Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain. Art 1945–1948
Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain: International Cooperation in Art, 1945–1948 will be a volume of essays discussing the exciting, underexamined years 1945–1948 when so many initiatives were made to create an all-inclusive international art, anticipating what currently is perceived as »global«, not knowing that time was limited. It will be published with Brill.
A selected group of excellent scholars will contribute case studies on the international art scene of the period, focusing on the sense of a new beginning, cooperation, and openness on the postwar international art scene. Considering Western and Eastern Europe, the United States, and Latin America together reveals the multiple, representative connections between continents and the great projects that were underway before the Iron Curtain descended and the world was divided into hostile entities. Art in this period reflects the backlash to fascism and the German occupation of many European countries, as well as efforts to preserve modernism internationally.
Éva Forgács is Adjunct Professor of Art History at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. Her field of research is the avant-garde art and design of the interwar and post-World War II periods, with emphasis on Eastern Europe and Russia. Her new book, Malevich and Interwar Modernism: Russian Art and the International of the Square was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, and an advisory board member of the Belvedere Research Center in Vienna and the European Network of Avant-Garde Studies. Her books include The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (CEU Press 1995), the co-edited volume (with T. O. Benson) Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (MIT Press and LACMA, 2002), and two volumes of essays. She has published widely, including essays and reviews in journals, edited volumes, and catalogues. Her current project is an edited volume on international artists’ initiatives in the post-World War II years.
Malevich and Interwar Modernism. Russian Art and the International of the Square, London, New York 2022; Hungarian Art. Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement, Los Angeles 2016; The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, London, Budapest, New York 1995.
The lecture will outline global art initiatives in the immediate post-World War II years 1945–1948. This was a unique period because of the strong sense of a fresh beginning that held the promise of a new cultural era of unlimited cooperation between West and East, North and South, on different continents and between countries that had only recently been war enemies.