The names, cultures, and nationalities of African artists who influenced Picasso have historically been omitted from scholarship. Yet Picasso’s interest in African masks is well-known. In this essay, MoMA staff member Kunbi Oni charts the implications— and possibilities—that closer attention to the makers of such masks could shed on modern art.
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 following excerpt is from Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act, published in Berlin by The Green Box in 2017. A collaboration between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke—supported by the Graham Foundation—the book introduces the concept of an “architecture of Balkanization” and explores textually and visually what that might be in the landscape of the decentralized socialist society of Yugoslavia.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has produced three exhibitions since its inception in 2012, with its fourth edition opening in December 2018. This essay sites the biennale within the historical context of the twin port cities of Kochi and Muziris, as well as within the recent burgeoning of the biennial as a international format for viewing “global” art and representing local identities.
The recent documentary “Reading Architecture” (2017) explores the contemporary history of design in India across five practices in Mumbai. Sameep Padora, one of five featured architects, is the founder of Sameep Padora & Associates (sP+a), a Mumbai (India) based architecture studio. In 2016, he initiated sPare, a research arm of the studio.
A major new publication, Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, presents key voices of this period that have been reevaluating the significance of the socialist legacy, making it an indispensable read on modern and contemporary art and theory. The following dialogue belongs to a series of conversations between artists and members of the C-MAP research group for Central and Eastern Europe at MoMA.
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.
Waldemar Cordeiro’s work shifts from his involvement with Concrete Art in São Paulo (of which he was one of the central artists, critics, and curators), to landscape design, a unique take on Pop Art through his “Popcretos,” and his final 1970s experiments with computer art. Cordeiro’s 1970s works were produced while Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship that was skilled and innovative in its manipulation of mass media to control society and manage dissent.
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.
