Central & Eastern Europe

Prints, interviews artist and publisher Igor Shelkovsky in his Moscow studio during the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group trip in June 2015.

Meghan Forbes examines the ways interwar periodicals blurred the boundaries between art and advertisement, creating international networks of exchange.

Art historian Klara Kemp-Welch draws parallels between artists of disparate avant-gardes whose claims over spaces in the 1960s and 1970s were political gestures. How are we to navigate the historical fields of experimental art in state socialist Eastern Europe and under Latin American military dictatorships? What happens when pedagogy, poetry, sculpture, and sociability bleed into…

Curator Juliet Kinchin addresses graphic images that spurred revolution in Budapest in 1919. Many avant-garde movements in Europe around the time of World War I were linked to radical politics, and in those stormy years, a generation of artists in Budapest created provocative newspaper illustrations, banners, and public posters in a new genre of graphic…

In Fall 2014, the Library at The Museum of Modern Art was very lucky to have acquired this pamphlet of Kantor’s Happening from 1967. It is now catalogued and available for public researchers, who may request to see and (gently) handle this vibrant illustration of early Polish performance art.

Inherent to sound recording and distribution technology is not only the possibility of storing and reproducing any given acoustic event, but also a correlating tendency to make incidental and accidental elements—those which are not considered part of the music recorded—constitutive elements in the sound of a recording. This paradoxically essential surplus, as David Grubbs observed…

Once in the XX Century, an eight-minute film by Deimantas Narkevičius shows a larger-than-life statue of Vladimir Lenin being erected in Vilnius’s main square to the cheers of a large crowd. MoMA acquired the film in 2011, and in 2013, it was included in the Museum’s Performing Histories (1), an exhibition of recent time-based art…

During the Central and Eastern Europe C-MAP group trip to Moscow in June 2015, the participants met with Ilya Budraitskis, who spoke to them about the crisis facing Russia today and its effects on art and culture. Budraitskis’ argument is presented here alongside drawings by Sveta Shuvaeva, an artist whom the C-MAP Group also met…

Since around 1977 when Gilbert and Lila Silverman began to develop their Fluxus Collection, Jon Hendricks has played a central role in fostering the formation of that renowned collection that bears their names.

A series of twelve black and white photographs from MoMA’s Photography Study Collection—each depicting a woman’s hands performing various gestures against a neutral background—have recently been the focus of renewed scholarly interest at the Museum. The prints, grouped in three sets of four and attached to one another with transparent tape, compose three vertical columns…

In 1936, the year after Kazimir Malevich’s death, Polish artist Władysław Strzemiński and his students in Łódź produced an album in honor of the Russian avant-garde master. Malevich’s legacy in Poland was well established by that time: his radical work in abstraction and Suprematism was embraced by artists and architects in the 1920s, many of…

In this interview, conducted when Jarosław Kozłowski visited MoMA to meet with C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe, the artist speaks about the past challenges of communicating across the Iron Curtain, his continuing fascination with language as an art medium as well as what he sees as the danger of a solely political reading of art.