Painting

In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat.

Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. The third and final section of this essay connects the sculptural nature of Clark’s paintings and the human body’s activation in her later works.

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.

Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part two of this essay positions Clark’s paintings as architectural explorations and living organisms.

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.

Through Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso to ancient Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder, scholar Luis Pérez-Oramas outlines and contextualizes Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s vast body of work. Part one of this essay examines Clark’s early works as form-based and the underlying performative aspects of their construction.

The texts below are entries taken from the 1933 guest book from the first solo exhibition of the work of Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1905–1988), a young Palestinian female artist, held in the Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair, organized in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Supreme Muslim Council.

Thoroughly committed to novelty, invention, and atomic and space-age practices, the Crystalist group proposed completely new directions for art in Sudan in the 1970s. Their manifesto published in a Khartoum newspaper within the artistic context of the time introduces the Crystalist themes of transparency and dualism.

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 of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments including those featured here.

In this essay, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas considers the work of Tarsila do Amaral, the subject of the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil on view February 11 through June 3, 2018 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In this essay, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas considers the work of Tarsila do Amaral, the subject of the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil on view February 11 through June 3, 2018 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

If the Caribbean has largely been subtracted from those better-known narratives of art and artists that dominate the Atlantic world, attempts to mend this failing have often brought about mixed results. How may we come to appreciate that Caribbean experience is integral to the historical development and understanding of modern and contemporary art?