Abstract, non-representational, non-figurative art is often associated with modernism of the 20th century, with beginnings charted from Russian and European avant-gardes. Such an art historical trajectory, however, does not recognize the abstract foundations of aesthetic traditions in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Accordingly, artists’ deployment of line, shape, form, color, texture, and gesture have historically been coupled with a diversity of premises and motivations—in some contexts non-representational vocabularies were associated with newfound innovation, while they signified a reconnection with indegenous tradition elsewhere. Over the course of the 20th century specifically, abstraction—as a counterpoint to figuration and realism—was leveraged for divergent ideological purposes and was famously heralded in the United States during the Cold War as an expression of freedom in contradistinction to communist socialist realism. The Theme brings into juxtaposition various case studies outside the westerncentric narrative of abstraction, thus problematizing the notion of a “universal” language and resonating with mounting awareness of the distinct local lineages that global surveys must necessarily attend to.
Curator Xenia Benivolski looks at the work of Zanis Waldheims (1909–1993), a self-taught Latvian artist who lived in exile in Canada and spent most of his life on a series of about six hundred geometrically abstract drawings. Benivolski considers the thinking behind Waldheims’s work and its meaning in terms of exile, diaspora, and art historical…
Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today.
Carlito Carvalhosa, who died in May at the age of 59, was one of the most widely praised contemporary figures in Brazilian art. In this homage to the late artist, Luis Pérez-Oramas reflects on their collaboration for the 2011 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Sum of Days.
Estonian artist Sirje Runge’s (born 1950) visionary 1975 thesis project conceptualizes the dynamics between the needs of the individual and the overall logic and construction of the city space in late Soviet Estonia.
One hundred years ago, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black) hung side by side in the Tenth State Exhibition in Moscow. Now part of MoMA’s collection, the two monochrome interventions and their dynamic relationship shape our understanding of nonobjective painting in post-revolutionary Russia.
Karl-Heinz Adler used an abstract geometric approach in both his design and his fine art practices. Given state control and the resistance to alternative aesthetic forms, it is remarkable that Adler’s abstract geometries found their way into the everyday life of East German citizens.
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.
In 2016, The Museum of Modern Art received a major gift from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, which added more than 100 works of modern art by major artists from Latin America to the Museum’s collection and established the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.
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