1940s

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.

In 1939, the South African artist Ernest Mancoba turned toward abstraction for the first time. Although this artistic development has been associated with Mancoba’s relationship to the CoBrA movement, Joshua Cohen argues that his embrace of abstraction also can be read as a turn away from the burdens of representation imposed by patrons upon a black South African artist.

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.

Colorhythms, a group of works by Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero made in the 1940s and 1950s, are vertical or horizontal rectangular paintings that unfold in countless serial compositional variations.

Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-65, an exhibition on view at Haus der Kunst in Munich from October 2016 – March 2017, presents the period and its art as already global, multi-faceted, and modern.

Art historian Anna Pravdová delves deep into the MoMA Archives to highlight the Museum’s first exhibition of Czech art.

Curator Laura Hoptman comments on the importance of Raúl Lozza’s work Invention no. 150, which connects Concretism, Neo-Concretism, and Conceptual art movements.