In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic…
What happens when we cross over to the other side? In relation to the phenomenon of transshipment – the risky and at times illicit practice of transferring cargo from one ship to another – artist and poet Rindon Johnson ruminates on borders and bodies that remain in flux.
This text considers the work of Vera Pagava, a Georgian artist who lived in exile in Paris, as an amalgamation of modernist and Georgian art historic references. Following Pagava’s life story from Tbilisi, where she was born, to Germany and later Paris, where she settled with her family in 1923 and lived until her death in 1988, this essay introduces her work in relation to that of various other Georgian artists, simultaneously tracing her path from figuration to abstraction.
Treating as insightful case studies the records of miraculous, flower-flurried advents of Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace in the Mindanao Cross, a local newspaper founded by Catholic missionaries in Cotabato City, Mindanao, in 1948, researcher and curator Renan Laru-an initiates the notion of an exhibitionary heritage, articulating this proposition through a self-created grid.
A trailblazing figure in the Southern Cone art scene of the middle decades of the 20th century, Yente (Eugenia Crenovich) has, until recently, received little recognition for her critical contributions to abstraction in Argentina. This essay discusses the context in which the artist realized one of her most unusual pieces, Object (1946), a work of art that defies clear alignment with either painting or sculpture.
This essay is the first in a series of texts on the Foto Cine Club Bandeirante, a group of amateur photographers whose ambitious and innovative works embodied the abundant originality of postwar Brazilian culture. The series coincides with the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964, on view at the Museum of Modern Art from May 8 to September 26, 2021.
Okamoto Tarō recollects his experiences in Paris between 1929 and 1940, discusses the Abstraction-Création movement and reflects on his time at the Sorbonne and Musée de l’Homme.
As the only woman artist in the 1920s avant-garde group Devětsil and an important figure in both Czech and French Surrealism, Toyen produced a significant body of work in painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage.
Wartime espionage, and a search for “Latin Americanness” in artistic practices, was the dual mission that sent Lincoln Kirstein to Latin America in the 1940s. This essay charts these travels in relation to shifting currents in artistic languages and geopolitics—and their part in shaping MoMA’s early collection of art from Latin America.
The Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński completed the manuscript for Theory of Vision in 1947, though it was not published until 1958. Nearly fifty years later, a critical re-edition was put out in 2016 by the Museum Sztuki in Łódź.
This essay considers the condition of Gertrudes Altschul as a German exile who developed a notable photographic practice after settling in Brazil in 1940. Altschul participated in the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) camera club, contributing to the development of the history of photography in São Paulo through her work.
Through a close analysis of documents in the MoMA Archives, this essay challenges the dominant narrative about the development and internationalization of Haitian art in the 1940s.
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