Abigail Lapin Dardashti noted, the Brazilian art critic “chose three artists that aligned with the notion of Racial Democracy, because their work appropriated various artistic sources and presented blacks as integrated into modern society.”32 These ideas were instrumentalized during the military dictatorship (1964–​1985) in order to obscure structural racism in Brazil.33 Taking into consideration this official context, further reinforced by the endorsement of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the selection of artists participating in the FESMAN was controversial. For Afro-​Brazilian scholar and activist Abdias do Nascimento, such choices were based on an archaic and primitivist vision of the black artist.34 Nascimento affirmed in a 1969 open letter that the artistic selection represented “a nonsignificant sample of the exact place occupied by black people in the artistic field in Brazil.”35 Nascimento also regretted the exclusion of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater, TEN) from the festival, and took the opportunity to challenge the supposed “racial integration” in Brazil, fiercely defended by Prado-​Valladares.36 He continued:

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  171 When, for example, the most active and creative forces in Brazilian black art are vetoed from the official delegation, the document that reflects the opinion of the Cultural Department, claims that this resulted from the requirement of a “national integration” criterion […] Is the alleged “integration” valid in this case? Integration means equal rights and opportunities for all integrated parties. Where are the authentic representatives of Black-​Brazilian culture in the working group? […] Now the most serious, harmful and offensive:  black artists have not been heard or consulted on issues that they are an integral part of.37 It is important to emphasize that, while Nascimento strongly criticized the myth of racial democracy exalted by Senghor, he was nevertheless an enthusiastic advocate of Négritude. “According to Leopold Sedar Senghor’s wise definition,” he stated, “it is in the work of art that the black African best expresses his culture.”38 Perhaps Nascimento was unaware that, at the time, another Brazilian artist had arrived in Dakar to speak for an engaged vision of black Brazilian art. His name was Wilson Tibério  –​one of the first members and collaborators of the Teatro Experimental do Negro.

Unofficial Mobilities and Black Solidarity Although surrounded by historiographical gaps and inaccuracies, Tiberio’s trajectory illuminates the international circulation of black Brazilian artists that challenged the pacifying narratives of “national integration” conveyed by the local intelligentsia.39 In an interview with the Alvorada newspaper Tibério stated: The black man who dedicates himself to art can always remain an artist who is black, but maybe never turn into a Black artist. A Black artist as I understand [is] the black man who puts his art at the service of his race […]40 A native of Southern Brazil, Tibério moved to Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s, and from there to Paris in 1947, at the invitation of the French Embassy in Brazil. France would, however, be a temporary stop on his journeys between Africa and Europe.41 As he affirmed, going to Paris was a step toward his dream to set foot on the “Black Continent.”42 Indeed, in August 1948 the painter left Europe for his first trip to colonial Africa, sponsored by the French government.43 On this occasion, he visited Senegal, Sudan, Niger and Daomé. In 1970, the journalist Anísio Félix recounted that Tibério ended up being “expelled from French Equatorial Africa, under military escort, […] for his active participation in the movement for the independence of those countries.”44 Back in France, Tibério joined a circle of artists and intellectuals united by the feeling of foreignness and the social experience of blackness in a country that was perceived as overarchingly white. Among his peers, was the South African artist Gerard Sekoto, who attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière with Tibério. Commenting on Sekoto’s relationships in Paris, Christine Eyene spoke of a strong sense of community among the members of the African diaspora who found in Négritude a shared field. We learn that [Sekoto] made the acquaintance of a medical student from Martinique who helped him find better accommodation, an African-​American

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172  Sabrina Moura who had come to France to study photography, a Brazilian artist who studied at the famous Académie de la Grande Chaumière; and, most significantly, the cousin of a Senegalese poet who would later become the first president of his country.45 [emphasis added] Thanks to his ties with artists from the black diaspora such as Sekoto, Tibério participated in the cultural congresses of Paris (1956) and Rome (1959).46 In an interview to Valentin Yves Mudimbe, the Haitian writer Maurice Lubin remembers how he became aware of the difficulties behind the transnational connections of black Brazilian artists in that period.47 Lubin recalled that he was in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s when he was contacted by Alioune Diop –​the founder of Présence Africaine and organizer of the First Conference of Black Writers and Artists in Paris (1956). [I remember that] Alioune Diop was concerned about having a very strong Black representation at the conference, particularly from the Black diaspora. Now, the Brazilian authorities are extremely sensitive to the issue of race. They will ask you: Why do you want to be in touch with Black people in Brazil? […] Because of this racial regulation, any official request from Présence Africaine would risk causing a “blanking-​out.” […] What solution could be found to have Brazilian Blacks represented at this conference, which was of such considerable importance to the Black world? There were, at this time, Black artists of Brazilian nationality living in France. It was at the suggestion of friends of mine that these be invited by Présence Africaine. And that is how Wilson Tibério and other Brazilian Blacks participated in that first conference.48 [emphasis added] Lubin offered a vivid account of how racial tensions were concealed by foreign cooperation policies and Brazilian official discourses. In fact, the conditions he described had a direct impact on the difficulties outlined by Nascimento in relation to black Brazilian artists and thinkers abroad. Tibério’s detachment from his country’s official institutions can also be understood as a consequence of this context. In 1966, again, Tibério along with Sekoto had to turn to French support to attend the FESMAN. Once in Dakar, both artists developed a strong relationship with Senegal and ended up taking residence in the country. Sekoto stayed for about a year, while Tiberio remained until 1970. It is said that his departure from the country was due to an “overt criticism of Senghor and Négritude that resulted in him being blacklisted by the late president’s entourage.”49 Affiliated to the Brazilian Communist Party since 1946, Tibério’s trajectory was marked by an explicit Leftist political engagement. Friend of Carlos Marighella –​a political activist and open opponent of the Brazilian military regime  –​he not only dedicated his work to figures like Ernesto Che Guevara, but overtly defined his paintings as a “form of a cry against social injustices, through a personal aesthetics.”50 He, however, highlighted that such aesthetics were distinct from “the African one that still tends towards the religious, but with realistic perspectives.”51 Although he tried to move away from these visual references, Tibério repeatedly spoke of how influential were the visits to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. In the museum galleries, he admired statues, masks and the so-​called fetishes, finding “a natural bridge between the country of his childhood (where African customs were still cultivated) and the motherland of his forefathers.”52

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  173 Thus the perception of arts nègres as an ancestral source of aesthetic reference was as crucial for Tibério as it was for other diaspora artists who wanted to establish more clear ties to Africa at the time of the FESMAN. On their part, white intellectuals like Fagg and Prado-​Valladares reclaimed such expressions to reject African modern production as belated and impure. Moreover, as Négritude aesthetics gained momentum in the 1960s, Senghor also nurtured expectations for the “return” of Senegalese artists to what he called the sources of blackness. The conceptual duality retraceable in these visions of African art is partially a reflection of the historical perspectives based on the principles of tribal authenticity.53 In recent revisions of the modernist canon, many of the artists associated with FESMAN have been recognized for their original contributions to artistic discourses developed in the wake of the African decolonization process. As active participants in these processes, black Brazilian artists and thinkers developed multifarious conceptual affiliations to Négritude in stark contrast with the official disavowal of racial inequalities experienced in their home country. Regardless of any conflicting or paradoxical positionings in their strategies of belonging, these artists present a significant contribution to the history of black solidarity, illuminating not only the discourses of the African diaspora in the 1960s, but also fostering a comprehensive vision of modern artistic exchanges in the Southern hemisphere.

Notes 1 Moacir Maia 1964, 95. 2 According to Ioris and Ioris 2013, 411–​ 426. Brazilian economic development in the postwar period was strongly incremented by “the intensification of import substitution policies aimed at simultaneously stimulating economic growth and protecting national manufactures from external shocks and competition.” 3 “Rassurez-​vous notre négritude est anti-​raciste. Enracinée dans nos valeurs ancestrales de civilisation, elle est ouverte aux pollens de toutes les civilisations et, d’abord, de la latinité.” Senghor 1954, 559. 4 n.a. 1964, 11. 5 Melo Filho and Magalhães Jr. 1961, 78. 6 See Cleveland’s work on Afro-​Brazilian art and the politics of Brazil’s cultural diplomacy, Cleveland 2012. See also the work of scholar Lapin Dartashi. 7 The term “contemporary African art” is used here in the context of FESMAN and taken from the festival’s official communication material, which includes programs, press releases, livre d’or, among others. 8 FESMAN 1966, 26. 9 Specially designed for the opening of the festival, the Musée Dynamique occupied a monumental building –​which has now been given over to the supreme court of Senegal –​ overlooking the Bay of Soumbédioune in Dakar. 10 Ficquet and Gallimardet 2009, 134–​155. 11 Ibid., 150. 12 Harney 2004, 20. 13 Archer-​Shaw 2010, 4. 14 Picasso, 1905 apud Flam and Deutch 2003, 33. 15 Diagne 2011. 16 Ibid. 17 “This ordering force that constitutes Negro style is rhythm. It is the most sensible and the least material thing. It is the vital element par excellence. It is the primary condition for, and

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174  Sabrina Moura sign of, art, as respiration is of life –​respiration that rushes or slows down, becomes regular or spasmodic, depending on the being’s tension, the degree and quality of the emotion” wrote Senghor in (1939) 1961. 18 Prado-​Valladares 1966, 9. 19 Vincent 2017, 101. 20 Underwood 2018, 1–​23. 21 Fagg 1967, 121. 22 Prado-​Valladares 1966, 9. 23 In 1977, Prado-​Valladares was also the coordinator of the Brazilian delegation to the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ‘77, Nigeria). 24 Menezes 2018, 70. 25 Prado-​Valladares 1966, 4. 26 Ibid., 5. 27 This expression references a literal translation into English of Prado-​Valladares paper’s title, “A Defasagem Africana” (1966), from which the quotes in this section were extracted. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Ricupero 2018. 30 Menezes 2018, 70. 31 Agnaldo dos Santos received one of FESMAN’s great visual arts awards for his sculpture Cabeça de Animal (in memoriam). 32 Lapin Dardashti 2019. 33 On the uses of this concept, Bonilla-​Silva 1997, 474–​475 argues that “racism, as defined by mainstream social scientists to consist only of ideas, does not provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding racial phenomena. I  suggest that until a structural framework is developed, analysts will be entangled in ungrounded ideological views of racism. In the context of Brazilian scholarship see Silvio de Almeida (2018), O que é racismo estrutural? (What is structural racism?). 34 Concerning the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nascimento (1976) 2016 states that it is an “institution whose racism is secular and ostensible. The institution is strictly composed of white people only.” 35 Nascimento 1969. 36 It is important to mention that at the Second World Festival of Black Arts, also known as FESTAC, that took place in Nigeria, in 1977, the issues raised by Nascimento will continue to reverberate. Once again, he will face resistance from Brazilian authorities after publishing “Racial Democracy” in Brazil: myth or reality” (1976). 37 Ibid. 38 Nascimento 1968, 21–​22. 39 Dossin 2016 offers a significant contribution on Wilson Tibério’s life and work. 40 Tibério 1946. 41 Caillens 1957, 190. 42 Tibério 1946. 43 There are different accounts on this departure date. In the report of the Manchete magazine (1970), it is stated that he left for Africa in January 1947. In Présence Africaine’s critique, made by Jean Caillens (1957), the date cited is August 1948. 44 Félix 1970. 45 Eyene 2010, 429. 46 Dossin 2016 points out that thanks to his insertion in these networks, Tiberio was also portrayed painting in his studio in the film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953), directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. 47 Mudimbe 1992, 372. 48 Lubin qtd. in Mudimbe, Ibid., 372.

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  175 49 Eyene 2010, 432. According to Manganyi:  “Tiberio was self-​consciously political in his painting and sculpture, and it was this political engagement which led to his expulsion from Senegal” in 1996, 112. Araújo 2008 in turn affirms that the artist became persona non grata in the country after getting involved in a “miners” revolt movement. 50 Tibério apud Félix, op.cit., 157. 51 Ibid. 52 Szezerbic circa 1955. 53 See Kasfir 1992, 41–​97.

Bibliography n.a. 1964. “Senghor e Castelo fazem comunicado.” Correio da Manhã, 25 September: 11. n.a. 1959. “Notre Politique de La Culture.” Présence Africaine, Deuxième Congrès des écrivains et Artistes Noires (Rome: 26 mars-​1er avril 1959), 24–​25 (Fev.-​Mai): 5–​7. n.a. 1959b. “Résolution de La Commission Des Arts.” Présence Africaine, Deuxième Congrès des Écrivains et Artistes Noires (Rome: 26 mars-​1er avril 1959): 24–​25 (Fev.-​Mai): 413–​418. Araújo, Emanuel. 2008. “Negros Pintores.” Vitruvírus (blog). [Accessed 13 February 2019]. www.vitruvius.com.br/​revistas/​read/​arquitextos/​09.100/​107. Archer-​ Shaw, Petrine. 2010. “Negrophilia, Diaspora and Moments of Crisis.” In Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Edited by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter. Liverpool:  Tate Liverpool. [Accessed 23 September 2019]. www.liverpool.ac.uk/​media/​ livacuk/​csis-​2/​blackatlantic/​archer-​text.pdf.pdf. Bonilla-​ Silva, Eduardo. 1997. “Rethinking Racism:  Toward a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review, 62, 3: 465. Brescia dos Reis, Raissa, Taciana Almeida, and Charlotte Arndt, eds. 2016. “Descolonizações na Adversidade: A Présence Africaine Como Prisma de Constelações Culturais.” In Cultura e Mobilização:  Reflexões a Partir Do I  Congresso Internacional de Escritores e Artistas Negros. Rio de Janeiro: Synergia. Caillens, Jean. 1957. “Tibério.” Présence Africaine, no. 16, November: 190–​191. Cleveland, Kimberly. 2012. “Afro-​Brazilian Art as a Prism: A Socio-​Political History of Brazil’s Artistic, Diplomatic and Economic Confluences in the Twentieth Century.” Luso-​Brazilian Review 49, 2: 102–​119. Costa, Flávio. 1966. “A Grande Festa Da Cultura Negra. Entrevista a Cléa Marsiglia.” Diário de Notícias, May 8. Costa, Flávio, and Gervásio Batista. 1966. “África, o Festival Da Negritude.” Revista Manchete, May 14. Diagne, Soleymane Bachir. 2014. “Négritude.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Summer, 24 February. [Accessed 29 October 2019]. https://​plato.stanford.edu/​archives/​ sum2018/​entries/​negritude/​. _​_​_​_​_​. 2011. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude. London/​ New York: Seagull Books. Dossin, Francielly. 2016. “Entre Evidências e Novas Histórias: Sobre Descolonização Estética Na Arte Contemporânea.” PhD Diss. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. _​_​_​_​_​. 2014. “Exposições Na Constelação Pós-​Colonial: A Busca Do Eixo Sul Por Uma Estética Descolonizada.” In História da Arte em Exposições, Unicamp. Eyene, Christine. 2010. “Sekoto and Négritude: The Ante-​room of French Culture.” Third Text 24: 423–​435. Fagg, William. 1967. “Tribalité.” Colloque sur l’art nègre. Volume II, Paris: Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, Société Africaine de Culture. Félix, Anísio. 1970. “Tibério, Um Brasileiro Na África.” Revista Manchete, January.

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176  Sabrina Moura FESMAN. 1966. Premier Festival Mondial d’arts Nègres (Livre d’or). Dacar; Paris:  Premier festival mondial d’arts nègres; Secrétariat d’état aux Affaires étrangères chargé de la Coopération. _​_​_​_​_​. 1966 (b). Programme. Dacar; Paris: Premier festival mondial d’arts nègres; Secrétariat d’état aux Affaires étrangères chargé de la Coopération. Ficquet, Éloi, and Lorraine Gallimardet. 2009. “On ne peut nier longtemps l’art nègre: Enjeux du colloque et de l’exposition du Premier Festival mondial des arts nègres de Dakar en 1966.” Gradhiva, no. 10, November: 134–​155. Flam, Jack D., and Miriam Deutch, eds. 2003. Primitivism and 20th Century Art. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press. Harney, Elizabeth. 2004. In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-​Garde in Senegal, 1960–​1995. Durham: Duke University Press. Ioris, Rafael Rossotto and Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris. 2013. “Assessing development and the idea of development in the 1950s in Brazil.” Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 33, no. 3: 411–​426. Johann Scholl, Camille. 2018. “Léopold Sédar Senghor No Brasil Por Uma ‘Comunidade Luso-​Afro-​Brasileira’ (1964–​1977):  Uma Investigação Acerca de Seu Discurso Político e as Relações com Os Movimentos de Descolonização Em África.” Democracia, Liberdade, Utopias. Anais Do XIV Encontro Estadual de História, Anpuh-​RS, July. Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield. 1992. “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow.” African Arts 25, no. 2: 41–​97. Lapin Dardashti, Abigail. 2019. “Negotiating Afro-​Brazilian Abstraction: Rubem Valentim in Rio, Rome, and Dakar, 1957–​1966.” In New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America. Edited by Mariola V. Alvarez and Ana M. Franco. New York: Routledge. Manganyi, Manche. 1996. A Black Man Called Sekoto. Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press. Melo Filho, Murilo and Raimundo Magalhaes Jr. 1961. “Alvorada Para Os Negros.” Revista Manchete, April. Menezes, Hélio Santos. 2018. “Entre o Visível e o Oculto: A Construção Do Conceito de Arte Afro-​Brasileira.” Master thesis. Universidade de São Paulo. Moacir Maia, Pedro. 1964. “O Senegal de Senghor.” Revista Manchete. Mudimbe, Valentin Y. ed. 1992.The Surreptitious Speech: Présence Africaine and the Politics of Otherness, 1947 –​1987. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Murphy, David ed. 2016. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nascimento, Abdias do. 2016. “Arte afro-​ brasileira:  um esprítiro libertador” [1976]. O genocídio do negro brasileiro:  processo de um racismo mascarado. São Paulo:  Editora Perspectiva. _​_​_​_​_​. 1977. “Racial Democracy” in Brazil: Myth or Reality. Ibadan: Sketch Publishing. _​_​_​_​_​. 1969. Carta Aberta Ao Primeiro Festival Mundial de Artes Negras. _​_​_​_​_​. 1968. “Cultura e Estética No Museu de Arte Negra.” GAM: Galeria de Arte Moderna 14: 21–​22. Povey, John. 1966. “Dakar: An African Rendez-​Vous.” Africa Today 13, 5: 4–​6. Prado-​Valladares, Clarival do. 1966. “A Defasagem Africana Ou Crônica Do I Festival Mundial de Artes Negras.” Cadernos de Crítica: 3–​15. Ricupero, Rubens. 2018. Interview with Sabrina Moura, November. Senghor, Léopold Sédar. (1939) 1961. “Ce que l’homme noir apporte.” Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Du Seuil: 23–​38. _​ _​ _​ _​ _​ . 1954. Discurso Oficial, Diário do Congresso Nacional, Brasília, 24 September: 558–​560. Tibério, Wilson. 1946. “Tibério, o Pintor Negro. Entrevista Concedida a Isaltino Veiga Dos Santos.” Alvorada, November.

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Cultural Politics of Négritude  177 Underwood, Joseph L. 2018. “Tendances et Confrontations:  An Experimental Space for Defining Art from Africa.” World Art, April: 1–​23. Vincent, Cédric. 2017. “Tendencies and Confrontations: Dakar 1966.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43, March: 88–​101. _​_​_​_​_​. 2016. “‘The Real Heart of the Festival’: The Exhibition of L’Art Nègre at the Musée Dynamique.” In The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies. Edited by David Murphy, 55–​73. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Szezerbic, Wladyslaw. circa 1955. “Abidjan: The Return of a Great Son of Africa.” Unknown source. Folder: Wilson Tibério, from the archives of the Museu Afro-​Brasil, São Paulo.

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13  An Index of Modernity Feminist Furniture by Teresa Burga and Beatriz González Sofia Gotti

This chapter’s goal is twofold: to locate the practices of artists Teresa Burga (Peru) and Beatriz González (Colombia) within a broader history of feminism in Latin America, and in doing so to challenge current configurations of modernism. The discussion focuses on two bodies of work produced between 1968 and 1970, which are made of furniture. Cheap or mass produced domestic objects were the quintessential emblems of new middle class homes born out of the modernization policies of the fifties. As such, the beds, chairs or tables used by Burga and González are symbols of modernization when seen from within the domestic space –​a place predominantly occupied by women. By repurposing such heavily connoted items, the artworks speak to how modern society’s fiber was changing, and to how the artists actively reflected on this paradigm shift. In order to successfully place such art in relation to feminism and modernism, the text begins by providing a tentative overview of feminism’s history in Latin America. With the word feminism I  refer to women’s struggles and practices of resistance, conducted in the public as in the private sphere, to achieve greater rights and liberation. The outlined history encompasses feminist efforts ante litteram, merging feminism with proto-​feminism, public with private, political with social. Secondly, the text establishes a link between feminism and the ideas of modernity and, in turn, modernism, understood as a cultural phenomenon. Third, it connects the idea of modernity with the art practices of these artists, thus putting forward the notion that feminism can be understood as an index of modernity, both political and cultural. The stake in examining how these artists exercised their freedom to contest modern society from within the domestic realm is to place them in relation to feminist agendas and ideology. In doing so, the text also sets out to expand and complicate an understanding of Latin American art’s relationship with political resistance.

Feminism in Latin America: An Overview The history of feminism in Latin America is not characterized by a definitive genealogy. Historians and anthropologists have instead recognized the dis-​unification of feminism in Latin America.1 In response to this heterogeneity, for example, the expression feminisms has been championed over feminism.2 Another key point that accompanies historiography is the intrinsic coupling of feminism with the Latin American modernist adventure. Despite the extensive work being conducted in the field, each account that observes or credits the work of women in politics, human rights or culture, declares from the outset to be fractured and often incomplete. In fact, to appreciate

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An Index of Modernity  179 feminist history, one must acknowledge a priori the gaps that exist. Another word that is useful to visualize this uneven history is interstitial, for it begins to express the importance of the space between and in between events, shifting the historian’s focus from milestones and clear chronologies, to a history in progress and in becoming. This approach is indebted to feminist authors such as Cecilia Fajardo-​Hill –​who co-​ curated in 2017 the ground-​breaking exhibition launched by the Hammer Museum of Art (Los Angeles) Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–​1985. Key proponents of such alternative historical formulations are also feminist theorists as far apart as Heléne Cixous, Rosi Braidotti and Carla Lonzi, who have proposed various strategies to construct a history that is plural, inclusive, unexpected and never definitive or univocal.3 The objective, therefore, is to transform our understanding of history from something singular to something mobile, which is able to generate new meanings each time it is considered. In addition to being multiple and heterogeneous, feminism in Latin America in the 1960s was never an organized movement and artists seldom defined themselves as feminists. Reasons for this can be found in the scarce circulation of information about feminism as an organized movement, because of social preconception toward feminism and because of a conflict between feminism and left-​wing politics. In fact, communism gender equality was dogma, which means feminism implied a flaw within the ideology and was hence dismissed as a bourgeois prerogative. Regardless of the term’s scarce currency, a multitude of women fiercely fought against a dominant, deeply catholic and repressive patriarchy. First traces of such struggles have been documented in a fragmentary way, and many of the protagonists of this history have been forgotten. Amongst these are the battles conducted by indigenous women whose feats were never documented in writing because many indigenous cultures have a predilection for oral transmission. Yet, starting in the early colonial period, there are many well-​known and documented examples of women, often of European descent, who fought for education rights for women of all social classes, or who worked in the cultural world as writers, editors, philosophers. Their efforts can be understood as proto-​feminist in nature, but remain vital within a history of women’s struggles for equal rights. For example, Sor Juana of Mexico (1651–​1695) was a poetess and a philosopher who worked to establish her work within a male-​dominated society in the baroque period of colonial Mexico. Studies on her life and work span over three centuries and feature prominent names in literature such as Nobel prize winner Octavio Paz.4 Her work continues to provide material for debate in the fields of philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, gender politics, literature as well as feminism.5 Peruvian-​French Flora Tristán (1803–​1844) is also considered a key figure of feminism in Latin America though she was born in France and spent much of her life in Europe. Following a transformative trip to Peru, she published her first major text The Workers’ Union (1843), an essay in which she notably argues that the key to the progress of workers was the establishment of unions and the liberation of women.6 Her linking of women’s rights with the working class became an inspiration for many after her. André Breton published a selection of letters by Tristán in the third issue of the journal Surrealism, in 1957, in celebration of her commitment against the bourgeois world of her time and her support of women.7 While Paz was fascinated by Sor Juana, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (another Nobel) wrote about Tristán in the novel The Way to Paradise (2003), in which her life is juxtaposed to her grandson’s (the painter Paul Gauguin). Multiple other figures would be worth mentioning in the

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180  Sofia Gotti disjointed history of Latin American feminism, which already these two examples have presented as transnational, deeply embedded in class, ethnicity and above all intertwined with multiple male intellectuals in our more recent past. Contemporary historian Nara Milanich, built on Tristán’s intuition that the working class’ progress and the emancipation of women were linked, making explicit the connection between feminism and modernity in her essay “Women, Gender, And Family in Latin America, 1820–​2000.”8 Tracing a history of the emancipation of women from independence circa 1820 to the present day in Latin America, she looked at a major misconception relating to the role of women in Latin American society. She explained that in the years before and right after independence the poor woman was typically a domestic –​meaning somebody with almost no social standing. This meant that in Latin America the domesticity of women was not rooted in tradition, but in innovation. With the foundation of republics, official policy demanded that women become good “wives, daughters, mothers” for the first time enunciating a way for them to achieve social standing, according to the constitution. Female family headship became increasingly common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact, while men mostly found employment in agriculture and mining, women often concentrated in cities, where machinery had alleviated the need for solely physical labor. As a result, many late nineteenth-​century cities were, according to Milanich, in a very real sense cities of (poor) women, in which women outnumbered men. […] Viewed from this perspective, the twentieth-​ century cult of domesticity, retrograde in its gender implications, appears progressive in terms of its class implications. Wife and mother have been privileged roles to which women of all social ranks could only recently aspire.9 As the prominent historian Sueann Caulfield explained: “gender played a primary role in defining and representing modernity and civilization […] women were primary targets for reformers.”10 Women were majorly responsible for the paradigmatic urban middle-​class boom that struck Latin America particularly during the years (1950s and 1960s), which were marked by Developmentalist ideology as propagated by the International Development Association based in Washington DC since 1960. In light of such scholarship, profound differences emerge between feminism in Latin America and feminism in the United States or Western Europe. The difference is such that when tracing the history of feminism in Latin America, it is useful to take some distance from the Western ideas of first and second waves. Burga and González, in fact, developed in a period in between what historians have identified as first and second wave feminist political movements. The so-​called first wave in Latin America took place between 1880 and 1948 when women’s activity in political circles was distinctly discernible. Notable episodes were the early Inter-​American Congresses held all over the hemisphere, the Congreso Feminino Internacional (International Feminine Congress) held in Buenos Aires in 1910 and the Inter-​American Commission of Women congresses between 1928–​1948. In this time the greatest causes their delegates fought for were equal pay and divorce bills that would protect them. Also, we must thank the 1945 Inter-​American Commission of Women Representatives of Brazil, Mexico and the Dominican Republic if the first paragraph of the United Nation’s charter reads “the equal rights of men and women.”11 Because of the extreme political oscillations across the continent, and because of a failed campaign for disarmament conducted

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An Index of Modernity  181 by Inter-​American Commission of Women at the beginning of the Cold War, there was a perceived Thaw in feminist activity until 1975, which was the UN National Year of the Woman. As such, history has recognized women’s actions in political and public arenas and it has simultaneously obscured all the activity conducted in private, including domestic work, and cultural labor, which becomes almost irrelevant.

From Modernity to Modernism: Burga and González’s Semiotics of the Living Room As discussed so far, a link between feminist struggles for the emancipation of women appears as tightly connected to progress and modernity. A deeper analysis of Burga’s and González’s work is instrumental for transferring this link to the realm of culture, therefore to a discussion about modernism. Deeper still, this discussion helps us to see how feminist struggles were conducted also outside of mainstream culture, for example, from within the domestic space and outside of time brackets delimited by first or second waves. The original title of the conference presentation proposing the arguments of this essay “Semiotics of the Living Room:  Proto-​Feminist Furniture pieces by Burga and González,” had the intent to tangentially reference Martha Rosler’s iconic 1975 feminist video Semiotics of the Kitchen, which expressed her resistance against imposed feminine roles. In the video she lists and holds up in alphabetical order kitchen utensils. Meanwhile, her anger increases until she herself becomes the utensil in letter form. What is most striking and applicable to Rosler’s video is how she brings a political consciousness to the domestic haven propagandized by the American dream. A reference to Rosler’s work also helps me problematize whether it is legitimate to use cultural frameworks and terminologies so strictly associated to Western canons –​ such as feminism, modernism or more specifically Pop art which was often used to describe Burga’s and González’s work12 –​in the art history of regions that were contextually so different to where these denominations were born. In Peru and Colombia, for example, the political scenario and its ideologies heavily influenced the development of artistic and intellectual life. References to La Violencia (the decade of civil war in Colombia between 1948 and 1958)  in all accounts of González’s trajectory abound;13 similarly Burga’s participation in the Arte Nuevo Group, which emerged as a collective of contestation against an exclusive and traditional art system, is an essential phase of her practice.14 In addition, the presence of foreign economic powers was felt to such an extent that anti-​Americanism had a prominent place in cultural debate, while Europe remained a beacon of good taste and bon-​ton. For said reasons I must acknowledge the ongoing research of an international community of scholars and curators seeking to retrieve obscured and sometimes lost narratives of women’s work in Latin America. These include but are not limited to Talita Trizoli, Camila Bechelany, Adriano Pedrosa, Kalliopi Minioudaki and Giulia Lamoni. A vital contribution has also been given by Andrea Giunta, who jointly curated the United States-​ born traveling exhibition Radical Women together with Fajardo-​Hill. The final reason why I reference Rosler is to address the role played by the United States in the development of feminist narratives in Latin America, which scholars have examined on a political level, but seldom on a personal one too. The United States’ influence was most obviously exercised through policies such as the Good Neighbour policy inaugurated by Roosevelt in 1933 in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and

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182  Sofia Gotti later the Pan-​American Union, which had its base in Washington DC, but which had the primary agenda to foster Americanism and free market distribution as an ideology across the continent, and implementing it by facilitating trade agreements and cultural exchange, which was mostly mono-​directional with the Museum of Modern Art in New York sending multiple exhibitions yearly to Latin America.15 Within this political scenario Burga and González began using furniture as the primary support of their work allowing us to examine an alternative history, which is more rooted in the social transformations that were taking place in Latin America during a period defined by the ideas of modernity and progress. Burga worked toward a renegotiation of the role and place of the Peruvian woman in society most notably in subsequent well-known works from the 1970s exploring her own identity and peruvian female identity more broadly. But prior to that, when she was a member of the pioneering artist group Arte Nuevo, she engaged in a more subtle and radical way with themes related to women’s emancipation.16 Arte Nuevo shook Lima’s art scene in 1966 (they were active until 1968)  when they staged a counter-​exhibition to The American Painting Festival, which had almost entirely excluded the young generation of artists. The providential appearance and intervention of Jorge Romero Brest –​the iconic director of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, which is amongst the best-​known Pop centers in South America –​led to the entire event to be transported to the Museo de Arte de Lima just weeks after. This phenomenon projected this group to stardom and Burga’s practice is amongst those that exploded thereafter. At her first solo exhibition titled Objetos (Objects), at Cultura y Libertad in 1968, the issue of feminine liberation became a central theme (see Figure  13.1). The six works she exhibited were described by critic and mentor Juan Acha in a review of the

Figure 13.1 Teresa Burga: Untitled, 1967, Installation view of the exhibition Objetos, Galería Cultura y Libertad, Lima. Image published in the magazine Caretas 356 (Lima, 14–​24 July 1967, p. 46). Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 13.2 Teresa Burga: Untitled, 1967, 80 x 108 x 208 cm (bed), 383 x 280 cm (curtain). Courtesy the artist, Galerie Barbara Thumm and Pinault Collection.

show as “sort of assemblages or montages,” which included elements of a bathroom, a boudoir, a bedroom and a small room (similar to those found in shop windows), the fragment of a façade and a card panel of a woman.17 Inspired by images advertising domestic products, which always represented women in domestic environments, Burga constructed women-​objects, or female figures that become embedded or absorbed by their domestic surroundings into furniture or architecture. As Acha described, as well as Emilio Tarazona more recently, on one side of the exhibition space two bi-​dimensional figures cut out of wood were placed against the wall: the first reclining wearing a brightly colored latex dress; the other standing whilst combing her hair.18 A further figure made of stuffed fabric was sitting on a chair in a construction that resembled a bathroom. In a corner, hidden behind curtains, was a naked woman assembled over a bed: her body painted on the bedspread, her head in the middle of the headboard and her breasts on two pillows that elongated sideways to the ground, making up the arms (see Figure 13.2). Burga’s women seem to disappear within the furniture, in effect becoming objects, or indiscernible to the viewer as women. The installation confronts the objectification of women and their relation to domesticity, and at last the spectacularization of domestic intimacy in the media, the artist’s original source of inspiration. As I previously noted, Burga was linked to Pop through Arte Nuevo, which had been associated to a youthful Pop phenomenon because of Romero Brest’s intervention and the albeit tenuous connection to the Pop ethos that had enlivened Buenos Aires in the mid-​sixties. Beatriz González’s work was also placed in dialogue with North American Pop almost for the entirety of her career.19 Invariably, however, her

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184  Sofia Gotti

Figure 13.3 Beatriz González: La última mesa [The Last Table], 1970, Enamel paint on metal table, 105 x 205 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tate Modern.

work was distinguished from Pop for how she treated her subject matter. Unlike her North American peers, in fact, she was not interested in the spectacle of images in the mass media, but instead was fascinated by the formal grain of photographs in the daily press, and she avidly reflected on their content and resonance for their readers.20 While her “Pop” painterly style emerged in the mid-​sixties, she first started using furniture in 1970. Amongst the first works González made with furniture, The Last Table (1970) (see Figure 13.3) is made by a metal sheet painted with enamel, mounted on a typically middle class, mass produced faux wood table. The image reproduces Leonardo’s The Last Supper (1495–​1498) in her typically flattened and simplified style, using a bright and distinctive palette. The important thing to note is that González was not celebrating or appropriating an icon of art history, but instead was commenting on the typically Colombian habit to collect mass produced reproductions of works by European Masters. In her words: The Last Supper was especially popular in Colombia because in every household this image was placed above the main entrance door as a good-​luck charm against thieves. In a way the image acquired its own life and many spin-​offs were produced.21 Another work titled Naturaleza casi muerta (Almost dead nature, 1970)  (see Figure 13.4) stretches further this idea of the spin-​off, or even a spin-​off of a spin-​ off because its subject matter is one of the religious prints distributed on religious holidays and carefully collected in the majority of households across the country. In this work González painted a traditional image of Jesus rising from the cross on an enamel sheet mounted onto a double bed. Juxtaposing this specific religious rendition of Jesus to a bed, can be interpreted as a critique of the religiosity –​connected to traditionalism –​that invaded the bedroom, perhaps to the detriment of intimacy, as further enhanced by the title –​literally “almost dead nature” but also a play on natura muerta, which means still life in Spanish. Though Pop was widely discussed locally, and was also the subject of several lectures and round-​table discussions in both institutional and informal settings, curators and historians then and now (among these Carolina Ponce de Leon, Paulo Sergio Duarte,

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Figure 13.4 Beatriz González:  Naturaleza casi muerta [Nature Almost Dead], 1970, 125 x 125 x 95 cm. Photo by Jairo Betancur modified by Laura Jiménez. Courtesy of the artist.

Marta Traba, Emilio Tarazona, Juan Acha) have made it a point to differentiate this kind of popular sensibility from North American Pop.22 Ponce de Leon explained that in González’s case, Pop un-​defined her works, aiding their internationalization.23 The contradiction is also present in González’s own words: “I feel as the precursor of a provincial art that can only circulate universally as a curiosity.”24 With this sentence she expressed her devotion to a national idiom, which didn’t necessarily aspire to appeal to an international audience. Despite González’s noble words, shortly after she also said that “this ordeal about painting as Colombian is silly” or a tonteria –​which hints at her deeper perspective that art may in effect circulate autonomously, though it will invariably mean different things to different audiences.25 In light of such perspectives around the use and significance of Pop, I would argue that this aesthetic –​with it’s almost un-​defining quality –​is a very important departure point for the interpretation of both Burga’s and González’s works. The ambiguity of interpretation Pop dwells on highlights how terminology was constantly being renegotiated and updated. The ambiguous use of Pop as an interpretative tool for both artists helps me to establish a tension between US-​centric narratives and to inscribe these works within a narrative of Latin American feminist art –​another ambiguous category, which neither artist explicitly subscribed to.

Conclusion To examine the home (the private instead of the public) as a space for social and political dissent, leads us to rethink the very definition of political resistance. If we begin seeing resistance in more than one of its forms, we already start breaking down the many labels and categorizations that ultimately limit the interpretation of art’s engagement with politics. The historical context provided drives the claim that the use of furniture in artmaking is entirely tied to the gender implications of

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186  Sofia Gotti domesticity. Because of the radical changes Imperial independence engendered for women in Latin America, in combination with the work of many female activists in the region, women’s role as workers in society deeply affected their status, their rights and, crucially, the economic development of urban centers. This meant that the miraculous explosion of an urban middle class was connected in a pronounced way to women’s rights movements and their role within society. Having produced their objects “in between” what has been identified as first and second wave feminism, Burga’s and González’s art stems precisely in the period when public activity was not at the forefront of the feminist movement, but when the private and the domestic, which were at the very heart of the middle class and of modernity, became its prime battle ground. Scholars, writers and curators before me have pinpointed the ways in which artists engaged with the political situation they were living by making explicitly political art. To differentiate conceptual art in Latin America from elsewhere, Mari Carmen Ramírez coined the expression “ideological conceptualism.”26 Other writers who have endorsed this view include Luis Camnitzer and Peter Osborne.27 The purpose of this definition addresses the work of artists who contested the totalitarian regimes they were living under from the 1960s. Amongst the most quoted phrases that illustrate this phenomenon is “the experimental exercise of freedom” by critic Mario Pedrosa, which was also used to title an exhibition featuring artists from across the continent at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1998. Another sentence by artist Hélio Oiticica reads “upon adversity we thrive,” which in origin was the name of one of his wearable sculptures (Parangoles, 1964–​1965). These phrases almost became a

Figure 13.5 Teresinha Soares with Ela me deu bola (Camas) [She Hit on Me (BEDS)] installed at Municipal Park, Belo Horizonte, 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

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An Index of Modernity  187 mantra in much writing about the artists working in opposition to the regime. Miguel A. López, Josephine Watson and Zanna Gilbert are amongst the scholarly voices who have questioned an overreliance on the notion of ideological art to categorize production in Latin America.28 The analysis presented so far of works by Burga and González builds upon these authors’ critique, to express how an experimental exercise of freedom also engages with women’s freedom; freedom from a traditionalist society, from gender expectations, all issues which traverse politics, but that are not explicitly confrontational of political establishments. Burga and González are two among a long list of artists using furniture as the support for their artwork. Amongst those whose work can be contextualized within the framework provided by this study are Brazilian Teresinha Soares (see Figure 13.5) and Colombian Feliza Bursztyn who chose beds and mattresses as vehicles for a critique of women’s perceived passive role within the domestic arena. The work of these artists can help us embrace and utilize feminisms’ ambiguities, to map a different history that radically alters our understanding of modernity and modernism.29

Notes 1 See Alvarez et  al. 2003, 537–​579; Femenías 2002; Bergmann et  al. 1990; Quiroz-​Pérez 2017,  17–​34. 2 See Alvarez et al 2003, 537–​579. 3 See Cixous 1979; Braidotti 2011. 4 Paz 1982. 5 Key sources I have consulted are: Paz 1982; Kirk 2016. 6 Reprinted in de Marco and Tristan eds. 1977. 7 As recorded on the Andre Breton Archive and Estate’s website. 8 Milanich 2011, 461–​479. 9 Ibid., 466. 10 Caulfield 2001, 475, cit. in Milanich 2011, 467. 11 Miller 1992, 24. 12 Both artists’ works were featured in the exhibitions The EY Exhibition; The World Goes Pop (Tate Modern, 2015), International Pop (Walker Arts Center, 2015)  and Pop America: 1965–​1975 (Block Museum of Art, 2018). 13 See Calderón ed., Beatriz González. 14 See Burga, López and Tarazona 2011. 15 Internationally Circulating Exhibitions 1952–​2004 [Accessed 20 June 2016]. 16 The group included Luis Arias Vera, Gloria Gómez-​Sánchez, Teresa Burga, Jaime Dávila, Víctor Delfín, Emilio Hernández Saavedra, José Tang, Armando Varela y Luis Zevallos Hetzel. 17 Acha, 1967. 18 Ibid. and Burga, López and Tarazona 2011. 19 See Traba and González 1977. 20 See Ponce de Leon 1988, 16–​17. 21 González 2015. 22 Beyond the texts already cited, see Duarte 1998; López and Tarazona 2007; Giunta and Traba eds. 2005. 23 Ponce de Leon 1988, 17. 24 González 2015. 25 González n.d. 26 Ramírez 1999.

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188  Sofia Gotti 27 See Ramirez 1993, 156–​167; Osborne 2002; Camnitzer 2007. The link between Latin American art and ideology has been addressed and complicated also in López and Watson 2010,  5–​21. 28 See Gilbert 2009; López and Watson 2010, 5–​21. 29 I have examined Teresinha Soares’ work in the paper Gotti 2015.

Bibliography Acha, Juan. 1967. “Ambiente expresionista:  Muestra de Teresa Burga,” El Comercio, Lima: 27 July. Alvarez, Sonia E. 2003. Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Ericka Beckman, Maylei Blackwell, Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Nathalie Lebon, Marysa Navarro, and Marcela Ríos Tobar. “Encountering Latin American and Caribbean Feminisms,” Signs, vol. 28, no. 2, Winter: 537–​579. Bergmann, Emilie L. et al. 1990. Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America: Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America. Berkeley; Oxford: University of California Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Bryan-​Wilson, Julia, Lila M. Schwarcz, Mariana Leme and Isabella Rjeille. 2019. Women’s Histories, Feminist Histories. São Paulo:  MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Burga, Teresa, Miguel Ángel López and Emilio Tarazona. 2011. Teresa Burga:  informes, esquemas, intervalos. Lima: ICPNA. Camnitzer, Luis. 2007. Conceptualism in Latin American Art:  Didactics of Liberation. Austin: University of Texas Press. Caulfield, Sueann. 2001. “The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review, n. 81. Cixous, Hélène. 1979. Vivre L’orange: = to Live the Orange. Paris: Des Femmes. de Marco, Yolanda and Flora Tristan eds. 1977. De Naturaleza de las cosas: Union Obrera. Barcelona: Editorial Fontamara. Duarte, Paulo S. 1998.The ‘60s:  Transformations of Art in Brazil. Rio de Janeiro:  Campos Gerais. Femenías, María Luisa. 2002. Perfiles Del Feminismo Iberoamericano. Compiladora, Buenos Aires: Catálogos. Gargallo, Francesca. 2007. “Feminismo latinoamericano,” in Revista Venezolana de Estudios de la Mujer, 12(28). [Accessed 6 April 2019] https://​francescagargallo.wordpress.com/​ ensayos/​feminismo/​no-​occidental/​feminismo-​latinoamericano/​. Gilbert, Zanna. 2009. “Ideological Conceptualism and Latin America: Politics, Neoprimitivism and Consumption,” re·bus, Issue 4, Autumn/​Winter. Giunta, Andrea and Marta Traba eds. 2005. Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–​1970. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. González, Beatriz. 2015. Interviewed for The Ey Exhibition: The World Goes Pop. London: Tate Modern. [Accessed March 2019] www.tate.org.uk/​whats-​on/​tate-​modern/​exhibition/​ey-​ exhibition-​world-​goes-​pop/​artist-​interview/​beatriz-​gonzalez. _​ _​ _​ _​ _​ . n.d. “Yo creo que el arte es universal y que eso de la pintura colombiana son tonterías.” [Accessed January 2020] www.banrepcultural.org/​coleccion-​de-​arte/​artista/​ beatriz-​González. Gotti, Sofia. 2015. “A Pantagruelian Pop: Teresinha Soares’s ‘Erotic Art of Contestation.” Tate Papers, no.24, Autumn. [Accessed 16 February 2020]. www.tate.org.uk/​research/​publications/​ tate-​papers/​24/​a-​pantagruelian-​pop-​teresinha-​soares-​erotic-​art-​of-​contestation. Kirk, Stephanie. 2016. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. London: Routledge.

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An Index of Modernity  189 Lonzi, Carla. 1982. Sputiamo Su Hegel: La Donna Clitoridea E La Donna Vaginale. Milano: Gammalibri. López, Miguel A. and Emilio Tarazona. 2007.Temas de Arte Peruano 3: Juan Acha y la Guerrilla Cultural, 1969–​1970. Lima: Centro estudios de la Universidad de San Marcos. López, Miguel A. and Josephine Watson. 2010. “How Do We Know What Latin American Conceptualism Looks Like?” Afterall:  A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 23, Spring. Milanich, Nara. 2011. “Women, Gender, and Family in Latin America, 1820–​ 2000.” In A Companion to Latin American History. Edited by Thomas H. Holloway. New  York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Miller, Francesca. 1992. “Latin American Feminism and the Transnational Arena,” In Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America: Seminar on Feminism and Culture in Latin America. Edited by Emilie Bergman, Janet Greenberg, and Mary L. Pratt. University of California  Press. Morgan, Jessica and Flavia Frigeri eds. 2015. The World Goes Pop. exh. cat. New Haven; London: Yale University Press; Tate Publishing. Osborne, Peter. 2002. Conceptual Art. London and New York: Phaidon Press. Paz, Octavio. 1982. Sor Juana de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Ponce de Leon, Camila. 1988. “Beatriz González in Situ.” In Beatriz González: Una Pintora De Provincia. Edited by Maerta Calderón. exh. cat. Bogotá: C. Valencia Editores. Quiroz-​Pérez, Lissell. 2017. “Del centro a las márgenes. Los feminismos de Perú y México de los 70 a la actualidad,” Amerika, n. 16. [Accessed 6 April 2019] http://​journals.openedition. org/​amerika/​8056 Pedrosa, Adriano, Camila Bechelany, Lilia M. Schwarcz, and Pablo Leon de la Barra. 2017. Histórias Da Sexualidade. exh. cat. São Paulo: MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. Ramírez, Mari Carmen. 1999. “Tactics for thriving on adversity:  conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–​1980.” In Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-​1980s. Edited by Luís Camnitzer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss and László Beke. exh. cat., New York: Queens Museum of Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 1993. “Blueprint Circuits:  Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America.” In Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century. Edited by Waldo Rasmussen, Fatima Bercht and Elizabeth Ferrer. exh. cat. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Sachs, Sid and Kalliopi Minioudaki. 2010. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–​ 1968. Philadelphia: University of the Arts. Traba, Marta and Beatriz González. 1977. Los Muebles De Beatriz González. Bogotá: Museo De Arte Moderno. Trizoli, Talita. 2011. Trajetórias De Regina Vater: Por Uma Crítica Feminista Da Arte Brasileira. São Paulo: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP. Online document Internationally Circulating Exhibitions 1952–​2004, (New York: MoMA, 2004) [Accessed 20 June 2016] www.moma.org/​momaorg/​shared/​pdfs/​docs/​learn/​icelist.pdf. As recorded on the Andre Breton Archive and Estate’s website: www.andrebreton.fr/​en/​work/​ 56600100239510?back_​rql=Any%20X%2CAA%2CAB%20WHERE%20E%20eid%20 104626%2C%20E%20item%20X%2C%20X%20modification_​date%20AA%2C%20 X%20title%20AB&back_​url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.andrebreton.fr%2Fen%2Fperson %2F16869%3Fvid%3Dprimary

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PART 3

Collecting Modernisms –​ Exhibiting Modernisms

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14  Traveler’s Tales Alfred Barr, the Soviet Union and International Modernism in the Postwar Period Masha Chlenova

One distinct advantage of a transnational approach to history is that it enables us to consider human connections above and beyond the current boundaries of political ideologies. In art historical scholarship this methodology allows us to restore the agency to individual players, artists, curators, critics, historians, collectors and patrons; to consider the transnational networks these individuals formed on the basis of shared values and goals, and to discern the ways in which these networks shaped historical processes, often operating outside the confines of specific nation-​states or politically defined territories. Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. presents an excellent case study for such an approach, not only as one of the most influential figures in the history of twentieth-​century art, but primarily because of his lifelong activity as a relentless proponent of international modernism and a protector of artistic freedom. Barr’s activity as a founding director and later Director of Museum Collections at The Museum of Modern Art between 1928 and 1968 has often been conflated with the institution itself, with the ideological interests of its patrons, and with the goals of the U.S. Department of State during the Cold War.1 Yet historical evidence demonstrates that Barr consistently advocated for the freedom of artistic expression and vehemently fought against its suppression anywhere and under any ideological regime, including those of Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR and McCarthy’s United States. As such, Barr’s position was that of resisting the pressure of the immediate sociopolitical circumstances and state agencies, rather than merely serving as their mouthpiece. Barr’s little-​known cultural diplomacy with the USSR during the postwar years, known in Soviet history as the Thaw, serves as an excellent illustration of this activity. By reconstructing the historical details of Barr’s little known trips to the USSR in 1956 and 1959, and his newly forged ties with collectors, artists and curators there, we may examine the functioning of a transnational network across the ideological divides of the Iron Curtain, revealing the history of the postwar period as considerably more intertwined than has hitherto been acknowledged. Moreover, focusing on the activity of an influential individual player, instead of primarily on government agencies and institutions, as much existing literature does, enables us to understand the constructive functioning of transnational historical processes through a subjective lens, which often provides a more nuanced perspective. Barr’s view of modernism as fundamentally transnational and interdisciplinary went hand in hand with his understanding of art historical development as grounded in a network of connections. It stemmed from his close study of the historical avant-​gardes

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194  Masha Chlenova of the early twentieth century, when ideas, artworks, artists and critics moved across national borders on an unprecedented scale. The pioneering course on modern art Barr first taught at Wellesley College in the spring of 1927 emphasized artistic connections across countries and media.2 Subsequently, Barr’s collecting and exhibition practices at MoMA during its first decades solidified this viewpoint institutionally, firmly establishing modernism as a fundamentally international phenomenon. Barr had an exceptional propensity for establishing connections not only between artists in historical perspective, but also between living advocates of radically innovative art, which he knew was vulnerable to misunderstanding and rejection. Barr’s extensive international travels contributed to his outlook. In 1927–​28 he spent several months in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the USSR on a stipend from his Harvard professor Paul J.  Sachs, studying modern visual culture and making connections. In 1933, during a year-​ long leave from MoMA granted for nervous exhaustion, Barr returned to Europe, where he became first-​ hand witness to the Nazis’ earliest attacks on modern art and its makers. Deeply shaken, Barr wrote a series of impassionate articles entitled “Hitler and Nine Muses,” in which he warned contemporaries against the threats modern art was facing in Nazi Germany. Much to Barr’s surprise and indignation, no American publishers accepted his premonitions.3 Upon returning to MoMA, Barr set out to prepare one of his most ambitious exhibitions to date. Opened in 1936, Cubism and Abstract Art was fundamentally a “project of rescue, retrieval and preservation” of modernism and abstraction from both the Nazi and the Soviet persecution of the 1930s.4 Barr alludes to this central goal of his exhibition in the introduction to its catalog: “The essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of squares and circles (and the architects influenced by them) who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power.”5 This protective mission remained central throughout Barr’s career and became especially astute again in the 1950s, when he defended the cause of radical modernism against political conservatives in his own country. Barr’s extensive travels played a key role in his ability to establish a network of like-​minded individuals –​artists, curators, historians, critics, museum directors and cultural officials –​who shared his view that modernism had the ability to connect people across the changing political tides. Barr’s view of modern art as fundamentally transnational stemmed from his understanding of the visual language of modernism as a universal mode of communication that can bridge cultural divides and withstand the vicissitudes of changing political circumstances. He expressed this vision in an educational book, entitled What is Modern Painting? initially published in 1943: [A]‌lthough we have seen a million pictures in our lives, we may never have learned to look at painting as an art. For the art of painting … is like a language which you have to learn to read. Some pictures … are prose, others are poetry, and others still are like algebra or geometry. But one thing is easy, there are no foreign languages in painting as there are in speech; there are only local dialects, which can be understood internationally, for painting is a kind of visual Esperanto.6 Precisely because it was not immediately accessible and understandable, Barr felt that modernism had to be protected and explained in any society including a democratic one:

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Traveler’s Tales  195 In a democracy the original, progressive artist often faces the indifference or intolerance of the public, the ignorance of officials, the malice of conservative artists, the laziness of the critics, the blindness or timidity of picture buyers and museums.7 Creative freedom, Barr felt, was indispensable for the avant-​garde to exist, for these were the artists who pushed the limits of the acceptable and understandable and only thus could take art to new levels. Throughout What is Modern Painting? Barr explains the ways in which the universal language of painting operates and teaches his readers to understand it, while also warning them against rejecting it. His rhetoric in doing this is far from light-​handed: Sometimes in art galleries one hears a man who has just glanced at a cubist or expressionist picture turn away with the angry words, “It ought to be burned,” or “There ought to be a law against it.” That was just the way Hitler felt.8 In 1943, when World War II was at its peak, and the United States had just entered into it, that was a harsh comparison to make. Barr’s partisanship for modern painting was deeply shaped by this rescue mission, even more so than by his wish to enlighten his fellow Americans, most of whom at that time had little exposure or openness to modern art. Throughout his life, Barr’s educational mission was always also a protective one. In the last section of What is Modern Painting?, entitled “Freedom, Truth, Perfection,” Barr openly expressed his advocacy for artistic freedom, which he believed to be an indispensable condition for artistic production and which in the 1950s was under threat from conservative American politicians as well. This freedom required artistic pluralism and a free choice for artists to work in any style. Barr gave examples of attacks on artistic freedom in Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, but also in the United States, where the artist “has had to suffer occasional persecution … [from] the self-​styled patriotic organizations and misguided congressmen.”9 Barr’s most public gesture in his struggle against McCarthy conservatives in his homeland was his well-​known article, published in The New York Times magazine on 14 December 1952, with a provocative title “Is Modern Art Communistic?”10 (see Figure 14.1). Barr started it with a strongly worded statement: Modern political leaders, even on our side of the Iron Curtain, feel strongly and express themselves eloquently against modern art. President Truman calls it “merely the vaporings of half-​baked lazy people” and believes “the ability to make things look as they are is the first requisite of an artist.” After looking at an abstract mural at the United Nations building, General Eisenhower remarked: “To be modern you don’t have to be nuts.” Prime Minister Churchill has been quoted as proposing assault, hypothetical but violent, on Picasso. Many others go further. Because they don’t like and don’t understand modern art, they call it communistic. They couldn’t be more mistaken.11 Barr proceeded to explain that Nazi and Stalinist ideologues had suppressed the freedom of artistic expression, putting to shame conservative American politicians of the McCarthy era, who actively sought to censor modern art, based on supposed or actual political affiliations of the artists themselves. By pointing out the absurdity of

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196  Masha Chlenova

Figure 14.1 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Is Modern Art Communistic?” The New York Times, Sunday Magazine (14 December 1952), p.22.

accusing modern art of communism, Barr brings out the superfluous nature of stigmatizing labels –​used by changing political regimes to censor art. Conservative attacks on individual artists as having Communist sympathies and pressures on art institutions persisted in the US through the 1950s, prompting Barr’s continued public advocacy. Throughout that decade, Barr regularly lectured in influential art institutions and universities across the United States, advocating for the need for artistic pluralism and the imperative to give artists freedom of expression as was fit for a free country.12 In the spring of 1956 Barr and Lloyd Goodrich, then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, published letters to the editor in College Art Journal, the mouthpiece of the main professional organization of American art historians, under the umbrella title “Artistic Freedom.” In his statement Barr identifies two kinds of censorship imposed by national agencies such as the State Department and the United States Information Agency (USIA)  –​“one has to do with the style of art; the other with the artist’s political inclinations.”13 Openly accusing USIA, which organized exhibitions of American art abroad, of refusing to include abstraction and of censoring artists on the basis of their political inclinations, Barr deemed its activity “subversive of our civilization and culture.”14 Evidently, instead of presenting Barr as a mouthpiece of the ideological interests of national agencies, as much revisionist literature has done over the last decades, we need to acknowledge that Barr actively opposed conservative political tides whenever they threatened artistic autonomy.15 At exactly the same time, in 1956, the grip of censorship began to give in on the other side of the Atlantic, as the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous speech denouncing Stalin’s excesses and marking the beginning of the period known

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Traveler’s Tales  197 as the Thaw. Soon enough cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States came on the horizon of possibility. Barr was particularly keen on this prospect, as his initial two-​month stay in Moscow and Leningrad during the winter of 1927–​28 had a major formative impact on his professional outlook. Barr was especially inspired by Soviet avant-​garde artists’ integration of all artistic media, by their radical museology and pedagogy; and he had discovered the rich holdings of French modernism, assembled by major Russian collectors and now held in Soviet museums. These early connections and discoveries turned into Barr’s life-​long interest in Russian arts and culture and his keen attention to its development. Upon learning of the Soviet Union’s openness for renewing artistic exchange with the west, Barr prompted MoMA’s director William Burden to approach the Soviet Embassy directly, bypassing the conservative American state authorities, with the initiative to organize an exchange of exhibitions.16 In May 1956 Barr and MoMA’s director René d’Harnoncourt went to the Soviet Union on an official visit, looking at works in museums in preparation for an exchange of exhibitions aimed at forging cultural ties. Of course, Barr was coveting to secure loans of Post-​Impressionist masterpieces from the famous Shchukin and Morozov collections as well as works of the Russian avant-​garde, which he had collected for MoMA since the 1930s. Back in the USSR for the first time since 1928, Barr reported with exhilaration: “There is a real thaw here … Got into … museum storerooms and saw eight Kandinskys and two Malevichs, including the Black Square! The staff had never been in there.”17 During this trip Barr also met George Costakis, who had started collecting Russian avant-​ garde ten years prior, finding family members of avant-​garde artists and rescuing their works from oblivion. A  Greek national who worked at the Canadian embassy in Moscow, Costakis had diplomatic protection and could allow himself the liberties no Soviet citizen could dream of. In Costakis’ apartment Barr saw works by Russian avant-​gardists of the 1910s and 1920s he admired, as well as works by contemporary independent-​minded Russian artists. Among them was Anatoly Zverev, whom Costakis had met two years prior and called “one of the most talented artists in Soviet Russia … a unique phenomenon.”18 Barr was duly impressed by his talent and acquired three of his drawings, initiating a collection of contemporary Russian art at MoMA. Costakis became Barr’s regular correspondent for many years. Barr sent him materials about MoMA and its collection; Costakis replied with letters in perfect English, which he sent through the safe and uncensored channels of diplomatic post, keeping Barr abreast of his search for avant-​garde works and of the current situation in Soviet art. Another important connection Barr cultivated in the 1950s and 1960s was with the aspiring art historian Camilla Gray. Gray first came to Moscow in 1955, an 18-​year-​old British dancer planning to enroll into the Ballet School of the Bolshoy Theater. Her dance career didn’t pick up, but Gray fell in love with Russian art and began to study it in earnest. In 1957 Gray studied relevant materials in Britain and the United States, and in January 1960 Barr gave Gray introductions to Soviet museum officials, curators and private collectors, including George Costakis. Barr recommended Gray to Costakis as “a devoted student of Malevich and the entire modern movement of Russian art, and my good friend”; and also recommended Costakis to Gray, writing that he “knows no one who can be more helpful to you in the unofficial art world.”19 Barr supported and guided Gray’s art historical research and writing, and was instrumental in her ability to complete her major survey of Russian avant-​garde, when she was only 26 years old. Entitled The Great

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198  Masha Chlenova Experiment:  Russian Art, 1863–​1920, it was released in 1962 simultaneously in New York and London and became a revelation for Western artists and historians, and remained an essential source for decades. As Russian avant-​garde was becoming better known in Europe, so was American gestural abstraction via the massively successful exhibition New American Painting, sent on a long tour of European countries by the USIA in 1958–​59. On the heels of that success, the United States government was preparing to send the biggest showcase of its achievements to the USSR, which included an exhibition of American art. The committee in charge of organizing that exhibition included prominent members of the American museum world, who fiercely defended their choices and stood firm ground against any government censorship. As the organizing committee faced a stern opposition from powerful conservative politicians, they wrote an open letter to President Eisenhower. It stated the committee’s position in no uncertain terms: The exhibition covers the chief viewpoints and styles of [the last] 30 years from traditional to advanced. It is highly diversified. It includes a considerable proportion of realistic art, and of works picturing the American people, life and landscape. Contrary to misleading statements by certain artists and members of Congress, the exhibition is not communistic, negative and un-​American. Nor does it consist of pretty idealized pictures of our country, such as artists of totalitarian nations are obliged to paint. It demonstrates the freedom of artistic expression and the variety of individual viewpoints that mark a democratic society. It is unquestionably the broadest and most balanced representation of recent American art ever sent abroad by our Government.20 The International Council of MoMA sent its own letter stating: “We believe that art should not be used as a political pawn or for propaganda purposes. It is a mode of communication of the spirit and the mind and transcends the limitations of political ideology and national rivalry.”21 MoMA’s director William Burden sent a third letter to President Eisenhower with a request not to censor the selection of works made by the exhibition committee.22 Eisenhower expressed his support and the exhibition remained unchanged. This episode shows firm evidence against the established revisionist accounts that present American exhibitions abroad, organized by MoMA and its International Council, as direct propaganda tools of the USIA. In the meantime, Barr continued to advocate for artistic pluralism individually. In the spring of 1959, he submitted two illustrated stories about MoMA and its collection to the magazine Amerika, which propagated American culture and way of life in the Eastern bloc. Fifty thousand copies of this magazine were distributed in the USSR through controlled subscriptions and limited sales.23 In anticipation of Barr’s captions for the photographs, Amerika’s editor warned his counterpart at MoMA: We aren’t a political magazine and we don’t talk too directly about freedom, nor do we make invidious comparisons. I’m sure Mr. Barr won’t make any because his paintings say everything for him. The reader will know how much freedom the artists shown have had and will make his own comparisons with art in his own regimented world.24

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Figure 14.2 Alfred H. Barr, Jr. “Sculpture –​geometry, motion” in Amerika no. 47 (September 1960), pp. 56–​7.

One of Barr’s stories, entitled “Sculpture –​Geometry and Motion,” appeared in the Russian version of Amerika in September 1960 (see Figure 14.2). Photographs on its pages presented a wide range of sculptural styles in MoMA’s collection, allowing works to speak for themselves. Barr’s brief introduction to the photo essay recounted that as late as 1927 US customs officials denied entry to Constantin Brancusi’s Bird In Space (1928) (reproduced on the first page) refusing to recognize it as an artwork because it did not look like a bird.25 A year later an American court reversed its decision. “Since then, Barr stated, The Museum of Modern Art tirelessly fights for the right of every sculptor to create in the style he chooses, be it in the traditional style of Aristide Maillol (whose work River (1938–​43) is reproduced on the right side of the page), or in abstract forms preferred by his contemporaries.”26 Barr’s laconic statement was not confrontational, but spoke volumes to artists under regimes that suppressed their ability to make free creative choices. Barr’s goal in these gentle modes of advocacy was not to demonstrate the advantage of capitalism over socialism or of the United States over the Soviet Union. Rather, it was to bring information about modern art to larger audiences and to inspire artistic pluralism, which he knew was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the “philistines with political power”27 on either side of the Atlantic and could never be taken for granted. In 1957 Barr received an invitation from the Soviet Cultural Attaché, Tamara Mamedova, with whom he had maintained contact since his trip in 1956, asking him to come to the Soviet Union with lectures. After protracted negotiations, the trip

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200  Masha Chlenova was finally approved for 1959.28 On this third visit, Barr spent 21 days lecturing in Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi and Yerevan. On 11 June 1959 The New  York Times reported on one of Barr’s lectures in Moscow: Mr. Barr gave a two-​hour lecture on American art from its origins to the present day, but his emphasis was on contemporary abstractionist, expressionist, and experimentalist techniques. He showed slides of nearly 150 American paintings as well as special film clips [of Calder and Pollock]. … Mr. Barr’s demonstration was attended by about 100 Soviet artists, with youth strongly predominating … Mr. Barr’s slides introduced leading American painters and techniques to many young [Soviet] artists for the first time. Many of the pictures brought murmured expressions of approval or gasps of astonishment.29 Barr noted that this account was “flattering but less accurate then it should have been” and that “the experience was troubling.”30 He knew well that his audience consisted not only of young artists, but also of Soviet artistic establishment, including the director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, where the lecture took place, Aleksandr Zamoshkin, who some 20 years earlier was instrumental in trampling the Russian avant-​garde with accusations of formalism and whom Barr had met during the official negotiations in 1956.31 After Barr’s lecture, Zamoshkin stood up to publicly denigrate modernism and Barr snapped back in defense.32 The atmosphere at Barr’s lectures at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad was more relaxed; the large conference room was overflowing with people spilling out into the corridors, on the second evening even more than on the first. There was no doubt that Soviet artists and museum professionals were craving this kind of exposure. Thereafter Barr gave two lectures in Tbilisi and Yerevan, where he also showed a documentary about Jackson Pollock and an abstract film by Francis Thompson.33 Upon his return to Moscow, Soviet officials “severely admonished Barr for the tone of his lectures” but he didn’t bulge and continued un-​phased.34 Another important interlocutor for Barr was the art historian Andrei Chegodaev, who was completing the first major Soviet survey of American art at the time of Barr’s visit. In the introduction to his study, published in 1960, Chegodaev referred to his polemic with Barr about contemporary American art.35 During his stay in Moscow Barr met with numerous Soviet museum officials, curators and art historians, returned to the storage rooms at the Tretyakov Gallery to study works of the Russian avant-​garde and visited Costakis again. He also looked intently at the work of young Soviet artists, both at Costakis’ house and at exhibitions, visiting among others the Exhibition of Young Artists at the Central Park of Culture and Rest.36 Barr experienced this trip as less uptight and official and more connected to the Soviet people, who he felt had invited him to speak. He would later describe this three-​week visit as motivated by connections and friendship. Barr left Moscow at the end of June, just a month before the National American Exhibition opened in Sokolniki Park. During its six-​week run the exhibition was attended by 2.7  million Soviet citizens. Its arts section had a strong impact on the artistic scene in the USSR. During the Thaw from the mid-​1950s Soviet artists were discovering abstraction in their own cultural legacy through small-​scale but highly influential exhibitions of El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, organized by Nikolai Khardzhiev at the Mayakovsky Museum in Moscow between 1957 and 1965. The most active also saw works of the Russian avant-​garde in the apartment

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Figure 14.3 Visitors at the American National Exhibition. Sokolniki Park, Moscow (25 July –​ 4 September 1959). Viewers looking at Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral (1947) (right) and Grant Wood’s Parson Weems’ Fable (1939) (left).

of George Costakis. And the 1959 American Exhibition came as a further revelation (see Figures 14.3 and 14.4). It included traditional paintings by early twentieth-​ century American modernists, but also radical works of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Ibram Lassow. The effect of this exposure on Soviet artists was powerful. The artist Lidiia Masterkova passionately expressed the opinion of many of her peers:  “abstraction was complete freedom.”37 At that moment, Soviet artists’ commitment to abstraction or another expressive visual language had to be largely private, but it carried a strong charge of commitment to the freedom of expression, much of the same kind Barr and Goodrich sought to protect. Barr saw his role as bringing information and knowledge about Western art to artists, scholars and curators who he knew were hungry for it. Ever since his first trip to the USSR in 1927 he maintained his connections with colleagues with whom they shared a dedication to innovative art: wrote letters, sent catalogs, photographs and books and received information in return. He continued to do so after his trips of the 1950s.38 Barr was aware that Soviet-​American cultural relations required subtle diplomacy; any open confrontation could destroy their fragile balance. Then a scandal erupted that led to the closing of museums storages, the crackdown on many unofficial artists and a general atmosphere of suspicion among Soviet cultural authorities. On 1 September 1959 Barr met for lunch with the Harvard archeologist and journalist Alexander Marshack, who had been to the USSR in March.39 Marshack visited reserves at the Tretyakov Gallery and the Russian Museum in Leningrad, as well as George Costakis, to whom he introduced himself falsely as a nephew of the well-​known

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202  Masha Chlenova

Figure 14.4 Visitors at the American National Exhibition. Sokolniki Park, Moscow (25 July –​ 4 September 1959). Viewers examining Ibram Lassaw’s Galactic Cluster #1, (1953). Reproduced in Vladimir Kemenov, Protiv Abstraktsionizma; V Sporakh o Realizme (Leningrad: Khudozhniki RSFSR, 1969).

Soviet children’s writer Samuil Marshak. When the Greek collector received him in his Moscow apartment filled with art, Marshack showed him a stack of slides –​to Costakis’ astonishment Marshack had been allowed not only to enter but also to photograph Russian avant-​garde works in storage. Costakis warned him that this was a very big trust and he had to handle this material carefully to avoid confrontation. He allowed Marshack to photograph a few works by Zverev on his walls. Several months later, on 28 March 1960 the American LIFE magazine ran a scandalous article that showed a traditional painting of Lenin proclaiming the power of the Soviets in 1917 next to a tachiste self-​portrait by Zverev (see Figure 14.5). Captions (which, as Marshack later apologetically explained, were significantly dramatized by LIFE’s editors) were deliberately confrontational and thus predictably upset the balance of the fragile cultural relations. Barr learned about its repercussions both from Gray and from Costakis. Gray informed Barr that Costakis no longer allowed her to photograph works she was studying –​as the Soviet ministry of culture was growing impatient with his apartment being the center of the underground avant-​garde.40 Since Marshak’s article showed identifiable works and gave names, it had direct repercussions for the artists. In March 1961 Costakis wrote to Barr that “Marshak’s ‘atomic bomb’ still has some effect” and antagonized Russian officials against modern art in the USSR. “One thing that is clear, Costakis wrote, is that Mr. Marshak did a great injustice to friends, and helped the group of official artists, who were hoping that something would happen to allow them to renew the struggle against abstract art.”41 Cultural diplomacy was ultimately more effective than spectacular exposure.

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Traveler’s Tales  203

Figure 14.5 Alexander Marshack “The Art of Russia that Nobody Sees” LIFE Magazine (28 March 1960):  60–​61 Reproductions:  left page:  Visitors in the Russian Museum in front of Vladimir Serov’s Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power in 1917, 1954; right page: Anatoly Zverev’s Self-​Portrait, 1950s.

Following his trips to the Soviet Union Barr resumed his lecturing activities in the United States. His lectures drew on his recent first-​hand experiences of artistic life in the USSR and he also considered his three trips as a whole. One of the titles he gave his lectures was “Art in the USSR, Now and Thirty Years Ago –​A Traveler’s Tales.”42 Between his first visit as a graduate student in the winter of 1927–​28, his second official visit in 1956, which he described as “a MoMA expedition for cultural exchanges with an ambiguous status” and his third trip in 1959, when Barr felt he was “a guest of soviet society” –​an entire era of Soviet history had passed.43 Barr called another set of his lectures “Painting and Politics” and added “I suppose this talk might have been subtitled ‘Patterns of Philistine Power!’ ”44 Barr’s savvy cultural diplomacy was combined with a staunch dedication to the freedom of artistic expression, which he saw as an indispensable condition for radical modernism to emerge and thrive. While for 30  years Barr occupied an influential position in one of the most powerful institutions of modern art, his deep trust was in human connections based on shared values that could withstand ideological changes. As this case study aimed to show, Barr’s dedication to the language of modernism went beyond the political agendas of any one country or its ideological system. Historical memory is selective and the politics of history are a powerful force –​and while the US-​ Russian political and cultural relations continue to play themselves out with absurdity from one year to the next –​our responsibility toward an accurate historical account is

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204  Masha Chlenova predicated not only on the big picture, but also on the networks of individual agents, who continue to weave the strings that ultimately matter.

Notes 1 Standard revisionist accounts that take this position include Cockroft 1974, 39–​ 41; Guilbaut 1983 and Hills 2010, 251–​75. 2 See Kantor 2002, 89–​92, 101–​5, 117–​21. 3 Barr M. 1987, 32. 4 For a detailed account of this see Dickerman, “Abstraction in 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art” in 2012, 364–​9. 5 Barr Introduction, 1936, 18 (emphasis added). 6 Barr 1943, 3 (emphasis added). 7 Ibid.,  38–​9. 8 Ibid., 38 (emphasis added). 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Barr’s title refers to the phrase of the Republican Representative of Michigan, George A. Dondero, the main attacker on modern art under McCarthy. In June 1949 Dondero told the journalist Emily Genauer: Modern art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress. Art that does not portray our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government and those who create it and promote it are enemies. Genauer 1949, 89

1 Barr 1952, 22. 1 12 MoMA’s archives contain materials related to numerous lectures Barr gave in American museums and arts organizations. Some examples include “Art Under Nazi and Soviet Dictatorships,” delivered at MoMA in 1952 and in London in 1953; “Art Under the Dictatorships” at the Norton Gallery of Art in Palm Beach in 1951 and at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953; “Art Under Totalitarian Governments” at the American Federation of the Arts in New York in 1953; “Painting and Politics I & II: Patterns of Philistine Power” at a Symposium at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL; “Modern Art and Political Oppression” at Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC in 1955. Alfred H.  Barr Jr. Papers [AAA: 3157]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY. 13 Barr 1956, 184. 14 Ibid., 188. 15 In 1959, in a letter to Porter McCray, MoMA’s Director of International Program, written shortly after his third trip to the USSR, Barr made an interesting analogy between Soviet and American institutional stand-​offs. He wrote about “a certain strain between the [Soviet] government (i.e. Ministry of Culture) and the ‘unofficial’ Union (ex-​VOKS) [Society for Cooperation with Foreign Countries]” as having “a certain parallel” with the stand-​off between MoMA and the State Department. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Letter to Porter McCray, 9–​12 July 1959, IC/​IP V.F.18 and AHB [AAA: 3158; 555–​8]. MoMA Archives, NY. 16 For details see Mikkonen 2013, 57–​76. 17 Qtd. in Marquis 1989, 303. 18 On Barr’s visit to Costakis in 1956 and his appreciation of Zverev’s work see Rakitin ed. 2015,  150–​4. 19 Barr’s letters to both parties are diplomatic and full of cautious practical advice for avoiding trouble with Soviet authorities. AHB [AAA: 3158; 562–​5]. MoMA Archives, NY.

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Traveler’s Tales  205 20 International Council and International Program Records, I.B.169. MoMA Archives, NY. For a detailed account of the controversy surrounding this exhibition see Kushner 2002,  6–​26. 21 IC/​IP, I.B.169. MoMA Archives, NY. 22 Ibid. 23 Peet 1951, 17–​20 and n.a. 1956. 24 Letter to Barr from Ruth Adams, Picture Editor, America Illustrated. AHB [AAA: 3261; 1160]. MoMA Archives, NY. 25 The version of Bird in Space in MoMA’s collection, which is reproduced in Amerika is dated 1928. The caption gives an incorrect date of 1919. The customs scandal involved an earlier version of this sculpture, dated 1926, now in the collection of Seattle Museum of Art. 26 Barr 1960, 56. Barr’s second article, dedicated to MoMA’s collection of paintings and entitled “Painting from Gauguin to Polloc,” 1961, 25–​35. It included color reproductions of 23 modernist works from MoMA’s collection. 27 See note 5. 28 Mamedova navigated complex diplomatic waters for over two years in order to bring Barr back to the USSR with lectures, accompanied by his wife Marga. On 12 January 1959 the invitation was confirmed by Lidia Kislova, the head of the American Department of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Exchange with Foreign Countries, which had replaced VOKS in 1957. “Soviet artists and people of arts will be glad to meet you and to listen to your lectures on American art,” Kislova wrote. “The idea of bringing slides and films is really excellent. We shall certainly be glad to help you know more about life and art in our country and to arrange your visits to the Soviet museums.” AHB [AAA: 3158; 335, 365–​8]. MoMA Archives, NY. 29 n.a. 1959, 3. 30 Barr letter to Porter McCrary, July 1959. AHB [AAA: 3158; 555–​8]. MoMA Archives, NY. 31 Zamoshkin had visited the US in the Fall of 1956 together with Polikarp Lebedev, Director of the Tretyakov Gallery, as part of the negotiations for a possible exchange of exhibitions. In his trip report entitled “Once more about what I  have seen in America” Zamoshkin expresses his admiration for American museums and hopes for a fruitful collaboration. However, his optimism did not extend to modern art, as the Soviets insisted on showing Socialist Realism in the U.S., while Barr and his colleagues asked for 19th century Russian realism and French modern painters from Soviet museum collections. Mention of the Russian avant-​garde was out of the question at that point. AHB [AAA:  3147; 488–​93]. MoMA Archives, NY. 32 Their exchange is reported briefly in the NY Times article cited in note 29. In her account, Marga Barr reported that she and Alfred had to rush for the jet to Leningrad right after the three-​hour lecture and didn’t have a chance to get the audience’s reaction. She suspected “that the audience with some few exceptions was poorly selected and only vaguely interested.” Marga Barr, Letter to T., June 22, 1959 Marga S. Barr Papers. III.F.54. MoMA Archives, NY. 33 Marga Barr relates her dialog in French with “a wonderfully keen scholar” in Tbilisi who took Barrs to churches during the day and came to the film screening in the evening. “Oh? You are here?” Mrs Barr asked. “Of course, he said, I have to see this modern art, since here we don’t even know what it is.” MSB, III.F.54. MoMA Archives, NY. 34 Jones 1978, 56. A long-​time curator at MoMA, Jones worked with Barr in the 1950s. 35 Chegodaev 1960, 6.  Despite his critical take on American “formalism,” Chegodaev described its development at some length. Barr kept a copy of this book in his archives. 36 Barr’s diary from this 1959 visit is very concise, almost exclusively listing local names and addresses. AHB [AAA: 3261; 0024-​0102]. MoMA Archives, NY. 37 Qtd. in Sharp 2007, 87.

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206  Masha Chlenova 38 Barr’s archives preserve scores of materials on Russian art and culture he carefully collected over the years:  press clippings, books, catalogs and holiday cards he received from his numerous contacts in the U.S.S.R. 39 Conversation with Alexander Marshack, Sept. 1, 1959. AHB [AAA: 3258; 283]. MoMA Archives, NY. 40 Gray’s letter to Barr, April 19, 1960. AHB [AAA: 3157; 458]. MoMA Archives, NY. 41 George Costakis letter to Barr, March 29, 1961. AHB [AAA: 3157; 409]. MoMA Archives, NY. On the basis of the story of Marshack’s visit, Russian investigative journalist Mikhail Zolotonosov has argued that permission given to Marshack to photograph avant-​ garde works in museum storages was a deliberate provocation sanctioned by the KGB. Zolotonosov, Diversant Marshak i drugie. 42 Lecture given at “The Art in Art Education” conference organized by the National Committee on Art Education at MoMA in May 1960. AHB [AAA:  3157; 0431-​0432]. MoMA Archives, NY. 43 Ibid., 0434. 44 Lectures at the Sarasota Eighth Annual Art Symposium at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida delivered in April 1955. AHB [AAA: 3157; finding aid and 813]. MoMA Archives, NY.

Bibliography n.a. 1972. “Camilla Gray Prokofiev, Historian of Russian Art” The New York Times, January 26: 40. n.a. 1959. “U.S. Abstract Art Arouses Russians; Some at Moscow Showing Say ‘Horrible,’ but More Call Works ‘Interesting’ The New York Times, 11 June: 3. n.a. 1956. “Draft of Letter to Party Organizations throughout the USSR concerning the dissemination of the magazine Amerika in the USSR” (August 15) The Bukovsky Archive [Accessed November 2019] https://​bukovsky-​archive.com/​2017/​06/​04/​15-​august-​1956-​st-​192/​ Barr Jr., Alfred H. 1961. “Zhivopis’ ot Gogena do Polloka. Mekka sovremennogo iskusstva” Amerika no. 61: 25–​35. _​_​_​_​_​. 1960. “Skul’ptura –​Geometriia i Dvizhenie. Mekka sovremennogo iskusstva” Amerika no. 47: 56–​61. _​_​_​_​_​. 1956. “Artistic Freedom” in Letters to the editor. College Art Journal vol. 15, no.3 Spring: 184–​8. _​_​_​_​_​. 1952. “Is Modern Art Communistic?” The New  York Times, Sunday Magazine December 14: 22–​3,  28–​30. _​_​_​_​_​. 1943. What is Modern Painting? New York: The Museum of Modern Art. _​_​_​_​_​. 1936. Cubism and Abstract Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Barr, Margaret S. 1987. “Our Campaigns:  Alfred H.  Barr Jr. and the Museum of Modern Art: A Biographical Chronicle of the Years 1930–​1944,” The New Criterion, special summer issue: 23–​74. Bishop, Scott et al. 2012. Art Interrupted: Advancing American Art and the Politics of Cultural Democracy. Athens, GA: Georgia Museum of Art. Chegodaev, Andrei D. 1960. Iskusstvo Soedinennykh Shtatov Ameriki: ot voiny za nezavisimost’ do nashikh dnei. Moskva: Iskusstvo. Cockroft, Eva. 1974. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War.” Artforum vol. 15, no. 10, June: 39–​41. Dickerman, Leah. 2012. Inventing Abstraction, 1910–​1925:  How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. NY: MoMA. Genauer, Emily. 1949. “Still Life with Red Herring.” Harper’s Magazine, September 1: 89. Guilbaut, Serge. 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Traveler’s Tales  207 Hills, Patricia. 2010. “‘Truth, Freedom, Perfection’: Alfred Barr’s What is Modern Painting? as Cold War Rhetoric.” In Pressing the Fight:  Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War. Edited by Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, 251–​ 75. Amherst, MA:  University of Massachusetts Press. Jones, Elizabeth. 1978. “A Note on Barr’s Contribution to the Scholarship of Soviet Art” October 7, Winter: 56. Kantor, Sybil Gordon. 2002. Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kushner, Marilyn S. 2002. “Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959:  Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy” Journal of Cold War Studies 4:1, Winter: 6–​26. Marquis, Alice G. 1989. Alfred H.  Barr Jr. Missionary of the Modern. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books. Marshack, Alexander. 1960. “The Art of Russia that Nobody Sees” in LIFE Magazine, March 28: 60–​71. Mikkonen, Simo. 2013. “Soviet-​American Art Exchanges during the Thaw: from Bold Openings to Hasty Retreats.” In Art and Political Reality. Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia. Edited Sirje Helme, 57–​76. Tallinn: KuMu. Peet, Creighton. 1951. “Russian ‘Amerika,’ a Magazine About U.S. for Soviet Citizens” College Art Journal 11: 1: 17–​20. Rakitin, Vasilii ed. 2015. Georgii Kostaki, Kollektsioner. Moskva: Iskusstvo. Sharp, Jane. 2007. “Abstract Expressionism as a Model of ‘Contemporary Art’ in the Soviet Union.” In Abstract Expressionism: The International Context. Edited by Joan Marter, 82–​ 98. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP. Tobias, Jennifer. 2012. The Museum of Modern Art’s ‘What is Modern’ Series, 1938–​1969. PhD Diss., City University of New York. Zolotonosov, Mikhail N. 2018. Diversant Marshak i drugie: TsRU, KGB i russkii avangard. St. Petersburg: Mir.

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15  Displaying Whose Modernity? The Bardis and the Museum of Art of São Paulo Camila Maroja

In 2015, after an almost 20-​year hiatus, the Museu de arte de São Paulo (Museum of Art of São Paulo, MASP) reinstalled the celebrated crystal easel display designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi (see Figure 15.1). Composed of artworks attached to vertical slabs of glass anchored by blocks of concrete, the arrangement produces the impression that the whole display in the Pinacoteca (picture gallery) is floating, giving visitors an unencumbered view of its masterpieces. According to the museum’s current director, Adriano Pedrosa, the “decolonizing potential” of the crystal easels, combined with the gallery’s open floor plan, eliminates “cultural snobbery” and desacralizes the art object. As such, he argued, the easels offer “an alternative to the classical exhibition design of exhibitions of fine art” and represent “a new way of displaying and articulating the collection, contesting the traditional museology and history of art.”1 Originally unveiled on the occasion of the inauguration of MASP’s new building in 1968, the easel arrangement was intended to converse with the museum’s open architecture  –​the building is famous for its glass walls that, as Pedrosa noted, create a continuum between its quiet interior and frenetic urban exterior.2 If the restoration of the display in the new millennium was mobilized to illustrate the museum’s new agenda of decolonization, in the late 1960s it reflected the curatorial rationale of designer Bo Bardi’s husband and first director of the MASP, the journalist and art dealer Pietro Maria Bardi –​a rationale based on art historical principles he had acquired along with the local material culture in his native Italy. Drawing on the Bardi’s writing and curatorial choices for MASP, this examination of Pietro Maria Bardi’s efforts to create a modern art narrative for Brazil argues that, by selectively mixing the local vernacular and European thought, he crafted a narrative of modernism in Brazil based on a Western historiography of art history. When the Italian couple arrived in Brazil in 1946, Bardi was promptly invited by media mogul Assis Chateaubriand to create MASP.3 By then, he had already directed the Galleria di Roma (where he was appointed by Benito Mussolini himself) and fiercely defended modern Italian architecture, known as rationalism, in the magazines Belvedere and Quadrante. Drawing upon his international network and a buyer’s market in the aftermath of the World War II, Bardi soon amassed the impressive collection of Western masterpieces for which MASP is still known today. The museum, whose opening in 1947 predated the famous São Paulo Biennial by four years, was intended by its founders to educate the local audience, and to this end, Bardi offered seminars, organized publications and trained museum docents to be conversant with what Bardi described as a universal art history. As might be predicted by his Italian origins and training, Bardi’s publications and exhibitions adhered to the

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  209

Figure 15.1 View of the exhibition Acervo em Transformação, which displayed Lina Bo Bardi’s famous crystal easel arrangement for the Pinacoteca, 2015. Photo:  Eduardo Ortega. MASP Research Center.

conventional tenets of Western art history, mixing diverse theoretical influences from Hegel to Fascist ideology. As a result, Bardi’s curatorial project reflected a chronological division according to national schools of art, a firm belief that race and national character directly influenced culture, and a commitment to a progressive art history marked by periods of ascent and decline of artistic styles. Bardi also supported the notion of genius loci: the belief that it was through the vernacular, or local form and materials, that an artwork could attain universality. This theoretical framework was the foundation of his famous 1947 series of lectures intended to train the São Paulo museum staff and later gathered in the book Pequena História da Arte (Short History of Art), first published in Brazil in 1958.4 Upon his arrival in São Paulo, Bardi faced the dual task of amassing MASP’s collection and educating both the general public and museum staff in a city still lacking in cultural resources. He quickly recruited his wife, an architect trained in Rome who had worked in Milan as a practicing designer and for famous magazines such as Domus, to help him with the exhibition displays.5 The Bardis would work closely together until Bo Bardi’s death in 1992, mutually influencing each other’s notions of exhibition design, architecture and curatorship. In the Brazilian context of the late 1940s, the MASP represented what Bo Bardi termed a formative experience dedicated to a mass audience.6 During its early years in a provisional commercial building in São Paulo’s downtown, the museum was divided into three exhibition areas:  Exposição Didática (Didactic Exhibition), Vitrine das Formas (Window of Forms) and Pinacoteca.7 All the displays were meant to provoke a shock reaction from the public, sparking curiosity and an enlightened aesthetic reaction.8 To achieve this positive shock, Bo Bardi created educational panels with labels and images for the Exposição Didática section and windows that accommodated material culture, design objects and artworks side by side for the Vitrine das Formas display. In the Pinacoteca section, she opted to remove the paintings from their traditional place on museum walls and instead attach them to aluminum tubes, directly evoking Bardi’s previous curatorial experience at the Galleria di Roma, where he had also presented

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210  Camila Maroja

Figure 15.2 View of the picture gallery exhibition area at MASP’s first venue with Pietro Maria Bardi in the foreground, 1947. Unknown photographer. MASP Research Center.

freestanding paintings (see Figure  15.2). This display also informed the crystal easel arrangement that Bo Bardi would use in the new museum building, which she completed in 1968.9 The MASP’s new modernist headquarters with the crystal easel display opened to the public in 1969 on the major thoroughfare of Paulista Avenue. The Italian architect had come to view her exhibition design not simply as an extension of the couple’s previous formal experiences but as part of a populist mode of pedagogy: As the one responsible for the Museum’s design and for designing the crystal easel (because it’s an easel and a painting is born in the air, on an easel) with didactic panels to display the paintings, I wanted to clarify that in designing the Museum it was my intention to destroy the aura that always surrounds a museum, to present the work of art as work, as a prophecy of work at everyone’s reach. To revitalize a painting, liberating it from the role of mummy.10 In other words, Bo Bardi considered the crystal easels a didactic component crucial to MASP’s mission as a popular museum open to everyone.11 When Pedrosa acclaimed the decolonial potential of the display in 2015, therefore, he was reaffirming Bo Bardi’s own description of the display as a form of radical pedagogy (see Figure 15.3).12

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  211

Figure 15.3 View of the picture gallery exhibition area at MASP on Avenida Paulista, c.1969. Unknown photographer. MASP Research Center.

In 1968, as in the museum today, the crystal easels occupied the entirety of MASP’s top floor. Each painting was displayed on the front of the glass on which it was mounted; from the back, visitors could view the artwork’s label, which included biographical information and reproductions of other works by the same master. This complementary information came mostly from art publications, including the Gênios da Pintura (Genius of Painting) book series that Bardi supervised in Brazil following the 1967 Italian edition published by Fratelli Fabbri.13 This book series, which was distributed at newspaper stands and aimed at the general public, comprised separately purchased monographs on individual artists that could be bound into thematic volumes, each with a preface that was frequently written by Bardi himself. This successful initiative enjoyed several revised editions. The format was simple: each week the reader would buy a fascicle surveying the work of a painter, which consisted of an introduction with detailed biographical and historiographical information followed by several colored plates of representative artworks by that artist. Readers were expected to bind these into volumes according to the Western history of styles: the first volume, Do Gótico à Renascença (From Gothic to Renaissance), was followed by Da Renascença ao Maneirismo (From Renaissance to Mannerism) and subsequently by Do Maneirismo ao Barroco (From Mannerism to Baroque), and so on. Only the penultimate volume, Modern Painters, included Latin American artists such as Diego Rivera and Cândido Portinari. The last volume, launched in 1973, was entirely dedicated to local arts: the supposedly encyclopedic Pintura no Brasil (Painting in Brazil).

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212  Camila Maroja Like the bound volumes, the curatorial arrangement of the crystal easels encourages visitors to take a stylistic view of the art collection.14 On the first row of the Pinacoteca, Bardi placed works by the Italian Gothics, followed by Renaissance masters, and then by modern painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. When works by Latin American painters such as Rivera, Lasar Segall and Portinari entered the MASP collection, mostly through donations, they joined those of the other modern painters at the back of the gallery.15 This later addition of modern local artists thus mirrors Bardi’s incorporation of twentieth-​century Latin American painters into the Western narrative of Gênios da Pintura. As visitors walk between the paintings, their all-​inclusive view of the Pinacoteca allows them to make direct comparisons among the works and thus presumably to construct their own narrative of how those are related to one another. But because the display follows a stylistic and chronological order in which works from a given artistic school appear close to one another and older works appear in the foreground, those comparisons inevitably embody those conventional art movements and that chronology. The overall result is a progressive narrative of Western art history that reflects Bardi’s art historiographical biases, which, as in the Gênios da Pintura collection, were inseparable from his Eurocentric background even as he mobilized them to construct a Brazilian narrative of modern art. The comparison of images facilitated by the open views of the Pinacoteca’s crystal easel display thus reflected Bardi’s conviction that to fully appreciate an artwork requires connecting it historically to others. In Pequena História da Arte, he explained that to “visualize one artwork mean[t]‌to justify it, to associate it to other works, to highlight its value and to put it into art’s patrimony.”16 Bardi, therefore, believed that understanding an isolated artwork within the framework of art’s universal patrimony or within a stylistic or chronological arrangement did not necessarily imply a hierarchy. Instead, he argued, such comparisons merely reveal the continuation rather than the superiority of past forms:  “nostalgic people who lament the old forms … are idiots who cannot understand that forms evolve and who cannot see the column in a pilotis or a tube of steel.”17 To support this nonhierarchical view of different artworks, he invoked a literal genius loci: “It is true that the local spirit remains for the totality of time in the same place: the spirit does not disappear or annul itself, but continues.”18 Bardi’s explanation of the persistence of forms constituted a passionate defense of vernacular modern form as a continuation of a classical legacy –​a supposedly inclusive approach that nonetheless represents an Eurocentric view of art. This was not the first time that Bardi had promoted the cultural importance of the continuation of vernacular forms as part of a universal legacy to a South American audience. In 1933 he had made a similar visual argument in his exhibition Mostra dell’archittetura italiana d’oggi (Exhibition of Italian Architecture Today), which was displayed in Buenos Aires, Argentina.19 This exhibition, comprising 36 photomontaged plates, had the dual goal of promoting modern Italian architecture and engaging the large Italian diasporic community in Buenos Aires as part of the Fascist regime’s attempt to expand its international influence through Italian emigres.20 Both aims were fully aligned with Mussolini’s political program and that of the magazine Quadrante, the short-​lived cultural journal cofounded by Bardi that promoted rationalism in Fascist Italy.21 The 1933 photomontages also advanced Bardi’s agenda of promoting “true” Italian architecture by superimposing historical and modern monuments to argue that both represented local vernacular architecture.

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  213 In one plate, for example, Bardi juxtaposed the modern Novocomum building (1927–​ 1928) by Giuseppe Terragni in Como with that city’s gothic cathedral with a baroque dome to make the point that the great Italian tradition lingered on, preserving its genius loci and producing authentic artworks.22 For Bardi, the argument that genuine art with universal value was distinguished by its expression of a local character or spirit was an easy one to make for Italian art, especially while the Fascist regime was actively claiming a direct lineage between its modern expressions with the traditions of imperial and Papal Rome.23 But how could this model be imported to Brazil? What spirit characterized modern Brazilian artworks’ genius loci and thereby its claim to universal artistic value? In 1970 Bardi attempted to answer these questions in Profile of the New Brazilian Art, which he described as a “survey of the best that Brazil is producing on the field of arts,”24 In this catalogue, published in English and aimed at presenting Brazilian art abroad, Bardi divided Brazil’s local arts into three main categories: indigenous art, popular art of the countryside and civilized art. Although vastly different, all three, he claimed, were representative of Brazilian art. Indigenous art, composed mostly of pottery and featherwork, had been largely produced for tourists “since the penetration of white men,” thereby running the risk of losing its authenticity, unlike popular art, such as woodcuts from the Northeastern of Brazil, which were made for local consumption and, according to the Bardis, not contingent on the demands of the art market.25 For the Bardis, therefore, the popular art we might refer today as outsider art deserved a place inside the museum because it was representative of Brazil’s genius loci and therefore of its people. The last category, civilized art made by professional artists, ran the risk of being derivative to meet the expectations of the art world. Therefore, although all three art forms could lay some claim to genuine localism (and thus potentially to universality), each also ran the risk of losing authenticity characterized by the use of vernacular forms. Quoting an earlier claim made by his wife, Bardi argued that Brazil will have to become either a culturally autonomous country, built on its own foundations, or an ungenuine country, with a pseudo-​ culture copied from imported and unsuitable systems, a sham version of other countries’ cultures; a country in a position of taking an active part in the universal concert of cultures, or a country hankering after other surroundings, regions, and climates.26 Because the Bardis’ viewed authenticity as directly connected to the adoption of local vernacular rather than international tastes or styles, they believed that all three types of art needed to be true to its genius loci to become culturally autonomous and find its place in “the universal concert of cultures.” This conceptualization of the universal as tied to vernacular styles and materials that had developed in the country’s diverse environments was again one they had derived from the Italian experience during Fascism, when the new state had deployed culture to help resolve concerns about localism and national identity prompted by historical tensions between northern and southern Italy.27 Beyond this Italian influence, the Bardis’ argument that Brazil must become culturally autonomous if it was to produce original art espoused a problematic notion of cultural purity, one that was not only historically suspect, but also presumably immune to any influence exerted by the couple’s institutional collecting and curatorial

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214  Camila Maroja agendas. Bo Bardi’s above-​quoted notion of cultural authenticity, originally written for a 1961 exhibition of the ceramist Francisco Brennand, directly reflected her experience as a museum director in the Northeast of Brazil, a destitute region that earlier twentieth-​century intellectuals such as Euclydes da Cunha, Gilberto Freyre and Roger Bastide had construed as the locus of national authenticity.28 While living in the city of Salvador, Bo Bardi’s romantic vision of a rustic, uncontaminated popular culture had been further cemented by her directorship of the Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia (Museum of Popular Art, MAP) and the Museu de Arte Popular (Museum of Popular Art, MAP).29 In these institutions, she developed her idea of the museum as a “direct popular experiment,” conceiving of both institutions as cultural initiatives intended to dynamize the local artistic scene and promote rural, popular Brazilian art.30 In later interviews, Bo Bardi claimed that finding “the authentic Brazil, not the one of the European immigrants” in Bahia had reoriented her vision of Brazilianity and made her “a different person.”31 Although she was removed from the directorship and returned to São Paulo after the military coup of 1964, she transported that experience with the local material culture to her work at MASP, where it also profoundly influenced the museum’s institutional function and the contextualization and design of its exhibitions. For the public inauguration of MASP’s new headquarters in 1969, the permanent crystal easels display in the picture gallery presented what Bardi referred to as civilized art, while the other two categories were displayed in a temporary exhibition titled A Mão do Povo Brasileiro (The hand of the Brazilian people) (see Figure 15.4).32 This show, organized by Bo Bardi, gathered local handicrafts such as featherwork, paper flowers, iron tools, oil lamps made of appropriated materials, quilts, hammocks, earthenware pots and ex-​votos under the label of “popular art,” which she defined as at “the farthest end of what is usually called Art for Art’s Sake” and, by stressing its utilitarian aspects, associated with design.33 That Bardi’s 1970 tripartite formulation of Brazilian art had clearly been informed by conventional tenets of Western art history and his previous Fascist experience in Italy as well as by his wife’s vision of Brazil was clear from the inclusion of A Mão do Povo Brasileiro in the opening of MASP. This exhibition officially enlarged the curatorial program of the new MASP to include local material culture and expanded its collection to accommodate artistic production that had previously been largely disregarded by most Brazilian art institutions.

Figure 15.4 View of the restaging of the exhibition A Mão do Povo Brasileiro 1969/​2016, 2016. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. MASP Research Center.

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  215 Because the artworks displayed in A Mão do Povo Brasileiro did not easily adhere to Western parameters of art, they invited the public to question the role of the museum in shaping the artistic canon and thereby materialized Bo Bardi’s desire to destroy the authoritative aura that tends to surround museums and to present works of art as within everyone’s reach. In his Profile of the New Brazilian Art, Bardi theorized that indigenous and popular art are legitimately national, based on the implied premise (also underlying his claims regarding Italian architecture) that culture is a direct product of race.34 To present “civilized art” as an authentic Brazilian expression, however, Bardi needed to assure his readers that it, too, was autonomous and local. In his chapter on the Brazilian art falling into this category, titled “Approach to Modernity,” Bardi thus glossed over the art of the colonial period and largely dismissed the academic and neoclassical art of the nineteenth-​century as spurious and derivative. Instead, he concentrated his narrative on the 1920s and the avant-​garde that had been so crucial to his own education in Italy. To that end, he argued that “The Brazilians, like all Americans for that matter, realized, after periods of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism, that the world had taken new ways of thinking, and that an unending series of isms were on their way.”35 To explain how this unending series of isms inspired by European movements was representative of Brazil’s genius loci, he emphasized that artists must not merely mimic but adapt these movements to their own local situation in order to avoid “mutual contamination, dangerous contiguity, or alienation of autonomous values.”36 To contend that such adaptions of Europeanisms by Brazilian artists were possible without losing authenticity, Bardi cited two artists, Mário de Andrade and Heitor Villa-​Lobos, as representing “the national spirit, enthusiastic in its self-​confidence, a certain self-​acquired taste, ingenuity, and genuineness.”37 Although they were not visual artists but, respectively, a poet and a musician, those arts had also been central to the Futurist movement in Italy. Both artists, whom Bardi described as “adherents of primitivism,” had also participated in São Paulo’s famed 1922 avant-​garde soiree known as Semana de arte moderna (Week of Modern Art), where for three days, and to the horror of the conservative São Paulo elite, Brazilian intellectuals had performed concerts, read poetry and exhibited paintings.38 Although the event had been a notorious fiasco rejected by the public, the audience and the press, it nonetheless had a continuing symbolic importance for the local intelligentsia, who considered it the birth of a modern and autonomous national art.39 By describing the 1922 Semana de arte moderna as “somewhat in the fashion of Marinetti’s ‘Futurist evenings’ ” and as the founding of Brazilian modernism and the end of derivativeness in the country’s fine arts,40 Bardi thus managed to produce a narrative of Brazilian modernism that was both easily commensurable with European modernity and accepted as local by the Brazilian intelligentsia eager to be a part of that modernity. The Semana de arte moderna was also highlighted in the Pintura no Brasil volume in the series Gênios da Pintura, which described the participants with the same words that Bardi had elsewhere used to describe their European peers: “the group of pioneers, [d]‌aring to propose revolutionary solutions, gave a mortal wound in the old academicism.”41 Again, this avant-​garde event was cited as distinctively Brazilian, providing artists with a model for generating authentic Brazilian art after “four centuries of shy obedience to artistic models imported from Europe.”42 In his writings about modern Brazilian painting, Bardi thus construed a Brazilian modern art narrative based on European notions of the genius loci, the avant-​garde

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216  Camila Maroja and originality that reflected the Western model of modernity and art history. Together, this literature and the MASP’s original crystal easel display, which integrated a few local modernists (including painter Anita Malfatti and Di Cavalcanti, both of whom participated in the 1922 Semana de arte moderna) into its larger survey of Western art, made it possible to easily insert Brazilian modernist artworks into Bardi’s “universal” narrative of art and still be viewed as distinctively national.

Notes 1 Pedrosa 2015, 24. For a critique of the restaging of the display, see Moura 2017. 2 The MASP was inaugurated during the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1968 but was opened to the public in 1969. 3 Although the Bardis described their decision to move to South America as a search for adventure, it was probably due to the economic conditions and the demise of Fascism in Italy at the end of the war. In that context, South America represented both a new beginning and new economic opportunities. See Tentori 2002, 71. For Bardi’s narrative, Bardi 1992, 6. 4 Bardi 1992. 5 The collaboration of Pietro Maria Bardi and Lina Bo Bardi was not always formalized or documented, due to the parochial Paulista art environment of the late 1940s. It is sometimes difficult, then, to trace some of the collaborations or determine how instrumental she was in many of her husband’s decisions for the MASP. 6 In the first issue of Habitat, an architecture magazine Bo Bardi started in Brazil with her husband, she stated that MASP’s mission was to educate a mass audience. See Bo Bardi 1950, 17. About Habitat, see Braschi n.d. 7 The MASP had two venues, the MASP 7 de Abril (1947–​1957), located downtown in the 7 de Abril Street, and the MASP Avenida Paulista (1968–​Present) in its present location at the Paulista Avenue. It was in this later venue that the Bardis arranged the celebrated crystal easel display. 8 Bo Bardi 1950, 17. 9 For more on the pedagogical aspect of MASP’s early years and its exhibitions’ displays, see Espada 2018. 10 I am here using the translation available in de Oliveira 2015, 94. Originally printed in Bo Bardi 1970. 11 For more on the relationship of the crystal easels and the Bardis’ European training, see Anelli 2015, 51–​55. 12 For the exhibition Acervo em Transformação (MASP, 11 December 2015–​), Pedrosa wrote in the wall label located inside the Pinacoteca, The return of the easels is not a fetishistic or nostalgic gesture in regard to what has become an iconic exhibition display device, but should rather be understood as part of a programmatic revision of Bo Bardi’s spatial and conceptual contributions to museum practice. Pedrosa 2015(b)

13 During my visits to the MASP archives in June 2016, I  found excerpts from Gênios da Pintura that had been cut by Bardi to be attached on the back of the crystal easels as didactical material. The librarian Ivani di Grazia Costa, who had worked under Pietro Maria Bardi since the 1980s, assured me that this had been a common practice. 14 Style was an important concept for Bardi, whose conception of aesthetics and art history had been influenced by German aesthetics. In his 1958 book, he defined style as “the ensemble of long-​lasting elements that are common to a body of works; hence the style of

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  217 an era, of a people, of an artist” Bardi 1990, 8. All translations from Portuguese, unless otherwise stated, are mine. 15 MASP’s founder, Assis Chateaubriand, had made clear to Bardi that the museum should concentrate on collecting European paintings. Thus, most of the Brazilian pieces entered the collection through donations, such as Anita Malfatti’s work A Estudante (1915–​1916). One exception is the artworks by Cândido Portinari that Chateaubriand had collected to decorate the auditorium of his radio station, Radio Tupi, and later donated to the museum. 16 Bardi 1990, 11–​12. 17 Ibid., 25. 18 Ibid. 19 Bardi had intended to send the exhibition to Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and North America, but the show was only staged in Argentina. Nevertheless, it was during this occasion that the Italian art historian had his first contact with Brazil, as he stopped in São Paulo on his way to Buenos Aires. 20 The exhibition was inaugurated at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It received official Italian patronage, as it was sponsored by the Ministero degli Esteri; that the catalogue was written in Italian and English and did not include a Spanish translation makes explicit the show’s favored audience. See Bardi 1933. 21 For a view of Quadrante and its ties to Fascist cultural policies, see Rifkind, “Pietro Maria Bardi, Quadrante, and the Architecture of Fascist Italy.” The 1933 exhibition featured several projects by architects who were part of the Quadrante circle and was amply promoted in the magazine, which published photos of projects included in the show in subsequent issues. Four panels from the exhibition were also reproduced in the magazine. See Rifkind 2014, 81. 22 n.a. 1933, 11. 23 As Schnapp notes, fascism’s association with Italy’s historical past did not preclude modernity or a utopian vision of the future. Paradoxically, it left unresolved the “balance between traditionalism and avant-​gardism, conservation and innovation, populism and elitism, nationalism and internationalism that should characterize fascist future.” Schnapp 2008, 45. 24 In addition to the first three chapters, which corresponded to Bardi’s tripartite structure (“Indian Art,” “Popular Art” and “The Approach to Modernity”), the remaining chapters largely followed Bardi’s particular interests:  “The New Architecture,” “Brasilia and the New Architecture,” “Sculpture,” “Trends in Painting” and “Mass Communication.” Bardi sent copies of the book to major art museums in the Northern hemisphere in an attempt to promote both Brazil and MASP. Bardi 1970, 5. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 13. 27 About the importance of Italian vernacular for architecture and its relationship to Fascism, see Sabatino 2010. 28 These authors wrote classic books about the region –​Os Sertões (1902), Nordeste (1937) and Brasil, terra de contrastes (1959), respectively –​which helped ideologically construct the Northeast as an intrinsically rebellious, rural place, a natural home to popular art. This characterization was further promoted in the 1960s by leftist intellectuals, such as the director Glauber Rocha and the musician Caetano Veloso, both of whom were close to Bo Bardi. See, Risério 2016. 29 Invited to teach architecture theory in the University of Bahia in 1958, Bo Bardi stayed in Salvador to serve as the first director of MAMB (which opened in 1960) and of MAP (which opened in 1963). 30 Bo Bardi 1994, 3. 31 I am using the translation available in de Oliveira 2015, 93.

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218  Camila Maroja 32 About this exhibition, see Pedrosa and Toledo, A Mão do Povo Brasileiro. Together with the crystal easel display, Pedrosa also presented a restaging of A Mão do Povo Brasileiro, underscoring Lina Bo Bardi’s impact on MASP. 33 Bo Bardi 1994, 3. 34 Bardi wrote that “the art of the common people, developed during four centuries of immigration from both Europe and Africa, with the resulting mixture of races, … also amounts to what is practically a native culture in itself.” In this assertion, Bardi subscribes to the idea that miscegenation constituted the “true” Brazil, a concept dear to the local intelligentsia since the end of the nineteenth century. See Bardi 1970, 21. On miscegenation in Brazil, see Schwarcz 1999. 35 Bo Bardi 1970, 23. By stressing the innovative spirit of the main European vanguard movements, Bardi was being faithful to his youthful admiration of the Futurists. During Mussolini’s regime, an older Bardi continued to praise the avant-​garde, now for opposing Italian pacifist bourgeois taste. See Bardi 1930, 22. 36 Bardi 1970, 23. 37 Ibid. 38 The impact of the Semana in Brazil, which was organized chiefly by the painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and the poet Mário de Andrade, can be compared to that of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show), held in New  York City in 1913. The public responded to the radicalism of the pieces presented by, for example, pelting Villa-​Lobos with tomatoes. Cf. Amaral 1998, 55. 39 A detailed account of the Semana appeared in 1939 in the magazine RASM, which was published in the occasion of the third edition of the Salão de Maio (May Salon) in São Paulo. See (RASM 1939). 40 “Nevertheless, the Week was the klaxon call that sounded the advance toward the quest of a new culture.” Bardi 1970, 24. 41 n.a. 1985, 5. 42 Ibid.

Bibliography Amaral, Aracy. 1998. Artes Plásticas na Semana de 22. São Paulo: Editora 34. Anelli, Renato. 2015. “The Origins and Topicality of MASP’s Transparence.” In Concreto e Cristal:  O acervo do MASP nos cavaletes de Lina Bo Bardi. Edited by Adriano Pedrosa et al., 44–​55. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó. Bardi, P. M. 1992. História do MASP. São Paulo: Instituto Quadrante. _​_​_​_​_​. 1990. Pequena História da Arte. São Paulo: Melhoramentos. _​_​_​_​_​. 1970. New Brazilian Art. New York: Praeger Publishers. _​_​_​_​_​. 1933. Belvedere dell’Architettura Italiana. Rome: Edizioni di Quadrante. _​_​_​_​_​. 1930. Carrà e Soffici. Milano: Belvedere. Bo Bardi, Lina. 1994. Tempos de Grossura: o design no impasse. São Paulo: Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi. _​_​_​_​_​. 1970. “Explicações sobre o museu de arte.” O Estado de São Paulo, April 5. _​_​_​_​_​. 1961. Brennand cerâmica. Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia. _​_​_​_​_​. 1950. “O Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Função social dos museus.” Habitat, no.  1 October-​December: 17. Braschi, Cecilia. n.d. “Lina Bo Bardi and the Magazine Habitat.” Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions. [Accessed 25 October 2016] https://​awarewomenartists.com/​en/​ magazine/​lina-​bo-​bardi-​and-​the-​magazine-​habitat/​. De Oliveira, Olivia. 2015. “Lina Bo Bardi’s and Paulo Freire’s Anti-​Museum and Anti-​Schools.” In Concreto e Cristal: O acervo do MASP nos cavaletes de Lina Bo Bardi. Edited by Adriano Pedrosa et al., 85–​97. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó.

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Displaying Whose Modernity?  219 Espada, Heloisa. 2018. “The Fotoforma Exhibition at MASP, 1951: Geraldo de Barros and the Museum-​School.” In New Geographies of Abstract Art in Postwar Latin America. Edited by Mariola V. Alvarez and Ana M. Franco, 69–​83. New York: Routledge. Leon, Ethel. 2014. “IAC/​MASP, a Futurist School in São Paulo.” Modernidade Latina, os italianos e os centros do modernismo latino-​americano. Edited by Ana Gonçalves Magalhães. www.mac.usp.br/​mac/​conteudo/​academico/​publicacoes/​anais/​modernidade/​pdfs/​ETHEL_​ ING.pdf. Moura, Sabrina. 2017. “Alike, But Not the Same: The Reenactment of Lina Bo Bardi’s Display for the São Paulo Museum of Art (1968–​2015).” Stedelijk Studies, Issue 5, Fall. https://​ stedelijkstudies.com/​journal/​reenactment-​lina-​bo-​bardis-​display-​sao-​paulo-​museum-​art-​ 1968–​2015/​. Pedrosa, Adriano. 2015. “Concrete and Crystal: Learning with Lina.” In Concreto e Cristal: O acervo do MASP nos cavaletes de Lina Bo Bardi. Edited by Adriano Pedrosa et al., 14–​27. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó. _​_​_​_​_​. 2015(b). “Acervo em Transformação.” [Accessed 20 February 2020]. https://​masp.org. br/​exposicoes/​acervo-​em-​transformacao. Pedrosa, Adriano and Tomás Toledo eds. 2016. A Mão do Povo Brasileiro, 1969/​2016. São Paulo: MASP. n.a. 1985. Pintura no Brasil. São Paulo: Abril Cultural. n.a. 1939. RASM, Revista Anual do Salão de Maio, no. 1, São Paulo. n.a. 1933. Quadrante 6, October. Rifkind, David. 2016. The Battle for Modernism:  Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy. Venice, Italy: Marsilio Editori. _​_​_​_​_​. 2014. “Pietro Maria Bardi, Quadrante, and the Architecture of Fascist Italy.” Modernidade Latina, os italianos e os centros do modernismo latino-​americano. Edited by Ana Gonçalves Magalhães. www.mac.usp.br/​mac/​conteudo/​academico/​publicacoes/​anais/​ modernidade/​index.html. Risério, Antonio. 2016. “Andanças pela praia de amar a Lina.” In A Mão do Povo Brasileiro, 1969/​2016. Edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, 59–​64. São Paulo: MASP. Sabatino, Michelangelo. 2010. Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 2008. “The People’s Glass House.” South Central Review, 25, no. 3, Fall: 45–​56. Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz. 1999.The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870–​1930. New York: Hill and Wang. Tentori, Francesco. 2002. Pietro Maria Bardi. Primo Attore del Razionalismo. Roma: Testo & Immagine. Zevi, Bruno. 1973. “Incontro con Lina Bo Bardi. Un supervisore con mitra e speroni.” L’Espresso, May 27.

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16  Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art The Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale, 1956–​1968 Kristian Handberg

Since its inauguration in 1895, the Biennale of Arts in Venice has been the world’s most renowned international exhibition of art. It has been characterized by Lawrence Alloway as an “orgy of contact and communication”1 and by Caroline A. Jones as an aspirational platform for the international and the global,2 but was also an unabashed stage of national performance through the ages of colonialism, Fascist dictatorships and the Cold War. A little-​known aspect of the Biennale and its political implications in the postwar world is the presence of the Soviet Union, which participated as exhibiting country from 1956 to 1977. My aim here is to illuminate the exhibition history of the Soviet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and ask what a cosmonaut as an exhibiting artist can say about what was possible –​and what was not –​at the crossroads between different modernities. The cosmonaut landing at the world’s largest contemporary art exhibition –​even in the turmoil of 1968 –​will inevitably raise questions in regards to the Biennale’s game of internationalization and contemporaneity and possibly also of incommensurability. Not least, it can offer some kind of window into Soviet modernity and the ways in which it was promoted as contemporary art in Venice. This chapter will provide an overview of the Soviet Pavilion in Venice and its reception in the West, leading to a closer reading of the 1968 exhibition featuring cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. It should be stressed that: source material relating to the USSR pavilion is scarce, photographic documentation is especially absent and the scholarship on the Soviet exhibitions is limited, despite the recent interest in the global postwar era and its exhibition histories. My reading will inevitably reflect these blind spots, but will hopefully lead to further discoveries.

“Insalata Russa”: Soviets in Venice In The Global Work of Art Caroline A. Jones reads the Biennale as a “world-​picturing apparatus,” where the aim is to stage internationalism. Through the biennial model, “contemporary” and “global” art today can be situated within “the lingering effects and remnant structures of the nineteenth-​century world’s fairs”3 and their tension “between local reference and international competition, between global styles and ethnic difference, between nation and world.”4 The Venice Biennale was obviously inspired by the grandes expositions so popular in the 19th century, but also marked a new turn in the history of exhibitions as a “trade-​specific” venues, where art was

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  221 segregated from being “one artifact among others in national displays” and “free from distracting assemblies of goods, machinery and sideshows.”5 Central to it all was the structure of national pavilions, of which the criteria then, as today, is for the applicant to be a country recognized by the Italian state. The Soviet Union was heir to the pavilion of Imperial Russia, which had opened in 1914 on the verge of World War 1 and the 1917 Revolution. The design of the Russian pavilion was initially in the hands of Italian architect Daniele Donghi, who proposed a form inspired by traditional Russian church buildings, but it ended up being carried out by Russian architect Aleksey Shchusev (1873–​1949). Following the historicist pavilion tradition dominating the Biennale, the building consisted of “a conspicuous concentration of motifs taken from the repertoire of national architecture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,” called “an anachronistic stucco-​castle” by critics.6 Later Schuchev would become a prolific architect in the Soviet Union, where his monumental style paved the way for commissions like the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow in 1924. That same year the Soviet Union participated in the Venice Biennale after abandoning the international revolution and propagating the official policy of socialism in one country instead, which then should be internationally promoted, also at the super salon in Venice, by then situated in Benito Mussolini’s Fascist state. Initially, Stalin’s Soviet was warmly welcomed in Mussolini’s Italy and received favorable press reviews. Mussolini himself expressed delight in Kuzma Petrov-​ Vodkin’s Death of a Commissar (1928) and especially applauded the works of Alexander Deyneka, whom he called a “true roman” and model to fascist artists.7 Despite, or rather maybe because of this success, the Soviet Union pavilion closed in 1934. This unexpected withdrawal should also be understood in light of Joseph Stalin’s mandate to make Socialist Realism the official style for all Soviet artists at the time. Boris Groys observed that the “socialist realist method was given its final form and adopted at the First Congress of the Writer’s Union in 1934, and was subsequently imposed on the other arts with no alterations whatever.”8 The socialist realist embrace of “anti-​formalism” and its opposition to the burgeouis art market was at odds with the international currents of the Biennale. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union would continue to exhibit and be artistically represented at non-​art international exhibitions like the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale with Boris Iofan’s pavilion crowned by Vera Mukhina’s sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman and the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which in a pavilion designed by Iofan featured the monumental fresco painting Illustrious People of the Land of the Soviets by Vasily Efanov. After World War II the period of Zhdanovism (named after Stalin’s director of the cultural policy, Andrei Zhdanov (1896–​1948)) led to the introduction of a doctrine on socialist realism and its “defence against all external sources of contamination.”9 This implied increasing isolation from the rest of the international art world. The Zhdanovist era of 1947 to 1953 was also characterized by a centralized system of organization of the arts through initiatives that saw the strengthening of:  the artists’ union (“Pan-​Soviet Artistic Union” established in 1957), the founding of the Academy of Arts in 1947, the promotion of the annual Pan-​Soviet Exhibition in Moscow and the publication of the art journal Iskusstvo. The totality of these efforts was aimed at securing an art of the “famous trinity of ‘partymindedness’, ‘ideological commitment’, and ‘national (or ‘popular’) spirit’ (partiinost, ideinost, narodnost)” as Antoine Baudin has observed.10

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222  Kristian Handberg Some changes occurred with the so-​ called “Thaw” of the post-​ 1953 de-​ Stalinization, where strict isolationism was abandoned and replaced with international engagement; not least to demonstrate the Soviet leadership of international socialism in a globalizing, decolonizing world. In correspondence with the introduction of this new policy aimed at peaceful coexistence, the Soviet Union rekindled its ties to international events like, the Venice Biennale in 1956 and Expo 58, Brussels’ World Fair in 1958. The enforced official style was still Socialist Realism, but its scope was expanded. As Susan S. Reid has explained: “modernizers sought a rejuvenated and expanded realism, a public art that could move and persuade and say something to contemporary people about the present day in a ‘contemporary’ style.”11 This, however, was not the impression that the Soviet pavilion gave to Western audiences following its reopening in 1956. According to the leading modernist critic and art historian Werner Haftmann, the Soviet Pavilion contained a “Bolshevik idyllic miles away from contemporary reality” reminiscent only of nineteenth-​century realism aimed at bourgeois taste.12 In his overview of the Biennale in the German newspaper Die Welt, Haftmann foresaw that the Soviet aesthetic would reach a point of inevitable confrontation with “the reality depiction of the creative European peoples”13 (i.e. abstraction) to which it would submerge. To a certain degree, Thaw initiatives allowed for the introduction of Western avant-​garde practices to a Soviet audience. Exemplary in this sense are the exhibition of Pablo Picasso held at the Pushkin Museum in 1956 in Moscow (which as a museum dedicated to European art had been reopened in 1954) and the International Exhibition at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow 1957,14 both of which had an impact on local artists turning their attention to more experimental practices. The Thaw period saw the emergence of the so-​called “severe style” or “new sincerity,” which were characterized by a less formulaic and more individualistic approach to the still hegemonic Socialist Realist subject matter. The Soviet presentation in Venice in 1962 resonated with this stylistic shift, even though Western observers rarely noticed it. They only saw “the same smiling smelters, the women carpenters with lilies-​of-​the-​valleys pinned under their robust breasts, the mustachioed Uzbeks who could easily have been painted 40 years ago.”15 The revisionists also faced resistance at home, when Nikita Khrushchev criticized the more experimental works on view at the exhibition 30 Years of the Moscow Union of Artists in the Manezh Exhibition Hall in 1962. As some have argued, this event marks the birthdate of nonconformist art,16 which in retrospect has come to overshadow official Soviet art. The organization of the USSR pavilion in Venice reflected the Soviet art world and its omnipotent and complex bureaucratic system. The choice of works was subject to a two-​tier control system by political authorities and the official artist’s organizations, which left little space for curatorial improvization. According to Vladimir Goriainov –​ who served as a commissioner for the Soviet pavilion in the 1960s –​works had to be shown at the annual Pan-​Soviet Exhibition in Moscow first and were typically selected from the stores of the Ministry of Culture and the Pan-​Soviet Artistic Union.17 Even though the pavilion would occasionally host retrospective exhibitions  –​like those dedicated to Alexander Deyneka in 1960 and 1970 –​the preferred format were group exhibitions, which filled up the pavilion with works by different generations of artists deemed worthy to represent the Soviet Union. Starting in the1920s, the Soviet pavilion made a chaotic impression on Western critics, who described it as an “Insalata russa” –​the mixed Russian salad –​as “participants and works jostled for

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  223 room in a confusing mixture.”18 The number of exhibiting artists exceeded most other countries. In 1962, 13 artists were featured in the Soviet pavilion, in 1964 38 and in 1968 14, a staggering number, when compared to the four artists representing France that same year. The rhetoric around the exhibitions in the catalogue texts were relatively subdued and generally restrained from any form of controversy. Instead the texts emphasize both the diversity (the exhibited artists stemming from different generations and republics) and unity (“spiritual unity,” “humanistic substance”) in Soviet art. In 1964, the character of the Soviet realism is highlighted as the “ability to detect from the usual and ordinary events the important historical processes,”19 which is the true humanism in its focus on the human as protagonist in the works. This was possibly a way of aligning Soviet Realism to Western values, even if this hardly ever succeeded. The staging of the exhibitions themselves did not garner sufficient popularity among Western audiences. As stated by Matteo Bertelé, Soviet authorities “always paid little attention to their national participation in Venice, as proved by their recurring absences, delays, improvisations, and failures to follow the directives.”20 The difference is made even more remarkable when compared to the carefully staged presentations of Soviet modernity at the World’s Fairs, where the contrast between the old imperial Biennale pavilion and the shiny, newly-​built World’s Fair pavilions are striking. Both events were equally prestigious and placed a similar emphasis on national performance, even if the World’s Fair’s focus on industrial and technological progress was especially sound to Soviet modernity with space exploration as its heavily promoted crowning achievement. At Expo 58 in Brussels, the Soviet pavilion was one of the most visited with a display aimed at materializing Soviet progress on a Sputnik model presented in the entrance hall as the main attraction. Expo 67 in Montreal presented the Soviet Union in a modern glass pavilion with a spectacular curved roof design, with sights such a Cosmos Hall, where “Soviet space technology is on display and visitors can experience the sensations of space travel while comfortably seated in armchairs.”21 Remarkably –​in light of Cold War history –​is the fact that Moscow was appointed in 1960 by the Bureau International des Expositions to host the 1967 fair, this would have coincided with the 50-​year anniversary of the October revolution. For unknown, probably financial reasons the Soviets eventually withdrew.22

On a Mission to Venice: The 1968 Exhibition The Soviet pavilion at the 34th Biennale di Venezia in 1968 featured an eclectic array of artists and works including:  Mariam Aslamazyan (1907–​2006), the “Armenian Frida Kahlo” and Belarus painter Mikhail Savitsky (1922–​2010) depicting wartime struggles with a vernacular symbolism in his Partisan Madonna (1967), as well as veteran Soviet Realists Arcady Plastov (1893–​1972) and Yakov Romas (1902–​1969). The most remarkable inclusion were seven paintings by Alexei Leonov, who like no other artist had a parallel career, as a cosmonaut and main player in the Soviet space program. Having privileged a career as a pilot over his artistic ambitions (he was accepted to the Riga Academy of Art in 1953), Leonov was among those selected for the first cosmonaut training group together with Yuri Gagarin in 1960. He entered the hall of fame with the Voskhod-​2 mission in March 1965, when he was the first human to take a “spacewalk” of extravehicular activity, floating for 12 minutes in open space above Planet Earth. On this breath-​taking space endeavor he brought his sketchbook

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224  Kristian Handberg

Figure 16.1 Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov drawing a sketch on the Voskhod-​2 Spaceship in 1965. Photo: ITAR-​TASS News Agency/​Alamy Stock Foto.

and crayons with him and in the small capsule he “sketch[ed] what [he] saw in space during any spare moments [he] had.” (see Figure 16.1)23 After the mission, which almost ended in disaster, as his spacesuit inflated in the open-​space vacuum and troubled his return to the ship’s airlock (at this moment the Soviet TV transmission stopped and played Mozart’s Requiem instead24), he was received as a hero on national soil immediately declaring that his next goal was the Moon. Thereafter he was appointed leader of a planned circumlunar flight set for 1967. On this occasion the Soyuz spacecraft would have circled around the Moon. Simultaneously he was also roped into a mission that would have made him the first man to land on the Moon in 1968.25 However, technical difficulties and the American moon landing in 1969 led to the cancellation of both of these missions. Instead, Leonov would act as commander of the Soyuz-​Apollo mission –​a collaboration of the American and Soviet space programs in 1975 –​and act as Chief Cosmonaut of the Soviet space team between 1976 and 1982. Leonov’s career as exhibiting artist started after the space walk, even if a later article in the Iskusstvo art journal refers to the picture In Space Flight by Leonov as being reproduced in the Pravda newspaper in 1961 on the occasion of Gagarin’s spaceflight. Around this time, Leonov entered in an artistic collaboration with Andrey Sokolov (1931–​2007), an architect who had made a career as a painter specializing in science fiction motifs. In 1967, their joint artistic efforts were first made public, through the presentation of an extensive series of individual and collaborative works published in an art book and showed in an exhibition titled Zhdite, nas zvezdy (Stars, wait for us!). The album was an elaborate publication with color reproductions of all 70 works. Its publication marked “the 50th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution” as clearly stated on the book’s opening pages and celebrated ten years since the 1957 Sputnik launch. It included an introduction by no other than Yuri Gagarin (1934–​ 1968, titled “Pilot-​Cosmonaut of the U.S.S.R., Hero of the Soviet Union”), who

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  225 saluted “mankind’s progressive development” and expressed his sureness that “many of those who read this album, young people especially, will go to the Moon, Mars and other planets, and will see for themselves the things described and depicted in drawings here.”26 According to his cosmonaut colleague, Leonov’s works reflected his unique vision as “the first earth dweller to see our blue planet, the bright untwinkling stars, and the dazzling of the sun set in the blackness of the sky, not through the porthole of a spaceship but from space itself, thus obtaining a much better view than the other cosmonauts.”27 With these credentials, the publication must be seen as a high-​ profiled official affair, also aimed at Western audiences for which English translations of the texts were provided. It was structured in five themed sections, each introduced by scientists of the Soviet Academy of the Sciences. The first part, “On Near-​Earth Orbits,” depicted Gagarin’s mission and Leonov’s own. The next, “The Lunar World,” portrayed the proposed Moon exploration as well as future lunar colonization (again, Leonov was chosen for the planned lunar operations). “To the Planets,” “Among the Stars and Galaxies,” “Suppose we landed on …” and “Towards infinity and beyond” continued this artistic exploration of space in expanding circuits of sci-​fi imagery. A short report on the exhibition appeared in the official art journal Iskusstvo, mentioning Leonov’s opening speech, the sections of the exhibition and its successful combination of the realistic/​scientifically elements in conjunction with fantastical ones.28 This duality was also used as a structuring principle in their following book To the stars! published in 1970, which comprised of two sections “Reality” and “Fantasy.” The first showed depictions of the Vostok and Voskhod missions with titles such as Vostok in Flight and Spacecraft, entry into dense atmosphere, whereas the latter included materials on Extra-​terrestial civilizations and In 100 years.29 The combination of present and future of the cosmic era was described as “a constant narrative of space exploration, which unfolds by and from our days till the distant future,” where space colonization apparently was inside of the horizon of expectation in the present of the Soviet space age. Curiously, the cosmic motifs were presented as a specifically Soviet kind of peaceful, optimistic sci-​fi in the catalogue text: Their starting point is that cosmos will be peaceful. The Soviet man will walk into the Universe as an explorer and creator, but far not conqueror. Contrary to many foreign fantasy art workers Leonov and Sokolov do not picture man’s meeting in space with inhabitants of other planets as a tragic encounter detrimental for our civilization. […] Leonov and Sokolov’s approach reflects the policy of our state with regard to cosmos.30 This ideological affinity with Cold War ideology can also be seen in a later review by a GDR art critic, who, on the occasion of a 1971 Leonov exhibition at the Haus der Deutsch-​Sowjetische Freundschaft in Berlin, wrote that “the creative future dreaming” of the works belonged to the “core characteristics of Socialism and Communism.”31 These exhibitions in their spatial as well as printed form, also including Star Roads (1971, on the tenth anniversary of the first space flight of Yuri Gagarin) and Kosmicheskie dali (Space Distances, 1972), had a special status, also in terms of the Soviet art world, as just containing Leonov and Sokolov’s work and being presented in a climate of art, science and Space Age enthusiasm. The context would be rather different in a prominent international venue of contemporary art such as the Venice Biennale. Considering the traditional academic and not very contemporary focus of

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226  Kristian Handberg

Figure 16.2 Alexey Leonov: Cosmic Dawn, oil painting on canvas, 1966. Soviet postcard from the 1960s. Collection of the author.

the selection, it was quite an experiment to select Leonov the cosmonaut, who was not a member of the Artist Union and possibly had one of the shortest careers as an exhibiting artist before being presented in Venice. The small catalogue-​pamphlet presented Alexei Leonov’s painting Above the Black Sea (1968) on its cover as an emblem of what the Soviets were up to in Venice. The list of exhibited works contains seven by Leonov making him the most well-​represented in the pavilion. The seven works carried the titles: Morning in Space, Aurora, Our Beautiful Planet, The Earth is Approaching, Above the Black Sea and The Departure, all oil paintings on canvas dating from 1965–​1968. Morning in Space (also appearing under the title Cosmic Dawn) (see Figure 16.2) which sees the sunlight breaking from behind Planet Earth, builds on Leonov’s impression of the Earth seen from space and the sketch he made of this motif onboard the spaceship just after the spacewalk. In his words, he aspired: “to capture the different shades of charcoal rings that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, the sunrise of air glow over the Earth’s horizon, the blue belt covering the Earth’s crust and the spectrums of colors I  had observed looking down the globe.”32 During the flight, when the ship was in orbit around the planet, he would have repeatedly seen this sight, which also corresponding with the name of his spaceship, as “Voskhod” means “Sunrise.” He painted the self-​standing motif, as well as the way he saw it from the inside of his helmet, in a bit of a sketch-​like form, as if he was searching for a way to capture the overwhelming space sights. The perspective is slightly different in Above the Black Sea, which depicts the cosmonaut freely floating in a cosmic self-​portrait from the iconic event. In contrast to the other-​worldly impressions, we encounter a recognizable geographical formation in the shape of the Black Sea (see Figure 16.3). Leonov described the impression of a “giant, colorful map” emerging, where he could see the whole of the Black Sea, the snow-​clad Caucasus Mountains and the Volga River.33 These particular landmarks are of course a reminder of the geopolitical context of the mission as a high-​profiled

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  227

Figure 16.3 Alexey Leonov: Above the Black Sea, oil painting on canvas, 1968. Image: Sputnik/​ Alamy Stock Photo.

project in the Soviet Union, despite Leonov’s claim that the painting was “representative of human race” and meant “to prove what human beings were capable of” without the political “boasting” of the leaders in Moscow and Washington.34 The spacewalking cosmonaut above the Black Sea is in some sense a peculiar meeting between free flight and open space and the carefully planned conquering of the elements by the authoritarian Soviet state. Space age tropes of new frontiers and the realization of utopian dreams through space can be seen in the work of artists like Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, the artist network ZERO and other touchstones of Western postwar avant-​garde.35 Fontana was aware of Leonov’s flight and saw it related to his work in which thin curving lines stretch across the open space in many of his Concetto Spaziale paintings reminiscent of the linking duct to the spaceship.36 Fontana had however remained skeptical of the adequacy of painting to represent the space age, as he claimed that “on the moon, they will not be painting, but they will be making Spatial art.”37 Despite Fontana’s knowledge of Leonov, none of the latter’s works were made in dialogues with the Western avant-​garde. Neither Leonov nor any of the other exhibited artists featured in the Soviet pavilion would have had the opportunity to visit the Biennale and take part in its “orgy of contact and communication” (to repeat Alloways’ term). The Soviet pavilion was only visited by “a select audience of diplomats, officials of the Ministry of Culture and the art elite”38 and information at home about what went on in Venice was very limited (see Figure 16.4).

A Cold Reception at a Heated Biennale Then how was the mission of presenting cosmonaut paintings as contemporary art received in the West? From the show’s onset, the exhibition inside the pavilion was overshadowed by the turmoil of protests and police reactions taking over the city around the Biennale’s opening days. A  number of countries, including the Soviet

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228  Kristian Handberg

Figure 16.4 Cover of exhibition guide to the pavilion of the USSR, La Biennale di Venezia 1968. Image: @ Archivio Storico della Biennale di Venezia –​ ASAC.

Union, decided to keep their pavilions closed at the opening of the Biennale, either in protest against the police violence or in fear of getting involved. According to one report, the Soviet pavilion was closed over preoccupations of being turned into the headquarter of “Maoist rebels.”39 The closure was also described as the Soviets “keeping the little Kremlin palace closed” and thereby sparing the Biennale of their inbred Socialist Realism.40 When the pavilion finally opened, it was generally ignored, judging from the international press reception and critical commentary, which only mentioned Leonov and the USSR pavilion sporadically. A  typical remark wrote it off as showing “the same propaganda art as in all previous years.”41 Just a handful of observers noticed Leonov. German art critic Werner Spies in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describes it as “a novelty” as “the first painting astronaut, Alexei Leonov, offers us a view from the spaceship at Earth’s curvature and stars,”42 but it does not seem to inspire him for further reflections. On the other hand, Niels von Holst in Nürnberger Zeitung sees the presence of Leonov’s paintings as an attempt to open a “window to the west” taking up whole walls in the pavilion, described as “memorized pictures from the cosmos such as ‘Red Morning in Space’ ” –​even if this is still subject to a proviso of representational art, whereas the other Eastern “Satellite states” have left Socialist Realism behind and taken upon free form with much Elan.43 This reception –​or the lack of it –​indicates a gap in the international artistic dialogue. Jostling with earth-​bound regionalism and rural themes in the limited space of

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  229 an old-​fashioned pavilion, the presentation of Leonov’s paintings did not set them off as contemporary art for the space age. The illustrative style of the paintings would be more to associate with popular science illustrations and Pop culture and sci-​fi –​pictorial realms rarely seen in Venice (even if Harald Szeemann in 1967 had presented his Science-​Fiction exhibition to audiences in Bern, Paris and Düsseldorf).

Into Oblivion –​Space Debris in Venice “In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet pavilion provoked heated debate, in the 1950s and early 1960s it provoked sniggers. By the 1970s it was no longer noticed, and so it remained until the pavilion was closed in response to the Biennale of Dissent in 1977.”44 This is how the story of the USSR Pavilion is summed up in a 2013 publication on Russian artists at the Venice Biennale. The Biennale del dissento culturale (Biennale of Dissent) was a festival of nonconformist culture of the Eastern Bloc including the art exhibition La nuova arte sovietica: una prospettiva non ufficiale (The new Soviet art: a non-​official perspective), which presented 300 works from 1960 to 1977 by 60 artists subjected to professional ban in the Soviet Union or in exile.45 The Biennale of Dissent represented one of the efforts to make events in Venice more topical. This had been proclaimed as part of a new “democratic and anti-​fascist statute” adopted by the Biennale in 1973, not least spurred by the protests against the exhibition in 1968.46 The show included works that had been excluded from the official Soviet pavilion in the 60 years of Russian revolution and was not surprisingly met by massive protests from the Soviet authorities, who declared that the Soviet Union (and other Warsaw Pact countries) would boycott the Venice Biennale if the Italian government did not close the exhibition. As a consequence, the USSR and Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were absent from the following biennale in 1978 and the USSR also stayed away in 1980, only to return in 1982. The boycott sealed the misadventure of the Soviet Union at the Venice Biennale, even if it is hard to find out how the Soviet organizers saw it all. To follow Jones’ account on the Biennale, the Soviets failed to produce a successful internationalism, both in the works presented and in the form of the exhibition. Not even the stunt of the world-​famous cosmonaut Leonov as exhibiting artist made an impact and their exhibition history is left as forgotten space debris in the art world. As a heterogeneous blend of exhibition strategies and artist selections, the Biennale in Venice was a showcase of different faces of modern art and, indeed, multiple modernisms. The impact of this complex and multidirectional space compared to the canonical selection settled in the art museums is growing in art historical scholarship and has also led to new curatorial investigations. One such was the exhibition of Gely Korzhev at the Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni in Venice 2019. Titled Back to Venice the exhibition recalled Korzhev’s participation at the Biennale as Soviet artist in 1962, now an occasion to reevaluate the severe style and Soviet modern art.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Alloway 1968, 13. Jones 2016, ix. Ibid., x. Ibid., xii.

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230  Kristian Handberg 5 Ibid., 43. 6 Mulazzani 2017, 62–​63. 7 Kovalev, Anrei. 2013. “Empty Space? The Soviet Pavilion During the Cold War.” in Molok, 2013, 73–​77, 73. 8 Groys 2011, 36. 9 Baudin, Antoin. “Why is Soviet Painting Hidden From Us? Zhdanov Art and Its international Relations and Fallout, 1947–​1955,” in Lahusen and Dobrenko 1997, 229. 10 Ibid. 228. 11 Reid 2016, 268. 12 Haftmann 1956. 13 Ibid. 14 Reid 2016. 15 Kovalev 2013, 76. 16 See May 2016, 360. 17 Kovalev 2013, 75. 18 Molok 2013, 13. 19 Gorianov 1964, 290. 20 Bertelé 2017, 171. 21 Expo 67. Official Guide, 148. 22 Spiegelbaum 2012, 134. 23 Leonov and Scott 2004, 100. 24 Ibid., 109. 25 Ibid., 194. 26 Yuri Gagarin introduction in Leonov and Sokolov 1967, n.p. 27 Gagarin 1967, n.p. 28 Notice with no author, Iskusstvo no. 5, 1968, 74. 29 Leonov and Sokolov 1970. 30 N. Malakhow in Leonov and Sokolov 1970, 13. 31 Harald Olbrich: “Ferne Wirklichkeit neu entdeckt. Gemälde über den Weltraum im Haus der DSF,” in Berliner Zeitung 11.8. 1971. Quoted from Wagner 2018, 11. 32 Leonov and Scott 2004, 110. 33 Leonov and Scott 2004, 105. 34 Leonov and Scott 2004, 107. 35 See, Petersen 2009. 36 Gottschaler 2012, 90. 37 Lucio Fontana in a letter to Giampiero Giani qtd. in Petersen 2009, pp. 5–​6. 38 Molok 2013, 14. 39 “Biennale läuft jetzt trotz Boykott,” 1968. 40 “Die Biennale hat die Polizei im Gebüsch,” 1968. 41 Tiroler Tageszeitung1968. 42 Spies 1968. 43 von Holst, 1968. 44 Kovalev 2013 76. 45 May 2016, 365. 46 Szacka 2016, 99.

Bibliography Alloway, Lawrence. 1968. The Venice Biennale:  1895–​1968. From Salon to Goldfish Bowl. London: Faber and Faber. Bertelé, Matteo. 2017. “Soviet ‘Severe Romanticism’ at the 1962 Venice Biennale.” In Experiment 23: 158–​172.

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Cosmonaut Paintings as Contemporary Art  231 _​_​_​_​_​.“Die Biennale hat die Polizei im Gebüsch,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 24th 1968. _​_​_​_​_​. “Biennale läuft jetzt trotz Boykott,” Nürnberger Zeitung, June 26th 1968. Goriainov, Vladimir. 1964. 32a Biennale di Venezia. Exhibition catalogue. Gottschaler, Pia. 2012. Lucio Fontana. The Artist’s Materials, Los Angeles: The Getty Institute. Groys, Boris. 2011. The Total Art of Stalinism. London: Verso. Haftmann, Werner: “Viel Genie und viel Ballast. Eine Schlußbetrachtung zur Biennale” in Die Zeit, No. 42, October 18th 1956. Jones, Caroline A. 2016. The Global Work of Art, World’s Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lahusen, Thomas and Dobrenko, Evgeny eds. 1997. Socialist Realism without Shores. Durham: Duke University Press. Leonov, Alexei and Sokolov, Andrey. 1970. To the stars!, Drawings by Cosmonaut A. Leonov and Fantasy Artist A. Sokolov. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers. _​_​_​_​_​. 1967. Zhdite, nas zvezdy –​ The Stars are Awaiting us. Moscow: Mol. Gvardiia. Leonov, Alexei and Scott, David. 2004. Two Sides of the Moon. ur Story of the Cold War Space Race. London: Bedford Square Books. May, Jan. 2016. “‘Biennale of Dissent’ (1977): Nonconformist Art from the USSR in Venice.” In Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–​1989). Edited by Jerome Pascal Bazin, Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski. Budapest: Central European University Press. Molok, Nikolai ed. 2013. Russian Artists at the Venice Biennale, 1895–​1913. Moscow: Stella Arts Foundation. Mulazzani, Marco. 2017. Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1887. Milan: Montadori Electa Spa. Petersen, Stephen. 2009. Space Age Aesthetics. Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar European Avant-​Garde. Pennsylvania State University Press. Reid, Susan E. 2016. “(Socialist) Realism Unbound: The Effects of International Discourse in the Khrushchew Thaw.” In Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–​1989). Edited by Jerome Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski. Budapest: Central European University Press. Spiegelbaum, Lewis. 2012. “Sputnik Goes to Brussels: The Exhibition of a Soviet Technological Wonder.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 47. no. 1: 120–​136. Spies, Werner: “Der parzellierte Mensch,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung June 1968. Szacka, Léa-​ Catherine. 2016. Exhibiting the Postmodern. The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. Venice: Marsilio Editorio. Tiroler Tageszeitung, 4.10. 1968. von Holst, Niels: “Ein Panorama der Weltkunst” in Nürnberger Zeitung, June 26th 1968. Wagner, Mathias: “Im freien Flug vom Schwarzen Meer nach Sachalin” pp. 4–​13 in Dresdener Kunstblätter 1. 2018.

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17  All That Jazz Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna and the Rise of Abstraction in Postwar Italy Flavia Frigeri

On 3 February 1951, the opening night of the exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia (Abstract and concrete art in Italy) at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) in Rome a jazz band took the art world by storm.1 While the artists were dancing away to the beats of this unlikely “street parade,” Guido Gonella, the Minister of Public Education, was left aghast by the intrusion of such unruly sounds in a space designated to the silent contemplation of art.2 Like him, the French cultural attaché was speechless stating that, such things “don’t even happen in Paris.”3 Indeed, a jazz band was an uncommon sight in the context of a modern art museum and yet it signaled a seismic shift in the development of postwar Italian art. Specifically, it spoke to the ambition of a burgeoning group of abstract artists, to stake a claim in the global modernist narrative that had been on the surface so abruptly halted during the ventennio (20 years) of Fascist rule (1922–​43). The antics of Futurist soirées, which had been brushed aside by Fascism’s revival of forms borrowed from the Italian classical tradition, were called to mind by this startling conflation of art and music.4 The “Roman New Orleans Jazz Band” despite the foreign-​sounding name was a homegrown jazz group formed in 1949.5 Moved by a common passion for jazz the eight founders rejoiced in the postliberation excitement for American imports.6 As Umberto Eco pointed out the “contemporary world” during World War II and in its immediate aftermath was represented by a growing awareness of American customs and mythologies.7 In his words: “Two days later [after Italy’s liberation on April 25,  1945] I  saw the first American soldiers. They were reading comic strips I had never seen before, with characters entirely unknown to me, like Lil’ Abner and Dick Tracy. I was discovering modernity through Pop art nearly twenty years before the fact.”8 From Eco’s words one can deduce how the very notion of modernity was strictly tied to a foreign import, despite Fascism’s claim to modernism. Discounting such a possibility, Eco associates the “discovery” of modernity to countries untainted by the lethal stroke of prewar dictatorial regimes. Naturally, the full implications of American foreign policy and the cultural imperialism it engendered would come to the fore with the European Recovery Program, better known as Marshall Plan, which in exchange for economic support ensured the political allegiance and stability of recovering countries like Italy.9 Untarnished by such considerations and boasting Louis Armstrong’s seal of approval (who visited Rome in 1949) the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band saw in jazz a long-​awaited mark of progressive freedom. Contemporary artists and especially those working in an abstract mode were also yearning for the radical renewal of art through new forms of expression, which variably called to mind the syncopated

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All That Jazz  233 beats of the trendy band. The milieu gravitating around the bookshop/​gallery L’Age d’or  –​founded in 1950 by Mino Guerrini, Piero Dorazio and Achille Perilli  –​was particularly enthused with the jazz band.10 As regulars of the jam sessions they were also put in charge of the set design for the Band’s concert at Cinema Splendore in Rome in 1950. A  combination of painted geometrical forms and a web-​like backdrop of crisscrossing strings took the lead in this vibrant setting.11 Reminiscing on the connections with the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band Dorazio would later recall: In 1950 we spent New Year’s Eve at Mario’s Bar on Via Pinciana [Rome] dancing the boogie-​woogie, drinking and falling in love … “The Roman-​New Orleans Jazz Band!”. To denounce our decadence Guttuso, had painted a Boogie-​woogie painting and a few years later he exhibited it at the Venice Biennale. In the background there was a painting by Mondrian and the dancers were Manisco and Rosita, Perilli and Franca, Turcato and Oretta, Scarpitta and Clotilde. But what was wrong with our attitude? Were we also expected to paint Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily?12 The artist acknowledges here the festive and light-​hearted spirit of his peers while also pointing to the tension between two starkly opposing factions, abstraction and figuration. Renato Guttuso, as can be inferred from Dorazio’s sarcastic comments, was at the helm of the figurative front. As a champion of postwar realism, he counted on the unequivocal support of the Communist party, whose political stakes Guttuso endorsed through paintings like the Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily (1949–​50). Presented at the Venice Biennale of 1950, this large work marked Guttuso’s departure from a neo-​cubist lexicon, while also highlighting his commitment to peasants and workers as agents of change. The artist made his political commitment manifest in 1943 when he wrote:  “I think more and more of painting that can function as a wrenching scream, a manifestation of rage, of love or justice, on the corners of the streets and in the angles of the city squares, rather than in the sad atmosphere of the museum, where a few specialists go once in a while to find it.”13 While Occupation of Uncultivated Land in Sicily visually testifies to this belief a painting like Boogie Woogie (1953) reveals instead Guttuso’s distaste for abstraction and the joie de vivre connected to it. Whereas Alex Potts draws out the work’s ambivalence: The painting Boogie Woogie is neither just a critique of the take-​up of the popular American dance fashion in Italy nor a celebration of Italian street culture, and the attitude to high abstraction implicit in the quotation of Mondrian’s late abstract painting Broadway Boogie Woogie is similarly unstable and conflicted.14 Less ambivalent and quite openly countering the legacy of Mondrian’s late abstract painting, Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie can be read as a provocation mired at the very artists he had supported in the liberation’s heyday. In fact, before becoming such a staunch advocate for an Italian prototype of socialist realism, Guttuso along with the Communist party had nurtured the very artists he later so fiercely condemned. Such a change of heart is perhaps best evinced by the experience of the short-​lived yet momentous “Forma” group. Founded in 1947, Forma counted among its members Dorazio, Guerrini, Perilli and Turcato, as well as Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi and Antonio Sanfilippo. These artists and especially Accardi and Sanfilippo had found in

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234  Flavia Frigeri Guttuso an early champion of their work. As Perilli recalled: “The studio was then a landmark for many young artists: both for the painter’s expansive, generous personality and for his almost Cubist painting.”15 Equally encouraging was the youth branch of the Italian Communist party, which provided financial support for Attardi, Consagra and Turcato’s study trips to Paris in 1946. In the French capital, this group of young Italian artists were introduced to the work of Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Nikolaus Pevsner and visited the studios of Fernand Léger, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. The encounter with such mainstays of the Parisian avant-​garde cemented the Italians’ interest in abstraction as a site of renewal and as a locus in which their artistic project could be realigned to modernism. However, the launch of the manifesto of abstract art in the Forma 1 magazine of April 1947 marked a point of no return in their rapport with Guttuso and the Communist party more broadly. Realism was, in fact, entirely forsaken in the name of color, line and form, as evinced by the oft-​quoted line from Forma’s manifesto: “we are interested in the form of the lemon, and not the lemon.”16 By declaring themselves to be both “formalists” and “Marxists” Forma artists appeared to challenge the conviction that art could only speak to the masses if realist in register. The Communist party were quick to condemn the group for their inflammatory stance and in a 1948 issue of Rinascita a vehement rejection of abstraction read: “Come on! Have courage! Do as the little boy in Andersen’s tale: say that the king is naked; and that a scribble is a scribble.”17 Arguably, by invoking Andersen’s notorious tale the emphasis was placed on abstraction as a make-​believe form of art with little substance beyond a scribble. Stances like this one led to a rift between those in favor of abstraction and those against it that mired most of the 1950s. While the polarization of the Italian art world of the 1950s, ensuing from the abstraction versus figuration feud, has been extensively rehearsed, this chapter focuses specifically on the strategic role played by the GNAM and its legendary director Palma Bucarelli in the deployment of abstraction to reclaim a place for Italy in the larger modernist narrative.18 Abstraction was, in fact, given center stage in the gallery’s program of temporary exhibitions, permanent collection displays and acquisitions, concurrently sanctioning the internationalization of the GNAM and of postwar Italian art. Critical to this narrative is the exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia, jointly organized by the GNAM, L’Age d’or and the Art Club (an association founded by Jòzef Jarema and the late Futurist Enrico Prampolini in 1945). This exhibition, as shall be argued, brings to the fore the existence of not one, but multiple abstractions, while also addressing the inherent tension between abstraction as a native art form and abstraction as a borrowed lexicon from the international avant-​garde.

Palma Bucarelli: The Joan d’Arc of Parisian Modernisms Looking back on Palma Bucarelli’s long tenure at the GNAM, the leading art critic Giulio Carlo Argan claimed: “One must give Palma Bucarelli … the merit of having understood from the beginning that a museum of modern art can be a national institution, but it must be culturally international.”19 Indeed, from the moment she took charge of the Gallery she made a point of positioning it at the forefront of contemporary discourses, both nationally and internationally.20 The months that spanned between the occupation and the end of the war on 25 April 1945 saw Bucarelli make a mark on the museum’s collection displays and forge

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All That Jazz  235 a new narrative for Italian art. The Esposizione d’arte contemporanea 1944–​ 45 (Exhibition of contemporary art), which unfolded across only ten of the museum’s many rooms, focused on contemporary art; suggesting that the present held the keys to the future.21 Featuring works by amongst others Giorgio Morandi, Medardo Rosso, as well as Guttuso and Mario Sironi (whose outspoken alignment with Fascism did not prevent Bucarelli from including him at this stage) proved that art historical concerns rather than ideological ones underpinned her survey.22 With time her clear penchant for abstraction would make itself more explicitly manifest, but for the time being the internationalization of Italian art from the first half of the twentieth-​century was Bucarelli’s chief concern. This is perhaps made most tangible by the publication of a bilingual catalogue (Italian-​English) to coincide with the Esposizione d’arte contemporanea, a move that allowed Bucarelli to share her vision for the museum with a foreign audience. Underlying it all was the much-​coveted notion that Italian art had finally overcome the return-​to-​order hiatus represented by Novecento painting and in doing so had rekindled the dialogue with modernism.23 Despite his progressive leanings, Argan spoke to the general concern facing postwar Italian art, when in 1946 he called on the “incontestable backwardness of Italian painting.”24 While surely Novecento’s archaizing tendencies were for the most part read as backward-​ looking, Argan’s contention neglected Italy’s relationship to prewar modernism in the form of Futurism and Metaphysical art. By contrast the art historian Cesare Brandi went to great lengths to remind young Italian artists of the seminal legacy of Futurism and Metaphysical art vis-​à-​vis the French avant-​garde to which they were all turning.25 With Esposizione d’arte contemporanea Bucarelli straddled these divergent approaches, presenting a narrative that legitimized the originality of Italian art, while countering the rhetoric of Fascist art. During Fascism’s apogee one wing of the GNAM had been given over to the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (Exhibition of the fascist revolution). By 1945 this last residue of Fascist propaganda was dismantled making space for new collection displays. These were informed by a drastic narrative revision aimed at downplaying nineteenth-​ century works and promoting contemporary art. As part of this, the packed hang was replaced by a much more spacious one and the décor was substantially paired down; turning the grand rooms of the museum into prototypical white cube spaces. Stripped of all excess the museum was ready to accommodate the modernist narrative envisioned by Bucarelli. This was founded on the following cornerstones: to overcome the consequences of 20 years of Fascist cultural dogma, to disengage with figurative practices in favor of abstraction, to understand art beyond ideological constructs, to promote innovative approaches to education and establish an international network of exchange. The next 15  years saw the affirmation and consolidation of this vision through the GNAM’s ambitious program of acquisitions and exhibitions. In the Spring of 1946, Bucarelli together with the art historian Lionello Venturi (who had recently come back from exile in the United States) organized an exhibition of color reproductions of French art from Impressionism to the present-​day. As Dorazio later affirmed: “This exhibition was the saving grace for modern art in Italy because it was visited and discussed by all the artists from Palermo to Milan and presented works and formal problems whose very existence no one had ever suspected.”26 Modern art and specifically the French avant-​garde was hailed as a beacon of conceptual and formal progressiveness. Like Dorazio, many of his contemporaries were

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236  Flavia Frigeri compelled to admire and unpack, but also make a wholly original contribution to a discourse they had all longed to enter. To most Italian artists, the international avant-​ garde emblematized here by French art, represented an aspirational myth not too dissimilar from the jazz tunes coveted by the Roman New Orleans Jazz Band. The foreigness of these modes of expression guaranteed a clear break from the cultural autarchy experienced under Fascism. Bucarelli took it upon herself to ensure that the GNAM was an instrumental platform in the reconnection with European culture and beyond. She achieved this by establishing strategic partnerships with cultural entities worldwide, while also ensuring that key figures and movements from the recent past entered the GNAM’s permanent collection holdings, as well as being celebrated through temporary exhibitions. Many acquisitions were made in conjunction with the Venice Biennale, which since its first postwar edition in 1948 played an important part in the revival of cultural openness in post-​Fascist Italy.27 For instance, from the 1948 Biennale, she acquired a drawing by Henry Moore.28 While two years later she went on to buy two watercolors by Paul Klee from Max Peiffer-​Webenphul a friend of the artist from the Bauhaus days.29 These early acquisitions, supplemented by a number of significant gifts, including Peggy Guggenheim’s donation of the painting Watery Paths (1947) by Jackson Pollock, reinforced Bucarelli’s ambition to position the GNAM at the crossroad between different modernities. Contemporaneously, she acted as a forceful advocate for Italian art by acquiring works by the leading artists of the time, including Morandi, Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, amongst many others.30 Her zealous acquisition strategy, however, was not appreciated by all and in the late 1950s Bucarelli endured a lengthy mediatic battle made of parliamentary hearings and endless newspaper headlines, in which she was accused of promoting and supporting art of a primarily nonobjective kind that was considered at best inconsequential and at worst dismal by her detractors.31 For example, Burri’s Grosso sacco (Large Sack, 1952) was at the center of a particularly acrimonious debate.32 The response by critics to Bucarelli’s program of temporary exhibitions was equally fraught. Again, criticisms were mostly leveled at her penchant for abstract art over figurative movements. In her choice of large-​scale retrospectives greater prominence was granted to leading abstract figures such as Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Mark Rothko to which Bucarelli dedicated solo exhibitions.33 The Mondrian retrospective, for which Bucarelli counted on the collaboration of architect Carlo Scarpa, showcased the artist’s trajectory and was widely regarded by those in favor of nonobjective art as a formative stepping-​stone in the establishment of a substantive legacy for contemporary abstraction.34 Picasso was also the subject of a major retrospective, which took over the museum almost in its entirety.35 In the aftermath of World War II, the artist had been hailed as a leading avant-​garde forefather by abstract and figurative artists alike. His cubist vocabulary in combination with his outspoken political commitment made him a revered figure for all those reacting to the war’s brutality and seeking to establish a clear rupture with the Fascist era. Despite the many acolytes “Picassism”  –​as the painter Ennio Morlotti later recalled –​“was a curse, because I couldn’t tear it off my back. I felt its weak sides, but I couldn’t see anything other than his imprimatur: Picasso.”36 Morlotti’s words point to how instrumental and yet overbearing Picasso’s presence was, but also gives an indication of the thirst for the international avant-​garde that a show like the one mounted by Bucarelli engendered amongst

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All That Jazz  237 the local audience. However, for all the excitement experienced by younger artists, an older generation of artists, like Giorgio de Chirico, voiced their disapproval. Having long distanced himself from Metaphysical art, de Chirico was now identifying with the archaizing notion of pictor classicus and attacked “Bucarelli, the Joan d’Arc of Parisian modernisms” for the “magnificence of a great Renaissance Lord” bestowed on Picasso.37 This snappy comment should be read as a firm stance against Bucarelli’s desire to turn Rome into an international hub of artistic exchange. De Chirico was not alone in leveling complaints at Bucarelli’s artistic choices, the press also followed suit, with comments such as:  “Ugly, deformed, anti-​human, incredible, insufferable painting.”38 The debate exacerbated even further in 1957 in conjunction with the opening of Capolavori del museo Guggenheim di New York (Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Museum in New York) an exhibition featuring key works from the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s holdings. Newspapers were quick to attack Bucarelli for her choice of yet another exhibition stressing the importance of the abstract canon and Guttuso reinforced these postures by calling it the “dictatorship of abstract art.”39 While these exhibitions have received extensive attention there are a number of ancillary projects that remain under-​researched; despite playing a significant role in GNAM’s ambition to reframe Rome’s postwar cultural offer. These exemplify how Bucarelli was casting her net wide, seeking to engage as many international interlocutors as possible, not just the mainstream avant-​garde. For example, in 1945 Bucarelli with the support of the British Council mounted the exhibition Arte inglese contemporanea (Contemporary British Art). The following year she reasserted the hegemony of French art with the exhibition Pittura francese d’oggi (French painting today). Alongside these European-​ centric projects she also ventured into more unfamiliar grounds with shows that ostensibly came into being through strategic cultural and political connections with countries worldwide. While concurrently speaking to the use of cultural soft power during Bucarelli’s tenure, the eclectic nature of these projects also demonstrates how varied the GNAM’s program was. The range included exhibitions focusing on:  contemporary Hungarian art, Polish engravings, Swiss architecture, Greek contemporary art, Brazilian architecture followed in quick succession by Brazilian painting, modern art from Israel, contemporary Yugoslavian art and a show dedicated to Hungarian exiles.40 In their totality these shows demonstrate how Bucarelli’s program was versatile and informed by many distinct priorities. The promotion of Italian art abroad was also integral to Bucarelli’s mission, who had been a member of the advisory committee of Twentieth-​Century Italian Art (1948) an exhibition curated by Alfred H. Barr and James Thrall Soby at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As an ambassador for Italian art, Bucarelli organized a number of touring exhibitions aimed at reinstating Italy’s place in discussions around modernism in the 1950s. For example, in 1958 she mounted an exhibition of Italian art, which traveled to Copenhagen and Tunisia. Similarly, Bucarelli acknowledged the place held by Italian art in major international collections, in exhibitions like Arte Italiana del XX secolo da collezioni americane (Italian Art of the XX century from American collections) on view at the GNAM in 1960. Speaking to its significance she remarked that the “recognition by a country [United States] so sensitive to all artistic avant-​garde movements” is a “mirror of our values,” which expressed how the affirmation and crystallization of postwar Italian art in the wider narrative of modernism was what she was after.41 Naturally, the connection with the United States was

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238  Flavia Frigeri important, but it was not, as demonstrated above, the sole interest of GNAM’s director. She recognized, in fact, that the establishment of multiple networks of exchange transcended the polarization of postwar art between New York and Paris. In nurturing her tentacular connections Bucarelli was securing a place for Italian art that was as far-​reaching as possible, while also striving to position her museum in the limelight both at home and abroad.

Arte astratta e concreta in Italia “Artists! Friends of all countries, we invite you to express international solidarity! MEET:  that’s the password for the Art Club:  an independent international artistic association.”42 With these words, Prampolini hailed members of the newly established Art Club. Positioned as an apolitical organization concerned with artistic regeneration and internationalization, the association’s long and intense activity saw its affiliates involved in the organization of exhibitions, publications, meetings and symposia for over two decades. As a former Futurist, Prampolini established a model for the Art Club which closely resembled that of Futurism. He made this manifest in the first newsletter he penned for the association: Established with the name of the Art Club, this association aims to use the direct contacts that exist between artists all over the world, quite apart from official channels, to organize the world’s artistic life. We therefore hope  –​for ourselves and for you artists of Paris, London, New York and all the other cities in Europe, the Americas, Australia and Africa –​ that we shall be able to establish reciprocal contacts to accelerate the formation of nuclei of the Art Club in the most important cultural centers in every country.43 Like in Futurism’s heyday the Art Club under Prampolini and Jarema’s joint leadership aspired to establish offshoots in as many locations as possible by drawing in its fold artists from all corners of the world. Despite their desire to be recognized as an independent entity operating outside of the mainstream, the Art Club members found in Bucarelli a close ally. In fact, mirroring Bucarelli’s programmatic ambitions for the GNAM, the Art Club also saw their mission as two-​fold: artistic renewal at home and new and multifarious dialogues abroad. The Art Club extended their network as far as Japan, South Africa and Scandinavia, amongst other places. The collaborations that ensued between members of the association globally resulted in international projects, as well as a number of successful collaborations with the GNAM, host to exhibitions like International Exhibition of the Art Club. Austria, Belgium, United States, South Africa (1949). While broadening the horizons of postwar Italian art was of paramount importance for both the Art Club and the GNAM, the prescription of abstraction as the language of Italian regeneration was also a shared concern. This was concretely evinced by the exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Italia, which brought together 46 artists from Florence, La Spezia, Livorno, Milan, Naples, Turin, Rome and Venice. Moved by a desire to be geographically comprehensive the exhibition was intentionally heterogeneous. Its chief ambition was not to present a cohesive movement, but rather to offer as many possible answers to the loaded question: which abstract style? The range of works included stark geometrical ones referencing the remoteness of post-​Cubism and Concrete art, as well as more

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All That Jazz  239 dynamic ones underpinned by automatism and gestural forms erring in the direction of Informel. No single line could be traced in this survey of abstraction rooted in both the legacy of Futurist dynamism, as well as the experience of the Galleria del Milione in Milan which had nourished the nonobjective idiom during the fraught Fascist era.44 At a time when archaizing figuration was the norm, the Galleria del Milione became a focal point for the development of abstract art, granting refuge to all those seeking respite from Novecento. Alberto Magnelli was among them and the inclusion of one of his 1914 paintings on the cover of the Arte astratta e concreta in Italia catalogue was meant to reinforce the connection between pre and postwar Italian abstraction; pointing to a native strand of abstraction for artists to draw upon without relying singlehandedly on imported styles. The catalogue subsidized by the participating artists was slim but rich in content. Like the exhibition itself it offered different viewpoints on the topic of abstraction by featured artists, leading critics like Argan and Gillo Dorfles, as well as the rationalist architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers. In his contribution “Situazione dell’arte concreta in Italia” (The Situation of concrete art in Italy) Rogers argued: “Ours is an age of disintegration: it will inevitably also be an age of new identifications and liberations.”45 The recognition that “disintegration” was a necessary step in the process of regeneration spoke to architectural, artistic and social concerns alike; ultimately pointing to abstraction’s place and relevance to postwar reconstruction efforts. This notion was discussed further in “Architecture and concrete art” one of two conferences organized in conjunction with the exhibition.46 Again, the role of concrete art from an architectural perspective was explored, lending abstraction a further dimension beyond that of painting and sculpture. Dorazio and Perilli’s contributions were instead underpinned by the goals of inscribing their work and that of their peers in a modernist avant-​garde legacy, while also establishing a wholly new discourse for Italian art. The difficult process of postwar self-​definition came head to head here with what Vetrocq defined as “the larger problem of Italy’s relationship to European [and American] Modernism.”47 Foreign imports were acceptable only as long as they were framed in relation to domestic accomplishments and that is where the significance of Magnelli’s image rests. As Perilli claimed: “The important thing was to discover those absolute values, but must we continue to redeploy them in the same way that Kandinskij or Mondrian had?”48 And in a similar vein, Dorazio noted: “From this synthesis of two complementary elements [Constructivist geometry and Surrealist fantasy] that are insufficient both as distinct entities and as expressive units, a more valid form of plastic expression is destined to come forth.”49 To the question, “which abstraction?” both artists seemed to respond by calling for a hybrid of geometry, surrealist automatism and lyrical expressionist forms. The rigor of Mondrian’s neo-​plastic color planes is countered here with the vibrancy of Kandinsky’s more lyrical and much freer gesture. The other artist, who does not receive an explicit mention here, but had been on the radar of most Italian abstractionists was Pollock, whose work they had first encountered in 1948 at the Venice Biennale when Peggy Guggenheim exhibited her collection in the Greek pavilion. Polar forms of abstraction come together here to express a “local” as well as a “global” struggle. American and French perceived cultural hegemony is at once acknowledged but also neglected in the search for a more inclusive form of abstraction that is apolitical and yet socially aware. In Perilli’s Grande spazio sincreto (Great syncretist space,

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240  Flavia Frigeri 1951), one of the works featured in Arte astratta e concreta in Italia, an amalgam of abstract styles share the picture plane. Interconnecting jigsaw-​like forms sit alongside shapeless blotches, while other areas of the painting are handed over to flat monochromatic planes and intersecting lines organized in a checkerboard pattern gone awry. Grande spazio sincreto reveals the disintegration of different abstractions through the collusion of idiosyncratic forms, lines, colors and planes as if the binary choices that had informed postwar Italian art up to that point such as “abstraction versus realism, creative autonomy versus collective responsibility, national versus international culture” could come undone in one Great syncretist space.50 All along abstraction had fulfilled a strategic role, for both the artists associated with the Art Club and L’Age d’or, as well as for Bucarelli’s GNAM. No single form of abstraction was ever hailed as the one, because establishing rigorous formal parameters was beyond the point. Ultimately abstraction, independently of the binary polarization with figuration, was deployed as a tactic: to rid art of political connotations, to reposition postwar Italian art on the international map and to fulfill the GNAM’s ambition to be recognized as a hub for modernism.

Notes 1 The exhibition was on view from 3 to 28 February 1951. 2 Perilli 2000, 173. 3 Troiani 1951, n.p. 4 For Futurist theatrics see: Berghaus 2013. 5 Lanza 1982. 6 Founding members:  Giovanni Borghi, Luciano Fineschi, Marcello Riccio, Ivan Vandor, Franco Nebbia, Bruno Perris, Pino Liberati, Peppino d’Intino. 7 Eco 1994, xii. 8 Ibid., xiii. 9 For a historical overview of the Marshall Plan see: Ginsborg 1990, 72–​120. 10 For a history of L’age d’or see: Perilli 2000. 11 Ibid. 147. 12 Dorazio qtd. in Mattiti 2002, 69. Unless otherwise stated translations are author’s own. 13 Guttuso qtd. in De Micheli 1989, 285. 14 Potts 2013, 31. 15 Perilli qtd. in Conte 1998, 99. 16 Forma artists (1947) 1994, 712. 17 Mattiti 2002, 82. 18 For the abstraction vs. realism debate see: Duran 2014 and De Micheli 1989. 19 Argan qtd. in Camerlingo 2009, 34. 20 Bucarelli held the title of “soprintendente della Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna” from 1941 to 1975. For a complete chronology of the GNAM’s activities during Bucarelli’s tenure see: Pesci 2011, 327–​58. 21 See, Margozzi 2009, 22–​6. 22 Braun offers an eloquent discussion of the complex relationship between Sironi and Fascism. Braun 2000. 23 For a discussion of Novecento see: Frigeri 2020, 22–​31. 24 Argan 1955, 32. 25 Brandi 1947, 69–​86. 26 Dorazio qtd. in Vetrocq 1994, 23. 27 See, Jachec 2007.

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All That Jazz  241 8 Camerlingo 2009, 35. 2 29 Ibid. 30 See, Margozzi, 2009 (b), 27–​33. 31 See, Marson 2009, 45. 32 On 10 April 1959 Bucarelli was called in for a parliamentary hearing leveled at her inclusion of Burri’s work in the display dedicated to contemporary art. To Senator Terracini (the accuser) Bucarelli’s choice of Burri was largely inappropriate. 33 Piet Mondrian (1956–​57); Jackson Pollock (1912–​ 1956) (1957); Kandinskij. Quarantacinque dipinti del Museo della Fondazione Solomon R. Guggenheim di New York (1958); Casimir Malevic (1959); Mark Rothko (1962). 34 See, Coltelli 2009, 57–​63. 35 Pablo Picasso (1953). 36 Morlotti qtd. in Vetrocq 1994, 23. 37 de Chirico 1955, 27. 38 Simongini 1998, 26. 39 Rosazza-​Ferraris 2009, 222–​7; Sorrenti 2009, 242–​50. 40 Mostra d’arte contemporanea ungherese (1948); Incisori polacchi. Mostra dell’Incisione Polacca in Italia (1948); Mostra di pittura ellenica contemporanea (1953); Architettura brasiliana; Mostra di pittura brasiliana contemporanea (1954); Arte moderna di Israele (1955); Mostra d’Arte per gli artisti esuli d’Ungheria (1957). 41 Bucarelli 1960, 13. 42 Prampolini qtd. in Conte 1998, 85. 43 Ibid.,  96–​7. 44 Caramel 1989, 187–​92. 45 Rogers 1951, 9. 46 The second conference was concerned with “The poetic of abstract art.” 47 Vetrocq 1994, 22. 48 Perilli 1951, 22. 49 Dorazio qtd. in Conte 1998, 112. 50 Vetrocq 1994, 21.

Bibliography Argan, Giulio Carlo. 1955. “Pittura italiana e cultura europea.” Reprinted in Studi e note. Edited by Giulio Carlo Argan, 21–​56. Roma: Fratelli Bocca. Berghaus, Günter. 2013. “Futurist performance, 1910–​1916.” In Back to the Futurists:  The Avant-​Garde and Its Legacy. Edited by Elza Adamowicz and Simona Storchi. Manchester University Press. Brandi, Cesare. 1947. “Europeismo e autonomia di cultura nella pittura moderna italiana.” L’immagine I: 69–​86, 133–​56. Braun, Emily. 2000. Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism:  Art and Politics under Fascism. Cambridge University Press. Bucarelli, Palma. 1960. Arte italiana del XX secolo da collezioni americane. Milano. Camerlingo, Rita. 2009. ““Un museo di arte moderna non può non essere inserito in un contesto di cultura internazionale” Le acquisizioni internazionali di Palma Bucarelli (1948–​ 72).” In Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 34–​ 41. Milano: Electa. Caramel, Luciano. 1989. “Abstract Art of the Thirties.” In Italian Art in the 20th Century. Edited by Emily Braun, 187–​92. London/​Munich: Royal Academy of Arts/​Prestel-​Verlag. Coltelli, Giovanna. 2009. “1956:  Piet Mondrian. Dietro le quinte di una grande mostra.” In Palma Bucarelli:  il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 57–​63. Milano: Electa.

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242  Flavia Frigeri Conte, Gisella. 1998. “Art Club 1945–​1964.” In Art Club 1945–​1964: la linea astratta. Edited by Gabriele Simongini and Gisella Conte, 85–​129. Parma: Galleria d’Arte Niccoli. de Chirico, Giorgio. 1955. “Le amazzoni delle croste.” Candido, Milan 29 May: 27. De Micheli, Mario. 1989. “Realism and the Post-​war Debate.” In Italian Art in the 20th Century. Edited by Emily Braun, 281–​7. London/​Munich: Royal Academy of Arts/​Prestel-​Verlag. Duran, Adrian R. 2014. Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy. Surrey: Ashgate. Eco, Umberto. 1994. “You Must remember This …” In The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–​ 1968. Edited by Germano Celant, xii–​xv. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications/​ Harry N. Abrams Inc. Forma artists. (1947) 1994. “Manifesto of the Forma group.” In The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–​1968. Edited by Germano Celant, 712–​ 3. New  York:  Guggenheim Museum Publications/​Harry N. Abrams Inc. Frigeri, Flavia. 2020. “In and around Novecento:  Between Political Art and Tradition.” In Morandi, Balla, de Chirico and Italian Painting 1920–​1950. exh. cat. London: Tornabuoni  Art. Ginsborg, Paul. 1990. A History of Contemporary Italy:  Society and Politics, 1943–​1988. London: Penguin Books. Jachec, Nancy. 2007. Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–​64. Manchester/​ New York: Manchester University Press. Lanza, Antonio.1982. “Roman New Orleans Jazz Band.” Treccani. www.treccani.it/​ enciclopedia/​roman-​new-​orleans-​jazz-​band_​%28Enciclopedia-​Italiana%29/​ [Last accessed 22 March 2020] Margozzi, Mariastella. 2009. “L’Esposizione d’arte contemporanea 1944–​45. Il presagio della Gloria.” In Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 22–​6. Milano: Electa. _​_​_​_​_​. 2009 (b). “Doni e depositi. La politica di Palma Bucarelli per accrescere le collezioni della Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna.” In Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 27–​33. Milano: Electa. Marson, Stefano. 2009. “Gli ordinamenti delle collezioni dal 1950 al 1968.” In Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 42–​56. Milano: Electa. Mattiti, Flavia. 2002. “Gli eventi. Luoghi di incontro, gruppi, tendenze e movimenti, mostre pubbliche.” In Roma 1948–​1959. Arte, cronaca e cultura dal neorealismo alla dolce vita. Edited by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, 69–​91. Milano: Skira. Perilli, Achille. 2000. L’age d’or di Forma 1. Roma: Edizioni De Luca. _​_​_​_​_​. 1951. “Sono due spazi.” In Arte astratta e concreta in Italia –​1951:  opere di artisti di Roma, Milano, Torino, Napoli, La Spezia, Livorno, Firenze, Venezia. N.e. 21–​ 22. Roma: L’age d’or/​Art Club/​GNAM. Pesci, Flavia. 2011. “Regesto cronologico.” In La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna: Cronache e Storia, 1911–​2011. Edited by Stefania Frezzotti and Patrizia Rasazza Ferraris, 327–​58. Roma: Palombi. Potts, Alex. 2013. Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art. London/​New Haven: Yale University Press. Rogers, Ernesto Nathan. 1951. “Situazione dell’arte concreta.” In Arte astratta e concreta in Italia –​1951: opere di artisti di Roma, Milano, Torino, Napoli, La Spezia, Livorno, Firenze, Venezia. N.e. 7–​15. Roma: L’age d’or/​Art Club/​GNAM. Rosazza-​Ferraris, Patrizia. 2009. “‘La dittatura dell’arte astratta’ (Guttuso, 1957).” In Palma Bucarelli:  il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 222–​7. Milano: Electa. Simongini, Gabriele. 1998. “The ‘Bothersome’ Freedom of the Art Club.” In Art Club 1945–​1964:  la linea astratta. Edited by Gabriele Simongini and Gisella Conte, 26–​35. Parma: Galleria d’Arte Niccoli.

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All That Jazz  243 Sorrenti, Linda. 2009. “La Galleria nazionale nella polemica sull’astrattismo 1957–​1958.” In Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia. Edited by Mariastella Margozzi, 242–​50. Milano: Electa. Terenzi, Claudia. 2002.“Gli artisti e il linguaggio della critica.” In Roma 1948–​1959. Arte, cronaca e cultura dal neorealismo alla dolce vita. Edited by Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, 115–​25. Milano: Skira. Troiani, Ferruccio. 1951. “Suonano I  Blues con la pistola in tasca.” L’Europeo 299–​ 15 Luglio n.p. Vetrocq, Marcia E. 1994. “Painting and Beyond:  Recovery and Regeneration, 1943–​1952.” In The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–​1968. Edited by Germano Celant, 20–​31. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications/​Harry N. Abrams Inc.

42

Index

abstract art 202, 232–​40 abstract cubism 130 abstract expressionism 1–​2, 46, 92, 99, 201 Accardi, Carla 233–​4 Acervo em Transformaçāo (exhibition) 209 Acha, Juan 182–​3 Addis Ababa 151, 156–​9 Afewerk Tekle 149–​60; window design by 149–​50, 153–​4, 159 African art 5, 9, 152, 155–​6, 166–​73 Africans and Africanologists 169 aftermodernity and altermodernism 17 Aggregation (exhibition and artwork) 83–​7 Alloway, Lawrence 44, 70, 220 Amerika magazine 198–​9 Amorales, Carlos 62 anamorphosis 116 Andersen, Hans Christian 234 Andersen, Troels 35 Andrade, Mário de 215 Andrews, Julia 115–​16 Appadurai, Arjun 4 Appel, Karel 27, 29, 31, 34 Araeen, Rasheed 39 Archer Gallery 45 Archer-​Shaw, Petrine  167 Argan, Giulio Carlo 234–​5, 239 Argentina 58–​61, 71, 76 Armstrong, Louis 232 Arp, Jean 27, 234 Arrière-​Garde Edition  63 Art Club 238, 240 art history 5, 12–​13, 16–​17, 113, 116, 122–​3, 127, 132, 134, 138, 181, 193, 208–​9, 229 Art Informel 71 Art since 1900 (diagram) 12–​13 Arte astratta e concreta in Italia (exhibition) 238–​9 Arte Destructivo (exhibition) 70 Arte Nuevo group 182 artistic freedom 195–​8 artistic values and artistic decision-​making 16

arts nègres 167, 173 Aslamazyan, Mariam 223 assemblages 70–​5; environmental 72–​4 Association International des Critiques d’Arts (AICA) 3 associations between artworks 212 Atkins, Guy 36 Augé, Marc 17 avant-​gardism and the neo-​avantgarde 1, 8, 13, 16, 36–​7, 58, 64, 66, 71, 76, 82–​5, 93, 131, 139–​45, 167, 195–​202, 215–​16, 222, 234–​6 Bacon, Francis 45 Bada Shanren 122 Badovinac, Zdenka 19 “bamboo curtain” 113 Bardi Bo, Lina 208–​10, 214–​15 Bardi, Pietro Maria 9, 208–​15 Barr, Alfred H. 9, 12, 193–​204, 237 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 131 Baudin, Antoine 221 Becher, Bernd and Hilla 105 Beier, Ulli 156 Berger, John 44 Berghaus, Günter 144 Bertelé, Matteo 223 Best, Susan 92 Beuys, Joseph 64–​6, 96 Bier, Elmira 149–​50, 153, 160 black artists 28–​9, 165, 170–​3 Bochner, Mel 96–​7, 102 bodiliness and the body 92, 100–​1 Bois, Yve-​Alain  4, 14 Bollinger, Bill 102 Bonami, Francesco 6 Borja-​Villel, Manuel  19 Borowski, Wiesław 58–​9 Bourriaud, Nicolas 17 Bowen, Nevis 44 Braidotti, Rosa 179 Brancusi, Constantin 199, 234 Brandi, Cesare 235

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Index  245 Brands, Eugène 37 Brazil 164–​5, 168–​72, 208, 212–​15 Brennand, Francisco 214 Brest, Jorge Romero 58, 72, 182–​3 Breton, André 179 Brett, Guy 44 Brexit 46 British Empire 44 Brown, Evelyn 155–​8 Bruscky, Paulo 63 Bucarelli, Palma 234–​8 Buchloh, Benjamin 4, 14 Buenos Aires 58, 71–​2, 76–​8, 183, 213 Burden, William 197–​8 Buren, Daniel 59 Burga, Teresa 9, 178–​87 Burlington House exhibition (1931) 128 Burn, Ian 59 Burns, Tucumán 61 Burri, Alberto 236 Bursztyn, Feliza 187 Bydler, Charlotte 2 Cage, John 142–​3 Camnitzer, Luis 186 capitalist artists 117 Carnevale, Graciela 61 Carrión, Ulises 63 Casid, Jill H. 5 Castellane Gallery 83, 87, 90 Castelo Branco, Humberto 164, 166 Caulfield, Sueann 180 Cavalcanti, Di 216 censorship 138, 196, 198 Centre Pompidou 5–​6 Césaire, Aimé 167 C’est Si Bon (music café) 141 Cézanne, Paul 14, 134 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4 Chateaubriand, Assis 208 Chegodaev, Andrey 200 Chenova, Masha 12 Chicago Art Institute 37 China 8, 113–​23; brush-​and-​ink painting see guohua Chlenova, Masha (author of Chapter 14) xiii, 9 Choi, Boong-​hyun  139 Choi, Sooran (author of Chapter 10) xiii, 8 Chung, Chan-​seung  142–​5 Churchill, Winston 47, 195 Cixous, Hélène 179 Clark, John 123 Clark, T.J. 14 Cobra group 7, 27–​40 Cohen, Joshua 151

Cold War era 6, 8, 15, 27, 36, 45–​7, 53, 113, 116, 138, 143, 193, 225 Colectivo Revolución 65 colonization 44 Commonpress Magazine 63 Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery 45 communism 114, 116, 119, 179, 195–​6, 233–​4 Como cathedral 213 conceptual art 99–​100, 104, 186 concrete art 239 contemporary art 2, 12–​14, 17–​19, 127, 132, 138, 141–​3, 155, 200, 220, 227, 235, 237 Coombes, Annie 149 Cordell, Frank 45 Cordell, Magda 7, 44 Cornell, Joseph 83 cosmopolitanism 16, 32, 46, 58, 76 Costakis, George 197, 200–​2 Cowcher, Kate (author of Chapter 11) xiii, 8 Craven, David 45–​6 creative freedom 195, 199 Crozier, Ralph 115 cubism 134 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition, 1936) 194 Cultural Revolution in China (1966–​76) 114–​17, 122 curatorship and curatorial style 12, 18, 167–​8, 212 Cytlak, Katarzyna (author of Chapter 4) xiii–​xiv, 7 Dadbeh, Aryasp 133–​4 Daftari, Fereshteh 135 Dakar 164, 166 Damas, Léon 167 Darboven, Hanne 99, 102, 105 de Aquino, Angelo 62 decentering of modernism 1, 4, 6, 8 de Chirico, Giorgio 237 decolonization 16 decorative art 128, 132 Deisler, Guillermo 62 de Lacaze, Michaela 71 de Leon, Ponce 185 Delzendeh, Siamak 132 Derain, André 135 Deressa, Solomon 158–​9 de Wilde, Edy 84 Deyneka, Alexander 221–​2 Dia Art Foundation 98 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir 167 Dias, Antonio 62 Diaz, Juan Luis 62 Diba, Kamran 135 Didi-​Huberman, George  46

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246 Index Diop, Alioune 172 Dirié, Clément 105 Dissent Biennale 229 Di Tella Institute and prize 57–​9 documenta 11 (exhibition) 5–​6 Donghi, Daniele 221 Dorazio, Piero 233–​6, 239 Dorfles, Gillo 239 Dormisse, Marianne 89 dos Prazeres, Heitor 170 dos Santos, Agnaldo Manoel 170 Dotremont, Christian 27, 33–​4, 38 drawing, role of 99–​103, 106–​7 Driving Image Show (exhibition) 83–​5, 90 D’Souza, Aruna 5 Duch, Leonhard Frank 64 Duchamp, Marcel 64 East–​West split  3 Eco, Umberto 232 Efanov, Vasily 221 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 195, 198 Eisenstadt, Samuel N. 4, 14 El Salahi, Ibrahim 152 Emami, Karim 131–​2 Englund, Lars 58 Enwezor, Okwui 3, 5–​6, 17 Enwonwu, Ben 152 Esche, Charles 19 Ethiopia 8, 149–​60 Eurocentrism 54, 57, 62, 213 exhibitions, role and importance of 2, 5–​6, 9, 87, 98, 198, 234 expanded concept of art 92 experimental art 88 Expos 158–​9, 223 Eyene, Christine 171 Fagg, William 167–​8, 173 Fajardo-​Hill, Cecilia 179, 181 Farmanfarmayan, Monir 135 fascism 209, 214, 232, 235–​6, 239 Félix, Anísio 171 feminism 9, 178–​81, 185–​7; in Latin America 178–​81 Ferlov (Mancoba), Sonja 7, 27–​40; Bird with Young 33; The Little Careful One 35–​6; Man and Woman 35; Maske 34; Owl 32 Festival of Britain (1951) 50–​2 Ficquet, Eloi 167 Fighting Rooster Association 129–​30 First World Festival of Black Arts (FESMAN) 164–​73, 179 Fischer, Konrad 99 Fletcher, Barbara 19 Foksal Gallery 58–​9 folk traditions 130, 140

Fontana, Lucio 89–​90, 227, 236 Forma group 233 Forma 1 magazine 234 fossilism 51, 53 Foster, Hal 4, 14 Foucault, Michel 103 freedom of expression 195–​8, 201 Freyre, Gilberto 169 Friedrich, Heine 97–​8 Frigeri, Flavia (co-​editor, co-​author of Introduction and author of Chapter 17) xiv, 9 Frondizi, Arturo 71 Fry, Roger 128–​9 Fu Baoshi 8, 118–​23 futurism 235, 238 Gabo, Naum 43–​4, 85 Gagarin, Yuri 223–​5 Galeria Lirolay 70, 72 Galerie Apollinaire 45 Galerie Crueze 70 Galleria del Milione 239 Galleria di Roma 208–​10 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) 9, 232–​40 Gallery Iris Clert 60 Gallery One 43 Gallimardet, Lorraine 167 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar 4 Gauguin, Paul 135, 179 Gebre Kristos Desta 151, 159 geometric images 134 Germany 99, 105 Gertrude Stein Gallery 83 Giacometti, Alberto 35, 234 Gilbert, Zanna 187 Giunta, Andrea 74, 181 Global Contemporary Art Worlds after 1989 (exhibition) 2 globalization 2–​4, 14, 16, 85, 93–​4, 133 González, Beatriz 9, 178–​87; The Last Table 184 Goodrich, Lloyd 196, 201 Goriainov, Vladimir 222 Gotti, Sofia (author of Chapter 13) xiv, 9 Goulart, Joāo 164 Gray, Camilla 197, 202 Great Exhibition (1851) 50 Great Leap Forward in China (1956) 114, 121 Greco, Alberto 71 Greenberg, Clement 1–​2, 12, 45–​6, 58, 130 Grigorian, Marco 127, 132, 135 Gropius, Walter 43 Groys, Boris 221 Gu, Jung-​seo  143

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Index  247 Guerrini, Mino 233 Guevara, Che 172 Guggenheim, Peggy 236, 239 Guggenheim Museum, New York 237 Guilbaut, Serge 14 Gu Kaizhi 119 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 4 guohua 8, 113–​19, 123 Gutai movement 93 Guttuso, Renato 233–​7 Haftmann, Werner 222 Haile Selassie 149–​55, 159, 166 Halley, Peter 103 Hamilton, Richard 43, 45 Hammer Museum of Modern Art 179 Handberg, Kristian (co-​editor, co-​author of Introduction and author of Chapter 16) xiv, 9 Hanover Gallery 45 “Happenings” 138–​45; attitudes to 145 Harmon Foundation 155–​6 Harney, Elizabeth 155, 167 Harnoncourt, René 197 Harris, Wilson 53 Hay, Jonathan 116 Hegel, G.W.F. 209 Helhesten (journal) 29 Henderson, Nigel 45 Hepworth, Barbara 47 Hesse, Eva 102 Het Parool (newspaper) 87 Hill, Anthony 43 Hitler, Adolf 194–​5 Holst, Niels von 228 horizontality 5, 7, 62, 67 Hosoe, Eiko 89, 93 Høst group 34 Hultén, Pontus 84 Hundred Flowers Campaign in China (1956) 114 Huyssen, Andreas 2 ideological art 187 Ikegami, Hiroko 5 immersive environments 74 imperialism 138 India 44 “indigenous figuration” 130 Informalism 71 The Inner and Outer Space (exhibition) 84, 86 installation art 83–​7, 90, 102 international artists, networks of 43 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 3 internationalism 134, 151, 160, 220, 235

Iofan, Boris 221 Iran 8, 127–​35; art scene in 1966 and in the twenty-​first century 127; cultural policies 132; school of modern art 132 Italian art and architecture 213–​15, 232–​40 Jackson, Anthony 50 Jackson, Sarah 7, 44–​51; Pterodactyil 50–​1 Jackson, Timothy 45 Japan 82–​3, 92–​3 Jarema, Jòzef 234, 238 jazz 232–​3, 236 Jensen, Knud W. 9 Johns, Jasper 13, 73 Jones, Caroline A. 2, 220 Jorn, Asger 27, 31–​8; Timid Proud One 36 Joyeux-​Prunel, Béatrice  14 Judd, Donald 83, 85, 92, 106 Judt, Tony 3 Ju-​Jus  156 Jung, Kang-​ja  141–​4 junk art 70, 73 Kamoji, Koji 59 Kanayama, Akira 83 Kandinsky, Wassily 27, 236, 239 Kaprow, Allan 58, 73–​6, 140, 142 Kawara, On 83 Kazemi, Houshang 131–​2 Kemble, Kenneth 71 Kennedy, John F. 116–​17 Keshmirshekan, Hamid 132 Khardzhiev, Nikolai 200 Khrushchev Nikita 116–​17, 196, 222 Kim, Young-​ja  139 Kimmel, Mark 156 Kjersmeier, Carl 32 Klee, Paul 27, 236 Klein, Melanie 32, 98 Klein, Yves 60, 83–​4, 227 Knell, Simon 17–​18 Knížak, Milan 60–​1 König, Kasper 98 Kooning, Willem de 201 Korzhey, Gely 229 Kostołowski, Andrzej 62 Kosuth, Joseph 99–​101 Kozłowski, Jaroslaw 62 Kraskiński, Edward 59 Krasner, Lee 36 Krauss, Rosalind 4, 14 Kubota, Shigeko 83 Kudō, Tetsumi 93 Kultermann, Udo 89 Kunsthalle Bern 86–​7, 102 Kurczynski, Karen (author of Chapter 2) xiv, 7

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248 Index Kusama, Yayoi 7, 82–​94; in Europe 88–​90; as a performer 88–​91; Walking Piece 93 Laachir, Karima 151 Laing, Gerald 116–​17 language of art 16, 59, 194–​5 Lapin Dardashi, Abigail 170 Lash, Miranda 156 Lassow, Ibram 201 Laurberg, Marie (author of Chapter 6) xiv–​xv, 7 Lefebvre, Henri 77 Léger, Fernand 167, 234 Lenin, V.I, 64 Leonov, Alexei 220, 223–​9 Levin, Ayala 153, 159 Lhote, André 129 Liang Qichao 115, 117 Licht, Jennifer 98, 103 LIFE magazine 203 Lippard, Lucy 61, 142 London 7, 43–​5, 57 Lonzi, Carla 179 López, Miguel A. 187 Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 186 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 9 Lubin, Maurice 172 McCarthy, Joseph 193, 195 McHale, John 45 Maenz, Paul 99 Magiciens de la Terre (exhibition) 5 Magnelli, Alberto 239 Mahmoud-​Khan  134 Maillol, Aristide 199 Malevich, Kazimir 85, 236 Malfatti, Anita 216 Malraux, André 31 Mamedova, Tamara 199 Mancoba, Ernest 7, 27–​40; Ancestors 35, 39–​40; Composition 30 Mancoba, Wonga 35, 39 Manet, Édouard 1 Mao Zedong 8, 117–​19; different roles played by 113 Marcuse, Herbert 144 Marighella, Carlos 172 Maroja, Camila (author of Chapter 15) xv, 9 Marshack, Alexander 201–​3 Marshak, Samuil 201–​2 Marshall Plan 232 Martin, Jean-​Hubert  5 Marxism 134 Marzagora, Sara 151 mass media 139 Masterkova, Lidiia 201

material aspects of art 27 Matisse, Henri 135 Matta, Roberto 155–​7 Mayakovsky Museum 200 Mazadiego, Elize (author of Chapter 5) xv, 7 Menezes, Hélio 168 Mercer, Kobena 4, 16, 46, 53 Metaphysical art 235, 237 Metelkova (Ljubljana) 18–​19 Méthamorfoses (television program) 88–​9 Mezzedimi, Arturo 153 Mignolo, Walter 66 migrant artists 16 Mikael, Käbbädä 151–​2 Miki, Tomio 93 Milanich, Nara 180 minimalism 91–​2, 99 Minujín, Marta 7, 57–​8, 70–​8; Boxes 71; The dead dog 70; Erotics in Technicolor 72; Mattresses 58, 72; La Menesunda 74–​8; Movimiento Interior 72; Three Country Happening 58; Wallow Around and Live! 72–​3 Miró, Joan 27 Mitchell, W.J.T. 51 Mitter, Partha 4–​5, 63 modern art 12, 14, 57, 60, 117, 127, 130, 135, 194, 229 Moderna Galerija 18 Moderna Museet 9, 84–​6 modernism 1–​2, 12–​17, 47, 50, 53–​4, 57, 63, 66–​7, 155, 178, 187, 193–​4, 200, 203, 234–​7; Chinese 113, 115, 123; definition of 1; early and late 13–​14; Euro-​American 116, 122; in Iran 127–​35; in mainstream 12–​13; meanings of 16; polycentric 14; situated 17; types of 17; see also multiple modernisms modernity 4, 6, 9, 16–​17, 57, 66–​7, 94, 178, 186–​7, 215–​16, 220, 232; Chinese 116, 122–​3; specious 17 modernization 16; in China 114 Modigliani, Amedeo 167, 212 Moholy-​Nagy, Lázló  43–​4 Mojabi, Javad 130, 134 Mondrian, Piet 233, 236, 239 Mongolia 17–​18 Monochrome Malerei (exhibition) 89 Montale, Eugenio 48 Moore, Henry 43, 49, 236 Morandi, Giorgio 235–​6 Morlotti, Ennio 236 motifs, artistic 82, 91 Moura, Sabrina (author of Chapter 12) xv, 8–​9 Moussavi-​Aghdam, Combiz (author of Chapter 9) xv, 8

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Index  249 Moxey, Keith 57 Mukhina, Vera multiculturalism 46 multiple modernisms 3–​9, 12–​18, 57, 66, 82, 94, 229 Multiple Modernisms book 7, 9 Multiple Modernisms conference (Humlebæk, 2017) 6 Munroe, Alexandra 93 Musée de l’Homme 29, 156, 172 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 18, 182, 193–​4, 197–​9, 237; International Council 198 Museum Sztuki (Lódz) 19 Mussolini, Benito 208, 213, 221 Myer, Richard 12 Nalecz, Halima 44 Narcissus Garden (installation) 90 Nascimento, Abdias do 165, 170–​2 National American Exhibition 200 national identity 116, 127, 129, 132, 152 nativism 46, 134 Nazi regime 194–​5 Négritude 164, 167–​73 Neo-​dada  71 New American Painting (exhibition) 198 New Vision Centre Gallery 43–​5 New York 2, 5, 12, 16–​17, 57, 82–​3, 92–​3, 96–​107, 238 Nochlin, Linda 14 Noé, Luis Felipe 59–​60, 66 Noiret, Joseph 27 Nouveau Réalistes 70, 75–​7 Nul (exhibition) 83, 85 “obsessional art” 93 October group 14 Ogbechie, Sylvester 152 Oh, Gwang-​soo  139–​42 O’Keeffe, Georgia 82 Okeke, Chika 34 Oldenburg, Claes 83 Orez Gallery 89–​91 orientalism 135 Orozco, José Clemente 143 Orsini, Francesca 151 Osborne, Peter 14, 186 outsider identity 93 Ozenfant, Amedée 47 Padín, Clemente 61–​2, 65–​6 Pahlavi dynasty 129 Pahlbod, Mehrdad 132 painting, meaning of 129–​30 Pallasvuo, Jaakko 12, 14 Pan-​American Union  181–​2

Pan Tianshou 8, 118, 121–​3 Paolozzi, Eduardo 43, 45 Parapolitics (exhibition) 6 Paris 1, 14–​17, 29, 37, 57, 70, 82, 93, 155–​6, 234, 237–​8 Park Chung-​hee 138, 145 Paz, Octavio 179 Pedrosa, Adriano 208, 210 Pedrosa, Mario 186 Peeters, Henk 89 Peiffer-​Webenphul, Max  236 Perilli, Achille 233–​4, 239 Péron, Juan Domingo 76 Persian art 128–​9, 132 “personable expressions” 28 Petasz, Paweł 63 Petrov-​Vodkin, Kuzma  221 Pevsner, Nikolaus 234 Picasso, Pablo 16, 47, 135, 167, 195, 212, 222, 234–​7 Piotrowski, Piotr 5 Pissarro, Lucien 16 A Plastic Umbrella and Candlelights 139–​42 Plastov, Arcady 223 pluralism, artistic 198–​9 poetry 119–​20 Polish art and artists 58–​9, 62 political art 186 political inclinations of artists 196 political messages 140–​1 Polka Dot Love Room (installation) 90–​1 Pollock, Griselda 14 Pollock, Jackson 4, 46, 135, 200–​1, 236, 239 Pop art 91–​2, 154, 183–​5, 232 Pope, Arthur 128–​9, 132, 134 populism 29 Portinari, Cândido 212 postcolonialism and postcolonial theory 16, 46, 127, 138 postmodernism and poststructuralism 4, 7 postwar era 3, 5–​6, 8, 49–​50, 93, 193 Potts, Alex 233 Powers, Martin 116 Prado-​Valladares, Clarival do 165, 168–​73 Prampolini, Enrico 234, 238 primitivism 28–​32 propaganda 113, 116–​18, 123, 198, 228, 235 Ptaszkowska, Anka 58 Quadrante (journal) 213 Quadros, Jânio 164 Quijano, Aníbal 66 racism 167, 170 Radical Women (exhibition) 179, 181 Rahmato, Dessalegn 158

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250 Index Ramírez, Mari Carmen 186 Ramsden, Mel 59 Rauschenberg, Robert 5 Rautert, Timm 98 Read, Herbert 45–​9 Reid, Susan S. 222 Reina Sofia (Madrid) 19 Reiss, Julie 102–​3 religious prints 184 Restany, Pierre 45, 58, 61, 70, 72, 76–​7 revisionism 2, 13–​14, 196 Richard, Sophie 99 Ricoeur, Paul 32 Ricupero, Rubens 169 Rivera, Diego 212 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 239 Roman New Orleans Jazz Band 232–​3, 236 Romas, Yakov 223 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 181 Rosario Group 61 Rosenau, Helen 47 Rosso, Medardo 235 Rothko, Mark 30–​1, 85, 89, 236 Rottner, Nadja 75–​6 Sachs, Paul J. 194 Sadr, Behjat 135 Saito, Takako 83 Sanfilippo, Antonio 233–​4 Santanonín, Ruben 74–​6 São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MASP) 9, 208–​16 Saqqa-​khaneh movement  131–​4 Savitsky, Mikhail 223 Scanavinio, Emilio 7, 44–​53; Evolution 47–​9; Pterodactyil 50–​1; This Is Tomorrow 48 Scarpa, Carlo 236 “school” concept 133 Schoonhoven, Jan 91 Schopp, Caroline Lillian 103 Schulz, Tomasz 64 Schwitters, Kurt 43 Sebreli, Juan José 77–​8 Second World Congress of Black Artists and Writers (Rome, 1959) 166 Second World War 2–​3, 9, 27, 53, 195, 208, 232, 236 Seitz, William 70 Sekoto, Gerard 165, 171–​2 Selam, Alec Felege 151 Senegal 169, 172–​3 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 151, 158, 164–​9, 172–​3 sexual liberation 144 Shah of Iran 135 Shchusev, Aleksey 221

Shiff, Richard 116 Shimamoto, Shozo 93 Shinohara, Ushio 83 Shiomi, Mieko 83 Shunk, Harry 89 SIEĆ/​NET project  62 Signalement ’67 (exhibition) 86–​7 Silbergeld, Jerome 115 Sironi, Mario 235 Skunder Boghossian 151, 154–​8; Ghosts of the Atlantic Ocean 157–​8; Night Flight of Dread and Delight 156–​8 slave trade 157–​8 Smith, Bernard 14, 16 Smith, Giulia (author of Chapter 3) xv, 7 Smith, Terry (author of Chapter 1) xvi, 7 Smithson, Alison and Peter 45 Soares, Teresinha 186–​7; She Hit on Me 186 “socialist realism” 114–​19, 129, 222, 228, 233 Sokolov, Andrey 224–​5 Sonnier, Keith 102 Sontag, Susan 74–​5 Sor Juana 179 Soulages, Pierre 135 South Korea 8, 138–​45 Souza-​Dantas, Raymundo de 164 Soviet Union 62, 193–​203, 220–​3, 228 space missions 223–​9 Spaces (exhibition) 102 Spies, Werner 228 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 17 Sredelijk Museum 9 Stalin, Joseph (and Stalinism) 58, 195–​6, 221 Stanford Friedman, Susan 14, 17 Stażewski, Henrik 59 Stedelijk Museum 83–​9 Stock, Karen (author of Chapter 8) xvi, 8 Straine, Stephanie (author of Chapter 7) xvi, 7–​8 Suchan, Jaroslaw 19 Sutherland, Graham 43, 46–​7, 50–​2; The Origins of the World 50, 52 Šuvaković, Miško 64 Sylvester, David 44–​5 Szeemann, Harald 86, 229 Szombathy, Bálint 64–​6 Tajiri, Shinkichi 7, 27, 37–​40; “knot” sculptures 38–​9; Prisoner 37–​8; Warrior 37–​8 Tanavoli, Parviz 135 Tarazona, Emilio 183 Tate Britain 43 Tate Modern 6 Tchorek, Mariusz 58 Tehran Biennial 127, 132

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Index  251 Teraoka, Masami 83 Terragni, Giuseppe 213 Thompson, Francis 200 Thompson, Robert Farris 5 Tibério, Wilson 165, 171–​3 “total art” 73, 143 “tourist-​oriented” art  135 transnational modern art 194 Transparent Balloons 143–​4 Tretyakov Gallery 200–​1 tribality 168 Tristán, Flora 179–​80 Truman, Harry 195 Turowski, Andrzej 59 Tuskegee Institute 156–​7 underground art scene 87, 202 Underwood, Joseph 168 “The Union” 138–​41 United Nations (UN) 3; Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 3, 155 universalism 39–​40 Uruguay 66 Valentin, Rubem 170 Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) 19 Van Houts, Theo 86, 91 Vargas Losa, Mario 179 Vasarely, Victor 135 Venice Biennale (2003) 6, 9, 18, 90, 127, 220–​9, 233, 236, 239 Venturi, Lionello 235 Venus of Willendorf 47 Verboon, Leo 89 Verocq, Marcia E. 239 Verstappen, Harrie 89–​91 Vigo, Edgardo Antonio 62 Villa-​Lobos, Heitor  215 Vincent, Cédric 168 Vinograd, Richard 123

Vogel, Albert 89–​91 Vostell, Wolf 58 Waisman, Mariana 77 Walther, Franz Erhard 8, 96–​107; Blind Object 104–​5; Walking Piece 100–​1; 1. Werksatz and Werkzeichnungen 96–​107 Walther, Johanna 98 Wang, Eugene 116 Warhol, Andy 92, 135 Watson, Josephine 187 Weiss auf Weiss (exhibition) 86–​7 Westad, Odd Arne 3 Western art and artists 57–​60, 63–​7, 114–​18, 208–​9 Wilk, Christopher 16 Williams, Aubrey 7, 45–​6, 52–​4; Death and the Conquistador 52–​3 Williams, Raymond 16 Wilson, Avray 44 Wilson, Sarah 49 women artists 37, 46, 85 women’s role and rights 149, 178–​81, 186 world’s fairs 220, 223 Wright, Richard 3 Yan’an Talks (1942) 117–​19 Yoshiaki, Tōno 92–​3 Yoshihara, Jiro 93 Yu, Joon-​sang  143 Yusoff, Kathryn 52 Zabala, Horacio 62 Zadkine, Ossip 37 Zamoshkin, Aleksandr 200 Zendehroudi, Hossein 133 ZERO network 227 Zewde, Bahru 159 Zhdanov, Andrei (and Zhdanovism) 221 Ziapour, Jalil 129–​34; Ey Amir, Amir 131 Zverev, Anatoly 197, 202

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