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…
Just a few days into his trip to Moscow in the winter of 1927–28, Alfred Barr wrote in his diary, “Apparently there is no place where talent of an artistic or literary sort is so carefully nurtured as in Moscow. . . . We’d rather be here than any place on earth.”* He went on…
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.
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. In the following interviews, they address the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
The posters, invitations, programs, and flyers in this selection have been selected to highlight the international range of Fluxus events from 1962 to 1977 and represent some of the most significant among them.
While going through MoMA’s Czech holdings during my Fulbright Research Fellowship at the Museum, I came across a surprising finding: the first Czech objects ever acquired by MoMA were a glass tumbler and two bowls designed by a young student, Věra Lišková (1924–1979) circa 1947, when Czechoslovakia was still part of the industrialized Western world.…
One of the many intercontinental relationships to arise from Fluxus in the second half of the 1960s was the one between Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, the two directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, respectively. When, in the 1980s, Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman outlined the basic ideas of Fluxus,1Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and…
Professor at the Lithuanian Conservatory of Music in Vilnius and scholar of the early 20th-century composer and painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Vytautas Landsbergis connected with the international Fluxus community in the 1960s via his childhood friend George Maciunas. As a result, he corresponded also with Ken Friedman in California and Mieko Shiomi in Tokyo, and…
Aktualní umêní (Contemporary Art), a rare, hand-assembled magazine by the Czech artists’ group of the same name, began production in late 1964. Here, the first two issues are reproduced in their entirety for the first time, along with a unique prototype for the second issue, which offers an exceptional opportunity to compare plans and the final realization.
Czech artist Běla Kolářová was a key figure in Prague’s intellectual circles in the decade of the 1960s, a time of great optimism in Soviet-bloc Czechoslovakia, one of both relative political freedom and cultural searching. The home she shared with her partner, the artist and poet Jiří Kolář, was the center of a progressive artistic…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition.
In this interview conducted during a C-MAP research trip to Belgrade in the spring of 2012, Vučićević speaks to Jon Hendricks and Gretchen Wagner about both art and life.
