The publication, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts…
“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis.
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.
When the Brussels Expo presented the exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art in 1958, it unintentionally pioneered a more broadly global view of modern art, although not without some friction.
Going beyond the context of modern Brazil and its experimental art scene, this essay traces a wide genealogy for his body of work, from local traditions such as samba to European intellectual figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche.
Shi Lu’s 1955 trip to India to oversee the design of the Chinese Pavilion at the Indian Industries Fair and his 1956 trip to Egypt for the Afro-Asian Art Conference offer a lens for understanding the PRC’s outreach and artistic diplomacy in the Cold War era.
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.
Painting 9 by Hélio Oiticica was made in 1959, at a pivotal moment for a new and quintessentially Brazilian form of modernism.
Samantha Friedman comments on the importance of the work in the development of Brazilian modern art.
