876

543
21 POSTWAR: ART
BETWEEN THE PACIFIC
AND THE ATLANTIC
19451965
 876
543
PRESTEL
MUNICH LONDON NEW YORK
21 EDITED BY
OKWUI ENWEZOR
KATY SIEGEL
ULRICH WILMES
 TABLE OF EXHIBITION SECTIONS
1. AFTERMATH:
3. NEW IMAGES OF MAN
338 Section Introduction
5. CONCRETE VISIONS
476 Section Introduction
7. NATIONS SEEKING
FORM
624 Section Introduction
CONTENTS
ZERO HOUR AND THE 340 Yule Heibel 478 Pedro Erber
ATOMIC ERA Germanys Postwar Out of Words: The 626 Galia Bar Or
132 Section Introduction Search for a New Spacetime of Concrete Channels for
134 Yasufumi Nakamori Image of Man Poetry Democratic Iteration
Imagining a City 344 Sarah Wilson 484 Andrea Giunta 632 Atreyee Gupta
PATRONS STATEMENT DIRECTORS FOREWORD Through Photography New Images of Man: After Bandung:
Simultaneous
7 Dr. Frank-Walter 13 Okwui Enwezor 140 Stephen Petersen Postwar Humanism Abstractions and Post- Transacting the Nation
Steinmeier Forms Disintegrate: and its Challenges war Latin American Art in a Postcolonial World
Federal Minister for CURATORS Painting in the Shadow in the West 638 Chika Okeke-Agulu
490 Mari Carmen Ramirez
Foreign Affairs ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of the Bomb 350 Homi K. Bhabha Fanon, National Culture,
The Necessity of Con-
17 Okwui Enwezor, 146 Ariella Azoulay Remembering Fanon: creteness: A View from and the Politics of
BAVARIAN STATE Lygia Clarks first major European exhibition
Katy Siegel, The Natural History of Self, Psyche, and the the (Global?) South Form in Postwar Africa takes place at Signals, London, 1965.
MINISTERS STATEMENT Ulrich Wilmes Colonial Condition
Rape
9 Dr. Ludwig Spaenle 6. COSMOPOLITAN
4. REALISMS APPENDIXES
Minister of State for INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS MODERNISMS
Education and Culture, 418 Section Introduction 759 Selected Documents
20 Okwui Enwezor 558 Section Introduction
Science and Art The Judgment of Art: 776 Artists Biographies
420 Alejandro Anreus 560 Zainab Bahrani
Postwar and Artistic Whatever happened to 806 Bibliography
PREFACES Baghdad Modernism
Worldliness Realism after 1945?
566 Catherine Grenier 812 About the
10 Johannes Ebert 42 Katy Siegel Figuration and Politics
Plural Modernities: Contributors
Secretary-General, Art, World, History in the Western
Goethe-Institut Hemisphere A History of a Cosmo- 816 List of Works
58 Ulrich Wilmes politan Modernity
11 Hortensia Vlckers Tanaka Atsuko wearing her Electric Dress
424 Ekaterina Degot 826 Index
Postwar: (Denkifuku)at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition,
Artistic Director, Tokyo, 1956. Commitment to 570 Courtney J. Martin 834 List of Lenders
Denazification and
Kulturstiftung des Humility Exiles, migrs and
Reeducation Hermann Nitschs first Aktion (Action)
836 List of
Bundes Cosmopolitans: takes place on December 19 at the flat of
68 Mark Mazower 2. FORM MATTERS 430 Anneka Lenssen Londons Postwar Art Otto Mhl, Vienna, 1963. Acknowledgments
Alexander Farenholtz Postwar: Exchangeable Realism
212 Section Introduction World 840 Image Credits
Administrative Director, The Melancholy 436 Gao Minglu 574 Tobias Wofford
Kulturstiftung des History of a Term 214 Emily Braun 844 Colophon
The Historical Logic of The Black 8. NETWORKS, MEDIA &
Bundes The Dirt Paradigm
74 Dipesh Chakrabarty Chinese Nationalist Cosmopolitans COMMUNICATION
Legacies of Bandung: 220 Salah M. Hassan Realism from the
When Identity Becomes 1940s to the 1960s 580 Damian Lentini 682 Section Introduction
Decolonization and the
Form: Calligraphic Cosmopolitan 684 Jea Denegri
Politics of Culture 442 Nikolas Drosos and
Abstraction and Suda- Contaminations: Artists, Art in the Network of
Romy Golan Objects, Media
VISUAL ESSAYS AND nese Modernism Realism as Technological Media
CHRONOLOGIES 226 Geeta Kapur International Style and Mass Communica-
Compiled by Damian Lentini Material Facture tion: New Tendencies
and Daniel Milnes 688 Walter Grasskamp
232 Richard Shiff
82 Visual Essay: Social 0 to 1 True Grid
Installation view of the Ninth Street Show,
New York, 1951. and Political Events 692 Anne Massey
238 Terry Smith
96 Chronology of Social Abstraction and Ideol- Reframing the
and Political Events ogy: Contestation in Independent Group
102 Visual Essay: Arts Cold War Art Criticism 696 Pamela M. Lee and
and Culture Fred Turner
The Cybernetic Vision
116 Chronology of
in Postwar Art
Arts and Culture

Jewad Selims Monument of Freedom at

Tahrir Square, Baghdad, 1962.
 PATRONS STATEMENT
Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs

A
n examination of the global development of modern art
between the end of World War II and 1965 is an ambitious
but highly worthwhile undertaking. Haus der Kunst has
taken on that challenge. The result, in my opinion, is impres-
sive: an exhibition that aims to offer its visitors new perspectives on the
artistic development of the period worldwide. The show presents works
by 218 artists, many of them barely known in Europe, from more than
sixty countries. Postwar makes possible a change of vantage points and
introduces us to things of which we were previously unaware. Both are
urgent necessities, becausein politics but also elsewhereto insist that
one is in possession of the absolute truth only leads to deadlocks and con-
flicts. If we want peaceful global development to have a chance, we must
all strive to acquaint ourselves with different perceptions of the same
reality. Only if we succeed in accepting different viewpoints and then
uniting them in dialogue will we succeed in true mutual understanding.
In a world that seems to be coming apart at the seams, cultural
politics has a decisive role to play in this process. Both inside and outside
our country, we must learn to see the whole picture. The more we trust
the social capacity of culture and education to keep differences from
leading to misunderstandings, misunderstandings to conflicts, and
conflicts to wars, the more possible that will be. This is precisely the aim
of Postwar: to contribute to exploring and understanding other perspec-
tives. That is why I was glad to take on the shows patronage.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all involved in the
realization of this exhibition for their outstanding work, in particular
Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes, and Katy Siegel. I wish all of the ex-
hibitions visitors new insights and new impulses for lively discussion.

Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier 7

 BAVARIAN STATE MINISTERS STATEMENT
Dr. Ludwig Spaenle Bavarian Minister of State for Education and Culture, Science and Art

T
hat art unifies society at its core is clear in our rich, diverse,
and vibrant cultural scene. We accord special status to
art that crosses boundaries, and Haus der Kunst, with its
prominence and reputation, makes a valuable contribu-
tion in this context. That is why it is the right venue for the exhibition
Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965, which follow
the coastlines of two great oceans, the Pacific and the Atlantic: from
Germany to Japan to South and North America.
The exhibition lays out the postwar era by perceiving it as a global
phenomenon. A study project as well as an exhibition, Postwar: Art
Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 encompasses a wide
spectrum of international events, including conferences, seminars, and
workshops with regional foci. The research and discussion it developed
are now mirrored in the show, which is devoted to the dynamic relation-
ships among artworks and artists in international, national, and local
contexts, as well as to the complex aesthetic forms that blossomed all
over the world after the turmoil of World War II.
I wish visitors to the exhibition a stimulating and enjoyable aesthetic
experience and many new insights as they immerse themselves in this
presentation of the multifarious facets of the postwar period. I extend my
sincere thanks to the organizers for their exemplary dedication and effort.

Dr. Ludwig Spaenle 9

 PREFACE PREFACE
Johannes Ebert Secretary-General, Goethe-Institut Hortensia Vlckers Artistic Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Alexander Farenholtz Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes

W A
ith its project of the three major thematic exhibitions
Postwar, Postcolonialism, and Postcommunism, Haus der
Kunst, under the direction of Okwui Enwezor, is taking
a new, globally oriented look at the art of these periods
from differing perspectives. The approach of interrelating these various
vantage pointsNorth and South, East and West, colonizers and colo-
nizedin all their nuances corresponds to the dialogical principle of the
work of the Goethe-Institut. It is our great concernand our strength
to support and make perceptible viewpoints and discourses thatare part
of our everyday business all over the world before they are known in Ger-
many. Renowned both nationally and internationally, Haus der Kunst
has proven an ideal partner in this effort. It has undertaken nothing less
than to create, through an in-depth research phase of several years, a
foundation for the writing of a new, globalized history of modern and
contemporary art after 1945.
The Goethe-Institut Fellowship at Haus der Kunst was launched
in 2013 in support of the preliminary research for these exhibitions.
Through this cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, Haus der Kunst
seeks to establish research as a new mainstay within its spectrum
of activities. International in scope, the program is directed toward
emerging scholars who, in addition to their own research work, are
integral members of the curatorial team for one year, making fun-
damental contributions to the preparation of the exhibition. In this
context the collaboration with Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes, and
the entire team at Haus der Kunst has proven eminently produc-
tive. The programs first fellowsAtreyee Gupta, Yan Geng, and
Damian Lentinicame from India, China, and Australia. To the same
extent that they gained from new experiences themselves, they also
gave the project new impulses. The concern in this reflective setting
is with the interplay between art, culture, politics, the economy, and
society as understood in modern and contemporary art on the global
level. That is a strong, future-oriented counter-position to the archi-
tecture and history of Haus der Kunst, which is now becoming a nexus
for encounter and mutual exchange between fellowship recipients and
artists, curators and scholars.
Part I of the trilogyPostwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic,
19451965is now open to the public. Thanks to the inclusion of artis-
tic approaches from the most diverse corners of the world, it is now,
for the first time, possible to read this world not solely from a Western
perspective. Instead, with the aid of works little known in the West, the
world presents itself here as a globally interlinked and mutually influ-
encing whole.
sked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma
Gandhi replied, I think it would be a good idea. The same
could be said of the postwar era: in retrospect, it might seem
to have been a good idea had the war been succeeded by a
period of peace. Instead, hardly had the defeated countries signed their
surrenders than the Cold War broke out between the victorious powers.
In the early postwar years, the war continued to make itself felt in
many waysincluding the politics of culture and exhibitions. Munichs
Haus der Kunst housed a military officers club, and the Allies used other
parts of the premises for reeducation events such as an exhibition on
international childrens and young peoples literature, or shows designed
to rehabilitate art movements proscribed under National Socialism,
from French Impressionism to the Blaue Reiter. From the time of this
new beginning onward, the concern was not solely with ex-post-facto
denazification in art and culture; the postwar affiliation with the West
advanced to become the chief perspective of West German cultural
politics. For decades, standardized collection histories, research foci,
exhibition practices, and art-historical narratives made modern art
and Western art look like one and the same thing.
The Postwar project shows that it was a good idea to counter this
transatlantic one-sidedness with globally expanded research projects.
Haus der Kunst had already committed itself to this goal some time ago
in its guiding curatorial principles, which are informed by recognition
of the fact that the development lines of contemporary art follow
a global and complex course, and defy constraint by geographic, con-
ceptual and cultural boundaries. In this spirit, the Kulturstiftung des
Bundes is pleased to support a project in which researchers, curators,
art historians, and studentsfrom Germany and, significantly, from
many other countries as wellpursue the endeavor of defining a glob-
al modernity that takes into account artistic approaches not only of
Germany, France, England, and the United States but also of India,
China, Japan, Egypt, Nigeria, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and
more. Haus der Kunst had already organized a research symposium
on this subject in 2014. Now, two years later, it is opening an exhibition
that offers a splendid abundance of works dating from the postwar
period. What it teaches us is that multiple modernisms await discovery
in places far remote from the Western centers. It is our hope that Postwar
will meet with a positive response, draw a broad public, and trigger a
discourse that will inspire many other exhibition venues to retell the
stories of modern art under the conditions of globalization.

10 Johannes Ebert Hortensia Vlckers and Alexander Farenholtz 11

 DIRECTORS FOREWORD
Okwui Enwezor
I
n his posthumously published Prison Notebooks, the Italian Marxist
philosopher Antonio Gramsci, writing in the 1930s, in the depths
of his incarceration by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini,
made the following observation: The challenge of modernity is to
live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. I am a pessi-
mist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. Gramscis
reflection on modernity is all the more captivating for having anticipat-
ed so succinctly the wretched spirit engendered by the catastrophe of
World War II across the world. For many who survived the warespe-
cially those who witnessed the concentration camps or the destruction
wrought by the atom bombs, saw the images of destroyed lives and cities
that these disasters produced, and lived through the social conditions
of the periodto refuse to become disillusioned required extraordinary
vigilance. Even before the war ended, the prescient incisiveness with
which Gramsci had confronted the positivist idealism of modernity had
united many modern artists, thinkers, policy-makers, legal theorists,
and ordinary people around a singular fact: the necessity of emerging
from the unprecedented trauma and violence of World War II without
illusions, particularly at a time when humanity faced the daunting task
of refusing disillusionment while building an entirely new modern and
humanistic global compact.
In Europe and Japan, the postwar period inspired a profound re-
flection on how to assimilate the lessons of the war and the invidious
Okwui Enwezor
statecraft of colonialism, while also recognizing, without equivocation,
the quest of the colonized for the end of colonial empires and imperial
dominions. Both the victors and the vanquished of the war had to live up
to new responsibilities, to which end they instituted new programs and
policies to allow a smooth transition from a bellicose period to a more
peaceful one. It is in this sense that within the remit of this project post-
war should be seen not as purely an aftermath but as a horizon into which
the ideals of global emancipation and decolonization could be projected as
the new world order transitioned into a multilateral system of governance.
In culture, similar ideals were pursued and questions were raised across
the world around issues of art and heritage, scientific and educational
exchange, cultural preservation and social interaction. These reflections
were important contributors in the founding of UNESCO in Paris in 1945.
From the defeat of Japan and Germany to the retreat of empire; from
the creation of the Atlantic charter, the Pacific alliance, and the Warsaw
pact to the building of a system of multilateral global institutions; from
decolonization and the emergence of new nation states to the partition
of others; from revolutions to dictatorships, Postwar: Art Between the
Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 probes the creative ferment in which
artists attempted to come to terms with the dawn of a new contempo-
rary era. Through the vital relationship between artworks and artists,
produced and understood from the point of view of local and specific
contexts, Postwar aims to project a broad global understanding of the
13
historical forces that attended the shaping of art after 1945. Covering the
years 1945 to 1965, the exhibition proposes, through exhaustive research
and case studies organized across regions, to explore the global view of
contemporary art in the wake of the radical geopolitical transformation
and realignment after the defeats of Japan and Germany. It is thus po-
sitioned not only as a reflection on the defeat of the aggressive regimes
located on the shores of two oceansthe Pacific and the Atlanticbut
also as a tracing of the spaces of art across the sweeping lines of those
two oceans on five continents. By mapping these oceanic lines and their
continental contours, Postwar straddles nations, political structures,
economic systems, institutional frameworks, and ideological positions.
More important, it engages with the vividness of the artistic systems
and cultural networks of the period. Postwar can also be understood as
the site of making and unmaking, connecting the ceaseless points of
movement of the cosmopolitans and the diasporic, the exiles and the
displaced, the immigrants and the refugees.
From this turning point in global history it is possible to see the
strong shift in artistic identities fomented by the entangled histories of
the postwar period: who made art? Where and why, with what and how?
The exhibition is devoted precisely to the untangling of this question.
Employing a dramaturgical and social lens, Postwar: Art Between the
Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 is centered in the interregnum be-
tween recovery from the devastation of the war and the creation of new
artistic networks in the wars aftermath. It responds to the multifarious
conceptions of art among artists working with a vital awareness of a
world created from conflict and within the experience of change. For
these artistswho lived in different parts of the world, and many of
whom were scarred by war and by imperialism, colonialism, racism, and
segregationthe idea that art and artists had roles to play in such a period
of instability, while constructing fresh insights into human culture and
creativity, was fundamental to the shaping of a new artistic modernity.
Artists were also deeply involved in the search for new subject matter,
creating contemporary forms and harnessing materials in fresh ways
that have since come to define modern and contemporary art.
It should also be noted that the two decades covered here, from 1945
to 1965, marked a cultural turning point: the end of European dominance
of contemporary around the world, the rise of the international promi-
nence and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture,
and mass media, and the incipient globalization of art. For even as the
United States was consolidating its newly found cultural position, other
nations, in South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and East and
Central Europe, were busy as well, exploring and rethinking the artistic
paradigms of their respective contexts. This changing of stakes in the
language, material, and form of art led artists to develop new and alter-
native modernities to mirror the changed terms of geopolitical dialogue
across the world. In Europe, as the Cold War divided the continent into
two separate ideological spheresthe Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern
and Central Europe, allied with the Soviet Union, and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization countries of Western Europe, allied with the United
14 Directors Foreword
Statesthe emerging global South of twenty-nine newly independent
Asian and African countries convened in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 to
lay the foundation for the principle of nonalignment, of supporting nei-
ther East nor West but instead facing forward, in the memorable phrase
of Ghanas Kwame Nkrumah. In the arts, even while the ideological fis-
sure created by the competition for cultural dominance between East
and West, communism and capitalism, socialism and liberal democracy,
created a crude binary in the way the terms abstraction and socialist
realism were taken as moral equivalents, artists in newly independent
countries were discovering the role that they could play in nation-build-
ing and the advancement of a de-Westernized national culture. Artists
across the world grappled not only with aesthetic and formal issues of
artistic creation but also with debates on the correct ideological and cul-
tural position: conformity or individualism, subjectivity or collectivity,
regionalism or internationalism, alignment or nonalignment.
In recent years, scholarship around the world has begun to shed
light on the many alternative histories of contemporary art from this
period, and these inquiries have created opportunities to interrogate
former conclusions and the general history of the postwar period. They
have often ended up challenging and expanding previous discourses of
modernity that were grounded in Western practices of exclusion. We in
turn have gained critical insight into the art of the postwar era by broad-
ening the borders of art history since 1945 while reflecting back on the
debates and discourses that were crucial and fundamental to artists
and their ideas in different regions of the world. At the same time, we
have explored how different terrains of artistic practice and conditions
of production that flourished in previously underrecognized and under-
studied art-historical canons can enrich our current understanding of
postwar art history. The emergent scholarship on postwar art has made
a deep impact on the curatorial arguments that frame this exhibition; in
turn, it requires exhibitions such as this one to foreground them. What is
crucial is that it is the art itself, and the systematic conceptual and aes-
thetic approaches undertaken by the artists of the period, that have been
the real revelation. It is our hope that some of these issues will come to
sharper relief in the course of the exhibition.
Postwar has involved 218 artists from more than sixty countries
and 150 lenders from 36 countries. A project of this complexity, scope,
and ambition must be multipronged in its affiliations and networks.
After nearly five years of research, it gives me great pleasure to thank my
two colleagues and co-curators of the exhibitionUlrich Wilmes, chief
curator and deputy director of Haus der Kunst, and Katy Siegel, Eugene
V. and Claire E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern American Art at Stony
Brook University, New Yorkfor the incredible privilege of develop-
ing and realizing such an important exhibition with them. Ulrichs and
Katys exemplary knowledge of the field, their commitment to research
and their marshaling of every available intellectual resource at their
disposal, and finally their insistence on building a more global account
of postwar art has meant that together we could curate an exhibition
worthy of the ambition we all invested in its making.
A project of this globe-spanning dimension requires not only deli-
cate diplomacy but also a shared common horizon among participants
and collaborators. To this end we are pleased to acknowledge the gen-
erous support provided to us by so many artists, colleagues, lenders,
archivists, foundations, museums, artists estates, galleries, and re-
search institutes over the course and the process of its planning. Our
immense gratitude goes to the patron of this exhibition, the honorable
Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal
Republic of Germany, whose support has been vital to the objectives
of Haus der Kunst as an open, global institution. We wish to thank our
principal collaborating institution, the Brooklyn Museum, New York,
and especially Anne Pasternak, president and director; Nancy Spector,
deputy director and chief curator; and Sharon Matt Atkins, vice direc-
tor, exhibitions and collections management, for their enthusiastic
endorsement of the exhibition and for making it possible to present it in
New York, a city where an important body of postwar art was created
and historicized.
We are indebted to so many individuals and organizations who
have played key roles in funding Postwar. We are particularly thankful to
the shareholders and the major supporter of Haus der Kunst: The Free
State of Bavaria, the Gesselschafft der Freunde Haus der Kunst, and
the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their annual funding support. As the
planning of the exhibition began, we received two major grants from the
Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Berlin, and the Goethe Institute, Munich,
that underwrote the exhibition and research. These two grants were
strengthened by two more from the Art Mentor Foundation, Lucerne,
supporting the exhibition and our educational programs. We are very
grateful to the boards and officers of these organizations, and especially
to Hortensia Vlckers, Artistic Director, and Alexander Farenholtz,
Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Berlin; Johannes
Ebert, General Secretary, and Hans-Georg Knoop, former General
Secretary, Goethe Institut, Munich; and Evelyn Kryst, Karin Ebling,
and Miriam Lthold Lindn, Art Mentor Foundation, Lucerne. Further
thanks go to Darren Walker, President, and Elizabeth Alexander, Direc-
tor, Creativity and Expression, at the Ford Foundation, New York; Wolf-
gang Heubisch, President, and Michael Barnick, Heinke Hagemann,
Irmin Rodenstock-Beck, and Philippe Litzka, Members of the Board, of
the Gessellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst; and Hans-Ewald Schnei-
der and Ingrid Schuchlenz at Hassenkamp, Cologne, for the additional
funding support they provided to us.
Finally, the staff of Haus der Kunst and the core organization-
al team of this exhibition have played an impressive role in shaping its
outcome on every level. It is with gratitude that I recognize their contri-
butions and thank each of them for ably shepherding the entire process
and bringing special professional care and sensitivity to the realization
of this mammoth project.
Okwui Enwezor 15
 CURATORS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes
P
ostwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 has
been in the making for five years. During that time we have ac-
crued debts to so many individuals and institutions who have
supported our work along the way. The generous support that
artists, colleagues, scholars, archivists, foundations, museums, artists
estates, and research institutes have provided to us over the course and
process of planning the exhibition has enabled us to map a truly global
view of the art of the postwar era. We are especially thankful to the lend-
ers, who not only lent key and rare works to the exhibition but granted us
permission to reproduce them in the catalogue. In 2013 and 2014, during
several curatorial meetings at Tate Modern, London, and in Munich, we
benefited from the knowledge and research of colleagues at Tate Modern
who hosted us and participated in our deliberations on the meaning of
postwar. We are especially thankful to Chris Dercon, former Director;
Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions; and, for their contribu-
tions during a two-day curatorial workshop, to Tate curators, fellows, and
researchers including Tanya Barson, Juliet Bingham, Elena Crippa, Lena
Fritsch, Matthew Gale, Mark Godfrey, Shoair Mavlian, Jennifer Mundy,
Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Nada Raza, Kasia Redzisz, Helen Sainsbury,
Chris Stephens, Sandra Sykorova, Alex Taylor, Katy Wan, Andrew Wil-
son, and Zoe Whitley. We acknowledge the early support and interest
of Catherine Grenier, former deputy director, Muse National dArt
Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes
In the best possible way this project has been structured by ex-
change. The exhibition has been enriched by the participation of the
large group of scholars who participated in a four-day conference
organized by Haus der Kunst in May 2014. Our gratitude goes to Atreyee
Gupta, Haus der Kunsts inaugural Goethe Institut Post-Doctoral
Fellow, who helped to convene and coordinate the conference and the
publication of its papers. For the insight they provided through their re-
spective researches we thank the participants in the conference and the
contributors to the forthcoming Postwar Reader: Sam Bardaouil, Nich-
olas Cullinan, Iftikhar Dadi, Federico Deambrosis, Alessandro Del
Puppo, Burcu Dogramaci, Nikolas Drosos, Patrick Flores, va Forgcs,
Hal Foster, Alessio Fransoni, Jacopo Galimberti, Walter Grasskamp,
Boris Groys, Serge Guilbaut, Hideki Kikkawa, Sohl Lee, Gregor H. Lersch,
Paula Barreiro Lpez, Tara McDowell, Abigail McEwen, Armin Me-
dosch, Kobena Mercer, Gerardo Mosquera, Alexandra Munroe, Chika
Okeke-Agulu, Mari Carmen Ramrez, Amanda Katherine Rath, Doro-
thea Schne, Nada Shabout, Devika Singh, Terry Smith, Ming Tiampo,
Reiko Tomii, and Isobel Whitelegg. In organizing the conference we also
benefited from the support of two crucial partners in Munich, the Zentral
Institute fr Kunstgeschichte and the art history department of Ludwig
Maximillian University, which hosted sessions of the conference in their
respective institutions. We thank Iris Lauterbach, Events and Fellow-
ships Manager at the Zentral Institute fr Kunstgeschichte, and Burcu
17
Dogramaci, Professor of Art History at Ludwig Maximillian Universi-
ty, for their staunch solidarity. Thanks are due to Eugene V. and Clare
E. Thaw for their generous support for Katy Siegels scholarly work and
research. We further acknowledge the support of Joachim Bernauer,
Head of Culture at the Goethe-Institut, and Johannes Hossfeld, Head
of the Film, Television, and Radio Division at the Goethe-Institut. We
are grateful to Uchenna Enwezor and Louise Neri for their unceasing
support throughout the preparations for Postwar.
We are delighted by the overwhelming response that our invita-
tion to contribute to the project has received from so many esteemed
colleagues. Our thanks go to Alejandro Anreus, Ariella Azoulay, Zainab
Bahrani, Galia Bar Or, Homi K. Bhabha, Emily Braun, Dipesh Chakra-
barty, Ekaterina Degot, Jea Denegri, Nikolas Drosos, Pedro Erber, Gao
Minglu, Romy Golan, Andrea Giunta, Walter Grasskamp, Catherine
Grenier, Atreyee Gupta, Salah Hassan, Yule Heibel, Geeta Kapur, Pamela
M. Lee, Anneka Lenssen, Damian Lentini, Courtney Martin, Anne
Massey, Mark Mazower, Yasufumi Nakamori, Chika Okeke-Agulu,
Stephen Petersen, Mari Carmen Ramrez, Richard Shiff, Terry Smith,
Fred Turner, Sarah Wilson, and Tobias Wofford for their illuminating
contributions to the catalogue. We acknowledge with gratitude the
excellent contributions of the graphic designers at Double Standards,
Berlin, especially Chris Rehberger, Annika Riethmller, and Julia
Egger, for the beautifully designed catalogue and the accompanying
exhibition guide. We thank Thomas Byttebier, Jerome Coup, Dimitri
Jeurissen, Jacques Letteson, and Sander Vermeulen at Base Design,
Brussels, for the engaging and stimulating design of our new website,
the microsite for Postwar, film trailer, and the image campaign. We were
fortunate to have the capable hands of David Frankel editing the texts
in the catalogue; Davids consummate skill, precision, and sensitivity
to elucidating the meaning of the writers core ideas shaped the book
and transformed the essays immeasurably. Our thanks go to Sophie
Reinhardt, the copy editor of the German catalogue and exhibition
guide, for her incisive and patient work. It was a pleasure to work with
Ann Henderson, Stacy Moore, Monica Rumsey, and Emily Salmon, the
team of copy editors of the catalogue and exhibition guide in English,
who provided the editorial overview with precision and reliability.
Further thanks are due to other contributors to the copy-editing pro-
cess, including Jonathan Fox (chronologies) and Wendy Vogel (artists
biographies). Our thanks go to the contributing writers of the short-
guide entries and artist biographies: Andrianna Campbell, Tiffany
Floyd, Yan Geng, Megan Hines, Carina Kaminsky, Damian Lentini,
Nicolas Linnert, Daniel Milnes, Alexandra Nicolaides, Ady Nugeraha,
Amy Rahn, Tim Roerig, Tatjana Schfer, Gemma Sharpe, Petronela
Soltsz, Joseph Underwood, Wendy Vogel, Caroline V. Wallace, and
Rachel Wetzler. We further acknowledge the important work of trans-
lating the texts from Croatian, French, Hebrew, and German, a task
rendered by Richard Flantz, Dorotea Fotivec, Judith Rosenthal, Rebecca
van Dyck, and David Wharry. For the enormous task of translating
the catalogue texts from English into German we thank Bernd Wei,
18 Curators Acknowledgments
translation coordinator, David Drevs, Bettina Eschenhagen, Drte indispensable in the logistical organization and coordination of such
Fuchs, Barbara Hess, Barbara Holle, Norma Keler, Felix Mayer, a complex project. Last but not least, we acknowledge the efforts
Jutta Orth, Trude Stegmann, and Christine Wunnicke. We also thank of Tina Anjou, Marketing; Anna Schller, Digital Communication;
Nikolaus Schneider, David Drevs, Barbara Holle, and Anne Pitz for their Jacqueline Falk, Digital Communication Assistant; Elena Heitsch,
excellent translations of the exhibition guide texts. It has been great to Press; Martina Fischer, Mediation and Visitor Relations; Chris
rely on the unflappable dedication of our colleagues at Prestel Verlag, Goennawein, (Jakob Jakob) graphic design; Christian Gries, Digital
the publisher that has overseen the production of the catalogue and Communications Consultant; and all those both inside and outside
exhibition guide. We are especially thankful to Christian Rieker, publisher, Haus der Kunst whose contributions have been invaluable in the reali-
Wolfram Friedrich, production director, Katharina Haderer, editor in zation of this project.
chief, Constanze Holler, editorial direction, and Cilly Klotz, production
management. Our immense thanks go to Nina Beitzen, Valeska Hchst,
and Wilfried Kuehn at Kuehn Malvezzi, Berlin, who with vivid and
meticulous clarity provided the beautiful exhibition design.
We are indebted and grateful to colleagues and staff at Haus der
Kunst for their dedicated work and or the attention they gave to every
detail of the project. Marco Graf von Matuschka, Chief Financial
Officer, and Moritz Peterson, Assistant, guided the financial, legal,
and operational work necessary to achieve our goals. Thanks are
due to Melissa Klein, Executive Assistant to the Director, and to Iris
Ludwig, Teresa Lengl, and Sonja Teine, Assistants to the Director, for
maintaining the smooth running of the Directors office. We recog-
nize with immense thanks the excellent and peerless work of a team of
curators, fellows, researchers, and liaisons at Haus der Kunst who have
enriched this exhibition. We especially thank Sabine Brantl, Curator of
the Archive; Patrizia Dander, former Curator; Leon Krempel, former
Senior Curator; Isabella Kredler, Assistant to the Chief Curator; Yan
Geng, 2014 Goethe Institut Post-Doctoral Fellow; Luz Gyalui, Exhi-
bition Liaison; Damian Lentini, 2015 Goethe-Institut Post-Doctoral
Fellow and Assistant Curator; Julienne Lorz, Curator; Megan Hines,
Curatorial and Research Assistant to Katy Siegel; Daniel Milnes,
Assistant Curator; Markus Mueller, Music Program; Mark Nash, Film
Program; Tim Roerig, Managing Editor and Curatorial Assistant;
Andrea Saul, Coordinator of Public Programs; Anna Schneider, Assis-
tant Curator; Sonja Teine, Curatorial and Research Assistant; Carina
Kaminsky, Curatorial Intern; and Laura Lang, Curatorial Intern, for
their impressive effort on every facet of the exhibition.
The professional and meticulous work of Tina Khler, Head of Ex-
hibition Production and Coordination; Cassandra Schmid, Registrar;
Sophia Sprick, Assistant, Exhibition Coordination; Lucas Hagin and
Mareike Hetschold, Assistant Registrars; Chlo Coquilhat and Maxim
Weirich, Interns; Johannes Baur, Marjen Schmidt, and Susanne von
der Groeben, Conservators; Anton Bosnjak, Markus Brandenburg,
Elena Carvajal Daz, Tanja Eiler, Andrea Faciu, Vincent Faciu, Florian
Falterer, Hans-Peter Frank, Moritz Friedrich, Adam Gandy, Ben
Goossens, Martin Hast, Tommy Jackson, Marzieh Kermani, Christian
Leitna, Ruth Mnzner, Kaori Nakajima, Roland Roppelt, Tina Schultz,
Andrea Snigula, Nikolaus Steglich, Magnus Thoren, Tim Wolff, and
Laura Ziegler, exhibition preparation and installation; Anton Kttl,
Head of Facilities; and Glenn Rossiter, Technical Assistant, has been
Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, Ulrich Wilmes 19
 O
PROLOGUE
n April 30, 1945, soldiers of the American
Seventh Army entered the bombarded,
nearly destroyed, and deserted streets of
Munich.1 One day earlier, regiments of the
army had liberated the Dachau concentra-
tion camp, just a few miles away on the out-
skirts of the city.2 Among the many events
auguring the collapse of the Nazi regime,
Munichs capture was especially significant, as this was where the Nazi
Party had been founded, in 1920, and it had served as the springboard for
Adolf Hitlers murderous political ambition. In the early days, the city,
known as Hauptstadt der Bewegung (Capital of the movement), had been
the center of the partys ideological machinery and base to its many loyalists
and brutal epigones.3
When American forces occupied the ruined city, the official capit-
ulation of the German army was still over a week away. 4 And when the
wars end was celebrated all across Europe on May 8, 1945, World War II
as such was far from over: as Europe began the process of reconstruction,
the war in the Pacific was still raging. The surrender of the Japanese
imperial military would demand another three months of intense
THE JUDGMENT OF ART:
POSTWAR AND ARTISTIC WORLDLINESS
Okwui Enwezor
Fig. 1. Aerial view of Munich's city center
after Allied air raids, c. 1945
fightingincluding the relentless fire-bombing of Tokyo and other
Japanese citiesbefore their dramatic conclusion: the detonation of
two atomic bombs, respectively christened Little Boy and Fat Man,
in Hiroshima on August 6 and in Nagasaki on August 9.5
Meanwhile, in Munich, American forces had occupied the Haus der
Deutschen Kunst, a miraculous survivor of the bombing that had leveled
a great part of the city. The occupation of the building on May 5, 1945,
was memorialized by the signatures of three American soldiers on the
pages of the institutions Goldenes Buch (visitors book; fig. 3), where in
Introductory Essays Okwui Enwezor
Fig. 2. Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur,
looks on as Umezu Yoshijiro, Chief of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff,
signs the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay,
September 2, 1945
earlier times important guests including Hitler, Benito Mussolini, the
Aga Khan, and Edward, Duke of Windsor, had recorded their visits to the
museum.6 The soldiers graffiti-like inscriptions marked the final chapter
of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst before it hurtled, along with the rest of
Germany, into the postwar era.
THE DISENCHANTMENT
OF MODERN ART
It is a serendipitous bargain of history that the exhibition Postwar: Art
Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 should be organized in
Haus der Kunst, a building that in its former incarnation as the Haus der
Deutschen Kunst completely abjured modern art and international ex-
change in the arts. While the exhibition is not commemorative, Postwar
marks the seventieth anniversary of Haus der Kunst as a public institu-
tion under its current name (acquired within a year after the end of the
war) and the revision of its critical perspective. Its past history of intol-
erance remains inextinguishable, though. Perhaps for this reason, Haus
der Kunst exemplifies the deep contradictions of the postwar era.7
To reach a sense of why Postwar matters in this context, we must go
beneath the buildings skin to review the institutions earlier, antimodern
understanding of art. In its former life as a Nazi cultural icon, the build-
ing was designed as a showcase, a triumphant work of architectural
propaganda. For Hitler the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was not just any
building: it was a temple of German art, conceived, designed, and con-
structed expressly for the purpose of exhibiting the timelessness and
purity of Germanys national aesthetic spirit. This point was adumbrated
in a speech Hitler gave on July 18, 1937, to mark the opening of the build-
ing and inaugurate the first edition of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung
(Great German Art Exhibition; fig. 4): When, therefore, the cornerstone
21
of this building was laid, it was with the intention of constructing a tem-
ple, not for a so-called modern art, but for a true and everlasting German
art, that is, better still, a House for the art of the German people, and
not for any international art of the year 1937, 40, 50 or 60.8 Describing
Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, and Dadaism as insane and inane
monstrosities, the speech underscored Hitlers fervent aesthetic ethno-
centrism and overall disenchantment with modern art.9 He denounced
Jews in particular, accusing them of being the leading propagators of the
fraud of modernism in museums and in the press:
Fig. 3. Title page of the Goldenes Buch signed by Adolf Hitler and
U.S. Army Sergeant Richard S. Radelet, 1945
On these cultural grounds, more than on any others, Judaism had
taken possession of those means and institutions of communication
which form, and thus finally rule over public opinion. Judaism was very
clever indeed, especially in employing its position in the press with the
help of so-called art criticism and succeeding not only in confusing the
natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goals,
but above all in undermining and destroying the general wholesome
feeling in this domain.10
A day after the speech, its verbal excoriation of modern art was
escalated into a merciless public denunciation in the form of the exhibi-
tion Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art; fig. 5), staged in the arcade galleries
of a nearby building in the Hofgarten.11 With modernist art thus con-
demned as degenerate, the leading lights of experimental modernism
22
were extinguished in Germany while museums were stripped of the
works of modern art in their collections.12
In counterpoint to these condemnations of modern art and Jews, the
resplendent white galleries of the new art temple provided the perfect
backdrop for the grandiose type of work that Hitler and the Nazis saw as
the true German art. It was in this building that eight editions of the Grosse
Deutsche Kunstausstellung were staged between 1937 and 1944. Their remit
was to show the types of mimetic art (mostly idealized figurative, landscape,
and genre paintings and monumental heroic sculptures), by regime-favored
artists such as the painter Adolf Ziegler and the sculptor Arno Breker, that
glorified the Nazi aesthetic position.13 In this role the Haus der Deutschen
Kunst not only signified the ideological strictures to which artists working
in Nazi Germany had to conform, it also conveyed the corrosive ethos of
identity discourse, thus putting in place the Fhrers purifying vision of art:
Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism, etc., have nothing to do with
our German people. For these concepts are neither old nor modern, but
are only the artifactitious stammerings of men to whom God has denied
the grace of a truly artistic talent, and in its place has awarded them the
gift of jabbering or deception. I will therefore confess now, in this very
hour, that I have come to the final inalterable decision to clean house,
just as I have done in the domain of political confusion, and from now on
rid the German art life of its phrase-mongering.
Works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but, for
the justification of their existence, need those bombastic instructions
for their use, finally reaching that intimidated soul, who is patiently
willing to accept such stupid or impertinent nonsensethese works of
art from now on will no longer find their way to the German people.14
For eight years of its existence the Haus der Deutschen Kunst fulfilled
Hitlers vision of artistic purity in his temple of art. Despite the in-
creasing battlefield losses of the German army and the near certainty of
defeat, Hitler insisted that plans for the 1945 edition of the Grosse Deutsche
Kunstausstellung should proceed. It was a delusional thought.
Fig. 4. Visitors at the
Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, 1937
Introductory Essays
POSTWAR TRANSITIONS:
FROM HAUS DER DEUTSCHEN KUNST
TO HAUS DER KUNST
The aftermath of the war midwifed an atmosphere of great indeter-
minacy, a state of change. Germany entered an extensive phase of
denazification. It was under this policy that the Haus der Deutschen
Kunst became Haus der Kunst, thus shedding its ignominious past, 15
but it is not clear today how the removal of Deutschen from the mu-
seums name took place or who gave the order. 16 The name change
may have been made by the American military administration,
which had control of the building; 17 that the initiative was German
also seems plausible, given the ideology of the institutions original
patron. In any case the name change signaled a new direction, an em-
brace of what had once been excluded, deemed filthy or degenerate,
and the rehabilitation of modern art in the reconstituted institution.
Fig. 5. Installation view of Entarte Kunst at
the Hofgarten Arcades, Munich, 1937
On January 17, 1946, after less than a year of closure, the building
reopened to the public under its new name. The inaugural exhibition was
Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemlde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Fifteenth-
and Sixteenth-Century Bavarian Paintings).18 Presented in the vast
galleries of the buildings west wing, this major exhibition was a veritable
blockbuster of masterpieces, including Albrecht Drers Self-Portrait in
Fur Coat (1500) and Four Apostles (1526), Matthias Grnewalds Saints
Erasmus and Mauritius (1523), Albrecht Altdorfers Battle of Alexander
at Issus (1529), and almost 200 more works.19 An unsigned review of the
exhibition in The Bavarian, the English-language newspaper catering to
the American military and civilian population, described this important
moment of the return of classical European painting to public view as
their return from exile.20
There followed a series of exhibitions of modern art, ranging
from Moderne Franzsische Malerei (Modern French Painting, 1946) to
Georges Braque (1948) to Die Maler am Bauhaus (Bauhaus Painters, 1950).21
In September 1949, five months after the partition of Germany into the
Okwui Enwezor
Fig. 6. Title page of the exhibition catalogue Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemlde des
15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Bavarian Paintings), 1946
German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the Federal Republic
of Germany (West Germany), Haus der Kunst staged the grand exhibition
Der Blaue Reiter Mnchen und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Blue Rider
in Munich and the Art of the Twentieth Century), showcasing works
by Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Andr Derain, Vasily Kandinsky,
Paul Klee, August Macke, Franz Marc, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso,
Kees van Dongen, Maurice Vlaminck, Alexej von Jawlensky, and other
artists who had been ostracized a dozen years earlier under the Nazi
regime. In 1955 the museum staged a triumphant Picasso retrospective
that brought together many major works of the artists career up to that
point, including half a dozen from New Yorks Museum of Modern Art
and all fifteen paintings of the newly completed series Women of Al-
giers(195455).22 The exhibition also included Guernica (1937), Picassos
great antiwar painting depicting the destruction of the Basque town by
the German and Italian air forces on April 26, 1937the first presentation
of this work in Germany. Joining this most political of paintings was an-
other antiwar work, Massacre in Korea (1951; plate 117), an addition to the
rich trove of politically oriented works that Picasso pursued following
Guernica, throughout and after the German Occupation.
The capstone of this period of Haus der Kunsts integration of mod-
ernism came with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Entartete Kunst. On
October 25, 1962, the museum opened Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor
23
25 Jahren (Degenerate Art: The Iconoclasm Twenty-Five Years Ago),23 an
attempt to reconstruct the 1937 exhibition. That show had contained
some 650 works of modern art, by 112 artists, that the Nazi regime had
labeled degenerate and had seized from private and public collections.
With the 1962 exhibition, which brought together works by such artists
as Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, James Ensor, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Wilhelm Lehmbruck, August Marc, Emil Nolde, and many others, Haus
der Kunst finally made a specific link between its past condemnation
of these artists and their contemporary rehabilitation in the context of
postwar Germany. In doing so it completed its journey into its own frac-
tured history. Yet in all the intervening years, and indeed right up to the
present day, not once did the museum organize any exhibition related
to either the theme of the war or its aftermath.
South, the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the
independence of Laos.
The process of recovery was not limited to the political and economic
spheres. Moral insight into the atrocities and suffering of the war was just
in weaponry and machinery, the sheer number of combatants, and the
planetary scale of the conflict, the war produced casualtieswounded,
maimed, and deadin incalculable numbers beyond those of any other
war.28 World War II was in fact several wars, fought across continents and
among countries and territories, among ideological and political beliefs.
The war stamped multiple enduring images on the global imagina-
tion. The extent of the horrors came into focus slowly, with photographs,
films, and writings documenting the cities, towns, and countryside in
ruin and desolation,29 the grotesque concentration camps,30 the indus-
trial-scale annihilation of the Holocaust,31 and finally the cataclysmic
devastation of the atom bombs that vaporized Hiroshima and Naga-
saki.32 The growing awareness of what had happened introduced the
sense of a new possibility: that humanity possessed the capability liter-
were already developed within the institutions of the colonial state,
where early prototypes of concentration camps and mass killing were
first conceived and tested.35
The acknowledgment of the dialectical relationship between
colonialism and violence complicated any sense of the uniqueness of
the Holocaust. In fact the logic of race and bureaucracy that the Nazis
integrated in the planning of the Final Solution, and on which Arendt
wrote so compellingly, operates through the blurring of the distinction
between man and animal, whereby it functions by excluding as not
(yet) human an already human being from itself.36 Writing at the height
of the global struggle against colonialism, Aim Csaire observed how
in the colonial state, colonization works to decivilize the colonizer.37 In
such a state, the colonizer is the victim of his own self-dehumanization;

A TIME OF RECKONING:
REMAKING A SHATTERED WORLD
The conflicts of World War II had barely ebbed before the process started
of reconfiguring, suturing, and repairing what had been broken and shat-
tered. What would the postwar peace look like? Who would be responsible
for overseeing it? What institutions would ensure that its terms were re-
Fig. 7. Participants at the Fifth Pan-African Congress
spected? Whether successful or not, as an attempt to consider the totality in Manchester, November 10, 1945

of the world as a single entity, the postwar planning process was one of the
most complex and unprecedented undertakings in history. On January 1,
1942, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and Great Britain signed
the Declaration of the United Nations, a declaration joined a day later by
twenty allied nations fighting the Axis powers and brought to fruition on
October 24, 1945, when the United Nations was formally established as a
global institution.24 Around the same time as the Declaration of the Unit-
ed Nations, preparatory meetings were taking place for the Bretton Woods
Conference of July 1944, which created the World Bank and the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund. The conference, which was planned in Washington,
D.C., and held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was initiated at the invi-
tation of the United States; forty-four allied nations from six continents
Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South Americapar-
as pressing. As a consequence, an enormous space of thinking fell open
to art. After all, artists and art institutions had been involved in process-
ing, transmitting, and translating reflections on the war for the public in
various parts of the world. In the United States, The Museum of Modern
Art had strongly supported the war effort, producing nearly forty related
exhibitions.27 It is important to note that the question of the means or ap-
proach by which art might address the urgent moral questions that arose
from the harrowing experiences of the war pointed to the complex pos-
sibilities available to art and artists during this pivotal moment, beyond
the conventional repertoire of recognizable imagery.
Fig. 8. Yosuke Yamahata. Nagasaki Journey. August 10, 1945.
Silver gelatin print on glossy fiber paper, 9.514.5 cm. Courtesy Daniel Blau, Munich

ticipated in shaping the final agreement, which reordered the international

finance and banking systems that would be essential in financing the
postwar reconstruction.25
Postwar planning, however, was not the province of the United States
and the European powers alone. As the new great powers were reorgan-
izing the affairs of the world, leaders in other regions were making their
own plans for the end of the war. The League of Arab States (also known
as the Arab League) was established in Cairo on March 22, 1945; in October
of the same year, the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester,
England, gathered delegates from many African and West Indian coun-
tries to demand freedom and an end to colonial rule in Africa and the
West Indies.26 This was also the year of Koreas division into North and
ANTHROPOLOGICAL MACHINES:
BETWEEN HUMAN AND ANIMAL
In order to understand the gripping hold of World War II on the
cultural, ethical, and moral imagination, it is necessary to under-
score the wars scale and the toll it exacted. Any discussion of art and
the postwar era must first come to terms with the effect of the war
on the thinking of artists, intellectuals, and the general public alike.
World War II was the most catastrophic and lethal conflict in human
history. It was the ultimate killing field: in less than a decade, tens of
millions of people were annihilated. Owing to technological advances
ally to destroy itself. With tens of millions dead and many more millions
left homeless, displaced, and stateless, the aftermath of World War II
demonstrated the crisis of humankind in extremis.33
World War II established a radical threshold between life and death.
It unleashed a debate about the nature of humanity and confronted the
entire global sphere with the dramatic misalignment of means and ends:
the sublation of power by dangerous ideological systems into fearful
anthropological machines, to use a term coined by Giorgio Agamben.34
The Holocaust and the camps were natural consequences of the exten-
sive development and deployment of the technologies of race, bureau-
cracy, and violence. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, these instruments
and colonization, Csaire insists, dehumanizes even the most civilized
man the colonizer who in order to ease his conscience gets into the
habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating
him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an an-
imal.38 Here, colonial violence is a vital extension of the anthropological
machine. For Agamben, the condition in which the human is reduced to
the nonhuman level is the state of bare life, a concept that enables the
distinction between worthy and worthless lives to be posited and insti-
tutionally interpolated. He writes, Nazism determines the bare life of
homo sacer in a biological and eugenic key, making it into the site of an
incessant decision on value and nonvalue.39

24 Introductory Essays Okwui Enwezor 25

 THE ART OF WAR
E
ven before World War II ended, artists were dealing with its re-
percussions. Many were exploring the possibilities of the war as
subject matter. With the stench of death everywhere, painting
too carried the acrid fumes of decay and the stains of decom-
position. Picassos Charnel House (194445; fig. 10), for example, its grisaille
tonality suggesting black-and-white documentary images of the war and
of the death camps, represented a coda to the artists Guernica, of 1937.
It depicts the rigid and contorted forms of a slain family, their bound and
stiff bodies crammed beneath a simple wooden table in their own home.
Francis Bacon painted his breakthrough triptych Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944; fig. 11) in London, a city devastated
by German bombing raids. The work provided the pictorial model for
a subsequent series of paintings on the theme of crucifixion, including
Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950; plate 2). Against an orange-ocher back-
ground, figures with elongated necks and distended bodies show snag-
gletoothed mouths bellowing out of their heads. The forms are pallid and
gray, as if dusted with ash; posed on a studio table and a sculptors mod-
eling plinth, they suggest monsters emanating from the abyss of torture
and the agonies of death. Several years earlier in Paris, Jean Fautrier had
explored the anatomy of executed prisoners: paintings such as Sarah
(1943) and La Juive (The Jewess, 1943; plate 1) suggest the bodies of violated
women and, through their titles, expose the entanglement of identity
and race. 40 In the series Otages (Hostages, 194345), meanwhile, Fautrier
used seriality to communicate a sense of the multiplicity of the Nazis
victims. With their built-up surfaces of plaster troweled onto canvas and
coated with slick smears of oil, the paintings have a relief effect that fuses
the abstract with the anthropomorphic. Made in the bleak years of the
German Occupation, they come close to an art of witnessing, depicting
bodies frozen in their own congealed fat, severed, tree-stump-like limbs,
and splayed, grisly heads marked with the punctures and lesions left by
blunt instruments.
With such images of the tortured and killed in circulation, and news
from the concentration camps emerging in the press, the tense air was
laden with grief-filled resonance. After the liberation of France on August
19, 1944, elation was mixed with revanchist passion, as if the veil of war
had simultaneously dissolved and reappeared. The mood was both tri-
umphant and anxious, laced with bitterness and vengefulness. Liberat-
ed France called for a thorough cleansing and demanded accounting from
those who had betrayed the country. As Sarah Wilson writes, The epuration,
however, was far more bloody. It was a period of denunciation, revenge
killings, the settling of scores, and jealousies, and above all of public
trials with hastily assembled judicial apparatus.41
26 Introductory Essays
THE ANOMALOUS ARCHIVE watching over the macabre scene. Two years later, in 1967, Richter would Whatever compelled Richters initial process of collocating and
add several more images of concentration camps in panels 1620. No collectivizing images of calculated shock, in some senses Atlas re-
The trials and cleansings in France presented a clear idea of what awaited images of the camps have appeared since. sponds to the very state of incommensurability into which photographs
all occupied countries as the war ended. As images and accounts of Atlas is collated in numbered panels, organized mostly chronolog- of Nazi atrocities were plunged after the war. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
the war became increasingly common after the Soviet armys libera- ically (there are sometimes jumps in sequence) and according to idio- has observed, the first appearance of the concentration camps in the
tion of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, and the release of grisly scenes syncratic categories. Each panel contains multiple images derived from work ruptures the overall banality of found photographs that preced-
of Bergen-Belsen by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, 42 a variety of sourcesnewspapers, magazines, photo albums, books, ed that photograph in panel 11: The puncturing suddenly positions
it was no longer possible to deny the imperative of images to speak to snapshots. This arbitrary combination of pictorial genres sometimes the Atlas project within the dialectics of amnesia and memory.49 But it
what had initially been rendered obscure or invisible. 43 A growing debate defies any sense of standard or systematic organization, yet the sudden also represents the challenge to artists to confront and demystify what
in the immediate postwar years centered around the representation appearance of the photograph in panel 11 seems calculated rather than was, in the early postwar period, the then evolving idea of the unrep-
of the death camps and specifically on the notion of the Holocaust as afterthought. It leads one to question whether Richters delay in intro- resentability of the Holocaust, one corresponding to Adornos remark
unrepresentable. Theodor Adornos controversial statement from ducing pictures of the camps, as well as prewar images in which Jews are about Auschwitz and poetry. In its relationship to the history of post-
1949 that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric opened up publicly shamed and humiliated, was a result of the traumatic violence war Germany, Atlas represents an ongoing act of commentary on the
debates around whether eschewing such representations made the contained within the fragile, yellowing paper of these newspaper cut- anomalous status of the archive and on the traumatic relationship to
Holocaust even more susceptible to opacity, almost to the point of outs and photographs. As some of his early work shows, his reticence in contemporary German history provoked by images of the camps. As
being an anomaly. 44 It was still impossible, however, to interpret the using war-related images to produce paintings was not categorical. 48 Buchloh notes,
afterlives of the images as mere evidence of the states anaesthetized
bureaucratic orderas the pictorial assembly of the banality of
evil, to borrow an incisive phrase of Arendts. 45 The death camps had
been reported on only sketchily during the war; now images of them
appeared, conveying their horrendous scope and stupefying scale.
Artists had to confront their anomalous status. 46
In Germany, it was difficult for such images to find their way into
art for at least a decade. When they did, it was in the form of allegory.
Joseph Beuys, who during the war had been conscripted into the Luft-
waffe as a pilot, was one of the very few artists to draw directly from
his wartime experiences in the shaping of his artistic persona. His
sculptural installation Auschwitz Demonstration (195664), composed of
symbolic objects in a series of wood-and-glass vitrines, was the rare
exception capable of invoking Auschwitz by name; an earlier tableau,
Hirschdenkmler (Monuments to the Stag, 1958/85; plates 5, 6), could
only suggest it. While the dissonance of the war and its anesthetized
memory remained issues for the postwar generation of German art-
ists, explicit references to the camps, as well as the use of wartime ex-
periences and imagery as subject matter, were not entirely absent. In
the three-part environment Das schwarze Zimmer (The Black Room)
Wolf Vostell brought together parts of three individual assemblages
Deutscher Ausblick (German View, 195859; plate 7), Auschwitz Scheinwerfer
(Auschwitz Floodlight, 195859) and Treblinka (195859; fig. 12)into
one overarching system to deal with the atrocities of the war. 47
Representations of the war and its devastation first appeared in
Gerhard Richters work as part of the vast archival resource Atlas (1962),
an open-ended databank of images placed in reserve, a pictorial cauldron
liable to singe all who touch it. The camps did not appear in Atlas until
1963: panel 11 contains a single such image, nestled among generic and
unrelated nature and wildlife scenes (fig. 9). The image is unmistakably
gruesome: it shows a cluster of blackened, emaciated, and rotting corps-
es scattered across a narrow lane between two low buildings. A flock of
Fig. 9. Gerhard Richter. Newspaper & Album Photos (Atlas Sheet 11). 1963. 14 b/w clippings, 2 b/w Photographs,
vultures perch in a row on the roof of the building to the left, like sentries 51.7 cm66.7 cm. Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Mnchen, Munich
Okwui Enwezor 27
 The first set of photographs of the victims of a concentration camp now
functions as a sudden revelation, namely, that there is still one link that
binds an image to its referent within the apparently empty barrage of
photographic imagery and the universal production of sign exchange
value: the trauma from which the compulsion to repress had originated.
Paradoxically, it is at this very moment that the Atlas also yields its own
secret as an image reservoir: a perpetual pendulum between the death of
reality in the photograph and the reality of death in the mnemonic image.50
FIGURED AND DEFIGURED
M
eanwhile, artists in Central and Eastern Europe found the
concentration camps and the Holocaust far from unrepre-
sentable: they drew openly from imagery of the destructions
and killings perpetrated by German soldiers. Explicit refer-
ences to these programmatic massacres appeared in the paintings of the
young Andrzej Wrblewski, who, at barely twenty years old, painted some
of the most startling narratives of the destruction of the Jews of Poland.
The figure of the Gestapo executioner appears repeatedly in such works as
Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man (1949 ; plate 10). Beyond this
sinister figure of terror, so indelibly sketched by Paul Celan in the searing
poem Todes Fugue (Death Fugue, 1945),51 Wrblewski also refers to the
Warsaw ghetto in the double-sided painting Liquidation of the Ghetto/
Blue Chauffeur (1949; plate 9). Another Polish artist, Alina Szapocznikow,
explored the Holocaust in sculptures such as HandMonument to the
Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II (1957; plate 8). In relation to Adornos phrase
about poetry and Auschwitz, it is interesting that Wrblewskis paintings
are contemporary with Celans poem, and with Boris Taslitzskys depiction
Fig. 10. Pablo Picasso. Le charnier (The Charnel House). 194445. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 199.8250.1 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Mrs. Sam A. Lewisohn Bequest (by exchange) and Mrs. Marya Bernard Fund in memory of her husband Dr. Bernard Bernard and anonymous funds. Acc. n.: 93.1971
Fig. 11. Francis Bacon. Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. c. 1944. Oil paint on 3 boards, 9473.7 cm (each).
TATE Collection, London. Presented by Eric Hall 1953
28 Introductory Essays
of the concentration camp in The Small Camp, Buchenwald (1945; fig. 13).
Olivier Messiaens Quartet for the End of Time, written and performed by
the composer in a Nazi prison camp in 1942, and Arnold Schoenbergs
jarring composition A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) also share in the
ceaseless explorations of the themes of death and survival inspired by
the Holocaust.
At different turns in the first two decades after World War II, the war
as subject matter or catalyst for artistic reflection was addressed through
what could be called a de-figured representation. Mark Godfrey has
written compellingly on the relationship of abstraction to represen
tations of the Holocaust; his eloquent exploration considers whether
abstract art, or a work without the figure, has the capacity to tackle
genocide, which seems to call for an explicitly representational language
rather than a symbolic one.52 Among the examples he envisions as able to
overcome the seeming limitations of a symbolic, abstract language are
Frank Stella and Morris LouisStella in his breakthrough black geo
metric paintings Die Fahne Hoch and Arbeit Macht Frei (1958 ; plate 13),
which explore the vision of the Nazi regime through the meaning of the
paintings titles; Louis in using the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Ex-
pressionism as a form of coded writing in Untitled (Jewish Star) and the
series Charred Journal: Firewritten (both 1951; plates 14, 15).
OTHER ARCHIVES
Like many traumatic relics of the war, the archive, far from being an
aide-memoire, addresses the implicit question, what is an image in re-
lation to the event it references or depicts? The destruction caused by
Okwui Enwezor 29
the atom bomb, and the number of people killed, did not fall into the
category of the unrepresentable or unspeakable. Rather, the images of
the atomic blasts produced by Japanese photographers were soon sub-
jected to active censorship by the occupying forces of the American
army. At first, Japanese newspapers widely published images of the enig-
matic mushroom clouds that emerge from the ground zeroes of Hiroshi-
ma and Nagasaki, while the American media used such images to con-
solidate the U.S. status as the only superpower with a nuclear arsenal.
However, as concern about the bombs and condemnation of their effects
began to appear worldwide, photographs showing those effects, and the
dead, were either restricted or outright suppressed.
The Japanese military photographer Ysuke Yamahata arrived in
Nagasaki on August 10, 1945, a day after the bomb was dropped, and pho-
tographed the aftermath extensively (plate 28). He was one of the earliest
photographers to document the destruction of the city, and some of his
images appeared ten days later in the August 21 issue of the Japanese
newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. Upon Japans surrender, on August 14, images
of the aftermath were restricted by the occupying American military
government until the restrictions were lifted in 1952.53
When the army successfully detonated a plutonium device in the
New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945a device similar in design and make-
up to Fat Man, the bomb soon detonated over Nagasakithe United
States effectively won a new arms race, becoming the first country to ac-
quire nuclear capabilities for military purposes. In destructive force and
power, the atom bomb was unlike any weapon previously developed, let
alone deployed for warfare. The implications were immediately apparent:
not only did the atom bomb come to symbolize U.S. military superior-
ity, it became the central animating military weapon in the search for a
balance of power that led to the Cold War. The bomb also instilled the
fear that the ensuing nuclear arms race would lead to unintended conse-
quences.54 Before long, however, the debates over radioactive nuclear fallout
were counteracted by a growing interest in atomic power as a source of
cheap, safe, clean energy. The dialectic of a dystopian and a utopian view
of nuclear science was an important one in postwar public thought.
Artists throughout the world were not merely attuned to these
nuclear debates, they weighed in on the various attributes of the technol-
ogyits ethical dimension, the fate to which it exposed civilization and
humanity.55 With the military doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction
(mad) between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War
exacerbated existential doubts regarding the survival of humankind.
Artists such as Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi in Hiroshima Panels (195082;
fig. 14, plates 26, 27), Isamu Noguchi in Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950;
plate 17) and Atomic Man (1952; plate 22), Karel Appel in Hiroshima Child
(1958; plate 25), and Yves Klein in Hiroshima (1961) employed different rep-
resentational strategies to engage with the effects of the bomb on Japanese
civilians. In these works, Hiroshima, much like Auschwitz, becomes an
emblem of annihilation. For artists such as Salvador Dal, in Atomic Idyll
and Melancholic Uranium/Melancholic Atomic (1945); Lszl Moholy-Nagy,
in Nuclear I CH (1945; fig. 15) and Nuclear II (1946); Weaver Hawkins, in
30 Introductory Essays
Atomic Power (1947; plate 29); Enrico Baj, in Manifesto Nucleare BUM (1951;
plate 37); Henry Moore, in Atom Piece (196465; plate 39); Roy Lichtenstein,
in Atom Burst (1965; plate 38); and Andy Warhol, in Atomic Bomb (1965), the
iconography of the mushroom cloud served an allegorical function as
a means by which to both address the actuality of a nuclear catastrophe
and render its possibility unthinkable.56
The inquiry into the nature of the human had always been ambiv-
alent, for the question is profoundly unanswerable and unknowable,
under constant interrogation. It became all the more so after World War
II, which produced devastating demonstrations of man as both victim
and perpetrator of violence. Alberto Giacomettis shrunken, cadav-
erous figures tottering on spindly legs attest to these issues, as do the
skeletal, distended figures in Ibrahim El Salahis paintings. Both bodies
of work respond to an ambivalence, and recall the photographs of the
gaunt, emaciated inmates of the death camps staring out at the viewer
with hollow, vacant eyes. The terrible images of violated bodies left to
the postwar generations incessantly raised the question of what defines
the human and sets it apart. Throughout Postwar, the figure is encoun-
tered in countless states of precarity: crushed, mutilated, flayed, dis-
membered, tortured, crucified, as in David Siqueiross Cain en los Estados
Unidos (Cain in the United States, 1947; plate 164), Magda Cordells
Figure 59 (1958; plate 136), Colette Omogbais Agony (1963; plate 171), and
Jack Whittens Head IV (1964; plate 148). In this procession of tormented
figures and maimed bodies, Siquieros and Whitten introduce a new
resonance in their treatments of the black body as it was subjected to
racist violence in the United States during the postwar era.
ANTI-RACIST RACISM:
HUMANISM AND DECOLONIZATION
A
s the preoccupation with the human form in states of pri-
vation, degradation, desolation, and worry took hold in
Europe, African, Asian, and African American artists lifted
the body from its beleaguered and anguished state onto the
historical stage as a figure of social agency. It was almost as if prior rep-
resentations of existence through a collective leitmotif of suffering had
been cast into doubt. Yes, suffering remained, and mattered; it seemed
a mistake, though, to read the human predicament purely through the
lens of the abjection of the white body. Certainly, when the topography
of postwar art is scanned, an absence emerges, namely that of the col-
onized body whose trauma had constantly been erased to the point of
expungement from the historical record. As Homi Bhabha notes, It is as
if the question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the
oppressed has to be denied to make way for an existentialist humanism Fig. 12. Wolf Vostell. Treblinka from the environment Das schwarze Zimmer (The Black Room). 195859.
that is as banal as it is beatific.57 D-Collage: motorcycle part, wood, film, and transistor radio, 18014131 cm. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
Because of this absence of the colonized body, a philosophical com-
bat was shaping up on the poverty of the Western discourse on humanism.
Okwui Enwezor 31

Fig. 13. Boris Taslitzky. Le petit camp Buchenwald (The Small Camp Buchenwald). 1945. Oil on canvas, 300500 cm.
Paris, Centre Pompidou - Muse national d'art moderne - Centre de cration industrielle
The tools were those of postcolonial battle. For postcolonial critics the
target in Western humanism was not just its internal contradictions but
its hypocrisy and complicity in maintaining the colonial state. Csaire
confronts this question head-on in the opening lines of his Discourse on
Colonialism: The fact is that the so-called European civilizationWestern
civilizationas it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is
incapable of solving two major problems to which its existence has given
rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem.58 In this
context the absolution of colonial violence by philosophy and art was
addressed with alacrity by many who knew otherwise. I do not come
with timeless truths,59 are the words Frantz Fanon used to set the stage
of the combat. In his rhetorical query What does a man want? What does
the black man want? Fanon asked that the question of man be considered,
not in the language of universal abstraction, but in the concrete realm of
a refigured blackness.
Blackness can be both figural and metaphoric in the works of post-
colonial artists, as in Maqbool Fida Husains Man (1951; plate 155), Gerard
Sekotos Head of a Man (1963; plate 169), El Salahis Self-Portrait of Suffering
(1961; plate 119), and Malangatana Valente Ngwenya's To The Clandestine
Maternity Home (1961; fig. 16). On Kawaras Thinking Man (1952; plate 157)
may not literally depict someone black, but the mottled brown skin of the
diseased figure, standing slightly off-center in the frame, discloses itself
as other. Certain works suggest blackness as constituting a resistance to
an idealized and blinding whiteness.60 This is made the more so by black-
nesss need for intense acts of looking. In Francis Newton Souzas Head of
32
a Man Thinking (plate 153) and Two Saints (After El Greco) (plate 154), two
of a series of dense black paintings that the artist produced in 1965, the
figure melts into the background (fig. 17). Rather than one dominating the
other, figure and ground hold the same pictorial valence, as if Souza were
demanding of viewers that their gaze penetrate the materially compact-
ed surface in order to make out the forms gouged deep into the caked
crust. One looks, but can barely perceive the images in the thick, hatched
impasto of black-on-black oil paint. Yet this makes the blackness still
more luminous.
Postwar Paris may have been consumed by existentialism61 but in
cities like Algiers, Baghdad, Bombay, Cairo, Dakar, Jakarta, Lagos, Nairobi,
New Delhi, Saigon, Tehran, and Tunis, the rights of the black and the
brown, from the Sahara to the Himalayas and beyond, were dialectically
jousting with the rights of the white/European, from New York to Paris
and London. Decolonization and civil rights movements demanding in-
dependence, equal rights, and an end to oppression, racism, segregation,
and exclusion had revealed the hollowness of the high-minded discourse
of humanism. These ideas also played out in the domain of art, producing
different strands of pictorial effects.
In Africa, for example, there was the idea of cultural sovereignty and
of the uniqueness of postcolonial African modernity, a theme derived
from the Ngritude movement. An exemplary work of this culturalist take
is Ben Enwonwus painting Going (1962; plate 289), a festival of forms, ob-
jects, and figures in a pictorial pageant of post-independence Nigeria.62
Graceful female figures float through a raucous landscape packed with
Introductory Essays
classical African masks and sculptures, suggesting the daily interaction
among precolonial and postcolonial African cultures. Uche Okeke mean-
while sought similar results through different iconographic means and a
concept of natural synthesis,63 an attempt to harness both African and
Western-modernist pictorial forms. Here, cultural sovereignty does not
supersede individual autonomy; they are held in dialogic tension. In
Aba Revolt (Womens War) (1965; plate 290) Okeke foregrounds the dis-
cursive relevance of the postcolonial experience against the expression-
ist exuberance that is a core trope of modernist painting. His imagery
is drawn from a tradition of feminist militancy in Africa, where women
may strip naked as a shaming tactic against an oppressor, their nudity
thus becoming a sign of radical protest. Both Enwonwu and Okeke artic-
ulate the presentness of the battle for decolonization and independence,
as well as foregrounding a discursive interplay among different cultural
archivesamong colonial and postcolonial memories, among African
and European forms. The depiction of decolonization through the
image of the nubile celebrant suggests the continuity of tradition with-
in the changing space of postcolonial modernity, while independence is
embodied by an engaged figure committed to defending the integrity of
the African space from colonial injustice.
REFIGURING THE OTHER
The humanism articulated by European intellectuals in the postwar peri-
od was met with radical postcolonial doubt. As Csaire made clear, What
is serious is that Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible.64 The reasons
for these repudiations of Europea term to be understood as including
the United Stateshad to do with the fact that Western traditions of
thought had constructed a civilizational scaffold that defined man through
a hierarchical scheme, a racial epidermal schema, in Fanons phrase.65
This scaffold set the European (white) man at the apex, the negated,
deracinated figure of the black/brown, non-European other at the base.
In self-exile in Paris, James Baldwin wrote of this figure, The black
Fig. 14. Markui Iri and Toshi Maruki. Water (Panel III) from Hiroshima Panels (series of 15 panels), 1952.
Indian ink on Japanese paper, 180720 cm. Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashimatsuyama
Okwui Enwezor
man insists, by whatever means he finds at his disposal, that the white
man cease to regard him as an exotic rarity and recognize him as a
human being.66 Invited by Lopold Sdar Senghor to write an introduction
to an anthology of black and Malagasy poetry, Jean-Paul Sartre drew
on the dialectic of race and racism as a route into the tension between
humanism and colonialism. 67 To tackle that tension he articulated a
recognition, what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity:
this antiracist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of
racial differences.68 The prescription, though troubling in its strange
advocacy, is worth considering, especially in the context of the search on
the part of the oppressed for an insurgent, radical, separatist, and militant
subjectivity.69
Sartres moment of separation and negativity was based precisely
on the agenda of decolonization and the self-determination of the op-
pressed. Although the European powers initially failed to accept or
recognize it, the postwar period marked the start of the collapse of
empire and imperial rule in the search for justice, freedom, and an al-
ternative global order of equality and self-determination among nations
and peoples. This was the world envisaged by the Bandung Conference,
organized by Sukarno in Indonesia in April 1955. The conference brought
together a coalition of twenty-nine independent Asian and African
countriesplus Yugoslavia, the one European participantto discuss
the postwar global order from the perspective of the colonized in the
midst of the Cold War. In his opening address Sukarno requested vigi-
lance among the gathered countries:
I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which
we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa,
knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic
control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien
community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and
it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever,
whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one
which must be eradicated from the earth.70
33

Fig. 15. Lszl Moholy-Nagy. Nuclear I, CH. 1945. Oil and graphite on canvas,
96.576.2 cm. Gift of Mary and Leigh Block 1947.40. The Art Institute of Chicago
34 Introductory Essays
The Bandung Conference was a landmark moment in the postwar
period. It inspired a new international consciousness in the decolonization
movements and laid the foundation for an incipient world picture. What
would a world liberated from totalitarian tyranny and colonial rule and ex-
ploitation be? Who and what should oversee the control of human destiny?
Because of the nebulous alliances around which the battles were
fought, the postwar arrangements that emerged after the war had the
effect of producing atomized geopolitical spaces that were soon recon-
figured into new battle fronts, from liberation wars to the Cold War.
Nevertheless, the postwar period brought the business of European
colonial empires to a crashing halt. As Tony Judt writes, the period en-
tailed Europes reduction, for the Continent and its constituent states
could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status.71
In the aftermath of the war, decolonization and liberation struggles
would fundamentally reshape the imperial mission of European colo-
nialism. They would mark the attenuation of empire.72 Even while the
embers of imperialism still glowed across vassal states in Africa, Asia,
and the Middle East, in the decades that followed the shrinking of
Europe also witnessed, as Judt observes, the withering away of the
master narratives of European history: the great nineteenth-century
theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution
and transformation.73
The postwar period also accelerated the process of movement
between the colonies and the colonial metropoles. Within a decade after
the end of the war, as refugees and the displaced returned to their home
countries or moved elsewhere to be resettled, former colonial subjects
began a counter-movement to the European cities their countries had
been affiliated with to study, seek opportunity, and live. These migrations
and exilic movements, a flow of people that included many artists, ex-
panded the cosmopolitan imaginary. The Europe of the immigrations,
to paraphrase the subtitle of Sarat Maharajs essay The Congo Is Flood-
ing the Acropolis, was being transformed into a scene of radical alterity.
The Continent foregrounded what Maharaj describes as the immigrant
exiles portmanteau.74 The narrator of V. S. Naipauls autobiographical
novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) captures this epochal moment in a
telling passage:
Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great move-
ment of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth
centurya movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of
the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the
New World. This was a movement between all continents. Cities like
London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national
cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes,
establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of
islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and
culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods
and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe,
people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays.75
Okwui Enwezor
This convergence of dark peoples in Europes modern-day Romes sign
posts the colonial/postcolonial clash so succinctly captured in Maharajs
twinning of the Congo and the Acropolis. In his civilizational meta-
phor, the Congo essays backwardness while the Acropolis carries the
stamp of all that is excellent, good, and enduring. In this scene, as
Maharaj writes, If the Congo evokes the swelling tide of the dark peo-
ples, the Acropolis signals Europes domination which the colonised
seek to shake off.76
BETWEEN THE PACIFIC
AND THE ATLANTIC
Artworks never exist in time. They have entry points. Redza Piyadasa77
Throughout this essay the term postwar is used to describe the histor-
ical period following the end of World War II. These years were marked
on the one hand by reconstruction and rehabilitation and on the oth-
er by a fundamental program of taking stock, asking questions, and a
flurry of institutional activities: the creation of new global bodies such
as the United Nations, the first global courts of justice, tribunals for war
crimes, the agencies arising out of Bretton Woods (the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization), unesco,
the Commission on Human Rights, and other corporate devices for
mediating relationships among nations, economies, and scientific pro-
jects. The building of the foundations of the postwar global order was
accompanied by the drafting of key international documents such as
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the rise of global decol-
onization and nonaligned movements that would usher in and solidify
postcolonial accounts of political and cultural sovereignty.
In the field of art, the postwar period marks a historical and cultural
turning point, for it brought about a waning of the dominance of the
Western European art capitals and the rise of the international presence
and hegemony of contemporary American art, popular culture, and
mass media.78 If America liberated Western Europe from the scourge
of Nazism, it also liberated itself from the artistic and cultural domina-
tion of Western Europe. This shift in fact mirrored the altered terms of
geopolitical power, with defeated Europe acquiring and acquiescing to
new patrons and protectors. As the Cold War divided the Continent into
two spheres of influence, between the Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern
and Central Europe, allied with the Soviet Union, and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization countries of Western Europe, allied with the United
States, the arts also created a distinct ideological relationship between
communism and capitalism, socialism and liberal democracy. A crude
binary for sure, but the ideological differences in the division of East and
West posited abstraction and socialist realism into two moral equivalents:
freedom and restriction.
35
 It would be a mistake, howeverone often made in the narratives
of postwar historyto place the entire focus on the North Atlantic world
and its Pacific corollary, as if the rest of Asia, Africa, the Middle East,
and Latin America did not exist. Surveys of art history in the postwar
periodart since 1945are notorious for such exclusions and blind
spots. Until recently, art-historical narratives have tended to stay on the
safe ground of an exclusivist illusion in which all forms of artistic innovation
Fig. 16. Malangatana Valente Ngwenya. To the Clandestine Maternity Home.
1961. Oil on canvas, 84.597.8 cm. Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth.
Courtesy DEVA, Universitt Bayreuth
begin and end in the dominant centers of North American and Western
European spheres of influence. This geopolitical bias has often tilted to
the advantage of the countries that emerged victorious in the warin
other words to the North Atlantic alliance, thus skewing the study of
contemporary art.
While it is not our task to rewrite this narrative, it is nevertheless our
purpose in this exhibition to present a new understanding of the actors
and to raise substantial questions about the trajectories and genealogies
of postwar art and its histories. In recent decades, a new art history has
come to the fore that is neither exclusivist in its interests nor exclusionary
in scholarship. New spaces of research are opening up, just as recon-
ceived maps and networks of the flow of art and the assessment of its
meaning are being constituted.79 And the rise of interest in the construction
of a new map of global art history coincides with the emergence of recent
scholarship that understands the value of studying the uneven development
of historical methodologies across art histories.
With this transformation in the optics of analysis, a vivid picture of
postwar art is taking shape. Inevitably, such changes are attended by dis-
putes that are at once methodological and historical, cultural and political.
Yet these disputes not only engage and complicate the modernist narra-
tives of art history, they have also produced insightful studies focused
on regions, continents, countries, as well as individual artists. New
36
art-historical scholarship from across the world in Asia, Africa, South Amer-
ica, the Middle East, and the former Eastern Europe are expanding the
study of postwar art. It is our hope that some of these issues will come
into sharper relief through this exhibition.
Rather than being a map, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the
Atlantic, 19451965 is about networks. The project is also about the
conundrums that have shaped the uneven exchange between the West
and the Rest. On one hand it is a meditation, despite all doubts, on the
creative vitality and potential of art, the ways in which the artists of
the period engaged and experimented with forms and materials. This
includes the transformations that occurred within aesthetic systems
and within the logic of artistic production as new ideas and movements,
technologies and techniques, emerged to redefine the subjects, strategies,
and languages of contemporary art. At the same time, the postwar years
mark a critical juncture in global art: the decline of the power of European
art to set the agenda of global art discourse and the rise of American
artistic hegemony. At the same time, an artistic worldliness emerged in
which diasporic, transnational, and decolonized subjectivities chart-
ed new paths of artistic discourse. With this in mind, this exhibition is
premised on the construction of a global picture of artistic production in
the two decades that the project covers.
Following the arc of two oceansthe Pacific and the Atlantic
Postwar is a reflection and retracing of the spaces and conditions
of artistic production. By navigating the broad sweep of these epic
bodies of water, the exhibition straddles continents, nations, geopo-
litical structures, economic patterns, and institutional frameworks to
map new cultural networks and aesthetic agendas. These include case
studies on the emergence of new nation states, the partition of others
(India and Pakistan, North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Israel
and Palestine, East and West Germany), and the remaking of old ones.
The encounters and artistic dialogues among artists, their exchanges of
ideas, lend insight into the development of postwar art. From the First
World to the Second World and Third World, from liberation struggles
and civil rights movements to decolonization and nonalignment, from
revolutionary socialism to liberal democracy, from the atomic age to
the space age, from mass communication to consumerism, this survey
informs and frames the processes that attended the remaking and re-
modeling of the global order.
But which stories of art can this exhibition tell of the momentous
events that shaped the world seventy years ago? Inevitably, a project of
this scope and ambition faces vexing questions on multiple fronts. These
include questions of interpretation, such as social versus formal art-his-
torical methodology; of diachronic in contrast to synchronic curatorial Fig. 17. Francis Newton Souza. Untitled (Head). 1965. Oil on board,
73.758.4 cm. Courtesy Aicon Gallery, New York
approaches; of the criteria governing the inclusion and exclusion of art-
ists and artworks; and of the balance between Western and non-Western
art. At the same time, an exhibition such as this emerges from a long lineage
of exhibitions and academic writing on art and artists of the period that
this project covers. Against this backdrop, we must inevitably confront
the weight of canonical art history, whose immense shadow falls on
Introductory Essays Okwui Enwezor 37
the shoulder of historical accounts and aesthetic interpretations in the
face of alternative narratives.
To soldier forth with this endeavor, the weight of canonical art
history must first be shrugged off, let fall, gracefully, by the wayside. This
does not necessarily mean casting it aside in toto, nor abandoning some
of its many important insights. But it is part of this exhibitions mission to
acknowledge and identify the persistent blind spots of that history, and
the Eurocentric limits that it places on artistic activities outside Europe
and North America. To whatever extent possible, Postwar seeks, even in
abbreviated terms, to be global and expansive, so as to tell a different kind
of story of postwar art since 1945. In many ways the exhibition is revisionist
in the best possible sense: it aims to create a multivalent network of rela-
tionships and differences, affiliations and cultural solidarities, singularities
and multiplicities. Most significantly, it seeks to bring into dialogue the
work of artists from North and South, East and West, regional and metro-
politan, national and transnational, cosmopolitan and diasporic. In doing
so it reshapes unsustainable art-historical boundary-making, which for
too long has sequestered artists (including Europeans) in ethnocentric
corrals and has divided the art world into consolidated enclaves, while
consigning many significant artists from outside Western Europe and
North America to the margins of critical inquiry.
Postwar is a story that can only make sense on a broad canvas. It is
neither a chronological narrative nor an episodic account of art move-
ments; instead, the privileged mode of narration of this complex and
complicated topoi is heterotemporal80 and heterochronical. 81 In other
words, there is neither a singular temporality nor one sole chronicle.
One way to approach this task might be to provincialize82 (to borrow
Dipesh Chakrabartys illuminating term) the postwar art-history indus-
tryArt since 1945in order to project what Terry Smith has called
the world-picture of modern and contemporary art. 83 This clearly calls
for a recasting of art historyan examination on a global scale, bearing
in mind the work of artists across the world, in every continent, and of
every shade. 84 It is our hope that Postwar not only reconceives the very
syntax of artistic modernity but enlivens the multiplicity of the accounts
that have come to shape it.
38 Introductory Essays
1 The first American forces to enter Munich were a small squad of soldiers under the com-
mand of twenty-seven-year-old, German-born Lieutenant Wolfgang F. Robinow. See Charles
Hawley, Remembering World War II: The US Soldier Who Liberated Munich Recalls Con-
fronting the Nazi Enemy, Spiegel Online, April 29, 2005, available online at www.spiegel.de/
international/remembering-world-war-ii-the-us-soldier-who-liberated-munich-recalls-con-
fronting-the-nazi-enemy-a-354029.html (accessed June 2016).
2 Located just sixteen kilometers (ten miles) from Munich, Dachau was the Nazi regimes
first concentration camp. It opened in March 1933, initially to house political prisoners op-
posing the regime, and was the model for all later concentration camps and subcamps built
in Germany and German-occupied countries. See the website of the Dachau memorial at
www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/index-e.html (accessed June 2016).
3 See Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Munich and National Socialism, trans. Jefferson Chase
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015), p. 9.
4 V-E Day, the official end of the war, is commemorated on May 8 in Europe and on May 9 in
the Soviet Union. Germanys capitulation had been announced two days earlier, on May 6, in
Rheims, where General Dwight D. Eisenhower had accepted the German surrender. Cele-
brations were postponed until May 8, however, when the Allied and Soviet commands signed
the document of surrender together in Berlin. See Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), pp. 1518.
5 See Sadao Asada, The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japans Decision to Surrender:
A Reconsideration, in The Pacific Historical Review 67, no. 4 (November 1998): 477512.
6 Like trophy hunters, American army officers added their signatures to the Goldenes Buch
next to the names of august earlier visitors to the building. On the main and title page of the
book, Sgt. Richard S. Radelet signed his name between the printed name and the signature
of Adolf Hitler; Sgt. Eugene Johnson signed on the top page, above where Benito Mussolini
and the Aga Khan had signed on September 25 and October 22, 1937; and 1st Lt. Robert
E. Bishoff left his name below the signature of Edward, Duke of Windsor, who had visited on
October 23, 1937. The guest book lies in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich.
7 On the complexity of the new geopolitical arrangements that followed the end of the war
see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
8 Hitler, Speech Inaugurating the Great Exhibition of German Art, Munich, in Herschel B.
Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 476.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 475.
11 Entartete Kunst opened on July 19, 1937, one day after the inauguration of the new
Haus der Deutschen Kunst. See Entartete Kunst Ausstellungsfhrer, exh. cat. (Berlin: Verlag
fr Kultur- und Wirtschaftswerbung, 1937).
12 On Entartete Kunst and its impact on artists and the avant-garde see Stephanie Barron,
Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991).
13 After 1936, besides being one of Hitlers favorite painters, Adolf Ziegler also served as
president of the Reichskulturkammer (Chamber of visual arts), a position that gave him the
responsibility of coordinating the seizure of artworks deemed degenerate from museums
throughout Germany. It was Ziegler who was responsible for the hasty organization of the
Entartete Kunst exhibition, beginning in Munich and then touring the countrys cities.
14 Hitler, Speech Inaugurating the Great Exhibition of German Art, Munich, p. 479.
15 The various testimonies presented in the course of the denazification of the Haus der
Deutschen Kunst include a submission made by three Frenchmen who had been sent to work
there during the war as forced labor. The letter, signed by a Mr. Armand, a Mr. Mesler, and a Mr.
Petior Grolet, stated that during their time at the museum, Mr. H. Grf, Mr. A. Kugler, Mr. Otto, Mr.
K., and Mr. Koppauer had treated them correctly. The letter clearly implicates the museum in the
use of forced labor. See M. Armand, M. Mesler, and M. Petior Grolet, denazification certification
letter for Heinrich Grf, May 1, 1945. Spk A K539 Grf, Heinrich, Staatsarchiv Mnchen, Munich.
16 The earliest published document using the changed name is the title page of the book
Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemlde des 15. und 16 Jahrhunderts (Munich: Monuments, Fine
Arts and Archives, Office of the Military Government for Bavaria, 1946), the catalogue for an
exhibition that opened on January 17, 1946.
17 The building seems to have remained identified as the Haus der Deutschen Kunst at
least until late in 1945. A letter in the Haus der Kunst archives written on November 2, 1945,
identifies the Officers Club as located in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst through both the
printed letterhead and writing in the letter itself. It is signed by the civilian personnel chief of
the Officers Mess and carries an identification stamp noting the same location.
18 See the exhibition catalogue Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemlde des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts.
The exhibition was the first, other than the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung, to be staged in
Okwui Enwezor 39
the building since 1944. It contained works from the Bayerische Staatsgemlde-Sammlungen,
the Bavarian state painting collection.
19 Because Munichs Alte Pinakothek had been damaged during the war, the paintings were
exhibited at Haus der Kunst, where the collection remained until the 1950s.
20 The Bavarian, January 24, 1946, p. 8.
21 A review of the museums rapid reorganization of its artistic program is available online
at www.hausderkunst.de/en/research/history/historical-documentation/after-the-war/ (ac-
cessed June 2016).
22 The Pablo Picasso exhibition included 126 paintings, 34 sculptures, 25 drawings, 56
prints, and 13 ceramic works. It traveled to the Rheinisches Museum Kln-Deutz, Cologne, and
to the Kunstverein and the Kunsthalle-Altbau, Hamburg. See Picasso 19001955 (Munich:
Austellungleitung Mnchen, e.V. Haus der Kunst, 1955).
23 See Jrgen Claus, Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren, exh. cat. (Munich: Ausstel-
lungsleitung Mnchen e.V. Haus der Kunst, 1962).
24 See Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N. (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 45.
25 See Official Proceedings and Documents of United Nations Monetary and Financial Con-
ference, vols. 1 and 2, available online at https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/
books/1948_state_bwood_v1.pdf and https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/publications/books/
1948_state_bwood_v2.pdf (accessed June 2016). See also Ben Steil, The Battle of Bretton
Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
26 The Pan-African Congress was organized by Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana (formerly the
Gold Coast) to independence from Britain in 1957 and became its first prime minister, and the
Trinidadian writer and trade unionist George Padmore. The congress, a postwar attempt to re-
suscitate W. E. B. Duboiss earlier Pan-African Congresses, brought together representatives of
African and West Indian political, labor, and civic organizations who declared, The delegates of
the Fifth Pan-African Congress believe in peace. How could it be otherwise when for centuries
the African peoples have been victims of violence and slavery. Yet if the Western world is still
determined to rule mankind by force, then Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force
in the effort to achieve Freedom, even if force destroys them and the world. See Padmore, ed.,
History of the Pan African Congress (London: The Hammersmith Bookshop, 1947), p. 5.
27 During the war years the museum modified its program, working in support of the war
effort by preparing special programs, posters, films, and exhibitions for the government, the
armed forces, and later on for veterans. The Museum executed thirty-eight contracts for various
governmental agencies, including Office of War Information, the Library of Congress, and the
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Nineteen exhibitions were sent abroad and
twenty-nine were shown on the premises, all related to the war and the problems and suffering it
engendered. Sam Hunter, The Museum of Modern Art: Introduction, in The Museum of Modern
Art, New York: The History and Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams and The Museum of Mod-
ern Art, 1984), pp. 2021. In a bulletin from 1942, the Museum had this to say about its collec-
tion: Though it does not so obviously bear upon the War, the museum collection is a symbol of
one of the four freedoms for which we are fightingthe freedom of expression. It is art that Hitler
hates because it is modern, progressive, challenging (Hitler insists upon magazine cover realism
or prettiness); because it is international, leading to understanding and tolerance among nations
(Hitler despises the culture of all countries but his own); because it is free, the free expression of
free men (Hitler insists upon the subjugation of art). The Museum and the War, The Bulletin of
the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 1 (OctoberNovember 1942): 19. Even in the postwar period,
no museum was more directly involved than MoMA as an arbiter of progressive modernism
and a promoter of American contemporary art. In 1952, the Museums second director, Ren
dHarnoncourt, established its International Program (later succeed by its International Coun-
cil) to promote modern art and contemporary American art through a global lending program
and through traveling exhibitions sometimes organized in collaboration with U.S. government
agencies. These collaborations were the subject of controversy, especially when they involved
the CIA-financed Congress for Cultural Freedom. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the
Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 26774.
28 Worldwide statistics remain incomplete, but it is calculated that over 40 million died across
the world. The Soviet Union alone incurred an estimated 20 million war dead. See Micheal
Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other
Figures, 14942007, 1992 (rev. ed. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008), pp. 56061.
29 Buruma recounts a chilling exchange during the German surrender to the Soviets. Field
Marshal Wilhelm Keitel of Germany, Buruma writes, told the Russians that he was horrified
by the extent of the destruction wrought on the German capital. Whereupon a Russian officer
asked Keitel whether he had been equally horrified when on his orders, thousands of Soviet
villages and towns were obliterated, and millions of people, including many children, were bur-
ied under the ruins. See Buruma, Year Zero, p. 18. For a riveting recollection of the bombings
that laid many German cities to waste see W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction,
1999, Eng. trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003).
30 After the end of the war, beyond the exhaustive reports of governmental and human-rights
organizations on the nature of the death camps, a range of memoirs by survivors began to
appear. One of the earliest accounts published, originally in 1947, was that of the Jewish-
Italian chemist Primo Levi, who had survived internment in Auschwitz. See Levi, If This Is a
Man, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Orion Press, 1959). For a compelling elaboration of the
meaning of Auschwitz and its moral and ethical implications see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants
of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 1998, Eng. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York:
Zone Books, 1999). Even camp administrators, including some of the most notorious ones,
wrote memoirs; see Rudolph Hss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the Kommandant at
Auschwitz, 194647, Eng. trans. Andrew Pollinger (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996).
31 See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961 (rev. ed. New York: Holmes
and Meier, 1985).
32 For many, World War II has come to signify and conjure two particular images of appalling
horror: the Holocaustthe extermination of millions of European Jewsand the dropping of
atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
33 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958 (reprint ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
34 See Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, 2002, Eng. trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 3338.
35 For Arendt, the convergence of the ideology of race and its management was actually
made on the Dark Continent. Race was the emergency explanation of human beings whom
no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and hu-
miliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species. See
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951 (reprint ed. San Diego and New York: Harcourt,
1985), p. 185.
36 Ibid, p. 37.
37 Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1950, rev. 1955, Eng. trans. Joan Pinkham
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 35.
38 Ibid., p. 41.
39 Agamben, Homer Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995, Eng. trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 153.
40 See Rachel E. Perry, Jean Fautriers Jolies Juive, October 108 (Spring 2004): 5172.
41 Sarah Wilson, Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute, in Frances Morris, Paris Post War:
Art and Existentialism 194555, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), p. 27.
42 The British Army Film and Photographic Unit was a corps of trained photographers and
cameramen established on October 24, 1941, to record military events in which the British
Armed Forces were engaged. The No. 5 British Army Film and Photographic Unit entered the
Belsen-Bergen concentration camp on April 17, 1945, two days after the camp had been lib-
erated by British and Canadian Forces, although some of the units photographers had already
entered the camp earlier. One year later, in 1946, the unit disbanded. See Mark Celinscak,
Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), p. 38.
43 On the question of what images can show about the Holocaust see Georges Didi-
Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, 2003, Eng. trans.
Shane B. Lillis, 2008 (repr ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
44 At the end of the essay Cultural Criticism and Society, 1951, Theodor Adorno, who spent
the war years in Los Angeles, wrote that cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final
stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
See Adorno, Prisms, Eng. trans. Shiery Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1983), p. 34.
45 This dictum came as the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem, an in-depth article on the
trial of Adolf Eichmann that Arendt wrote on assignment for The New Yorker, which published
it in February and March 1963. Arendt later revised and expanded the article into a book:
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1964).
46 Immediately after the war, with the onset of the Nuremberg trials and the denazification
process, the German people were confronted with questions of their responsibility, or lack
thereof, for the crimes of National Socialism. One of the first thinkers to grapple with the
issue of guilt was the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who had been expelled by the Nazis from the
University of Heidelberg in 1937 but had remained in Germany through the war, although he
was strongly anti-Nazi. When he launched his inquiry into the idea of German guilt, then, in a
series of public lectures delivered in the fall of 1945, just a few months after Germanys sur-
render, he had the authority to engage the most important moral dilemma faced by Germans
of the postwar generation. See Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage, 1947, Eng. trans. as The Question of
German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Doubleday Broadway, 1948). Arendt, Wolfgang
Borchert, Alfred Dblin, and Eugen Kogon were among the important voices dealing with the
issue of guilt within Germany immediately after the war.
47 See Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War
Germanys (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), p. 55.
48 Some of Gerhard Richters early paintings, including Hitler (1962), Bombers (1963),
Uncle Rudi (1965), Herr Heyde (1965), Family by the Seaside (1964), and others, address
images, events, and individuals related to Nazism and the war. He recently completed a
cycle of four large-scale abstract paintings based on grainy black-and-white photographs of
Birkenau. It is intriguing that he chose abstraction as a way to engage this obviously difficult
subject matter, after over fifty years without producing such a picture. See Helmut Friedl,
Gerhard Richter: Birkenau (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther Knig, 2015).
49 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richters Atlas: The Anomic Archive, October 88
(Spring 1999): 143.
50 Ibid., pp. 14344.
51 For a careful translation and examination of Celans great poem, which thematizes the nec-
essary voicing of the Shoah, see Paul Celan, Death Fugue, Eng. trans. John Felstiner, in
Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 3132.
52 Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
-
53 After their initial appearance in Mainichi Shinbun in August 1945, Yosuke Yamahatas
photographs were proscribed and kept out of circulation. The ban was lifted in 1952, and the
magazines Asahi Graph and Life soon published the photographs, respectively in the issues
of August 6 and September 29, 1952. In 1955, Edward Steichen, curator of photography at
New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, included some of the photographs in the Museums influ-
ential exhibition The Family of Man. Similar censorship of images of the bomb also occurred in
films. As Jerome F. Shapiro writes, Recently, film historians have brought to light the extent
to which the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (scap) censored references to Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in films made during the Occupation years of Japan, and the extent to which the
Japanese government itself also suppressed, and even now continues to suppress, culturally
and historically important films about the atomic bombings. See Shapiro, Atomic Bomb Cinema:
The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 6.
54 Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein were among those alarmed about the consequences
of the introduction of atomic weapons of mass destruction. On July 9, 1955, they called a
press conference at Claxton Hall, London, where they released the Russell-Einstein Mani-
festo on nuclear disarmament. See Russell and Einstein, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, of a conceptual artwork, a painting titled Entry Points (1978), by the Malaysian artist Redza
in Joseph Rotblat, Scientists in the Quest for Peace: A History of the Pugwash Conferences
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972), 137140. The manifesto is also available online,
at https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/; see also https://pugwash.org/
1955/07/09/audio-bertand-russell-joseph-rotblat-manifesto-press-conference-9-july-
1955/ (both accessed June 2016). See also Jaspers, The Future of Mankind, 1958, Eng. trans.
E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). The book was also published under
the title The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man.
55 Along with Russell and Einstein, the philosophers, theologians, and scientists addressing
these issues included Jaspers, Gnther Anders, and Lewis Mumford.
56 In cinema there emerged a genre of filmmaking that Shapiro calls atomic bomb cinema:
films such as Children of Hiroshima (1952), by Kaneto Shind; The Bells of Nagasaki (1953),
by Hideo ba; Gojira (Godzilla, 1954), by Ishir Honda; Hiroshima mon amour (1959), by Alain
Resnais; La Jete (1962), by Chris Marker; and Stanley Kubricks classic nuclear war spoof
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). See Shapiro,
Atomic Bomb Cinema.
57 Homi Bhabha, Foreword. Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and Colonial Condition, in
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, Eng. trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:
Pluto Press, 1986), p. xx.
58 Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 31.
59 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 9.
60 David Siqueiross Cain en los Estados Unidos shows a white mobfigures of the gro-
tesquedragging a bloodied black man out of a prison cell for a lynching. In the blurry
forms of Jack Whittens series of heads (Head IVLynching, 1964, for example), whiteness
assumes a ghostly presence.
61 See Morris, Paris Post War. The intriguing aspect of Morriss exhibition is not so much its
exclusive focus on the work of white European artists as the absolute absence of any discus-
sion of French colonialism in Indochina and North Africa, regions that in the period in question
were literally at war with the French state. The absence strikes one as part of a general his-
toricist fiction that pervades the art establishment and its institutions.
62 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-
Century Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
63 See Uche Okeke, Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, Nigeria: Documentation
Centre, Asele Institute, and Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982).
64 Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 32.
65 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112.
66 James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village, Harpers Magazine, October 1953, p. 45.
67 Born in 1906 in Senegal, Lopold Sdar Senghor cofounded the black-consciousness literary
movement Ngritude, with Csaire and Lon Damas, in 1935, several years before the outbreak
of World War II. A Paris-based coalition of intellectuals of the African diaspora, the founders used
their literary journal Ltudiant noir as a platform for a dialogic, positivist black/African humanism
and a resistance to colonialism. Ngritudea neologism coined by Csaireappropriated the
negativity of the pejorative racist terms ngre and nigger and deployed W. E. B. Duboiss dia-
lectical idea of a diasporic black double consciousness to contest, challenge, and reject Western
cultural, racial, and moral domination. The movements influence went beyond the initial franco-
phone world of African and Caribbean writers to encompass much of the African and diasporic
worlds. See James A. Arnold, Modernism and Ngritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aim Cesair
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York:
Bantam Books, 1989); and Cesair, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1947, Eng. trans.
Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).
68 Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, 1948, Eng. trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts
Review 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1964Winter 1965): 18. The essay was originally published in French
as the introduction to Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle posie negre et malgache (Paris:
Quadrigge/Presse Universitaire de France, 1948).
69 See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, Eng. trans. Constance Farrington (New York:
Grove Press, 1963).
70 Sukarno, quoted in Partha Chatterjee, Empire and Nation Revisited: 50 Years After
Bandung, in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (August 2006): 487.
71 Judt, Postwar, p. 7.
72 See Chatterjee, Empire and Nation Revisited, pp. 48796.
73 Judt, Postwar, p. 7.
74 Sarat Maharaj, The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in the Britain of Immigrations,
Third Text 15 (Summer 1991): 7790.
75 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), pp. 14142.
76 Maharaj, The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis, p. 81.
77 The poignant and evocative text of this epigraph appears as an inscription on the surface
Piyadasa. In many ways it articulates with incisive brevity the task of mapping the global coor-
dinates of the artworks in this exhibition.
78 Serge Guilbaut has made the contentious claim that the waning of Paris as the center
of modernism and the rise of New York were consequences of the concerted assertion of
American hegemony in global cultural politics. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Eng. trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
79 Several exhibitions since the late 1980s have presented new curatorial research that
has broadened the field of postwar scholarship. For a few examples see Rasheed Araeen,
The Other Story, exh. cat. (London: The Hayward Gallery, 1989); Jean-Paul Ameline, Face
lhistoire, 19331996, exh. cat. (Paris: Flammarion and Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996);
Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and Rachel Weiss, eds., Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
1950s1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999); Okwui Enwezor, The Short
Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 19451994, exh. cat. (Munich:
Prestel and Museum Villa Stuck, 2001); Mari Carmen Ramrez and Hctor Olea, Inverted
Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, and
Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2004).
80 See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Preface to the 2nd edition, in Provincializing Europe: Postco-
lonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2000, (rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), p. xvii.
81 Nicolas Bourriaud uses this term to underline the multiplicity of accounts of contemporary
art. See Bourriaud, statement from a brochure outline for the Altermodern program of the
Tate Triennial (London: Tate Britain, April 2008).
82 The terminological turn made through Chakrabartys concept of provincialization is enor-
mously useful in grappling with how to break up historical master narratives. See his Provin-
cializing Europe.
83 Terry Smith, World Picturing in Contemporary Art: The Iconogeographic Turn, Australian
and New Zealand Journal of Art 7, no. 1 (2006): 2446. See also Smith, What Is Contemporary
Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 56.
84 For an important contribution toward an expansive methodological view of art history
studied on such a global scale, see David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the
Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003).

40 Introductory Essays Okwui Enwezor 41

 Lhistoire de la peinture est lie a celle de lhumanit (The history of painting
is linked to the history of humanity).
P
Mohamed Khadda, 1964 1
ostwar is more than Aftermath and Triumph,
the most obvious traces of World War II in the
view from Europe or the United States. The
destruction, ruin, and then reconstruction of
Europe, alongside or in conflict with the rising
tide of American affluence and influence, is
only one part of the story, the part that focuses on
the shifting fortunes of the West. The destroyed
cities to be reconstructed and modernized included Hiroshima,
Nagasaki, and Tokyo, as well as the Arab citiesCairo, Beirut,
Damascusbombarded by colonial violence before and after the
war. 2 Yet the tragedies of European cities are often cast as singular in
art-historical accounts, particularly those written for exhibitions that
tell and retell the story of Europe and/or the United States, with in-
creasing detail or polemic.3 In these accounts, even this storys other,
more proximate sidethe tale of Communist Russia and Eastern Eu-
rope, the Wests competitors in the Cold Warwas long in eclipse. 4
In recent decades, however, historians tout court have aggres-
sively questioned and reconfigured received accounts of the postwar
ART, WORLD, HISTORY period.5 First came the revelations from Eastern European archives
opened after 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
Katy Siegel the Communist bloc, affording a much more detailed vision of Russia,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the other Iron Curtain nations.
A second wave of historical reconsideration looked at the so-called
Third World; many political, social, and economic histories over the
past two decades have discussed anticolonial struggles and new na-
tionhood. 6 Still more recent accounts have traced the transnational
ties of the pan-Arab and -African movements and the affiliations of the
nonaligned nations. Many historians tackle the broader historical co-
nundrum of the relation of these new accounts to the older ones that
focused on the two superpowers and their Cold War, asking whether
China, for example, or Asia broadly conceived, has a history incom-
mensurate with that paradigm.7 Others have countered the East-West
narrative altogether, reorienting to North-South and arguing that the
American and Western European perception of the threat posed by
masses of poor people of color was equal to that of the threat posed
by Communism. 8 Debates have arisen around the subject matter of
history as well, around whether to emphasize the paper trail of foreign
policy or the more nebulous category of culture. 9 And some, particu-
larly postcolonial theorists, have questioned the very idea of world
history as a linear development in which the worlds cultures belong
to a single master narrative. 10
Art historians have not been absent from these disciplinary
shifts. Scholars and curators have done muchthough certainly not
allof the primary research required to write accounts of the artistic
Introductory Essays
figures and institutions of new nations (although Western museums,
particularly in the United States, have been slow to stage monographic
exhibitions for postwar artists from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and
the Middle East).11 The question of how such accounts might sit within,
inform, or refigure a larger account of modern art, and of art history
more broadly, remains far from resolved. Scholars studying the for-
merly colonized nations have produced penetrating critiques of the
center/periphery account of modernism, with its implication of de-
layed or imitative versions in the non-West, and have developed sub-
sequent debates about alter or hybrid modernities. 12 But no previous
exhibition has attempted a global account of postwar art, staged from
a perspective of interrelation.
A worldwide perspective is often seen as properly relevant only after
1989, when the end of state Communism created the conditions for a
global art world. This change has been categorized as a shift from the
modern to the contemporary.13 And in fact, contemporary art from
the non-West seems an easier fit for the market than the work made
earlier by modern artists in new nations, where stylistic choices were
more obviously restricted by ideology (emphasized in many accounts
of Chinese art) or seemed imitative to Western critics (as in many ac-
counts of Middle Eastern art). Global art histories therefore rush to
the post-1989 years, perhaps after a brief prelude, in order to leap over a
momentthe modernwhen much art is dismissed as being of
questionable quality; as being marked by inadequate difference from
other art sharing a seemingly belated style; or, conversely, as produc-
ing too much friction with globalism, thanks to a nationalist political
orientation that now appears old-fashioned.
A few scholars have sought to rewrite the history of world art as
a whole, producing radically reconceived survey texts or theoretical
reconsiderations of historical models, epitomized respectively by the
work of David Summers and Hans Belting. 14 The global survey begins
at a moment well before modernism and attempts to locate univer-
sal features of art from different cultures and periods, allowing an
art history that doesnt jump, as in the earlier survey model, from an-
cient Egypt to ancient Greece, as though art in Egypt simply stopped
at a certain year. However well-intentioned, the approach can seem an
art-historical analogue of the neoliberal end of history, while its at-
tempt at global comprehension through the quest for universalsoften
found in formal similaritiesoccludes appreciation of the material spe-
cificities, politics, and conflicts in and among different artistic cultures.
In other words, it occludes history itselfthe relations and con-
flicts among nations and cultures that shaped the postwar world,
with actors interacting intensely and in many directions on a global
scale, well before 1989. (In fact, accepting 1989 as the crucial date
presumes the centrality of the Cold War, a centrality that historians
have recently sought to question.) It was in the postwar period that
relations among artistic practices across the world became active
and necessary, though not by any means equal. 15 After 1945, the world
was united, not in the recurrent hope of a rational universalism in the
Katy Siegel 43
 interest of humanity as a whole, but by a new order based on contin- the art-world battle between the United States, newly ascendant polit-
uous conflict among political and economic interests. This conflict ically and economically, and the damaged nations of France, Germany,
both produced and was enforced by apocalyptic technology, mass and to a lesser degree England. In fact, however, the makers (and even
production, endless war, new forms of economic empire and resist- many supporters) of the apparently new artistic modes in New York
ance, and global mass communication. Postwar seeks to exploreat and on the West Coast were initially tentative in their claims for their
least in a first draftthe artistic aspect of this situation, examining work, and exhibitions of these modes included European, Mexican, and
it in a way that is both global and historical, framed by the ambitious Cuban artists along with Americans. The only insistent note was the
questions posed by historians and making use of the primary and crit- assertion that American art, long seen as provincial, imitative, and
ical work done by art historians in particular.
No exhibition, of course, even one on the scale of Postwar, can
fully measure up to this task. Not only did we have to make choices
about what to include, but our choices were of course constrained
by the availability of particular artworks, a condition itself reflecting
a whole history of valuation (entailing economics and even interna-
tional diplomatic relations). But within the practical limits curators al-
ways face, Postwar has taken its cues, above all, from reconsiderations
of the nature of global history. The exhibition rests on the shoulders of
those who have done the demanding work of recovering and studying
individual artists from around the world, and also on those of recent
art historians who have looked at transnational connections among
artists, including those belonging to pan-Arab and -African, South-
South, and nonaligned networks.16 It reflects an attempt to see the Cold
War as one aspect of a global struggle for power; to see Europe as only
one terrain of that struggle, and as itself provincial in this sense; and to
look at history not as the unfolding of a single story, or as a fractured
plurality of stories, but as a knot of mutually inflecting histories. 17
This complexity was already sensed by the artist On Kawara in
1955, speaking at a roundtable, Atarashii ningen z ni mukatte (Toward
a New Human Image), in Tokyo:

In our reality, we did not pass through an upwardly mobile time, or the
best time, of modernity. Take, for example, capitalist production. We are
already mired in late-stage ills of monopoly [without having gone through
its earlier stages]. At the same time, feudal institutions and sentiments
remain, permeating every aspect of our life. I suspect that these different
historical stages are layered. When we try to transcend this, we cannot pro-
actively change our reality, unless we shed a Westernized monolithic vie-
wpoint and accept these contradictions as autonomous subjects in order
Fig. 2. Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze). Apatride. 1944.
to devise a method or plan for change based on the concrete reality.18 Photography. Private Collection

Fig. 1. Mohammed Khadda. Alphabet libre (Free Alphabet). 1964. Oil on canvas,
10081 cm. Muse national des beaux-arts dAlger, Algiers
Kawara was speaking specifically about Japan, but his insistence that primitive or even barbaric, might in fact be developing something of
histories coexist, as historical strata, so to speak, has broad implications. value. 19 Even within the United States, the art of Willem de Kooning,
Even though he uses the language of developmentstages, modern Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and others that was later
ityhe undercuts its reality. As we begin to see the modern, including its labeled Abstract Expressionism was only one mode among others;
dominant iterations in the United States and Europe, as both local and there were also realisms of all stripes, such as the identifiably Amer-
a matter of mutual exchange, the obdurate centrality of this category to ican subjects of Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth and the popular
our thinking about the art of the period may begin to dissolve. leftist images of Ben Shahn (the last, famously, paired with de Kooning
The starting point for most histories and exhibitions of the postwar in the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 1954), which, how-
period has historically been just that tale of Aftermath and Triumph ever, have come to be granted far less historical importance. 20

44 Introductory Essays Katy Siegel 45

 Despite growing excitement about Abstract Expressionism, the
market and general regard for it were weak both inside and outside
the United States until the mid-to-late 1950s, and the attention it re-
ceived was balanced by scornful dismissal of its outlandishness. Early
since 1945 accounts (such as Documenta II, in 1959, and various text-
book surveys) placed the United States in a relatively minor role, and
often reached back before the dark interlude of the war (and its atten-
dant, questionable art) in an effort to cast postwar European artists
as the heirs of earlier modernists such as Vasily KandinskyHans
the most obvious artistic (rather than territorial) issue was the appar-
ently purely stylistic conflict between abstraction and figuration. This
pair of categorieswhich became a clich largely without passing
through the stage of analysiswas described bluntly by the paint-
er Georg Baselitz: There was abstraction in the West and realism in
the East.24 At the level of official policy, prescription, and nationalist
promotion of the arts, the line between the two was indeed drawn
firmly, as in the United States famously advertising abstraction as
democratic freedom and the Soviets mandating legible, uplifting images

Fig. 3. Wifredo Lam. La Runion (The Reunion). 1945. Oil on paper, remount, white chalk,
152212 cm. Paris, Centre Pompidou - Muse national d'art moderne
- Centre de cration industrielle

Hartung, for example, or the politically blameless artist Wols (featured
in Documenta I and II and in the 1958 Venice Biennale), a German resident
in France who was interned in a French camp during the war and died
six years after its end (fig. 2).21 It was in this context that the exhibition
The New American Painting, which circulated through Basel, Milan,
Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London in 195859, ac-
companied by a Pollock retrospective, announced the newly uppercase,
newly official label. Reviews were mixed, but regardless of their verdict
of the labor and health made possible under Communism. This insti-
tutional history, of diplomatic papers and museum correspondence,
has conditioned art-historical accounts. 25 But in the day-to-day lives
of artists, the practices were rarely as fixed as the names for them were
in the discourse. 26
Although critics could be didactic about the historical necessity
and definition of abstraction, many artists were not interested in it as Fig. 4. Taro Okamoto. My Reality. 1950. Digital scan from silver gelatin print.
an explicit program or supposed telos of painting. Abstraction as an Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kawasaki

critics often saw a battle between former national alliesa moment, as
Lawrence Alloway characterized the 1960 Venice Biennale, when [Jean]
Fautrier slapped Franz Kline or Kline socked Fautrier.22 American politi-
cal and artistic ascendance would become much more truly joined in the
1960s, with Pop art, whose content seemed to anticipate this reception.23
By this time the territorial battles between New York and Paris
had long taken their place in the context of the Cold War. From this optic
absolute dictateas it was for Ad Reinhardtwas rare, and to some
seemed ridiculous enough that Elaine de Kooning parodied it in her
spoof article Pure Paints a Picture.27 Her husband, Willem de Kooning,
along with Wols, Tobey, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Mark Rothko, and many
others who were referred to as abstract painters rejected the term, lin-
king it to the rationalism that in their eyes led to fascism.28 Nor did they
prefer its opposite, which artists like Norman Lewis and Francis Bacon

46 Introductory Essays Katy Siegel 47


Fig. 5. Mathias Goeritz. El animal del Pedregal. 1951. Reinforced concrete.
Courtesy L.M. Daniel Goeritz & Galera La Caja Negra, Madrid
48 Introductory Essays
identified as illustration, seeking instead an impure and active relation
between the artist and his or her materials and in the specificities of the
paints speed and viscosity and color on canvas, whether it made a face
or a squiggle (but, for these particular artists, no squares). Furthermore,
artists were ambivalent not only about abstraction, which they linked
to a discredited theoretical and ideological modernism, but also about
the United States. Many of them were immigrants, Jews, gay, socialists,
and African Americans, with cosmopolitan identities and experiences
that put them at odds with any conservative posturing about the nation
(making them suspicious of the Whitney Museum of American Art, for
example), even as some found things to love in American culture: its in-
formality, its music, its movies.
Representation too could be an engaged and personal practice
rather than a socially dictated one. While the Communist regimes
had mandates for political representations and acceptable subject
matter, those mandates fluctuated through the thaw after the death of
Joseph Stalin and during Mao Zedongs Hundred Flowers campaign.29
Soviet painting had a range of styles, including severe and romantic,
reaching back to nineteenth-century Russia, and Chinese traditional
ink-painting techniques were sometimes forbidden and sometimes
allowed, depending on the content and the artist. There was art in the
popular democracies of Eastern Europeby Vladimir Boudnik, Ivo
Gattin, and Tadeusz Kantor, for examplethat engaged gestural ab-
straction or that continued earlier geometric styles. Art by Commu-
nist artists varied throughout the world, as manifested in the work of
the many socialist and Communist artists in the West, such as Andr
Fougeron, Renato Guttuso, and Charles White, and in the widespread
influence of the Mexican artist David Siqueiros (despite his own
Stalinism) on the work of artists as varied as Kawara and Inji Efflatoun.
In the United States, popular paintings and illustrations by Norman
Rockwell were more than a match for Soviet art as realist propaganda.
Nonetheless, the tension between abstraction and figuration was
real, and it is fascinating to see how it played out not only in the con-
flict between East and West, or between Communism and capital-
ism, but also as a way of figuring other frictionsmost notably those
aroused by decolonization, arguably the most significant political fact
of the period. In this context it provided an artistic register for the re-
vival of an earlier understanding of East-West conflict, that between
Asian and Middle Eastern cultures on the one hand and Western on
the other.30 Here Western abstraction was often positioned against
non-Western representational content, from rural scenes of indig-
enous life to political, ethnic, or religious imagery. Succinctly de-
scribing this conceptual structure as one that divides art into form,
which is learned and borrowed from the West, and content, whose raw
material is abstracted from national cultures, art historian Shiva
Balaghi finds this dilemma at the root of a forty-year-old question in
her field: Is this art modern and is it Iranian?31 The fact that a parallel
question had been asked of American art in the early and mid-twen-
tieth century, and in fact in many locations outside Europe, helps us
Katy Siegel
to understand the divide as less between East and West than between
modernism, as a provincial (and exceptional) European conceit, and
the art of every other place in the world, especially the former colo-
nies.32 Even after World War II, the form of the modern, despite the
putative triumph of American art, still primarily meant the modern-
ism of the former colonial powers, whether known through the work
of an early-twentieth-century artist such as Paul Klee (a sympat hetic
figure for many artists in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle
East because of some common feeling for nature and/or Klees own
reciprocal interest in arts of those regions) or through the academic,
third-generation Cubism of colonial art education.
What an art historian might understand as an (unanswerable) ques-
tion about style was experienced by artists as an (impossible) demand
that the artist choose between social and artistic identity, as when Iba
NDiaye spoke of the pressure on Senegalese artists to be Africans be-
fore being painters or sculptors.33 Referring to culture as broadly con-
ceived, Aim Csaire framed the dilemma neatly: The problem is often
summarized in the form of which option to take. A choice between au-
tochthonous tradition and European civilization. Either to reject indi-
genous civilization as puerile, inadequate, bypassed by history, or else, in
order to preserve the indigenous cultural heritage, to barricade oneself
against European civilization and refuse it. He put the poisoned choice
thus: In other terms, we are summoned: Choose between fidelity and
backwardness, or progress and rupture.34 Looking at art through the
lens of this opposition, fidelity could mean faith with the past, and with
the legibility and familiarity of representation; progress and rupture
would be the modern, and breaking with the familiar in favor of abs-
traction, the unknown.
The polarity of this choice could be reversed so as to obviate the
presumed hierarchy of social value. In terms of anticolonial politics, this
could mean reversing the opposites of barbaric and civilized, as in Len
Ferraris 1965 condemnation of Western and Christian civilization: for
Ferrari, the use of the atom bomb was not the necessary factor ending
World War II but a prelude to the U.S. war in Vietnam, the latter event
made still more malign by being broadcast to the world on television.35
Writers such as Csaire and Frantz Fanon pointed out how the promises
of empire as a modernizing regime had been broken, and noted the truly
democratic, educational developments achieved by colonized peoples
in resistance to both their rulers and selected traditional practices.
In some contexts abstraction could be found not as a rupture of
local artistic practice but, in the guise of tradition, on its side. Contra-
dicting the idea of abstraction as a fundamentally modern, Western
phenomenon, spreading around the world like economic development,
many Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African artists, such as
Mohammed Khadda, Anwar Jalal Shemza, and Jewad Selim, saw the
historical arts of Islam as inherently nonrepresentational, abstract
avant la lettre.36 (Some Western artists, such as Barnett Newman,
promoted the idea of non-European indigenous or traditional art as
abstract, but tended to cast the makers of this art as admirable but
49
naive.) When the reference was to the graphic arts and Arabic callig-
raphy, a pointed dialectic could develop between the universal and
the particular, as in the work of artists such as Sadequain, Charles
Hossein Zenderoudi, and Shakir Hassan Al Said.37 For these artists
abstraction functioned as a historical return, rather than a rupture; as
Sylvia Naef frames it, whereas in Europe the modern meant breaking
with the past, In the Arab world (as in other non-European coun-
tries), modernity was, from the beginning, a way of reconquering the
past.38 (Some Japanese artists worked similarly with traditional Jap-
anese calligraphy.)39 Gestural marks and shapes drawing on Arabic
or Urdu script could both be read with particular knowledge and ap-
preciated broadly for their formal qualities. While respecting the dif-
ferences between art that played with Arabic script and the concrete
poetry widespread through South America, Japan, and Europe, we
can nonetheless see a common wish to speak at once to the particular
and to the universal. 40
Fig. 6. Lee Seung-taek. Hanging Oji. 1960s.
Courtesy Gallery Hyundai, Seoul
Some artists of course did choose sides, whether owing to social
pressure or to personal conviction, and hewed strictly to either pro-
grammatic abstraction or figuration. Others believed that highlighting
the dichotomy would drive the conflict to a climax of contradiction.
In a manifesto of 1949, Taro Okamoto explicitly sought to keep form
50 Introductory Essays
and content, abstraction and figuration, and other terms on a list of
dichotomies in active conflict; this meant, in his own early painting,
the unreconciled coexistence of a classical, static structure, and a
romantic, dynamic structure. The result is a painting that generates
an extremely intense dissonance, a dissonance capturing a conflict-
ed social reality. Okamoto expressed the conflict most intensely in a
performance of 1950, in which he slashed a photograph of his face into
fragments (fig. 4). 41 That same year, in a conference in Darmstadt (at
which artist Willi Baumeister and art historian Hans Sedlmayr rep-
resented the ideological extremes of abstraction and representation),
Theodor Adorno similarly insisted that harmony in a modern work
of art rests in its uncompromised expression of the irreconcilable.42 A
decade later, Gerhard Richter (like Baselitz, an emigrant from East to
West) developed a practice that alternated between or forced together
the materiality of paint and representational imagery, so as to preserve
the clash between them. 43
M
any rejected the opposition of abstraction and realism,
condemning the terrible choices between East and West,
academic convention and soulless modernism, local and
modern, particular and universal, and often the very
categories of the distinction. Their art represented less a moderate
compromise than a refusal of the alternatives, a third way. For Ernest
Mancoba, the distinction was symptomatic of all of the problems of
modernity: Our history has brought about, little by little, this dichot-
omy between abstraction and figuration which provokes, more and
more, a terrible atomization in the very essence of life. In no domain
more than in the arts has this systematic dichotomy caused such de-
struction of the very foundation to the human identity.44
Mancobas complaint was echoed by many others through the idea
of a missing center, with humanity as something pushed aside or ex-
plicitly denied by the two modernist extremes of ideology. Among the
many events inspired by this question were the 1950 Darmstadt con-
ference featuring Baumeister, Sedlmayr, and Adorno (Das Menschenbild
in unserer Zeit, The Image of Man in our Time), the Tokyo roundtable
at which Kawara spoke in 1955, art-critical debates in London and Paris,
the publication of essays in such cultural journals as Prsence Africaine
and Al-Adab (Syria), an exhibition at New Yorks Museum of Modern
Art (New Images of Man), and the formation of an artists group in
Buenos Aires (Otra Figuracin). Some of this discourse was based on
a humanism flowing from the influence of Jean-Paul Sartres existen-
tialist writing on art, which saw the individual pitted against faceless
social forces. 45 But what could sometimes seem like a generic human- Fig. 7. Gazbia Sirry. Hopscotch. 1959. Oil on canvas, 100150 cm.
Courtesy Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo
ism was often a claim to something more legitimate, because more
specific, as in discussions that asserted a specifically Syrian humanism
embodied in a cultural tradition stretching back to ancient Sumeria. 46
Much of this writing critiqued the West as the agent of World War II and
of colonialism, as in Fanons indictment of this Europe, which nev-
er stopped talking of man, which never stopped proclaiming its sole
Katy Siegel 51
concern was man; we now know the price of suffering [that] humanity
has paid for every one of its spiritual victories.47 Fanon might have
been speaking for artists like Demas Nwoko, whose Colonial Officers
(1960) condemns not humanity or man but European colonialism.
In texts such as Fanons and the talks at the Tokyo roundtable,
what was at stake was not a choice between humanist and antihumanist
Fig. 8. Theodoros Stamos. Sounds in the Rock. 1946. Oil on composition
board, 122.272.1 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Gift of Edward W. Root. Acc. n.: 27.1947
positions (itself a dichotomy grounded in a Western perspective) but
the recognition of a new human, as both Fanon and Kawara put it. 48
Artists grasping to visualize this figure, including Baselitz, Mancoba,
Fateh Al-Moudarres, Karel Appel, Magda Cordell, Antonio Berni, Ben
Enwonwu, Alfonso Ossorio, Francis Newton Souza, and Jack Whitten,
aggressively pushed abstraction and representation into each other,
interrupting human images with lumps of oil paint, metal objects,
charcoal, sand, detritus, and gestural marks. Though often seen as
more battered and belated than avatars of the new, these figures argu-
ably embodied the historical present as the result of war, anticolonial
struggles, and fusions between humans and technology.
52
Artists weary of the fractures of modernity often looked back,
whether to a moment before the disrupting of an earlier unity or to a
space beyond the reach of culture, using a range of strategies art his-
torians have commonly labeled primitivism. In 1945, Csaire pro- a profound engagement with the material world. The will to animate
nounced Wifredo Lams totemic paintings free of the twin modern
constraintsaesthetics and realismand claimed that they called
modern man back to the first terror and passion (fig. 3). 49 Many
North American and European artists, including Baumeister, Jay
DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mathias Goeritz (one of a group of
artists dubbed the new prehistorics), made pilgrimages to the pre-
historic sites of Lascaux and Altamira and sought to emulate what
they found there in their own work (fig. 5).50
While artists involved in such attempts were often trying to es-
cape their own culture and history, they could also be trying to reclaim
it. Amid Chinas civil war of the 1940s, Dong Xiwen went to study the
Buddhist murals in the caves of Dunhuang.51 In the early 1960s, Lee
Seung-taek used stones and earthenware fermentation vessels to
make sculpture, returning it to a time before the Japanese occupa-
tion of Korea, not to mention the Korean War (fig. 6).52 In the Zaria
Art Society in Nigeria at the end of the 1950s, Uche Okeke and Demas
Nwoko studied traditional practices such as Nok sculptures and Igbo
drawing. For these artists, of course, primitivism is not the relevant
category; the sources they sought were not outside history but explic-
itly inside their national history, even if the handmade aspect or spirit-
uality of the works seemed to provide alternatives to faulty aspects of
the modern.53 At the same time, paradoxically, the nationalist aspect
of this workthe attempt to create a new Nigerian traditionaligned
it with modernity, once again overturning a dichotomy.
The image of non-Western art as shaped by fixed and timeless tra-
ditions beyond historical change was a false one; as many artists, such
as NDiaye, pointed out, they and their peers largely hailed from cities,
not from traditional agrarian settings. On the other hand, many cast
the Western traditionsupposedly the progressive term of the con-
trast, having broken with the past and hurtled forwardas ironically
itself suffering from rigor mortis. Both Mancoba and Newman decried
the rigidity of rules put forth by the ancient Greeks: the canon of pro-
portion, which rendered African art ugly, and the overrefined ideals
of beauty and geometry.54 (Both also, like many other artists including
Okamoto, complained about the Western philosophical tradition, with
its tyranny of conceptual structures over experience.) Their complaints
resonated with Fanons broad condemnation of Western civilization as
inert, even dead: All the Mediterranean valuesthe triumph of the
individual, of enlightenment and Beautyturn into pale, lifeless, trin-
kets.55 All tradition, in fact, had the potential to be dead weight. Fanon
was ruthless, condemning Western traditional aesthetics and modern
nonrepresentational modes alike as models for the colonized artist,
and also decrying the postindependence turn of African nations to a
point by point representation of national reality which is flat, untrou-
bled, motionless, reminiscent of death rather than life.56
Introductory Essays
Many artists, in advanced as well as underdeveloped na-
tions, sought to create an active relation between tradition and the
modernto find a dynamism that kept both living. They also sought
has been called vitalism (although that name ties it too firmly to Henri
material fueled the postwar stress on touch and performance; in
Japan, for example, it was centralmore so than the influence of
European or American gestural paintingto the Gutai artists and
critics, who viewed matter through the lenses of nature, artistic ex-
periment, and socialism.57 The widespread interest in chance and in
the rule of natural physical laws downplayed human subjectivity (even
among American painters, much criticized in later years for their sup-
posed egotism).
This desire for active involvement with the world also colored the
seeming opposite of materialist, gestural art: realist, socialist paint-
ing; in Guttusos words, This is the condition of the engag artist.
There is no other way for him to feel, to study, to imagine, to be af-
fected than by seeing/finding himself permanently merged with life
and engaged in the task of grasping the movement/vitality [before
him].58 Gazbia Sirry wrote of her political and fantastic paintings, I
have had my own myths since my childhood. I feel I am fused into var-
ious elements of nature and life such as human beings, the desert, the
sea, plants, and even manmade constructions. I strive to express the
essence of humanity (fig. 7).59 By treating human subjects as objects
among other objects, such work cast humans as belonging to the nat-
ural world, rather than as knowing subjects observing and controlling
from outside it.
Sirrys statement and work speak of an empathy with the mate-
rial world, one that both dialed down her own subjecthood and rec-
ognized the value and perspective of things we normally think of as
objects. As the artist Sadamasa Motonaga said, There is limitless
emotion in nature. [It is] in every object, every person, every creature,
even in a blade of grass, but most people have difficulty seeing it.60
Everywhere, artists and writersWols in France, Theodoros Stamos
in the United States, Lopold Sdar Senghor in Senegalpointed to
their connection to things like rocks or pebbles, mute, opaque, and
ordinary (fig. 8). This active empathy could reflect an antimodernist
return to nature, but did not by any means exclusively; as Sirry said,
the connection could apply to manmade things as well. When Robert
Rauschenberg told an interviewer, I dont like to take advantage of an
object that cant defend itself, he was speaking of the man-made and
often industrially produced objects in his Combinesa car door, a
stuffed goat, a photograph, a commercial label. 61
This attitude of radical respect for things, a nonhierarchical at-
titude that could lend subjecthood to objects, verged on animism.
Most common in materialist painting and sculpture, it appeared,
surprisingly, in self-consciously transgressive art: David Medalla
went so far as to call himself a hylozoista believer in the unity of
life and matterand the soapy forms of his Cloud Canyons visibly
grow, bubbling over their frames and out into space. 62 Hans Haackes
Katy Siegel
early sculptures, while using a Minimalist/formalist vocabulary as
containers, were also organic in the constantly changing condensa-
tion or growing grass contained within their Plexiglas cubes. What
Bergson and specific philosophical traditions) could coexist with even
the most apparently rationalist practice of the postwar period. Mad
and Neoconcrete artists rendered geometry itself mobile and living,
in paintings, books, and sculptures intended to be handled and acti-
vated by the spectator, who is in turn herself touched by them (fig. 9). 63
With their Bichos and Blides respectively, Lygia Clark and Hlio Oit-
icica sought to enact a kind of healing, both psychological and social,
by returning the participant to a holistic experience of body and soul.
The aim of overcoming the subject/object divide becomes explicit:
the subject must not just look at but work with the object to change it,
and thus change her own experience.
L
ooking globally at postwar art thus helps us to go beyond ad-
ding names and works to canonical lists (although that is cer-
tainly important) to rethinking the category of art itself and
reconsidering the criteria for understanding and evaluating it.
Modernist art theory, its vision centered on the West, made abstrac-
tion the goal toward which the history of art seemed to move. Atten-
ding to the multiplicity of postwar art asks us to put aside the idea of a
will to abstraction in favor of a more complex understanding of artists
practices, one that no longer separates their relation to their materials,
emphasized by theory under the name of form, from their relation to
physical, social, and political realities. A blanket category like repre-
sentation, for instance, fixes an image and obscures the interactive
aspects of the artists relation to the physical world, whether scientific,
natural, or animistic.
Again and again, the artists included in Postwar insist on the in-
separability of supposedly purely formal qualities of their work from
the subject matters with which they are concerned. It was possi-
ble to experiment with painting, and abstraction, without isolating
the means as a value above all others. While waiting for a critique in
a Washington, D.C., newspaperanticipating Western judgments
of quality and fetishization of formEnwonwu remarked that his
painting technique may be disappointing to very good painters but
technique in painting is not the criterion for knowing what is good,
bad or indifferent in art.64 The alternative was not to hew to either
representational content or the informe but to undo the dominance and
isolation of formalism, to revalue the political, the spiritual, the per-
sonal, the traditional, the popular, and the everyday, as dynamically
manifested in material form.
Anticolonial writings, particularly by African and Caribbean
authors, theorized this relation between art and world in varying
registers. For Senghor, the dynamism was both aesthetic/epistemo-
logical and social, demanding a way of knowing that would acknowl-
edge the division between subject and object and work to overcome
53
it. The divide could be bridged with empathy, revealing the political
potential in a commonplace artistic act. 65 Senghors criticism of the
conventional Western individual subjectthe European first distin-
guishes the object from himself. He destroys it by devouring it
resonates strikingly with that of Adorno: the subject swallows the
object, forgetting how much it is an object itself.66 The hypersubject
creates its counterpart, the pure object. This separation into extreme
positions was something Csaire recognized in colonialism, calling it
chosification, a kind of Midas touch that turned people into objects. 67
Undoing this separation, whether through theory, art, or politics,
participation and communion.70 Perhaps the most important thing
was not the choice of strategycommunion or confrontationbut
the fact of agency. Similarly, the most important facet of the animism
that imbued certain artists work was not respect for objects, or even a
connection to nature, but the perception that we are none of us either
alone in or central to the universe.
There is a negative aspect to dynamism, of course; despite the
picture of stalemate and stasis implied by the idea of the Cold War,
the social reality of the postwar period was one of constant inter-
vention and change, as new political forces replaced the old empires.
We have seen these warningsof the worldwide reach of atomic
warfare, ideological broadcasting, and ecological disasterall come
true, even as the promise of nonalignment celebrated at Bandung has
faded. But in trying to understand the art of a period that looked to the
future at least as much as it reflected an experience of decline and af-
termath, it is important to maintain its sense of possibility, to see the
promise inherent in active engagementin conflict as well as affinity.
To look beyond the Cold War to the most pressing issues of the day:
Kwame Nkrumah told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York
City in 1958, This attitude of nonalignment does not imply indiffe-
rence to the great issues of our day. It does not imply isolationism. It is
in no way anti-Western; nor is it anti-Eastern. The greatest issue of our
day is surely to see that there is a tomorrow.72 For postwar artists too, the
refusal to line upwith orthodoxies of abstraction or representation,
with purely objective or subjective views of the worldcould mean
an attempt to see and shape a history no longer dominated by the
ideological or material structures of the past.

Fig. 8. Lygia Pape. Book of Creation Walking (detail), 1959. Gouache on cardboard, 18 parts,
30300.2 cm (each).

held the potential for the object to become a subject again, to be un-
frozen. Taking this sense of agency and mobility still further, Fanon, an
adamant advocate of national liberation, did not equate national iden-
tity with nationalism, seeing it not as an end in itselfa formal, fixed
thingbut as liberating the living consciousness of a people. 68 Despite
their differences, these thinkers all spoke against the split of subject
and object and its attendant immobility. If claims for intuitive and
embodied knowing have been criticized as clichd, even as themselves
the product of colonial binaries (and founded on opposition to West-
ern rationalism), today, when the West seems moribund rather than
rational, they appear prescient, desirable, radical. 69
Senghors endorsement of empathy was just one strategy for the
subjects engagement with its other; further possibilities included
confrontation, related to the preservation of incommensurability
and conflict so strongly advocated by Fanon (and Adorno), and also
If Csaires 1945 essay on Lam bemoaned the distance that money
and machines had put between people, by 1965 a lack of distance was
equally disturbing. Even the defenses once afforded by the Pacific
and Atlantic oceans were disappearing. As Sukarno said, opening the
Bandung Conference in 1955,
[Man] has learned to consume distance. He has learned to project
his voice and his picture across oceans and continents. He has
learned how to release the immense forces locked in the smallest
particles of matter. And do not think that the oceans and the seas
will protect us. The food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes,
even the very air that we breathe can be contaminated by poisons
originating from thousands of miles away.71

54 Introductory Essays Katy Siegel 55

I thank my assistant Megan Hines for her extensive and expert research for this essay, and
Hosam Aboul-Ela for his thoughts on broad theoretical readings.
1 Mohamed Khadda, lements pour un art nouveau, Rvolution Africaine no. 74 (June 27,
1964): 22. To be repr. and trans. in Modern Art of the Modern World: Primary Documents, eds.
Anneka Lenssen, Sarah A. Rogers, and Nada Shabout (forthcoming from The Museum of
Modern Art, New York). Thanks to Lenssen for so generously sharing this material and her
own insights with me throughout the research for Postwar.
2 Hassan Jabareen directly compares the Middle East and the Europe of 1945 as Tony Judt
describes it in Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
See Jabareen, Palestinians and Hobbesian Citizenship: How the Palestinians Became a Mi-
nority in Israel, in Will Kymlicka, ed., Multiculturalism and Minority Rights in the Arab World
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 198.
3 Many admirable and important exhibitions nonetheless attend solely to Europe as the
locus of the postwar, sometimes including Russia or the United States as foils. See, e.g., Face
lhistoire (19331996), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1997, and Be-Bomb: The Transat-
lantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 19461956, MACBA, Barcelona, 2007).
4 In English, see the broadly read John Gaddis, Now We Know: Rethinking Cold War History
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine
Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlins Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
5 Postwar is shaped by the work of scholars too numerous to reference here. I single out the
meta-historical writing of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Matthew Connelly, Paul Gilroy, Ranajit Guha,
Heonik Kwon, Lydia Liu, Mark Mazower, Walter Mignolo, Vijay Prashad, Tuong Vu, and Odd
Arne Westad.
6 The term Third World was coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, in Trois mondes, une planet, Wifredo Lam.
LObservateur no. 118 (August 14, 1952): 5.
7 Even among those nations that did enter World War II as combatants, it was common to
characterize the conflict primarily as a territorial/local war; see David Reynolds, The Origins
of the Two World Wars: Historical Discourse and International Politics, Journal of Contem-
porary History 38, no. 1 (January 2003): 2944. For an argument positing the imbrication of
the Cold War and the Third World see Westads many publications, including The Global Cold
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the argument that Asia has not
only a different history but demands a different historical model see Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia
as Method (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). For the claim that the vast epic of
Asia after 1945 is ultimately the most significant of the postwar era see Joyce and Gabriel
Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 19451954 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 246.
8 See Connelly, Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the
Algerian War for Independence, American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (June 2000): 739
69, and Prashad, The Darker Nations: A Peoples History of the Third World(New York: New
Press, 2007).
9 For the former see Connelly, Taking Off the Cold War Lens; for the latter see Vu, Cold War
Studies and the Cultural Cold War in Asia, in Vu and Wasana Wongsurat, eds., Dynamics of the
Cold War in Asia: Ideology, Identity, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 116.
10 See Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
11 Recent initiatives by Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou are exceptions, with exhibitions
on artists such as Saloua Raouda Choucair (Tate Modern, 2013) and Wifredo Lam (Centre
Georges Pompidou, 2015). The museological history of Latin American art is quite different,
with both The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, undertaking major
scholarly and monographic intiatives. Contemporary artists are also treated differently, with
artists such as Walid Raad often featured in major monographic exhibitions.
12 For particularly rounded discussions among the many possible examples, see Salah M.
Hassan, African Modernism: Beyond Alternative Modernities Discourse, South Atlantic
Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 45174, and the rest of this special issue on African
Modernism, and Partha Mitter, Interventions. Decentering Modernism: Art History and
Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery, Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008): 53174.
13 The most consistent writing here is Terry Smiths, as in What Is Contemporary Art? (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). One can see this supposed shift as a historical
event or, thinking of the modern in its usual definition as a local (or, per Chakrabarty, pro-
vincial) European phenomenon, as a geographic one; this is explicitly true in the case of
the United States and Japan, both of which posited the modern as European in the 1940s.
For the historical approach see Katy Siegel, Since 45: America and the Making of Con-
temporary Art (London: Reaktion, 2011), and Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013); for the geographic see Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in
the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 2016).
14 David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism
56 Introductory Essays
(London: Phaidon, 2003); Hans Belting, The End of Art History? (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987).
15 Even if we think of modernity as always having been a world system, as Mignolo and
Immanuel Wallerstein claim, in the late twentieth century relations became directly, furiously
reciprocal, operating in all directions and all over the world. See Wallerstein, The Modern
World-System (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), and Mignolo, Local Histories/
Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000).
16 To name only a few, Hassan, Iftikhar Dadi, Nancy Jachec, Saloni Mathur, Ming Tiampo, and
Bojana Piskur.
17 These are, respectively, the powerful and perspective-shifting insights of Connelly,
Chakrabarty, and Guha. See Connelly, Taking Off the Cold War Lens; Chakrabarty, Provin-
cializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2000); and Guha, History at the Limit of World-History.
18 On Kawara, in Hamada Chimei, Kawara, Yamanaka Haruo, Ikeda Tatsuo, Kiuchi Misaki,
Yoshinaka Taizo, and Haryu Ichiro (roundtable moderator), Atarashii ningen zo ni mukatte, the colonized and colored masses discussed in Connelly, Taking Off the Cold War Lens,
Bijutsu hihyo, July 1955, p. 47. Thanks to Tomii for translating this discussion and helping me
to engage its nuances.
19 See, e.g., the 1945 exhibition A Problem for Critics, organized by Howard Putzel in his
small New York City gallery, Gallery 67; reviewed, with a reprint of the press release, in
Edward Allen Jewell, Toward Abstract or Away, New York Times, July 1, 1945, sec. 2, p. 2.
Many of these early shows and critical roundups were not exclusively American, including
Europeans such as Andr Masson and Mexican or Cuban artists such as Rufino Tamayo and
history are the subject of my book Since 45, which deals not with the exceptionalism of
20 On U.S. arts multiple postwar styles see Mary Caroline Simpson, American Artists Paint
the City: Katharine Kuh, the 1956 Biennale, and New Yorks Place in the Cold War Art World,
American Studies 48, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 3157.
21 The first textbook called Art since 1945 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1958) had one chap-
ter on the United States and twelve on European nations; the 1959 Documenta II, subtitled
Kunst nach 1945, included only a few American artists and placed them at the exhibitions end.
22 Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale: 18951968 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York
Graphic Society, 1968), p. 144. Contemporary and subsequent accounts from both sides
have emphasized the combative institutional and discursive aspects of the situation rather
than the art and politics of the artists. See, e.g., Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American
Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983).
23 See Catherine Dossin, To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art, Artl@s
Bulletin 3, no. 1 (2014): 80103. It is interesting that recent global survey exhibitions have
focused on Pop art as an international phenomenon vigorously contesting the dominance of
American culture. See The World Goes Pop! at Tate Modern, London, and International Pop at
the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, both in 2015.
24 Georg Baselitz, in Outcomes, Prospects, Bounces: Georg Baselitz talks to Rainer Michael
Mason, in Rainer Michael Mason, Georg Baselitz, exh. cat. (Lugano: Museo darte moderna,
2007), p. 159. The East German/West German conflict is an exception and has been thor-
oughly studied, recently, for example, in Eckhart Gillen, Feindliche Bruder? Der Kalte Frief und
die deutsche Kund, 19451990 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2009), and Stephanie Barron and Sabine
Eckmann, eds., Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Cultures (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009).
25 For less doctrinaire accounts of the American promotion of art as politics see Jachec,
Transatlantic Cultural Politics in the Late 1950s: The Leaders and Specialists Grant
Program, Art History 26, no. 4 (September 2003): 53355, and Dossin, The Rise and Fall
of American Art, 1940s1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (London: Ashgate,
2015). On the mechanics of the Soviet blockade on artistic interaction with the West see
Antoine Baudin, Why Is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?: Zhdanov Art and Its Interna- Deformation of the Body, Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 34796. I thank
tional Relations and Fallout, 194753, in Thomas Lahausen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds.,
Socialist Realism without Shores (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 22756.
Discussion of this subject has a long, contested, and often misleading history. Hilton Kram-
er, who was to become a notably conservative critic, was one of the first to remark on the
use of American artists by the government, which he pointed out was done without their
agreement: Kramer, The Coming Political Breakthrough, Arts 34, no. 4 (1960): 12. Later
accounts often elided the politics of the artists with those of officials, as in Eva Cockcroft,
Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War, Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974):
3941. For some of the documents surrounding this circulationincluding the 1956
exhibition Modern Art in the U.S.A., the first show sent not only to Western but to Eastern
Europe (notably Belgrade)see Porter McCray, American Tutti Frutti, The Sweet Sixties:
Specters and Spirits of A Parallel Avant-Garde (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 12135.
26 As others have noted with respect to East and West Europe. See for example Siegfried
Gohr, "Art in the Post-War Period", in Christos M. Joachimides et al., eds., German Art in
the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 19031983, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy
of Arts (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1985), p. 466; and Giles Scott-Smith and Joes Segal,
Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West, in Peter Romjin, Scott-
Smith, and Segal, eds., Divided Dreamworlds: The Cultural Cold War in East and West
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp. 19.
27 Elaine de Kooning, Pure Paints a Picture, ARTnews 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 57, 8687.
28 Willem de Kooning, What Abstract Art Means to Me, The Bulletin of The Museum of
Modern Art 18, no. 3 (Spring 1951): 7.
29 See, e.g., Susan E. Reid and David Crowleys anthologies Socialism without Shores and
Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (both Oxford:
Berg, 2000). On Maos Hundred Flowers campaign see Lu Peng, A History of Art in 20th-Cen-
tury China, 2006 (rev. ed. Milan: Charta, 2010), pp. 46569.
30 The older, Orientalist divide between East and West somewhat parallels the fear of
54 Mancoba, in Obrist, An Interview with Ernest Mancoba, p. 382; Newman, The New
and Prashad, The Darker Nations. The Indonesian President Sukarno called it the conflict
between black and white, East and West, colonizer and colonized. Quoted in Westad, The
Global Cold War, p. 83.
31 Shiva Balaghi, Iranian Visual Arts in The Century of Machinery Speed, and the Atom: Re-
thinking Modernity, in Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert, Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 24.
32 This intersection of the history and form of European modernism with American social
of Michigan, 2005, and Erber, Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil
the United States but rather with its specificity and, equally and conversely, to borrow from
Chakrabarty, with the provincialism of Europe.
33 Iba NDiaye, quoted in Elizabeth Harney, Densities of Modernity, South Atlantic Quarterly
109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 495. Similar conflicting pressures existed for African American
artists, including Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, and Jack Whitten, and also for women
artists around the world.
34 Aim Csaire, Culture and Colonization, 1956, repr. in Social Text 28, no. 2 (Summer
2010): 14041.
35 Len Ferrari, La respuesta de la artista, Propositos, October 7, 1965, n.p. Thanks to
Megan Hines for her translation of this text.
36 See Anneka Lenssen, The Shape of the Support: Painting and Politics in Syrias Twenti-
eth Century, PhD diss., MIT, 2014, pp. 28990.
37 See Shabout, The Arabic Letter in Art, in Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab
Aesthetics (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), pp. 61144.
38 Sylvia Naef, Reexploring Islamic Art: Modern and Contemporary Creation in the Arab World
and Its Relation to the Artistic Past, RES: Anthroplogy and Aesthetics no. 43 (Spring 2003): 167.
39 See, e.g., Takiguchi Shuzo, Calligraphy East and West, 1957, repr. in Doryun Chong,
Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kaiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds., From Postwar to Postmodern: Art
in Japan 19451989 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 7477.
40 There is a large and growing body of writing, addressing both art and literature, around
these experiments with the Arabic alphabet and calligraphy. See Naef, Reexploring Islamic
Art; Shabout, The Arabic Letter in Art; Dadi, Ibrahim El Salahi and Calligraphic Modernism
in a Comparative Perspective, South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 55576;
Hassan in the present volume; and Robyn Creswell, Tradition and Translation: Poetic Modern-
ism in Beirut, PhD diss., New York University, 2012. Thanks to Lenssen for discussing this with
me. On concrete poetry in Brazil and Japan see Pedro Erbers essay in the present volume.
41 Taro Okamoto, Avant-Garde Manifesto: A View of Art, 1949, in Chong, Hayashi, Kaiya, and
Sumitomo, eds., From Postwar to Postmodern, p. 38. On Okamotos early paintings see Bert
Winther-Tamaki, Oil Painting in Postsurrender Japan: Reconstructing Subjectivity through
p. 499. Both Senghor and Adorno summarized their long-running concern with the topic in
Rika Hiro for discussing her research with me; see her forthcoming Walking out of Ground
Zero: Art and the Aftereffects of the Atomic Bombs in Postwar Japan, PhD diss., University
of Southern California.
42 Theodor Adorno, 1950, quoted in John Paul Stonard, Fault Lines: Art in Germany, 1945
1955 (London: Ridinghouse, 2007), p. 258. On the Darmstadt conference see Hans Ger-
hard Evers, ed., Darmstdter Gesprch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (Darmstadt: Neue
Darmstdter Verlagsanstalt, 1950).
43 See Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 19621993
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), p. 37.
44 Ernest Mancoba, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, An Interview with Ernest Mancoba, Third
Text 24, no. 3 (2010): 381.
45 See Sarah Wilsons essay in the present volume.
Katy Siegel
46 See the poet Adoniss 1953 essay The Meaning of Painting, as discussed in Lenssen,
The Shape of the Support, pp. 20811.
47 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), p. 236.
48 I am indebted to Reiko Tomii for translating the roundtable and discussing its nuances
with me.
49 Csaire, Wifredo Lam, Cahiers dart 2021 (194546): 357. Authors translation from
the French.
50 On Mathias Goeritz see Jennifer Josten, Mathias Goeritz and International Modernism in
Mexico, 19491962, PhD diss., Yale University, 2012, p. 33.
51 Thanks to Neil Huang for drawing this to my attention.
52 Joan Kee, Use on Vacation: The Non-Sculptures of Lee Seung-taek, Archives of Asian
Art 63, no. 1 (2013): 10329.
53 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, The Art Society and the Making of Postcolonial Modernism in
Nigeria, South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 50527. See also Okeke-Agu-
lus essay in the present volume.
Sense of Fate, 1948, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews , ed. John ONeill
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), pp. 16470. Here Newman constitutes the West as Europe,
situating the United States instead within the Americas and its histories.
55 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 11.
56 Ibid., p. 161.
57 See Natsu Oyobe, Human Subjectivity and Confrontation with Materials in Japanese Art:
Yoshihara Jiro and Early Years of the Gutai Art Association, 19471958, PhD diss., University
and Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 62.
58 Renato Guttuso, Del realismo del presente e altro, Paragone 85 (1957): 5374, Eng. trans.
as On Realism, the Present, and Other Things, trans. Nan Hill and Marco Lobascio, in Kristine
Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Art-
ists Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 179.
59 Gazbia Sirry, quoted in Mursi Saad El-Din, ed., Gazbia Sirry: Lust for Color (Cairo: Ameri-
can University in Cairo Press, 1998), p. xv.
60 Sadamasa Motonaga, The Unknown, 1955, quoted in Joan Kee, Early Gutai Painting,
19541957, Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2003): 126.
61 Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in G. R. Swenson, Rauschenberg Paints a Picture, Art
News 62, no. 2 (April 1963): 46.
62 See Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on
the Sculpture of This Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), p. 345.
63 See Mari Carmen Ramrez, Vital Structures: The Constructive Nexus in South America,
in Ramrez and Hctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, and Houston: MFA Houston, 2004), pp. 191201.
64 Ben Enwonwu, quoted in Sylvester Okwunodo Ogebechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of
an African Modernist (Rochester, N.Y.: Rochester University Press, 2008), p. 107.
65 On Lopold Sdar Senghors philosophical interests, particularly with regard to Ger-
man ethnographic traditions, see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers
Landscape (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 3338, and Gabriele Genge,
Survival of Images?, in Genge and Angela Stercken, eds., Art History and Fetishism Abroad:
Global Shiftings in Media and Methods (Bielefeld: [transcript] Verlag, 2014 ), pp. 4345.
66 Senghor, On African Homelands and Nation-States, Negritude, Assimilation, and African
Socialism, 1996, summarizing a lifetimes view. Quoted in Frederick Ochieng-Odhiambo,
Negritude: The Basic Principles and Appraisal, in Isabelle Constant and Kahiudi C. Ma-
bana, eds., Negritude: Legacy and Present Relevance (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2009), p. 71; Adorno, Subject and Object, 1969, in Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1985),
these essays.
67 Csaire, Discours sur le colonialisme, 1950 (Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1955), p. 22.
68 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 144. Fanon saw nationhood as a necessary step on
the route to developing a still more radical liberation.
69 For the critique of Senghor within African intellectual circles of the late 1960s and 70s
see Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Philosophy of Negritude: Race, Self,
and Society, Theory and Society 36, no. 3 (June 2007): 27476.
70 Senghor, Libert I. Ngritude et humanisme (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 9.
71 Sukarnos welcoming speech at Bandung, 1955, repr. in Jussi M. Hanhimki and Westad,
eds., The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2003), p. 351.
72 Kwame Nkrumah, quoted in ibid., p. 355.
57
 T
he end of World War II and the collapse of the
Third Reich left most of Germanys large cities in
ruins. Given the numbing magnitude of the des-
truction, reconstruction within a foreseeable fu-
ture seemed inconceivable. The Allies had flown
more than seventy air attacks on Munich between
1940 and 1945, reducing large sections of the city
to rubble. The neighborhoods worst affected were
the old districts of the city center. Altogether more than half of the buil-
dings, including over 80,000 residential flats, had been damaged or des-
troyed. Before the war Munich had had a population of approximately
830,000, making it the fourth-largest city of the Reich. By the end of the
war that number had decreased to an estimated 550,000.
Life in the urban stone desert made extreme demands on peoples
will to survive, in comparison to
which the restoration of cultural
life was secondary. Given the citys
living conditions and more or less
nonexistent infrastructure, the
fact that cultural institutions of all
kinds resumed work right after the
wars end seems quite remarkable.
POSTWAR: DENAZIFICATION One of the few major buildings to
have survived the bombing intact
AND REEDUCATION was Haus der Kunst, the House
of Art, formerly the Haus der
Ulrich Wilmes deutschen Kunst, the House of
German Art. The city had ba-
rely been liberatedby the U.S.
Seventh Army, on April 30, 1945
when the exhibition hall became a
Fig. 1. US soldiers carrying a town sign that reads Mnchen. Hauptstadt der Bewegung
focus of the occupying power. The (Munich. Capital of the [Nazi] Movement), April 30, 1945
initial intention was to demolish
this ideologically contaminated building, which had stood since 1937 as
a stronghold of true German art, a symbol of the prohibition on the
international modern avant-gardes as degenerate.
Haus der Kunst had taken elaborate measures to camouflage its
facilities, and to some extent may have had these to thank for the fact
that it had withstood the war almost unscathed. Yet the concealment
efforts are also a sign of the significance for the Nazis of the building
where eight editions of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great
German Art Exhibition) had taken place by 1944. The raison dtre of the
exhibitions during the Nazi era was purely propagandistic: they served
as the stage for an aesthetic ideology in keeping with the regimes the-
ories of race. Moreover, after the outbreak of the war, the art shown in
Haus der Kunstlandscapes, animal depictions, glorifications of the
family, a corporeal ideal corresponding to Nazi race theoryserved
as a distraction from reality. The fact that the most successful versions
of the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellungthose of July 1942February
Introductory Essays
1943 and of June 1943February 1944received nearly 850,000 and
700,000 visitors respectively (846,674 and 694,680 to be exact) proves
this point.1 Even so, in the end it was presumably pure chance that saved
Haus der Kunst during the many airstrikes on the city. Aerial photogra-
phs from the period show destruction in the immediate vicinity; nearly
the entire row of buildings on the opposite side of Prinzregentenstrasse,
for example, had been gutted (fig. 2). It was only thanks to good luck that
exhibition activities could be resumed at Haus der Kunst quite promptly
after the war.
The building ultimately owed its postwar preservation to a mix-
ture of prudence and self-interest: the American commanders not only
saw a need to maintain it in its original function as an art space but also
realized that its undamaged state made it an ideal setting for events and
activities of their own. In the entirely intact restaurant facilities and a
number of the exhibition and ad-
ministration rooms, they set up
their Officers Club, the Pee One,
the ancestor of the P1 Club that
opened in Haus der Kunst in 1949
and still exists there today.2 And
shortly after the end of the war, the
spacious halls of the eastern and
western wings were already being
used again for exhibitions.
The establishment of Nazi
rule and then the war had produced
a rupture between German cul-
ture and the modern avant-gardes.
Efforts to reconnect with contem-
porary developments had to be car-
ried out from an absolute zero point
on the economic and sociopolitical
scales alike. Against the background
of this completely new beginning and the demands of large-scale recon-
struction, the declared aim and priority of the victorious powers was the
elimination of every last trace of National Socialist ideology, a goal they
pursued through a strategy of denazification, reeducation, and social
restructuring. The requisites for this program were political differ
entiation, cleansing, and the rehabilitation of persecuted groups.3
Five categories of guilt were established: major offenders, offen-
ders (Activists, Militants, and Profiteers, or Incriminated Persons), les-
ser offenders (placed on probation), followers, and exonerated persons
(persons from the above groups who had succeeded in proving their
innocence before civilian tribunals). Although the occupying powers
fundamentally agreed on the general objectives of the denazification
measures, there were no standardized procedures for the practical im-
plementation of these aims in the occupation zones. 4 Cleansing ope-
rations had already been carried out before the liberation by so-called
antifascist committees, mainly members of the labor movement, in the
Ulrich Wilmes 59
spring of 1945, but had not met a positive response from the Allies and
were prohibited in the early summer of that year. It was not until January
1946 that the Allied Control Council (the governing body of the Allied
Occupation Zones) issued a joint directive of the occupying powers,
Fig. 2. Aerial photograph of Haus der Kunst by the
U.S. Air Force, June 6, 1945
followed in October of that year by guidelines for dealing with active Nazis
and their beneficiaries. By this point, however, the trials were already in
full swing, and widely differing procedures were used to carry them out.
Whereas the Americans distinguished themselves with a radical
moral stance, and were intent on cleansing the movement to its
depths, administrators in the British and French zones took a largely
pragmatic approach focused on removing National Socialist elites from
politics and government. It took the directive of the Control Council of
October 1946 to define a common orientation, at least formally. Dena-
zification was implemented most rigorously and briskly in the Soviet-
occupied zone, where a catalogue of measures was enacted providing
for the removal of former members of the Nazi party (the National
sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German
Workers Party [NSDAP]) from public administration and their debar-
ment from all public functions. This included the withdrawal of all
political rights. The American military governments most important
instrument, meanwhile, was a questionnaire with 131 questions deman-
ding information on the respondents relationship to the Nazi regime
(fig. 3). The cases were heard before civilian tribunals, lay courts with the
authority to pass judgment.5
In all of the occupied zones, the cleansing process faced the prob-
lem that certain experts whose services were crucial to the reconstruc-
tion of a functional infrastructure were also ideologically unacceptable
in the context of denazification. Lack of transparency made the proce-
dures seem despotic, and public criticism of them emerged early on.
Even the liberal center-left Sddeutsche Zeitung, in its issue of April 24,
1946, amended its basic approval of the process because activists, who
had actually incurred guilt, were being neglected at the expense of the
60 Introductory Essays
less severely incriminated followers. This opinion was reinforced by
the allowance of so-called Persilscheine, statements submitted by no-
nincriminated citizens confirming a persons innocence in terms of the
incrimination categories. The more this procedure took hold, the more
it was seen as unjust. At the same time, however, it served as a pretext for
the increasing repression of the guilt of the silent majority who had con-
nived in or consented to the regime. The spread of the refusal to confront
and reexamine the everyday reality of the Third Reich was mirrored in
opinion polls conducted by the Americans: whereas in March 1946, 57
percent of the respondents expressed positive attitudes to the denazifi-
cation process, by December the proportion had shrunk to 34 percent.6
Artists and culture workers were naturally subject to the same denazi
fication procedures as the rest of the population. In this context it will
hardly come as a surprise that they pursued the same strategies of
casting a favorable light on their roles in the service of the regime. The
famous cases of Leni Riefenstahl and Arno Breker, which have been
comprehensively discussed in the literature, remain alarming today as
examples of how cunningly people who had benefited from Hitlers regi-
meeven allowing for contrary evidence, still beyond all doubtsought
to clear themselves of the charge of having generated Nazi propaganda.7
Both artists used the same strategy and made the same arguments in
their defense. To Riefenstahl, her film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of
the Will), on the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg on September 510,
1934, was a neutrally descriptive documentary that merely recorded
events: That has nothing to do with politics. The images had to be
able to say what otherwise would be spoken. But that doesnt make it
propaganda. 8 As for her two-part film Olympia: Fest der Vlker/Fest der
Schnheit (1938), Riefenstahl claimed it had been made on behalf of the
International Olympic Committeeeven though Joseph Goebbelss
propaganda ministry had financed the films production company,
Olympia-Film GmbH, in which she herself was a shareholder.
Breker for his part lamented what he termed an ideologically mis-
conceived classification and assessment of his work that had served to
diminish his artistic importance:
Im an inflicted phenomenon, a victim of the times. I was robbed of the
entire impact of my artistic uvre. If someone stands in front of my
figures in fifty years and views them without bias because the politi-
cal points of contact no longer applythe points that are still relevant
today, as your presence showsthen he will see only how I depicted
arms and legs, and in general the human being, and then I will meet
with understanding. 9
Fig. 3. Personnel questionnaire of the Military Government of Germany, 1946
The self-description as victims that both Riefenstahl and Breker would
claim for the rest of their lives included adjustments to their personal
relationships with Hitler. Breker maintained that Hitler and I were not
friends. Nor was I his favorite sculptor, as is always claimed. [Josef]
Thorak ranked foremost. 10 Meanwhile Riefenstahl went so far as to
say, I regret 100 percent having made Hitlers acquaintance. That he
Ulrich Wilmes 61
interfered with my fate. Everything I suffered after the war came about
only because of that. 11
The claim of ignorance of Nazi atrocities became a collective atti-
tude, presenting an obstacle to the critical reassessment of each indivi-
duals own past. Instead, the demand for a so-called Schlussstrichthat
is here, a bottom line, a line at the bottom of the only very recent past
began to spread, and by the time of the campaign for the first Bundestag
elections, in 1949, was being vehemently propagated by the Free De-
mocratic Party (FDP) (fig. 6).
From 1933 onward there had been substantial disruptions to the
managements of the major museums. As was the case with all public
institutions, many directors had been dismissed, to be replaced by suc-
cessors the Nazis considered reliable. Remarkably, despite the increased
government influence on collection and exhibition policies, a number
of influential posts remained in the hands of independent art histori-
answho, however, could not of course prevent the substantial losses to
their institutions holdings brought about by what, following the closure
of the modern-art department of the Nationalgalerie Berlin in October
1936, was in effect a prohibition on modern art in public collections. Un-
der the direction of Adolf Ziegler, a painter who had risen to the position
of president of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Visual Arts),
Munich in 1937 and subsequently traveling throughout Germany,
Ziegler spoke at its opening in the Hofgartenarkadengebude:
market but in areas the Germans had occupied, the Netherlands and
Fig. 5. Leni Riefenstahl (center) and her lawyer Dr. Alfred von Seefeld (right)
at the start of her denazification trial, West Berlin, April 21, 1952
You see around us monstrosities of madness, of impudence, of in-
ability and degeneration. What this show has to offer causes shock
and disgust in all of us. Here I lack the time to present to you, my
national comrades, all of the crimes these fellows have ventured to
commit in German art on behalf, and as pacemakers, of international
Jewry.12
Ziegler carried out his duties with a fervor rooted in the deepest convic-
tionbut that did not protect him from being suspended from his office
by Goebbels after privately expressing already in 1943 anti-administration
views on the cessation of the bombing war . It was Hitlers protection alone
that saved him from lengthy concentration camp custody and allowed him
to keep receiving his salary. After the war, he was categorized as a follo-
wer; thus denazified, he withdrew entirely from public life.
The bloodletting inflicted on the Museum Folkwang, Essen,
through the confiscation of degenerate art was severe, encompassing
more than 1,400 works in all150 paintings and a larger stock of water-
colors and prints. The museums internationally outstanding holdings
of modern art were thus eliminated at a single blow. The operation was
In 1933, Otto H. Frster rose to the position of director of the on the territories of the former occupied zones, cemented Germanys
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, a post he held until 1945. In 1934 political division. From that time on, the boundary between the two
he joined the NSDAP. Under his directorship, some 500 works branded German states was tantamount to a demarcation line between the
as degenerate were confiscated, and about 600 further works were Soviet Union, as one sphere of influence, and the United States of
sold to obtain funds for for new acquisitions, not only on the domestic America, with its allies France and Britain, as the other.
The division of Germany affected the biographies of many artists
the northern part of France. After the war, Frster defended these pro- in West and East Germany alike, if in very different ways. The propa
ceedings as legally and morally sound. On the basis of that argument, gandistic form of art that had been practiced by the National Socialists
he continued to protest his dismissal until 1957, when he once again was rightly branded a reprehensible abuse. One of the main concerns of
received an appointment, now as director general of the museums of artists after the war, then, was to regain the liberties they had lost, and
Cologne, an office he kept for three years. above all the freedom to develop without ideological constraints. At the
In their striving for reeducation, the occupying powers attached same time, art was now instrumentalized yet again to buttress the re-
crucial importance to creating an entirely new and (even if initially spective social systems claims to ideological superiority. Whereas the
subject to their control) independent press. After the American mili- idea of the autonomy of art illustrated the liberal orientation of the cap
tary governments information control division granted the Frankfurter italist West, in the East the focus was on arts political function in the
Rundschau an initial group license for the establishment of a daily construction of a socialist society.
newspaper, on August 1, 1945, Colonel Bernard B. McMahon, who
ran that division in Bavaria, awarded license no. 1 to the Sddeutsche
Zeitung, the first newspaper founded in Munich, Bavaria. The first issue,
published on October 6, 1945, the same day the license was granted,
contained an article by Alfred Dahlmann, Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung
(Modern art as hope). The text is noteworthy in two respects. On the
one hand, it emphasized the key function of modern art in the resto-
ration of a liberal society. On the other, it demanded that art not limit
itself merely to picking up where it had left off in 1933when some
modernist art had had a pessimistic undertone, a prophetic sense of
the coming disasterbut should express a positivism of the calamity
overcome, a positivism that bestows the mercy of the chance to make a
common fresh start. In lofty language, Dahlmann called attention to
the responsibility of the arts immediately after the war, but also to the
accompanying opportunity:
Modern art in Germany has thus indeed been given a new beginning. If
we understand it, make practical use of it, and realize itand let us call
this to mind very fundamentally again and againit will grant or deny
us the opportunity to join in shaping the cultural future of the world
as creatively mature members of a family of nations in the process of
reuniting. German contemporary art faces its hour of destiny.14
Fig. 6. Schlustrich drunter! (Bottom line!), election poster of the Free Democratic Party
(FDP) for the first Bundestag elections on August 14, 1949

Fig. 4. Leni Riefenstahl looks on in horror as Wehrmacht soldiers massacre the Jewish
population of Konskie, Poland, in the presence of Sonderfilmtrupp Riefenstahl
(Special Film Troop Riefenstahl), September 12, 1939
over 20,000 artworks by about 1,400 artists were confiscated as part
of a drive to purge museums of works classified as degenerate. As the
director of Entartete Kunst, the Degenerate Art exhibition held in
managed by Klaus Graf von Baudissin, appointed as the museums
director by the Nat ional Socialists in 1934, after the resignation of Ernst
Gosebruch. The Museumsverein (museum society), which oversaw
the museums operations along with the city of Essen, had resolutely
resisted this decision, leading to Baudissins suspension in 1938 by Mayor
Just Dillgardt. Heinz Khn took his place and, during the war and
postwar years, succeeded in controlling the museums fate in such a way
as to prevent even greater damage from being done. His career can be
considered exemplary of the continuity in personnel that determined
cultural life in the newly founded Federal Republic. 13
After the war, the controversies over the direction art might take
were increasingly eclipsed by the political confrontation between the
power blocs. The international coalition against the Nazi regime had
already begun to disintegrate before the end of World War II. The doc-
trine proclaimed by Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947, and the failure
of the foreign ministers conference of December of that year in London,
where the break between the two United States and the Soviet Union
became clearly evident, significantly aggravated the tension. The foun-
ding of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on May 23, 1949, and of
the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on October 7 of the same year,
Under the influence of the United States, the development of
European art of the postwar period was distinguished by a radicali-
zed conception of the artwork. American artists in turn took their cue
from a victors mentality that strove for complete dissociation from the
European tradition of art history. At the same time, Central Europe-
an art strove to pick up the thread of modernism where it had broken
during the Nazi era.
In 1958, an exhibition entitled The New American Painting had a
four-week run at the Hochschule der Bildenden Knste (the present-day

62 Introductory Essays Ulrich Wilmes 63

Universitt der Knste) in Berlin. Organized by The Museum of
Modern Art in New York, this propagandistic survey of the emerging
dominant artistic movement, which also traveled to several other
European cities, showed eighty-one works by seventeen painters,
including all of the chief Abstract Expressionists. The driving force
behind the project was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in
turn was financed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA,
through foundations closely affiliated with that organization.15
For young German artists who had grown up under the Nazi
regime, the exhibition was both a shock and a revelation. It confronted
the young Georg Baselitz, for example, with the abrupt experience of
an attitude wholly unfamiliar to him and based on a seemingly
unbounded conception of freedom:
never really able to free himself of it. On the contrary, he consistently
professed to it as a formative influence:
I lived through seven years of war. After 1945, the part of Germany
I grew up in was occupied by the Russians; then I was sent to the part
that was occupied by the Americans. It was as though the children
were being punished for the stupidities of the fathers.17
Gerhard Richter had a similar experience a year later when he
visited Documenta II, which acquainted him with the same American
painters. As had been the case with Baselitz, it was above all Jackson
Pollock who made the most powerful impression on Richter:
On June 18, 1945, the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste in Berlin
reopened, and with it the schools first postwar exhibition, with works
by the German Expressionists as well as artists such as Hans Uhlmann,
Rene Sintenis, Oskar Nerlinger, and others. This was followed by the
first exhibition of the Kammer der Kunstschaffenden in Berlin, with
works by artists such as Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Ney Gerhard Mar-
cks, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.19
In Dresden, the Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (First
General German Art Exhibition) took place from August 25 to October 31,
1946. Such prominent figures as the artists Karl Hofer, Hans Grundig,
collection of Expressionist art to the city of Cologne, his native town,
on May 2, 1946. Toward the end of that year the works were exhibited
in the citys Alte Universitt, and subsequently also in Hamburg, Olden-
burg, and Stuttgart. Haubrich had been collecting since the 1920s with
a focus on German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objecti-
vity) work. In that context he had worked with Frster, director of the
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum beginning on April 1, 1933. It was under
Frsters directorship that some 500 works had been eliminated from
the museums holdings in 1937 and about the same number of purcha-
ses made, many of them in occupied territories. Haubrich had acquired

Fig. 7. Adolf Hitler (center) with, to his right, Gerdy Troost, Adolf Ziegler, and Joseph Goebbels
at the opening of the Haus der deutschen Kunst, Munich, May 5, 1937

I found those pictures so overwhelming, so totally unexpected, so The sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed Fig. 8. Installation view of Adolf Ziegler's painting Die vier Elemente (The Four Elements,
1937) at the exhibition Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of
different from the experience of my own world at the time that I felt me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason why Art, 1937-1955, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2012

totally desperate, because I thought Id never stand a chance of doing
well compared to those painters.16
In Berlin, the shows propagandistic function was manifest in the
choice of an art school as the venue for its presentation. It participated
in the confrontation between two social systems, based on contrary
ideologies, that were contending with one another over which could lay
claim to being the legitimate countermodel for overcoming the fascist
past on German soil. The contest was fought in all areas of society: the
economy, science, culture. Baselitz, who had been born in the Germa-
ny of the Nazi regime and had grown up in the socialist workers and
peasants state (the GDR), was so put off by this ideological confronta-
tion between the German past and his own postwar present that he was
I left the GDR. I realized that there was something wrong with my
whole way of thinking.18
Hardly had Germany been liberated, hardly had the hostilities
ceased at the beginning of May 1945 and the country proclaimed its
unconditional surrender on the 8th of that month, than cultural life was
revived in all of the countrys major cities. Museums and art associations
resumed their activities, orchestras performed concerts in what auditori-
ums were intact. The decade 194555 was a period of the recovery and cita-
tion of modernism. It began with the reconstruction of the infrastructure
and the reeducation of the population, a task in which cultural institutions
and programs played a key role. A very few examples will have to suffice
here to illustrate the tremendous will that motivated these efforts.
Max Pechstein, and Herbert Volwahsen, but also the art critic Will
Grohmann, made up the jury and were moreover responsible for the
exhibition concept, which provided for the presentation of 594 works
by 250 artists. The project stood out not only in its magnitude but
more important stillbecause it was a genuinely pan-German exhibi-
tion, intended to give contemporary artists an international orienta-
tion and affiliation. At the same time, it was the only opportunity to
unite two cultural spheres that were already beginning to drift apart:
all subsequent Allgemeine Kunstausstellungen took place after the foun-
ding of the FRG and the GDR.
One of the most remarkable gestures of these years was the en-
dowment made by the lawyer Josef Haubrich, who gave his outstanding
a number of the degenerate works from the museum; after the war, his
endowment returned them to the collection.20
A course was set in cultural politics when Josef Haubrich decided to
donate his collection to the city of Cologne in 1946, after his house
was confiscated by the British. Haubrichs collection became a
symbol of resistance, but also of the so-called Wiedergutmachung
[reparation]. It was to symbolize the credible will to democracy.21
In Munich, the former Haus der Deutschen Kunst had been closed
for only a short phase of the denazification trials. The building resumed
its activities in January 1946, now under the name Haus der Kunst,

64 Introductory Essays Ulrich Wilmes 65

with a presentation of works from the collections of the Bavarian state,
formerly housed in the Alte Pinakothek, which had been destroyed. The
Bavarian state collections would remain in Haus der Kunst until 2001,
when the modern department of the collections that were presented
there since 1946 moved into the Pinakothek der Moderne in Barerstrasse.
In July 1946, Haus der Kunst staged the Internationale Jugend-
buchausstellung (International Childrens and Young Adult Book Exhi-
bition), designed by Jella Lepman. Presenting more than 4,000 books
from fourteen countries, it was the first international event to take place
in postwar Germany. For Lepman, a journalist, Haus der Kunst was
an ideal venue for her projectnot despite its past but precisely because
of it. In the memoirs she wrote nearly twenty years later, she recalled
her thoughts and feelings: I began critically inspecting the exhibition
rooms and strode through the halls as if they already belonged to us.
In my thoughts I swept away the boxes and crates; the international chil-
drens books would move into this heathen temple and their good spirits
would chase away the evil ones.22
The program of Haus der Kunst in the first postwar decade
was largely devoted to rehabilitating modernism in Germany. In
September 1949, the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter. Mnchen und die Kunst
des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Blaue Reiter: Munich and the Art of the Twen-
tieth Century), organized by Ludwig Grote, formed the prelude to a
series of presentations on artists who had been banned from the mu-
seums and condemned as degenerate under the Nazi regime. In a
speech at the opening, the responsible undersecretary of the Bayeri-
schen Staatsministerium fr Unterricht und Kultus (Bavarian State
Ministry of Education and Culture), Dieter Sattler, remarked that
Haus der Kunst had thus been denazified.23 That show was follo-
wed by Maler am Bauhaus (Painters at the Bauhaus) and by monogra-
Fig. 9. Editorial staff of the Sddeutsche Zeitung in their
war-damaged office, 1946
phic exhibitions on Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in
1952, Adolf Hlzel and Oskar Schlemmer in 1953, and Vasily Kandinsky,
Paul Klee, and Edvard Munch in 1954. The series culminated with a
Pablo Picasso retrospective in 1955 (fig. 10), the founding year of the
66
Documenta series of quinquennial exhibitions, whose future as the
most important exhibition institution for contemporary art was not
foreseeable at the time. The Picasso show featured over 250 pain-
tings, drawings, prints, and sculptures, and aroused as much curio-
sity as it did protest. Virtually casting its subject as the embodiment
of the contemporary artist personality, and his work as a synonym for
Fig. 10. Visitors admire Pablo Picassos painting Guernica
(1937) at the exhibition Picasso 19001955, Haus der
Kunst, Munich, 1955
avant-gardist thought, the exhibition was broadcast to the public from
a vantage point removed from political retrospect. Even so, it brought
one of arts most famous and most gripping testimonies to the barba-
rity of warGuernica (1937), which was shown alongside many other
opera magnainto the former sanctuary of National Socialist aesthetic
ideology. There was also a work referring to the continuing topicality
of war, which had by no means disappeared from the face of the earth:
Massacre in Korea of 1951 (plate 117).
In December 1937, Picasso had expressed himself unambiguously
on the stance he associated with Guernica: It is my wish at this time to
remind you that I have always believed, and still believe, that artists who
live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indiffe-
rent to a conflict in which the highest values of humanity are at stake.24
In his discerning positive review of Haus der Kunst exhibition for Die Zeit,
Carl Georg Heise pointed to the works political perspective by empha
sizing the liberty with which Picasso had guided art from its rich past
into the present and beyond, and came to the conclusion that society was
obligated not only to acquaint itself with Picassos art, but to accept it
as a decisive contribution to the shaping of our image of the worldand,
what is more, to the recognition of the self.25 In view of the webs of global,
political, and cultural relationships that have their origins in the decades
after World War II, Heises postulate is as relevant today as ever.
Translated from German by Judith Rosenthal
Introductory Essays
1 See Sabine Brantl, Haus der Kunst, MnchenEin Ort und seine Geschichte im National-
sozialismus (Munich: Allitera Verlag, 2007), p. 86.
2 Since Haus der Kunst was the only major undamaged building in central Munich, in the
early postwar years it was used to house American officers and their social events. The pre-
sence of the Officers Club turned the building into an entertainment hotspot, but its exotic
addressPrinzregentenstrasse 1was difficult for the Americans to pronounce, so they
called the club the Pee One. The birth of an institution! From then on, jazz concerts and
dances were the order of the day. As the rooms used for cultural purposes developed into a
global contemporary-art center, one section of the building was reserved for gastronomical
and entertainment highlights. When the Greek Alecco took over the restaurant, in 1968, he
impressed his guests with a motto that still characterizes the P1 Club today: To be in is a pas-
sing phenomenon; to be the best is an art. See http://p1-club.de (accessed August 5, 2016)
3 According to the Munich city records for 1946: March 5, 1946: in a meeting chaired by
Minister President Dr. Wilhelm Hgner, the minister presidents of the three Lnder of the Ame-
rican zone signed the Law on Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism in the council
chamber of the Munich city hall. On behalf of General [Joseph] McNarney, General [Lucius]
Clay pronounces the consent of the American military government. On May 13, with the con-
sent of the American military government, the first civilian tribunals for the enforcement of the
cleansing law began their work. Quoted in muenchen.de https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/
Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/Stadtarchiv/Chronik/1946.html (accessed July 18, 2016).
4 At the Yalta Conference of February 4 to 11, 1945 the Allied Powers decided to separate
Germany into four occupation zones adminstered by the United States, the Soviet Union,
Great Britain, and France until the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in the west
Ulrich Wilmes
and the German Democratic Republic in the east in 1949. Only the city of Berlin, the former
capital of Nazi Germany, was jointly administered by the Allied powers and divided into four
sectors.
5 The discrepancy between expectation and reality that ensued in the American zone in
the course of denazification was prodigious. Thirteen million persons of the age of eighteen
and over had filled out their questionnaires; the liberation law applied to nearly one-third of the
population. Some 10 percent were ultimately sentenced. And actual punishment or lasting disad-
vantages were suffered by fewer than 1 percent of those designated for denazification. Wolf-
gang Benz, Demokratisierung durch Entnazifizierung und Erziehung. Quoted in Bundeszentrale
fr politische Bildung, Bonn, Informationen zur politischen Bildung, Heft 259: Deutschland
19451949,. Quoted in http://www.bpb.de/izpb/10067/demokratisierung-durch-entnazifi-
zierung-und-erziehung?p=all (accessed August 8, 2016).
6 See Paul Hoser, Entnazifizierung, Reaktionen in der Gesellschaft, available online at
www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Entnazifizierung#Reaktionen_in_der_
Gesellschaft (accessed July 22, 2016).
7 See, e.g., Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (New York: Knopf, 2007);
Jrgen Trimborn, Riefenstahl: Eine deutsche Karriere (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002); and Andr Mller,
Interview mit Arno Breker, 1979, in Mller, Entblungen (Munich: Goldmann, 1979).
8 Leni Riefenstahl, quoted in Spiegel Online, September 9, 2003: http://www.spiegel.
de/kultur/kino/zitate-von-leni-riefenstahl-ich-bedaure-zu-100-prozent-hitler-kennenge-
lernt-zu-haben-a-264954.html (accessed July 21, 2016).
9 Arno Breker, in Mller, Interview mit Arno Breker, 1979. Available online at http://andre-
muller.com-puter.com (accessed July 20, 2016).
10 Ibid.
11 Riefenstahl, quoted in Spiegel Online, September 9, 2003.
12 Adolf Ziegler, quoted in Klaus-Peter Schuster, Nationalsozialismus und Entartete Kunst.
Die Kunststadt Mnchen 1937, 1988 (5th rev. ed. Munich: Prestel, 1998), p. 217.
13 Hans-Jrgen Lechtreck, Ein stetiges, der Stadt Essen wrdiges Ausstellungsleben
Das Museum Folkwang 19451955, in Julia Friedrich and Andreas Prinzing, eds., So fing
man einfach an, ohne viele Worte. Ausstellungswesen und Sammlungspolitik in den ersten
Jahren nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), p. 64.
14 Alfred Dahlmann, Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung, Sddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) no. 1
(October 6, 1945): 4.
15 When the Tate Gallery in London showed interest in the exhibition The New American
Painting in 1958 (it was on view in Paris at the time) but couldnt bear the transport costs,
the American millionaire and art lover Julius Fleischmann stepped up and brought the de
Koonings and Pollocks to London. The money came from the Farfield Foundation, of which
Fleischmann was president. The foundation was nothing other than a secret channel for CIA
funds. Fleischmann was also a member of the board of directors of the International Pro-
gram of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. See Armin Wertz, Kunst als Propaganda
im Kalten Krieg, Journal 21, July 25, 2014, available online at https://www.journal21.ch/
kunst-als-propaganda-im-kalten-krieg (accessed July 22, 2016).
16 Georg Baselitz, quoted in Farah Nayeri, Georg Baselitz: Raw Views of a Painful Past,
New York Times, February 26, 2014, available online at www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/
arts/international/Georg-Baselitz-Raw-Views-of-a-Painful-Pastnt-to-the-end.html?_r=0
(accessed August 9, 2014).
17 Baselitz, A Conversation with Donald Kuspit at the Guggenheim Museum, in David
Craven and Brian Winkenweder, eds., Dialectical Conversions: Donald Kuspits Art Criticism
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), p. 74.
18 Gerhard Richter, in Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, in Richter, Gerhard Richter,
Writings, 19612007 (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 163.
19 See Kunst in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 19451985, exh. cat. (Berlin: Nationalga-
lerie, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1985), p. 454.
20 See Friedrich and Dorothee Grafahrend-Gomert, Josef Haubrich. Ein Sammler und seine
Sammlung, in Friedrich, ed., Meisterwerke der Moderne. Die Sammlung Haubrich im Museum
Ludwig (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2011), pp. 1341.
21 Grafahrend-Gohmert, Die Sammlung Haubrich und der Wiedeaufbau des Wall-
raf-Richartz-Museums ab 1945, in Friedrich and Prinzing, eds., So fing man einfach an, ohne
viele Worte, p. 92 (see note 13).
22 Jella Lepman, quoted in Brantl, Haus der Kunst, Mnchen, p. 115.
23 Ibid.
24 Pablo Picasso, Message to Artists Congress, sent by telephone to the American Artists
Congress, New York, December 1937, in Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A Selection of
Views (New York: Da Capo, 1972), p. 145.
25 Carl Georg Heise, Picasso und kein Ende, in Die Zeit, December 1, 1955, available online
at http://www.zeit.de/1955/48/picasso-und-kein-ende (accessed August 5, 2016).
67
 M
ore than any war before it or since, World the two had been striking during the war, when many ardent anti-Nazis
War II was an exercise in world-making, had seemed happy to defend the need for colonial rule indefinitely into
an expansion of the imagination that ran the future. It was as though for them the war were about establishing the
in parallel with the struggle on the battle- difference between good and bad ways of running empires, not about
field. Dominated by dreams of the future the evil of empire tout court. Putting these two stories together raises the
and human improvement, and by radi- question of Europes changing place in the world after 1945, in an era in
cally divergent views of what that might which the long centuries of European global ascendancy suddenly and,
mean, it was a struggle in which virtually to many people, unpredictably, came to an end.
none of the participants thought or wished that things should go back Postwar, the title of this sweeping exhibition, seems as good a word
to how they had been before the fighting began. How New Will the Bet- as any to encompass this period of rupture and reinvention. But it is a
ter World Be? cautioned the American historian Carl Becker in 1944 word that like all such terms has its own secret history and carries its own
in response, but amidst the war he went unheeded.1 The Germans had
begun with their talk of a Neuordnung or New Order, but their oppo-
nents quickly realized that they had no choice but to follow and offer
alternatives. When H. G. Wells penned his polemic The New World
Order in early 1940, it was to excoriate those members of the British rul-
ing class who thought, just as they had in 1914, that there was nothing
much wrong with how things were, and that once the Germans had been
taught how to behave like gentlemen, everyone could settle down again
and things could go back to being run in the old way.2 That summer, as if
to signal the death of liberal internationalism, Germany, Italy, and Japan
signed a pact that proposed carving the world up into separate spheres

POSTWAR: THE MELANCHOLY of influence. The following year came the Allied response in the form of
the Atlantic Charter and the detailed planning that eventually led to the

HISTORY OF A TERM formation of the United Nations.

Wells was right that old blinkers were not so easily cast aside. The
Mark Mazower war was a global onefar more than its predecessor in 191418and its
effects were felt across continents: a huge civilian death toll in East Asia,
devastating famine in India. It accelerated urbanization and economic
development in Africa and the Middle East and fanned dreams of the
end of colonialism everywhere. Yet in the minds of Europes leaders
and not only Europes but Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin as
well, men educated in the old truths of the nineteenth centurypeace
and security were still primarily issues that revolved around the future
of Europe. When Gilbert Murray, a prominent internationalist, wrote
in 1946 about the shift from the League of Nations to the new United
Fig. 1. John Vachon. Wrocaw 1946 (Marketplace at
Nations, he noted that some great movement for unity and construc- Grunwald Square). 1946. Photography

tive reconciliation in Europe is an absolute necessity for civilization.

Then he added, almost as an afterthought: Of course Europe is not
everything. There are other continents.3
Europe is not everything. That insight was a start but it was one
acquired painfully and often reluctantly and its full implications took
time to emerge. For the end of the war seemed to mark two quite distinct
processes, and while one went deep into Europes heart, the other led
far afield. The first was the effort to reconstruct a decimated continent,
to stabilize the nation-state system that had emerged after 1918, and to
restore democracy to peoples who had abandoned it. The second was to
determine the fate of Europes overseas empires and to bring democracy
and independence to those demanding it there. The disjuncture between
hidden and not-so-hidden implications. For to call these years the post-
war years is not to lay bare something in nature. Time does not present
itself in epochs; it is we who see it that way, and the way we carve periods
out of time, fix their origins and endpoints, and label them is itself a rev-
elation of perspective and its contingencies.
For one thing, no previous war in history had ever been regarded
by those who lived through it as leading in its aftermath to some post-
war era. The term was not unknown before 1939 but it was extremely
rare, and even after 1918 it was not used except by a few economists and
technical experts. Deployed shortly after World War II erupted in 1939,
the term has enjoyed its own fitful history. Once it entered common

Introductory Essays Mark Mazower 69


Fig. 2. A photographer in Warsaw uses his own backdrop
to mask war-damaged buildings, November 1946.
70 Introductory Essays
parlance, very rapidly, in the early 1940s, it was never abandoned, but its
peak usage occurred in two distinct phases: one during the 1940s them-
selves, as a term to describe a wished-for future, and the other after the
end of the Cold War, to take a new look at a now-distant past.
Postwar: it is a crisp term, pragmatic yet imbued with hope.
It posits the audacious possibility of a break with violence, the dawning
of a new era in which war itself is finally banished from human affairs.
Friedrich von Gentz, secretary to Klemens von Metternich, had hoped
that the 1815 Congress of Vienna might win Europe a breathing space of
one or two generations; neither he nor any other respectable statesman
seriously believed that war could be eradicated for ever. That was, in the
nineteenth century, the millennial dream of radical evangelical fanatics,
not sober diplomats, not even the most mystically inclined. Yet this was
the hope in and after World War II, a hope of course given extra urgen-
cy after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over a century the dreams of nine-
teenth-century American and British peace activists had been passed on
to those most practical of dreamers, the mid-twentieth-century planners.
It was American planners who drove the thinking among the Allies
about a new era of global peace and prosperity. They were men like
State Department officials Sumner Welles and Leo Pasvolsky, the one,
in the early years of the war, the most important figure in Washington
driving thinking about international governance; the other a brilliant
foreign-policy expert, a keen student of Soviet communism and a man
aware of the importance of dreams in international politics and of the
pitfalls that lay in wait for them. They wanted to avoid the mistakes of
the past, and in particular the mistakes of their American predecessor
Woodrow Wilson. The British followed reluctantly, fearful that post-
war was a cover term for anti-imperialism or else, more cynically, for
an American takeover of their possessions. But they too understood that
you could not fight a modern war with a conscript army without a clear
sense of what you were fighting for, and that an integral part of that sense
was the capacity to win the peace, or at least to think during the war
about how to prevail once the fighting had stopped.
If the golden age of the postwar was the last two years of the war it-
self, the term remained useful long after 1945 because the world was now
living in an atomic age. The millennial dream of universal peace acquired
new meaning once war had suddenly become more terrifying than ever.
Within days of the bombing of Nagasaki, Bertrand Russell warned that
the prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent.4 Even
before this, seventy scientists working on the Manhattan Project, led by
physicist Leo Szilard, had petitioned President Harry S. Truman to think
carefully before resorting to the military use of the bomb against the
Japanese. Concerned scientists presented world peace as a goal above
politicsbut scientists, like businessmen, tend to imagine a world above
politics as the place they live in. In fact, not only did political tensions get
in the way of the dream of international control of atomic energy, they
broke apart the alliance of the Big Three that had defeated the Nazis and
the Japanese. One way or another, the alliance against Napoleon had
held for generations; the alliance against Germany scarcely outlived
Mark Mazower
Adolf Hitler himself. Or, to be more precise, it heldjustbut frayed
badly in the 1940s to the point of invisibility. The Cold Waranother
new term that betrayed the preposterous ambition, the unfulfilled long-
ing, embodied in the term postwarwas now underway, and the long
shadow of the atom bomb, as this exhibition testifies, overhung it.
Did the Cold War mean that the promise of a postwar time had
been falsified? Certainly there were indications of this, as civil war in
Greece erupted in a series of campaigns that swept the mountains of
the mainland, left hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, and saw
napalm used on the European continent for the first time before the
1940s were out. Yet Greece aside, war did not return to Europe: so much
was gained. And arguably the principal goal of the postwar planning ef-
fort was attained: to keep the general peace in Europe once Nazism was
defeated. From this perspective, postwar embodied the deeply Euro-
centric view of what mattered that we started out highlighting, a view in
which the war that counted was the war within Europe, or over Europes
future. Other wars, in this way of looking at things, could be discounted
as small wars, or better still omitted from the collective memory and
conscience of the world. One could thus overlook, as much of the Euro-
pean and American media did, the stirrings of colonial revolt in Algeria
beginning in May 1945; Damascus, where the war against Hitler mor-
phed seamlessly into the war for Syrian independence against France;
and insurgencies in Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, and Madagascar
in 194547, bitter and bloody conflicts that marked, in retrospect, the
endgame of empire.
The trouble was that postwar was an argument not only about
peace but about stability. What counted internationally, and counted
more and more in the atomic age, were not the rights of colonial peo-
ples, still less the universal march of democracy, but the stabilization of
power around the world to prevent conflict between the Soviet Union
and its enemies spilling out of control. This usually, especially early on,
meant American support for at least some of the tottering European
empiresFrench and British in particulareven if in the 1950s and ear-
ly 60s the United States in particular was often working quietly behind
the scenes trying to get its allies in Europe to liberalize colonial rule. The
odds were stacked against those fighting for liberation from the colo-
nial regimes, and from their perspective the postwar era could only
be regarded as one in which the legitimacy of their struggle was ques-
tioned and opposed. Europe mourned its dead, lamented its past, and
simultaneously celebrated its continued role in civilizing the backward
peoples of the world. So talk about the postwar was obviously a matter
of perspective and for many outside Europe, the wars to think about
were those to come, not those behind them. Other wars remained to be
fought, other peaces to be challenged. One reason surely for the declining
use of the term postwar in the 1960s was the growing awareness every-
where that the age of wars had not ceased, that national liberationoften
attainable only through warwas the cause of the age, and, increasingly,
that beyond the achievement of national self-determination and colonial
independence, a new era of wars lay in wait: of civil wars, such as those in
71
Pakistan and Nigeria, or of Third World powers, like that between China
and India. The omnipresence of war stretched into the future. The post-
war era, in short, was nothing if not an era of new wars.
Which begs the question: why then the revival of interest in the
postwar after 1989? There can be no question about this refocusing: in
the 1990s, the number of books with the word in their title suddenly tre-
bled compared with the previous decade; in the first fifteen years of this
century, the number more than doubled again. books like Tony Judts
Postwar also signaled a specific psychological situation: coping with
the past in all its dimensions, embarking on the work of mourning, the
estimating of material and psychic losses, and above alla theme that
came naturally to our increasingly psychologizing erathe reckoning
with trauma. How did we get over it? Did we? Can we put it behind us?
And now, in 2016, the more Europe descends into infighting and the
more the far right returns from the ashes, the more we are drawn back
to those questions, and the more we talk about we and forget to ask
years, sometimes decades in the future, and may be continuing at the
time of this writing? The challenge of this exhibition is to target that
older Eurocentric conception and to amplify its meaning. The art itself
shows a commonality of visual languages that transcends the specific-
ity of historical experiences and hopes. It also suggests an underlying
commonality of hopes characteristic of that moment in world histo-
rythe emergence of rural populations everywhere into dignity, the
appeal of formalism, the embrace of the technical as an engine of social
transformation. If the threat of the bomb was one force bringing peo-
ple together, these were others. Older, identifiably European languages
of painting were quietly jettisoned: the pastoralrarely encountered in
the works shown hereand above all the neoclassicism that had offered
the principal challenge to modernism across the ideological spectrum
in the 1920s, and that survived after 1945 only momentarily in pockets
of Socialist Realism. Into the vacuum came a diversity of aesthetics that
mediated the violence of the war years and tried to find ways to contain
it. There is an unprecedented sense of the fragility of the human body
in a physical landscape now detonated by bombs or churned by rebuild-
ing. The utopianism that survived into the postwar era, and indeed that
underpinned a new era of ambitious social planning, coexisted with a
deep sense of psychic unease. Postwar as a moment of hope, an era of
achievement; postwar as a sense of promise that was not to be fulfilled
because it could never have been. All of that and more is visible here.

Fig. 3. Floris Jespers. The United States Saved Belgium from Starvation during the War and When
Peace Came They Helped to Rebuild the Country and Its Scientific Institutions. 1939.
Tapestry, 502.9563.9 cm.

Postwar, conceived and written in the aftermath of Europes reunifica-
tion, articulated a new concern, and help us understand the reasons for
it too.5 This time round postwar was primarily not a policy matter but
an academic onethe concern of historians, and of historians of Europe
in particular, and beyond that, of all those seeking to understand the
promise of the future of a newly unified continent by returning to the last
moment before its division. In this context postwar mean everything
that the term Cold War had denied: the autonomy of Europe in
relation to the superpowers, the possibilities for continental and
national revolutionary reconstruction, movement as opposed to stasis.
who we really are. It is all too easy even for historians to forget that the
postwar was also the last phase of the scramble for Africa, and that
the imperial land grab that began in the Maghreb in the mid-nineteenth
century ended in the desperate jockeying over the fate of the Italian
colonies in north and east Africa, the same territoriesLibya, Eritrea,
1 Carl Becker, How New Will the Better World Be? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944).
Somaliawhose plight today reminds us how little was actually settled 2 H. G. Wells, The New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 1940, repr. ed. Minneapolis:
in that postwar moment. Filiquarian Publishing, 2007).
Can art encourage us to reflect on the limits and bounds of our per- 3 Gilbert Murray, Retrospect and Prospect, From the League to the U.N. (London, New
York, and Toronto: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 191, 197.
spective? Can the notion of postwar be expanded to include those only 4 Bertrand Russell, The Bomb and Civilization, Glasgow Forward, August 18, 1945.
peripherally drawn into World War II and those whose real wars lay 5 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

72 Introductory Essays Mark Mazower 73


LEGACIES OF BANDUNG: DECOLONIZATION
AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introductory Essays
T
he urge to decolonize, to be rid of the colonizer in
every possible way, was internal to all anticolonial
criticism after the end of World War I. Postcolo-
nial critics of our times, on the other hand, have
emphasized how the colonial situation produced
forms of hybridity or mimicry that necessarily
escaped the Manichaean logic of the colonial
encounter.1 It is not only this intellectual shift that
separates anticolonial and postcolonial criticism. The two genres have
also been separated by the political geographies and histories of their
origins. After all, the demand for political and intellectual decoloniza-
tion arose mainly in the colonized countries among the intellectuals
of anticolonial movements. Postcolonial writing and criticism, on the
other hand, was born in the West. They were influenced by anticolonial
criticism but their audiences were at the beginning in the West itself, for
these writings have been an essential part of the struggle to make the lib-
eral-capitalist (and, initially, mainly Anglo-American) Western democ-
racies more democratic with respect to their immigrant, minority, and
indigenousthough there have been tensions between thesegroups
and populations. Race has thus figured as a category central to postco-
lonial criticism while its position in anticolonial discourse varies. The
question of race is crucial to the formulations of Frantz Fanon, Aim
Csaire, or C. L. R. James, for example, but it is not as central to how a
Mahatma Gandhi or a Rabindranath Tagore thought about colonial
domination. If historically, then, anticolonialism has been on the wane
since the 1960s and displaced by postcolonial discourse in the closing
decades of the twentieth century, it has been further pointed out by
more recent critics of postcolonialism that even the postcolonial mo-
ment is now behind us, its critical clamor having been drowned in turn
by the mighty tide of globalization.2
This seemingly easy periodization of the twentieth centuryanti-
colonialism giving way to postcolonialism giving way to globalization
is unsettled if we look closely at the discussions about decolonization
that marked the 1950s and 60s of the last century. Ideas regarding decol-
onization were dominated by two concerns. One was development. The
other I will call dialogue. Many anticolonial thinkers thought of colo-
nialism as something of a broken promise. European rule, it was said,
promised modernization but did not deliver on it. As Csaire said in his
Discourse on Colonialism:
It is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding
schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; it is the African
who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is
niggardly on this score; it is the colonized man who wants to move
forward, and the colonizer who holds things back. 3
This was the developmentalist side of decolonization whereby anti-
colonial thinkers came to accept different versions of modernization
theory that in turn made the West into a model for everyone to follow.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
This today may very well seem dated but it has not lost its relevance.
What I will focus on here is a cultural style of politics that the talk about
development fostered. I will call it the pedagogical style of politics. In
the pedagogical mode, the very performance of politics reenacted civi-
lizational or cultural hierarchies: between nations, between classes, or
between the leaders and the masses. Those lower down in the hierarchy
were meant to learn from those higher up. Leaders were like teachers.
But there was also another side to decolonization that has received less
scholarly attention. Anticolonial thinkers often devoted a great deal of
time to the question of whether or how a global conversation of humani-
ty could genuinely acknowledge cultural diversity without arranging them
on a hierarchical scale of civilizationthat is to say, an urge toward
cross-cultural dialogue without the baggage of imperialism. Let me call
it the dialogical side of decolonization. Here, unlike on the pedagogical
side, there was no one model to follow. Different thinkers took different
positions, and it is the richness of their contradictions that speaks di-
rectly to the fundamental concerns of both postcolonial criticism and
globalization theory. That indeed may be where the global movement
toward decolonization left us a heritage useful for the world even today.
In what follows, I track these two aspects of the language of decol-
onization, starting with the historic conference in Bandung, Indonesia,
where some 600 leaders and delegates of twenty-nine newly independ-
ent countries from Asia and Africa met on April 1824, 1955, to exchange
views of the world at a time when the Cold War and a new United Na-
tions regime were already important factors in international relations.4
[]
DATELINE: BANDUNG, APRIL 1955
In 1955, when Richard Wright, the noted African American writer then
resident in Paris, decided to attend the Bandung Conference, many of
his European friends thought that this would be an occasion simply for
criticizing the West. Even Gunnar Myrdal, in writing the foreword to the
book that Wright wrote as a result of his experience at Bandung, ended
up penning an indictment of what happened in Bandung: [Wrights]
interest was focused on the two powerful urges far beyond Left and
Right which he found at work there: Religion and Race. Asia and Af-
rica thus carry the irrationalism of both East and West.5 Both Myrdals
and Wrights Parisian friends appear to have misjudged what decoloni-
zation was all about. It was not a simple project of cultivating a sense of
disengagement with the West. There was no reverse racism at work in
Bandung. If anything, the aspiration for political and economic freedom
that the conference stood for entailed a long and troubled conversation
with an imagined Europe or the West. I was discovering, wrote Wright,
that this Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the West,
their Westernness consisting in their having been made to break with the
75
past in a manner that but few Westerners could possibly do.6 It was in
fact the newsmen from his own country who attended the conference
who, Wright felt, had no philosophy of history with which to under-
stand Bandung. 7
I will shortly come to this question of the philosophy of history
that marked the discourse of decolonization. For now let me simply
note the historical moment when the conference met. The Bandung
Conference was held at a time when currents of deep and widespread
sympathy with the newly independent nationsor with those strug-
gling to be independent (such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, central
Africa, etc.)met those of the Cold War. Treaties unsatisfactory to
the United States had been signed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The French had lost in Dien Bien Phu and the Korean War had ended.
Some of the Asian nations had joined defense pacts with the United
States: Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Some others belonged
to the Socialist bloc. Bandung was attempting to sustain a sense of
Asian-African affinity in the face of such disagreements. This was not
Fig. 1. Indonesian president Sukarno, Indian prime minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, and other delegates at the Bandung
Conference, 1955
easy, as there was pressure from the Western countries to influence
the course of the conversation at Bandung by excluding China, for
example. Jawaharlal Nehrus correspondence with the United Nations
makes it obvious that sometimes he had to stand his ground on the
question of neutrality in the Cold War. A letter he wrote to the Secre-
tary General of the United Nations dated December 18, 1954, on the
subject of Bandung, reads:
We have no desire to create a bad impression about anything in the US
and the UK. But the world is somewhat larger than the US and the UK
and we have to take into account what impressions we create in the
rest of the world. For us to be told, therefore, that the US and the UK
will not like the inclusion of China in the Afro-Asian Conference is not
very helpful. In fact, it is somewhat irritating. There are many things that
the US and the UK have done which we do not like at all.8
[]
76
Apart from the lack of mutual trust and respect, the conference, so
opposed to imperialism, had no operative definition of the term. This
was so mainly because there were deep and irreconcilable differenc-
es among the nations represented. The prime minister of Ceylon (Sri
Lanka), Sir John Kotelawala, caused some tension in the political com-
mittee of the conferenceand shocked Nehruwhen on the afternoon
of Thursday, April 21, 1955, he referred to the Eastern European coun-
tries and asked, Are not these colonies as much as any of the colonial
territories in Africa or Asia? should it not be our duty openly to
declare opposition to Soviet colonialism as much as Western imperi-
alism?9 The compromise prose drafted by the conference in trying to
accommodate the spirit of Sir Johns question clearly reveals the shallow
intellectual unity on which the conference was based. Rather than refer
directly to the form of the colonialism of the Soviet Union, the founding
committee eventually agreed on a statement that called for an end to
colonialism in all its manifestation[s]. 10
[]
PEDAGOGICAL STYLE OF
DEVELOPMENTAL POLITICS
The discourse and politics of decolonization in the nations that met
in Bandung often displayed an uncritical emphasis on modernization.
Sustaining this attitude was a clear and conscious desire to catch up
with the West. As Nehru would often say in the 1950s, What Europe did
in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, we must do in ten or fifteen
years, or as is reflected in the very title of a 1971 biography of the Tan-
zanian leader Julius Nyerere: We Must Run While They Walk.11 The accent
on modernization made the figure of the engineer one of the most eroti-
cized figures of the postcolonial developmentalist imagination. Even the
cursory prose of a stray remark by Wright to a friend in Indonesia catches
this precedence of the engineer over the poet or the prophet in the very
imagination of decolonization. Indonesia has taken power away from
the Dutch, Wright said, but she does not know how to use it. This, he
thought, need not be a Right or Left issue, but he wondered, Where is
the engineer who can build a project out of eighty million human lives,
a project that can nourish them, sustain them, and yet have their volun-
tary loyalty?12
This emphasis on development as catching-up-with-the-West pro-
duced a particular split that marked both the relationship between elite
nations and their subaltern counterparts and that between elites and
subalterns within national boundaries. Just as the emergent nations
demanded political equality with the Euro-American nations while
wanting to catch up with them on the economic front, similarly their
leaders thought of their peasants and workers simultaneously as people
who were already full citizensin that they had the associated rights
Introductory Essays
but also as people who were not quite full citizens in that they needed
to be educated in the habits and manners of citizens. This produced a
Fig. 2. President Gamal Abdel Nasser speaks in Damascus
at ceremonies to mark the second anniversary of the
United Arab Republic, 1960
style of politics on the part of the leaders that could only be called pedagog-
ical. From Nasser and Julius Nyerere to Sukarno and Nehru, decoloniza-
tion produced a crop of leaders who saw themselves, fundamentally, as
teachers to their nations.
[]
DIALOGICAL SIDE OF DECOLONIZATION
It is our contemporary interest in the circulation of humans, objects,
and practices across and beyond the boundaries of the nation state that
makes the other side of decolonizationrepresenting the thoughts of
the colonized on conversation across differencesrelevant to the con-
cerns of both globalization and postcolonial theory. However, what was
said by theorists of decolonization about dialogue across difference
was often contradictory. But precisely because their debate was of
necessity unfinished, it leaves us a rich body of ideas that speaks to the
concept of cosmopolitanism without seeking any overall mastery over
the untamable diversity of human culture.
Long before academics began to talk about global English, Band-
ung brought Wright a premonition of the global future of this language
that was once, as Gauri Viswanathan and others have shown, very much
a part of the colonizing mission. I felt while at Bandung, wrote Wright,
that the English language was about to undergo one of the most se-
vere tests in its long and glorious history. Not only was English becoming
Dipesh Chakrabarty
the common dominant tongue of the globe, but it was evident that soon
there would be more people speaking English than there were people
whose native tongue was English. H. L. Mencken has traced
the origins of many of our American words and phrases that went to
modify English to an extent that we now regard our English tongue in
America as the American language. What will happen when millions
upon millions of new people in the tropics begin to speak English?
Alien pressures and structures of thought and feeling will be brought to
bear upon this mother tongue and we shall be hearing some strange
and twisted expressions. But this is all to the good; a language is
useless unless it can be used for the vital purposes of life, and to use
a language in new situations is, inevitably, to change it.13
Clearly ahead of his time, Wright glimpsed a future that would be
visible much later only to the generations that would come after Salman
Rushdie. Wrights was a vision of anticolonial cosmopolitanism. English
would cease to be the masters language. Learning it would no longer be
a matter of the colonized Caliban talking back to Prospero, the master.
Instead, the vision was that as other languages gradually died into it,
English would become plural from within so that it could become the
new Babel of the world. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe would echo
this vision ten years after Wright articulated it:
Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone
elses? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.
But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the [English]
language and I intend to use it. I felt that the English language will
be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have
to be a new English, still in full communication with its ancestral home
but altered to suit new African surroundings.14
Yet, delivering the Robb lectureslater published as Decolonizing
the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literatureat the University
of Auckland in New Zealand some twenty years after these words were
spoken, Ngugi wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer, adopted a position exact-
ly the opposite of that spelt out by Wright and Achebe. An essay by the
Nigerian writer Gabriel Okara in the Africanist journal Transition illus-
trated for Ngugi the lengths to which we were prepared to go in our mis-
sion of enriching foreign languages by injecting Senghorian black blood
into their rusty joints. Okara had written,
In order to capture the vivid images of African speech, I had to eschew
the habit of expressing my thoughts first in English. It was difficult at
first, but I had to learn. I had to study each jaw expression I used and
to discover the probable situation in which it was used in order to bring
out their nearest meaning in English. I found it a fascinating exercise.
Ngugi disagreed. Why, he asks, should an African writer, or any
writer, become so obsessed with taking from his mother-tongue to enrich
77
other tongues? What seemed to worry us more was this: after all this
literary gymnastics of preying on our languages to add life and vigor to
English and other foreign languages, would the result still be accept-
ed as good English or good French? 15 He for one experienced this as a
neo-colonial situation and went on to describe the book resulting from
his lectures as his farewell to English as a vehicle for any of [his] writing:
From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way. 16
It is not my purpose to use the positions of Wright and Ngugi
to cancel each other out. I think they anticipate two familiar and
Fig. 3. Senegalese president Lopold Sdar Senghor and French
president Charles de Gaulle at the lyse Palace, Paris,
July 1965
legitimate responses to possibilities inherent in global conversation:
globalization as liberation and globalization as subjugation. Glo-
balization is no one homogeneous thing. It could indeed be both.
Lopold Senghor, on the other handof whose love of French Ngugi
was no fanpoints us in directions that remind us that the am-
biguities and the richness of the moment of decolonization were
never exhausted by the antinomies set up here by what we have ex-
cerpted from Wright and Ngugi. Senghors thoughtseven in what
he wrote on the (somewhat unpopular) topic of assimilation to
French culture in 1945have much to say to us about what it might
mean to inflect our global conversation by a genuine appreciation of
human diversity. Clearly, Senghor was not for nativist isolation. He
wrote, for instance, mathematics and the exact sciences by defini-
tion have no frontiers and appeal to a faculty of reason which is found
in all peoples. This, he thought, was true for even history and geogra-
phy, which had attained a universal value. But what about languages
like Greek, Latin and French? He wrote: I know the advantages of
these languages because I was brought up on them but the teach-
ing of the classical languages is not an end in itself. It is a tool for dis-
covering human truths in oneself and for expressing them under their
various aspects. And then followed Senghors argument for diversity
in the humanities:
78 Introductory Essays
It would be good in African secondary schools to make it compulsory
to study a vernacular language along with French. We have heard for
decades about the modern humanities. Why should there not be
African humanities? Every language, which means every civilization,
can provide material for the humanities, because every civilization is
the expression, with its own peculiar emphasis, of certain characteris-
tics of humanity. This then is where the real aim of colonization lies.
A moral and intellectual cross-fertilization, a spiritual graft.17
In other words, there is no cross-fertilization without an engage-
ment with difference. Senghors thoughts received an even sharper
focus when, writing in 1961 on the question of Marxism, he made a
passionate plea against overlooking the always situated human being
man in his concrete affiliations to the pastin favor of the figure of the
abstract human, so favorite of the modernizersor some globalizers
of todayfrom both the Left and the Right. Man is not without a
homeland, wrote Senghor.
He is not a man without color or history or country or civilization. He
is West African man, our neighbor, precisely determined by his time
and his place: the Malian, the Mauritian, the Ivory Coaster; the Wolof,
the Tuareg, the Hausa, the Fon, the Mossi, a man of fish and bone
and blood, who feeds on milk and millet and rice and yam, a man
humiliated for centuries less perhaps in his hunger and nakedness
than in his color and civilization, in his dignity as incarnate man.18
Incarnate manor man as always already incarnatewas how
Senghor imagined the worlds heritage of historical and cultural diver-
sity. It was not a diversity that got in the way of cross-cultural commu-
nication nor was it a diversity that did not matter. For Senghor, one way
that diversity could be harnessed in the cause of development was by
deliberately creating a plural and yet thriving tradition of humanities in
the teaching institutions of the world.
The vision was different from those of Wright or Ngugi. Neither
global English (or French) nor a return to ones native language was
the option Senghor outlined. The way forward was a world of multi-
lingual individuals who would appreciate language both as means of
communication and as repositories of difference. A philologists uto-
pia, perhaps, but how far from the vision of anticolonial modernizers
who, in their single-minded pursuit of science and technology in order
to catch up with the West, ended up leaving to the West itself the task
of preserving the worlds humanities. The humanities have general-
ly suffered in the newly emergent nationsmy generation of Indians
could testify to the cult of engineering and management that went
hand-in-hand with discussions of developmentwhile it at least sur-
vived in some of the elite universities of the West in the form of area
studies. This is not an argument against area studies in the West. For
it may very well be a sad fact today that it is only in the West that mod-
ern, non-Western humanities are pursued with some seriousness.19
But there is a risk here. As the late Edward Said demonstrated it for our
generation, the West has seldom performed this task in a manner that
transcends its own geopolitical interests.
And that is where Senghors call for a plural tradition of the hu-
manities remains a living legacy for all postcolonial intellectuals both
inside and outside the West.
saying You are engineers, not poets. Personal communication from Lee, May 20, 2005.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
A longer version of this essay was published in Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 46
(November 2005): 4812-4818. It was presented initially as a keynote lecture at a conference
entitled Bandung and Beyond: Rethinking Afro-Asian Connections in the Twentieth Century,
held at Stanford University on May 1415, 2005. I am grateful to the participants at the con-
ference and to Rochona Majumdar for comments. Thanks to Arvind Elangovan and Sunit
Singh for assistance with research.
1 The classic statement of this is Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994).
2 See, for instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2000), pp. 14359.
3 Aime Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1972), p. 25.
4 The countries that sponsored the conference were Burma, India, Ceylon, Indonesia,
Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. In addition, twenty-four other countries joined the conference. They
were: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Peoples Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran,
Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of [North] Vietnam, State of Vietnam, and
Yemen. See Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference (New York: Institute of Pacific
Relations, 1955), p. 29. It should be noted that Israel was invited to participate in the Asian
Relations Conference of 1947 but the delegation was called the Jewish Delegation from Pal-
estine. See Asian Relations: Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian
Relations Conference, New Delhi, MarchApril 1947, introduced by D. Gopal (Delhi: Authors-
press, 2003). Bandung, however, excluded Israel, mainly because of strong opposition from
Arab countries. See Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (hereafter SWJN), second series, ed.
Ravinder Kumar and H. Y. Sharada Prasad (Delhi: JN Memorial Fund, 2000), 27: 109, 566.
5 Gunnar Myrdal, Foreword, in Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Band-
ung Conference (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 7.
6 Ibid., p. 71. This point is underlined in a review of the book by Merze Tate of Howard Uni-
versity in The Journal of Negro History 41, no. 3 (July 1956): 26365. Tate quotes the following
lines from Wright: Bandung was the last call of Westernised Asians to the moral conscience
of the West. P. 265.
7 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 82.
8 SWJN, second series, 27: 106.
9 Sir John Kotelawala, quoted in Roeslan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The
Asia-Africa Connection in Bandung in 1955 (Jakarta: Gunung Agung, 1981), pp. 115, 117. See
also Kotelawala, An Asian Prime Ministers Story (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1956).
10 Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection, p. 119. It should be noted that the Bandung con-
ference was not to make any majority decisions or raise divisive, controversial issues. See
SWJN, second series, 28: 9798.
11 Nehru, Speech inaugurating the new building of the Punjab High Court, Chandigarh,
March 19, 1955, SWJN, second series, 28: 30; William Edgett Smith, We Must Run While
They Walk: A Portrait of Africas Julius Nyerere (New York: Random House, 1971).
12 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 132. Emphasis added. Christopher Lee tells me of a fiction-
alized film about Gamal Abdel Nasser, Nasser 56, in which Nasser, trying to gather support
and expertise for nationalizing the Suez, exhorts two engineers who question his judgment,
13 Wright, The Colour Curtain, p. 200.
14 Chinua Achebe, The African Writer and the English Language, 1964, quoted in Ngugi wa
Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James
Curry, 1986), p. 7.
15 bid., pp. 78.
16 Ibid., pp. xii, xiv.
17 Lopold Sdar Senghor, Prose and Poetry, selected and trans. by John Reed and Clive
Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 5355: 1945 essay on "assimilation"
excerpted from Vues sur LAfrique noire, ou Assimiler, non tre assimils.
18 Ibid., p. 59.
19 In saying this I exclude the field of postcolonial studies, for that field, as I have already
said, had its origins in the West. Postcolonial writers from outside the West are absorbed in
that global field, which still tilts toward the West. Nor do I mean to denigrate or deny the value
of the work in modern, non-Western humanities that emanates from countries like India, for
instance, for a wider audience. But voices from the world of non-Western scholarship in the
humanities command much less global presence than voices from the social sciences in India
and elsewhere. The humanities one comes across in global forums today are much more
parochially Western than the social sciences: that is my point. And that, I think, was the gap
Senghor also was pointing to.
79
 VISUAL ESSAYS
AND CHRONOLOGIES
Compiled by Damian Lentini and Daniel Milnes
 VISUAL ESSAY: SOCIAL AND
POLITICAL EVENTS

2 Tank and troops of the Allied 5th Army pass cheering civilians by the 8 Civilians and service personnel in Picadilly Circus celebrate the
Colosseum in Rome, June 3, 1944. news of Allied victory over Japan, London, 1945.

7 Ruins of the Reichstag in Berlin after the allied bombing,

Berlin, June 3, 1945.
1 Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle walk
down the Avenue des Champs-Elyses during the French
Armistice Day parade in Paris, November 11, 1944.

10 The crew of the Enola Gay before the dropping of the atomic bomb on
4 Japanese representatives including Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigem-
Hiroshima, Tinian, August 1945.
itsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu on board the USS Missouri during the
surrender ceremonies, Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945.
3 Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel signs the ratified 9 Starved prisoners after the liberation of the concentration
surrender terms for the German Army at Russian camp at Ebensee, May 7, 1945.
Headquarters in Berlin, May 7, 1945.

12 Polar cap of the Fat Man weapon is prepared for the bombing of
Nagasaki, Tinian, August 1945.
6 Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from the Enola Gay while flying over
Matsuyama, Shikoku, August 6, 1945.

5 Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped in Hiroshima,

on trailer cradle ready to be loaded, Tinian, 11 Remains of the Industry Promotional Hall amongst the ruins
August 1945. following the dropping of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima, August 1945.

83
 19 Prime Minister Clement Attlee celebrates a Labour Party election
victory over Winston Churchill, London, July 26, 1945.
13 Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin convene at the 14 American servicemen and women gather in front of Rainbow
Yalta Conference, Yalta, February 1945. 20 Sukarno declares the independence of Indonesia, Jakarta, August 17, 1945.
Corner Red Cross club to celebrate the unconditional surrender of
Japan, Paris, August 15, 1945.

21 Hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd atop a train leaving for Pakistan,

New Delhi, September 1947.

22 Residents of Athens protest the fatal shooting of

16 Corporal Irwin Goldstein sets the switches on one of the 28 unarmed civilians during a peaceful demonstration,
function tables of the ENIAC, the first electronic, a precursor to the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949,
general-purpose computer, Moore School of Athens, December 8, 1944.
Electrical Engineering, Philadelphia, 1946.
15 German citizens read a special edition of the Sddeutsche Zeitung announcing
the result of the Nuremberg trials, October 1, 1946.

23 The proclamation of the Italian Republic is announced in newspapers,

Milan, June 1946.

17 Delegates of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, Manchester,

October 1945.
24 The Exodus, a crowded ship carrying illegal Jewish refugees from Europe,
18 U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt meets with King Ibn Saud of arrives in Haifa, July 18, 1947.
Saudi Arabia on board the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake,
Egypt, February 14, 1945.

85
 26 Hundreds of thousands of Koreans flee south after the North
Korean army strikes across the border, 1950.
32 Ten people are crushed to death in the rush to receive the 40 grams of
gold allotted to each citizen after the value of paper money drastically sinks
in China, Shanghai, December 1948.

25 A so-called Raisin Bomber lands at Tempelhof Airport to deliver supplies

to Berlin after the Soviets cut off access to the city from the west,
Berlin, June 1948.

31 Posters for the London Peace Congress on display on the wall of the
Military School, Paris, 1950.

33 Refugees board boats headed for Lebanon and Egypt

during the Palestinian Exodus, Al-Shati Camp, 1949.

27 Three hundred portraits of Dutch governors are

removed from the Governors residence, later known
as the Palace of Freedom, after the official recognition
of Indonesian independence, Jakarta, December 1949.

28 Founder of the state of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, reads the proclamation that
establishes the country as an independent nation, Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948.

34 The Free German Youth organizes a parade to mark the election of State President Wilhelm
Pieck and the founding of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin, October 1949.

30 President Truman signs the document implementing

the North Atlantic Treaty at his desk in the Oval Office,
29 Mao Zedong declares the founding of the Peoples Republic of China at Tiananmen as a number of foreign dignitaries look on, 35 The Olympic Torch is presented at the Summer Olympic
Square, Beijing, October 1, 1949. Washington, DC, August 24, 1949. Games at Wembley Stadium, July 1948, London.

87
 42 Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser is welcomed by
cheering crowds after the signing of the British withdrawal
order and one day after a failed attempt to assassinate him,
Alexandria, October 27, 1954.

37 Demonstrators with flags march through the Brandenburg Gate during

the Peoples Uprising in East Germany, Berlin, June 17, 1953.
43 Original model for the double helix structure
of DNA as discovered by James Watson
and Francis Crick, 1953.

36 Viewers in 3-D glasses enjoy the screening of the Bwana

Devil, the first full-length, color 3-D motion picture at the
Paramount Theater, Hollywood, November 26, 1952.

44 A resident washes graffiti from a wall during the clean-up

after a coup detat which restored power to the Shah of Iran,
45 Roger Bannister runs the first sub-four minute mile,
Tehran, August 1953.
Oxford, May 6, 1954.

38 Revelers party on the street during the carnival 39 Thousands of Vietnamese refugees move from
in Rio de Janeiro, February 1953. a French landing ship to the USS Montague as part
of the Operation Passage to Freedom that helped
citizens flee to the south of the country,
Haiphong, August 1954.

40 Delegates arrive for the Asian-African Conference in Indonesia, 46 Citizens storm the Soviet Cultural shop
Bandung, April 1955. and set fire to Communist propaganda
during the Hungarian Revolution, Budapest,
41 The RussellEinstein Manifesto issued by Bertrand October 1956. 47 Crowds gather at Drill Hall during the Treason Trial, Johannesburg,
Russell at Caxton Hall, London, July 9, 1955. December 1956.

89
 54 Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco descend the steps of Saint Nicholas
49 A replica of an atomic mushroom cloud is carried through Cathedral on their wedding day, Monaco, April 19, 1956.
48 Leaders convene at the Palazzo dei Conservatori to sign the Treaty of Rome,
Rome, March 1957. the streets in protest against the upcoming British nuclear
tests at Christmas Islands, Tokyo, May 1, 1957.

55 The Soviet Union launches the worlds first artificial satellite,

Sputnik 1, into orbit, Baikonur, October 4, 1957.

56 More than two dozen indigenous Australian men come to

Perth to fight a defamation case against Stanley Guide
Middleton, Commisioner for Native Affairs, and the
Australian Broadcasting Commission, Perth, 1958.
51 Ravi Shankar and members of his group
practise in New York, 1957.

50 Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine students of color whose integration into

Little Rocks Central High School was ordered by Federal Court,
is heckled by a mob on her first day, Little Rock, September 1957.
57 A public demonstration of the new Fiat Nuova 500 takes place at the
Piazza San Carlo, Turin, July 4, 1957

52 Fidel Castro delivers a speech after ousting Presi-

59 Crowds cheer and rejoice after the formation of
dent Fulgencio Batista, Santa Clara, January 1959.
the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria,
58 The Explorer VI Earth satellite takes the first Arbin, February 1958.
53 Soviet citizens look at television sets and radios at the USSR Exhibition
photograph of the Earth from space, South Point,
in Sokolniki Park, which took place parallel to the
Hawaii, August 14, 1959.
American National Exhibition, Moscow, August 1959.

91
 61 An aerial photograph shows the site of the first
French nuclear test, entitled Gerboise Bleue, in the
Tanezrouft area of the Sahara Desert, south-west of
Reggane, February 1960.

60 The Enovid birth control pill becomes widely avail-

able in the USA, June 1960.

67 Sony begins mass production of its new all-transistor, porta-

ble television set, Tokyo, January 1960.

66 Residents of West Berlin look over toward the eastern part of the
city at Bernauer Street as construction work begins on the Berlin
Wall, West-Berlin, August 13, 1961.

62 Anti-nuclear weapons protests take place in Ghana after proposals

for further French nuclear testing in the Sahara, Accra, September
1960. 68 Soviet women view a poster celebrating cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin
63 A family explores the planned city of Brasilia after after he became the first man to travel into space aboard Vostok on
its inauguration as the countrys new capital, Brasilia, April 12, Moscow, May 1961.
April 1960.

69 After being captured in Buenos Aires fugitive Nazi war crim-

inal Adolf Eichmann is taken to Israel where he stands trial,
Jerusalem, April 1961.

64 French security forces try to stop young demonstrators in the

Rue Michelet opposing the peace plan with France, Algiers,
December 1960.

70 Former Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba is brought back

to Leopoldville under armed guard after his capture and is secretly
65 Workers at the Tryokhgornaya Manafaktura textile factory perform executed one month later, Leopoldville, December 1960.
early-morning exercises, Moscow, 1960.

93
 77 President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as
Martin Luther King, Jr. and others look on,
Washington, DC, July 2, 1964.
76 Demonstrators at Tiananmen Square protest Americas military
intervention in Vietnam, Beijing, February 1965.

72 Martin Luther King, Jr. waves to supporters during the March on Washington,
the occasion on which he delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech,
Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.

71 Protesters from the group Women Strike for Peace hold placards
urging for caution in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis,
New York, October 1962.

78 Muhammad Ali stands over Sonny Liston during their

controversial title fight after knocking out his opponent after just
one minute of the first round, Lewiston, May 25, 1965.

73 Citizens react to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, New York, 79 A group of Beatlemaniacs wave and scream across from the Plaza Hotel
November 22, 1963. where the Beatles are staying, New York, August 28, 1964.

80 A group of civil rights demonstrators march from Selma to Montgomery to fight

for voting rights for racial minorities, Alabama, March 1965.

75 On the day after French National Police attack a demonstration of 81 U.S. helicopters pour machine gun fire into the tree line to cover the
around 30,000 pro-FLN Algerians in Paris, a graffiti inscription on the advance of South Vietnamese troops in an attack on a Viet Cong camp
left bank of the Seine reads 'We drown Algerians here', near the Cambodian border, Ty Ninh, March 1965.
74 Students at the Al Aqida High School, Baghdad, 1961. Paris, October 18, 1961.

95
 CHRONOLOGY
OF SOCIAL
AND POLITICAL
EVENTS
1944
June 4
Rome is liberated from Fascist rule by Allied
forces. Mussolini flees
June 6
D-Day landings by Allied forces on the
beaches of Normandy
June 15
US Army Air Forces begin bombing the
Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata, in
northern Japan, the first direct attack on the
Japanese home islands
July 1July 22
The Bretton Woods Conference takes
place in New Hampshire, paving the way
for the creation of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund
July 3
Japanese forces are defeated at the battles
of Imphal and Kohima.
August 1
The Warsaw Uprising, orchestrated by the
Polish Home Army, is crushed by Nazi forces
August 21October 7
The Washington Conversations on Inter-
national Peace and Security Organization
(also known as the Dumbarton Oaks Con-
ference) takes place in Washington, D.C.,
paving the way for the establishment of the
United Nations
August 25
Paris is liberated from Nazi rule by the Free
French Forces. Charles de Gaulle is declared
chairman of the Provisional Government of
the French Republic the following day
August 26
The National Council of Nigeria and the
Cameroons, an anticolonial political party,
is formed by Nigerian nationalists Nnamdi
Azikiwe and Herbert Macaulay in Lagos
September 4
Brussels is liberated by the Second Canadian
Division and the Welsh Guards
September 19
The Moscow Armistice marks the end of the
Continuation War between Finland and the
Soviet Union
October 7
Concentration camp inmates forced to aid
with the disposal of gas chamber victims
revolt at Auschwitz
1945
January 27
The Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration
camps are liberated by the Soviet Red Army
February 4February 11
Following the Tehran Conference in 1943,
US president Roosevelt, British prime min-
ister Churchill, and Soviet premier Stalin
meet again at the Yalta Conference to dis-
cuss Europes postwar reorganization
March 22
The Arab League is founded in Cairo
April 4April 29
The Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen,
Sachsenhausen, and Dachau concentration
camps are liberated by Allied forces
April 12
US president Roosevelt dies. He is suc-
ceeded by Vice president Harry S. Truman
April 28
Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta
Petacci are executed by Italian partisans
and hung upside down in the Piazzale Lo-
reto in Milan
April 30
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun commit suicide
in the Fhrerbunker in Berlin
April 30
Munich, once called the Capital of the [Nazi]
Movement, is liberated by the US Army
May 7
The first German Instrument of Surrender
is signed in Reims in the presence of rep-
resentatives of the Free French Forces and
the US Army
May 8
VE Day. The German Supreme Command of
the Armed Forces, the Allied Expeditionary
Force, and the Supreme High Command
1 French civilians celebrate the Liberation
of Paris, August 1944.
of the Soviet Red Army sign the second
Instrument of Surrender in Berlin, marking
the end of World War II in Europe
May 8
103 Algerian demonstrators are killed by
French police forces in the Stif and Guel-
ma massacre
June 5
Germany is divided into four occupation
zones, administered by the United States,
the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet
Union
June 21
200,000 public servants participate in the
Nigerian General Strike, the largest anti-
colonial workers strike in Africa
June 26
The United Nations Charter is signed in San
Francisco by fifty member states
July 16
The United States successfully detonates
the first nuclear bomb near Alamogordo,
New Mexico
July 17August 2
The Potsdam Conference on the eventual
denazification of Germany takes place
July 26
In British elections Labour leader Clement
Attlee defeats Winston Churchill, resulting
in the implementation of socialist reforms
throughout the United Kingdom
August 6
The nuclear bomb Little Boy is dropped UNESCO is founded
on Hiroshima by the US B-29 bomber Enola
Gay. Three days later, the plutonium bomb
Fat Man is dropped on Nagasaki by the
Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar
August 15
Japanese Emperor Hirohito announces the
unconditional surrender of the Japanese
military in a radio broadcast to the Japa-
nese people
August 17
Indonesian nationalists Sukarno and Mo-
hammad Hatta declare the independence
of Indonesia, igniting a revolution against
the Dutch Empire
September 2
The Japanese foreign minister Mamoru
Shigemitsu signs the Japanese Instrument
of Surrender on board the USS Missouri in
Tokyo Bay
September 6September 8
The Soviet Red Army occupies the north-
ern part of Korea along the 38th parallel
to dismantle Japanese forces after their
capitulation, while the southern part of the
peninsula is occupied by the US Army
September 9
Japanese forces surrender to the chairman
of the Nationalist Government of China,
Chiang Kai-shek, in Nanking, officially end-
ing World War II in the Pacific
September 20October 20
Tallinn, Riga, and Belgrade annexed by the
Soviet Red Army
October 6
The first issue of the Sddeutsche Zeitung
is published in Munich; it is the first news-
paper in southern Germany to receive a
license from the US military administration
October 15October 21 The Treaty of London is signed by the gov-
The Fifth Pan-African Congress takes
place in Manchester, resulting in a unani-
mous demand for an independent Africa
2 Defendants, including Hermann Goering,
Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop,
and Wilhelm Keitel, sit in the dock at the
Nuremberg Trials, Nuremberg, c. 1945-46.
October 20
A Mongolian independence referendum takes
place, with officials reporting 100 percent of
the electorate voting for independence
October 24
Syria gains independence after the joint
UN/French Mandate ends
November 1November 16
July 1
November 20
The Nuremberg trials against former lead-
ers of the Nazi regime begin
November 29
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
is founded, with Marshall Tito as president
December 27
Following the Bretton Woods conference,
twenty-eight nations meet in New York
and agree to establish the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund
1946
January 4
The Anglo-American Committee of In-
quiry meets in Washington, D.C., to dis-
cuss Jewish immigration and settlement
in Mandatory Palestine. Subsequent
meetings eventually result in the UN Par-
tition Plan.
January 10
Project Diana bounces radar waves off the
moon and proves that communication is
possible between Earth and outer space,
thereby initiating the Space Age
February 15
The creation of Electronic Numerical Inte-
grator And Computer, the first electronic
general-purpose computer, is officially an-
nounced
February 24
Juan Pern wins the Argentinian presiden-
tial elections, initiating the age of Peronism
March 22
and the public to support the endangered
ernment of the United Kingdom and the
Emir of Transjordan. Three days later, Trans-
jordan becomes the Hashemite Kingdom of
Transjordan
March 31
The Greek Civil War breaks out between
the Greek government army and the Com-
munist Democratic Army of Greece
March 31
The Chinese Civil War breaks out between
the Kuomintang-led government of the Re-
public of China and the Communist Party of
China, headed by Mao Zedong
April 17
The last French troops stationed in Syria
during the Vichy regime leave, handing
control of the country to the republican gov-
ernment of Shukri al-Quwatli
June 2
After a second constitutional referendum,
Italy votes to abolish the House of Savoy
and become a republic
June 30
US Presidential Executive Order 9102,
which ordered the forced relocation and
internment of Japanese Americans during
World War II, officially expires
The United States begins the controversial
testing of atomic bombs on Bikini Atoll
July 4
The Philippines attain independence from
the United States
July 4
An outbreak of violence against a gather-
ing of Jewish refugees in the Polish city of
Kielce results in a pogrom that leaves for-
ty-two Jews dead
July 29
The Paris Peace Conference results in nu-
merous peace treaties between the former
Allied and Axis powers
August 16
The Direct Action Day (also known as the
Great Calcutta Killings) takes place amid
widespread rioting and killing between Hin-
dus and Muslims in Calcutta, resulting in
between 200 and 300 deaths
October 7
The new Constitution of Japan is ratified
by the Japanese House of Representa-
tives, marking the countrys transition from
a monarchy to a democracy, based on the
British model of parliamentary government
December 19
First Indochina War breaks out between the
French Army and the Vit Minh, extending
into the neighboring protectorates of Laos
and Cambodia
1947
March 12
President Truman urges the US Congress
January 30
peoples of communist Europe, thereby an-
nouncing the United States claim of being
the leader of the Western world
March 23April 2
The Asian Relations Conference in New
Delhi lays the groundwork for cooperation
among Third World nations and the forma-
tion of the Non-Aligned Movement
June 5
The European Recovery Program (also known
as the Marshall Plan) is launched by the Unit-
ed States, contributing $13 billion to the eco-
nomic reconstruction of Western Europe
June 17August 15
The end of the British Raj leads to the parti-
tion of the British Indian Empire into the new
nations of Pakistan and India. The resulting
mass migration of Hindus and Muslims results
in up to 400,000 deaths
July 11
The ship Exodus 1947 leaves the port of
Ste in France carrying 4,515 Jewish pas-
cas general elections, ushering in Apart-
3 Citizens queue to vote on Mongolian
independence, Mongolia,
October 20, 1945.
sengers on their way to Palestine. After
being intercepted in Haifa, the passengers
are returned to Europe, being forcefully re-
moved by British forces in Hamburg
September 2
The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal
Assistance (also known as the Rio Pact) is
signed in Rio de Janeiro. The treatys prin-
ciple claim is that an attack against one sig-
natory is to be considered an attack against
all signatories
October 22
The Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 breaks out
over India and Pakistans joint claim to the
princely states of Kashmir and Jammu
November 30
The Civil War in Mandatory Palestine
breaks out between Jewish and Arab com-
munities, resulting in the Palestinian exodus
from Mandatory Palestine and the concur-
rent Jewish exodus from Muslim states
1948
January 4
The Union of Burma is founded after the
country breaks away from British rule
The Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai-Shek is
Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu
fanatic in New Delhi
February 1
The Federation of Malaya is proclaimed, re-
sulting in the amalgamation of the Malayan
Union, Penang, and Malacca
February 4
Ceylon is granted its independence from
Great Britain
February 21
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
stages a coup dtat, assuming control of
the government and marking the start of
four decades of Communist rule
April 1
The publication of the AlpherBetheGa-
mow paper (or paper) in the journal
Physical Review leads to the development
of the Big Bang theory
May 14
The State of Israel is officially declared on
the day that the British Mandate of Palestine
expires. 700,000 Palestinian Arabs flee or
are expelled from the Israeli territories
May 26
D. F. Malan is elected prime minister as the
Afrikaner National Party wins South Afri-
heid as official state policy
June 22
The ship MV Empire Windrush arrives in
England with 492 Jamaican immigrants on
board, signaling the beginning of the migra-
tion of almost 172,000 workers from the
Caribbean and Asia to the United Kingdom
June 24
The Berlin Blockade commences after
the Soviet Union blocks rail, road, and ca-
nal access to the Allied sectors of the city,
marking the first concrete confrontation of
the Cold War. Western Allies respond by de-
livering goods via an airlift, which lasts for
almost a year
June 28
Yugoslavia is expelled from the Communist
Information Bureau, leading the country to
develop its own method of socialism
July 29August 14
The first Olympics since World War II take
place in London. Germany and Japan are
not allowed to participate
August 15
Korea is officially partitioned after the estab-
lishment of the First Republic of South Korea
followed by the declaration of the Democrat-
ic Peoples Republic of Korea in the north on
September 9, 1948
September 9
The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea
is formally established in the northern half
of the Korean Peninsula, with Kim Il-sung
as prime minister
October 29
A military coup in Peru sees General
Manuel Apolinario Odri declared president
October 30
defeated at Mukden in Manchuria
November 26
Edwin Herbert Land invents instant pho-
tography
December 16
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
is ratified by the United Nations General
Assembly
1949
January 8
The Council for Mutual Economic Assis-
tance (Comecon) is founded in Moscow as
a response to the Organisation for Europe-
an Economic Co-operation (OEEC)
January 26
The Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948,
which grants citizenship to all Australians
(including Aboriginal people), comes into
effect.
February 24
The Israel-Egypt Armistice Agreement is
signed on the island of Rhodes, signaling
the beginning of the end of the 1948 Arab
Israeli War
April 4
The signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in
Washington, D.C., paves the way for the for-
mation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organi-
zation (NATO) on August 24, 1949
April 20April 23
The first International Peace Conference
is held in Paris, with Picasso designing its
dove emblem
4 Visit of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia
on board the USS Quincy at the Great
Bitter Lake, Egypt, February 13, 1945.
May 11
Siam officially changes its French name to
Thalande (Thailand), in accordance with
the change of its Thai name to Prated Thai
(the Thai nation) in 1939
May 23
The Federal Republic of Germany is de-
clared, with Bonn as its capital
July 1
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act No.
55 is passed in South Africa
August 12
The Fourth Geneva Convention, which de-
fines humanitarian protections for civilians
in a war zone, is agreed upon
97

October 1
The Peoples Republic of China is declared
by Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
October 7
The German Democratic Republic (East
Germany) is established, resulting in the
official partitioning of Germany
December 7
The government of the Republic of China
under Chiang Kai-Shek finishes its evacu-
ation to Taiwan, declaring Taipei its tempo-
rary capital
December 27
The Republic of the United States of Indo-
nesia is declared, with Sukarno as president
1950
May 9
French foreign minister Schuman presents
his proposal for the creation of a pan-Euro-
pean organization, signaling the beginnings
of the creation of the European Economic
Community
June 24July 16
The 1950 FIFA World Cup takes place in
Brazil, the first to be contested after World
War II
June 25
The Korean War begins when the North
Korean Army crosses the 38th parallel and
attacks South Korea
July 15July 17
The first Darmstadt Talks, dedicated to the
theme of The Image of Man in Our Time,
take place in West Germany
October 6
At the Battle of Chamdo, the Peoples Lib-
eration Army troops enter Tibet, which ends
with the signing of the 17 Point Agreement
in Lhasa in May the following year
November 28
The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Eco-
nomic Development in South and South-
East Asia is launched with the aim of
strengthening the economic and social de-
velopment of member states
1951
April
Iranian prime minister Mossadegh national-
izes the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
April 11
President Truman relieves General Douglas
MacArthur of duties in Korea
April 18
Foreign ministers of the Benelux States,
France, Italy, and West Germany sign the
treaty that founds the European Coal and
Steel Community (ECSC), a precursor to the
European Union
5 Juan Pern wins the Argentinian
presidential elections, Buenos Aires,
February 27, 1946.
October 14
The Organization of Central American
States is formed, a precursor to the creation
of the Central American Common Market
December 20, 1951
The Breeder Reactor, which begins opera-
tion in Arco, Idaho, is the first to success
fully produce energy from nuclear fusion
December 24
The United Kingdom of Libya officially
comes into being, with King Idris I as chief
of state
1952
August 12
April 9
The Bolivian National Revolution results in
the overthrowing of Hugo Ballivins gov-
ernment and the beginning of a period of
agrarian reform, universal suffrage, and the
nationalization of tin mines
hedi, who is loyal to the Shah
June 27
The Native Laws Amendment Act No. 54 is
passed in South Africa, ordering all black
people over the age of sixteen to carry pass
books, as well as prohibiting them from re-
maining in urban areas longer than seven-
ty-two hours without permission
July 23
The Egyptian Revolution breaks out when
an attempt to overthrow King Farouk esca-
lates, resulting in the establishment of an
Egyptian republic
August 12
The Night of the Murdered Poets, the exe-
cution of thirteen imprisoned Soviet Jewish
poets, takes place in a Moscow jail
October 20
The Land and Freedom Army (also known
as Mau Mau) begins an insurgency against
British rule in Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta is taken
into custody
November 1
The United States successfully detonates a
hydrogen bomb, the worlds first thermonu-
clear weapon, on Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific
November 4
In the US presidential elections the for-
mer Supreme Commander of the Allied
Expeditionary Force in Europe, Dwight D.
Eisenhower, defeats Adlai Stevenson in a
landslide
1953
January 13
Pravda, the state newspaper of the USSR,
publishes an article falsely accusing a num-
ber of prestigious Jewish physicians of plot-
ting to poison the country's senior political
leaders, the so-called Doctors Plot
February 28
James Watson and Francis Crick publish
their theory of the double-helix model of DNA
March 5
Joseph Stalin dies of a stroke at his Kuntsevo
residence near Moscow. He is succeeded
by Nikita Khrushchev
May 29
Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay are the
first to reach the summit of Mount Everest
July 27
An armistice between North and South Ko-
rea brings an end to the Korean War
July 28
The Republic of Egypt is declared, with Gen-
eral Muhammad Naguib the first president
In response to the United States successful
detonation a year earlier, the Soviet Union
announces the first successful detonation
of a hydrogen bomb
August 19
A group of Iranian military leaders success-
fully overthrows Prime Minister Mossadegh
and replace him with General Fazlollah Za-
September 7
Ilya Ehrenburg publishes The Thaw. The
novels title would later be used to describe
the period of relaxation of official cultural
politics in the Soviet Union under the rule of
Nikita Khrushchev
November 9
The Laotian Civil War breaks out between
communists and royalists
1954
March 13May 7
The Battle of in Bin Phu signals the end
of French colonial rule in Indochina
May 14
The Hague Convention for the Protection
of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict is adopted
May 17
In the Brown v. Board of Education case, the
US Supreme Court rules that the segrega-
tion of schools along racial lines is inher-
ently unequal and therefore illegal
June 27
The worlds first nuclear power station
opens at Obninsk, near Moscow
September 8
The Southeast Asian Treaty Organization
(SEATO) is founded in Manila, comprising
Thailand, the Philippines, Great Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, France, the United
States, and Pakistan
November 14
Egyptian president Muhammad Naguib is
deposed by Gamal Abdel Nasser
1955
February 24
The Bagdad Pact, a pro-Western defense
alliance that aims to restrict the spread of
Communism in the Middle East, is signed
between Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and
the United Kingdom
April 18April 24
The Asian-African or Afro-Asian Confer-
ence (also known as the Bandung Confer-
ence) takes place in Indonesia. Organized
by representatives from Indonesia, Burma,
Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and India, the
conference is a forerunner to the creation of
the Non-Aligned Movement
May 14
The Warsaw Pact is formed between East-
ern European states keen to restore the
balance of power between East and West
June 26
The Congress of the People in Kliptown,
Soweto, adopts the Freedom Charter, the
6 Shukri al-Quwatli, the first President of
Syria after the country gained independence
from France in 1946.
manifesto of the African National Congress
and the South African liberation struggle
against Apartheid
September 16
Argentinian generals overthrow President
Juan Pern, bringing an end to the age of
Peronism
November 1
The Vietnam War officially begins when the
US Military Assistance Advisory Group rec-
ognizes the conflict in Vietnam as a civil war
December 1
The Montgomery bus boycott begins after
Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give
up her seat to a white passenger
December 22
Cytogeneticist Joe Hin Tjio discovers the
correct number of human chromosomes,
forty-six
1956
January 1
The Republic of Sudan is declared after a
referendum calls for a split from Egyptian
and British control
January 15
Oil is first discovered at the Oloibiri Oilfield
in Nigeria
February 25
Khrushchev delivers his report On the Cult
March 6
founding of the European Economic Com-
7 Mourners at Birla House sit beside
the body of Mahatma Gandhi who was
assassinated the day before,
January 31, 1948.
of Personality and its Consequences to
the 20th Party Congress of the Commu-
nist Party of the Soviet Union, in which he
formally denounces the glorification of one
person (Stalin)
April 28
Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist
Party of China, launches his guiding prin-
ciple: Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a
hundred schools of thought contend, en-
couraging citizens to openly express their
opinions of the Communist regime
May 22
French minister of state Pierre Mends
resigns due to his governments policy on
Algeria
July 26
The Suez Crisis erupts after President
Nasser of Egypt nationalizes the Suez
Canal, which leads to an unsuccessful in-
vasion of the country by the armies of the
United Kingdom, France, and Israel
September 25
The first transatlantic telephone cable be-
gins operating. In the first twenty-four hours
of public service, there are 588 calls from
London to the United States and 119 from
London to Canada
October 23
The Hungarian Revolution breaks out when
a student protest in Budapest develops into
a nationwide revolt against the government
and its Soviet-imposed politics
December 19
The five-year Treason Trial commences
in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which
Nelson Mandela and 156 other defend-
ants are accused of treason. The trial
concludes in 1961 with the acquittal of all
the accused
1957
January 5
US president Eisenhower delivers his Spe-
cial Message to the Congress on the Situa-
tion in the Middle East (also known as the
Eisenhower Doctrine), which states that a
Middle Eastern country can request Amer-
ican economic or military assistance if it is
being threatened by armed aggression from
another state
Gold Coast and British Togoland merge to
form the State of Ghana after attaining in-
dependence from the United Kingdom
March 25
The Treaty of Rome results in the creation
of the European Common Market and the
munity
July 25
Tunisia becomes a republic, with Habib
Bourguiba its first president
July 29
The International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) is established in Vienna
August 31
Malaysia gains independence from the
United Kingdom
October 4
The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1 into
orbit, further integrating the Space Race
into the Cold War
October 22
Franois Papa Doc Duvalier seizes con-
trol of Haiti, declaring himself president
for life
1958
January 19581961
The Great Leap Forward, an attempt to in-
stigate the rapid development of Chinas ag-
ricultural and industrial sectors, entails the
mobilization of the countrys enormous la-
bor forces and the abolition of private plots.
The results are dramatic: the endeavors
lead to economic regression and contribute
to the Great Famine, which claims between
15 and 45 million lives
January 1
The Treaty of Rome comes into effect, with
the aim of bringing about economic integra-
tion among its members
January 3
The West Indies Federation is formed in the
Caribbean by various former colonies of the
United Kingdom
February 1
Egypt and Syria merge to form the United
Arab Republic, which is intended as a first
step to a larger united Arab state. Gamal Ab-
del Nasser is nominated as the first president
April 4
Several thousand people march for four
days from Trafalgar Square in London to the
Atomic Weapons Establishment in Alder-
maston to demonstrate their opposition to
nuclear weapons
May 25
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is
launched in London by Bertrand Russell. On
this occasion Gerald Holtom designs the
peace symbol
July 14
The Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan,
which was formed on February 14, 1958, is
abruptly disbanded by the July 14 Revolu-
tion in Iraq. The Republic of Iraq is formed
August 30September 5
West Indian residents of the London suburb
of Notting Hill are the victims of racially mo-
tivated violence during race riots
September 28
The constitution of the Fifth French Re-
public, initiated by Charles de Gaulle, is ac
cepted in a referendum
December 5December 13 1960 as the Year of Africa
The First All-African Peoples Conference
in Accra is attended by more than 300
delegates from twenty-eight African
states
December 18
The United States launches SCORE, the
worlds first communications satellite, which
broadcasts a Christmas message from US
president Eisenhower via an onboard tape
recorder
December 31
Rebel troops under the command of Ernesto
Che Guevara force the resignation of the
Cuban dictator Batista. Fidel Castro is in-
stalled as the new Cuban prime minister on
February 16, 1959
1959
March 10
An uprising in Tibet results in the Peoples Lib-
eration Army taking control of the entire coun-
try and the Dalai Lama permanently fleeing
July 24
The Kitchen Debate between US vice-
president Nixon and Soviet premier
Khrushchev takes place at the opening of
the American National Exhibition in Moscow
August 14
The US Explorer 6 satellite transmits the
first pictures of Earth from orbit. Almost two
months later, on October 7, 1959, the Soviet
probe Luna 3 takes the first photographs of
the dark side of the moon
August 15
Cyprus attains independence after Cypriot
community leaders reach an agreement
with representatives of Turkey, Greece, and
the United Kingdom
September 26
Ceylons prime minister S. W. R. D. Bandara-
naike is assassinated in Colombo. He is
succeeded the following year by his wife,
Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who becomes the
worlds first elected female head of state
October 30
Anti-colonial riots in Stanleyville (today
Kisangani) in the Belgian Congo, result in
the death of thirty protesters
October 31
The Western Nigerian Government Broad-
casting Corporation transmits the first tele-
vision broadcast in Africa
1960
January 1
Cameroon is the first of seventeen African
nations to gain independence in 1960, the
others being Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Belgian
Congo, French Congo, Ivory Coast, Upper
Volta (Burkina Faso), Somalia, Dahomey
(Benin), Mauritania, Madagascar, Niger,
Chad, Togo, Gabon, and the Central Afri-
can Republic. The United Nations declares
8 News of the overwhelming majority
vote in favor of independence spreads
throughout Algeria, Algiers, July 5, 1962.
February 3
British prime minister Macmillan delivers
his Wind of Change speech to the South
African parliament, in which he announces
that the British Government intends to grant
independence to its African colonies
March 21
South African police kill sixty-seven demon-
strators of the Pan-African Congress during
the Sharpeville Massacre
April 21
Braslia is inaugurated as the new federal
capital of Brazil
May 11
Fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
is abducted by Mossad agents in Buenos
Aires and taken to Israel to stand trial. On
December 15, 1961, he is sentenced to
death by the Jerusalem District Court
99
August 19
The satellite Sputnik 5 is launched, with the
dogs Belka and Strelka (Russian for Squirrel
and Little Arrow, respectively), forty mice,
two rats, and a variety of plants on board
September 14
The Organization of the Petroleum Export-
ing Countries (OPEC) is formed in Baghdad
October 12
Inejiro Asanuma, chairman of the Japan
Socialist Party, is assassinated during a
taped political debate in Tokyo by Otoya
Yamaguchi wielding a wakizashi (samurai
sword)
October 30
The first successful kidney transplant is
performed by Dr. Michael Woodruff at the
Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
December 9
A state visit by French president Charles de
Gaulle to the city of An Tmouchent in Al-
geria results in rioting, resulting in the death
of 127 people
9 Members of the Delegation of
Cameroon in the United Nations Assembly
Hall, New York.
1961
January 17
During his final State of the Union address,
US president Eisenhower warns of a mili-
tary-industrial complex in which the vested
interests of the defense industry could
come to influence US public policy
January 17
The former prime minister of the Republic
of Congo, Patrice Lumumba, is secretly
executed. The announcement of his death
sparks off protests across Europe and Af-
rica
April 12
The Vostok spacecraft, piloted by Yuro
Gargarian, completes a full orbit of Earth,
making the Soviet cosmonaut the first hu-
man to journey into outer space
April 17April 19
Counter-revolutionary forces, with support
from the US Central Intelligence Agency,
unsuccessfully invade the Bay of Pigs in
Cuba
April 27
Sierra Leone gains independence from the
United Kingdom
May 1
The Freedom Riders begin their interstate
bus rides in the American South to protest
against the non-enforcement of US Su-
preme Court decisions ruling that segregat-
ed public buses are unconstitutional
May 16
A military coup in South Korea renders the
democratically elected government of Pres-
ident Yun powerless and brings about the
end of the countrys Second Republic
June 16, 1961
Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev de-
fects to France while on tour in Paris with
the Kirov Ballet
August 13
The German Democratic Republic begins
the construction of the Berlin Wall
September 1
The Conference of Heads of State in Bel-
grade results in the formation of the Non-
Aligned Movement, which advocates a
more prominent role for small and newly
independent nations in the United Nations
November 1
The Hungry Generation movement is
launched in Calcutta. Comprising a range
of avant-garde writers, many of the move-
ments leaders would lose their jobs or be
imprisoned by the incumbent government
December 11
US involvement in the Vietnam War officially
begins when 400 US Army Special Forces
personnel arrive in Saigon to train South
Vietnamese soldiers
December 19
An armed action by the Indian Armed Forces
ends 451 years of Portuguese occupation
in Goa
1962
January 1
Western Samoa gains independence from
New Zealand
January 24
The Organisation de larme secrte (Or-
ganisation of the Secret Army)a far-right
nationalist group opposed to Algerian in-
dependencebombs the French Foreign
Ministry in Paris
February 7
The US embargo against Cuba begins,
prohibiting all US-related Cuban imports
and exports
March 18
France and Algeria sign the vian Accords
in vian-les-Bains, ending the Algerian War
and paving the way for Algerias independ-
ence on July 3, 1962
July 1
Rwanda gains independence from Belgium
July 23
The worlds first transatlantic television sig-
nal is transmitted between New York and
Brussels
October 20
The Sino-Indian War breaks out over the
Himalayan border dispute
10 National Guard soldiers escort Freedom
Riders on their journey from Montgomery,
Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi,
Montgomery, May 1961.
October 11
The Second Vatican Council is opened by
Pope John XXIII. The council results in in-
creased efforts by the Vatican toward dia-
logue with other religions
October 16October 28
The Cuban Missile Crisis breaks out after
the Soviet Union stations nuclear missiles in
Cuba. The conflict is eventually resolved with
both countries agreeing to remove missiles
from bases close to the others territory
December 9
Tanganyika (part of modern-day Tanzania)
becomes a republic
1963
January 26
Iranian Shah Pahlavi introduces a series
of reforms known as the White Revolution,
which include major land reform, grant-
ing suffrage to women, the creation of a
national literacy program, and the privat-
ization of nationalized manufacturing in-
dustries
April 7
Yugoslavia is proclaimed a socialist repub-
lic, with Tito named President for Life
April 20
Members of the terrorist group Front de
libration du Qubec bomb the citys Cana-
dian Army Recruitment Centre
June 11
Vietnamese monk Thch Qung c burns
himself to death on the streets of Saigon
to protest the persecution of Buddhists by
South Vietnams Ng nh Di.m adminis-
tration.
June 20
The Washington-Moscow Direct Communi-
cations Link (also known in popular culture
as the red telephone), a Moscow-Wash-
ington hotline that was to facilitate quick
diplomatic contact, is established as a di-
rect result of the Cuban Missile Crisis
June 26
US president Kennedy delivers his Ich bin
ein Berliner speech to an estimated audi-
ence of 450,000 in West Berlin
August 27
Thousands of Americans converge upon
Washington, D.C., for the March on Wash-
ington for Jobs and Freedom. On August
28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers
his I Have A Dream speech in front of
the Lincoln Memorial, calling for an end to
racism
August 27
W. E. B. Du Bois dies in Accra, Ghana
November 22
US president Kennedy is assassinated by
Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas
December 12
The formation of the Republic of Kenya
marks the end of over seventy years of co-
lonial rule
1964
January
Mao Zedong publishes Mo Zhux Yul
(Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,
to also known as The Little Red Book)
February 25
Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) beats
Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and
is crowned the heavyweight champion of
the world
March 20
Cosmic background radiation caused by
the Big Bang is discovered by astronomers
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson
April 26
Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form
Tanzania after the Arab dynasty in Zanzibar
is overthrown
May 27
Indian prime minister Nehru dies. He is suc-
ceeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri
May 28
The Palestinian National Council adopts
the Palestinian National Covenant, which
results in the founding of the Palestine Lib-
eration Organization (PLO)
June 12
Nelson Mandela and seven other members
of the African National Congress are sen-
tenced to life imprisonment for incitement
to rebellion at the Rivonia Trial
July 2
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed
into law by US president Johnson. It out-
laws discrimination based on race, color,
religion, sex, or national origin in facilities
that serve the general public and at the
workplaces
August 1
Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Saint Vincent
and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago,
Turks and Caicos Islands, and Jamaica all
celebrate of the end of slavery in these for- August 5
mer and continuing British colonies The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 breaks out
after escalating tensions between the two
September 25 countries over the disputed provinces of
The Mozambican War of Independence Jammu and Kashmir
commences between the guerrilla forces of
the Frente de Libertao de Moambique August 6
(Mozambique Liberation Front) and Portugal US president Johnson signs the Voting
Rights Act into law, which prohibits racial
October 14 discrimination in voting
Soviet premier Khrushchev is forced into
August 9
Singapore is expelled from the Federation
of Malaysia and becomes an independent
city-state
October 18
The Communist Party of Indonesia, the larg-
est non-ruling communist party in the world,
is officially banned on March 12, 1966
November 6
Cuba and the United States formally agree
to start Freedom Flights, an airlift for Cu-
bans who want to go to the United States
11 South Vietnamese government troops
sleep in a U.S. Navy troop carrier on their way
back to the Ca Mau,
August 1962.
voluntary retirement by the Central Com-
mittee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. He is succeeded by Leonid Brezhnev
October 16
China successfully detonates its first nucle-
ar bomb, becoming the worlds fifth nuclear
power
October 24
Northern Rhodesia attains independence
and becomes the Republic of Zambia
1965
January 4
During his State of the Union address, US
president Johnson proclaims his Great So-
ciety, a set of domestic programs that seek
to eliminate poverty and racial injustice in
the United States
January 24
Former British prime minister Winston
Churchill dies
February 12
A group of students from the University of
Sydney commence a Freedom Ride from
Sydney to various segregated New South
Wales towns. Inspired by the US Freedom
Riders, the group protested, picketed, and
advocated for civil rights for aboriginal Aus-
tralians
February 21
Malcolm X is assassinated by two Nation of
Islam members in New York
March 18
Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov becomes
the first person to walk in space
July 14
US spacecraft Mariner 4 takes the first
close-up photographs of Mars
101
 VISUAL ESSAY:
ARTS AND CULTURE

2 The Mona Lisa returns to The Louvre

after the war, Paris, 1945.
6 Members of the artists' group Gelanggang Seniman 7 A Piet Mondrian's studio at 15 East 59th Street after his death, with
Merdeka including Mochtar Apin, Baharudin en Asrul Victory Boogie Woogie (unfinished; 1942-4), February 1944,
Sani and Chairil Anwar, Jakarta, 1948. Photograph: Harry Holtzman

1 Josef Albers and students of his photography class in the cabbage patch near the
Studies Building of Black Mountain College, 1944.

3 Two school children view Sidney Noland's painting Ned Kelly at Stringy Bark
Creek at the South Melbourne Arts Festival, Melbourne, 1946. 8 Israeli sculptor Zeev Ben Zvi working on the Holocaust memorial at
Mishmar HaEmek, 1945.

9 The All-Union Exhibition takes place at the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow,

1946.

4 Willem de Kooning sitting next to one of his Woman paint-

ings in his studio, New York, 1946. Photograph: Harry Bowden.

5 Group photograph of the participants of the Hst exhibition of Dutch artists, Copenhagen,
1948. Back row f.l.t.r: Sixten Wiklund, Ernest Mancoba, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Erik Ortvad,
Ejler Bille, Knud Nielsen, Tage Mellerup, Aage Vogel-Jrgensen and Erik Thommesen. Mid-
dle row: Karel Appel, Tony Appel, Christian Dotremont, Sonja Ferlov with her son Wonga,
and Else Alfelt. Front row: Asger Jorn, Corneille, Constant and Henry Heerup.
10 Lucio Fontana visits the ruins of his studio which was
destroyed by bombs during the Second World War, Milan, 1946.
11 Participants from Israel and Palestine at the 24th edition of the Venice
Biennale, Venice, 1948.

103
 13 All six founding members of the Progressive Artists Group
12 The Third General Exhibition of Plastic Arts takes place at the Sociedade Nacional photographed during their exhibition, Bombay, 1949. f.l.t.r. (back row): 18 An exhibition of works by Rafael Soriano opens at the Caseta del Parque Central,
de Belas Artes, Lisbon, 1948. M. F. Husain, S. K. Bakre, S. H. Raza. (Front row): F. N. Souza, K. H. Havana, October 1950 [Group photograph with Lol Soldevilla (fourth from left),
Ara, H. A. Gade. Rafael Soriano (sixth from left), Wifredo Lam (fourth from right), and others.]

19 Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in the studio, 1950 [Long Island,
New York, 1950]. Photograph by Hans Namuth.

14 Whilst visiting from Paris, Shafic Abboud and a companion

named Jacqueline partake in a field trip organized by the Acadmie
libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Choueifat, 1950. 20 A view of the studio of Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM) during a
visit by President Sukarno, Yogyakarta, 1955.

15 Aldo Turchario, Raffaele Leonporri, Antonello Trombadori

and Renato Guttuso pose in front of the painting
La Battaglia di Ponte dell'Ammiraglio in Guttuso's studio
at the Villa Massimo, Rome, 1951.

21 Group photograph of participants of an exhibition of the Movimento per l'Arte

Concreta at the Libreria Salto, Milan, 1951 [F.l.t.r: Giulia Mazzon Sala, Regina
Bracchi, Salto Jr., Gianni Bertini, Luigi Veronesi, Bruno Munari, Giuseppe Salto,
Nino di Salvatore, Galliano Mazzon, Gillo Dorfles, and Gianni Monnet.]

16 Isamu Noguchi visits buildings, ruins and construction works in Hiroshima,

1951 [f.l.t.r.: Isamu Noguchi, Kenzo Tange, Tsutomu Hiroi, Michio Noguchi.]
22 Installation of works by Alexander Calder at the second edition of the So Paulo
Biennial, 1953.

17 The members of the Brazilian Grupo Ruptura, 1952. [f.l.t.r: Lothar Charoux,
Anatol Wladislaw, Kasmir Fejer and Waldemar Cordeiro.]

105
 24 Artist Dong Xiwen and Mao Zedong view works together with academy
administrators during a visit to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 30 Pablo Picassos Massacre in Korea is displayed on the streets
1953. of Warsaw, 1956.
23 Reg Butler in his studio, sculpting Working Model
for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner,
Berkhamsted, c.1955.

29 Alberto Giacometti in his studio, Paris, 1954.

26 The Surrealist Group including Man Ray, Andr Breton, Alberto Giacometti
25 Mahmoud Hammad, Adham Ismail, Fathi Muhammad and other and Wifredo Lam reconvene at the Caf de la Place Blanche three decades 31 The Fifth Exhibition of the New Horizons Group opens at the
students from the Middle East pose for a photograph with the after their first activities together, Paris, 1953 Tel Aviv Museum, 1953.
Director at the Scuola dell'arte della medaglia, Rome, 1954.

32 Ben Enwonwu works on a sculpture in the studio he shared with

William Reid Dick, London, mid 1950s.

27 Installation view of Sand Dari and Luis Martnez Pedros two-per-

son exhibition at the Pavilion of Social Sciences, University of Havana,
Havana, 1955.

28 Anwar Jalal Shemza and Safdar Ali (right) attend the opening 33 The Jikken Kobo group perform the ballet Eve Future in collaboration with the Matsuo
of an exhibition of the Lahore Arts Group, Murree, 1954 Akemi Ballet Company at the Haiyu za Theater, Tokyo, 1955.

107
 35 Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Piero Simondo, and friends at work at
the Experimental Laboratory, Alba, September 1956.
34 Vladimr Boudnk during one of his actions on the streets of Prague, 1959.

40 Gutai members at the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition, Ashiya Park,

Ashiya, 1956. [Top row: Tanaka Atsuko, Murakami Saburo, Yamazaki
Tsuruko; middle row: Mizuguchi Kyoichi, Kanayama Akira, Shimamo-
to Shozo; bottom row, f.l.t.r.: Yoshihara Jiro, Sadamasa Motonaga
and Horii Nichiei.]
41 David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler embrace in Frankenthaler's studio,
New York, 1957.

36 Members of the Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM) group work on the

relief Flora and Fauna of Indonesia at the Kemayoran International
Airport, Jakarta, 1957.
37 The Group 2 show, created by Richard Hamilton, John McHale
and John Voelcker, is installed at the exhibition This is Tomorrow at
the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956.

42 K.O. Gtz uses a rake to create one of his paint-

ings at his studio, Dsseldorf, 1959.

44 Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the

2nd Gutai Art Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956.
39 Teachers and students work on a mural at the Central Academy of Fine
Arts, Beijing, 1958.

38 Rauschenberg in his Front Street Studio with Interview (1955), Untitled

43 Yayoi Kusama in her New York studio, 1958-59.
(c. 1954), the second state of Monogram (195559; second state 195658),
Bed (1955), and Odalisk (1955/1958), New York, 1958.
109
 46 Gustav Metzger publicly displays his auto-destructive art by spraying hydrochloric
acid on colored nylon sheets at his South Bank Demonstration, London, 1961.
52 Patty Mucha and Claes Oldenburg performing in Snap-
shots for the City at Judson Memorial Church, New York,
1960.

45 Victor Musgrave, Anwar Jalal Shemza and the art critic George Butcher at
Gallery One, London, 1960.

51 Installation view of the Second Neoconcrete Exhibition at MEC, Rio de Janeiro, 1960.

48 Malangatana (seated on the right on the shelf in the background) relaxes

with Pancho Guedes and his family and colleagues at Guedes studio in
Loureno Marques, 1960.
47 Willem de Kooning speaks at a symposium held at the Judson .
Center, New York, alongside Isamu Noguchi (seated second
right) and Clement Greenberg (seated right), New York, 1961.
53 The members of the Gorgona group at the first New
Tendencies exhibition, Zagreb, 1961. [f.l.t.r.: unidentified
friend, Josip Vanita, Radoslav Putar, Ivo tajner, Matko
Metrovic, Slobodan Vulicevic, Julije Knifer, uro Seder.]
54 Jacques Villegl tears posters from a wall in Montparnasse, Paris, 1961.

50 Niki de Saint Phalle creating one of her shooting (Tir) paintings at

Galerie Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1961

49 A group of young artists stage The Wall Exhibition of informel painting as a protest
against the more conservative art on display at the Kukjeon (National Art Exhibition) 55 Jeram Patel at work in his studio in the Department of Painting at the Faculty of Fine
inside the Duksoogung Palace, Seoul, 1960. Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, c. 1961.

111
 62 George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell, Benjamin Patterson and
Emmet Williams perform Philip Corners Piano Activities during the FLUXUS:
Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik at the Stdtisches Museum,
Wiesbaden, 1962.
57 Allan Kaprow creates his environment Stockroom for the exhibi-
tion Art in Motion at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1961.

56 The American delegation including Nina Simone (third from left) and Hale Woodruff
(second from right) arrive for the cultural festival in Lagos, 1961.

63 The exhibition Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren (Degenerate Art:

The Iconoclasm 25 Years Ago) takes place at Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1962.

64 Nam June Paiks Exposition of Music Electronic Television

opens at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, 1963.

59 K.G. Subramanyan working on his large-scale mural, the King of the Dark Chamber,
58 Marta Minujin destroys all of the works she has later installed at the cultural centre Rabindralaya in Lucknow, 1963.
created during her time in Paris in La Destruccion
(The Destruction) at Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1961.

65 Dr. Saburi Oladeni Biobaku holds his opening speech at the

inauguration of the First International Congress of African Culture
held at the National Gallery, Salisbury, 1962.

66 A meeting of the Nouvelle Tendance group at the GRAV [Groupe de Recherche

dArt Visuel] studio at rue Beautreillis, Paris, 1962. [From left to right: Dieter Hacker;
Angel Duarte (Equipo 57); Uli Pohl; Franois Morellet (GRAV); Carlos Cruz-Diez; Ivan
61 Testumi Kudo performs Happenings: Philosophy of Impotence at Picelj; Bernard Aubertin; Luis Tomasello; Henk Peeters; Horacio Garca- Rossi (GRAV);
60 Gulammohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah and F.N. Souza converse at the the Cinma-Studio de Boulogne, Paris, 1963. Julio Le Parc (GRAV); Gregorio Vardanega; Jess Soto; Michelle Yvaral; Martha Le
Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, c. 1962. Parc; Jean-Pierre Yvaral (GRAV); Dada Maino; Martha Boto; Mme. Morellet; Francisco
Sobrino (GRAV); Jol Stein (GRAV).]

113
 73 Shigeko Kubota performs Vagina Painting as part of the Perpetual Fluxfest event
held at the Cinematheque in New York, July 1965.

67 The Third Annual Festival of the Mbari Mbayo club takes place,
Osogbo, 1965.

68 David Siqueiros delivers a lecture to fine art students in front of his mural
Del Porfirismo a la Revolucin three days after being released from Lecumberri
prison, Mexico City, July, 1964.

72 Celebrated passista Miro with Hlio Oiticicas Parangol P02 Flag

01 at the exhibition Opinio 65, Museum of Modern Art,
Rio de Janeiro, 1965.

74 Marta Minujin performs Leyendo las noticias en el Ro de la Plata

69 Artists and tutors including Elias Zaiat, Mahmoud Hammad, (Reading the News in the Ro de la Plata), Buenos Aires, 1965
Nassir Chora and Fateh Moudarres judge students works at the
Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus, 1965.

70 Ernst Wilhelm Nays installation of three Augenbilder

(Eye paintings) suspended from the ceiling garners attention at the 76 Revellers enjoy a party at Andy Warhols studio, the Factory at 231 East 47th Street,
third edition of the Documenta, Kassel, 1964. New York, August 1965.
71 Hi Red Centers Cleaning Event (officially known as Be Clean! and Campaign to 75 Tadeusz Kantors Cricotage takes place at the TPSP cafe,
Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area) takes place in Tokyo, 1964 Warsaw, 1965
[F.l.t.r.: Zbigniew Gostomski, Wiesaw Borowski, Edward Krasinski.]

115
 CHRONOLOGY
OF ARTS
AND CULTURE
1944
February
Piet Mondrian dies in New York, leaving his
painting Victory Boogie Woogie (194243)
unfinished
March
Max Bill organizes the exhibition Konkrete
Kunst (Concrete Art), the first international
exhibition of concrete art, at the Kunsthalle
Basel. The show subsequently travels around
Europe, inspiring the founding of art groups
May Institute of History and Art in New York, fea-
Eugene W. Smith exhibits photographs of
the Pacific war zones at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York
Halim el-Dabh premiers his experimental
manipulated recording Taabir al Zaar (The
Expression of Zaar) at the Expositions de
lart indpendant (Exhibition of the Art and
1 Works by Pablo Picasso installed at the
Salon dAutomne, 1944, the artists first
exhibition in Paris after the end of German
occupation
Liberty Group) held at the Lyce Franais in
Cairo, constituting one of the earliest exam-
ples of electronic music
June
The first and only issue of the journal Arturo:
Revista de artes abstractas is published in
Buenos Aires, and includes Gyula Ksices
essay La aclimatacin artstica gratuita a the Grand Palais in Paris, an exhibition ex-
las llamadas escuelas (The Free Acclimati-
zation to the So-Called Schools) and Rhod
Rothfusss El Marco: Un Problema de la
plstica actual (The Frame: A Problem in
Contemporary Art)
September Toms Maldonado and others found the
The exhibition La prima mostra darte Italia
libera (The First Art Exhibition of a Free Ita-
ly) takes place in Rome
October Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Max Pechstein, Karl
The Salon dautomne (Salon of Independ-
ents), also known as the Salon de la Libra-
tion (Salon of Liberty) takes place in the
Grand Palais in Paris, with a focus exhibi-
tion of Pablo Picassos work
Jacob Lawrence exhibits his Migration of
the Negro series at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York
Jean Dubuffet holds his first solo exhibition
at Galerie Ren Drouin in Paris
December Georges Henein publishes the pamphlet
Wassily Kandinsky dies in Neuilly-sur-Seine
1945
January George Orwell publishes his dystopian novel
Richard Wright publishes his memoir Black
Boy
Chester Himes publishes If He Hollers Let
Him Go, detailing the life of an African
American shipyard worker in Los Angeles
during World War II
The exhibition The Negro Artist Comes of
Age: A National Survey of Contemporary
American Artists takes place at the Albany
turing the work of artists such as Romare
Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis,
and Charles White
April
Francis Bacon exhibits his Three Studies for
Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion at the
Lefevre Gallery in London to much contro-
versy
May
Howard Putzel organizes the exhibition A
Problem for Critics at 67 Gallery in New
York as a challenge for someone to come
up with a name to define recent tendencies
in US painting
The Expositions de lart indpendant (Ex-
hibition of Independent Art), the first post-
war exhibition of Egypts surrealist Art and
Liberty Group, takes place at the Lyce
Franais in Cairo, including the work of
Ramss Younan
June
The first postwar exhibition of modern art
in Germany takes place at a private house
belonging to the artist Hans Uhlmann.
Exhibited are classical expressionist works
by Jeanne Mammen, Oskar Nerlinger,
Hans Uhlmann, Rene Sintenis, and Georg
Tappert
Crimes hitlriens (Hitler's Crimes) opens at
ploring the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis
during the war
Germanys first postwar art school, the
Hochschule fr bildende Knste, re-opens
in Berlin
July
The first exhibition of the Kammer der
Kunstschaffenden takes place in Berlin,
featuring works by Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer,
Schmitt-Rottluff, Gerhard Marcks, and other
formerly degenerate artists
August Lopold Sdar Senghor publishes his col-
The first postwar commercial art gallery,
the Galerie Gerd Rosen, opens in a former
textile and military supplies shop in Berlin,
exhibiting works by Ernst Barlach, Marc
Chagall, Lyonel Feininger, Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner, Paul Klee, and other Brcke art-
ists
Prestige de la terreur (The Prestige of
Terror) a couple of days after the dropping
of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima
Albert Camus publishes his reaction to the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the French
Resistance newspaper, Combat
Animal Farm
September
Jorge Luis Borges publishes his short story
El Aleph in the Argentinian literary mag-
azine Sur
Roberto Rossellini releases his film Roma
citt aperta (Rome, Open City)
Karl Jaspers delivers a series of lectures
exploring the collective guilt of the German
people at Heidelberg University, which are
subsequently published as Die Schuldfrage
(The Question of German Guilt)
October Picasso unveils The Charnel House (1944
The Commemorative Exhibition of the Liber-
ation takes places at the National Museum
of Contemporary Art at Deoksugung Pal-
ace in Seoul
The first issue of the Sddeutsche Zeitung
is published in Munich, the first newspaper
to receive a license from the US military ad-
ministration of Bavaria
The inaugural exhibition of Arte Concreto-
Invencin opens at the house of Dr. Enrique
Pichon Rivire in Buenos Aires. Featuring
the works of Ramn Melgar, Juan Carlos
Paz, Rhod Rothfuss, Estban Eitler, Gyula
Kosice, Valdo Wellington, and Carmelo Ar-
den Quin, the exhibition is considered the
first example of concrete art shown in South
America
Jean Fautrier exhibits for the first time the
series Otages (Hostages) he created
during the Paris occupation at the Galerie
Ren Drouin
Jean-Paul Sartre delivers his lecture LEx-
istentialisme est-il un humanisme? (Exis-
tentialism is a Humanism) at Club Mainte-
nant in Paris, which would be published the
following year.
Alfred Hitchcock releases the film Spell-
bound, which contains a dream sequence
designed by Salvador Dal
November
Asociacin Arte Concreto-Invencin (Con-
crete-Invention Art Association) in Buenos
Aires
The first postwar German art group, Der
Ruf, is exhibited for the first time at the Gr-
nen Haus in Dresden
lection of poems Chants dOmbre (Shadow
Songs) in Paris. Predominantly written pri-
or to the outbreak of the War, many of the
poems reflect upon the conflict between
French and African culture.
Charlie Parker records his landmark bebop al-
bum Ko-Ko at WOR studios in New York City
December
Francis Newton Souzas exhibition opens at
the Bombay Art Society
1946
January ford, Texas
The exhibition Bayerischer Gemlde des
15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Bavarian Paintings
of the 15th and 16th Centuries) opens
at Munichs former Haus der deutschen
Kunst, which has been now officially re-
named Haus der Kunst
The All-Union Exhibition takes place at
the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, showing
1,459 works by 555 artists
February of US abstract expressionist art in Europe
John Cage begins composing his Sixteen
Sonatas and Four Preludes for Prepared Piano
45) at the Art et Rsistance (Art and Resist-
ance) exhibition in Paris.
May currently publishes the Mad Manifesto
The first edition of the magazine Plastic Arts
is published in Seoul
The first Salon des ralits nouvelles (Salon
of New Realities) takes place at the Palais
des Beaux-Arts in Paris
June
Boris Taslitzky exhibits his Buchenwald
2 Visitors admire Albrecht Drer's self-por-
trait at the exhibition Bavarian Paintings of
the 15th and 16th Centuries at Haus der
Kunst, Munich, 1946.
series of paintings at the Galerie La Gentil-
hommire in Paris
Ad Reinhardt publishes his visual essay
How to Look at Modern Art in America in
PM magazine
July
The Salon des Ralits Nouvelles is founded
in Paris by art lover Fredo Sids.
August
Toms Maldonado and other artists publish
the Manifesto invencionista (Inventionist
Manifesto) in the magazine Asociacin Arte
Concreto-Invencin.
The first Mad exhibition takes place at
Galera van Riel in the French Institute for
3 The First Exhibition of the Asociacin
Arte concreto-invencin (AACI) opens at the
Saln Peuser, Buenos Aires, March 1946
Superior Studies in Buenos Aires, officially
launching the movement. Gyula Kosice con-
The first Ferienkurse fr internationale Neue
Musik (International Summer School for
New Music) is held in Darmstadt
The Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kun-
stausstellung (First General German Art
Exhibition) opens in Dresden, exhibiting
many works by artists previously declared
degenerate
November Nuovo delle Arti takes place at the Galleria
Romare Bearden publishes his essay The
Negro Artists Dilemma in the journal Cri-
tique: A Review of Contemporary Art
Lucio Fontana and his students at the Al-
tamira academy publish Manifesto Blan- in Paris
co (White Manifesto) pamphlet in Buenos
Aires, announcing his aim for a Spatialist
art
Lszl Moholy-Nagy dies of leukemia at the
age of fifty-one in Chicago
December Henri Matisse publishes his artist book Jazz
Dylan Thomas publishes his collection of
poems Deaths and Entrances, many of
which deal with the effects of World War II
1947
January at Londons Berkeley Galleries
Robert Antelme publishes LEspce hu-
maine (The Human Race) concerning his
experiences in the concentration camps
The group Pelukis Rakyat (Peoples Paint-
ers) is founded in Jogjakarta by the artists
Affandi and Hendra Gunawan
Barnett Newman organizes the exhibition
The Ideographic Picture at Betty Parsons
Gallery in New York and includes works
by himself, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, Ad
Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos,
and Clyfford Still
February
Lee Kwae-dae writes a detailed report on
the North Korean art scene in the journal
New Paradise
Alberto Burri is repatriated to Italy from the
United States after spending almost four
years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Here-
The Group of Seven exhibit for the first time
at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Primo Levi publishes Se questo un uomo
(If This Is A Man, also known as Survival in
Auschwitz), describing his incarceration in
the Auschwitz concentration camp
March The First International Congress of Art Crit-
Samuel Kootz organizes the first exhibition
at the Galerie Maeght in Paris
June
Otto Frank publishes his daughter Annes
diary as Het Achterhuis (The Diary of a
Young Girl)
May
Willi Baumeister publishes his book Das
Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in
Art), championing an art that is universally
relevant and an artistic freedom that em-
bodies a responsibility toward humanity
Albert Camus publishes La Peste (The
Plague)
The definitive version of Yasunari Kawaba-
June
The first exhibition of the group Fronte
della Spiga in Milan, featuring work by Re-
nato Guttuso, Renato Birolli, Emilio Vedova,
andothers
The Muse National dArt Moderne opens
standslose Malerei in Amerika (Abstract Art
August The first performance of Pierre Schaeffers
Arnold Schoenberg completes his composi-
tion A Survivor from Warsaw Op. 46, paying
tribute to Holocaust victims.
September
October the first Kukjeon (National Art Exhibition) as
Cai Chusheng and Zheng Junli release
the film The Spring River Flows East. Now
considered a classic of Hong Kong cinema,
the film details the trials and tribulations of
a family during the Second Sino-Japanese
War
Ben Enwonwu holds his first solo exhibition
November
The first issue of the quarterly journal
Prsence Africaine is published by Alioune
Diop in Paris
Lucio Fontana publishes his Primo Mani-
festo dello Spazialismo (First Manifesto of
Spatialism) in Buenos Aires
December
Kwame Nkrumah publishes Towards Colo-
nial Freedom, a manifesto that called for the
introduction of a Marxist-Leninist ideology
in African politics
The New Realists exhibition takes place at
the Hwa-shin Gallery in Seoul
1948
January
Lopold Sdar Senghor publishes Antholo-
gie de la nouvelle posie ngre et malgache
de langue franaise (Anthology of New
Negro and Malagasy Poetry in the French
Language), which contains the introduction
Orphe Noir (Black Orpheus) by Jean-
Paul Sartre
Working under the pseudonym Andr
Tamm, K. O. Gtz publishes the first edition
of the journal Metamorphose, dedicated to
experimental contemporary art and poetry
Jackson Pollock holds his first solo exhibition
at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York,
where he exhibits his famous drip paintings
Fei Mu releases the film Spring in a Small
Town
Alberto Giacometti exhibits new works at
the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York;
Jean-Paul Sartre writes the preface for the
catalogue
February the journal Commentary
tas Yukiguni (Snow Country) is published.
An integration of nine separately published
works, the book is a classic of modern Jap-
anese literature
March don. It includes the work of fifty-three white
New Yorks Museum of Non-Objective
Painting organizes the exhibition Gegen-
4 Mad Exhibition at the 3me Salon des
Ralits Nouvelles, Paris, 1948.
in America), which opens at the Staatliche
Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, before later trave-
ling to Dsseldorf, Mannheim, Munich, and
Stuttgart
Ismael Rodrguez releases the film Nosotros
los pobres (We the Poor)
Sidney Nolan first exhibits his famous Kelly
series of paintings at the Velasquez Gallery
in Melbourne
Willem de Kooning has his first solo exhi-
bition at the Charles Egan Gallery in New
York, where he exhibits his black-and-white
abstract paintings
Vladimr Boudnk conducts his first Events
in the Street in Prague at the end of April as
part of the Art-Explosionalism manifesto
that he had just published
May
Alberto Burri holds his first solo exhibition
at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome
The 24th Venice Biennale opens, the first to
be staged after World War II
Norman Mailers first novel The Naked and
the Dead is published, based on his expe-
riences during the Philippines Campaign in
World War II
June
ics is held at UNESCO headquarters in Paris
July
Ezra Pound publishes The Pisan Cantos
August
Paul Celan publishes Todesfuge (Death
Fugue), which addresses the horrors of the
concentration camps
September
Constant publishes CoBrA Manifesto in
the journal Reflex #1
Harold Rosenberg publishes his famous es-
say The Herd of Independent Minds: Has
the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture? in
Luchino Visconti releases the film La Terra
Trema (The Earth Trembles)
The survey show Overseas Exhibition of South
African Art opens at the Tate Gallery in Lon-
South Africans, as well as that of Gerard Se-
koto, which garners widespread praise
October
Cinq tudes de bruits (Five Studies of Nois-
es) takes place on French National Radio,
one of the first public broadcasts of con-
crete music
November
The Korean Ministry of Education launches
a platform for Korean culture
The first exhibition of the Ofakim Hadashim
(New Horizons) group takes place at the Tel
Aviv Museum of Art
Alexander Dymschitz, head of the Cultural
Division of the Soviet Military Government
in Berlin, publishes his two-part essay
ber die formalistische Richtung in der
deutschen Malerei (On Formalist Tenden-
cies Within German Painting) in the news-
paper Tgliche Rundschau, providing the
first high-profile Soviet assessment of Ger-
man art and condemning the domination of
formalist tendencies within painting
Vittorio De Sica releases the film Ladri di
biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)
117

December May Adolph Gottlieb, Morris Graves, Hans Hof-
The first exhibition of Movimento per larte
concreta (Concrete Art Movement) is held
5 Participants of the 1st Exhibition of
Modern Art, Krakow, 1948
at the Libreria Salto in Milan. The group is
comprised of Bruno Munari, Gillo Dorfles,
Gianni Monnet, and Atanasio Soldati
Alan Paton publishes Cry, The Beloved
Country
Roberto Rossellini releases the film Germa-
nia anno zero (Germany, Year Zero)
Barnett Newman publishes his essay The
Sublime is Now in the journal Tigers Eye
Tadeusz Kantor organizes the First Exhi-
bition of Modern Art at the Paac Sztuki
w Krakowie, featuring works by a young
Andrzej Wrblewski, as well as Henryk
Stazewski and Alfred Lenica
The nascent Institute of Contemporary Arts
(ICA) holds its second major exhibition,
40,000 Years of Modern Art, at the Academy
Cinema in London
1949
January Museum in Amsterdam
Max Bill publishes his influential essay Die
mathematische Denkweise in der Kunst
unserer Zeit (The Mathematical Approach
in Contemporary Art) in the Swiss journal
Werk, in which he argues for an art free
from any reference to the existing world
March January Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapi organ-
Isamu Noguchi holds his first postwar solo
exhibition at the Charles Egan Gallery in
New York
Vladimr Boudnk publishes his program
of explosionalism at the State School of
Graphic Art summer school at Nov Falk-
enburk. He expands upon this program a
couple of weeks later, producing the Ex-
plosionalism Manifesto No. 2
April degenerate before the war are exhibited
The first volume of Louis Aragons Les
Communistes (The Communists) is pub-
lished
Hkielmar Lers releases the film Adamah,
which was shot in Palestine just prior to the
establishment of the State of Israel
Heinrich Bll publishes his first novella Der
Zug war pnktlich (The Train Was on Time),
focusing on the experience of German sol-
diers fighting on the Eastern Front
The Ausstellung sowjetischer Malerei (Exhi-
bition of Soviet Painting), a major exhibition
of socialist realist painting, takes place at the
Haus der Kultur der Sowjetunion in East Berlin
June Zapata, Bernardo Chataing, Rgulo Prez,
Simone de Beauvoir publishes Le Deuxime
sexe (The Second Sex)
George Orwell publishes 1984
July July deutscher Rundfunk. Over the years, it
Yukio Mishima publishes his autobiographi-
cal novel Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions
of a Mask)
The All-China Art Workers Association or-
ganize the First National Art Exhibition at the
Beijing School of Arts; it is the first major
exhibition to take place after the end of the
war with Japan and the only one held prior
to the establishment of the Peoples Repub-
lic of China
The first Exhibition of the Progressive Art-
ists Group at the Bombay Art Society
represents the first major showing of the
groups work
August mediately following the Armitace
Claude Lvi-Strauss publishes Structures
lmentaires de la parent (The Elementary
Structures of Kinship)
The influential Uruguayan artist and teacher
Joaqun Torres Garca dies
September ative spirit ...) in the catalogue
The exhibition Der Blaue Reiter Mnchen
und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (The
Blue Rider Munich and the Art of the 20th
6 CoBrA members bring their works
to First International Exhibition of
Experimental Artists at the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam,
November 1949.
Century) at Munichs Haus der Kunst rep-
resents the first time that artists labeled as
in the city
The Mexican mural painter Jos Clemente
Orozco dies in Mexico City
Harold Rosenberg and Samuel Kootz or-
ganize the influential exhibition The Intra
subjectives at the Kootz Gallery in New
York, where they show work by William
Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky,
mann, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock,
Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey,
and Bradley Walker Tomlin
October June dArte Moderna in Rome, featuring the work
Curzio Malaparte publishes his book La
Pelle (The Skin), detailing the myriad social
7 Artists Sessions take place at Studio 35,
April 1950, New York [Left to right:
James Brooks, Ad Reinhardt, Richard
Pousette-Dart, Louise Bourgeois, Herbert
Ferber, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Janice
Biala, Robert Goodnough, Hedda Sterne,
David Hare, Barnett Newman, Seymour
Lipton, Norman Lewis, Jimmy Ernst.]
Photograph by Max Yavno.
transformations that took place in Italy im-
Ral Lozza organizes the Primera Exposicin
de Pintura Perceptista (First Exhibition of
Perceptivist Painting) at the Van Riel Galera
de Arte in Buenos Aires; he also publishes
the manifesto Ante la decadencia y espritu
negativo ... (Faced with the decline and neg-
November Auschwitz is barbaric)
CoBrA artists first show together as a group
at the Exposition Internationale dArt Expri-
mental (International Exhibition of Exper-
imental Art), which is held at the Stedelijk
1950
Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi tour five of the
Hiroshima Panels to fifty Japanese cities
March
Alina Szapocznikow exhibits her sculptures
for the first time at the VI Exposition des
Artistes Juifs (Fourth Exhibition of Jewish
Artists) in Paris
April The work of Jackson Pollock is first exhibited
The so-called Artist's Sessions take place
at Studio 35 in New York, attended by two
dozen artists who later came to be known
as the Abstract Expressionists
Pablo Neruda publishes his collection of
340 poems Canto General (General Song)
in Mexico City
The group Zen 49 hold their premiere exhi-
bition at Munichs Galerie des Central Col-
lecting Point
1952
May Torino, Napoli, La Spezia, Livorno, Firenze, June September
Eugne Ionescos first play La Cantatrice Venezia (Abstract and Concrete Art in Ita- Saloua Raouda Choucair publishes her es- Yosuke Yamahata publishes Kiroku-shashin:
chauve (The Bald Soprano) premieres at the ly, 1951: Works by Artists of Rome, Milan, say Kayfa Fahima al-Arabi Fanna at-Tas- Genbaku no Nagasaki (Atomized Nagasaki:
Thtre des Noctambules in Paris Turin, Naples, La Spezia, Livorno, Florence, weer (How the Arab Understood Visual The Bombing of Nagasaki: A Photographic
Venice) is held at the Galleria Nazionale Art) in the journal al-Abhaath January Record)
The Lahore Art Circle is founded by Ahmed
Aim Csaires essay Discours sur le colo- of Alberto Burri, Piero Dorazio, Mimmo September Parvez, S. Safdar, Anwar Jelal Shemza, Sand Dari, Luis Martnez Pedro, and
nialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) is pub- Rotella, Emilio Vedova, and others Helen Frankenthalers first solo exhibition Moyene Najmi, and Ali Imam in Pakistan Mario Carreo launch the magazine Noti-
lished in Paris takes place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in cias de Arte (Art News) in Havana
A conference on abstract art takes place at New York Frantz Fanon publishes his book Peau noire,
Alejandro Otero, Jess Rafael Soto, Rafael New Yorks Museum of Modern Art and in- masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) December
cludes contributions from Alexander Calder, October The Grupo Ruptura exhibition at the Museu
Genaro Moreno, Omar Carreo, and others Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Ben Enwonwu holds his first US exhibition The Independent Group is founded in Lon- de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, along with
found the group Los Disidentes (The Dis- at Howard University in Washington, D.C. don as a collection of young artists circu- the Manifesto Ruptura, which was also
senters) in Paris, concurrently publishing lating around the ICA. At the groups first signed in 1952, represented a debut for the
their Manifesto No The Studio fr elektronische Musik begins meeting, Eduardo Paolozzi passes around group, which comprised Waldemar Cordei-
broadcasting on Colognes Nordwest- his Bunk! collages ro, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, Leo-
pold Haar, Kazimir Fejer, Anatol Wladyslaw,
The exhibition Das Menschenbild in unserer would attract to the city the likes of Karl- Isidore Isous experimental film Trait de and Luis Sacilotto
Zeit (The Image of Man in our Time) takes heinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, Cor- bave et dternit (Treatise on Venom And
place at the Mathildenhhe in Darmstadt nelius Cardew, David Tudor, Mauricio Kagel, Eternity) is released Harold Rosenberg publishes his essay
concurrent with the Darmstadt Talks at the and John Cage American Action Painters in ARTnews
Kunsthalle February
The first So Paulo Biennial takes place at Gil J Wolmans lettrist film LAnticoncept Michel Tapi organizes the exhibition Un
UNESCO publishes The Race Question the Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo (The Anticoncept) opens in Paris art autre (An Other Art) at Studio Paul Fac-
chetti in Paris, suggesting a new terminolo-
August November March gy that encompasses both the abstract and
8 Installation view of the
Billy Wilder releases the film Sunset Boule- exhibition by Max Bill at the Michel Tapi organizes the exhibition Sig- Ralph Ellison publishes Invisible Man, about figurative works of the likes of Jean Dubuf-
vard Museu de Arte Moderna de nifiants de linformel (Signifiers of Infor- an African-American man whose color ren- fet, Jean Fautrier, Alfred Otto Wolfgang
So Paulo, 1951 mel) at the Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris. ders him invisible Schulze, Alfonso Ossorio, Jackson Pollock,
The social and literary group Lembaga Showing the work of Jean Dubuffet, Jean
Kebudajaan Rakjat (LEKRA) is founded in Fautrier, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, The Soviet Fine Arts Exhibition opens in
Jakarta, issuing its first declaration on cul- Davis, George L. K. Morris, and Willem Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Jaroslav Serpan, New Delhi before touring to Calcutta and
ture (Mukadimah) and establishing close de Kooning, who reads his famous essay he coins the term informel to group all of Bombay
links to Indonesias Communist Party What Abstract Art Means to Me these works together
April
Akira Kurosawa releases the film Rashomon Le Corbusier commences work on his mas- Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) The Prima esposizione del Movimento Nu-
ter plan for the Indian city of Chandigarh present their first collective work, a ballet cleare (First Exhibition of Nuclear Art) at
October entitled The Joy of Life, created to mark the the spaces of the Amici della Francia in Mi-
Nemai Ghosh releases Chinnamul, the first March first Pablo Picasso retrospective in Tokyo. lan signals the formation of the group, who
Indian film to confront the partition of India. Theodor W. Adorno publishes Kulturkritik The work functions as a performative man- publish their first manifesto as part of the
und Gesellschaft (Cultural Criticism and ifesto of the groups ideas and provides an exhibition
Sand Dari holds his exhibition Estructuras Society), in which he famously notes that
Pictricas (Pictorial Structures) at the Ha- Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schrei- May
vana Lyceum in Cuba ben, ist barbarisch (To write poetry after Lucio Fontana and a group of sixteen other
artists publish the Manifesto del Movimen-
A group of writers and artists publish the to Spaziale per la televisione (Television
Surat Kepertjajaan Gelanggang (The Max Bills first exhibition in Brazil, at the Mu- Manifesto of the Spatial Movement), which
Gelanggang testimonial of beliefs) in post- seu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, inspires was simultaneously distributed during a tel- 10 Walter Nicks experimental dance
independence Jakarta, beginning with the numerous Brazilian concrete artists evision broadcast by Fontana group perform in front of Mathias Goeritzs
words We are the legitimate heirs to world The Serpent in the courtyard of the
culture, and we are furthering this culture in The Exhibition of the National New Nianhua June Museo Experimental El Eco,
our own way. takes place at the Reading Room of the Rus- Amos Tutuola publishes The Palm-Wine Mexico City, 1953.
sian Foreign Affairs Association in Beijing. Drinkard
9 The first Sao Paulo Biennial takes
December Organized by the Chinese Artists Association,
Luis Buuel releases his social realist film the exhibition demonstrates the governments place at the Museu de Arte Moderna The Peace Bridge, designed by Isamu No- Mark Tobey, Sam Francis, Pierre Soulag-
de Sao Paulo, October 1951
Los Olvidados (the forgotten ones) support for artists working in print media guchi, opens in Hiroshima es, Georges Mathieu, Graham Sutherland,
Karel Appel, Germaine Richier, Eduardo
early indication of postwar Japanese inter- The exhibition Mensch und Form unser- Paolozzi, and others
1951
ize the exhibition Vhmences confrontes est in multimedia and performance art er Zeit (Man and Form of Our Time) takes
(Opposing Forces) at the Galerie Nina place at the Stdtische Kunsthalle in Reck- The Ruptura exhibition opens at the Mu-
Dausset in Paris, where they juxtapose the December linghausen seu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, widely
work of US and European abstract artists The German artist Wols (Alfred Otto Wolf- considered to mark the official beginning of
January gang Schulze) dies of food poisoning in July concrete art in Brazil
Kofi Abrefa Busia publishes Self-Govern- April Paris Karlheinz Stockhausen premieres his first
ment for the Gold Coast Gholam Hossein Gharib, Hassan Shirvani, composition, Kreuzspiel, at the Interna-
and Hooshang Irani publish The Nightin- The group EXAT 51 (an abbreviation of tional Summer School for New Music in
1953
February gales Butcher Manifesto on the back cover Eksperimentalni atelje/Experimental Darmstadt
of the magazine Fighting Cock. atelier) officially form at a plenary meet-
in Japan as part of the First International ing of the Association of Applied Artists August
Art Exhibition that takes place at the Tokyo The newly formed Baghdad Group for Mod- of Croatia and publish their manifesto in As part of his exhibition Antonio Berni ex-
Metropolitan Art Museum. The exhibition ern Art exhibit for the first time at the Museum protest against the dominance of officially pone 22 obras (Antonio Berni Exhibits 22 January
will prove to be highly influential to artists of Ancient Costumes in Baghdad sanctioned socialist realist art and the con- Works) at the Galera Viau in Buenos Aires, The controversial International Sculpture
such as Takamatsu Jiro demnation of all forms of abstraction and the artist publishes an essay about Nuevo Competition: The Unknown Political Prisoner
May unacceptable motifs Realismo is held at the ICA in London, later traveling
Hannah Arendt publishes Elemente und Leo Castelli organizes the iconic 9th Street to the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Ursprnge totaler Herrschaft (The Origins of Show exhibition in an empty store at 60 David Tudor first performs John Cages
Totalitarianism) East 9th Street, introducing the work of 433 at the Maverick Concert Hall in Samuel Becketts play Waiting for Godot
sixty-one, mainly young New York artists Woodstock, New York premieres in Paris
The exhibition Arte astratta e concreta in Ita- and propagating the idea of a New York
lia, 1951: Opere di artisti di Roma, Milano, School of painting
119
February Ray Bradbury publishes Fahrenheit 451
The first Exposio Nacional de Arte Ab-
strata (National Exhibition of Abstract Art)
takes place at the Museu de Arte Moderna
do Rio de Janeiro, featuring work by Lygia
Pape, Lygia Clark, and Ivan Serpa
March New Wave cinema
In New York, Willem de Kooning first exhib-
its his Woman series at the Sidney Janis
Gallery, while Robert Rauschenberg shows
the White Paintings that he created in
1951 at the Stable Gallery
April Yasujiro Ozus film Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo
Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain
11 Following its inauguration in December
1953, Alexander Calder's Acoustic Ceiling
decorates the Aula Magna of the Universi-
dad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, 1954.
Cloquets film Les statues meurent aussi
(Statues Also Die) premieres at the Cannes
Film Festival. The anti-colonial message of
the film was so confrontational, that it was
promptly censored by the French state and
was not screened again until 1968
Roland Barthes publishes Le Degr zro de
lcriture (Writing Degree Zero)
Luis Garca Berlangas comedy film Bien- other Central and Eastern European coun-
venido, Mister Marshall! (Welcome Mr. Mar-
shall!) is released in cinemas in Spain
June The National Gallery of Modern Art opens
Camara Laye publishes his autobiograph-
ical novel LEnfant noir (The African Child)
August Jorge Romero Brest publishes his essay
Mulk Raj Anand publishes The Private Life
of an Indian Prince, detailing the social and
political reform that was brought about by
the abolition of the princely states system
in India
The Hochschule fr Gestaltung Ulm (Ulm
School of Design) begins operations, under
the supervision of Max Bill
September Boidar Raica, and Aleksandar Srnec
Dong Xiwens monumental painting The
Founding of the Nation is first exhibited to
great acclaim in Beijing
The exhibition Parallel of Life and Art takes
place at the ICA in London
October Rock Around the Clock
James Baldwin publishes his semi-autobi-
ographical novel Go Tell It On the Mountain
Yale University, laying the foundations to his March The I. mednarodna graficna razstava (1st works of Fernand Lger, a year after his death The first Exposio Nacional de Arte Con-
theory of formalism within modern art Clement Greenberg publishes his polem- International Exhibition of Graphic Arts) is creta (National Exhibition of Concrete Art)
Ray Ashleys (also known as Raymond ical essay American-Type Painting in the held at Ljubljanas Moderna Galerija. The July opens at the Museu de Arte Moderna de
Abrashkin) Little Fugitive premieres in New June spring edition of Partisan Review exhibition would subsequently become Ousmane Sembne publishes his first novel So Paulo, the first national meeting of con-
York. The films naturalistic style and use The first Grupo Frente exhibition takes the Bienale Grafike (Biennial of Graphic Le Docker noir (Black Docker) crete visual art and poetry
of nonprofessional actors would prove to place at the Galeria Ibeu in Rio de Janei- Famed jazz pioneer Charlie Parker dies in Arts)
be profoundly influential to the subsequent ro, exhibiting the work of Lygia Clark along New York Joo Guimares Rosa publishes his mon- The exhibition Jackson Pollock opens at the
with that of Hlio Oiticica, Alusio Carvo, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein launch ologue book Grande Serto: Veredas (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the first
and Lygia Pape Wifredo Lam exhibits a series of his paint- The Russell-Einstein Manifesto at a press Devil to Pay in the Backlands) to great con- major exhibition of the artists work after his
November ings at the Universidad de La Habana, conference at Caxton Hall, London troversy death
William Burroughs publishes Junkie: Con- July Pabellon de Ciencias Sociales, in support
fessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict and Frida Kahlo dies at her home in Mexico City. for students protests against the dictator- The first Documenta exhibition opens in Kassel 14 Saburo Murakami performs Destruction August
Queer under the pseudonym William Lee ship of Fulgencio Batista of paper (Tsuka) at the 2nd Gutai Art Mongo Beti publishes his novel Le pauvre
August The exhibition Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Exhibition, Tokyo, 1956. Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bom-
The Lalit Kala Akademi (the National Acad- Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun rep- ba) in Paris
Story) is released emy of Art) inaugurated in New Delhi resents the unofficial launch of the Gutai Pablo Picassos monumental Guernica is
group (in that twenty-three of the forty par- exhibited as part of the exhibition Picasso The landmark exhibition This is Tomorrow
December Luigi Nono's cantata La victoire de Guernica ticipants were members) 19001955 at Munichs Haus der Kunst opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London
The Aula Magna building opens at La Ciu- (The Victory of Guernica) premieres at the
dad Universitaria de Caracas, with acoustic International Summer School for New Mu- The Premire biennale de la Mditerrane November Sand Dari first exhibits his Estructura
clouds designed by Alexander Calder sic in Darmstadt (First Biennial for the Arts of Mediterrane- The Wystawa obrazw (Exhibition of Pic- transformables (Transformable Structures)
an Countries) takes place at the Alexandria tures) is held at the House of Artists at the Pabelln de Ciencias Sociales of the
The influential Chinese painter Xu Beihong September Museum of Fine Arts in Krakow, presenting works by Tadeusz Universidad de La Habana, Cuba
dies of a stroke. As a mark of respect, the Federico Fellinis film La Strada (The Street) Kantor, Jerzy Nowosielski, and others who
Chinese Communist Party orders the crea- premieres at the Venice International Film August combined Surrealism and Abstract Expres- Jackson Pollock dies in a car accident
tion of the Xu Beihong Museum at his home Festival Vladimir Nabokov publishes Lolita. Follow- sionism. The exhibition resulted in the crea-
in Beijing ing its publication in Paris, the British Home tion of numerous artists groups, clubs, and September 15 For Yves Kleins Sculpture arostatique
William Golding publishes Lord of the Flies 12 The first Documenta exhibition opens at Office orders all copies entering the United galleries The First World Congress of Free Artists 1001 blue balloons are released into
the Fridericianum, Kassel, 1955. Kingdom to be seized. The French and US takes place in Alba, Italy. Organized by the sky over Paris on the occasion of the
October governments also subsequently ban the Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Asger Jorn, the exhibition Yves Klein : Propositions
1954
The influential Exhibition of Economic and book for several years. conference concludes with an accord and monochromes at Galerie Iris Clert,
1956
Cultural Achievements of the Soviet Union April signed resolution declaring the inevitable Paris, May, 1957
takes place at the Soviet Exhibition Hall in Victor Vasarely and Pontus Hultn publish The newly formed Grupa 55 hold their first outmodedness of any renovation of an art
Beijing. Featuring works such as Fyodor their Yellow Manifesto as part of the ex- exhibition at the Desa salon in Warsaw. within its traditional limits
1957
January Shurpins The Morning of Our Motherland hibition Le Mouvement (Movement) at the Billed as an anti-Arsenal exhibition, the
The China Artists Association publishes the (1948), the exhibition would provide the Galerie Denise Ren in Paris, thereby intro- group rebelled against the domination of January The First Congress of Black Writers and
essay New Chinese Painting Movement template for Chinese socialist realism for ducing the idea of kinetic art Socialist Realism Frank Auerbach is given his first solo exhi- Artists is held at the Sorbonne in Paris.
in the first edition of the relaunched journal decades bition at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London Leading black intellectuals address issues
Meishu, outlining the precepts for the sort The exhibition Indonesian Art is held as part of colonialism, slavery, and Ngritude January
of socialist realist art that was to be promot- November of the Asian-African Conference in Ban February Renato Guttuso publishes his essay Del
ed in the country Jean Rouch screens his first ethnofic- dung, exhibiting the works of key Indonesian Lennie Tristano releases his album Lennie October realismo del presente e altro (On Realism,
tion short film Les matres fous (The Mad modern artists Tristano, in which he overdubs piano and The 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition takes place at the Present, and Other Things) in the jour-
February Masters) to a small, select audience at the manipulates tape speed for effect on some the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo. It features Tana- nal Paragone, arguing for a form of socially
Cyprian Ekwensi publishes People of the Muse de lHomme in Paris Sand Dari and Luis Martnez Pedro stage tracks kas Electric Dress, a painting performance engaged realism outside of the socialist
City the Primera Exposicin Concreta (First Ex- by Shimamoto Sho zo , Kazuo Shiragas realism proscribed by the Soviet Union
Ishiro Honda releases the film Gojira hibition of Concrete Art) at the Pabelln de Toru Takemitsu premieres his work Relief Challenging Mud, and Saburo Murakamis
March (Godzilla) Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad de La Statique in Tokyo, one of the first compo- At One Moment Opening Six Holes Roland Barthes publishes his collection
Renato Guttuso is given a solo exhibition at Habana, Cuba sitions to employ electronic tape-recording of essays from Les Lettres nouvelles as
the Central Office of Art Exhibitions Zache- December techniques Satyajit Ray releases the Indian Bengali Mythologies
ta in Warsaw. The exhibition would then tour Ulli Beier publishes his essay Wand- May drama Aparajito (The Unvanquished), the
malereien der Yoruba (Yoruba Wall Paint- The exhibition Man, Machine and Motion: An March follow-up to Pather Panchali February
tries and would be profoundly influential on ing) in the journal Das Kunstwerk Iconography of Speed and Space is held at Fred M. Wilcoxs pioneering science fiction Miles Davis releases the influential album
realist artists the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne film Forbidden Planet premieres in the United November Birth of the Cool
13 Participants at the First World Con-
gress of Black Writers and Artists at the States Bayn al-Qasrayn (Between the Two Palac-
The exhibition The New Decade: 22 Euro- Sorbonne, Paris, 1956. es), the first book of Naguib Mahfouzs Cairo The Baghdad Exhibition of Painting and
1955
in New Delhi pean Painters and Sculptors opens at the Lol Soldevilla organizes the influential ex- Trilogy is published in Cairo Sculpture is held at the Al-Mansur Club and
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alberto hibition Pintura de hoy. Vanguardia de la Es- shows the work of forty-five modern artists
April Burri uses the occasion to print his famous Fernand Lger dies at his home in Gif-sur- cuela de Pars (Painting Today: Avant-Garde Allen Ginsberg publishes Howl and Other
Words Are No Help statement Yvette of the School of Paris) at the Palacio de Poems, one of the principal works of the Ingmar Bergman iconic film Det sjunde in-
Dilogo sobre el arte abstracto y el arte con- January Bellas Artes in Havana Beat Generation seglet (The Seventh Seal) is released
creto (Dialogue on Abstract and Concrete Edward Steichens acclaimed Family of June Satyajit Ray releases the Bengali-language
Art) in the Argentinian journal Saber vivir Man exhibition is held at the Museum of Pierre Teilhard de Chardins book Le drama film Pather Panchali (Song of the Elvis Presley releases his debut solo album Roger Vadim releases the film Et Dieu March
Modern Art, New York, later traveling un- Phnomne humain (The Phenomenon of Little Road), the first film of The Apu Trilogy Elvis Presley cra la femme (And God Created Woman), Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and Mamadou
The Salon 54: Exhibition of Contemporary der the auspices of the US Information Man) is posthumously published in Paris launching Brigitte Bardot into the public Sarrs short documentary film Afrique sur
Yugoslav Painting and Sculpture is held in Agency throughout the United States and The Hiroshima Peace Center and Memorial April spotlight Seine (Africa on the Seine) premieres in
Rijeka. Dubbed a key exhibition for the re- Europe Herbert Bayer creates his Earth Mound at Park, designed by Kenzo Tange, opens Alain Resnaiss documentary Nuit et brouil- Paris
construction of modernism in Yugoslavia, the Aspen Institutes Aspen Meadows cam- lard (Night and Fog) is shown out of compe- December
the show featured the work of EXAT 51 Pokolenie (A Generation), the opening film pus in Colorado, possibly the first earth- October tition at the Cannes Film Festival Yoshihara Jiro publishes the Gutai bijutsu Alina Szapocznikow publishes Plastycy o
members such as Ivan Picelj, Vlado Kristl, of Andrzej Wajdas Three War Films trilogy, work done within the context of contem- Iannis Xenakis orchestral work Metastaseis sengen (Gutai Art Manifesto) in the journal plastyce (Visual Artists on Visual Art) in
is released porary art premieres at the Donaueschinger Musik- May Geijutsu Shincho the journal Przeglad Kulturalny
tage (Donaueschingen Festival) Elie Wiesels 245-page manuscript of his
Akira Kurosawa releases his epic histor- Arnold Rdlinger organizes the exhibition July experiences at the Auschwitz and Buchen- Uche Okekes first solo exhibition, Life in Miles Davis releases his hard bop album
ical drama Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Tendances Actuelles III (Current Tenden- The Oglnopolska wystawa modej plastyki The First Gutai Art Exhibition opens at the wald concentration camps, Un di Velt Hot Northern Nigeria: An Exhibition of Paint- Round About Midnight
Samurai) cies III) at the Kunsthalle in Bern, where he (National Exhibition of Young Art)subti- Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo, with Saburo Murakami Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent), ings and Drawings (19541956), takes
groups all of the exhibited abstract work tled Against War, Against Fascismtakes performing Work (Six Holes) and Kazuo is published in Argentina. A shortened ver- place at the Community Centre in Kaduna, The Modern Fine Art exhibition opens at the
May under the term tachisme place in the recently restored Armory build- Shiraga staging his work Challenging Mud sion of this book is published two years later Nigeria Dong-hwa Gallery in Seoul
Bill Haley & His Comets release the album ing in Warsaw. More popularly known as the in Paris as La Nuit (Night)
February Arsenal exhibition, the show is considered Nicholas Rays film Rebel Without a Cause Direction 1 opens at the Macquarie Galler- Andrzej Wrblewski dies in a mountaineer-
Francis Newton Souza publishes his autobi- to be the beginning of the cultural thaw in is released, portraying the moral decay of June ies in Sydney, a landmark exhibition of ab- ing accident in Tatry, Czechoslovakia, at the
Clement Greenberg delivers the lecture ographical essay The Nirvana of a Maggot Poland, leading to a significant revision in American youth The Muse des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris stract art in Australia age of twenty-nine
Abstract Representational, and so forth at in the journal Encounter Socialist Realism stages a large-scale retrospective of the
121
April Diego Rivera dies at his San ngel studio
The First one-night exhibition of the ZERO
Groupan evening vernissage without a
subsequent exhibitiontakes place at the
Ruinenatelier in Dsseldorf
The First Southeast Asia Art Conference
and Competition takes place in Manila,
which includes an small exhibition sent over
by New Yorks Museum of Modern Art
May The exhibition Seven Indian Painters in
The first Annual Fifth Moon Group Exhibition
is held at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, officially
launching the group. These annual exhibi-
tions would continue until 1970
Yves Klein releases his Sculpture arosta-
tique (Aerostatic Sculpture) into the sky as
part of his exhibition Propositions mono-
chromes at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris
June Jasper Johns exhibits his Flags for the
Elaine de Kooning publishes the article
Pure Paints a Picture in the summer edi-
tion of ARTnews; it is widely considered to
be one of the best articles on pure paint-
ing
July chitectural Design, coining the term Pop art
Nevil Shutes post-apocalyptic novel On the
Beach is published
The founding conference of the Situationist
International takes place at Cosio dArroscia
in Italy. Participants include Michle Bern-
stein, Guy Debord, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio,
Asger Jorn, Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo,
Elena Verrone, and Ralph Rumney
August The exhibition Das rote Bild (The Red Picture)
The landmark installation/exhibition An
Exhibit opens at the Hatton Gallery in New-
castle-Upon-Tyne, before traveling to the
ICA in London
September publication after three issues
The first issue of Black Orpheus, a journal
of African and Afro-American literature, is
published in Ibadan, Nigeria
Jack Kerouac publishes On the Road, a de-
fining work of the postwar Beat and Coun-
terculture generations
The Chinese painter Qi Baishi dies at his
home in Beijing at the age of ninety-three
November Bomb and the Future of Man)
The collective Equipo 57 publish their man-
ifesto The Interactivity of Plastic Space to
accompany their inaugural exhibition at the
Sala Negra in Madrid
Boris Pasternaks book Doctor Zhivago
is first published in Italy after the author
smuggles it out of the Soviet Union
Ben Enwonwu completes his sculpture of
Queen Elizabeth II
The exhibition Korean Contemporary Artists
opens at the National Museum of Contem-
porary Art at Deoksugung Palace in Seoul
Commemorating the fortieth anniversary of
the October Revolution, the All-Union Art
Exhibition is held at the Manege Exhibition
Hall in Moscow; it is one of the largest ex-
hibitions in Soviet history, with over eight
thousand works displayed
Sensibility, The Void) takes place at Galerie
in Mexico Iris Clert in Paris
December The first Tehran Biennial takes place at the
Yayoi Kusama holds her first exhibition in Abyaz Palace building within the Golestan
the United States at the Dusanne Gallery Palace complex. Organized by Marcos Grig-
in Seattle orian and featuring the work of almost fifty
artists, the Biennial acts as a feeder exhi-
1958
January Avinash Chandra and Francis Newton Souza
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas novel Il
Gattopardo (The Leopard) is posthumously
published
Bimal Roy releases the Hindu drama Mad-
humati
first time at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New
York 17 Yves Kleins performance Anthropomtrie
de l'poque bleue takes place at the Galerie
February internationale d'art contemporain, 253, rue
Lawrence Alloway publishes his essay The Saint Honor, Paris, 9 March 1960.
Arts and the Mass Media in the journal Ar-
bition for the countrys participation in the
March Venice Biennale
Robert Rauschenberg first exhibits his
combines at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New An event simply called Untitled (Happening)
York takes place at Douglass College in New
Brunswick, New Jersey, most likely the first
Chuck Berry releases his classic rock-and- happening in the United States
roll single Johnny B. Goode
Brussels Worlds Fair (also known as Expo
April 58) opens at the Heysel Plateau, and in-
cludes the Atomium and Le Corbusiers
takes place in the studio of Otto Piene in Philips Pavilion
Dsseldorf, exhibiting monochrome works
by forty artists. The catalogue accompa- Pablo Picasso unveils his mural The Fall of
nying the show is also the first issue of the Icarus on the wall of the UNESCO Head-
groups magazine, ZERO, which ceases quarters in Paris
May February solely on postwar art, particularly a con-
Michel Tapi and Yoshihara Jiro jointly or- John Kenneth Galbraith publishes The Af-
ganize the exhibition International Art of a fluent Society, which introduces the contro-
New Era: Informel and Gutai at the Takashi- versial term conventional wisdom
Elizeth Moreira Cardoso releases the album
Cano do Amor Demais, widely considered
to be the worlds first bossa nova record
Karl Jaspers publishes Die Atombombe
und die Zukunft des Menschen (The Atomic
Ritwik Ghatak releases the Indian Bengali
film Ajantrik (The Pathetic Fallacy)
June as a result of World War II
The exhibition Transferences at the Zwem-
mer Gallery constitutes the first London
group show of Commonwealth artists,
16 Frank Stella in front of one of his Black including Sidney Nolan, Francis Newton
Paintings, New York, between 1958 and Souza, Denis Bowen, and a number of New
1962, Photograph: Hollis Frampton Vision Centre artists
The Primera Bienal Interamericana de Pintu-
maya Department Store in Osaka, bringing ra y Grabado (First Inter-American Biennial
together informel artists from Japan, Eu- of Painting and Engraving) takes place at
rope, and the United States the Museo Nacional de Artes Plsticas in
Mexico City
Yves Kleins exhibition La spcialisation
de la sensibilit ltat matire premire Luciano Berios pioneering electroacoustic kan, Simon Okeke, and Uche Okeke, the
en sensibilit picturale stabilise, Le Vide composition Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is
(The Specialization of Sensibility in the broadcast for the first time in Naples
Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial
Chinua Achebes postcolonial novel Things
Fall Apart is published
July publish Manifesto Neoconcreto (Neo-Con-
Wojciech Fangor and the architect
Stanisaw Zamecznik organize the exhibi-
tion The Study in Space at the New Cul-
ture Salon in Warsaw; it is the first spatial
painting (i.e., installation art) exhibition in
Central Europe
Europe at Gallery One in London attracts
significant media attention to the work of
Youssef Chahine releases the film Bab
al-H.add (Cairo Station)
August The first Paris Biennale opens at the Muse
Yashpal publishes Vatan Aur Desh (Home-
land and Country), the first of his two-
volume novel Jhutha Sach (This Is Not
That Dawn) which is based on the events
surrounding Partition. The second volume
Desh Ka Bhavishya (The Future of the
Country) is published two years later.
September opens at the Manege Exhibition Hall in
Mikhail Kalatozov releases the film Letyat
18 Pablo Picasso attends the inauguration
of his mural at the UNESCO building,
Paris, 1958.
zhuravli (The Cranes Are Flying), depicting
the damage suffered to the Soviet psyche
Dorothy Miller organizes the exhibition The
New American Painting at the Hochschule
fr bildende Knste in Berlin, which subse-
quently travels to Basel, Milan, Madrid, Am-
sterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London
October ing is something that can only destroy itself,
The Zaria Art Society is formed by a group
of art students at the Nigerian College of
Arts, Science, and Technology. Comprising
Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, S. Irein
Wangboje, Yusuf Grillo, William Olaosebi-
Concrete Art) opens at the Museu de Arte
group aimed to decolonize the visual arts
as taught by expatriate Europeans
19 Antonio Porta, Angela Verga, Farfa,
Nanni Balestrini and Enrico Baj pose with
Baj and Verga's Interplanetary Sculpture,
Milan, 1959.
December DDR-Grndung (The Tenth Anniversary Ex-
The exhibition Art of Socialist Countries
Moscow. Framed as a socialist response to
the commercial biennials held in Western
Europe, the exhibition was best remem-
bered for the inclusion of several contrasting
approaches to socialist realism as well as,
in the case of the Polish contribution, ele-
ments of abstraction
1959
January Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev
Gnter Grass publishes Die Blechtrommel
(The Tin Drum)
Musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens,
andJ. P. The Big Bopper Richardson are
killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake,
Iowa, along with their pilot, Roger Peter-
son.The event is later dubbed The Day the
Music Died
The Extraordinary Congress of Art Critics
takes place in Braslia, Rio de Janeiro, and
So Paulo with the aim of discussing the
construction of Braslia as part of the Inte-
gration of the Arts project
March most important novel of twentieth-century
Jean Tinguely publishes his manifesto Fr
Statik (For Static), which he then scatters
from an airplane over Dsseldorf.
Jean Fautrier publishes his essay Par-
allles sur linformel (as Parallelen zur tipodean Manifesto, the exhibition argues
neuen Malerei [Parallels to the New
Painting]) in the Viennese journal Bltter +
Bilder, in which he famously states paint-
which must destroy itself in order to be re-
invented
The first Exposio Nacional de Arte Neo-
concreta (National Exhibition of Neo-
Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, the first large-
scale exhibition of neo-concrete works
Amlcar de Castro, Ferreira Gullar, Franz September Raja Rao publishes his best-known work,
Weissmann, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, William S. Burroughs publishes Naked The Serpent and the Rope
Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanudis Lunch
Federico Fellini releases La Dolce Vita
crete Manifesto) in the Brazilian journal Charles Mingus releases the song Fables
Jornal do Brasil / Suplemento Dominical. In of Faubus as a protest against Arkansas The exhibition Ray Gun takes place at the
the same issue, Lygia Pape publishes her governor Orval E. Faubuss actions to pre- Judson Memorial Church in New York, fea-
essay Ballet: A Visual Experience vent integration at Little Rock Central High turing Claes Oldenburgs The Street and Jim
School in 1957 Dines The House
The Second Conference of Negro Writers
and Artists, organized by the Socit afri- Peter Selz organizes the exhibition New Im- February
caine de culture takes place in Rome, with ages of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, The exhibition uvres dArt transformable
Gerard Sekoto delivering his I Am an Afri- New York, examining new approaches to (Transformable Art) opens at Gallery One
can speech figuration in Europe and the United States in London
May October The First National Art Exhibition Soviet
Satyajit Ray releases Apur Sansar (The Ornette Coleman releases the album The Russia takes place in Moscow, featuring
World of Apu), the final part of The Apu Tri- Shape of Jazz to Come over 2,400 works of socialist realist art
olgy of films
The Modern Literature and Art Association
Franois Truffaut releases his debut film d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, exhibiting organize the Hong Kong International Salon
Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows) mostly the work of younger artists of Paintings at St. Johns Cathedral Hall, the
first major exhibition of modern art from
The exhibition Gego: Sculptures and The exhibition Zehn Jahre bildende Kunst in both Hong Kong and Taiwan
Gouaches takes place at the Liberia Cruz der DDR (Ten Years of Fine Art in the GDR)
del Sur in Caracas; it is her first solo show takes place as part of the 10. Jahrestag Yu Hyun-mok releases the film Obaltan (A
Stray Bullet), commonly regarded as one of
June hibition of the Founding of the GDR) at the the best Korean films ever made
Alain Resnaiss film Hiroshima mon amour Pavillon der Kunst in East Berlin
premieres in Paris The International Sky Festival takes place
Allan Kaprow stages his ground-breaking on the roof of the Takashimaya Department
Marcel Camus film Orfeu Negro (Black Or- 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Store in Osaka, in which the work of thirty
pheus) premieres in Paris. Featuring music Gallery in New York
by Antnio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonf,
the film is also noteworthy for popularizing The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
bossa nova music outside of Brazil opens in New York, ten years after the
death of its founder and six months after its
July architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, died.
The American National Exhibition opens in
a pavilion in Sokolniki Park, Moscow, and is November
best remembered for the impromptu Kitch- Gustav Metzger publishes his first mani
en Debate during the opening between festo of Auto Destructive Art, which
then US vice president Richard Nixon and exhibits at the Cardboards exhibition, held
at Brian Robins' Coffee House in London
Documenta 2 opens in Kassel. Subtitled Nam June Paik performs Hommage John
Art After 1945, the exhibition focuses Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano at
Dsseldorfs Galerie 22, his first action in
tingent of ninety-seven predominantly which he performs outside the boundaries
20 Raymond Hains, Pierre Restany,
abstract expressionist works sent by New of conventional music
Jacques Villegl, Franois Dufrene and
Yorks Museum of Modern Art
Arman meet at the studio of Yves Klein
The exhibition 10 Pintores concretos expo- to sign the Constitutive Declaration of
August nen pinturas y dibujos at the Galera de Arte New Realism, Paris, 1960.
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio publishes his Man- ColorLuz in Havana represents the first
ifesto della Pittura Industriale (Manifesto major showing of the recently-formed group
of Industrial Painting: For a Unitary Applied Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Japanese, US, and European artists are
Art) in the journal Internationale Situation- Painters); comprising Pedro lvarez, Wifre- attached to helium balloons and launched
niste do Arcay, Salvador Corratg, Sand Dari, into the sky
Luis Martnez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, Jos
Qurratulain Hyder publishes his novel Aag Mijares, Pedro de Ora, Lol Soldevilla, and May
ka Darya (River of Fire), considered to be the Rafael Soriano Guy Debord publishes the Situationist In-
ternational Manifesto in Paris
Urdu fictio Fateh Moudarres is given his first solo exhi-
bition at the Galleria Cichi in Rome June
The Antipodeans exhibition takes place at Nagisa Oshima releases the film Seishun
the Victorian Artists Society in Melbourne. December Zankoku Monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth)
Accompanied by the publication of The An- Frank Stella exhibits the first of his Black
Paintings at the exhibition Sixteen Amer- Gustav Metzger stages the First Public
for the importance of figurative art and pro- icans at the Museum of Modern Art, New Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art at
tests against the pervasiveness of US-style York the Temple Gallery in London
Abstract Expressionism
Michelangelo Antonioni releases the film
1960
Miles Davis releases the influential album LAvventura
Kind of Blue
July
Eugne Ionescos absurdist play Rhinocros Jean-Luc Godard releases his first full-
is presented for the first time on BBC Radio April length film, bout de souffl (Breathless)
Parviz Tanavoli opens the Atelier Kaboud in
Tehran, an important meeting spot for the
Contemporary Artists Group
123
September Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, JP
Lionel Rogosins semi-documentary film
Come Back Africa premieres at the Venice
International Film Festival
Ben Enwonwu publishes his letter African
Art In Danger in the Times newspaper, in
which he speaks of his fear about the un-
healthy situation affecting Nigerian modern
art due to the influx of Western, particularly
British, ideas and the ascension of the com-
mercial market
Gillo Pontecorvo releases the film Kap
October generation of artists such as Daniel Spoerri,
Armans exhibition Le Plein (Full-Up) opens
at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris
Wole Soyinkas A Dance of the Forests is
first performed as part of Nigerias inde-
pendence celebrations in Lagos
The Independence Exhibition takes place
on Victoria Island in Lagos, and includes an
Exhibition of Contemporary Nigerian Art
Lygia Clark first exhibits her Bichos at the
Galeria Bonino in Rio de Janeiro
The Nouveau Ralisme Manifesto is
signed at Yves Kleins apartment in Paris
21 Frank McEwen with founding members
of the Workshop School in Salisbury.
November in the journal Das Kunstwerk
A group of artists stages an alternative ex-
hibition of works on the exterior walls of
the Duksoogung Palace in Seoul, which
is hosting the annual Kukjeon (National
Art Exhibition). Comprising informel-style
works, the exhibition contrasts with the
predominantly conservative works on ex-
hibit inside the building
Hermann Nitsch stages his First Painting
Action at the Technical Museum in Vienna
1961
January Athol Fugards play The Blood Knot pre-
Jewad Selim dies in Baghdad, just prior to
the completion of his monumental Nasb
al-Hurriyah (Monument of Freedom) in Al-
Tahrir Square
February experimental documentary film Chronique
Niki de Saint Phalle stages the first of her
Shooting actions in a vacant lot behind the
artists studio at 11 Impasse Ronsin in Paris,
the first of a dozen such events
March American Painting, which opens in Vienna
The Mbari Artists and Writers Club is found-
ed in Ibadan by Ulli Beier and the writers
Clark, and Ezekiel Mphahlele
The first proto-Fluxus events are held in
New York to coincide with the opening of
George Maciunas and Almus Salciuss AG
Gallery. Music and events are staged by
Maciunas and Salcius himself, along with
Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jackson Mac Low, and
Dick Higgins
The exhibition Bewogen Beweging (Moved
Movement) takes place at the Stedelijk Mu-
seum in Amsterdam; it is an exhibition of ki-
netic art introducing the work of an emerging
Jean Tinguely, Robert Mller, Jess Rafael
Soto, and Dieter Roth
April The exhibition Sydney Nine opens at the
The Gorgona group publish the first of their
anti-magazines, Gorgona 1, with each is-
sue prepared as an original artwork by a
single artist, beginning with Josip Vanita
Malangatana Ngwenya has his first solo
exhibition, Malangatana Goenha Valente, at
the Associao dos Organismos Econmi-
cos in Loureno Marques
May opens in Tiananmen Square in Beijing
The I. Trijenale likovnih umetnosti (First Yu-
goslav Triennial of Fine Arts) takes place at
the Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum
of Contemporary Art) in Belgrade
The exhibition Environments, Situations,
Spaces opens at the Martha Jackson Gal-
lery in New York. Allan Kaprow installs his
seminal work, The Yard, in the sculpture
garden, while Claes Oldenburg publishes
his text I Am for An Art
June in Zagreb
Karl Otto Gtz publishes his essay Elekt-
ronische Malerei und ihre Programmierung
(Electronic Painting and its Programming)
V. S. Naipaul publishes his much-acclaimed
novel A House for Mr Biswas
Kwame Nkrumah publishes his book I Speak
of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology
22 Demas Nwoko and Uche
Okeke at the opening of the
inaugural art exhibition
at the Mbari Artists
and Writers Club, Ibadan, 1961.
The United States Information Agency or-
ganizes the traveling exhibition Vanguard
before traveling to Belgrade, Skopje, Za-
greb, Maribor, Ljubljana, Rijeka, London,
Darmstadt, and Salzburg
Rattana Pestonjis film Prae Dum (Black
Silk) premieres at the Berlin International
Film festival, becoming the first Thai film to
be chosen for a major festival
The survey Recent Australian Painting opens
at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, repre-
senting the first major exhibition of modern
Australian art outside of the country
Raymond Hains and Jacques (Mah de la)
Villegl first exhibit their affiches lacres
referencing the Algerian War as part of the
exhibition La France dchire (Torn France),
which is held at Galerie J in Paris
July esco Lo Savio, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni,
David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney, before
showing at Gallery A in Melbourne in Sep-
tember. A direct response to the recent
Antipodeans exhibition, the participating art-
ists make a dramatic entrance, arriving at the
opening of the Melbourne show in helicopter
and brandishing abstract paintings. A young
Robert Hughes writes the catalogue
The Museum of the Chinese Revolution
Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, und Gnther Ueck-
er organize the event ZERO. Edition, Expo-
sition, Demonstration at Galerie Schmela in
Dsseldorf, which coincides with the publi-
cation of the third and final issue of ZERO
magazine
August Music) at the Stdtisches Museum in Wies-
The first Nove tendencije (New Tendencies)
exhibition opens at the Galerija suvremene
umjetnosti (Gallery for Contemporary Art)
The exhibition Otra Figuracin (Other Fig-
uration) takes place at the Galera Peuser
in Buenos Aires, featuring the work of Luis
Felipe No, Jorge de la Vega, Rmulo Mac-
ci, and Ernesto Deira
September found objects subsequently distorted or de-
Arnold Belkin publishes his essay Interio-
rism, Neo-Humanism, New Expressionism
in the journal Nueva Presencia
Ornette Coleman releases the landmark
album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation
Members of the Gorgona group hold the
first Studio G exhibition at the ira picture
framing shop in Zagreb. Participants include
Eugen Feller, Ivan Koaric , Maeda, Franois
Morellet, Ivan Rabuzin, Matija Skurjeni,
Marko utaric , and Victor Vasarely
mieres at the Rehearsal Room of Dorkay
House in Johannesburg
October Benjamin Britten premieres his work War
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin release their
dun t (Chronicle of a Summer)
William Seitz organizes The Art of the As-
semblage at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, a monumental survey exhibition
of 130 artists works, ranging from cubism
to the present day; the exhibition subse-
quently travels to Dallas and San Francisco
Joseph Hellers satirical novel Catch-22 is
published
Gyrgy Ligetis micropolyphonic orches-
tral work Atmosphres premieres at the
Donaueschingen Festival
November which he releases balloons into the air, illu-
Ibrahim El-Salahi is given a solo exhibition
at the Mbari Gallery in Ibadan, Nigeria
Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schnebeck
publish the first edition of their Pandmo-
nisches Manifest (Pandemonic Manifes-
to) as a poster during their joint exhibition
at Fasanenplatz in Berlin. A second version
of the manifesto would later be published
as a limited edition in February 1962
Frantz Fanons book Les Damns de la terre
(The Wretched of the Earth) is published in
Paris
The exhibition Arte Destructivo (Destruc-
tuve Art) takes place at the Galera Lirolay
in Buenos Aires. The exhibition comprises
23 Participants of the Arte Destructivo
(Destructive Art) exhibition pose for a
group photo at the Galeria Lirolay, Buenos
Aires, 1961 [Seated: Kenneth Kemble,
standing f.l.t.r.: Jorge Lopez Anaya, Silvia
Torras, Jorge Roiger and Luis Wells.]
stroyed to the sound of a lecture by Jorge
Romero Brest, a reading of Aristotles Po-
etics, and the script to a play by Picasso,
along with the artists own musical compo-
sitions
Yoko Ono performs A Grapefruit in the
World of Park, A Piece for Strawberries and
Violin, and AOSto David Tudor at Carnegie
Hall in New York
December May others
Claes Oldenburg installs The Store in a
disused property at 107 East 2nd Street in
New York
1962
January June introduces the work of artists who would
Glauber Rocha releases the Barravento
(The Turning Wind), one of the key films
within the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement
February Christo installs his Wall of Oil Barrels: The
Chris Markers post-apocalyptic science fic-
tion film La Jete (The Pier) is released in Paris
March The inaugural concert of the Judson Dance
Otto Piene organizes the first Zero-Fest
at the Rheinwiesen in Dsseldorf, during
minating them with spotlights
Marcos Grigorian exhibits part of his monu-
mental Gate of Auschwitz for the first time
at the Misaquieh Film Studio in Tehran
First Salon of Independence) takes place
The exhibition Nul is staged at Amsterdams
Stedelijk Museum. Featuring the work of
Arman, Pol Bury, Enrico Castellani, Dada-
maino, Piero Dorazio, Lucio Fontana, Franc-
Otto Piene, and Gnther Uecker, the exhibi-
tion constitutes the first major survey of the
ZERO group
The Mbari Mbayo Club is founded in
Osogbo. For its inauguration Duro Lad-
ipo premieres his first opera, Oba Moro
(Ghost-Catcher King)
April Salisbury, Rhodesia
A display of paintings by Charles Hossein
24 Emmet Williams demonstrates his
participative Universal Poem at The
Festival of Misfits at the ICA,
London, 1961.
Zenderoudi at the Third Tehran Biennial at
Abayz Palace marks the official beginning
of the Saqqa-kana School movement
Andrei Tarkovskys Soviet war drama Ivano-
vo detstvo (Ivans Childhood) is released in
Moscow
Vladimir Nabokov publishes his 999-line
poem Pale Fire
Umberto Eco publishes Opera aperta (The
Open Work)
Requiem, Op. 66 to mark the consecration
of the new Coventry Cathedral
Doris Lessings novel The Golden Notebook
is published
Yves Klein dies of a heart attack in Paris
Iron Curtain in Rue Visconti in Paris
July ace Museum, Seoul
Theater takes place at the Judson Memorial
Hall in New York
Andy Warhol first exhibits his Campbells
Soup Cans (1962) at the Ferus Gallery in
Los Angeles
The Premier salon de lindpendance (The
December Ben Enwonwu publishes Into the Abstract
at the Salle Ibn Khaldoun in Algiers, the
nations first major post-independence art
exhibition
August
Frank McEwen founds the Workshop
School in the basement of the Rhodes Na-
tional Gallery in Salisbury, Rhodesia
The first Actuel exhibition opens at the Na-
tional Central Information Center in Seoul
The First International Congress of African
Culture is held at the National Gallery in
The kinetic art exhibition Dylaby: Dyna-
misch Labyrint (Dylaby: Dynamic Labyrinth)
takes place at the Stedelijk Museum in Am-
sterdam
September Tetsumi Kudo performs Happening: Philos-
Joseph Beuys helps organize FLUXUS:
Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik
(FLUXUS: International Festival of Newest
baden, Europes first major Fluxus festival
Rachel Carson publishes her book Silent
Spring, documenting the grave environmen-
tal effects caused by the indiscriminate use
of pesticides
October musik. Das Instrumentale Theater held at
The exhibition Entartete KunstBildersturm
vor 25 Jahren (Degenerate ArtIconoclasm
25 Years Ago) takes place in Munichs Haus
der Kunst; it is the first critical survey of the
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition
that the National Socialists staged in the
city in 1937
Dr. No, the first James Bond film, is released
The Festival of Misfits takes place at Lon-
dons ICA and Gallery One, featuring Fluxus
concerts and events organized by Robert
Filliou, Dick Higgins, Gustav Metzger, Robin
Page, Nam June Paik, Daniel Spoerri, and
The First International Exhibition of Fine Arts
of Saigon takes place at the Round-Pavilion
in the Tao-Dn Garden. Intended as a bien-
nial, nomadic exhibition, the outbreak of the
Vietnam War ensures that this is the only
iteration of this event
The International Exhibition of the New Real-
ists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York
later be grouped under the banner of Pop
art: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichten-
stein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist,
George Segal, Andy Warhol, Tom Wes-
selmann, Tano Festa, Mimmo Rotella, and
Mario Schifano
November
The 1st Exhibition of the New Image Asso-
ciation takes place at Gyeongbokgung Pal-
An important solo exhibition of Jacob Law-
rences work opens at the Mbari Club in
Ibadan, Nigeria. It then travels to Lagos and
Oshogbo
Yasujiro Ozu releases the film Sanma no aji
(An Autumn Afternoon)
June
Anthony Burgess publishes his dystopian
novel A Clockwork Orange
1963
January
The exhibition Two Painters from Africa:
Malangatana and Salahi opens at the ICA
in London
Ousmane Sembne's debut short film Bo-
rom Sarret (The Wagoner) premieres at the
Festival de Tours in Paris
Sylvia Plath publishes The Bell Jar
February
ophy of Impotence at the Cinma-Studio de
Boulogne in Paris
George Maciunas publishes the first Flux-
us Manifesto comprising selected diction-
ary definitions of the word flux
Joseph Beuys performs Sibirische Sym-
phonie, 1. Satz (Siberian Symphony, First
Movement) as part of the festival FESTUM
FLUXORUM. FLUXUS. Musik und Anti-
the Staatlichen Kunstakademie in Dssel-
dorf
Piero Manzoni dies of a heart attack in his
studio in Milan
Federico Fellini's film 8 premieres in Italy
to universal acclaim
Jean-Marie Straub releases his short film
Machorka-Muff in New York
March Matko Metrovic uses the occasion to pub-
Dennis Brutuss collection of poems Sirens,
Knuckles, Boots: Poems is published by the
Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan
while he is in prison in South Africa
Daniel Spoerri stages Restaurant de la
Galerie J in Paris, which consists of a work-
ing restaurant, the remnants of which are
then exhibited
Nam June Paik stages Exposition of Music
Electronic Television at the Galerie Par-
nass in Wuppertal
The Beatles release their debut studio
album Please Please Me
The Zero Group stage their exhibition
ZERO Der neue Idealismus at the Galerie
Diogenes in Berlin, the leaflet of which
contains a copy of their manifesto
April
Pierre Boulle publishes his science fiction nov-
el La Plante des singes (Planet of the Apes)
May
Josiah Kariuki publishes Mau Mau De
tainee, recounting his experiences of the
detention camps in Kenya during the Mau
Mau Uprising
25 The members of the Otra Figuracin
group, Rmulo Macci, Ernesto Deira,
Luis Felipe No, and Jorge de la Vega, in
Buenos Aires, 1963.
Jungle: A Criticism of the New Trend in
Nigerian Art in the South African journal
Drum
Marta Minujn, along with a group of other
artists, stages La Destruccin (The De-
struction) at Impasse Ronsin in Paris, in
which she destroys all of the works that she
had created during her scholarship in the
city by burning them and then smearing the
remains with paint
July
Alexander Skunder Boghossian is given
a solo exhibition of his works at the Mbari
Gallery in Ibadan
LeRoi Jones publishes his landmark study
of Afro-American music and culture Blues
People: Negro Music in White America
August
The Nove tendencije 2 exhibition takes
place at the Galerija suvremene umjetnos-
ti (Gallery of Contemporary Art) in Zagreb.
lish his untitled manifesto, which would be
subsequently distributed as ldeologija
Novih tendencija (The Ideology of New
Tendencies)
The Manifes Kebudayaan (Cultural Man-
ifesto) is published in the News Republic
newspaper. Signed by a number of Jakar-
ta-based artists, the manifesto called for a
rejection of Sukarnos authoritarian cultural
policies in favor of a universal humanism
Charlotte Moorman stages the first
Avant-Garde Festival of New York at the
Judson Memorial Church in New York; it
combines Fluxus and happenings with per-
formance, kinetic, and video art
125
September Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) at the
The Groupe de Recherche dArt Visuel
(Visual Arts Research Group) stage their
first collective work, Labyrinthe, as part of
the third Paris Biennale at the Muse d'art
moderne de la ville de Paris
Forough Farrokhzads acclaimed documen-
tary short film Khaneh syah ast (The House larna (Popular Exhibition, also known as the
Is Black) is released
Wolf Vostells large-scale happening Nein
9 Decollagen (organized by Galerie Parnass)
takes place at various locations throughout
Wuppertal. The audience is ferried by bus
from location to location, including a cinema
that screened Sun in Your Head as people
lay on the floor
Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai holds her
first solo exhibition at the Exhibition Centre
in Marina, Lagos
The First Commonwealth Biennial of Ab-
stract Art takes place at Londons Common-
wealth Institute, before traveling around the
United Kingdom
The XII Convegno Internazionale Artisti,
Critici e Studiosi dArte (12th International
Convention of Artists, Critics, and Art Stu-
26 Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg
stage the exhibition Leben mit Pop: Eine
Demonstration fr den kapitalistischen Re-
alismus (Living with Pop: A Demonstration
for Capitalist Realism) at the Mbelhaus
Berges, Dsseldorf, 1963.
dents) takes place in Rimini and San Mari-
no, concurrent with the IV Biennale di San
Marino
October Aktuln umeni (Aktual Art), both of which
The first exhibition of the newly formed Am-
adlozi Group opens at the Egon Guenther
Gallery in Johannesburg, featuring work
by Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo, Ezrom
Legae and Edoardo Villa
Georg Baselitz holds a solo exhibition at the
Galerie Werner & Katz in Berlin; in which
he exhibits Die groe Nacht im Eimer (The
Big Night Down the Drain, 196263) for
the first time. The work proves so contro-
versial that it, along with the work Nackter
Mann (Naked Man, 1962), are confiscated
by the police
The exhibition By or of Marcel Duchamp or
Rrose Slavy opens at the Pasadena Mu-
seum of Art. Curated by Walter Hopps, the
show is Duchamps first ever retrospective
Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer stage
the exhibition/demonstration Leben mit
Pop Eine Demonstration fr den kapital-
istischen Realismus (Living with Pop A
Mbelhaus Berges in Dsseldorf
Group 1890 have their inaugural (and only)
exhibition at the LKA Gallery in New Delhi
November June across twenty-four locations
Tadeusz Kantors exhibition Wystawa popu-
Anti-Exhibition) at the Galeria Krzysztofory
in Krakow, filling the spaces dark brick
basement with almost a thousand objects
that include drawings, sketches, theatrical
costumes, boxes, and photographs
December John Coltrane releases the album A Love
Shigeko Kubotas first solo exhibition, 1st
Love, 2nd Love ..., takes place at the Naiqua
Gallery in Tokyo
The first Original Form Association exhibi-
tion takes place at the National Central In-
formation Center in Seoul
1964
January Oshogbo
The Society of Nigerian Artists hold their
inaugural exhibition at the Exhibition Centre
in Lagos
Stanley Kubricks satirical black comedy Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor-
rying and Love the Bomb is released in the
United States
March graphic artas well as its emphasis on
Marshall McLuhan publishes Understand-
ing Media: The Extensions of Man, coining
the term global village
Duro Ladipos Three Yoruba Plays (Oba
Koso/The King Did Not Hang; Oba Moro/
The King of Ghosts; and Oba Waja/The
King Is Dead) are published together for the
first time
April and a forerunner to reggae
Milan Knk organizes the Prvn manifes-
tace Aktulnho umen (First Manifestation
of Aktual Art) in the streets around Prague,
simultaneously publishing his magazine
constitute Central Europes first happenings
The Rolling Stones release their first, self-ti-
tles album
Clement Greenberg organizes the exhibi-
tion Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, represent-
ing a comprehensive survey of color field
painters and subsequently leading to their
work being grouped under this heading
May October Inta Harr fi Raika (You Are Free to Your
The 32nd Venice Biennale signals the Eu-
ropean arrival of Pop art, with the work
of Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, and Claes
Oldenburg exhibited in the American pa-
vilion, while a collateral exhibition of pop
artists is staged by Leo Castelli and Ileana
Sonnabend in the ex-American Consulate
in San Gregorio. Most controversial of all is
the awarding of the prize for foreign artists
to Robert Rauschenberg, further signifying
the United States ascension as the center
of the Western art world
Carolee Schneemann first performs her work
Meat Joy at the American Center in Paris as
part of the First Festival of Free Expression
Mohammed Khadda publishes his essay
lments pour un art nouveau (Compo-
nents for a New Art) in the Algerian journal
Rvolution africaine
Roland Barthes publishes lments de
smiologie (Elements of Semiology) in the
French journal Communications
Documenta 3 opens in Kassel. Now nick-
named the Museum of 100 Days, Docu-
27 Paul Keeler, Sergio de Camargo, Guy
Brett, Christopher Walker, David Medalla
and Gustav Metzger mailing Signals
Newsbulletin from Cornwall Gardens,
London, 1964.
mentas focus on painting, sculpture, and
abstractionresulted in it appearing to
be somewhat behind the times, especially
when considering the ascendancy of Pop,
Nouveau Ralisme, Fluxus, and Capitalist
Realism in Europe and the United States
July Archie Shepp releases the album Fire Mu-
Millie Small releases a cover version of the
song My Boy Lollipop, the first successful
hit that was recorded in the bluebeat style
participatory environments
Yoko Ono first performs Cut Piece at the
Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, with further
performances taking place in Tokyo, Lon-
don, and New York
August outside of America
The first edition of the Signals Newsbulletin
is published in London
Mikhail Kalatozovs film Soy Cuba (I Am
Cuba) is released in Moscow
September I Put a Spell on You
Uzo Egonu holds his first solo exhibition at
the Woodstock Gallery in London
The inauguration of the Signals Gallery takes
place in London. Founded by David Medal-
la and Paul Keeler, the gallery opens with a
solo exhibition of Takiss kinetic sculptures
Hi Red Center perform their famous Och-
anomizu Drop and Lets Participate in the
HRC Campaign to Promote the Cleanup
and Orderliness of the Metropolitan Area!
in various venues around Tokyo during the
citys hosting of the Olympic Games
November Shigeko Kubota performs Vagina Painting However, the director of the institute, Jorge
Herbie Hancock releases the album Empy- as part of the Perpetual Fluxfest event held Romero Brest, orders its removal just prior
rean Isles at the Cinematheque in New York to the opening
Wolf Vostell organizes In Ulm, um Ulm und Gnter Brus stages his Wiener Spaziergang October
um Ulm herum, featuring 200 participants (Vienna Walk) through the streets of Vien- The Muzej savremene umetnosti (Museum
nas old city of Contemporary Art) in Belgrade officially
opens
The first Biennial of Spatial Forms takes
place in Elblag, Poland. Organized and The exhibition Between Poetry and Painting
1965
sponsored by the Zamech Mechanical takes place at the London ICA
Works and the artist Jrgen Blum (Gerard
Kwiatkowski), the biennial served as a na- November
tional survey of large-scale sculpture On the evening before the opening at the
January Galerie Schmela in Dsseldorf, Joseph
August Beuys stages the action Wie man dem toten
Supreme Hlio Oiticica presents the first public per- Hasen die Bilder erklrt (How to Explain
formance of his Parangols during the ex- Pictures to a Dead Hare). With the doors
A censored version of Marlen Khutsievs hibition Opinio 65 at the Museu de Arte locked, Beuys sits in the window of the gal-
film Mne dvadtsat let (I Am Twenty) is re- Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; concurrent lery explaining the surrounding paintings to
leased in Moscow. The original three-hour a dead hare he cradles in his arms, his face
film would not be screened until 1989 covered in gold leaf and honey
March December
Duan Makavejevs art film Covek nije tica Tadeusz Kantors stages his first happen-
(Man Is Not A Bird) is released in Yugoslavia ing, Cricotage, at Towarzystwo Przyjaci
Sztuk Pieknych (Krakw Society of Friends
Twins Seven Seven has his first exhibition of Fine Arts) on Chmielna Street in Warsaw
as part of the Third Anniversary Celebration
of Mbari Mbayo at the Mbari Mbayo Club in
May
The Spiral Group (Romare Bearden, Charles
Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff)
hold their firstand onlyexhibition, First
Group Showing (Works in Black and White),
in a storefront space at 147 Christopher
Street in New York. Bearden exhibits his
work Conjur Woman (1964) for the first time 28 Gnter Brus during his Vienna Walk,
1965.
Stano Filko and Alex Mlynrcik stage the
legendary HAPPSOC I events throughout with his publication of Paragol: uma nova
the streets of Bratislava fundao objetiva arte (Paragol: A New
Objective Foundation for Art) in the Brazil-
David Smith dies in a car crash in South ian journal Opinio
Shaftsbury, Vermont
Marta Minujn and Rubn Santantonn sic, which included a requiem for Malcolm X
organize the installation exhibition La Me-
nesunda (Mayhem) at the Instituto di Tella Swiss architect Le Corbusier dies after
in Buenos Aires, featuring sixteen rooms of drowning in the Mediterranean Sea at
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France
The exhibition Lygia Clark: First London Ex- September
hibition of Abstract Reliefs and Articulated Ye Yushan and a team of sculptors from
Sculpture takes place at the Signals Gallery the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts exhibit
in London, her first major solo exhibition The Rent Collection Courtyard at the former
Manor House of Liu Wencai (the original
rent collector). The 114 sculptures prove
June to be so popular that replicas are quickly
David Medalla publishes his MMMMMMM made and exhibited at the Museum of the
Manifesto in the Signals Newsbulletin Chinese Revolution in Beijing
Nina Simone releases her influential album The Commonwealth Art Festival takes
place in various locations throughout Lon-
don. Although predominantly focused on
Fateh Al-Moudarres, Abdel Aziz Alloun, and historical art, the exhibition of New Rho-
Mahmoud Daadouch publish their letter desian Sculpture at the Royal Albert Hall
features works by a group of African artists
Opinion) in the journal Sawt al-Arab; the who emerged from the school run by Frank
letter would be later known as the Syrian McEwen at the National Gallery in Harare
Artists Manifesto (then Salisbury)
July Len Ferrari first attempts to exhibit his
The first Biennale der Ostseelnder (Bienni- sculpture La civilizacin occidental y cristi-
al of the Baltic Sea Countries) takes place ana (Western Christian Civilisation, 1965)
at the Museum der Stadt Rostock as part of as part of the Premio Nacional e Internac-
the citys larger Ostseewoche Festival ional Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (National
Award and the International Institute Tor-
cuato Di Tella) exhibition in Buenos Aires.
127
Section Introduction
Yasufumi Nakamori
Stephen Petersen
Ariella Azoulay
Plates

1 AFTERMATH:
ZERO HOUR AND
THE ATOMIC ERA

AFTERMATH:
ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA
T
he opening image of the postwar era is that of the atomic bomba
new technology that ushered in an era of intertwined beginnings
and endings. The bomb was first a Japanese story, told through
photography (much of it suppressed, only to be released later)
and by artists describing the suffering they saw. Photographs and films of
ruined cities and of concentration camp survivors also appeared in the im-
mediate postwar period, and the full realization of the horror of the camps
sparked ambitious work in Germany. As these accounts put an end to
European moral authority, the wars conclusion also signaled the end of
Europes political power and the opening of an era of American military
and commercial dominance. American artists were excited by the won-
drous natural and scientific revelations of the nuclear age and were awed by
the bombs biblically scaled power, even as they were skeptical of the U.S.
governments justification for its use. In the wake of Futurisms worship of
technology, Italian artists were also keenly focused on the bomb. A new
kind of war began: the Cold War and the arms race, driven by the United
States and Russia but encompassing all nations. The iconography of the
mushroom cloud helped to create a new awareness of the globe as a single,
interconnected entity, a sense of scale emphasized by the programs of
space exploration that would emerge from military technology, affording
views of the Earth that led to an awareness of global interconnectedness.
Introduction 133
 B
y ruminating on the images of Japanese cities
bombarded in 1945, I believe I might be able to
construct a point of view with which to confront
world history. It was only from the springboard
stance of a return to that point where all human
constructs were nullified that future construction
would again be possible, I thought. Ruins to me
were a source of imagination, and in the 1960s,
it turned out that the image of the future city was itself ruins. Professing faith
in ruins was equal to planning the future, so much were the times deranged
and out of sync.
Arata Isozaki, 20061
The epigraph above, by the architect Arata Isozaki, represents a senti-
ment shared in the 1960s by many of the so-called yakeato-ha, the pop-
ulation that had grown up in the fire-devastated areas of postWorld War
II Japan. Born in the 1930s, as adolescents they saw their cities in ashes.
Working from their memo-
ries in the immediate post-
war years, they envisioned an
archetypal city, a future city.
on August 10, 1945, reveal a raw, direct dimension of the carnage, unfil-
tered by artistic subjectivity.3 When the second atom bomb was dropped
on Nagasaki on August 9, Yamahata was immediately dispatched from
his post in Fukuoka to go there with four other soldiers, including a writ-
er and a painter. Despite the relatively short distance between the two
citiesabout 105 kilometers, or 65 milesin the chaos of the moment
the reporters trip took them twelve hours by train. They arrived on the
outskirts of Nagasaki around 3 a.m. on August 10. In the cold night air
and under a beautiful starry sky, Yamahatas first sight there was of
numerous small fires, like elf fires, smoldering at a distance.4 He soon
sensed that the city was in complete ruins. One of his companions
described it as a desert of death, as if hit by the largest storm in an era,
unfolding under a crescent moon.5
Yamahata was in Nagasaki for the next twelve hours. As day broke
and the light grew, he began to photograph, walking about six kilometers
from south to north and passing near ground zero. His images show
charred bodies, bomb victims near death (fig. 1), architectural debris,
a burning landscape, and a
few seemingly healthy survi-
vors, all seen under the direct
rays of a cloudless August sky

IMAGINING A CITY Isozakis statement thus

speaks of the power of visually
(plate 28). A photograph of a
young boy standing with his

THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY: and viscerally experiencing

the city in ruins. For many of
mother, each holding a rice
ball and gazing absently at

JAPAN FROM 1945 TO 1968 them, the image of the

bombed city, memorialized
the photographer, is among
the best-known pictures
Yasufumi Nakamori through photographs, served Yamahata shot that day; it
as an allegory for the death of was later included in the 1953
the old city and its ideological exhibition The Family of Man
systemthat is, Japans im- at The Museum of Modern
perial fascism of the war Art, New York, a version of
yearsas well as for the citys which traveled to Tokyo in
2
new life. 1955, where four more of
It is against this back- Yamahatas Nagasaki photo-
ground that this short essay graphs were added. 6
Fig. 1. Yosuke Yamahata. Nagasaki Journey. August 10, 1945. Silver gelatin print
traces the ruins of the war, as on glossy fiber paper, 10.413.6 cm. Courtesy Daniel Blau, Munich Yamahatas photographs
they were photographed and from that day, later called
rebuilt, between 1945 and the ground zero of atomic
1968, a significant period in the postwar era when Japans political, eco- photography by the critic Masafumi Suzuki,7 were dramatically dif-
nomic, ideological, and architectural environments shifted dramatically. ferent from his earlier documentary photographs of people and sites
At first those ruins served as mere documents, but as they were built over in China and Southeast Asia. Those photos had emphasized the trium-
and the collective memory of them began to evaporate, they began to phant aspects of Japans colonial expansion in the region and were
function not only as reminders of the past butin Isozakis senseas released in propagandistic publications supporting the fascist govern-
imaginative sources in the search for the future. They were crucial in ment. In Nagasaki, finding his consciousness of expression blown
constructing alternate times and spaces to revive fading memories. away, Yamahata just kept looking at the transfiguration of the world
Among the photographs bearing witness to the atrocity of the atom brought about by the A-bomb. 8 He would later remember that he was
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, at least 119 shots of completely calm and composed it was just too much, too enormous
Nagasaki taken by the Japanese-army photographer Ysuke Yamahata to absorb.9

1. Aftermath Yasufumi Nakamori 135

 The Japanese military never used Yamahatas Nagasaki photo-
graphs for propaganda, since Japan soon surrendered. Some appeared
in newspapers before General Douglas MacArthur banned publishing
any information relating to the A-bombs. But Yamahata managed to
keep his negatives during the Allied Occupationthey were not confis-
catedand on August 15, 1952, after the ban was lifted, he published them
as a book called Kiroku shashin: genbaku no Nagasaki (Documentary
Photography: A-Bombed Nagasaki). The publication closely followed
the issue of the magazine Asahi Graph for August 6, 1952, which for the
first time widely distributed photographs of the full extent of the
atrocities visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Fig. 2. Unidentified Photographer, United States Government.
Blast- Fire-Damaged Ruins of Takeya Grammar School, Hiroshima.
October 1945. Silver gelatin print, 1012.7 cm. International Center of Photography,
New York. Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006
Yamahatas pictures contrast sharply with a group of photographs
taken in Hiroshima by photographers assigned to the Physical Damage
Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Those pho-
tographs, shot to investigate and record the effects of the bombs on
buildings, infrastructure, and industrial complexes, focus on structural
damages absent human presence. Between October 14 and November
26, 1945, the photographers took over a thousand photographs.10 These
images are clinical, scientific, and typological; they categorize their
subjects by building type and by location and elevation in relation to
ground zero (fig. 2). They appear alongside written analyses in a clas-
sified three-volume report, The Effect of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima,
Japan (1947).
The lives of the bomb victims soon began to be forgotten as the na-
tion and its cities rebuilt at full speed. (By 1956, a Japanese white paper had
stated that Japans postwar recovery efforts were complete.) Among the
photographers who began to document the lives of A-bomb survivors in
the 1950s was Ken Domon, who had earlier contributed to such journals as
Nippon and Life. Having advocated realism in photography, Domon spent
136
the year of 1957 photographing survivors of the A-bomb at a hospital, an
orphanage, and in various communities in Hiroshima. The following year,
these photographs became a book, Ken DomonHiroshima, which begins
with photographs of a young girls skin-graft surgery.
While Domon focused on humanistic efforts to portray the lives of
those affected by the bomb, the younger photographer Shmei Tmatsu
took a more conceptual approach, creating a narrative flow of photo-
graphs presented as expressive rather than objective documents.11 In
1961, commissioned to produce images of bomb victims in Nagasaki by
the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, Tmatsu in-
stead photographed fragments of objects stored at the Nagasaki Inter-
national Culture Hall (predecessor of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Mu-
seum), such as a melted beer-bottle and a stopped wristwatch (fig. 3),
shooting them simply against a plain backdrop. He also visited local
villages with a social worker, photographing the keloid scars, burnt skin,
and blinded eyes of their inhabitants. From then until 1999, he would
take a series of photographs of the Urakawa familya mother directly
injured by the bomb and her three daughters born later, one of whom had
only one functioning eye because of secondary exposure to radiation in
utero, through her mother.
When Tmatsu published these images in the book <11:02>
Nagasaki, in 1966, twenty years had passed since the end of the war. A
kind of collective amnesia had erased much of the direct memory of the
consequences of the A-bombs, but Japans sovereignty remained in
question through the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security be-
tween the United States and Japan (also known as Anpo), which allowed
for the massive presence of U.S. military forces on Japanese soil. First
signed in 1952, the treaty had been renewed in 1960. Around the same
time, the photographer Kikuji Kawada became intrigued by cracks and
stains on the surviving walls and ceiling of the dim, damp basement of
the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome, the ruin now a memorial in the city.
He created dark, high-contrast, abstract photographs of these shapes,
then published them in 1965 in a book called Chizu (Map). The book was
elaborately designed, with intricate foldouts of some of the photographs,
which included images of portraits, letters, and personal items left
behind by fallen kamikaze pilots. Tmatsus and Kawadas rather different
books represented each photographers attempt to argue that the period
of the A-bomb damage was not confined to August 1945it had just be-
gun ticking then, and continued into the present.
In 1968, Yamahatas Nagasaki photographs resurfaced in a different
context. Not only was that year the centennial of the Meiji Restoration,
which launched Japans modern era, but politically, socially, and cultural-
ly it was one of the most turbulent years since the end of World War II, in
Japan and around the globe. The nation was caught in a dichotomy, on the
one hand anticipating the opening of Asias first world exposition, the Fig. 3. Shomei Tomatsu. Atomic Bomb Damage: Wristwatch Stopped at 11:02, August 9, 1945, Nagasaki. 1961 (printed 1980).
Gelatin silver print, 21.420 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art. The Alfred and Ingrid Lenz Harrison Purchase Fund. Acc. n.: 2013.22.1
techno-utopian and futuristic Expo 70, in Osaka in two years time, and
on the other the second renewal of the security treaty, also scheduled for
1970. Japanese cities were flooded with protesters who considered Expo a
mere distraction from the treaty renewal for Japanese citizens;
1. Aftermath Yasufumi Nakamori 137
universities were barricaded, and some shut down, by agitating students.
This specific historical context saw a number of photographic examina-
tions of the formation of Japan as a modern nation, for example a massive
traveling show of over 1,600 photographs, Photography 100 Years: A History
of Photographic Expression by the Japanese.12 The exhibition traced the modern
nations history through twenty thematic sections. Four of those sec-
tionsDocument, War Period, National Propaganda, and Graph[ic]
Journalismincluded photographs directly related to World War II,
among them five of Yamahatas photographs of Nagasaki, which were en-
larged to almost one-to-one scale and exhibited as photographic panels.
With their large size and vivid depictions of corporeal damage, these im-
ages renewed and even magnified their earlier impact, and in the minds of
many viewers the post-apocalyptic city streets of Nagasaki in 1945 became
linked with Tokyo streets in 1968, shattered and filled with protestors.
Fig. 4. Arata Isozaki. Re-ruined Hiroshima, project, Hiroshima, Japan (Perspective). 1968. Ink and gouache with cut-and-pasted gelatin silver print on gelatin
silver print, 35.293.7 cm. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation. Acc. n.: 1205.2000
Also in 1968, the architect Isozaki created Re-ruined Hiroshima, a
complex collage of found photographs and his own drawings (fig. 4).
Remembering the bombing and burning of his hometown of ita by U.S.
air raids in July 1945, and seeing streets and campuses in Tokyo vandal-
ized over Anpo againIsozaki himself had been one of the protesters
who clashed with police over the first renewal of the treaty, in 1960he
made the work as part of a larger sonic, visual, architectural, and cyber-
netic installation, Electric Labyrinth, which he produced for the Milan
design triennial that same year. Electric Labyrinth visualized an inter-
mingling of past, present, and future, interwoven and saturated with
tensions and contradictions.
Re-ruined Hiroshima itself is based on a found photograph of the
apocalyptic landscape of Hiroshima soon after the A-bomb was
dropped. While the work refers to the citys nuclear death on August 6,
1945, its title refers to a future momentin terms both of 1968, when
138
the work was made, and of the present in which the work is being
viewedwhen the city may once again become a ruin. A closer look
reveals ambiguities over whether two steel building frameworks that
survived the war (images Isozaki found and superimposed onto the
ruined cityscape), disproportionately large, are collapsing or under
construction. The architects own drawing of a utopian and futuristic
megastructure, seen as vertical shafts beneath one of the frameworks,
suggests the incubation of a new city. Thus multiple moments collide
within Re-ruined Hiroshima, in a constellation of past and present. The
title suggests that the city is for a second time dead, but fragments
within the collage provoke a hope to restore the city with, in Isozakis
words, the operation of imagination.13 The time sequence here is
disordered; Isozaki deliberately disregarded the linearity of time, an
integral aspect of modernity.
As these examples indicate, photographs of A-bombed cities and
their residents were shown and interpreted between 1945 and 1968
according to different strategies, in different formats and contexts, and
for different purposes. As memories of the war began to slip away,
though, photographers and artists gave the images a different life as an
act of protest, reviving them, for example as a collage, in a context that
unfolded as Japans growing role in the Cold War increased the recover-
ing nations importanceproblematically in relation to U.S. involvement
in Asia. In this process, photographs of the ruins, whether they showed
buildings or human bodies, transformed from mere documents to
catalytic agents that complicated the linear sense of time and challenged
the modernity Japan had achieved and the seeming progress it had made
through its miraculous accomplishments in the economic, technolog-
ical, and industrial arenas.
1. Aftermath
1 Arata Isozaki, Japan-ness in Architecture, trans. Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 2006), pp. 99100. Emphasis added by author.
2 See Yasufumi Nakamori, Imagining Cities: Visions of Avant-Garde Artists and Architects
from 1953 to 1970 Japan, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2011.
3 See Rupert Jenkins, Introduction, in Jenkins, ed., Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of
Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945 (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), pp. 1322.
-
4 Yosuke Yamahata, Genbaku satsuei memo, in Munehito Kitajima, ed., Genbaku no Naga-
saki: kiroku shashin (Tokyo: Daiichi shuppan-sha, 1952), p. 23. Authors translation.
5 Jun Higashi, Reportage: genbaku Nagasaki no sanj o,- in ibid., p. 16.
6 The additional photographs in the Tokyo exhibition were removed when Emperor Hirohito
visited it, leaving only a cropped and enlarged photograph of the boy with the rice ball. The
exhibition was designed by the architect Kenz -o- Tange, who at the time was completing the
Hiroshima Peace Center (194956). Tange had played an important role in the life of Isamu
Noguchi during the artists early years in Japan. Inspired by Tanges Hiroshima project, Noguchi
created Model for Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1950; plate 17) and proposed Memorial to the Dead
of Hiroshima (1952).
7 Masafumi Suzuki, The Atomized City and the Photograph, in Jenkins, ed., Nagasaki
Journey, p. 35.
8 Nakamori, Experiments with the Camera: Art and Photography in 1970s Japan, in Naka-
mori, Allison Pappas, and Yuko Fujii, For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art
and Photography, 19681979, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2015), p. 16.
- Meet Yosuke
9 Yamahata, quoted in Hidezoh Kondo, - YamahataNagasaki Photographer the
Day after the Atomic Bombing, Yomiuri Weekly, August 20, 1962, quoted here from Jenkins,
ed., Nagasaki Journey, p. 103.
10 Erin Barnett and Philomena Mariani, Introduction, in Hiroshima Ground Zero 1945, exh.
cat. (New York: International Center of Photography, in association with Steidl, 2011), p. 5.
- -
11 Shomei Tomatsu argued for this approach in his debate with the documentary photographer
-
Yonosuke -
Natori in 1960. In the issue of Asahi Camera for November of that year, Tomatsu
published the letter A Young Photographers Statement: I Refute Mr. Natori, a response to Na-
toris essay The Birth of New Photography, which had appeared in the magazine the previous
month. Active since the prewar years, Natori complained that new, socially oriented photography
often took on the style of Dada-influenced European commercial or fashion photography of the
-
1930s. Tomatsu in turn challenged the realist documentary photography practiced by Natori
and his contemporaries and argued for the portrayal of social issues as personal documents.
12 See Nakamori, Experiments with the Camera, pp. 1516.
13 Isozaki, quoted in Nakamori, Imagining Cities.
Yasufumi Nakamori 139
 I
n May of 1952, Time magazine reviewed an exhibition of paint- nuclear fusion attacks their profiles and prevents them from remaining
ings at the Galleria del Cavallino, Venice, inspired by the atomic intact. As if a hammer had crushed them or as if a charge of dynamite
bomb. How, the review began, should a modern artist react placed inside them had exploded, leaving the traces of combustion.6 The
to the atomic age? The works in the show, including a pierced idea of traces of combustion recalls the scorched landscapes of
canvas by Lucio Fontana, shown illuminated from behind, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as firebombing and other wartime
an enamel drip painting by Gianni Dova, described as a churn- atrocities. Viewed in this way, Wolss nonfigurative works, like those of
ing blue and green fantasy, were self-conscious attempts to Pollock and de Kooning, remain haunted by the absent (exploded,
translate atomic energy into pure gesture (fig. 1). Time described disintegrated) figure.
the works as being almost as explosive as the bomb itself: furious fire- In postwar Milan, influenced by both Pollock and Wols, painters
balls of bright colors and bold contrasts. The exhibit, the brainchild of explored dripped enamels and other automatic techniques as a way both
Milanese dealer Carlo Cardazzo, was a spectacular success. During its to depict and to express the consequences of the atomic bomb. Both the
first week alone, said Time, 4,000 crushed in for a look at the atomic Arte Spaziale (Spatial Art) group, launched by Fontana with Dova and
fireballs and glowing pinholes.1
The question of how modern artists should react to a world forever
altered by the use of atomic weapons had arisen as early as 1946, when
artist Ad Reinhardt rejected Ralston Crawfords hard-edged abstract
renderings of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, asking, Do crooked shapes
and twisted lines represent paintings adjustment to the atomic age?
(NO).2 In a much-quoted interview of 1950, Jackson Pollock linked his in-
novative drip-painting technique of the late 1940s to the need to respond
to recent technological developments, among them the atom bomb:

FORMS DISINTEGRATE: My opinion is that new needs need new techniques It seems to me

PAINTING IN THE SHADOW that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the
atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any

OF THE BOMB other past culture. Each age finds its own technique. 3

Stephen Petersen Pollock saw, or at least intuited, a connection between his own stylistic
breakthrough and the newly unleashed force of the atom, as did the
many critics who reflexively described his work as explosive.
Italian aesthetician Renato Barilli has more pointedly argued that
postwar artists had to confront the Holocaust of the Second World War,
and, as if that were not enough, that of the atomic deflagration:

It might be said that the Other dramatically irrupted and not only in the
marginal domain of stylistic research, but so as to reach all of human- Fig. 1. Members Roberto Crippa, Lucio Fontana, and Gianni Dova of the Arte
Spaziale group holding their paintings inspired by the atomic bomb, Milan, 1952.
ity. This irruption changed the terms of the problem. Artists, with their Courtesy Galleria del Naviglio Milano

intuition, understood it very well, and the informel, accompanied by

other tendencies, was the response they proposed. 4
Barilli vividly likens the dissolution of the figure in the work of
Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late 1940s to the bursting atom:
In the same way, in the free transcription of Pollock and de Kooning the
anthropomorphic figures of Picassian post-cubism explode and are
fused into the background of the picture.5 Whereas modern art had been
characterized by formal mastery, the informel brought about a disinte-
gration of form and a fusing of figure and ground. Likewise, Barilli
described the informel paintings of Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze)
as starting from the whimsical figures of Paul Klee, but the fire of
Roberto Crippa under the sponsorship of Cardazzos Galleria del
Naviglio, and the contemporaneous Arte Nucleare (Nuclear Art) group,
founded by Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, and Joe Cesare Colombo, saw
themselves responding to the atomic age with painterly experimental-
ism. Dova for his part had abandoned geometric abstraction in 1950 and
had begun to work with the Surrealist technique of flottage, producing
aqueous abstractions with titles such as Atomic Marinea seascape of
roiling paintand Composizione nucleare (Nuclear Composition). Mean-
while, Baj was dripping enamel paints so as to suggest liquidated land-
scapes and figures, giving his works such unmistakably atomic titles as
Esplosione (Explosion) and Due figure atomizzate (Two Atomized Figures).

1. Aftermath Stephen Petersen 141

 In November of 1951, Baj joined with Dangelo, who was exploring
similar themes, in a dual show dubbed Pittura Nucleare (Nuclear Paint-
ing) at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan. Writing at length about the ex-
hibit in Corriere della Sera, critic Leonardo Borgese summed up the art-
ists belief that the atomic age required a new artistic vocabulary, distinct
from the 1946 rendering of the atomic theme by Salvador Dal:
Let us therefore make an art that is modern, that is to say, atomic.
Well, Salvador Dal represented the atomic explosion with his fine
mushroom cloud; but that is not enough, since a nineteenth-century
painter would have rendered it in more or less the same fashion.
We want, rather, a more intelligent, more alive, and, in a certain
sense, more truthful representation, and even a more objective one.
Bajs recurring image of the atomic man was a crude, graphic, at times
whimsical conflation of a mushroom cloud and the skull and vertebrae of
an eviscerated figure formed from freely poured enamel paint. On a cer-
tain level, these damaged and mutated forms resonated with written
accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when photographs of the
bomb casualties were still being censored by the occupying authority and
genetic mutations were only gradually being discussed in the interna-
tional press. As the artist later explained, We had a tragic conception of
man. Representing pictorially the nuclear peril, the nuclear theme after
allnothing but exposing itwas already to show all its consequences.8
The theme of contaminated birth and mutation appears in Bajs
ironically titled Concezione Immacolata (The Immaculate Conception) of
1950, its monstrous figure emerging from streams and pools of enamel,

Fig. 3. Unidentified Photographer, United States Government. Flash Burns on Steps of Sumitomo Bank Company, Hiroshima Branch. November 1945.
Silver gelatin print, 1012.7 cm. International Center of Photography, New York.
Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006

We want to remake, to interpret artistically and poetically the
Fig. 2. Enzo Preda. Per dimenticare Hiroshima (In Order to Forget Hiroshima). 1951.
Enamel on canvas, 10080 cm. Private Collection physical and spiritualand indeed psychicexplosions of the new
man in the new world.7
and again in his 1953 Piccolo bambino (Little Boy), whose white blobs of
paint suggest both the mushroom cloud and a small skeletal figure, con-
flating the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima with its conse-
quences. Bajs and Dangelos works, said Arturo Schwarz, have as their
motif the human condition as it would be after an atomic explosion.9

142 1. Aftermath Stephen Petersen 143

 In preparation for a 1952 exhibit in Brussels, Baj and Dangelo issued
a Manifeste de la peinture nuclaire (Manifesto of nuclear painting), in
which they pronounced their desire to demolish all the isms of paint-
ing and to reinvent painting altogether. Forms disintegrate, the man-
ifesto said; mans new forms are those of the atomic universe.10 They
and Colombo collaborated to produce Nuclear Composition (1951; plate 36),
an inventory of drips, blots, and splatters focused on a central explo-
sion of pain. Baj has described the influence of Pollock on the three at
this time, specifically the idea of running colors, of colors thrown and
emulsified we were interested in investigating the material, by its dis-
integration.11 Colombo also collaborated with Baj to produce nuclear
sculptures, assemblages made with bones (femurs, pelvic bones); further
developing the atomic-anatomic theme, he exhibited a series of spray
paintings outlining skeletal forms. This technique, visually conjuring the
x-ray, used literal vaporization and atomization to suggest the effect of
atomic radiation on the body. As Enrico Brenna wrote of Baj and the
Nuclear artists in 1953, They have wished to disintegrate painting and
have found themselves in a nightmare world.12
Bajs 1951 word-painting Manifesto Nucleare BUM (Boom Nuclear
Manifesto) featured a black mushroom-cloud-shaped head against an
acid-lemon background overlaid with nuclear slogans and formulas,
declaring The heads of men are charged with explosives/every atom
is exploding. That same year, the Nuclear artist Enzo Preda exhibi-
ted Per dimenticare Hiroshima (In Order to Forget Hiroshima; fig. 2), a
mushroom cloud made of drizzled enamel and punct uated by a bright
orange spill emanating from its center. As the painter was clearly
aware, Hiroshima could not be consigned to oblivion.
In 1957, an expanded, international group of participants in Arte
Nucleare included Yves Klein, the young French painter whose notorious
and H bombs, so that the explosions and their fallout would have a tell-
tale color, detectable by all interested parties.14 The connection between
Kleins International Klein Blue (IKB) pigment and radioactive fallout
suggests one possible meaning for his Cosmogony works of 1960,
where the artist blew IKB pigment into falling rain and captured the
blue-infused drops on a sheet of paper, reminiscent of the black rain
that poured radioactive particles on the atom-bomb survivors.
Klein had lived in Japan for a year and a half in the early 1950s,
studying judo. According to a friend he met there, the author Shinichi
Segi, Klein was deeply impressed by a film by Fumio Kamei, Itike ite
yokata (Its good to live), which documented the scarred survivors of
Hiroshima. The film included footage of the shadow of a vaporized
figure burnt onto a Hiroshima doorstep by the atomic blast (fig. 3).
Segi described its impact on Klein:
In the great cataclysm, on the stairs, a man was disintegrated in a
second, maybe less, and his shadow, from the brightest of all pos-
sible lights, remains etcheda disappearance, for eternity. ... Yvess
emotion was at its height. ... This is close to a monochrome [he said].
Death, life and absence of life ... A stone colored by the shadow of a
man: the stone and the body melted into one another by the extreme
heat. The colored bodyabsence of the act of painting, and painting.15
The nuclear shadows, according to Segi, influenced and incited
Klein to make the series of body imprints and silhouettes that he called
Anthropometries. Klein, who only occasionally gave specific titles to
his works, called one of the body prints, a unique example from c. 1961
featuring ghostly silhouettes, Hiroshima. Here his signature color IKB,
applied with an atomizer, intimates the radiation blast itself, leaving faint 1 Outside Is Everything, Time 59, no. 21 (May 26, 1952): 73.

Epoca blu exhibiteleven nearly identical monochrome panels coated in
artificial ultramarine pigmenthad been held at the Galleria Apollinaire,
Milan, in January. In September, Klein signed Bajs manifesto Contro
lo stile (Against Style), which denounced convention and style in art as
empty repetition, and in October a monochrome painting by Klein was
included in an important exhibit devoted to Arte Nucleare at the Galleria
San Fedele. Only a few months later, Klein would exhibit his infamous
Le Vide (The Void) at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, presenting the small
gallery empty and painted a brilliant white, a provocative gesture that he
contextualized at the time explicitly in terms of the atomic age and the
threat of nuclear annihilation:
I am happy to be dealing with a problem that is so much of our time.
One mustand this is not an exaggerationkeep in mind that we are
living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could
disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the
ultimate abstraction imaginable.13
Soon thereafter Klein drafted a letter to the International Conference
on the Detection of Atomic Explosions proposing to paint in blue the A
shadows around absent figures. (The Hiroshima victims were literally
vaporized by the blast, their shadows forming negative stains as the ce-
ment around them was blanched). It was, as Klein reportedly said about
the atomic shadows, close to a monochrome.
In 1961 Klein made a series of Fire Paintings using a flame throw-
er, among which some examples, the size of large Abstract Expressionist
works, register imprints and silhouettes of figures along with scorch
marks and drips made from water. In the days after the Hiroshima
bombing, lacking onsite documentation, a Picture Post story on mans
entry into the Atom Age had in fact used the visual example of a flame
thrower scorching a Japanese soldier to illustrate the action of the atom
bomb, while pointing to the far greater force and speed of the bomb,
which literally seared to death all living things.16 Harking back to an
informel aesthetic while visibly suggesting flames and explosions, Kleins
Fire Paintings explored the ambiguous aesthetic territorybut also
the terrifying realitywhere the body disintegrates, fusing with the
background.
2 Ad Reinhardt, How to Look at Three Current Shows, PM, December 15, 1946, p. 12.
3 Jackson Pollock, interview with William Wright, 1950, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews,
Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 22.
4 Renato Barilli, Tachisme, informel, abstraction lyrique, In Les Annes 50 (Paris: Centre
Georges Pompidou, Muse national dart moderne, 1988), p. 80. All translations mine unless
otherwise noted.
5 Ibid., p. 81.
6 Ibid.
7 Leonardo Borgese, Arte Nucleare, Corriere della Sera (Milan), November 24, 1951, repr.
in Enrico Baj: Opere dal 1951 al 2001, exh. cat. (Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in associa-
tion with Skira, Milan, 2001), p. 238.
8 Enrico Baj, Attenzione alla Pittura: Baj par Baj, in Enrico Baj (Paris: Filipacchi, 1980), p. 19.
9 Tristan Sauvage [a pseudonym for Arturo Schwarz], Art Nuclaire, trans. John A. Stevens
(Paris: Editions Vilo, 1962), p. 52.
10 Baj and Sergio Dangelo, Manifeste de la peinture nuclaire (Brussels: Galerie Apollo,
1952), n.p.
11 Baj, interview with Freddy De Vree, in Enrico Baj Modifications, trans. Pia Nkoduga, exh.
cat. (Antwerp: Ronny van de Velde, 1998), n.p.
12 Enrico Brenna, Pretion, in Sauvage, Art Nuclaire, p. 204.
13 Yves Klein, My Position in the Battle between Line and Color, 1958, repr. in Otto Piene and
Heinz Mack, eds., Zero, trans. Howard Beckman (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1973), p. 10.
14 Klein, quoted in Sidra Stich, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1994), p. 147.
15 Shinichi Segi, Le raliste de limmatriel, in Yves Klein (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou,
Muse national dart moderne, 1983), p. 84.
16 Picture Post (London), August 25, 1945, quoted in Christoph Laucht, An Imagined Cata-
clysm Becomes Fact: British Photojournalism and Real and Imagined Nuclear War in Picture
Post, in Catherine Jolivette, ed., British Art in the Nuclear Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 83.

144 1. Aftermath Stephen Petersen 145

 B
y the end of World War II in 1945, many Ger-
man cities had been systematically destroyed
by bombing from the air. The people who sur-
vived, and particularly the women, then went
through another type of violence, this time
from the land. A popular axiom of the Allied
New World Order held that Germans had to pay
for the Nazis crimes, and women, German in
particular, had to relearn the lesson of rule by men, regardless of those
mens nationalities. The possibility that in the political vacuum created
by the end of the war and the destruction of social fabrics, women would
establish another polity amid the ruins, had to be eradicated.
Starting on April 27, and over the course of several weeks, anywhere
between a few hundred thousand and two million German women were
raped.1 In the urban spaces where many of these rapes took place, cam-
eras were not absent, to say the least; the destruction of living spaces
and of the buildings of German cities is recorded in countless trophy
photographs. These places were quickly crowded with photographers.
The presence of rape, including both the preface to and the aftermath
of physical violence, required no special effort to detectthe crime was
ubiquitous. Yet it did not appear as a prime subject for these photogra-
phers in the way that the large-scale destruction of the cities did.
A picture (fig. 1) showing two photographers together manifests
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF RAPE an interest in the photographer in zones of war and violence as a figure
always ready with his camera in his hand. That interest is reinforced by
Ariella Azoulay the invisible presence of yet a third photographer, the one who took the
photograph we are looking at. In the context of the alleged absence of
Fig. 1. Photographers at the Brandenburg Gate (untaken photographs of rape),
May 1945
photographs of rape, though, we can look at this photograph and ask,
where are the photographs of rape that these photographers could have
been taking in a city plagued with it? Did they not witness these rapes
firsthand, or if women were raped in front of their eyes did they choose
to avert their cameras? Using the diary A Woman in Berlin as a guide in
my exploration of photography to capture rape, I focus mainly on Berlin,
where thousands of photographs were taken during this time.2 In a city
1. Aftermath
where cameras abounded, though, I propose to use this photograph as a
placeholder in a photographic archive in formation and to relate to it as
a stand-in for a particular species: the untaken photograph of rape. De-
pending on the circumstances under which photographs wereor were
nottaken or disseminated, and on the spectator position we nego-
Fig. 2. The Capital of the Third Reich after the Storm,
April 1945
tiate, other placeholders can be named inaccessible photograph of rape, or
as yet unacknowledged photograph of rape.
These rapes were discussed, though not in depth or at length, in quite
a few historical accounts.3 There is no disagreement among research-
ers about the widespread occurrence of rapeonly about the precise
number of women who were violated. To ask where the photographs of
these rapes are, then, is not to search for evidence that women were sys-
tematically raped. Such evidence abounds. Instead, this is an ontopolitical
question forced on the photographic archive, defying the priority given to
photographs as the primary outcome of the event of photography, and the
sanctity accorded to the frame as the boundary that determines what pho-
tographic narratives can be written. These priorities and presumptions
limit what we can learn from photographs to discrete units of information
known as facts, which are often used for summary accounts (as if the most
important issue were whether only 700,000 or 800,000 women were
raped in Berlin) or are dismissed as having anything to do with rape. When
so many oral accounts from victims of rape describe the destroyed streets
full of armed soldiers as the arena of their rape, we cannot refrain from
asking, how is it that none of these photographs of destruction became
associated with rape? What expectations are implied by the dismissal of
these photosthat only a photograph in which a rapist or a group of rapists
are captured in the same frame with an attacked woman could be recog-
nized as a photograph of rape?
Rather than reproducing common assumptions about the scarcity
of images or the archival silence and expecting that after seventy years
during which photographs of this systemic rape did not circulate, the
archive will suddenly provide us with a few rare, previously unseen images
Ariella Azoulay 147
of torn bodies, and rather than inhabiting the imperial role of the discov-
erer of a large-scale and known catastrophe, I limit my study to available
images. After all, the aim is not to ratify the number of women known to
have been raped through photographs of their wounded bodies. When we
speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look for pho-
tographs of or about systemic violence, but should explore photographs
taken in zones of systemic violence. The places recorded in them are ex-
actly the same places where rapes took place. Maybe not on the third
floor, but on the second; maybe not in the apartment on the right, but in
this one on the left; maybe only three soldiers rather than four; and so

Fig. 4. Battered Berlin, July 11, 1945 (recto)

Fig. 5. Battered Berlin, July 11, 1945 (verso)

Fig. 3. Berlin, 1945

Fig. 7. Pumping for Water in Berlin, July 20, 1945 (recto)

on (fig. 2). The impossibility of stabilizing this kind of information, even

though it may be crucial in individual cases, is counterbalanced by the
possibility of using photographs to explore the conditions of systematic
rape as foundational to postWorld War II democratic political regimes:
ruined urban spaces, military rule, and artificially produced food short-
ages. Photographs should not be approached as raw archival materi-
alas if what was there is equal to what made it into the frameor as
positive facts whose intrinsic meaning as primary sources is to be
pulled out through research. They should be read with and against
other material, often considered secondary, and they deserve special Fig. 6. Berlin, 1945

148 1. Aftermath Ariella Azoulay 149

 attention since what they encapsulate is always more than what those
who produced them intended to record. Hence my rejection of the axi-
om according to which there are no images of rape, which relies on the
reduction of photography to photographs and ignores the co-presence
of cameras and rape in the same unit of time and space.
In zones of omnipresent violence of which there are no photos
at all, all photographs should be explored as photographs of that very
same violence.
As with the rabbit-duck test, I propose to ask in which kinds of im-
ages this systemic rape is located, even if it remains elusive, and to
attempt to bring rape to the surface of the photograph, side by side with
more visible phenomena. Photographs showing the massive destruction
of built environments are my first sources in this effort (fig. 3): I start-
ed to read these perforated houses, heaps of torn walls, empty door and
window frames, uprooted doors, piles of rubbleall those elements that
used to be pieces of homesas the necessary spatial conditions under
which a huge number of women could be transformed into an unpro-
tected population prone to violation.

Fig. 10. Berlin, 1945

caption assumes the right of those who have destroyed the city to con-
tinue to seize it, administer it, and view it, and to act as if they were
not the destroyers but those who had come to explore, assist, and restore
order. This is the familiar imperial protocol: the plight one perpetrates
becomes ones trophy, the object of ones gaze. Even if most of the rapes
were perpetrated by Red Army soldiers and in the Soviet occupation
zone, the tight daily cooperation among Allied forces made them more
than just spectatorsa position they inhabited without remorseand
certainly responsible for the naturalization and decriminalization of
Fig. 9. The Capital of the Third Reich after the Storming of the City,
this systemic violence. Rather than standing against that violence and
April 1945 using the term rape to name a crime, the occupying powers deliber-
ately conflated violence with sex and lovea private matter with public

Fig. 8. Pumping for Water in Berlin, July 20, 1945 (verso)

NO MARKS LEFT ON THE HISTORICAL
TIMELINE
Already in July 1945, the absence of rape was carefully constructed
through tropes of substitution and displacement. The chaotic envi-
ronment that had formed the arena of systemic rape had already been
remodeled and replaced by discrete destroyed objects on relatively
cleansed sidewalks. This is one of the scenes presented to the eyes of
Allied soldiers who entered war-shattered Berlin, states the news
agency that distributed these photographs (figs. 4, 5), replacing atten-
tion to the ruins with their appearance to the eyes of Allied soldiers. The
violenceby using fraternization as an umbrella term through which
to regulate relations between men and women. Thus a photograph
taken three months after the Allies entered the city, in which women
are seen walking casually in the street, showing no sign that they have
recently seen their first daylight after being forced to live for weeks as
cave dwellers, can be distributed as a representation of the scene the
Allies first saw when they entered the city on foot. The plight of certain
segments of the body politic, or of entire populations, is not etched
in historical time. Weeks of terror simply do not exist in the timeline
of imperial powers news desks. Only some weeks later, and no earlier
than that, were women actually back on the streets (fig. 6). To each

150 1. Aftermath Ariella Azoulay 151

other these women still seemed unbelievably different, unfamiliar,
older, distraught, even when some of the main arteries of the city were
cleared of rubble and differentiations between roads and sidewalks,
private space and commons, locked indoors and open outdoors, made
the street safe for them again (figs. 7, 8). 4
Reconstructing womens timeline is a first step in reassociating
photographs with rape. When photographs record the presence of well-
dressed girls and women in open spaces, as in the Battered Berlin
image, we are reminded that these women were in a very early moment
of re-experiencing the meaning of walking in their city without the
threat of being violently captured and raped, or forced into the cruel deal
Fig. 11. Berlin Struggles up out of Rubble (recto)
of being provided with enough food to survive in exchange for their bod-
ies and work. This is, though, a photograph of a city from which omni-
present rape has been wiped out in order to clear the way for its survivors
to be shaped as consumers by the Marshall Plan devised for them.
When the Allies walked into Berlin after heavily bombarding it,
smoke was still hanging in the air and the streets were carpeted with
rubble and the corpses of people and animals. A few refugees on the
run, carrying small bundles, could be seen. These elements gradually
152 1. Aftermath
disappeared, so that the degree of their presence in photographs can
be used in the reconstruction of the photographic timeline of the rapes
taking place in this decor. When an anonymous Russian soldier took
the photo in fig. 9, for example, womens screams were probably audi-
ble. Instead of complying with factual classifications such as bombed
city, provided by those who had the power both to destroy a fabric of
life and to promote a discursive matrix in which such violence could be
justified, I seek to render them unavailable, unreiterable. When photos of
catastrophe are made into tokens of destruction, details like the density
of the smoke, the height of the rubble, the position of the rubble in the
entrance to a building, womens grimaces, features, and clothesall
these are neglected, and appear as more of the same. When imperial vi-
olence is made into ether, these details can be helpful in making it pal- Fig. 12. Berlin Struggles up out of Rubble (verso)
pable again. After all, innumerable photographs were taken in imperial
arenas of violence. Careful attention to smell, color, sound, and other
tactile aspects is necessary to endow this etheric violence with material
presence in photographic archives.
Visual documents of violence perpetrated in the open are not
missing; they are located within available images falsely declared not to
Ariella Azoulay 153

Fig. 13. Hunger The Price of Defeat,
October 23, 1945 (recto)
be images of rape, even though they were taken in the same places and
at the same time as the rapes.
Inserted in such a reconstructed timeline, I propose to read fig. 9
not as another photo of destruction but rather as a photo of an arena
of rape. In these perforated and porous dwellings, women lived with
no windows, no doors, no water, no gas, no electricity, and very lit-
tle food. The women moved from the upper floors to the basement
and back, depending on the data they could gather on the behavior of
their rapists. Some of the rapists, they learned, were too lazy to climb
to the upper floors, especially when drunk; others felt less comfort
able raping women in crowded places like basements, where, after the
aerial bombing, people stayed since their apartments were made un-
inhabitable. Young girls in particular hid in closets and other less ac-
cessible parts of what was left of their or others homes. Some of the
women managed to reduce the number of men who raped them by
making deals with individual soldiers who would protect them from
the others and, in exchange for access to their bodies, provide them
with food. The rubble that blocked buildings entrances didnt stand
in the way of those who came to rape women. On the contrary, the
chase after women was part of the adventure. Although the buildings
were not secure, women preferred staying in them to going outside
and walking to their predators. The deserted street in fig. 9 indicates
this clearly: the road is already relatively cleansed of rubble, but only
one or two soldiers are seen on it.
On May 9, Anonymous wrote in her diary that she was alone be-
tween her sheets for the first time since April 27 (fig. 10).5 The day before,
154
Fig. 14. Hunger The Price of Defeat,
October 23, 1945 (verso)
with the help of some of their protectors, she and other women had
been able to block the entrance of the building they were living in with a
kind of door, which restored, even if in a very vulnerable way, some sem-
blance of privacy, threshold, choice, and order. Rapes didnt cease at
this point, but with some sign of order and organization, their number
and frequency diminished. After some of the apartments doors were
restored, it came time to clear buildings street entrances (figs. 11, 12).
Writing on the same morning, Anonymous continued, Some people
equipped with heavy scoops called us down to the street, where we
shoveled the pile of refuse on the corner.6 When the photo in fig. 9 was
taken, some time after April 27 and not much after the first week of
May, rapes were still numerous.
Fig. 15. Black Market Arrests, 1945
1. Aftermath
What exactly is fig. 9? Who took it, and why? The dead corpse of
a horse, still attached to a damaged carriage, doesnt seem to be what
attracted the photographer; nor was it the scale of the destruction, as is
clearly the case in Battered Berlin, whose focus is a collapsed building.
In this image the photographers gaze is closer and more intimate. The
photo was not taken in order to show the house or the street. It seems
more like an idiosyncratic souvenir the photographer wanted to carry
Fig. 16. Refugees Get Hot Soup
from Red Cross, 1945
with him. He would have been familiar with this particular building; he
probably knew how to get in and out of each of its holes, and wanted to
keep some memories of the many evenings and nights he spent there
with one woman or maybe many, first having to grab her wrists, jerk
her around the corridor, and pull her, hand on her throat, so she can no
longer scream, 7 and later providing some vodka, herring, candles, and
cigarettes after he had raped her. At this point food rations were either
nonexistent or minimal enough to push women to choose a sort of
rape-under-control in the form of a food-for-sex exchange in place of
other forms of rape. As Anonymous writes, Physically I feel a little
better, though, now that I am doing something, planning something,
determined to be more than mere mute booty, a spoil of war.8 The
photographer might be this guy, described by Anonymous: out of all
the male beasts Ive seen these past few days hes the most bearable,
the best of the lot.9 Those who succeeded in avoiding rape, or its re-
currence, found themselves outside any of these providential econo-
mies. City dumps were rare places where they could find food (figs. 13,
14). The black-market economy was manipulated to authorize certain
people to provide women with food, and to ensure that they were not
creating their own markets with their own rules (fig. 15). They were
constantly arrested since they never stopped trying to find and install
their own trade networks. When Anonymous met with a friend, this was
Ariella Azoulay
their exchange: How many times were you raped, Ilse? Four, and you?
No idea, I had to work up the ranks from supply train to major.10 Under
these conditions, four times could not have been enough for survival.
Not much could be found in a nearby dumping lot either. Anonymous
noted the people going hungry in mid-May, after another friend of
hers biked a two-hour distance to ask for some food (fig. 16). She herself
looks pitiful; a piece of bacon. Her legs are sticks and her knees jut out
like gnarled bumps.11
There are no statistics, but many women preferred to shelter
themselves from multiple gang rapes in these types of relationships.
These men became friends of sorts, welcomed insofar as they could
prevent foreigners from intruding and raping the women more brutal-
ly. Even if fig. 10 was not taken by Petka, Anatol, the Major, Vanya, it was
taken by another soldier in a threatening proximity to women who, at
the very moment when the photo was taken, hid in houses that were
violated.
This is a short version of a longer text shown as a visual essay at Pembroke Hall, Brown
University, April 2016, and at the f/stop Festival for Photography, Leipzig, June 2016.
1 On the approximation of the number of rapes in Germany see Atina Grossmann, Jews,
Germans and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Berlin (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007), pp. 4849; Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002);
and Helke Sanders film Liberators Take Liberties (1992).
2 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City. A Diary, trans. Philip
Boehm (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 13.
3 In 9,558 pages of books I have looked at that focus on 1945, only 161 address the mass
rape of German women. In the thousands of photographs taken in 1945 and printed in albums
there is no mention of rape at all. A few pages on rape can be read in each of these books:
Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 19451949 (New York: Crown, 1985);
Ian Buruma, Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013); Richard
Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Harper Collins, 2009); David Stafford,
Endgame 1945: The Missing Chapter of World War II (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007);
and Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York:
Basic Books, 2007).
4 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, p. 84.
5 Ibid., p. 155.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 53. These descriptions in the diary use first-person pronouns where I have used
the third person.
8 Ibid., p. 64.
9 Ibid., p. 116.
10 Ibid., p. 204.
11 Ibid., p. 140.
155
 AFTERMATH:
ZERO HOUR AND THE ATOMIC ERA
Plates

Karel Appel Kim Kulim Isamu Noguchi Igael Tumarkin

Francis Bacon Norman Lewis Eduardo Paolozzi Wolf Vostell
Enrico Baj Roy Lichtenstein Robert Rauschenberg Andrzej Wrblewski
Mieczysaw Berman Morris Louis Gerhard Richter -
Yosuke Yamahata
Joseph Beuys Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi Mira Schendel Yuri Zlotnikov
Jean Fautrier Henry Moore David Smith
Weaver Hawkins Movimento Arte Nucleare Frank Stella
Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins) Barnett Newman Alina Szapocznikow
1

Jean Fautrier Francis Bacon

La Juive (The Jewess) Fragment of a Crucifixion
1943 1950
oil on paper mounted on canvas oil and cotton wool on canvas
Muse d'art moderne de la ville de Paris Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

159
3

4
David Smith David Smith
Perfidious Albion The Maiden's Dream
1945 1949
bronze and cast iron bronze
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas The Estate of David Smith, New York

161
 Joseph Beuys
Hirschdenkmler (Monuments to the Stag)
1958/82
mixed media
Private Collection

5
 Joseph Beuys
Hirschdenkmler (Monuments to the Stag)
1958/82
mixed media
Private Collection

6
7

Wolf Vostell
Deutscher Ausblick aus dem Environment Das schwarze Zimmer 8
(German View from the environment The Black Room)
Alina Szapocznikow
195859 Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto II
dcollage, wood, barbed wire, tin, newspaper, bone, television with cover 1957
Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum fr Moderne patinated plaster and iron filings
Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow, Paris

167
 10
9

Andrzej Wrblewski Andrzej Wrblewski

Liquidation of the Ghetto/Blue Chauffeur Executed Man, Execution with a Gestapo Man
1949 1949
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Private Collection Private Collection

169
11 12

Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter

Bomber (Bombers) Sargtrger (Coffin Bearers)
1963 1962
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Stdtische Galerie Wolfsburg Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

171
Frank Stella
Arbeit Macht Frei
1958
enamel on canvas
Private Collection

13

173
14 15

Morris Louis Morris Louis

Untitled (Jewish Star) Charred Journal: Firewritten II
c. 1951 1951
acrylic on canvas acrylic (Magna) on canvas
The Jewish Museum, New York Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebk

175
 17

< Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchi

Humpty Dumpty Bell Tower for Hiroshima
1946 1950 (1986)
ribbon slate terra-cotta, wood
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Garden Museum, New York

16

177
18 20

19 21

Isamu Noguchi
Memorial to the Atomic Dead
1952-82
graphite on tracing paper
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Garden Museum, New York
Isamu Noguchi
Isamu Noguchi Study for Bell Tower for Hiroshima,
Isamu Noguchi
Sculpture Study Little Bomb, and Monument to Heroes Sculpture Study
c. 1950 c. 1950 1952
ink wash on paper pencil on paper pencil on paper
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Garden Museum, New York Garden Museum, New York Garden Museum, New York

179
 23

Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchi

Atomic Man Memorial to Man
1952 1947
kasama stoneware wallpaper
Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Bloomfield Hills Garden Museum, New York

22

181
24

25
Karel Appel
Exodus n0 1
Karel Appel
1951 Hiroshima Child
gouache and colored paper on brown kraft pieces 1958
of paper applied on paper oil on canvas
Fondation Gandur pour lArt, Geneva Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

183
26

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi

Fire (Panel II) from Hiroshima Panels (series of 15 panels)
1950
Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels,
Higashi-Matsuyama

185
27

Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi

Atomic Desert (Panel VI) from Hiroshima Panels (series of 15 panels)
1952
Indian ink and Japanese paper
Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels, Higashi-Matsuyama

187
 Yosuke Yamahata
Nagasaki Journey
1945
gelatine silver prints
Daniel Blau, Munich

28

189
 30

29

Weaver Hawkins Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins)

Atomic Power If All The World Were Paper And All The Water Sink
1947 1962
oil on hardboard oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

191
 32

31
Eduardo Paolozzi Joseph Beuys
Shattered Head Verstrahlter Hangar (Radiated Hangar)
1956 1962
bronze on stone base polystyrene, wood, animal hair, and oil
Private Collection, London Museum Schlo Moyland, Bedburg-Hau

193
33
34

Barnett Newman Norman Lewis

The Beginning Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration
1946 1951
oil on canvas oil on canvas
The Art Institute of Chicago Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

195
 Robert Rauschenberg
The White Painting (two panel)
1951
oil on canvas
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

35
 37

36

Movimento Arte Nucleare Enrico Baj

Nuclear Composition Manifesto Nucleare BUM
1951 1951
oil and enamel on paper glued on canvas varnish and acrylic on canvas
Private Collection Private Collection

199
38

39
Roy Lichtenstein Henry Moore
Atom Burst Atom Piece
1965 196465
acrylic on board bronze
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki

201
 40

41

Mieczysaw Berman Mieczysaw Berman Igael Tumarkin

Wojna (War) Apoteoza (Apotheosis) Aggressiveness
1944 1947 1964-65
collage photomontage iron
Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocawiu, Wrocaw Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocawiu, Wrocaw Tel Aviv Museum of Art

42
43

Andrzej Wrblewski Yuri Zlotnikov

Soce i inne gwiazdy (Sun and Other Stars) Geiger Counter
1948 1955-56
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Muzeum Sztuki in d The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

44

205
45

Kim Kulim 46
Death of Sun II
Kim Kulim
1964 Three Circles
oil and object on wood panel 1964
National Museum of Modern and steel, oil on wood panel
Contemporary Art, Gwacheon Collection of the Artist, Seoul

207
47

Mira Schendel
Untitled
1963
tempera and plaster on canvas
Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection, Rio de Janeiro

209
Section Introduction
Emily Braun
Salah Hassan
Geeta Kapur
Richard Shiff
Terry Smith
Plates

2 FORM MATTERS
 M
aterialist abstraction is accounted for in the exhibition with
works that were grouped under such labels as art informel,
Abstract Expressionism, and Gutai, as well as with works by
artists who responded to the visual appearance of this art but
found different and local meanings in materials and how they handled them.
Contemporary critics emphasized stylistic competitions that in historical
accounts since then have often devolved into a kind of nationalist boosting.
Today it is easier to see the transnational character of many of these strate-
gies. Postwar emphasizes affinities of ideas and materials among American
artists and artists who emigrated to the United States from Europe; it also
documents the encounters of artists from around the world who gathered in
such metropolitan centers as Paris, London, and Mexico City, and reviews
FORM MATTERS the proximity and circulation of artworks in international exhibitions and
small-press publications. This materialist art is typical of the postwar period
in its difference from earlier European versions of modernism, often rejecting
geometric approaches, for example, in a critique of rationality and science,
which were seen as having dead-ended in the war and the atom bomb. Ins-
tead, artists favored gesture, raw materials and the laws of their behavior, and
chance, producing surfaces that are often tactile, rough, and uneven. Many
artists went farther still, invoking the entropy of matter and, more specifically,
the outright destruction related to the traumatic events and lingering ruins of
the postwar landscape. More hopefully, this materialism also embraced or-
ganicist, even vitalist thinking, as well as full-body performative experiments.

Introduction 213
 To lay bare with a brutal brush all the tortures, all the filth, that lies at the expression could not be as enduring or pervasive as the previous two
base of our society. paradigms, nor did it aim to be. Its action was swift, the results
Gabriel Dsir Laverdant, De la mission de lart et du rle des artistes decisive: to level the Western pictorial tradition.
(On the mission of art and the role of artists), La Phalange, 1845 The works of Fautrier, Dubuffet, Burri, and others who followed in
their tracks (Antoni Tpies, Manolo Millares, Adolf Frohner, Otto Muehl)
All you need is mud, nothing but a single monochrome mud, if you really want attacked the privileged vertical orientation of easel and mural painting
to paint. The painter has to know how to smear. and with it the view into space, no matter how shallow, above and around

T
Jean Dubuffet, Notes pour les fins lettrs (Notes for the well read), 1945 things. They annihilated the fine in fine art, seized the metaphoric
higher ground that painting had aspired to represent, and reduced it to
he history of Western painting since the Renais-
sance has been framed by two dominant para-
digms. The first, which held sway for centuries,
was that of the window. Artists and viewers
perceived the painted canvas as a transparent
plane, a threshold into virtual depth, be it shallow
dimensions within arms reach or an infinite ex-
panse beyond the limits of the eye. Pictorial illu-
sionism embodied the humanist tradition that saw man as the measure
of all things. By the late nineteenth century, the carpet paradigm of
formalist modernism had displaced the window paradigm.1 Inspired by
theories in the decorative and applied arts, painting subordinated spa-
tial illusionism to the demands of a new realism: the inherent planari-
ty of the canvas. A picturebefore being a war horse, a nude woman,

THE DIRT PARADIGM or telling some other story explained Maurice Denis, is essentially
a plane surface covered with colors arranged in a particular pattern.2
Emily Braun This new concept of pictorial autonomy accompanied the determinis-
tic logic of the industrial revolution. Geometric abstraction aligned on
the grid emulated the rationale of technological systems; bursting color
fields and flat biomorphic shapes signaled a reaction against the same
standardizing forces, a retreat into the interior realm of the pure aesthet-
icism, the spiritual, the dream. The carpet paradigm accentuated a pure-
ly optical, highly subjective viewing experience through the shallow and Fig. 1. Jean Fautrier. Sarah. 1943. Impastos made of oil, white lead, pastel
shifting spaces of figure-ground reversals. It produced beautiful objects powder, ink, and varnish on paper mounted on canvas, 11680.7 cm.
Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland.
based on pleasing arrangements of color and form, even when disrupted Inv. n. FGA-BA-FAUTR-1

by pictorial assassins such as Joan Mir.

A different concept emerged around 1945, when two French art-
ists began to heap and smear gritty oils onto the canvas or to obliterate
the surface with coagulated pools of tar. Painting hit bottom, reve-
ling in dirt, organic decay, and the ooze of geological substrata. Jean
Fautriers Otages (Hostages) series, exhibited at the Ren Drouin
gallery, Paris, that year, inaugurated this view on and in the ground,
and were followed in 1946 by a show of Jean Dubuffets canvases paved
with asphalt and the gravelly detritus usually employed for surfacing
roads.3 After seeing their work at the end of the decade, Italian artist
Alberto Burri created his Catrami (Tars), Muffe (Molds), and defiled
Bianchi (Whites), and by 1950 was making Sacci (Sacks), pictures made
out of soiled burlap gunnysacks (which had often been used as sand-
bags during the war). The dirt of soil and sweat impregnated the paint-
erly support, now reduced to threadbare rags. This new form of artistic
an indeterminate mass of sand, pumice, bitumen, and other crushed
organic and mineral substances. At times, the weighty mounds of earthy
matter warped or compromised the planar support. Critics referred to
the style as matiriste (matter painting), hautes ptes (thick pastes) art brut
(raw art or outsider art), or informe (formless),but these descriptive mon-
ikers did not capture the cause of this historical shift. The dirt paradigm
expressed the conditions of its specific historical moment: pulverized
self-confidence, psychological disintegration. World War II had reduced
city and country to rubble and muck. Millions of bodies were buried be-
neath. So was European culture: from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, pig-
ments to ground matter.
The battle metaphors used here to describe this ground oper-
ation are intentional: the term avant-garde took its name and pur-
pose from the military advance guard. In 1845, writing in the socialist

2. Form Matters Emily Braun 215

journal La Phalange (or the phalanx, a body of troops in close formation),
Gabriel-Dsir Laverdant defined this new cadre of intellectuals and
artists and stressed the importance of its front-line position if one was
to know where Humanity is headed, know the destiny of the human
race. Rooted in radical left-wing ideology, its heroic mission was to de-
pict the plight of the downtrodden, in all their destitution and despair. 4
Exactly one hundred years later, Dubuffet scratched out some Notes
for the Well-Read that articulated a last-ditch effort for painting. The
French artist represented the low in literal terms by covering the can-
vas with filth, primal pastes, and outlines drawn in the earth by heels. 5
Some have interpreted Dubuffets elevation of the unworthy as a Marx-
ist contestation of museum high culturea proposal for a lumpen art
for the common man. 6 He indeed preferred the techniques of the pro-
letarian housepainter to those of the artistically trained one. But in the
immediate aftermath of the war, when Dubuffet advocated returning
painting to the primal soils of origins, class warfare had temporarily
ceased as the nation united under the myth of the Resistance and the
need for rehabilitation.7 The dirt paradigm expresses not the culture of
the left but the culture of the defeated. The destiny of the human race
had reversed course: all of humanity was brought down to the ground.
The plunge into grime and putrescent matter around 1945 was sud-
den and drastic, nothing like the lyrical scattering of sand and animal glue
(another product of organic decomposition) in earlier Cubist and Surre-
alist painting. Nor did it merely entail working horizontally with a canvas
on the ground or table top, temporarily rotating the axis of a painting be-
fore mounting it on a wall.8 In imagery, medium specificity (a focus on the
materiality of painterly grounds rather than on the material support), and
address to the viewer, the dirt paradigm emphasized being one with the
earth. It refused grandiose sight lines that projected skyward or over and
above the terrain. Height in every culture, writes Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
stands for power and control. These qualities are symbolically elevated,
just as homo sapiens, the only creature that walks erect, rises above the
rest of the animal world. Conversely those who lack power are put down,
subjugated, subordinated. The winner rises up in the world while the
loser falls.9 At the end, Italy and France were technically on the winning
Shz Shimamoto, and Michio Yoshihara sulliedeven violently digging, scratching, pressing, squeezing, and gouging, immersing civilians, equated fleshy pastes with atrocities, being all tumescent
attackedtheir canvases with charred bits, pulverized rubble, and the oneself in the mire. Jean Paulhan observed that in Fautriers strange- faces, crushed profiles, bodies stiffened by gunfire, dismembered, trun-
iridescent stains of spreading oil. Kazuo Shiraga slopped and slid paint ly shimmering and vaporous pastes, crushed pastel is mixed with cated, eaten by flies, as Francis Ponge described them in 1946.18 In his
with his feet. Many members of the group, including their leader, Jir oil and ink with gasoline. Everything is made into a putty, pounded, macadam paintings Dubuffet went below the earths crust to fashion his
Yoshihara, had participated in the war.10 As to the German defeated, am- rubbed down by hand.15 Painting with sedimentary admixtures, urban troglodytes out of tar, then turned them into griddle cakes, ironed
nesia forestalled the representation of trauma until the next generation. these artists preferred tools that pushed, dragged, scraped, and trow- flat.19 He often gave them the same colors as the ground into which they
Among those artists, Anselm Kiefer was a grand master of the dirt para- eled, or else they turned to the more basic appendages of palms and were impressed: fossil figures made from the same petroleum extracts
digm, first seen in his series of catastrophic battlefields, large-scale black- fingers. A painters basic action is to besmear, proclaimed Dubuffet, as fossil fuel. The surfaces of the paintings actually open up physically
and-white photographs of scorched terrain overlaid with paint, sand, not to spread tinted liquids with a tiny pen or a lock of hair but to but in one direction only, down, through cracks and fissures. Figure/
and straw.11 They emerged in the early 1980s, just as painting had been plunge his hands into brimming buckets or basins. He has to putty it ground relationships in the dirt do not follow the spatial projections
declared dead.
Issues of personal culpability, equivocation, or helplessness aside,
these artists acknowledged the toppling of European culture from its
preeminent position. The utopian aims of the avant-garde had been
compromised by instances of collaboration with totalitarian regimes
of the left and right. To the winner go the spoils: America had secured
the victory and therefore stole (or earned) the idea of modern art. The
strengths and capabilities of the vanquished, observes Schivelbusch,
are symbolically transferred to the conqueror a fate that befalls all
losing elites in collapsing cultures as they are replaced by the homines
novi.12 Abstract Expressionism, however, did not stoop when it con-
quered: it embraced luminous and stormy hues, the colors of skies, ver-
dant groves and watery depths. Awe, not disgust, prevailed. American
postwar painters applied their medium freely with broad, energized
stokes in a new kind of flatness, wrote Clement Greenberg, one that
breathes and pulsates.13 They conjured deep space, the vertical figure,
and transcendent atmospheric fields, by contrast to the compacted or
excrescent layers of the European pictures under consideration here.
Jackson Pollocks occasional additions of strings, coins, and cigarette
butts, while gritty, do not smother his labyrinthine skeins. Even his at-
omized compositions, with intimations of nuclear catastrophe, evoke
inundation in the air, with sight lines through the autumn mists. Only
after trips to Paris (in 1948) and Rome (195253) did an American, Robert
Rauschenberg, start to paint and compile with asphaltum and gravel, Fig. 2. Paul-mile Borduas. The Black Star. 1957. Oil on canvas, 162.5129.5 cm.
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Grard Lortie.
soil and mold.14 Acq. n. 1960.1238

side against Nazi Germany, but were morally compromised by fascism
and the Vichy collaborationist regime. They had sunk low, even if collec-
tive guilt was mitigated by the sense of collective victimhood at the hands
of the Nazi occupiers and by the heroic instances of resistance.
Dirty painting, dirty handsone day someone will write an essay on
guilt as a motivating factor in aesthetics. For now we can observe that the
dirt paradigm was tilled by avant-garde artists in certain nations whose
governments and people had shamed themselves by supporting fascism,
genocide, wars of empire, and brutal colonial rule. Fautriers involvement
with the Resistance remains murky; Dubuffet, a professed anti-Semite
(and admirer of the famously anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Cline),
profited selling wine to the Germans during the Occupation; Burri
served in fascist Italys armed forces, including during the conquest of
Ethiopia. The Japanese Gutai artists Uemae Chiy, Saburo Murakami,
Nor did the dirt paradigm apply to all postwar European gestural ab-
stractionists, who preferred the American way in the postwar years of reha-
bilitation. Art informel practitioners Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, and
Pierre Soulages choreographed free-floating strokes of color that hover in
a distinct foreground plane (and, in their own time, metaphorically rose
above the surrounding devastation). Working in Paris after the war, French-
Canadian artists (on the winning side) invigorated their thick handling
of paint with luscious white folds (Paul-Emile Borduas) or brilliant colors
in a kaleidoscopic array (Jean-Paul Riopelle). By contrast, expressions of
and with dirt resulted in drab hues or the acrid colors of rot. Accumulat-
ed particles and pancaked layers accentuated the perception of obdurate
mass and refuted the three-dimensional extension of volume and space.
Whereas the motions of Abstract Expressionism and art informel were
sweeping, scattering, and elliptical, those of matter painting involved
with his soils and thick paints, grapple with it, knead it, impress upon
it.16 As a result, he continued, the viewer would not scan the painting
passively with an instantaneous glance but would dig deep into it
as if through touch, becoming one with the matter and reenacting the
feeling of being crushed, furrowed, plowed, and dragged down by grav-
ity: Wherever the surface has puckered when drying, he also dried,
contracts, puckers.17
Indeed, these artists privileged tactile sensations over the disem-
bodied optical experience in tandem with their reorientation of the gaze.
The wide visual scope commanded by the upright viewing figure was nar-
rowed and directed downward to contemplate a new kind of landscape,
not vertical motifs standing near or far but bodies in the ground. Fautriers
Otages, begun in late 1942 in response to Nazi executions of French
and shifts of the carpet paradigm, as Hubert Damisch explained: It is
this illusion of the behind-worlds that Dubuffet tirelessly denounces.
And his work eventually boils down to the stubborn assertion that be-
hind things and under figures there is nothing but the ground.20 The
same damning reversal of wall to pavement, vertical to horizontal, holds
true even when Dubuffet paints urban walls marred by graffitior dirty
words. As with Burris Catrami, Muffe, and Bianchi, layers of bitu-
men, pumice, and grime signal the reality of earthy biological growth
and decay. We may view all of these pictures vertically on the wall but
regard-less, what we see is the world beneath our feet; we press up
against these images, they rub dirt in our faces.
Faces, feces: Ponge noted the resemblance in Fautriers pasty
adhesive mortars, and in his telling mania for covering up small

216 2. Form Matters Emily Braun 217

or fat mounds, masking their traces with quick lines of cinder or
dust, like cats who claw over their excrement.21 Like others after him,
Ponge likened the globs, humps, and hollows of this postwar expres-
sion to Georges Batailles concept of the informe, or formlessness.22
For Bataille, matter that refused to take form in a coherent and cen-
tered composition represented the ascent of the foot and the demise
of the head. This reversal of bodily hierarchy incarnated a loss of faith
in reason and in the traditional cultural values of the West. Devised
in response not to this postwar work but to Surrealism, however, Bat-
ailles analysis missed the embedded self-reflexivity of these artists
ground maneuvers. The earthbound reality of the painterly medium,
comprising powdered minerals, decomposing vegetative matter, and
Fig. 3. Alberto Burri. Bianco nero (White Black). 1952.
Oil, enamel, pumice, and PVA on canvas, 65100 cm. Private Collection.
plant secretions, or what Dubuffet called the artists forgotten native
soil: these base materials stood for themselves.23 Fautrier, Dubuffet,
and Burri favored blending their own colored matterblack anthra-
cite, blood-red mercuric sulphide, dark-blue cobalt oxide, and the
whites of zinc, limestone, and gypsum. Their mucking about with ar-
tisanal craft debunked any notion of deskilling; to the contrary, they
opposed the assembly production of paint in tubes. We must bear
in mind, wrote Dubuffet respectfully on the language of materials,
that the colors we handle are not abstract ciphers, they are highly
concrete pigments or dilutions made of more or less finely ground
minerals and blended with equally concrete substances like linseed
oil, turpentine (distilled pine resin) and all kinds of other gums, glues
and glazes. 24
218 2. Form Matters
Plants and leaves fall, minerals are crushed, but only to be taken up
again and revivified by the artists palette. The culture of defeat inevitably
leads to a culture of renewal. The dirt paradigm, as noted earlier, was nec-
essarily short-lived: it provided a temporary buffer zone for psychic recov-
ery. The function of such zones, writes Schivelbusch, can be compared to
the coagulation of blood and formation of scabs necessary for wounds to
heal.25 One is reminded of Burris burlap skins with mucus membranes
of polyacetate resin forming in and around the cavities. Wallowing in the
mud is an age-old form of catharsis and cleansing before the cycle of death
and rebirth, defeat and victory, begins again. In France, painting filth would
not be tolerated for long in a new postwar society of modernization and de-
colonialization, obsessed with hygiene and smooth, clean surfaces.26
As befits its origins, the cycles of avant-garde fortune mimic those
of the military. One might argue that these artists of base materialism
buried the Western pictorial tradition, which had reached a saturation
point, for good. Historical events hastened its demise. Nonetheless,
the firsthand, highly physical encounter with soil and viscous matter
proved fertile in the postwar decade and the one to follow. Dirt came
off the wall and onto actual grounds and bodies with new, creative
force. Notably, the Japanese exponents of the dirt paradigm inaugu-
rated a new genre of performance art epitomized by Shiraga, who,
while dressed only in his underwear, kicked, rolled, and dug through
earthen wall plaster, rocks, sand, and gravel (Challenging Mud, 1955). 27
In 1909, midway between Laverdant and Dubuffet, F. T. Marinetti had
already scripted this narrative of regeneration when he recounted how
he drove his car into a ditch and emerged from the dank sludge reborn
as a Futurist. Avant-garde renewal was a messy business, but someone
had to do it.
5 Jean Dubuffet, Notes pour les fins lettrs, 1945, Eng. trans. as Notes for the Well-
1 Joseph Masheck coined and defined the term in his landmark article The Carpet Par-
adigm: Critical Prolegomena to a Theory of Flatness, Arts Magazine 51, no. 1 (September
1976): 82109.
2 Maurice Denis, Definition of Neo-Traditionalism, 1890, Eng. trans. in Charles Harrison,
Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 18151900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), p. 863.
Emily Braun
3 See Mirobolus Macadam e Cie. Hautespates de J Dubuffet, text by Michel Tapi (Paris:
Galerie Ren Drouin, 1946).
4 Gabriel-Dsir Laverdant, De la mission de lart et du rle des artistes, La Phalange.
Revue Mensuelle de la Science Sociale, tome 2, vol. 1, pp. 254, 271. Available online at http://
gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k95711m/f305.image (accessed April 2016). On the history
of the terminology of the two avant-gardes, political and aesthetic, see Renato Poggioli, The
Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard
University Press, 1968), pp. 89.
Read, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, in Jean Dubuffet and Mildred Glimcher, Towards an Alter-
native Reality (New York: Pace Publications and Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 67.
6 Hubert Damisch, Dubuffet ou la lecture du monde, 1962, Eng. trans. as Dubuffet or the
Reading of the World, trans. Kent Minturn and Priya Wadhera with revisions by Richard G. El-
liott, Art in Translation 6, no. 3 (2014): 302. First published in Art de France 2 (1962): 33746.
7 Dubuffet, Notes for the Well-Read, p. 67. See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe
since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 41, 6371.
8 Influenced by Georges Batailles notion of formlessness (see note 22 below), Rosalind Krauss
makes the argument that Jackson Pollocks importance was lodged in an axial rotation of painting
out of the vertical domain of the visual field and onto the horizontal vector. See The Crisis of the
Easel Picture, in Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel, eds., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 161. But while Pollock dripped and scattered paint
onto a canvas laid on the floor, he aimed at a new kind of mural painting, which, as Krauss admits
(pp. 16465) via an excursus into the criticism of Clement Greenberg, reasserted the optical,
vertical orientation of the viewing subject and the opening up of the flat picture plane. Important
for the horizontal vector argued for here is the self-reflexive subject matter (grounds literal and/
or depicted) and materiality of the medium employed, regardless of axial orientation.
9 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery
(New York: Picador, 2004), p. 292.
10 Ming Tiampo, please draw freely, in Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid
Playground, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2013), pp. 4647. Jiro
Yoshihara had been familiar with the French avant-garde and its periodicals from before the war.
11 See Andreas Huyssen, Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth,
October 48 (Spring 1989), esp. pp. 4345.
12 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 19.
13 Greenberg, American-Type Painting, 1955, in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press,
1961), p. 226.
14 On the influence of Alberto Burri on Robert Rauschenberg see Emily Braun, Alberto Burri:
The Trauma of Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2015), pp.
7476. On Burris matter painting under discussion in this essay see Braun and Carol Strin-
gari, Materials, Process, Color, in ibid., pp. 11619, 13033, 13639.
15 Jean Paulhan, Fautrier lenrag, 1943, 194546, Eng. trans. as Fautrier, the Enraged,
trans. Carol J. Murphy, in Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler, eds., Jean Fautrier: 18981964
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 181. First published in Fautrier.
Oeuvres, 19151943 (Paris: Galerie Ren Drouin, 1943), rev. and republished in 194546.
16 Dubuffet, Notes for the Well-Read, p. 77.
17 Ibid., pp. 7778.
18 Francis Ponge, Note sur les Otages, peintures de Fautrier, 1946, Eng. trans. as Note on
the Otages, Paintings by Fautrier, trans. Vivian Rehberg, in Carter and Butler, eds., Jean Fautrier:
18981964, p. 175. First published Paris: Editions Seghers, 1946. For the chronology of Fau-
triers Otages see Rachel Perry, Jean Fautriers Jolies Juives, October 108 (Spring 2004):
5355; as Perry establishes, he started on these images in Paris well before he took refuge
in the sanatorium at Valle-aux-Loups, Chtenay-Malabry, in April 1944, where he supposedly
overheard hostage shootings.
19 Dubuffet, Notes for the Well-Read, p. 79.
20 Damisch, Dubuffet or the Reading of the World, p. 11.
21 Ponge, Notes on the Otages, p. 176.
22 Ibid., and see Yve-Alain Bois and Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone
Books, 1997).
23 Dubuffet, Notes for the Well-Read, p. 67.
24 Ibid., p. 71.
25 Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat, p. 26.
26 See Kristen Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995).
27 Tiampo, please draw freely, p. 51. On the French/Japanese network in the early 1950s
and the influence of Gutai on Allan Kaprows Happenings see Munroe, all the landscapes:
gutais world, in Tiampo and Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid Playground, pp. 2736.
219
 T
he late Osman Waqiallas pioneering experimen-
tation with classical Arabic calligraphy led to the
rise of a distinct style within postwar Sudanese
art. 1 Based on a mastery of this calligraphys
diverse styles, and an extensive knowledge of its
aesthetic balancing of masses of light and dark,
Waqiallas contribution lay not only in his creative
treatment of the sacred text of the Quranclearly
evidenced in his calligraphic variations on Quranic themes, as in his
Al-Anbiyya (Prophets) series (19522002)but in liberating Arabic cal-
ligraphy from its association
with the Quran through a pi-
oneering treatment of secular
Arabic texts, exemplified in
his series on Sudanese mod-
ern poetry and starting with
his earliest surviving work, Al
Sufi al Muazab (The Torment-
ed Mystic, 1952; fig. 1).2 This
interest in revolutionary ex-
perimentation was shared
WHEN IDENTITY BECOMES FORM: by his relatively younger
colleagues Ibrahim El Salahi
CALLIGRAPHIC ABSTRACTION AND and Ahmed Shibrain, prom-
inent figures in what by the
SUDANESE MODERNISM
early 1960s had evolved into
the influential Khartoum
Salah M. Hassan School. Fig. 1. Osman Waqialla. Al Sufi al Muazab (The Tormented Mystic) (title page). 1952.
Ink and color on hand made paper,
In his early works
Shibrain further developed
the potential of the Arabic letter as abstracted form, seeing it as a figural
element with an inspiring plastic aesthetic value that he applied to an
3
Africanized Sudanese framework. In his innovative pen-and-ink paint-
ings of c. 1960, such as Untitled (fig. 2), Arabic-like characters are ar-
ranged in a Kufic style on a plain white background. Individual characters
are barely decipherable, being shortened or elongated, compressed or
expanded, to become part of a larger abstracted composition. Shibrains
oil painting Message 40 (1966) includes both calligraphy and traditional
Islamic decorative motifs, such as rosettes, crescents, and semifloral
arabesques. The paintings from this period, such as Untitled (1965),
deploy earthy colors recalling the references to landscape in the work of
other other Khartoum School artists, including El Salahi. Shibrain envi-
sions colors such as blue and bluish green as referring symbolically to the
Nile rivera major life presence in Sudanand red, yellow, and brown as
the hues of the earth and of northern Sudanese traditional architecture.
Concerns with calligraphic forms and abstracted figurations also
appear in the work of El Salahi, who began to break down Arabic let-
ters and abstract their shapes in the early 1960s, focusing on their for-
5
mal properties rather than on their meanings. Through this process of
2. Form Matters
experimentation he revealed the abstracted rhythmic shapes of callig-
raphy, finding in them the presence of objects, figures, and a fantastic
world of imagery. The Last Sound (1964; fig. 3), Allah and the Wall of Con-
frontation (1968) and Untitled (early 1960s), three representative works
from this period, clearly evidence Arabic script and Arabic-like charac-
ters, in addition to the Islam-inspired crescent motif and West African
masklike figures. These works reference events in the artists lifeThe
Last Sound, for example, was made on the death of his fatherbut can-
not be interpreted as narrative or realist depictions. Both demonstrate El
Salahis pursuit of a new, modernist visual vocabulary and mark a trans-
formation in his practice, a
shedding of his Western ac-
ademic training, first at the
College of Fine and Applied
Art (formerly known as the
School of Design in Gordon
Memorial College in Khar-
toum), beginning in the late
1940s, then at Londons
Slade School of Fine Art in
the 1950s. These concerns
had parallels among art-
ists in other metropolitan
centers of the Arab world.
The well-known Fu-
neral and the Crescent (1963;
plate 118) refers to the kill-
ing of Patrice Lumumba,
4636 cm. the democratically elected
leader of Congo, executed
in a coup in 1961. Lumumbas assassination had been a turning point in
the era of decolonization, creating an outcry against imperialism and
neocolonialism not only in Africa but in the rest of the Third World. The
crescent moon, seen in other works of El Salahis from the early 1960s,
recurs here with a procession of mourners, their facial expressions
masklike, carrying a corpse. Abstracted, elongated, and emaciated fig-
ures cover the paintings surface. Points of articulation such as knees and
elbows are delineated with spiral forms, and the male sexual organ is de-
liberately exaggerated, in a style recalling certain West African sculptur-
4
al forms and styles.
The real breakthrough in Sudanese visual modernism came in the
late 1950s and early 60s in the pioneering work of Waqialla, Shibrain,
and El Salahi. Iftihkar Dadis argument that El Salahis work should
be situated between [Arabic] textuality, African plastic forms, and
transnational modernism holds for the other two as well, and they also
shared a distinctive role in developing an aesthetic of decolonization for
the Sudan and much of Africa.6 The uniqueness of the dialectics and
intertextualities in the work of these three artists becomes evident when
analyzed in the context of artistic developments in the postwar period,
Salah M. Hassan 221
which saw the rise of a distinct postcolonial modernism that was imbri-
cated with Western metropolitan modernism. Calligraphic abstraction,
which originated in different metropolitan centers of the Arab and
Islamic worlds, was one form of this expression. It has continued to in-
form modernist experimentation, particularly in Sudan, where the early
generation of the Khartoum School embraced it in the mid-to-late 1950s.
Bandung Conference in 1955, the Congress of Black Writers and Art- modernist forms that defy any literal interpretation. These experiments period, the search for a common denominatorfor a Sudanese national
ists in Paris in 1956 and in Rome in 1959, the Pan-African Festival in continue among younger artists such as the Algerian Rachid Korachi culture that would cut across its ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity
Algiers in 1969.7 The postwar era both engendered and intensified new and the Iraqi Dia Azzawi, who have developed a more conceptual ap- became a focal point. Totalizing terms such as Sudanese culture,
and emerging schools of thought such as Ngritude, Pan-Africanism, proach. As Dadi argues in the context of Muslim South Asia, the imbri- Sudanese identity, Sudanese literature, and Sudanese art became
Pan-Arabism, and African socialism, in addition to the rise of move- cation of modernist calligraphy with post-Cubist art represents a broad central to discourse, forming the basis for the vocabulary of a new social,
ments for Afro-Asian solidarity and tricontinentalism. 8 Decolonization artistic movement that can be understood in a variety of ways.11 In the literary, and artistic consciousness.13
shaped the rise of a distinct postcolonial modernism, producing some work of these artists, abstraction and figuration can be interpreted as a The overall ideology guiding this intellectual drive evolved into what
of the periods most exciting developments in visual expression. Such renewal of a traditional artistic form in a modernist fashion; as a vehicle Ahmed El Tayib Zein El Abdein has called al-Sudanawiyya, Sudanism,
new art forms were the result of a process of hybridization that shaped of individual expression and subjectivity; as fostering a renewed sense of an evolving cultural process through which Sudan has developed a
them in terms of media and material, technique, and personal and cul-
tural identity.9
In the Arab and Islamic worlds, the rich tradition of the Arabic
letter was available to artists in search of a new visual vocabulary. The
letter and its various calligraphic styles generated complex and di-
verse forms of abstraction and figuration. In art-historical discourse
this movement has come to be known by different terms, including
al Hurufiyya (letterism) and calligraphism. 10 Calligraphic abstrac-
tion seems to me a more appropriate designation: the juxtaposition
of calligraphy and abstraction encompasses more of this multifaceted
movement, and of its multifarious intersections with Western and
transnational modernism.
Although nationalism remains central to any analysis of post-
war art in the context of decolonization in North Africa and the
Arab world, African and Arab modernist artists had crossed geo-
graphic and cultural boundaries since the early twentieth centu-
ry, moving beyond national identities to express themselves in a
transnational visual language that incorporated an array of mo-
tifs, images, and objects. Arab literacy, and a well-developed corpus
of art and literary criticism, facilitated forms of Pan-Arabism and
Pan-Islamism in the modern visual arts.
In North Africa and the larger Arab world, this tendency was fur-
ther reinforced by a phenomenon of diglossia specific to Arabic,
namely the coexistence of two forms: the standardized high version
of Arabic known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used across the
Arab world in education, the mass media, and the press, and the various
vernaculars specific to regions and countries. Modern Standard Arabic
further facilitated the diffusion of artistic and literary ideas across the
Fig. 3. Ibrahim El Salahi. The Last Sound. 1964.
Arabic and Islamic worlds in North Africa and the Middle East. As the Oil on canvas, 121.5121.5 cm. Collection of Abdulmagid A. Breish

Fig. 2. Ahmed Shibrain. Untitled. N.d. Ink on paper, 76.345.8 cm.

Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth. Courtesy DEVA, Universitt Bayreuth
Rooted in Islamic discursive traditions, it must be understood within the
modernist quest for a new formalist visual language that emerged in the
context of decolonization in the Middle Eastern Arab world.
The end of World War II signaled not only the defeat of fascism
in Europe but the beginning of decolonization in Africa, Asia, and the
Arab world. The impact of decolonization on art and culture is still
insufficiently well studied. It advanced through several landmark events
that shifted world politics and created a new international orderthe
vehicle of the Quran, the Arabic language is considered sacred, but given
the fundamental role played by calligraphy in the aesthetic and style of
classic Islamic artthe nonreligious poetic verses on the walls of palaces
and on everyday items not intended for sacral usethis tradition did not
forestall modernist experiment with the Arabic letter.
In the context of the Arab and the larger Islamic world (North
Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia), calligraphic abstraction has
evolved into a complex set of artistic practices. El Salahi, Shibrain, and
Wagialla in the Sudan have pioneering counterparts elsewhere: Shakir
Hassan Al Said in Iraq, Nja Mahdaoui in Tunisia, Pervez Tanavoli in Iran,
Sadequain in Pakistanall have reworked Arabic calligraphic motifs in
nationalist pride; or, as in the case of El Salahi and Shibrain, as a critical
engagement with Western modernism.
While the art of Waqialla, Shibrain, and El Salahi resonates with
these analogous visual vocabularies in other parts of North Africa and
the Arab world, these artists are unique in the interconnectedness of their
work with classical African forms, and in their quest for a new identity in
the context of independent Sudan. No discussion of art and modernity
in Sudan can be isolated from a deeper knowledge of the cultural geogra-
phy of this ethnically diverse country, within which almost every major
African ethnic or linguistic group is represented.12 In the decolonization
unique ethos based on principles of hybridity and layering of cultural
continuities. Zein El Abdein understands this multiple layering as the
common denominator that distinguishes Sudanese culturesdespite
their internal variations and differencesfrom neighboring nations in
Africa and the Arab world.14 The roots of the Khartoum School were
intricately related to this larger quest for a shared Sudanese identity.
Germane to our understanding of the schools intellectual tenets is
its relationship to the literary group Madrasat al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra,
the Jungle and the Desert School, which included major poets, lit-
erary critics, and intellectuals such as Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim,

222 2. Form Matters Salah M. Hassan 223

Muhammad Abdul-Hai, and Salah Ahmad Ibrahim. The main ideologi-
cal and intellectual concern articulated by this group was the creation of
a true Sudanese literature, art, and aesthetic. Their literary production
clearly reinforces the symbolism behind the name: the goal of representing
not only the geographical landscape of the country but its hybrid cultural
framing of Islamic and African elements.15 The poet Salah Ahmad Ibrahim
passionately expressed such concern for hybridity and racial intermixture
in his collection Ghabat Al Abanus (The forest of ebony) of 1958. He wrote,
Liar is he who proclaims: I am the unmixed, the pure pedigree.
The only.
Yes!, a liar!16
I
ndeed, Waqialla, Salahi, and Shibrain, who were closely associated
with the poets, novelists, and literary critics in the Jungle and the
Desert School, shared the goal of constructing a new ethos for Suda-
nese identity in the visual arena. A major question was how far art-
ists should be obliged to shake off Western and other influences in their
schooling and to produce art that was uniquely Sudanese.
Experimentation with calligraphic forms continued in Sudan into
the 1980s, then took a more conservative ideological turn under the
current Islamist regime, which came to power in 1989. A circle of art-
ists that included Shibrain joined in the wave of Islamic revivalism that
swept the region, mostly propelled by the success of the Islamic Rev-
olution in Iran after the mid-1970s.17 In 1986, a group of artists led by
the painter Ahmed Abdel Aal, a student of both El Salahi and Shibrain,
issued the manifesto of a new school called Madrasat Al-Wahid, the
School of the One.18 While acknowledging pioneers such as El Salahi
and Shibrain, members of Madrasat Al-Wahid claim that a spiritual
link with the Islamic faith gives their work a spiritual dimension. In
advocating an exploration of the arts of Islam, especially calligraphy,
Madrasat Al-Wahid echoes the ideas of the Iraqi modernist Al Said,
who claimed to have connected his concern with calligraphy as an
artistic practice to spiritual salvation.19 Few of these artists aban-
doned figuration for pure calligraphic forms, but not all artists who use
calligraphy work strictly abstractly. Indeed, calligraphy is an influential
motif within representation for many Sudanese artists.
To assert a Sudanese identity, many Sudanese who engaged with
calligraphic abstraction emphasized local styles associated with popu-
lar Islamic schools, an approach known as the Khalwa style.20 In prac-
tice, the work of Madrasat Al-Wahid is a continuation of the Khartoum
Schools attempt to synthesize the African and the Islamic elements of
Sudanese culture. While Madrasat Al-Wahid puts more emphasis on
the Arabic and Islamic identity, and (like Al Sa'id) its member artists
claim to seek spiritual salvation through artistic creativity, its manifes-
to also acknowledges Sudanese culture as hybrid and Africanized. After
all, the reworking of calligraphic forms in the art of Ahmed Abdel Aal,
Ibrahim Al-Awam, and Ahmad Abdallah Utaibi differs little from the
Khartoum School approach seen in the works of El Salahi and Shibrain.
224 2. Form Matters
Calligraphic abstraction was intricately linked to the Western at the College of Fine and Applied Art until 1954, when he formed Studio Osman, in the center
of Khartoum. After Sudan won independence, in 1956, Studio Osman received major visual
avant-garde tradition, which was significant in the revival of calligra-
assignments, such as the calligraphic design on the first Sudanese currency, and served until
phy in the context of a postcolonial modernism. Western modernist 1964 as a meeting place for artists and others.
movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Lettrism, art brut, and oth- 2 Al Sufi al Muazab is among the few surviving works dating to Waqiallas post-Camberwell
studies. This twelve-page manuscript, executed on large-format handmade paper (46 x 36 cm,
ers proved more engaging for the mid-twentieth-century non-Western 18 x 14 inches), is based on a famous poem by the late Sudanese poet Al Tijani Yusuf Bashir, Al
artist than did older realist and academic schools of European paint- Sufi al Muazab. The manuscript, which is bound in brown coated cloth and paper, is rendered in
ing. This does not make calligraphic abstraction merely a derivative of the classic Diwani style and framed in a colored calligraphic formation based on extracts from
the poem, exemplifying Waqiallas pioneering experimentation with calligraphic abstraction.
Western modernism. Decolonization presented a challenge for Arab 3 Ahmed Shibrain, quoted in Evelyn S. Brown, Africas Contemporary Art and Artists (New
and African modernists, who faced the urgent task of recovering and York: Harmon Foundation, 1966), p. 109.
reviving expressive visual practices that had been suppressed or inter- 4 It is worth noting that Shibrain rarely titled or dated his early works.
5 See Ulli Beier, Ibrahim El Salahi, an Interview, Bayreuth, Iwalewa-Haus archives, University
rupted in the colonial period. Nationalism offered one crucial avenue of Bayreuth, 1983. Repr. in Salah Hassan, ed., Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (New York:
in the practice of calligraphic abstraction, whether in Sudan or else- Museum for African Art, 2013), pp. 10713.6. Iftikhar Dadi, Ibrahim El Salahi: Calligraphic Mod-
ernism in Comparative Perspectives, South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 555.
where, but calligraphic abstraction is also a transnational aesthetic
7 See Hassan, How to Liberate Marx From His Eurocentrism: Notes on African/Black Marx-
form that has been shared across the region. This becomes acutely im- ism, dOCUMENTA (13): 100 Notes100 Thoughts No. 091 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).
portant when we consider the facts of diaspora and mobility in the life 8 For more on the Afro-Asian solidarity movement in the art and literary arenas see issues of
Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers Association from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.
and work of artists such as El Salahi, Shibrain, and Waqiallah, whose
Lotus was important in documenting the development of this body of thought, networks, and
Western schooling, and experience of living in the West in the early exchanges of ideas among African and Asian writers and artists in the 1960s and 70s. See
1950s, challenged them to create a new transnational modernism in Hala Halim, Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 56383.
which the development of forms out of experiments with calligraphic
9 See Amanda Alexander and Manisha Sharma, (Pre)determined Occupations: The
modes was fundamental. Post-Colonial Hybridizing of Identity and Art Forms in Third World Spaces, Journal of Social
Theory in Art Education 33 (2013): 86104.
10 See Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 1997), chapters 15 and 16; Nada Shabout, Arab Art: Formation of Arab
Aesthetics (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2007); and Sharbal Daghir, Al Hurufiyah
Al-Arabiyah: Fan wa Hawiyah (Beirut: Sharikat al-Matbuat Lil Twazi wa Al-Nashr, 1990).
11 See Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Durham: University of North Car-
olina Press, 2010). See also his article Ibrahim El Salahi: Calligraphic Modernism in Compar-
ative Perspectives, South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 555.
12 See Muhammad Abdul-Hai, Conflict and Identity: The Cultural Poetics of Contemporary
Sudanese Poetry, African Seminar Series no. 26 (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian
Studies, University of Khartoum, 1976); Mohammed Omar al-Bashir, Cultural Diversity and
National Unity in Sudan (Khartoum: Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khar-
toum, 1980); Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Al Fikr Al Sudani Usuluh Wa Tatawurhu (Khar-
toum: Ministry of Culture and Communication, 1976); and Ali A. Mazrui, The Multiple Margin-
ality of the Sudan, in Yusuf Fadl Hasan, ed., Sudan in Africa (Khartoum: Institute of African
and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1971), pp. 24055.
13 In the 1930s, Hamza al-Malik Tambal, an influential Sudanese literary critic and editor,
proclaimed that Sudanese identity is an ideal to which we should all aspire, it must be re-
flected in all our work. See Hamza al Malik Tambal, al-Adab al-Sudani wa Ma yajib an yakuna
alayhi, 1931 (repr. ed. Khartoum: New Edition, 1972), pp. 66-67, 77; see also Abdul-Hai, Con-
flict and Identity, pp. 710. This ideal has evolved into intellectual movements characterized by
conflict and by attempts at reconciliation of identities.
14 Ahmed El Tayib Zein Al Abdein, Al-Sudanawiyya, Majallat Al Thaqafa Al Sudaniyya no. 15
(July 1998): 3035.
15 For an excellent recent autobiographical reflection on the Jungle and the Desert School
see Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, Fi Zikra al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra (Omdurman: Abdul Karim
Mirghani Center, 2007).
16 Salah Ahmad Ibrahim, from Ghabat Al Abanus (Beirut, 1958), p. 45, trans. in Abdul-Hai,
Conflict and Identity, p. 52.
17 In the early 1980s members of the fundamentalist Islamic group the Muslim Brotherhood
formed a Society for Islamic Thought, which, though, has tried to recruit artists and writers
who are not fundamentalists.
18 See my translation of the manifesto of the School of the One in Clementine Deliss, ed.,
Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995), pp. 24446.
19 See Shakir Hassan Al-Said, al-Usul al-Hadariya wa al-Jamaliya lil Khat al-Arabi (Baghdad,
1988).
1 Osman Waqialla was a poet, journalist, and broadcaster as well as a visual artist. After 20 The Khalwa style is closer to the Kufic-derived Maghribi tradition, known in North and
studying at the Camberwell School of Art, London, in 194649, he attended the School of West Africa as Sudani and in North Africa as ifriqi style, than to the Naskh tradition popular in
Arabic Calligraphy and College of Applied Arts in Cairo. Returning to Sudan in 1951, he taught the eastern part of the Islamic world.
Salah M. Hassan 225
 T
he title Material Facture layers this essay with
a double emphasis on materiality. In modernist
discourse, facture means the treatment of ma-
terials, the manner of making, or the formal and
material qualities of a work. It has conceptual and
ideological significance because it surfaces with-
in Constructivism, for which reason it also corre-
lates with the terms techne and construction. 1 plates. If the painting had been seen as a window, Antoni Tpies board-
Transported to postwar art (including painting), facture implies an
enhanced materiality, foregrounds surface textures as tactile affect, and
confounds the difference between form and formlessness with gestural
manifestations of materiality.
The 1920s avant-garde had two major aspects, each with a dis-
tinct form of materiality.2 The Surrealists, following Dada and Marcel
Duchamp, unraveled a newly theorized unconscious into tantalizing
miracles on the ground of art. In revolutionary Russia, Suprematists
such as Kazimir Malevich and Constructivists such as Vladimir Tatlin
saw abstraction as both transcendent and rational and proclaimed it the
language for a new world. One move spelt subversion and excess; the
other mapped the universe conceptually, materially, ethically, and gave
it a utopian dimension.
World War II and the Holocaust devastated such claims. Conscious-
ness and language were sundered, the efficacy of art annulled. Witness
and mnemonic form. Philosophically, modernism harbored existential
doubt and semantic ambiguity and placed ethics on a par with formal-
ist aesthetics. Jean Dubuffet swirled his deformed bodies in mud and
packed them in filth. Jean Fautriers Otages (Hostages) series, made
during the war, cast human heads as fatal lesions. In a new language of
abstraction, artists built up paint as matter, turning the picture plane
into wall or ground and converting surface opacity into sign-laden tem-
ed it up, erected a wall of crumbling sand and plasterlike paint etched
with graffiti. He gave the formalist credo of surface and support an
existential and political resonance, as did Lucio Fontana, who abstracted
trauma, transcribing it into gesture, slashing and perforating the canvas.
Piero Manzoni replaced the image with an artifice masked in white, as
in the object-studded kaolin-soaked canvases in the Achromes series
(196162). Alberto Burri compacted several strategies to build up reliefs
that were at once imagist, haptic, and visceral. As a former doctor and

MATERIAL FACTURE literature narrates the destruction of experience, the destruction of the
body, the destruction of the image.3 Important postwar artists strate-
Geeta Kapur gized nihilist agendas. In 1959, Gustav Metzger, an migr transported
as a child from the Nuremberg of the Nazis to England, issued his mani-
festo Auto-Destructive Art and soon staged a series of destructions in
civic sites, incendiary acts using acid or technologically devised implo-
sions. In South Bank Demonstration of 1961, for example, Metzger sprayed
hydrochloric acid on three large tarpaulinswhite, black, and red, after
the palette of Malevichstretched over a set of frames. His 1966 De-
struction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in London elicited the participation
of international artists and gave the countercultural underground a plat-
form for performance and a credo for hyphenating creation and destruc-
tion as a compound pair. Metzgers work drew attention to the violence
Fig. 1. John Latham. Soft Skoob. 1964. Books on canvas and
immanent within postwar politics. 4 John Lathams assemblages and per- spray paint, 2513250 cm. Courtesy Lisson Gallery

formances, made in England in the same period, involved pulping, burn-

ing, devouring, and entombing books, which he called skoobs (fig. 1).
His idea of the Event Structure troped postwar crisis with a critique
of liberal societies and presented a complex realignment of social, eco-
nomic, and political structures with concomitant aesthetic and knowl-
edge systems. He participated in the Artist Placement Group, founded in
1966 to position artists in industry, science, and government for direct
intervention and creative employment.
Continuing this theme, this essay foregrounds the postwar practice
that was material-driven, improvisatory, and, in relation to modern-
ist integrity, antiform. Cruelly distorted by the violence of the mid-
century, the figure-ground gestalt reconfigured itself as moral obduracy
prisoner of war, he memorialized mutilation and blood with humble
materialssutured sack-cloth bandages for the symbolic wound.
There is both aesthetic conceit and abjection in messing with grit
and slime, in using wax, nails, resin, tar, metal, burlap. All stuff, whether
abstruse or enchanting, transmutes in the artists hands. In the Vienna
Actionist movement, blood and shit proffered meaning in myth and
ritual, were believed to substantiate the experiences of desire, death,
and regeneration, and translated into extravagant blood ceremonies
arguably a modern artists claim to apotheosis. There was renewed refer-
ence to Georges Batailles metaphysics of base materialism.5 Infantile
dreams gained sanction, and so, along with them, did sinful and ludic

2. Form Matters Geeta Kapur 227

acts. The hand probed the gash, slipping to the underbelly of the absent
subject and messing with excremental stuff. As magician, surgeon, and
bricoleur, the artist staged encounters that inverted ontological attributes.
Living subjects were snatched away from humanist rendering. Joseph
Beuys's objects, (over)signified metonyms for amnesiac recovery, be-
come amenable to psychoanalytical reading.
In the 1960s, women artists, progenitors of feminist art in the United
States, extended the aesthetic of enhanced materiality. Carolee Schnee-
mann melded body and paint and installed her exposed self as votive fig-
ure and desacralized form. Niki de Saint Phalle used a pellet gun to burst
sacs of color, transforming white surfaces into color fields. Her many
Nana figures culminated in Hon-en-Katedral (She-a-Cathedral, 1966), a
giant reclining Nana open to public entry between her legs. In this per-
verse and productive mayhem, form matters.
Saburo Murakami crashed through framed paper walls as through bar-
ricades, ruptured the mise-en-scne, and (literally) collapsed (fig. 2). Hav-
ing left Japan for Paris in 1962, Tetsumi Kudo made lurid, object-based
performances/Happenings. Add to this the Fluxus-related performative
acts of Shigeko Kubota and Yoko Ono, the one provocative, the other
conceptual, and the scandalous excess of Yayoi Kusamas performances
and installations, which mimicked psychedelic experience. The specta-
tors witnessed a theatricalization of the encounter on feminist ground.
If this is art in extremis, I pause to consider an altogether differ-
ent aesthetic, indeed a reverse aesthetic that looped around modernist
canons and signaled, again but differently, the metaphysical basis for
abstraction. Here was a turn to Far Eastern conventions that transposed
spirit and language and understood phenomenology and aesthetics in
terms of immanence. Certain artists extended modernist formalism,
In rethinking postwar art, there are distinctions to be made be- between art and life. In their different ways, both Lygia Clark and Hlio
tween artists in countries directly affected by the war (that is, artists in Oiticica drew on the phenomenological sentience of living com-
Fascist or Fascist-occupied territories and in the liberal and Communist munities and transformed the mise-en-scne of ritual to host per-
countries constituting the Allied forces) and those involved indirectly, formative installations. There was a subtle recalibration of material
through colonial recruitment, or not at all. Further, the postwar period traditions and thus of the concept of facture, followed by a bold rein-
is charged with alternate histories of countries where national libera- terpretation of matter, means, and formall of which made Brazil-
tion struggles led to active decolonization and shaped the Third World. ian art a culturally charged avant-garde. Three famous categories of
Mid-twentieth-century art was made the more complex by a situational Oiticicas art remain unique even within modernisms long engage-
ethics relevant not only to newly enfranchised citizens/subjects but also ment with poor materials. These were the Blides (Fireballs), exquisitely
to migrant, marginalized refugee populations that remained in effect
disenfranchised. Narratives of belonging and unbelonging materialized
new subjectivities, new communities, as well as conditions of exile that
made the right to a new aesthetic a political call.
If the claim that form matters is not limited to academically recorded
modernism, it must include arts materiality as it was elicited from
a cultural ethos both inspired by living traditions and committed to a
modernizing process supporting radical self-realization. If we make the
ideological assumption that modernity is coproduced by the colonizers
and the colonized, several strategic positions are viable. The historical
project of postcolonial reconstruction might become strongly nationalist,
as in India.7 At the same time, artists might break away from Western
(imperialist) antecedents but realign themselves with Marxist-socialist
politics rooted in Western modernity, or forge international political
alliances, as the Egyptian Surrealists did. 8
Here we should look at the contentious term indigenism, de-
ployed in relation to resurgent cultures of South America and aligned
with radical politics in Mexico and Brazil. A creative response to

Fig. 4. Nildo of Mangueria wearing Hlio Oiticica's P15

Parangol capa 12, Eu incorporo a revolta (1967), c. 1968.
Courtesy Projeto Hlio Oiticica

Fig. 2. Saburo Murakami. At One Moment Opening Six Holes. 1955.

Performance. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey
A retroactive understanding of postwar practice must start with treating the compaction of surface and support as affording perceptual
the assumption that art produced across the world, from Brazil to Japan, and cognitive lucidity. I refer to the work of two Korean artists, begun
is not reducible to the conventional art-historical litany of origin, chro- between the mid-1950s and the mid-60s: Lee Seung-taek put together,
nology, precedence, and derivation. Works from this vast elsewhere tied, and laid out materials ranging from stones to human hair, inducing
are often positioned in an agonistic relationship to mainstream Euro- the viewer to sublimate the quality of touch into a discreet act of contem-
American art. Within a decade of the wars end, for example, Japanese plation. The diasporic artist Lee Ufans gestural paintings recalibrate the
artists launched the Gutai movement to enact postwar rageagainst modernist language of painterly touch with the virtuoso hand of oriental
Japanese fascism, against American imperialism.6 They pushed against calligraphy. His later installations in stone, metal, and found objects
the boundaries of Jackson Pollocks method, preempted Allan Kaprows spatialize the act of chance-determined meditation. Beginning in the
celebrated Happenings. The surface of wall or ground was damaged, late 1950s, V. S. Gaitonde, an Indian artist inspired by Zen, developed a
abused, held on to in desperation. Kazuo Shiragas Challenging Mud (1955), numinous aesthetic with color-saturated paintings aglow with viscuous,
a manic performance with field mire, produced a stressed indexicality. roller-spread paint-matter animated by spare tachist markings (fig. 3).
Fig. 3. V.S. Gaitonde. Untitled. 1962. Ink and watercolor on paper,
55.976.2 cm. Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
colonial hegemony and its cultural hubris led to a canny paradox: the
Brazilian concept of antropofagia (roughly translated as cannibalism)
and its critique of humanist modernism had remained a tendentious
inscription in cultural history since the 1920s. In the 1960s, Bra-
zils Neo-Concretist and Tropiclia movements developed a vitalist
affect and embraced an avant-garde principle: active engagement
simple assemblages; the human-scale Penetrables, resplendent with
color and light; and the Parangols, rough capes worn by favela youth
in improvised performances (fig. 4). Clarks formal aesthetic distilled
simple materials into objects that were also communicative devices
seeking to change subjective lives and social relations. Her practice
gave feminist art forms of therapeutic embodiment; it also prefigured
the conceptual and linguistic transmission that characterizes later
feminist practice.
In continuation with the drive toward indigenism, con-
sider how the replay of fetishism envisaged pure presence, how
totems turned into new linguistic signs, how craft (inversions) pro-
duced bricolage, and how ornamental calligraphy yielded esoteric
diagrams. The material surfaces of walls and earth became a cul-
tural resource. The Armenian-Iranian artist Marcos Grigorians
framed tablets of patterned earth were constructed, congealed, and

228 2. Form Matters Geeta Kapur 229

meditative. Mohan Samants canvases, with their fragile surfaces of
paint and sand, recall the ritually painted and easily erased markings
on mud walls in rural India. Inspired by Bengals seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century terra-cotta temples, the horizontal relief mural
installed by K. G. Subramanyan in the Lucknow Rabindralaya in 1963
set around 13,000 terra-cotta tiles in a figural pattern (fig. 5). Its motif
derived from a play by Rabindranath Tagore, founder of the culturally
syncretic, Asia-oriented university at Santiniketan, where Subraman-
yan was educated. Subramanyans engagement with living traditions
articulates artisanal practices in semiotic rather than ethnic terms, as a
language and grammar sustainable within modernizing societies.
I select another example from the Indian context, the (only) ex-
hibition of Group 1890, in Delhi in September 1963. 9 Jagdish Swami-
nathanCommunist, journalist, and, later, artist/anarchistwrote
Fig. 5. K.G. Subramanyan. King of the Dark Chamber (detail). 1963.
Terra-cotta mural, 2470270 cm. Courtesy Asia Art Archive
the (unsigned, collective) manifesto printed in the catalogue. Octavio
Paz, then Mexican ambassador to India (and a friend of Indian artists),
wrote a text, Surrounded by Infinity. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
opened the exhibition. A full account of this conjuncture would unpack
histories of modernism and indigenism, and of statist, liberal, and radi-
cal perceptions within Indian and Third World discourse in the 1950s and
60s. While that story cannot be told here in detail, I offer a few pointers to
the material and formal choices made in this context.
The foremost artist in Group 1890 was Jeram Patel, who rendered
the modernist project in erotic-nihilist terms enacted as violence.
He hammered nails and scrap metal into wooden supports, layering
them with shoveled tar and globules of color-dyed glue; he gouged out
forms with a blowtorch in thick-layered plyboard. While traveling in Eu-
rope in the late 1950s and early 60s he was attracted to Tpies and Burri,
but if Burris wounded and bandaged surfaces suggested the need for
haptic healing, Patel asserted psychic potency through an aesthetic of
destruction, declaring exactly why form mattered to an artist at the
230 2. Form Matters
(then) margins of canonical modernism: it was a claim to authorial
self-signification. Group 1890 refused representation as well as
composed and painterly (School of Paris) abstraction. It assumed a
style of self-primitivization to bait pictorial protocols. There was a
deskilling and a retooling of the hand. Much later, Swaminathan de-
veloped a virtual thesis prioritizing the cultural, cultic, and linguistic
contribution of Indias ancient adivasi/tribal communities. 10 As an
artist/ideologue in the postcolonial mode, Swaminathan denounced
modernitys guilt and, ironically, favored untethered contemporane-
ity over historical time.
By the 1960s, the manifold cultural imaginaries looped into global
contemporaneity needed to be retranslated into semiotic structures
based on a principle of difference. Take three artists from the Asian
diaspora. The Filipino artist David Medalla, founder, with Paul Keeler,
of the Signals Gallery, London, was a key avant-garde figure in the 1960s.
His itinerant and contrarian practice privileged an ebullient formless-
ness, as in his Cloud Canyons series and in participatory projects with
indigenous antecedents such as A Stitch in Time (196872), cloth murals
stitched with associative fragments by volunteer contributors. Rash-
eed Araeens provocations began in Karachi; his mimicry of Englands
ethnic typecasting developed into militant partisanship as an editor
of the critical journals Black Phoenix and Third Text, and his wood-and-
industrial-pipe constructions engaged the international art language
from a (claimed) level ground. The Iranian artist Siah Armajani realized
a diasporic internationalism on a monumental scale through symbolic
bridge projects made for public spaces in the United States.
Three concluding propositions:
Disparate cultures within or without the modernan attribution that
remains complicatedfunction through a locus of knowledge that
produces a revisionist understanding of modernism itself. Art history
can be less reparative and more engaged if it is, in equal measure,
archival and dialogic.
If the Western world has suffered a fading of the utopian vision, the fu-
ture must be placed as a key motif in that narrative: the socialist rev-
olution in conjunction with World War I, decolonization before and
after World War II. This historical paradigm facilitates a hermeneutics
whereby given narratives and annotated interpretations generate both
doubt and affirmation. This also permits a turn to a negative aesthet-
ics. The compact of destruction and creation produces a performative
poetics: ironic, activist, and emancipatory.
Matter relates to materials and means of production. Form contours
the act of perception and signifies a phenomenology of encounters.
That form matters is an instance of how historical materialism aspires
to the more esoteric operation of a dialectic.11
Geeta Kapur
1 See John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism
19021934 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), pp. 2057, 21617, 22325, and Benjamin H.
D. Buchloh, From Factura to Factography, in Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods
in Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015), pp. 25668.
2 For an ideologically annotated chronology of twentieth-century avant-garde art see Hal
Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimod-
ernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). Especially relevant to this essay
are pp. 12529, 17476, 19095, 20811, 37378.
3 See Theodor W. Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1983), pp. 1734. See also Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The
Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2000), esp. the chapters The Witness (pp.
1539) and The Archive and Testimony (pp. 13769).
4 See Paul Schimmel and Kristine Stiles, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the
Object, 19491979, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998). This
catalogue is widely referenced in this essay.
5 See Georges Bataille, Base Materialism and Gnosticism, 1930, in Visions of Excess: Se-
lected Writings, 19271939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), pp. 4552, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, The Destiny of the Informe, in
Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 23554.
6 See Alexandra Munroe, Ming Tiampo, Yoshihara Jiro, et al., Gutai: Splendid Playground,
exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2013). The book includes Jiros Gutai
Manifesto.
7 I cite India as a way of indicating the material and ideological struggles that often char-
acterized transitions from nascent nationhood to a postcolonial nation-state. Indias political
leadership differed on strategy but recognized Britain, its colonial oppressor, as an antifascist
force. The tumultuous decade leading up to independence, in 1947, had seen a volunteer
Indian army of 2 1/2 million soldiers recruited to fight for the Allies, the Quit India Movement of
1942, and the Bengal famine of 1943 (a collateral effect of the war economy), which left c. 3
million dead. India and Pakistan gained independence after the violence of Partition, in which
200,000 or more were killed and 14 million displacedthe largest mass migration in human
history. Gandhis civil disobedience movement placed trust in the populace, and especially
in village India, and was averse to the monolithic nation-state. The new republics constitu-
tion was largely formulated by B. R. Ambedkar, a militant leader of Indias oppressed dalit
caste. Jawaharlal Nehru, Indias first prime minister, shaped a modernizing, socialist-inclined
nation-state. Because of him, India became a leading member of the Afro-Asian and Non-
Aligned movements, part of what became the Third World. In art, the Bombay Progressive
Artists Group (1947) developed mytho-realist and expressionist genres (M. F. Husain and F.
N. Souza respectively). Satish Gujral, who trained in Mexico in the 1950s, practiced a form
of social-realist expressionism. Abstraction developed in the early 1960s (S. H. Raza, Mohan
Samant, V. S. Gaitonde). On Group 1890 of 1963 see below.
8 The Egyptian Surrealists, active from the late 1930s and working under the name Art and
Liberty Group (the Arabic initials are JFH), were part of a worldwide network of comrades
with special connections to Mexico. During and after the war, Egyptian and British authorities
began to imprison and exile these revolutionaries for their political (at first Trotskyite) affili-
ations. Surrealist theorist and painter Ramses Younan was arrested in 1947, went to Paris,
aligned himself with anarchists, and was active in the early 1950s. Gamal Abdel Nassers
nationalist military coup in 1952 confirmed the states hostility toward Surrealism.
9 In 1962, artists from Delhi, Baroda, Ahmedabad, and Madras met to draft a new aesthetic.
They started with a critique of the ParisLondonNew York axis that had, they argued, over-
determined Indias art since the countrys independence. The twelve artists of Group 1890
(the number in the address of the house in Bhavnagar where they met) exhibited together in
1963, aligning themselves with their Mexican friend Octavio Pazs tilt toward a surrealist/
anarchist, indigenist, and material-based language. These artists were not fully cognizant of
contemporary art in Brazil and Japan.
10 See Jagdish Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of Roopankar Collection of
Folk and Adivasi Art from Madhya Pradesh, India (Bhopal: Bharat Bhavan, 1987).
11 See Fredric Jameson on Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno (differing protagonists of
form), in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972).
231
 W
e speak, write, and read, all without
attending to the shape and pattern-
ing of our language. Its everyday use
grows so customary that we need not
probe it to understand it. Painting and
sculpture similarly operate as thor-
oughly established modes of commu-
nication. These media present images,
raise cultural issues, and offer speculative arguments, while implicitly
excluding their materiality as an additional focus of interpretive effort.
Identifying an object of depiction, an issue in question, or the gist of an
argument nevertheless becomes secondary when a medium reveals its
material core. Exposure of the fundamentals is shocking, as if a veneer
an image (Spatial Concept, Expectation, 1962; fig. 1). Similarly, in viewing
works by Jackson Pollock, we may be struck by fluidity; in Beauford
Delaney, viscosity; in Frank Auerbach, thickness; in Jean Fautrier, smears;
in Ellsworth Kelly, nothing but color; in Piero Manzoni, colorlessness;
in Yayoi Kusama, repetitive texture; in Tetsumi Kudo, skeins; in Helen
Frankenthaler, stains; in Simon Hanta, creases; in Alberto Burri,
cracks; in Ramss Younan, accumulation; in Hermann Nitsch, corporal
physicality. The list could continue. Physical gesture guides Willem de
Koonings mimeticism (Woman, 1952; plate 131). Engagement with gravity,
letting it hang, shows Eva Hesse what sculpture can be (Untitled, 1965; plate
79). The material assumes its form, which becomes the form of a novel art.
How it went, thats how it was: Barnett Newmans rhetoric of
monosyllables conveys the elemental directness of the drawings he

0 TO 1
Richard Shiff

Fig. 1. Lucio Fontana. Spatial Concept, Expectation. 1962.

Oil on canvas, 100.581.3 cm. Private Collection, Wassenaar

of cultural civility had been removed. In reaction to the wartime loss of
political civility, arts of the postwar period offered a homeopathic remedy
by returning to base materialityaesthetic experience lacking aesthetic
development, experience lacking history.
Beginning in 1949, Lucio Fontana punctured his canvases, destroy-
ing the integrity of the pictorial surface, shifting a viewers attention from
the potential for depiction to the physical condition of the object. By 1958,
Fontana was using razor cuts, sometimes just a single one, causing the
materiality of canvas to become the image rather than the support for
produced in 1944 and 1945, as the war ended in moral ambiguity, with
fire-bombing in Dresden and atom bombs in Japan (Untitled, 1944; fig.
2).1 Newmans art may be the clearest expression of a postwar aesthet-
ic devoid of prewar and wartime baggage. His modest compositions
groupings of strokes in ink, crayon, or watercolor: straight, angled, loop-
ing, squiggly, rubbedmarked his return to visual art after a midwar
hiatus. He was reassessing what art should be. The war itself demon-
strated the extent of a collective moral failing that threatened continued
global disorder. Newman was pessimistic; he perceived little difference

2. Form Matters Richard Shiff 233


Fig. 2. Barnett Newman. Untitled. 1944.
Oil and crayon on woven paper, 50.537.8 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington.
The Nancy Lee and Perry Bass Fund. Acc. n.: 1998.59.1
234 2. Form Matters
among fascists, nationalists, communists, capitalists, and imperialists,
condemning the lot for tacitly accepting a Hegelian sense of progress.
Hegelianism provided dialectic cover for destructive policies: The sci-
ence of history is the curse of the world.2
Each political institution, restricting itself to the ordering prin-
ciples of its ideology, had become repressive. Through the noninsti-
tution of art, Newman would restore the world not to order but to vi-
tality. The drawings of 194445 resulted from his realization that he
needed not only to begin again but, before beginning, to intuit how
to begin, as if his evolutionary position had been set back to the cha-
otic formlessness of state 0 rather than the elemental primacy of state
1. All imagery, both representational and abstract, seemed tainted, all
methods were suspect: The Depression and the War made the histo-
ry of painting obsolete.3 So Newmans renewal enlisted no familiar
imagery, deployed no accepted method; at state 0, an artist has nei-
ther orientation nor commitment, even to cultivated techniques of
the hand. Newmans action amounted to exercising intimate phys-
ical gestures with a sense of the natural inclination of the materials:
With an automatic move you could create a world.4 The artist would
occupy this world, becoming an element of it, in sympathy with the
configured form. The collaboration of artist and material would raise
the consciousness of both, rendering the sensitivity of the artist
more acute, revealing form as mind-in-matter. Newman imposed no
forms that were entirely of his invention. He was not tracing an image
onto his paper ground, as if it could exist elsewhere. Instead, the form he
drew was as much of the pigment and the paper as it was of the artists
imagination.
By 1946, Newman was creating radically abstract paintings
that lacked all traditional features of composition. Composition-
al devices would have been impositions, violations of the freedom
of how it was. He would later say that his paintings had not only
been a confrontation with surrealism (too much of an escapist fan-
tasy for times of political crisis) but also, more significantly, a con-
frontation with abstraction.5 His strategic choices implied a distinc-
tion between what we might label material (or materialist) abstraction
and a more pictorial, image-oriented abstraction of either geometric
or organic elements in harmony and dynamic balance (Piet Mondri-
an, Wassily Kandinsky). Where Newman placed verticals he included
no compensating or competing horizontals; pictorial dialectic was not
at issue (The Beginning, 1946; plate 33). Likewise, where he used hori-
zontals there were no corresponding verticals. He removed from his
practice the traditional means of pictorial articulation, just as philos-
ophers, seeking a foothold in state 0, speculated on removing conven-
tional signification from their use of language. Newmans contemporary
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, Philosophy asks of our experience of
the world what the world is before it is a thing one speaks of before
it has been reduced to a set of manageable, disposable significations;
[philosophy] addresses itself to that compound of the world and of our-
selves that precedes reflection.6 How it went preceded Newmans
Richard Shiff
reflection on how it should go. His action was a Merleau-Pontylike
compound of world and selfthe reciprocal articulation of the two
aspects of being, rather than a top-down expression of an artists aes-
thetic authority.
Yet to reach such a conclusion is to repeat a massive generali-
zation that, in theory, could be applied to any creativesignifying,
communicative, meaningfulhuman act. Modern theory is reple-
te with chiasmus: human volition, we claim, does not act without the
resistance of what it acts upon, which in turn acts upon it; language,
we contend, has a rhetoric and a sensory effect that resist its messa-
ge even as they generate it. In the postwar context, however, it did
not seem that artists merely invoked a philosophical truism when
they took aesthetic, even antiaesthetic action in recognition of the
material ground of meaning. Newman attempted to revivify aes-
thetic experience by passing from state 0 to state 1and no further
through every work he fashioned. Analogously, Fontana developed no
composition with his cuts; he merely cut. Extremes of form offered
liberation from the history of painting, as oppressive as the dialectical
science of history.
Postwar politics failed to assure Newman that humankind was re-
gaining its humanity. Like many intellectuals, he worried over increasing
rule by technocracy. In 1946, the United States began to conduct atom-
ic tests at isolated South Pacific atolls, seemingly oblivious to the local
environment and the island culture it sustained. Shortly before the first
test, Newman published an introduction to an exhibition of Oceanic art,
noting that the remote Pacific could no longer serve artists as the roman-
tic dream of our time (as it had served Gauguin and Matisse). The atolls
had always been sites of intangible terror, their existence threatened by
unpredictable tsunamis.7 Now the entire world was experiencing an anal-
ogous intangible terror, but manmade: the bomb. In prehistoric ages or
perennially in Oceania, when humans faced terrifying phenomena, they
took solace in primitive magic, becoming maker[s] of gods that had an-
imate life [and] intrinsic meaning. 8 Experiencing new terrors, Newman
returned his art to a materialist version of primitive magic.
Philosophers, not to mention the physicists of the bomb, argued that
matter, base materiality, holds a magical vitalism within; an evolution-
ary continuity exists between mineral life and animal life, independent
of any actualized evolution. The continuity is at every moment potential.
All matter has some mind, though not much. This notion was prevalent
around 1900, expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce, Henri Bergson, and
others. Matter is effete mind, Peirce wrotepassive and habit-bound,
like the law-abiding elements of nature.9 Through a process of ideolog-
ical stultification, the technocratic mind devolved to become immobile
like rock. In 1956, Gilles Deleuze published on Bergson; his essay reads as
if reflecting the philosophical position Newman and others had reached
inadvertently through a primitive manipulation of materials. Deleuze ar-
gued that matter represents the lowest degree of the life force, life at its
most distended. In its passivity, thoroughly removed from living con-
sciousness, it becomes a mere object of instrumentality. The single life
235
force, extended as matter, converts to mind when contracted down to a
spatial point and a temporal instant: this is consciousness.10 The differ-
entiation of life into mind and matter may seem tantamount to a dual-
istic, even a dialectical system of negations, but is instead chiasmic, in
reciprocal flux, so that mind finds itself in matter and matter in mind.
The chiasmic element amounts to rhetorical sleight-of-handthe
philosophers magic act, relieving a dialectical impasse. It encourages
speculation that intelligent life and obtuse matter might interact in
mutual respect, even in the form of the tsunami or the bomb, certainly
so in materialist art. Materials become energized like living bodies and
Fig. 3. Kazuo Shiraga. Challenging Mud. 1955.
Performance. Courtesy Fergus McCaffrey
convey their feelings to receptive minds. Newman spoke of stretching a
color until it broke: it would break (as if exercising a will to break); he
would not break it himself.11 Manipulating matter does not equate with
controlling it.
When we think this way, we imagine that matter must think also. Per-
haps we merely project abstract thoughts onto matter as an indirect way
of representing and objectifying those thoughts as external form. Is it like
film projection, with a thought-image that can alight on any surface, leaving
no material trace? This would be imposed, top-down thinking. Deleuze
suggests that the material medium we use to express our thoughts
and feelings absorbs our excess of psycho-sensory vibrations, with
the result that the material itself receives a boost in sentienceits
sensory form.12 Otherwise why would we feel that any material object
236 2. Form Matters
or force is capable not only of responding to us but also of initiating the
exchange, speaking to us, like the Oceanic spirit or mind of the
tsunami? This is the magic of matter and its form, acknowledged by
Newman and Deleuze, and simultaneously by the Japanese Gutai
group (fig. 3): Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to
life. In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their
hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed (differ
entiated as mind and matter).13 The metaphoric use of animating verbs,
such as speak and reach out, replacing the undemonstrative likes of re-
present and signify, indicates more than rhetorical flourish. The formal
matter of material abstraction communicates directly, as if, among all
material stuff, it attained the highest degree of sentience. To develop
art that speaks outside the static culture of ideological programming,
begin with 0 to 1.
Self-consciousness occurs when we turn our thinking and feel-
ing upon our thinking and feeling. We exchange self for matter. We
treat our subjectivity, not as if it were condensing and projecting onto a
material surface, but as if it were penetrating into the surface, becom-
ing the object. At moments of self-consciousness, we view our con-
scious actions as an emergent work of art having material presence.
Autonomous will yields to compelling sensation. When passing from
0 to 1, no self-expression is involved. No self yet exists to be expressed;
it will precipitate from the encounter with matterpart mind, part
matterconstituting an impersonal moment of discovery. The art of
0 to 1 is anonymous, with names merely temporary place-holders. The
various forces and qualities are transient markersnot possessions or
expressionsof individuals who incorporate them as art.
Materials do what materials do; they assume form. The artistry
that gains our respect induces us to perceive elemental quality, forms
primordial emergence. Groping for a metaphor, Peirce associated this
first level of material awareness with the equation of quality to con-
sciousness: not a waking consciousness. A sleeping consciousness,
perhaps.14 Bridget Riley called it the somnambulist element in per-
ception, what we cannot quite see. 15 Ideology inhibits perception of
what cannot ordinarily be sensed; terror does the same. Philosophers
and artists agree that perception is best advanced by ceding a degree of
conscious control: How it went, thats how it was. At state 0, no con-
trol: terror. At state 1, some control, yet no ideology to dull the mind.
State 1 is a place of discoveryof magic as well.
1 Barnett Newman, in conversation with Thomas B. Hess, 1968; see Hess, Barnett Newman
(New York: Walker and Company, 1969), p. 26.
2 Around 1944, Newman drafted an anti-Hegelian diatribe, unpublished during his life-
time; see Richard Shiff, Newmans Time, in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho
(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005), p. 161.
3 Newman, in conversation with Hess, 1969; see Hess, Barnett Newman, pp. 2526.
4 Newman, interview with Alan Solomon, May 20, 1966. Unedited transcript, Barnett Newman
Foundation, New York.
5 Newman, Letter to the Editor, Artnews, May 13, 1968, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writ-
ings and Interviews, ed. John P. ONeill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 234.
6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 102. Merleau-Pontys text
remained unfinished at his death, in 1961.
7 Newman, Art of the South Seas, 1946, Selected Writings and Interviews, pp. 98, 100.
8 Newman, Painting and Prose/Frankenstein, 1945, in ibid., p. 93.
9 Charles Sanders Peirce, The Architecture of Theories, 1891, in Collected Papers, ed.
Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 195860), 6:20.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Bergson, 18591941, 1956, in LIle dserte et autres textes, ed. David
Lapoujade (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 2002), p. 42.
11 See Shiff, Until It Breaks, Source 29 (Fall 2009): 39.
12 Deleuze, Bergsonism, 1966, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1988), pp. 7475.
13 Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai Art Manifesto, 1956, in Whats Gutai?, ed. Shoichi Hirai (Hyogo:
Bijutsu Shuppan-Sha, 2004), p. 84.
14 Peirce, The Origin of the Universe, 1898, Collected Papers, 6:149 (emphasis eliminated).
15 Bridget Riley, The Artists Eye: Seurat, 1992, in The Eyes Mind: Bridget Riley, Collected
Writings 19652009, ed. Robert Kudielka (London: Ridinghouse, 2009), pp. 267, 273
(original emphasis).
Richard Shiff 237
 I
n 1957, the British-Australian author Nevil Shute published On
the Beach, a novel that follows a number of Australians, immi-
grants, and American naval personnel in Melbourne as they
face the death inevitably coming their way as radiation from
the nuclear war that has obliterated life in the Northern Hemi-
sphere floats toward them across the Pacific.1 Two years later in
the same city, a group of artists released a statement in which
they fought back against a different kind of virus. Known as the
Antipodean Manifesto, the document opens with this salvo:
Today tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists, abstract
expressionists and their innumerable band of camp followers threaten
to benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious
mysteries. The art they champion is not an art sufficient for our time, it
is not an art for living men. It reveals, it seems to us, a death of the mind
ABSTRACTION AND IDEOLOGY:
CONTESTATION IN COLD
WAR ART CRITICISM
Terry Smith
Fig. 1. Lithographic poster for the Antipodeans' exhibition at the Victorian Artists Society,
Melbourne, 1959
and spirit. And yet wherever we look, New York, Paris, London, San
Francisco or Sydney, we see young artists dazzled by the luxurious
pageantry and colour of non-figuration.2
The signatories of the Antipodean Manifesto were artists Charles
Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson,
John Perceval, and Clifton Pugh, along with art historian and critic
Bernard Smith. The last was its primary author, shaping drafts by the
artists into his own unmistakable language.3 While deploring the tri-
umph of non-figurative art in the West, the Antipodeans also opposed
2. Form Matters
Socialist Realism in the East. Instead they sought a middle path, one
along which they might, as Australians, serve a young society still mak-
ing its myths, and the society of man more generally, by making art
about subjects of national and universal concern and by using a visual
language accessible to allthat is, through the image, which communi-
cates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences the artist shares
with his audience.
While specific to the art worlds in Melbourne, Sydney, and London,
the battle lines drawn within the Antipodean Manifesto are a microcosm
of those that shaped postwar art discourse throughout the world: ab-
straction versus figuration, nationalism versus international styles,
peripheries versus centers, artistic autonomy versus social obligation,
dependence versus nonalignment, democracy versus socialism. An-
other, less remarked recurrence is the pivotal role of art critics, acting
as champions of one artistic group or tendency against another and
promoting one or the other side of these dichotomies. As we shall see,
the debates were never black-and-white divisions between clearly
marked positions. Local circumstances, the changing relationships
among places, and above all the constant contrariness of artists made
them always, everywhere, volatile.
In the immediate prehistory of contemporary artthat is, the
transformative moment of the later 1960s and early 70s and the postwar
period just before itthe figure of the art critic seems to catch more light
than other actors. If attention today seems captivated by collectors and
auctioneers, in the 1990s and early 2000s curators were both celebrated
Terry Smith 239

Fig. 2. Sidney Nolan. Ned Kelly. 1946.
Enamel paint on composition board, 90.8121.5 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of Sunday Reed 1977
and attacked for creating the most visible buzz. Less obviously, but
insistently, theorists came to the fore in the 1980s, while in the late 1960s
and 70s it was artists who offered the most powerful accounts of what
art was and could be. These artistsso the story goeshad displaced
the critics who seemed so prominent in the 1950s and early 60s.
Generalizations such as these are mostly rhetorical fictions, but
their persistence signals energies that were alive in at least certain times
and places. (This decade-by-decade story is mainly a North American
one.) We need to ask more specific questions: in the reconstituting and
soon expansionist art worlds of the major European centers, and in
ascendant New York and some of the rapidly growing art worlds else-
where, such as Tokyo and Buenos Aires, did certain writers succeed in
recording, defining, and even setting artistic agendas to a degree that
their predecessors rarely achieved? If so, how did they do itwith which
arguments, about what kinds of art, using what kinds of acumen, and
with what effects? Did they remain men of letters (litterateurs, critics of
the arts in general) or did they redefine the role of the critic as a medium
specialist? What were the issues that impelled them to write? How did
they mobilize the evolving elements of art-critical practiceselection,
description, interpretation, evaluationin sizing up the situation for
art in their location? Many places were in the early phases of becoming
art worldswhat role did critics play in building their infrastructures?
Above all, given that the European wars of the twentieth century had
resonated throughout the world, not least in accelerating the collapse of
colonial empires, what was distinctive and what shared among writers
in the many different art centers that were being rebuilt or were under
construction at the time?
Unfortunately there is no single survey of the history of modern
art criticism on which to draw to find ready answers to these ques-
tions. In the rare encyclopedia entries on the subject, postwar writing
in New York is taken as the gold standard, to the virtual exclusion of
everything and everywhere else. 4 From this perspective, critics are
valued to the degree that they were influential explicators of The
Triumph of American Painting, a story that goes like this: initially
shaped in the crucible of Depression-era social realism, inspired by
the arrival during World War II of Europes most innovative artists of
the interwar years, a loose cohort in New York turns first to a univer-
salizing primitivism, then to an existentially expressive action paint-
ing (as Harold Rosenberg characterized it) or a kind of post-Cubist
pure abstraction (as defined by Clement Greenberg), thus arriving,
instinctively, intuitively, but unmistakably, at a distinctively Ameri-
can kind of art. By the mid-to-late 1950s, however, ironic literalism,
allusive figuration, and popular imagery enter the picture, inviting
on the one hand a debate about the exact nature of artists attitudes
(are the Pop artists for or against U.S. consumerism?) and on the oth-
er a principled refusal of interpretation in the face of the arts evident
singularity (Susan Sontag). Despite objections and reconsiderations,
this story has been repeated so often that it has become the rock upon
which even the most critical accounts of postwar art continue to be
erected, even as they complicate it and slowly but surely reject it.5
The good news is that a generation of scholars is finally focusing
on critics as worthy of the kind of close attention paid to artists. They
are doing so from a contemporary global perspective, alert to the com-
plexities of the relationships among the multiple modernities of actual,
existing modern art. Andrea Giunta and Ins Katzenstein have done
pioneering work in the case of Argentina, as have Charles Green and
Heather Barker for Australia. 6 Pierre Restany is an obvious focus of
studies of Nouveau Ralisme, as is Michel Tapi for art informel.7 Reiko
Tomii has highlighted the role of critics such as Miyakawa Atsushi,
Nakahara Ysuke, Tno Yoshiaki, and Hary Ichir in defining the
acute sense of international contemporaneity (kokusai-teki djisei)
in Japan when information about art informel in Europe and Happen-
ings in the United States arrived there after the innovations of the
Gutai group. 8 Research into postwar art criticism elsewhere (includ-
ing the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, and the Middle
East), however, remains in the early stages. Documents from the ar-
chives of art critics are being gathered, notably by the Archives de la
critique dart, Rennes, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles,
and some are being published, as in the Primary Documents book
series produced by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which
now includes Eastern Europe, China, Japan, Argentina, Venezuela,
and the influential Brazilian critic Mrio Pedrosa.9 There is promise in
enterprises such as the Documents of 20th-Century Latin American
and Latino Art Digital Archive, hosted by the International Center
for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.10
Symposia and conference sessions devoted to individual critics are
appearing with increasing frequency, so we can anticipate more pub-
lications along the lines of the recent collection of studies of Lawrence
Alloway.11 Any comprehensive picture of the role of art critics during
the postwar periodindeed, of any periodmust await the results
of such research. What follows are provisional notes about the work
of certain representative and in various ways exemplary critics, crit-
ics who played crucial roles within the debates about the dichotomies
mentioned earlier. Each did so in a different way, according to the con-
text in which he (it is, unfortunately, overwhelmingly he) operated.
THE CRITIC AS AMANUENSIS,
PUPPET-MASTER, AND MEDIATOR
If, with the great exception of poet/activist Filippo Tommaso Marinettis
Futurist Manifesto of 1909, statements by artists were the primary writ-
ten documents of the early-twentieth-century avant-gardes, it is striking
that the key texts of postwar art were in many places authored by art crit-
ics. They spoke, usually, as the voice of a specific group of artists, whom
they joined in defining the option that they believed would best secure
arts future. In such contexts, criticism became engaged in contestation

240 2. Form Matters Terry Smith 241

about the direction of art, which just about everyone presumed would
indeed flow in one or another major direction. In the postwar period,
such criticism was also, unavoidably and necessarily, engaged in the
Cold War culture wars.
On April 4, 1958, in the culture supplement of the Mexico City
newspaper Novedades, painter and graphic artist Jos Luis Cuevas pub-
lished a pivotal document of postwar Mexican art. Headlined Cuevas:
The Enfant Terrible versus the Sacred Monsters, the essay tells the story
of Juan, son of a bribe-taking official, as he strives to forge a career as an
artist, inspired by predecessors in Mexico and contemporaries abroad,
yet slowly succumbs to the compromises and bad faith of an art world
dominated by officials in obsequious thrall to an ossified and unpop-
ular muralism. I protest, Cuevas writes, against the crude, limited,
provincial, nationalistic Mexico of the Juans, a condition he names la
cortina de nopal (the cactus curtain) to link Mexican muralism to Sovi-
et Socialist Realism. He praises the few artists, writers, and filmmakers
whose art he believes represents the true, universal Mexico, open to the
whole world without losing its essential characteristics. What I want in
my countrys art are broad highways leading out to the rest of the world,
rather than narrow trails connecting one adobe village with another. 12
These sentiments reflect Cuevass relationship to the Cuban critic
and curator Jse Gmez Sicre, from 1946 to 1968 head of the Visual Arts
Unit of the Pan American Union, which operated within the Organiza-
tion of American States. From his base in Washington, D.C., and with the
support of U.S. political and cultural figures such as Nelson D. Rockefeller
and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Gomez Sicre traveled tirelessly, promoting the idea
of Latin American Art as a loose collation of regional modernisms and,
after the Cuban Revolution (which he did not support), a vital part of a
pan-American cultural front against the spread of Communism. Cuevas
wrote his barbed essay from Philadelphia, where he was a member of a
tour organized by Gomez Sicre. Recent research has shown that the young
artist and the worldly critic actually collaborated on most of Cuevass writ-
ings from this period, including the famous cactus curtain text.13 Gomez
Sicre celebrated Cuevas as the model of the self-creating Latin American
artist: inspired by local traditions, alert to international tendencies, but an
individualist, finally beholden to neither. It is no surprise that caricatures
of the two as puppet-master and puppet circulated in the Mexican press.14
Similar patterns may be found throughout the Caribbean and
Latin America. In Argentina during the 1960s, artists such as Toms
Maldonado, Kenneth Kemble, and Marta Minujn, patrons such as
Guido di Tella, but above all critics such as Julio Llins and Jorge
disabling practice of matching categories of art, and particular styles, vigorously promoted a rigorous Western academicism as the way that there is very little genuine abstraction and no naturalistic art of any
to exclusionary ideologies. Their role was to act as public and private forward for African artists, while his colleague Kenneth Murray was importance; rather, the more powerful African artists are drawn to
mediators between competing, indeed incommensurable visions of equally convinced that the elements of folk art were essential to the expressionist or Surrealist forms.21 We are immediately in a discursive
what art could become. modernization of Nigerian art.19 Igbo artist Ben Enwonwu forged a space quite other than that of the dichotomies prevailing in Europe, the
synthesis of these opposing positions in his work and writings.20 United States, and their modernized cultural colonies in much of South
ARTICULATING ARTISTIC CHANGE
Published in Rio de Janeiro in the Sunday supplement of the Jornal do
Brasil on March 2122, 1959, the Manifesto neoconcreto was signed by the
poet and critic Ferreira Gullar, the artists Franz Weissmann, Amlcar
de Castro, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Cludio Mello e Souza and the
poets Theo Spanudis and Reynaldo Jardim (fig. 3). Associated with
a show at the Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, it sought to put
the exhibiting artists at a small but significant distance from the Con-
structivist tendency then defining modernism in Brazilian art and
also, by implication, from the developmentalist ideology inspiring the
New Brazil, expressed most visibly in the building of the new capital,
Braslia.
Neo-Concrete art, born out of the need to express the complex
reality of modern humanity inside the structural language of the new
plasticity, denies the validity of scientific and positivist attitudes in
art and raises the question of expression. This is the language of the
group. It was, however, Gullar who sought to define what this meant
as a description of what was distinctive in the works of these artists:
We do not conceive of the work of art as a machine or as an ob-
ject, but as a quasi corpus; that is to say, as something which amounts
to more than the sum of its constituent elements; something which
analysis may break down into various elements but can only be un-
derstood by phenomenological means.16 A few months later, realiz-
ing that Clarks art of the time could not be characterized as either
painting or sculpture but constituted a new kind of artwork, Gullar
wrote his essay Theory of the non-object. 17 He recognized that
these artists had moved to rupture the frame and eliminate the
base, with the result that the artwork became a primary formula-
tion of the world, one that occurred in the phenomenological field
between the artist and the spectator. 18 Gullar was one of the first to
articulate the spirit of conceptualism, over a decade before it was
formalized as Conceptual art. Fig. 3. Amlcar de Castro, Lygia Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Reynaldo Jardim, Cludio Mello e Souza,
Lygia Pape, Theo Spanudis, and Franz Weissmann. Manifesto neoconcreto. 1959

Romero Brest engaged in a constant struggle to influence the direc-

tion of culture in their country. 15 Everyone involved believed art to
be vital to Argentinas polity and all were aware of the countrys eco-
nomic and political vulnerability to American interests. Without hes-
itation, all understood that taking up art styles and adopting critical
postures meant adopting ideological allegiances. At the same time,
the most influential critics of the period, while not afraid to take po-
sitions (or, if afraid, taking them anyway), also sought to modify the
OUT OF THE COLONIES:
CRITICISM AS CULTIVATION
In Africa, the first formulations of contending perspectives on the de-
sired direction of the visual arts are replete with paradox. From the
1930s through to the 60s, Nigerian artist and teacher Aina Onabolu
Along with his short study Art in Nigeria, from 1960, Ulli Beiers
1968 volume Contemporary African Art is arguably the first art-critical
text that attempted to survey the emergence in Africa of a kind of art that
neither perpetuated traditional, local practices nor sought, through im-
itation or expatriation, to join other, usually European artistic currents.
A German writer, educator, translator, and institution-builder, Beier had
moved to Nigeria in 1950 to teach at the University of Ibadan. He notes
America and in Australia. It is a tentative, exploratory one, searching for
a language appropriate to its fresh yet fragile experience of possibility.
Contemporary African Art opens with an acknowledgment of the
decline of traditional African art, steering blame not only to European
colonialism but also to the inherent weaknesses and decadence of
many local cultures.22 Against this, Beier notes the recent exuberance
of many kinds of popular and touristoriented art, which heralds the

242 2. Form Matters Terry Smith 243

coming of the intellectual African artist, one who refuses to be fos-
silized, who accepts the challenge of Europe, and does not hesitate to
adopt new materials, be inspired by foreign art, look for a different role
in society, such that New Forms, new styles and new personalities are
emerging everywhere and this contemporary African art is rapidly
becoming as rich and as varied as were the more rigid conventions of
several generations ago.23 He demonstrates this claim through evalu-
ations of the work of artists from across the continent, many of whom
have subsequently become widely acknowledged. While noting that
In the postwar period, critics took sides within the various artistic (accessed June 2016); and Kerr Houston, A History of Art Criticism, An Introduction to Art
Criticism: Histories, Strategies, Voices (New York: Pearson Education, 2013), pp. 2381, avail-
tendencies and attitudes, favoring one over another and often becoming
able online at https://www-pearsonhighered-com-prd.pearson.com/assets/samplechap-
its public spokesperson. Art-world position-taking nearly always aligned ter/0/2/0/5/0205835945.pdf (accessed June 2016). See also Lionello Venturi, History of
with one or another competing ideological or political perspective with- Art Criticism 1936 (rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1964), and James Ackerman, Art History and
the Problems of Criticism, Daedalus 89, no. 1 (Winter 1960): 25263.
in each center, and was readily understood to be so aligned by others in 5 Landmarks include Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American
the same discursive world. A competition of styles dominated discourse Painting (London: Pall Mall, 1970); Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
and, to a large degree, practice. Nevertheless, within the period, coun- Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983); Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s
ter-tendencies arose and countercurrents swirled. By the mid- and late (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
1960s, things were changing: while these markers persisted for the grow- (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Anne Wagner, A House Divided: American Art since

superficially a common vocabulary can be detected among many of
these artists: the mask, the sacrifice, spirits, and folklore, Beier under-
scores that the way in which this mythological vocabulary is used dif-
fers considerably from artist to artist. For example, while Uche Okeke
collects and illustrates Igbo folklore, Skunder Boghossian rejects the
imagery of his country (Ethiopia) in favor of a painstaking constructed
personal mythology.24 Prefiguring the future for art in Africa, this is an
art driven by its own differences.
Beier remarks that many artists regret and rightly so that art criti-
cism is a field hardly explored by Africans themselves at the moment,
but that they certainly want to communicate about art.25 Oddly, he
does not cite Okekes Natural Synthesis manifesto, written in 1960,
the year of Nigerias independence. It is a call to the young artists in
a new nation to reject the confusion of Western art (What form of
feelings, human feelings, can void space inspire in a machine artist?)
and, equally, the copying of our old art heritages, for they stand for our
old order. Instead, Okeke urges artists to create a synthesis based on
openness to all possibilities, a natural synthesis, for it should be uncon-
scious not forced.26
CRITICISM AS A POSTWAR PRACTICE
These few examples of different critical practices, undertaken in wildly
differing situations, have introduced us to some of the challenges critics
faced in their immediate localities during a period when international
connections between art worlds were gathering pace, inequities between
them were becoming more evident, and these differences were being
both codified and contested. There are marked inequities between the
dense concentrations of critics in the modern metropolitan centers and
their relative isolation in towns within internal provinces, in the cities of
colonies and ex-colonies, and in peripheral countries. In such settings,
certain individuals, many of them artists, took on multiple roles as critics,
curators, art dealers, educators, and administrators. Everywhere critics
took for granted that their basic task was to describe and evaluate the
kinds of art being made and exhibited in their location. With exceptions
(including Sontag, Dore Ashton, and Marta Traba), and usually late in the
period, it was rare for women to take prominent roles as critics, but some
(such as Dorothy C. Miller at MoMA) curated significant exhibitions.
ing audiences for art, artists deliberately set out to complicate them, and
increasing numbers of younger critics took on the responsibility to do
the same.
I thank Nicole Coffineau for research assistance and Jennifer Josten and Paulina Pardo for
helpful suggestions.
1 Nevil Shute, On the Beach (London: Heinemann, 1957).
2 The Antipodean Manifesto is most readily accessible in Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara,
and Philip Goad, eds., Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture
19171967 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2006), pp. 69497.
3 See Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and History (Melbourne: Ox-
ford University Press, 1975), p. vii.
4 For example, James Elkins, Art Criticism, Dictionary of Art (London: Macmillan, 1996),
2:51719; Donald Burton Kuspit, Art Criticism in the 20th Century, Encyclopedia Britannica,
available online at www.britannica.com/topic/art-criticism/Art-criticism-in-the-20th-century
1955 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); and Katy Siegel, Since 45: America and
the Making of Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). Few individual critics have
won monographic studies, with Clement Greenberg being the most evident exception.
6 Ins Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here, Now!: Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the
Avant-Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Charles Green and Heather
Barkers No Place like Home: The Idea of Contemporary Australian Art, 19601988, forthcom-
ing, is a sustained analysis of three generations of critics.
7 See Jill Carrick, Nouveau Ralisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: Topogra-
phies of Chance and Return (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), and Julia Robinson, ed., New Re-
alisms: 19571962. Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle, exh. cat. (Madrid:
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2010).
8 See Reiko Tomii, Historicizing Contemporary Art: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai
Bijutsu in Japan, Positions 12, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 61141.
9 Mrio Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glora Ferreira and Paulo Herkenhoff (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2016).
10 Online at https://www.mfah.org/research/international-center-arts-americas/icaa-doc-
uments-project/ (accessed June 2016).
11 Lucy Bradnock, Courtney J. Martin, and Rebecca Peabody, eds., Lawrence Alloway: Critic
and Curator (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015).
12 Jos Luis Cuevas, Cuevas: El nio terrible vs. los monstrous sagrados, Mxico en la cultura
no. 473 (April 4, 1958): 7. Eng. trans. as The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity
in Mexican Art, Evergreen Review 2, no. 7 (Winter 1959): 11120, this quotation 11920.
13 See Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013), chapter 3, esp. pp. 15159.
14 See ibid., p. 150.
15 See Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the 1960s
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
16 Manifesto neoconcreto, Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, Sunday supplement, pp. 45.
Extracted in Mari Carmen Ramrez and Hctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin
America, exh. cat. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2004), pp. 49697.
17 Ferreira Gullar, Teoria do No-Objeto, Jornal do Brasil, December 1920, 1959, Sunday
supplement. Eng. trans. in Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, and London: Institute of International Visual Arts), pp. 17074.
18 Ibid., p. 174. See also Michael Asbury, Neoconcretism and Minimalism: Cosmopolitanism
at a Local Level and a Canonical Provincialism, in ibid., pp. 17489. The contemporary reso-
nance of Gullars essays has eclipsed the fact that the dominant Brazilian critic at the time was
Mrio Pedrosa; see Mrio Pedrosa: Primary Documents, ed. Glora Ferreira and Paulo Herken-
hoff (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), and the introductory essays discussion of
the relationship between the two critics.
19 See Ola Oloidi, Art Criticism in Nigeria, 19201996: The Development of Professionalism
in the Media and the Academy, in Katy Deepwell, ed., Art Criticism and Africa (London: Saffron
Books, 1997), pp. 4149. See also comments by Olu Oguibe in the same volume, pp. 99101.
20 See Sylvester Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (New York:
University of Rochester Press, 2008).
21 Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 168.
22 Ibid., p. 3.
23 Ibid., pp. 13, 14.
24 Ibid., pp. 169, 168.
25 Ibid., p. 167.
26 Quoted in Clmentine Deliss, ed., Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (London:
Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995), pp. 2089. See also Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Mod-
ernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2015).

244 2. Form Matters Terry Smith 245

 FORM MATTERS
Plates

Shafic Abboud Lucio Fontana Lee Ufan Mohan Samant

Rasheed Araeen Helen Frankenthaler Ernest Mancoba Carolee Schneemann
Siah Armajani Ivo Gattin Piero Manzoni Anwar Jalal Shemza
Frank Auerbach Marcos Grigorian David Medalla Shozo Shimamoto
Antonio Berni Philip Guston Gustav Metzger Kazuo Shiraga
Lee Bontecou Raymond Hains Marta Minujn Antoni Tpies
Vladimr Boudnk Eva Hesse Joan Mitchell Emilio Vedova
Alberto Burri Jir Kol r Ernst Wilhelm Nay Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
John Chamberlain Leon Kossoff Hermann Nitsch Wols (Alfred Otto
Ahmed Cherkaoui Lee Krasner Hlio Oiticica Wolfgang Schulze)
Lygia Clark Tetsumi Kudo Alfonso Ossorio Ramss Younan
Willem de Kooning Yayoi Kusama Jeram Patel Prinzessin Fahrelnissa Zeid
Niki de Saint Phalle Maria Lassnig Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio
Beauford Delaney John Latham Jackson Pollock
Jean Fautrier Lee Seung-taek Carol Rama
48

Jackson Pollock
There Were Seven in Eight
c. 1945
oil, enamel, and casein on canvas
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

249
49 50

Jackson Pollock Willem De Kooning

Number 23 Black Untitled
1948 1948
enamel on gesso on paper oil and enamel on paper, mounted on wood
TATE, London The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

251
51

52
Ernest Mancoba Ernest Mancoba
Composition Untitled
1951 1962
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg Moderna Museet, Stockholm

253
53

Lee Krasner
The Seasons
1957
oil and house paint on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

255
54

Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid

My Hell
1951
oil on canvas
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art

257
55
56

Leon Kossoff Frank Auerbach

City Building Site Shell Building Site
1961 1959
oil on board oil on board
Private European Collector Hartlepool Borough Council

259
Helen Frankenthaler
Lorelei
1957
oil on untreated cotton duck
Brooklyn Museum, New York

57

261
58

59

Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) Philip Guston

Composition jaune (Yellow Composition) Untitled
c. 1947 1958
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie Private Collection

263
60 61
Ernst Wilhelm Nay Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Augen (Eyes) Meteor
1963 1964
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne

265
 John Latham
Untitled (Roller Painting)
1964
spray paint on white duck
Lisson Gallery

62

267
63

Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell

Lucky Seven Chemin des Ecoliers
1962 1960
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Museu Coleo Berardo, Lisbon Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York

64

269
65

66

Piero Manzoni Siah Armajani

Achrome Prayer
1958 1962
parts of canvas, impregnated with kaolin, and glue on burlap oil and ink on board
MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

271
67

68

Maria Lassnig Beauford Delaney

Selbstportrt (Self-Portrait) Untitled
1957 c. 1958
oil on Wood oil on canvas
Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

273
 Kazuo Shiraga
Work II
1958
oil on canvas
Hygo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe

69

275
 Tetsumi Kudo
The Flowing Movement and Its Condensation in Mind
1958
watercolor on cotton fabric
Aomori Museum of Art
70

277
 Ramss Younan
Cristaux rocheux (Rocky Crystals)
1960
oil on fiberboard
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

71

279
72
73

Jeram Patel Jean Fautrier

Untitled Sunset in Alabama
1961 1957
oil on Masonite board oil on paper mounted on canvas
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi Muse d'art moderne de la ville de Paris

281
 Rasheed Araeen
Before Departure (Black Paintings)
1963-64
oil on canvas
3 panels from a series of 5
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

74

283
 76

75
Anwar Jalal Shemza Anwar Jalal Shemza
Composition in Three Parts City Wall
1963-64 1960
oil on canvas on hardboard oil on board
Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, London Private Collection, New York

285
77

78

Shafic Abboud Ahmed Cherkaoui

Composition Le Couronnement (The Coronation)
1954 1964
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris

287
 Eva Hesse
Untitled
1965
painted cord wrapped around plastic tubing and ring in wood and metal
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

79
80

82

81

Vladimr Boudnk Vladimr Boudnk Vladimr Boudnk

Krajina (Landscape) Krajina (Landscape) Kompozice (Composition)
1960 1960 1960
mixed media on paper mixed media on paper mixed media on paper
The National Gallery in Prague The National Gallery in Prague The National Gallery in Prague

291
83

Alberto Burri
Sacco e oro (Sackcloth and Gold)
1953
burlap and gold on canvas
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citt di Castello

293
 85

84

Lucio Fontana Lee Ufan

Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept) Pushed-Up Ink
1949 1964
paper on frame ink on Japanese paper mounted on wood
Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan Private Collection

295
86
87

Antoni Tpies Hermann Nitsch

Forma negra sobre quadrat gris (Black Form on Grey Square) Blutbild (Blood Painting)
1960 1962
mixed media on canvas fabric, blood on canvas
Fundaci Antoni Tpies, Barcelona Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna

297
 89

Niki de Saint Phalle

Fragment de l'Hommage au Facteur Cheval
Niki de Saint Phalle
(Fragment of a Homage to Postman Cheval) Grand Tir - Sance de la Galerie J (Big Shot Gallery J Session)
1962 1961
paint, plaster, assemblage of small found plaster, paint, string, fence, plastic on chipboard, wire, mesh,
objects, wire mesh on wooden board wooden board, plastic balloons
Private Collection Private Collection

88

299
90

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio
La sirena e il pirata (The Mermaid and the Pirate)
1958
mixed media on canvas roll
Galerie van de Loo, Munich

301
91

92

Raymond Hains
Les nymphas
Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
1961 Palissade aux palmiers (Fence with Palm Trees)
torn posters on zinc sheet panel 1957
Centre Pompidou, Paris, Muse national d'art ripped posters mounted on wood
moderne Centre de cration industrielle Private Collection

303
 94
93

Marta Minujn Shozo Shimamoto

My Mattress Sakuhin (Work)
1962 1955/92
mattresses, cardboard, patching plaster, and paint galvanized steel painted on both sides
Collection of the Artist, Buenos Aires Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation, Antwerp

305
 Emilio Vedova
Berlin '64
1964
relief, paper, iron, mixed media on wood
Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Venice

95

307
96

97

Carol Rama
Ovale Nero (Black Oval)
1961
mixed media and oil on canvas
Aishti Foundation, Beirut
Lygia Clark
Obra mole (Soft Work)
1964 (replica)
industrial rubber
The Associao Cultural O Mundo
de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

309
 99

98
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann Colorado House
Conversions 1962
1961 wood, stretchers, wire, fur, strips of painted canvas, bottles,
wood, paint, rope, metal on board broom handle, glass shards, flag, photograph, plywood base
Private Collection, London Private Collection

311
 101

100

Lee Bontecou John Latham

Untitled Belief System
1962 1959
welded steel, epoxy, canvas, fabric, saw blade, and wire books, plaster, metal, light bulb, and paint on canvas on board
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston TATE, London

313
 John Latham
Little Red Mountain
1960-62
timber base, books, plaster, wires
Lisson Gallery

102
 104

103

Jir Kolr
Marcos Grigorian Rasierklingengedicht (A Poem of Razors)
Lee Seung-taek >
Untitled 1962 Non-Sculpture
1963 assemblage, cords, and razor blades on cardboard, wooden frame with glass 1960
sand and enamel on canvas Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum fr Kunst rope, paper, and wooden stick
Grey Art Gallery, New York und Design in Nrnberg, Nuremburg Gallery Hyundai, Seoul

317
105
 107

< Yayoi Kusama Yayoi Kusama

Ladder No. E.R.F
1963 1960
mixed media mixed media
Des Moines Art Center Private Collection

106

321
 Gustav Metzger
Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art
1960 (remade 2004)
glass, fabric, table, trash bag, paper, plastic, and steel
TATE, London

108
 Tetsumi Kudo
Philosophy of Impotence
1959
cord and resin on painted panel
Private Collection

109
 Helio Oiticica
B17, Glass Blide 05 Homage to Mondrian
1965
glass, textile, water, pigment, cork
TATE, London

110

327
 112
111

Ivo Gattin Mohan Samant

Red Surface with Two Slashes Green Square
1962 1963
resin, pigment, burlap synthetic polymer paint, sand, and oil on canvas
Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb The Museum of Modern Art, New York

329
 David Medalla
Cloud Gates - Bubble Machine
1964
John Chamberlain
stainless steel, methacrylate, water pump, Wildroot
water, soap, and acrylic 1959
Museo Nacional Centro de automobile parts; iron, lacquered, and welded
Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

113 114
115
Alfonso Ossorio
Rescue
1961
mixed media on panel
Philadelphia Museum of Art

333
 Antonio Berni
La pampa tormentosa (The Stormy Pampas)
1963
oil, tempera, wooden sticks, metals (including sheet metal,
corrugated metal with paint residue , scrap and tin plate),
cardboard , imprint on paper , plastic buttons , threads and
fragments of lace on two plywood panels
Private Collection

116

335
Section Introduction
Yule Heibel
Sarah Wilson
Homi K. Bhabha
Plates

3
NEW IMAGES OF MAN
 H
iroshima and Nagasaki, Auschwitz and the other camps, and
colonialism had laid bare the failures of Western civilization.
In the wake of these shocks came ambivalent political attempts
to establish more just geopolitical systems, using new legal
forms such as the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Hu-
man Rightsputatively global but in fact dominated by Western authority.
At the same time, people in former European colonies struggled for full
citizenship and autonomy. Philosophers and artists sought to inquire into
human nature itself, in debates that included the discourses of Ngritude
and existentialism and of the rights of individuals and groups within lar-
ger (often oppressive) social and political entities. New Images of Man
features pictorial versions of such inquiries. Here, humans often appear
NEW IMAGES OF MAN battered, deformed by the horror of modern life, rent by the question of
their own value. The artists making this work often deliberately combined
figuration and materialist facture, refusing the choice between abstrac-
tion and representationor between physical and social life, seeing the
binary as not only ideologically false but also deeply destructive. The most
significant counterforce to universalist Western humanism came, in diffe-
rent veins, from the former European colonies. Sometimes, as with Frantz
Fanon's new man, the formerly colonized claimed a moral right to define
humanism broadly and universally, a right abrogated by the West, and of-
fered a correspondingly more positive, future-oriented vision of humanity.

Introduction 339
 G
ermany reentered a contested public life had learned to despise modernism as degenerate Judeo-Bolshevism.
after the Allies defeated Nazism. The many Since they had also mostly exhausted their appetite for heroics, mod-
publications that sprang up between 1945 ernist artists who wanted to risk what Nay called openness and self-
and the currency reform of 1948 gave writ- creation through vitalism could not count on young audiences to sup-
ers and critics platforms on which to probe port their work.7 Nor, in the late 1940s, was there any young German
1
Germanys situation. Much ink was spilled version of the New York critic Clement Greenberg, who was effectively
over the idea of the Menschenbild (image shaping a narrative about the American painting of the time, tying it to
of man), by 1950 a pressing enough issue French modernism while championing its heroic American direction.
2
to justify a conference in Darmstadt. Twelve years of Nazi rule, a Ger- The closest any German critic came to linking German and French
man destruction of states that entrenched Hitlers racialized view of the modernism was Will Grohmann, who by the end of the decade was
world, and the murder of millions of Jews by Germans and their help- in his sixties, and was more than twenty years older than Greenberg.
ers had created an unprecedented crisis in Europe.3 The critical focus In postwar Germany it was (weirdly) up to relatively older writers like
fell mainly on politics and philosophy but the question also mattered Grohmann to lead German youth to an understanding of modern art.
deeply in modernist art, especially abstract painting, where the troubled Yet Nay persisted. In 194548 he embarked on his Hekate series, a
Menschenbild prompted anxieties around expression and expressivity. group of Cubist- and Expressionist-inspired works that take the human
Those anxieties in turn provided figure, often severely abstract-
parameters for arts reception. ed, as their starting point. 8 The
Fast-forward to 1965 and an formal vocabulary Nay created
exhibition at Munichs Galerie here would serve him even in his
Franke by the abstract painter most abstract works, the 195462
Ernst Wilhelm Nay. In opening Scheibenbilder (Disk Paintings).
remarks at the show, Nay told vis- Consider a 1948 Hekate pen-

GERMANYS POSTWAR SEARCH itors that since West Germanys

general restoration, the nation
cil drawing, Begrung Auerhalb
(Meeting Outside; fig. 1), a work

FOR A NEW IMAGE OF MAN had become anaesthetized, in-

capable of accepting openness
Yule Heibel and self-creation (Selbsterfind-
ung). 4 A practitioner of vitalism
the belief that all living matter
is determined by an almost su-
pernatural life force not found in
dead matterNay was one of the
Fig. 1. Ernst Wilhelm Nay. Begrung auerhalb (Meeting Outside). 1948.
countrys few abstract painters Pencil on paper, 2130.5 cm. Private Collection
of the period who leaned on the
lessons of Cubism. Most postwar abstractionists of his generation prac-
ticed absolute painting, abstraction without reference to the material
world.5 For some, this postwar German abstraction had turned into wall-
6
paper decoration. But was postwar Germany, divided into eastern and
western zones, in fact anaesthetized and its art merely decorative? Or
had the patient submitted to a kind of cultural triage in which successive
operations had stitched up the tattered Menschenbild until he (the im-
age of man was most decidedly male) could once again confidently take
sides in a polarized Cold War world?
Most postwar German critics failed to note even obvious differ-
ences between abstract styles such as Nays and absolute painting.
Their reviews might differentiate between abstract tendencies and
realism, but they couldnt seem to differentiate within abstraction itself.
Consider, too, the generational problem facing the country: many young
Germans had spent their youthful enthusiasm on Nazism, where they
with the controlled affective
charge that would prove charac-
teristic of Nays postwar art. We
recognize two figures emerg-
ing from and receding into the
hatched and shaded ground.
Their eyes are set in faces that
resemble Pablo Picassos quota-
tions of African masks, and their
sexual markersthe round forms
of buttocks and bellies, triangular breasts set off by darker dots for nip-
plesrepeat in circles that could be pupils, vertebrae, or umbilici. A kind
of vitalist agitation is suggested by arms that fling upward, but all is
held parallel to the picture plane. Never does Nay ignore the basic limits
of the pictures two-dimensional support, oras he himself put itdoes
he let objects float on their ground. He had disparaged floating ab-
straction as early as 1948, instead praising formalism, the close adher-
ence to modernism found in Czanne and Picasso, because it led to the
picture-form, a Cubism of Juan Gris [which] must combine with the
new style, the modern vitalism.9 Here we find him describing verbally
exactly what he was working on visually.
Nays position was unusual insofar as most of his contemporar-
ies, if they were abstractionists, wanted to stay away from physical vi-
tality and instead to seek refuge in Geist, the mind. 10 Compare Nays
work to that of Fritz Winter, a member of Zen 49. The title of Winters

3. New Images of Man Yule Heibel 341

Klnge (Sounds, 1949; fig. 2) already suggests disembodiment. Two
types of shapes float across the picture plane: the soft layers of mut-
ed color that constitute the ground are bisected by a brown, semi-
transparent arc that attenuates at the supports edges, while on top of
this arc, eight earth-toned vertical bars, tinged with yellow-gold, are
arrayed in a cluster. This is an abstraction that eschews all references to
the physical world.
But why this turn away from physicality? A look at the discourse
shaping up in the postwar publications I mentioned at the outset is in-
structive. Take Werner Krausss 1947 analysis of the role of slang in firing
up young mens romantic enthusiasm for military life under Hitler. Work-
ing from a short story in a Nazi schoolbook, Krauss shows how and why
slang was viscerally authentic. A fighter pilot gets blown full of holes
but avoids getting snuffed as
his motor gags and croaks;
on the lower-class social levels
where slang like this circu-
lated, Krauss argues, bodily
functions were ascribed to
machines, and this form of
language was compelling,
even dangerous because it
engaged a visceral response,
a way of thinking through
the body that shaped identi-
ty. Reflection, which requires
distance, was canceled out.
This formal strategy molded
the readers thinking: Argot
forces its world view on all
those who speak it, Krauss Fig. 2. Fritz Winter. Klnge. 1949. Mixed media on paper. Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen -
writes. As long as one spoke Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne Mnchen, Munich
the language of the infantry-
11
man, he was bound to the infantrymans faith.
Geist was altogether different. Consider Joseph Finks paean to the
ideal Greek countenance, published in the same year as Krausss dis-
cussion of slang. Fink wants to explain why the Greeks pursued a Men-
schenbild reflecting the high, the elevated, the affinity to the gods. The
Greeks, he writes, discovered the human portrait in a spiritualized
sensenot physiognomy (the particular, the bodily) but countenance
(the eternal, mental aspect of the face). In championing Geist it was
also once again perfectly all right to be just a little colonial: Fink writes,
Recall the goggly-eyed faces of early, non-Greek artists. Their con-
quest was the spiritual deed of the Greek artists.12 As goggly-eyed
physiognomy is conquered by a colonizing ideal of countenance, the
body dies so that Geist may live. Physical being changes but Geist is eter-
nal. Geist also requires middle-class leisure: contemplation cant happen
if one is preoccupied with gagging and croaking.
342 3. New Images of Man
Vitalism or physical expressivity could be seen as dangerous
or dirty, then, through association with the recent past, whereas Geist
seemed above it all. The distinction is akin to that drawn between the
Dionysian (vitalist) and Apollonian (spiritual). Absolute abstrac- vious that Germans had to choose sides, East or West. Some critics
tion, which eliminated the body, was the safer bet. As the Cold War
deepened and the safe as opposed to the experimental set the agen-
da,13 it became even less desirable to venture into vitalism, or to see
differences within abstraction. Expression and affect were hot-button
issues in postwar Germany, especially for people who had expended
as much vehement feeling as the Germans had on Hitler and his racial
war. Surely German wildness was dangerous. A return to that other
German tradition of Geist, on the other hand, offered a safe harbor.
As an old-boys' network returned to power in the wake of curren-
cy reform (1948), partition
(1949), and rebuilding, discus-
sion of the Menschenbild con-
tinued.14 The thousand-year
Reich had upended social
norms, and Nazi rites had dis-
placed civic behaviors. Ernst
Cassirer observed in 1947 that
rites were designed to eradi-
cate the subjects sense of self:
in Nazi racial politics, Not
the individual, but the group,
is the moral subject.15 The
individual was left precarious.
Similar concerns came
from the conservative camp,
typically couched within
more general indictments
of modernity. Consider Max
Picards book Hitler in uns
Selbst (Hitler in Ourselves) (1946), which emphasized the nonhumanness
of Nazism, its seeming alienness to civilized norms. The book also gave
Germans a kind of pass by setting the Nazis crimes beyond human
bounds: They are so monstrous that one cannot in any way explain
them through any human cause that still acts as a cause within human
order. Nazi cruelty no longer has human measure, but rather the
measure of something beyond the human, emanating from a human
who has become a total apparatus.16 Cassirers description of Nazism
as producing new political myths that did not start by dictating mans
ability to do or not do, [but instead] undertook in the first instance to
alter man himself, in order then to regulate and control his actions here
meshes with Picards conservative critique.17 Man was mutable. Ironi
cally, this realization was brought home by an ideology, Nazism, that had
pretended to give man a fixed, eternal contour. And with this realiza-
tion of mutability, foundational beliefsthat the Menschenbild was secu-
rely rooted in Western rationalitycaved. It was impossible to go back to
the way things were after Nazism had destroyed fundamental truths
about man.
The Cold War subsequently provided an escape hatch. It was ob-
cemented the rift by mapping cultural qualities onto geographical
regions. 18 In the East, Berlins Kulturmagistrat encouraged a Soviet-
style Menschenbild in which comrades could strive in solidarity for the
messianic future promised by socialism. The Wests Menschenbild was
different: capitalism doesnt encourage the deferred satisfactions of
the messianic worldview, it runs on near-instant gratification. Its ide-
al man is the bourgeois liberal individual, into which former Nazi
Germans had to be reeducated. This isnt to say that Americaniza-
tion anaesthetized West Germany, but many Germans welcomed the
opportunity to bury the body of history by transubstantiating it into
inoffensive Geist. If the ensuing form of modernism was wallpaper,
that made it no less expensive.
This edition of 1949 was the books third printing.
18 See, e.g., J. A. von Rantzau, Geschichte und Politik im deutschen Denken, Die Sammlung 1
Yule Heibel
1 This essay is based on my book Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western
Germany, 19451950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). For details on Germanys
postwar publications see p. 153, n. 34.
2 See Hans Gerhard Evers, ed., Darmstdter Gesprch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit
(Darmstadt: Neue Darmstdter Verlagsanstalt, 1950).
3 Hitler thought that the world was a planet covered by races rather than a globe covered
by states. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim
Duggan Books, 2015), p. 241.
4 E. W. Nay, Bilder und Dokumente 19021968 (Munich: Prestel, 1990), p. 206.
5 Grouped around Willi Baumeister in Stuttgart, Zen 49 brought together metaphysical ab-
stractionists. See Jochen Poetter, ed., Zen 49. Die ersten zehn JahreOrientierung, exh. cat.
(Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1986).
6 See Gnter Grass, Geschenkte Freiheit. Versagen, Schuld, vertane Chancen, originally
published in Die Zeit 40, no. 20 (May 17, 1985), available online at www.zeit.de/1985/20/
geschenkte-freiheit/seite-5.
7 Visiting Frankfurt in 1947, the German architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, in
exile in the United States during the war, was devastated: My only hope I place in the spirit of
the older generation that finished school before Hitler. The younger generation is cynical,
and relations with them are very difficult. Quoted in Hermann Glaser et al., Soviel Anfang war nie.
deutsche Stdte 19451949 (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag, 1989), p. 221. See also Hans
Grundig, Berichte und Berechtigungen. Dresdener Bilanz. Betrachtungen zur ersten allge-
meinen deutschen Kunstausstellung, Prisma 1, no. 2 (1946): 3334. It is also worth noting
that American Abstract Expressionism wasnt shown in Germany until the early 1950s. See
my Reconstructing the Subject, pp. 7778.
8 See Nays catalogue raisonn, available online at http://www.ewnay.de/werkverzeichnis.html.
9 Nay, letter to Herr Voigt, September 19, 1948. Nay file, Archiv fr bildende Kunst, Nuremberg.
10 Space constraints prevent me from discussing the wrangling, especially in divided Berlin,
where a Communist-led Kunstmagistrat tried to set an agenda of social realism while attack-
ing formalism. But consider the case of Carl Hofer, a supporter of socialism who had the
misfortune of running afoul of both the Communist leadership (for refusing to subordinate his
work to Soviet extra-artistic demands) and West German students (for signing an address
to the World Peace Congress that was published in the Communist journal Vorwrts in 1949).
11 Werner Krauss, ber den Zustand unserer Sprache, Die Gegenwart 2, no. 2/3 (1947): 30.
12 Joseph Fink, Das griechische Antlitz, Aussaat 1, no. 10/11 (1947): 39.
13 Konrad Adenauers slogan in the West German federal election of 1957 was Keine Ex-
perimente! (No experiments!) See http://www.kas.de/wf/de/71.5230/.
14 The art historian Edwin Redslobs postwar careerism seems typical. See my Reconstructing
the Subject, pp. 11720.
15 Ernst Cassirer, Der Mythos als politische Waffe, Amerikanische Rundschau 3, no. 11
(1947): 34.
16 Max Picard, Hitler in uns Selbst, 1946 (Erlenbach-Zrich: Eugen Jentsch Verlag, 1949), p. 58.
17 Cassirer, Der Mythos als politische Waffe, p. 34.
(194546): 54454. In von Rantzaus view, Eastern thinking creates Romanticism (and is
linked to the Asiatic), which damages Western (Occidental) rationality. In a postwar con-
text, anti-East, anti-Soviet attitudes neatly meshed with rationalism and anti-Communism.
18 On the OMGUSECR (Office of Military Government for Germany, United StatesEducation
and Cultural Relations Division) see Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject, passim, esp. pp. 12631.
343
 H
umanity is not something man simply has. He with rage, spirituality, compassioneven with hope or a new beauty. Ex-
must fight for it anew in every generation and he pressing both pathos and human resilience, this art contrasted with the
may lose his fight. One need only look at the technological imagery of the future: Londons Skylon sculpture (1951), for
dehumanizing structure of the totalitarian sys- example, or the Atomium structure built for the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair.
tems in one half of the world, and the dehuman- Western European philosophy had dual origins as well in the
izing consequences of technical mass civilization thought of Ancient Greece (pre-Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian) and
in the other half. In addition, the conflict there in Christianity, with Protestant individualism countering the Vatican.
may lead to the annihilation of humanity. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century German
Paul Tillich, New Images of Man, 19591 Romanticism would join these twin heritages to subtend modern
philosophys arguments, its institutional edifices, and national tradi-
Humanism was never so passionately debated as during the aftermath tions. Ren Descartess famous proposition I think, therefore I am,
of World War II, a period of relative stability thanks only to the fearful nominally Christian, would resonate with the atheist philosopher
consensus of the Cold War. In 1959, the exhibition New Images of Man at Jean-Paul Sartre, who celebrated the 350th anniversary of Descartess
The Museum of Modern Art in New York explored this humanism un- birth in 1946.3 To rethink the I in a period of mourning and psychic
der pressure. It was the last great muse- disarray was Sartres challenge.
um exhibition of the twentieth century in Existentialisms influence expand-
the United States to unite European with ed to Eastern Europe and the Unit-
American artists. Alberto Giacomettis ed States, while Sartre and Simone de
Tall Figure (1949) was the shows emblem. Beauvoir, writing in the heart of Saint-
Many of the same key figuressuch Germain-des-Prs in Paris, were the
as the Americans Jackson Pollock and doyens of a movement whose appeal

NEW IMAGES OF MAN: POSTWAR Willem de Kooning, Europeans Francis

Bacon and Jean Dubuffet, as well as influ-
substantially impacted upon popular
culture. It offered the possibility for

HUMANISM AND ITS CHALLENGES ential though lesser-known players such

as Karel Appelhave been brought to-
self-reinvention: man is not only what
he conceives himself to be but what he

IN THE WEST gether again, along with Tall Figure, in the

current exhibition, Postwar.
wills, Sartre wrote, an appealing pros-
pect to those with dreadful memories
Sarah Wilson In Europe following the war, civ- or to the young born in the aftermath
ilization had devoured itself: millions of war. 4 Sartre gave his lecture Exis-
of human bodies had been physically tentialism Is a Humanism in October
destroyed. With the dropping of atom- 1945 as a riposte to the French Commu-
ic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nists against charges of individualism
in August 1945, mass civilian deaths and despair, and to the Catholics who
from a devastating new breed of weap- accused him of irresponsible nihilism.
ons joined the genocidal legacy of Nazi Fig. 1 Cover of the exhibition catalogue New Images of Man with
He acknowledged a Christian strand
concentration camps. Realpolitik; arms Alberto Giacometti's sculpture Tall Figure (1949), 1959 in his thought (originating in Sren
dealing; the desire for conquest; na- Kierkegaards attack on Hegel) and a
tional, international, and supranational antagonismsall continued strain of existential atheism via Martin Heidegger. Existentialism is
throughout the atomic age. The complex origins of humanism were not a humanism, retorted the Communists in 1947.5
spelled out clearly in 1949 at a conference in Geneva: There are two The Americans, wary of the Soviet threat, began pouring money
sources of humanism: on the one hand antiquity, Greco-Roman cul- into Western Europe for reconstruction. The Truman Doctrine was
ture, and on the other, Christianity. In Greece, in art and thought, it launched, followed by the Marshall Plan in 1948; the battle to discredit
is the image of man which emerged. In Christianity, man was recog- Communism intensified; France would choose U.S. and NATO pro-
nized as the image and semblance of God. And God himself became tection. In contrast, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, joint editor with Sartre of
2
man. The material fabric of Europe reflected both sources, and now Les Temps Modernes, would attempt to rationalize the Soviet system as a
the emblems of bothwhether classical and neoclassical buildings means justifying the end in Humanism and Terror. 6
or the gothic heritage of medieval cathedralshad been reduced to In 1946, Paris became the headquarters of the United Nations
ruins or rubble. Architectural modernism banished references to Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), estab-
the past, but painting and sculpture responded to ruins and wounds lished to foster peace via transnational exchange in the three broad

3. New Images of Man Sarah Wilson 345

areas that constituted the organizations name. At its inaugural con-
ference there was a split between Latin and Anglo-Saxon clans,
with the French ideal of elite intellectual cooperation clashing imme-
diately with the American preoccupation with the masses, with radio
and television (Theodor Adornos despised culture industry).7 Mean-
while, the desire for a unique world culture and universal rights
of man sat uncomfortably with UNESCO's de facto acceptance of
Fig. 2. Germain Richier. L'Eau (Water). 195354. Dark patinated bronze, 14663101 cm.
Private Collection. Courtesy Dominique Lvy Gallery, New York
non-autonomous territoriesthat is, dependent colonies. Despite
this tension, UNESCO's new director, the Mexican statesman and
poet Jaime Torre Bodet, declared in 1948, The Chinese and Peru-
vians, Arabs and the French, Australians and Turks, the Czechs and
the Polish, Anglo-Saxons from Great Britain and Anglo-Saxons from
America [sic], Negroes [sic] from Liberia or Indians from Mexico,
Bolivia or the Equator: all have a distinctive and original voice here. 8
346
Linked to UNESCO, a series of conferences in Geneva debated
urgent matters, notably A New Humanism in 1949. Here the origins
of humanism were expanded beyond ancient Greek philosophy and
Christianity to reference Confucian, Buddhist, and Brahmanistic
thought, and contemporary constructs were brought to bear as well:
structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxist biology, math-
ematics, and physiology. In the wake of the Nuremberg trials and
speaker Karl Jasperss Question of German Guilt (1946), the debate
was remarkably abstract. 9 The Geneva delegates were well inten-
tioned, conservative, middle-aged, competitive in regard to their
rhetorical performances, and, of course, entirely male. In contrast,
the painting and sculpture produced in the postwar period, tran-
scending language barriers, was capable of a far more powerful dia-
logue of forms.
3. New Images of Man
The focus on the body was crucial. For Sartre, Giacomettis human
figures embodied the relationship between base matter (clay or bronze)
and the notion that ones identity is constituted by the gaze of an Other
(lAutre). The noncorresponding gazes of the male bust and female figure
in Giacomettis Cage (1950) emphasize their solitude and entrapment
and the absurd, Sartres crucial complement to anguish. Sartre also
articulated the disturbing continuity of primitive instincts, between the
prehistoric man of Altamira and the martyrs of Buchenwald.10 The
unleashing of killer and survival instincts in war set against the rational
responsechoice, engagement, altruism, even suiciderhyme Sartres
plays. And beyond the gaze, the sight of distorted, pierced, or charred
sculptures provoked feelings of identification, instinctual and empathic.
De Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, declared the Other to be
Woman (challenging Sartre). French sculptor Germaine Richier was
proud of her links to Auguste Rodin, mile-Antoine Bourdelle, and the
classical tradition. Her work embodies the hybrid classical/Christian
sources of humanism. Ismail Fatahs seated female bronze figure from
1965 recalls Richiers Water (195354; fig.2), incorporating a classical ampho-
ra. Richiers well-known insect sculptures, however, looked to medieval
gargoyles; her existentialist crucifix caused an international scandal.11
Conversely, Alina Szapocznikow was Jewish, a Holocaust survivor. Is
her memorial to the Warsaw ghetto, Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the
Warsaw Ghetto II (1957; plate 8), her own left hand or a gesture toward
Christs tortured fingers nailed to the cross la Grnewald?
The work of contemporary sculptors cast in bronze necessarily im-
plied a relationship to history and to masterpieces of the past, the sort
that might feature (in photographic reproduction) in what Frances first
Minister of Culture, Andr Malraux, famously called the muse imagi-
naire, or the imaginary museum. 12 The brutalized surfaces of postwar
sculptures found an equivalent in art informel painting. Jean Fautriers
"Otages" (Hostages) paintings originated in his sculpture: features
obliterated, except for a crested profile, were repeated like bloody scars
in the painted series. Fautriers surfaces refer to cave painting and pre-
historic artthe discovery of the Lascaux caves in France in 1940, and
the Stone Age Venus of Lespugue.13 A featureless body is all that is left in
La Juive (1943; plate 1), which recalls Watteaus ftes galantes in its delicate
pastoral palette. Painting conceals the horror of the act: the Nazi rape of
a Jewish female hostage in the woods.
Like Giacometti, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) also de-
veloped an intense relationship with Sartre; he demonstrated that art
informel painting, with its traces of the hand and perceptual ambiguities,
was as inscribed with the human as any figurative art.14 Wolss painting
recalls both the bomb and the bodys viscera. He asked Camille Bryen
to write his 1945 catalogue; Bryen would initiate what he called the
peinture-cri, shouting as he attacked the canvas, and abhumanisme, a
supra- and infrahumanism without man as we know him.15 This inside-
outside reading of art informel spread throughout Europe, becoming
even bloodier in the liquid traces by Czech artist Vladimr Boudnk. It
reached farther east across Asia, to the Gutai movement in Japan and to
Sarah Wilson
Koreaa nation especially prominent in the Paris Biennales of the
1960s, after the Korean War. A reaction to the virility of Jackson
Pollocks drip painting, art informel becomes paysagisme abstrait (abstract
landscape painting) in the works of Joan Mitchell, the American artist
who chose to live near Claude Monets gardens at Giverny. The energy
and open remit of the informel explains its crucial position in Umberto
Ecos Open Work of 1962, comparable to Stphane Mallarm or James
Joyce in literature, or to Karlheinz Stockhausens new music: it offered an
epistemological metaphor of being itself.16
Jean Dubuffet adapted Fautriers dense pictorial matter but meta
phorically started from scratch with his violent, graffiti-based art. He col-
lected art brut: the work of naive artists, schizophrenics, and outsiders.17
In the misogynistically pink Womans BodyButchers Slab (1950; plate 132),
the nude stretches out as body, liquid, orifices, filling the oblong of the
canvas; compare Full Mother (1951; plate 137), the work of Dubuffets
Filipino friend Alfonso Ossorio, or, from London, Magda Cordells fig-
ure with its skeleton drawn in red-hot orange onto the skin.18
Dubuffet was now exhibiting in New York while Ossorio and
Pollock were showing in France, thanks in part to Michel Tapi, the
critic who coined the term informel and later art autre: an other kind
of art.19 Pablo Picasso, once the staple of the pre- and postwar Muse-
um of Modern Art, now caused major problems for curatorsand for
the FBIas the most famous Communist in the West.20 His Massacre in
Korea (1951; plate 117) became a European icon. With sources in Poussin,
Manet, and Degass Young Spartans Exercising (1860), it was not explicit or
socialist realist enough for the Communist apparatchiks in Paris, but
in a reversal of its initial pro-Communist intent, it proved perfect for
Polish anti-Communist protests against the Soviet invasion of Hun-
gary in 1956.21
The ground was laid for New Images of Man at MoMA. Curator Peter
Selz had grown up in Europe, then fled Nazi Germany for America in
1936. He spent 194950 in Paris and 1953 in Brusselshence the con-
cept of exhibiting art from both sides of the Atlantic. He chose Protes-
tant theologian Paul Tillich to write the preface to the catalogue, a text
that, while a powerful plea for reconciliation under the aegis of human-
ism, did not mention the Holocaust. But Rico Lebruns Buchenwald Pit
(1955) and Study for Dachau Chamber (1958) were paintings in which dis-
cernible body parts and skulls demonstrated an unresolved, displaced
mourning.22 Abstraction was on display, as in the five black-and-white
works by Pollock, but Selzs choices were mostly figurative; the fact that
these all were from American collections signaled a major change of
taste and the enthusiastic commitment of dealers. The sole European
loan, Reg Butlers Woman (1949), a geometry of fear sculpture, came
from Londons Tate Gallery, to accompany his Unknown Political Prisoner
(Project for a Monument) (195153).23
New Images of Man followed the triumphant return to MoMA of
The New American Painting (195859), the exhibition whose eight-coun-
try tour exemplified the devastatingly effective push of Ameri-
can soft power into Europe.24 The Unknown Political Prisoner
347
competition in London similarly reflected the CIAs (covert) invest-
ment in anti-Soviet propaganda. While the competition itself exposed
the argument between pierced sculptures of the human form and ab-
stract works, Butlers winning entry was remarkable precisely because
of its inhuman, quasi-totalitarian surveillance aerial. 25 This chal-
lenge to humanist pathos in New Images of Man signaled the end of an
era, as did H. C. Westermanns Neo-Dada assemblages, anticipating
Pop, including the one-eyed Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an
Idea (1958). 26
In Europe, the charismatic neo-Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser displaced Sartre; his texts on the Italian painter Leonardo
Cremonini marked the passage to what he called a radical antihuman-
ism.27 These followed a so-called humanism quarrel in the French
Fig. 3. Atelier of Alina Szapocznikow on Brzozowa street, Warsaw,
1965.
Communist Party in the context of Nikita Khrushchevs Soviet thaw.
It was in 1965, however, and in Americain the midst of war against
Communist Vietnamthat the German migr Erich Fromms
international symposium Socialist Humanism managed to pierce the
Iron Curtain, inviting many philosophers from Eastern Europe but also
Lopold Sdar Senghor, president of Senegal, and Raya Dunayevskaya,
author of Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism, and the Afro-Asian
Revolutions (1961).28
Forgotten in the MoMA-driven twentieth-century conception
of the Western museum of modern art, artists from the East and the
South now come to rejoin the humanist conversation in the current
exhibition. Sartres 1948 text Black Orpheus, celebrating the poetry of
Ngritude, transposed the discourse of Self and Other onto the colonial
paradigm.29 Subsequently, Martinique-born Frantz Fanon published
Peau noir, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) in 1952, reconfiguring
the insights of ethnopsychiatry within the discourse of the Other.
Fanon spoke at the First Congress of Black Writers and Artistsincon-
ceivable in a still-segregated Americaheld in Paris in September 1956,
with a follow-up in Rome three years later.30
348
Let us return to Jaime Torre Bodets global aspirations for 2 Nikolai Berdyaev, Rencontres Internationales de Genve (Neuchtel: ditions de la
Baconnire, 1948), 2:85.
UNESCO in 1948. Throughout the 1950s and after, Paris experienced
3 See Jean-Paul Sartres introduction and selection of texts in Descartes, 15961650
a focused internationalist dialogue in its art world, one where peo- (Geneva: Traits, 1946).
ple came together from all countries and then stayed or returned to 4 Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), p. 28.
5 Jean Kanapa, LExistentialisme nest pas un humanisme (Paris: ditions Sociales, 1947).
their homelands, enriched with the very spirit of universalism that 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Essai sur le problme communiste (Paris:
the cultural diplomats and bureacracies of UNESCO found difficult Gallimard, 1947).
to achieve: witness, for example, the international community repre- 7 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklrung (Amsterdam: Querido,
1947).
sented by a slim book of 1956 on the new school of Paris. 31 Zao-Wou 8 Jaime Torre Bodet, quoted in Chlo Morel, Histoire de Unesco. Les Trente Premires
Ki from China, Avigdor Arikha from Israel, and, later, African Ameri- Annes, 19451974 (Paris: LHarmattan, 2010), p. 55.
can sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud followed this path of intellectual 9 See Karl Barth et al., Pour un nouvel humanisme, Rencontres Internationales de Genve
(Neuchtel: ditions de la Baconnire, 1949), with contributions by the theologian Barth as
discovery, fueled by artistic conviviality and personal passions.32 So well as Marxist Henri Lefebvre and orientalist Ren Grousset.
did many of the artists who would ultimately appear in Postwar: Art 10 Sartre, The Search for the Absolute, in Alberto Giacometti, exh. cat. (New York: Pierre
Matisse Gallery, 1948).
Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965: Gerard Sekoto, the artist
11 See Sarah Wilson, A Very Great Sculptor: Germaine Richier, in Wilson, Anna Swinbourne,
and jazz musician, friend of Ernest Mancoba, who left the Transvaal and Andr Pieyre de Mandiargues, Germaine Richier: Sculpture, 19341959, exh. cat. (New
for Paris in 1947; Iba NDiaye from Senegal, protg of sculptor Ossip York: Dominique Lvy and Galerie Perrotin), pp. 1017.
12 See Andr Malraux, Museum without Walls (London: Secker and Warburg, 1965).
Zadkine, jazz aficionado and student at the cole des Beaux-Arts;
13 See Robert Ganzo, Lespugue (Paris: Durand, 1942), with eleven lithographs by Fautrier.
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, who moved from Tehran to Paris in 1961. 14 See Sartre, Doigts et non-doigts, in Wols en personne, acquarelles et dessins (Paris:
And the mission of Malraux was to bring the art of India to Paris on a Delpire, 1963), pp. 1021.
15 Camille Bryen and Jacques Audiberti, LOuvre-Bote. Colloque abhumaniste (Paris: Galli-
grand scale in 1960; the art of Iran in 1961; the art of Africa, historical
mard, 1952)
and contemporary, from the festival he originated in Dakar in 1966; 16 Umberto Eco, The Open Work in the Visual Arts, in The Open Work, 1962, Eng. trans.
and of Tutankhamuns Egypt in 1967, making his imaginary museum Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 84104.
17 For further contextualization of Jean Dubuffets art brut see Wilson, From the Asylum to
a contemporary reality.
the Museum: Marginal Art in Paris and New York, 19381968, in Parallel Visions: Modern
The humanism debate became scholastic and then was eclipsed. Artists and Outsider Art, ed. Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
The commodity-based imagery of Pop, geometric abstraction, Op, and County Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 12049.
18 Jean Dubuffet, Peintures initiatiques dAlfonso Ossorio (Paris: La Pierre Volante, 1951).
kinetic art corresponded more vitally to early-1960s optimism and Ossorio wrote the preface for Jackson Pollocks first show in Paris and later housed Dubuf-
space-race competition. The 1959 Kitchen Debate in Moscow between fets art brut on Long Island.
Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon has a place in history more prom- 19 Michel Tapi, Un Art autre, o il sagit de nouveaux dvidages du rel (Paris: Giraud, 1952).
20 See Wilson, Loyalty and Blood: Picassos FBI File, in Picasso and the Politics of Visual
inent than New Images of Man. Yet the power of this art, and the global Representation, ed. Jonathan Harris and Richard Koeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University
aspirations of humanist thought implicit in its forms, are given a new life Press, 2013), pp. 11024.
and context in the current exhibition, and are all the more relevant today 21 See Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2013), pp. 15461, 17475.
in contradistinction to postmodernisms culture of instantaneity and 22 Rico Lebrun, artists chapter, in Selz, New Images of Man, pp. 96101. Naples-born, Lebrun
the insatiable appetite for kitsch. emigrated to the United States in 1924.
23 For geometry of fear see Herbert Read, New Aspects of British Sculpture, exh. cat.
(Venice: XXVI Venice Biennale, British Pavilion, 1952), n.p.
24 The New American Painting, as Shown in Eight European Countries 19581959 (New
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959).
25 Reg Butler also references the Crucifixion, however. See Robert Burstow, The Limits of
Modernist Art as a Weapon of the Cold War, The Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1 (1997): 68
80, and Axel Lapp, The Freedom of SculptureThe Sculpture of Freedom , The Sculpture
Journal 2 (1998): 11322.
26 H. C. Westermann, artists chapter, in Selz, New Images of Man, pp. 14145.
27 Louis Althusser, Cremonini, peintre de labstrait [196466], in crits philosophiques et
politiques (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997), pp. 592609.
28 Lopold Sdar Senghor, Socialism Is a Humanism, in Socialist Humanism, ed. Erich
Fromm (New York: Doubleday, 196566), pp. 5367; and Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxs Hu-
manism Today, in ibid., pp. 6883.
29 Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle posie ngre et malagache de la langue franaise,
prcd d Orphe noir de Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: PUF, 1948).
30 Prsence Africaine, Le 1er Congrs international des crivains et artistes noirs, Paris,
Sorbonne, 1922 septembre 1956, nos. 810 (JuneNovember, 1956).
31 Hubert Juin, Seize peintres de la jeune cole de Paris (Paris: Georges Fall, 1956), featured
artists from Algieria, Belgium, France, Holland, Japan, Poland, Switzerland, and the United States.
32 See Jean-Hubert Martin and Thierry Raspail, eds., Partage d'exotismes: 5e. Biennale d'art
1 Paul Tillich, A Prefatory Note by Paul Tillich, in Peter Selz, New Images of Man, exh. cat. contemporain de Lyon, 2 vols. (Paris: Runion des Muses Nationaux, 2000), and Martine
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 9. Franck and Germain Viatte, From Other Lands, Artists in Paris (Arles: Actes Sud, 2011).
3. New Images of Man Sarah Wilson 349

REMEMBERING FANON: SELF, PSYCHE AND
THE COLONIAL CONDITION
Homi K. Bhabha
3. New Images of Man
O my body, make of me always a man who questions!
M
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952
emories of Frantz Fanon tend to the myth-
ical. He is either revered as the prophetic
spirit of Third World liberation or reviled
as an exterminating angel, the inspiration
to violence in the Black Power movement.
Despite his historic participation in the
Algerian revolution and the influence of
his ideas on the race politics of the 1960s
and 70s, Fanons work will not be possessed by one political moment or
movement, nor can it be easily placed in a seamless narrative of libera-
tionist history. Fanon refuses to be so completely claimed by events or
eventualities. It is the sustaining irony of his work that his severe com-
mitment to the political task in hand never restricted the restless, inquiring
movement of his thought.
It is not for the finitude of philosophical thinking nor for the finality
of a political direction that we turn to Fanon. Heir to the ingenuity and
artistry of Toussaint LOuverture and Lopold Sdar Senghor, as well
as to the iconoclasm of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-
Paul Sartre, Fanon is the purveyor of the transgressive and transitional
truth. He may yearn for the total transformation of Man and Society, but
he speaks most effectively from the uncertain interstices of historical
change: from the area of ambivalence between race and sexuality; out of
an unresolved contradiction between culture and class; from deep with-
in the struggle of psychic representation and social reality.
To read Fanon is to experience the sense of division that prefig-
uresand fissuresthe emergence of a truly radical thought that never
dawns without casting an uncertain dark. His voice is most clearly heard
in the subversive turn of a familiar term, in the silence of a sudden rup-
ture: The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. The awkward division
that breaks his line of thought keeps alive the dramatic and enigmatic
sense of the process of change. That familiar alignment of colonial sub-
jects Black/White, Self/Otheris disturbed with one brief pause and
the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed, whenever they
are found to rest in the narcissistic myths of Ngritude or white cultur-
al supremacy. It is this palpable pressure of division and displacement
that pushes Fanons writing to the edge of things, the cutting edge that
reveals no ultimate radiance but, in his words, exposes an utterly naked
declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.
[]
As Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible transforma-
tions of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation,
its displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and ter-
ritory, refuses the ambition of any total theory of colonial oppression.
The Antillean evolu cut to the quick by the glancing look of a frightened,
Homi K. Bhabha
confused white child; the stereotype of the native fixed at the shifting
boundaries between barbarism and civility; the insatiable fear and
desire for the Negro: Our women are at the mercy of Negroes. ... God
knows how they make love; the deep cultural fear of the black figured in
the psychic trembling of Western sexualityit is these signs and symp-
toms of the colonial condition that drive Fanon from one conceptual
scheme to another, while the colonial relation takes shape in the gaps
between them, articulated in the intrepid engagements of his style. As
Fanons text unfolds, the scientific fact comes to be aggressed by the
experience of the street; sociological observations are intercut with liter-
ary artifacts, and the poetry of liberation is brought up short against the
leaden, deadening prose of the colonized world .
What is this distinctive force of Fanons vision that has been forming
even as I write about the division, the displacement, the cutting edge of
his thought? It comes, I believe, from the tradition of the oppressed, as
Walter Benjamin suggests; it is the language of a revolutionary awareness
that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the
rule. We must attain to a concept of history that is in keeping with this
insight. And the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.
The struggle against colonial oppression not only changes the direction
of Western history but challenges its historicist idea of time as a pro-
gressive, ordered whole. The analysis of colonial depersonalization not
only alienates the Enlightenment idea of Man but challenges the trans-
parency of social reality as a pregiven image of human knowledge. If the
order of Western historicism is disturbed in the colonial state of emer-
gency, even more deeply disturbed is the social and psychic representa-
tion of the human subject. For the very nature of humanity becomes
estranged in the colonial condition, and from that naked declivity it
emerges, not as an assertion of will nor as an evocation of freedom, but
as an enigmatic questioning. With a question that echoes Freuds What
does woman want?, Fanon turns to confront the colonized world. What
does a man want? he asks, in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks,
What does the black man want?
To this loaded question where cultural alienation bears down on
the ambivalence of psychic identification, Fanon responds with an ago-
nizing performance of self-images:
I had to meet the white mans eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened
me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the
development of his bodily schema. ... I was battered down by tom-toms,
cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects. ... I took
myself far off from my own presence. ... What else could it be for me
but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole
body with black blood?
From within the metaphor of vision complicit with a Western met-
aphysic of man emerges the displacement of the colonial relation. The
black presence ruins the representative narrative of Western person-
hood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and
351
degeneracy will not produce a history of civil progress, a space for the
Socius; its present, dismembered and dislocated, will not contain the
image of identity that is questioned in the dialectic of mind/body and re-
solved in the epistemology of appearance and reality. The white mans
eyes break up the black mans body and in that act of epistemic violence
its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed.
What does the black man want? Fanon insists, and in privileg-
ing the psychic dimension he changes not only what we understand
by a political demand but transforms the very means by which we
recognize and identify its human agency. Fanon is not principally pos-
ing the question of political oppression as the violation of a human
essence, although he lapses into such a lament in his more existential
moment. He is not raising the question of colonial man in the uni-
versalist terms of the liberal-humanist (How does colonialism deny
the Rights of Man?); nor is he posing an ontological question about
mans being (Who is the alienated colonial man?). Fanons question
is not addressed to such a unified notion of history nor such a unitary
concept of man. It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of
Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experi-
ence. There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide
a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the
problems of the individual or collective psyche. Such a traditional
sociological alignment of self and society or history and psyche is
rendered questionable in Fanons identification of the colonial sub-
ject, who is historicized as it comes to be heterogeneously inscribed
in the texts of history, literature, science, myth. The colonial subject
is always overdetermined from without, Fanon writes. It is through
image and fantasythose orders that figure transgressively on the
borders of history and the unconsciousthat Fanon most profoundly
evokes the colonial condition.
[]
For Fanon such a myth of man and society is fundamentally
undermined in the colonial situation where everyday life exhibits a
constellation of delirium that mediates the normal social relations
of its subjects: The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man
enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic
orientation. Fanons demand for a psychoanalytic explanation emerg-
es from the perverse reflections of civil virtue in the alienating acts
of colonial governance: the visibility of cultural mummification in
the colonizers avowed ambition to civilize or modernize the native,
which results in archaic inert institutions [that function] under the
oppressors supervision like a caricature of formerly fertile institu-
tions; or the validity of violence in the very definition of the colonial
social space; or the viability of the febrile, fantasmatic images of racial
hatred that come to be absorbed and acted out in the wisdom of the
West. These interpositions, indeed collaborations of political and psy-
chic violence within civic virtue, alienation within identity, drive Fanon
352 3. New Images of Man
to describe the splitting of the colonial space of consciousness and so- tethered shadow of deferral and displacement. It is not the colonialist narrative of fulfilment or an imaginary coincidence between individ-
ciety as marked by a Manichean delirium. self or the colonized other but the disturbing distance in-between that ual interest or instinct and the general will.
The representative figure of such a perversion, I want to suggest, is constitutes the figure of colonial othernessthe white mans artifice
the image of post-Enlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, inscribed on the black mans body. It is in relation to this impossible []
his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man, which splits his pres- object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its
ence, distorts his outline, breaches his boundaries, repeats his action at vicissitudes. In his more analytic mode Fanon can impede the exploration of
a distance, disturbs and divides the very time of his being. This ambiv- Finally, as has already been disclosed by the rhetorical figures of my these ambivalent, uncertain questions of colonial desire. The state of
alent identification of the racist worldmoving on two planes without account of desire and otherness, the question of identification is never emergency from which he writes demands more insurgent answers,
being in the least embarrassed by it, as Sartre says of the anti-Semitic the affirmation of a pregiven identity, more immediate identifications. At
consciousnessturns on the idea of man as his alienated image, not self never a self-fulfilling prophecyit is times Fanon attempts too close a
and other but the otherness of the self inscribed in the perverse pal- always the production of an image correspondence between the mise-
impsest of colonial identity. And it is that bizarre figure of desire, which of identity and of the transformation en-scne of unconscious fantasy and
splits along the axis on which it turns, that compels Fanon to put the of the subject in assuming that im- the phantoms of racist fear and hate
psychoanalytic question of the desire of the subject to the historic con- age. The demand of identification that stalk the colonial scene; he turns
dition of colonial man. that is, to be for an otherentails the too hastily from the ambivalences
What is often called the black soul is a white mans artefact, representation of the subject in the of identification to the antagonistic
Fanon writes. This transference, Ive argued, speaks otherwise. It re- differentiating order of otherness. identities of political alienation and
veals the deep psychic uncertainty of the colonial relation itself: its split Identification, as we inferred from cultural discrimination; he is too
representations stage the division of body and soul that enacts the the illustrations above, is always the quick to name the other, to person-
artifice of identity; a division that cuts across the fragile skinblack return of an image of identity that alize its presence in the language of
and whiteof individual and social authority. What emerges from the bears the mark of splitting in that colonial racismthe real Other for
figurative language I have used to make such an argument are three con- other place from which it comes. the white man is and will continue to
ditions that underlie an understanding of the process of identification in For Fanon, as for Jacques Lacan, the be the black man. And conversely.
the analytic of desire. primary moments of such a repeti- These attempts, in Fanons words, to
First: to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness, tion of the self lie in the desire of the restore the dream to its proper polit-
its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward to an external ob- look and the limits of language. The ical time and cultural space can, at
ject, and, as J. Rose writes, it is the relation of this demand to the place atmosphere of certain uncertainty times, blunt the edge of Fanons bril-
of the object it claims that becomes the basis for identification. This that surrounds the body certifies its liant illustrations of the complexity
process is visible in the exchange of looks between native and settler existence and threatens its dismem- of psychic projections in the patho-
that structures their psychic relation in the paranoid fantasy of bound- berment. logical colonial relation. Jean Ve-
less possession and its familiar language of reversal: when their glanc- neuse, the Antillean evolu, desires
es meet [the settler] ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive, They Look, a Negro! Mama, see the not merely to be in the place of the
want to take our place. It is true for there is no native who does not Negro! Im frightened! I could white man but compulsively seeks
dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settlers place. no longer laugh, because I already to look back and down on him-
It is always in relation to the place of the other that colonial desire is know there were legends, stories, self from that position. The white
articulated; it is, in part, the fantasmatic space of possession that no history and above all historicity man does not merely deny what he
one subject can singly occupy that permits the dream of the inversion Then, assailed at various points, fears and desires by projecting it on
of roles. the corporal schema crumbled, its Fig. 1. Marc Riboud. Algiers, July 1st 1962 (Women in Algiers stand in front
wall painted with the word oui [yes] on the day of the Algerian independence
of a them; Fanon sometimes forgets
Second: the very place of identification, caught in the tension of place taken by a racial epidermal referendum). 1962. Photography that paranoia never preserves its po-
demand and desire, is a space of splitting. The fantasy of the native is schema It was no longer a ques- sition of power, for the compulsive
precisely to occupy the masters place while keeping his place in the tion of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple per- identification with a persecutory They is always an evacuation and
slaves avenging anger. Black skins, white masks is not, for example, son I was responsible for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. emptying of the I.
a neat division; it is a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least Fanons sociodiagnostic psychiatry tends to explain away the
two places at once, which makes it impossible for the devalued, insa- In reading Black Skin, White Masks it is crucial to respect the dif- ambivalent turns and returns of the subject of colonial desire, its mas-
tiable evolu (an abandonment neurotic, Fanon claims) to accept the ference between personal identity as an intimation of reality, or an querade of Western man and the long historical perspective. It is
colonizers invitation to identity: Youre a doctor, a writer, a student, intuition of being, and the psychoanalytic problem of identification as if Fanon is fearful of his most radical insights: that the space of the
youre different, youre one of us. It is precisely in that ambivalent use that, in a sense, always begs the question of the subjectWhat does body and its identification is a representational reality; that the poli-
of differentto be different from those that are different makes you a man want? The emergence of the human subject as socially and tics of race will not be entirely contained within the humanist myth
the samethat the unconscious speaks of the form of otherness, the psychically authenticated depends upon the negation of an originary of man or economic necessity or historical progress, for its psychic
Homi K. Bhabha 353
affects question such forms of determinism; that social sovereign-
ty and human subjectivity are only realizable in the order of oth-
erness. It is as if the question of desire that emerged from the trau-
matic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied, at the end of Black
Skin, White Masks, to make way for an existentialist humanism that is
as banal as it is beatific:
Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other,
to explain the other to myself? At the conclusion of this study, I want
the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
Such a deep hunger for humanism, despite Fanons insight into
the dark side of man, must be an overcompensation for the closed
consciousness or dual narcissism to which he attributes the deper-
sonalization of colonial man: There one lies body to body, with ones
blackness or ones whiteness in full narcissistic cry, each sealed into his
own particularitywith, it is true, now and then a flash or so. It is this
flash of recognitionin its Hegelian sense, with its transcendental,
sublative spiritthat fails to ignite in the colonial relation, where there is
only narcissistic indifference: And yet the Negro knows there is a differ-
ence. He wants it . The former slave needs a challenge to his humani-
ty. In the absence of such a challenge, Fanon argues, the colonized can
only imitate, never identify, a distinction nicely made by the psychoan-
alyst Annie Reich: It is imitation when the child holds the newspaper
like his father. It is identification when the child learns to read. In disa-
vowing the culturally differentiated condition of the colonial worldin
demanding Turn White or disappearthe colonizer is himself caught in
the ambivalence of paranoic identification, alternating between fanta-
sies of megalomania and persecution.
However, Fanons Hegelian dream for a human reality in itself-for-it-
self is ironized, even mocked, by his view of the Manichaean structure of
colonial consciousness and its nondialectical division. What he says in
The Wretched of the Earth of the demography of the colonial city reflects
his view of the psychic structure of the colonial relation. The native
and settler zones, like the juxtaposition of black and white bodies, are
opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. No conciliation is
possible, he concludes, for of the two terms one is superfluous.
No, there can be no reconciliation, no Hegelian recognition, no
simple, sentimental promise of a humanistic world of the You. Can
there be life without transcendence? Politics without the dream of
perfectibility? Unlike Fanon, I think the nondialectical moment of Ma-
nichaeanism suggests an answer. By following the trajectory of coloni-
al desirein the company of that bizarre colonial figure, the tethered
shadowit becomes possible to cross, even to shift the Manichaean
boundaries. Where there is no human nature, hope can hardly spring
eternal; but it emerges surely and surreptitiously in the strategic return
of that difference that informs and deforms the image of identity, in the
margin of otherness that displays identification. There may be no Hegeli-
an negation but Fanon must sometimes be reminded that the disavowal
354 3. New Images of Man
of the other always exacerbates the edge of identification, reveals
that dangerous place where identity and aggressivity are twinned. For
denial is always a retroactive process; a half acknowledgment of that
Otherness which has left its traumatic mark. In that uncertainty lurks
the white-masked black man; and from such ambivalent identifica-
tionblack skin, white masksit is possible, I believe, to redeem the
pathos of cultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion.
We cannot agree with Fanon that since the racial drama is played out
in the open the black man has no time to make it unconscious, but that
is a provocative thought. In occupying two places at onceor three,
in Fanons casethe depersonalized, dislocated colonial subject can
become an incalculable object, quite literally, difficult to place. The de-
mand of authority cannot unify its message nor simply identify its sub-
jects. For the strategy of colonial desire is to stage the drama of identity
at the point at which the black mask slips to reveal the white skin. At that
edge, in between the black body and the white body, there is a tension
of meaning and being, or some would say of demand and desire, which
is the psychic counterpart to the muscular tension that inhabits the face the history of the Negro, which they had never contemplatedto
native body:
The symbols of social orderthe police, the bugle calls in the bar-
racks, military parades and the waving flagsare at one and the
same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the mes-
sage Dont dare to budge; rather, they cry out Get ready to attack. politics of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, Fanon opens up a
It is from that tensionboth psychic and politicalthat a strategy
of subversion emerges. It is a mode of negation that seeks not to unveil
the fullness of man but to manipulate his representation. It is a form
of power that is exercised at the very limits of identity and authority,
in the mocking spirit of mask and image; it is the lesson taught by the
veiled Algerian woman in the course of the revolution as she crossed
the Manichaean lines to claim her liberty. In Fanons essay Algeria
Unveiled the colonizers attempt to unveil the Algerian woman does
not simply turn the veil into a symbol of resistance; it becomes a tech-
nique of camouflage, a means of strugglethe veil conceals bombs.
The veil that once secured the boundary of the homethe limits of
womannow masks the woman in her revolutionary activity, link-
ing the Arab city and the French quarter, transgressing the familial
and colonial boundary. As the veil is liberated in the public sphere,
circulating between and beyond cultural and social norms and spaces,
it becomes the object of paranoid surveillance and interrogation.
Every veiled woman, writes Fanon, became suspect. And when the veil
is shed in order to penetrate deeper into the European quarter, the co-
lonial police see everything and nothing. An Algerian woman is only,
after all, a woman. But the Algerian fidai is an arsenal and in her hand-
bag she carries her hand grenades.
Remembering Fanon is a process of intense discovery and dis
orientation. Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or
retrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present. It is
such a memory of the history of race and racism, colonialism and the
question of cultural identity, that Fanon reveals with greater profun-
dity and poetry than any other writer. What he achieves, I believe, is
something far greater: for in seeing the phobic image of the Negro,
the native, the colonized, deeply woven into the psychic pattern of
the West, he offers the master and slave a deeper reflection of their
interpositions, as well as the hope of a difficult, even dangerous free-
dom: It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize
the self, it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will
be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.
Nobody writes with more honesty and insight of this lasting tension of
freedom in which the selfthe peremptory self of the presentdisa-
vows an image of itself as an orginary past or an ideal future and con-
fronts the paradox of its own making.
For Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, there is the intricate irony of
turning the European existentialist and psychoanalytic traditions to
face the reality of Fanon himself. This leads to a meditation on the ex-
perience of dispossession and dislocationpsychic and socialthat
speaks to the condition of the marginalized, the alienated, those who
have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that
denies their difference. In shifting the focus of cultural racism from the
margin of interrogation that causes a subversive slippage of identity and
authority. Nowhere is this slippage more visible than in his work itself,
where a range of texts and traditionsfrom the classical repertoire to the
quotidian, conversational culture of racismvie to utter that last word
which remains unspoken.
In the case of display the play of combat in the form of intimidation,
the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that
is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in
order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of
himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death.
Jacques Lacan
The time has come to return to Fanon; as always, I believe, with a
question: how can the human world live its difference? How can a hu-
man being live Other-wise?
A longer version of this essay was published initially as a foreword to: Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, Eng. trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press,
1986), pp. vii-xxvi.
Homi K. Bhabha 355
 NEW IMAGES OF MAN
Plates

Affandi Ben Enwonwu Maria Lassnig Jewad Selim

Fateh Al-Moudarres Ismail Fattah Luis Felipe No David Alfaro Siqueiros
Frank Auerbach Alberto Giacometti Colette Oluwabamise Lucas Sithole
Francis Bacon Leon Golub Omogbai Francis Newton Souza
Georg Baselitz Philip Guston On Kawara Alina Szapocznikow
Magda Cordell Maqbool Fida Husain Alfonso Ossorio Rufino Tamayo
Willem de Kooning Asger Jorn A. R. Penck Tony Tuckson
Aln Divi Marwan Kassab-Bachi Pablo Picasso Jack Whitten
Jean Dubuffet Ivan Koaric Gerhard Richter
Ibrahim El Salahi Wifredo Lam Gerard Sekoto
117
Pablo Picasso
Massacre en Core (Massacre in Korea)
1951
oil on plywood
Muse national Picasso, Paris

359
 119

118

Ibrahim El Salahi Ibrahim El Salahi

Funeral and the Crescent Self-Portrait of Suffering
1963 1961
oil on hardboard oil on canvas
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth

361
120 121

Francis Bacon Alberto Giacometti

Pope La cage (premire version) (The Cage [first version])
1955-56 1949-50
oil on canvas bronze
Brooklyn Museum, New York Fondation Giacometti, Paris

363
Alberto Giacometti
La Clairire (The Clearing)
1950
bronze
Fondation Giacometti, Paris

122
 Alberto Giacometti
Grande figure II (Tall Figure II)
1948-49
plaster
Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Alberto Giacometti
Femme de Venise IX (Woman of Venice IX)
1956 (cast 1958)
bronze with black patina
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

123 124

367
 126

128

127

Lucas Sithole Ismail Fattah Ismail Fattah Ismail Fattah

Lazarus I Reclining Man and Shield Untitled Untitled
1961 1960 1965 1965
bronze bronze with brown patina on natural bronze base bronze with brown patina on natural bronze base bronze sculpture
Laurie Slatter QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

125

369
 Ben Enwonwu
Anyanwu
1954-55
bronze
Private Collection

129
 131
130

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning

Woman Woman
1953-54 1952
oil on paper board pastel and pencil on paper
Brooklyn Museum, New York Glenstone Museum, Potomac

373
 133

132

Jean Dubuffet
Corps de dame Pice de boucherie
Jean Dubuffet
(Womans Body Butchers Slab) La dame au Pompon
1950 1946
oil on canvas mixed media, oil on canvas
Fondation Beyeler, Basel National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

375
134 135
Wifredo Lam
Wifredo Lam Seated Woman
Lunguanda Yembe 1955
1950 oil and charcoal on canvas
oil on canvas Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Museu Coleo Berardo, Lisbon Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

377
 137

Magda Cordell Alfonso Ossorio

Figure 59 Full Mother
c. 1958 1951
oil and acrylic on Masonite oil and enamel on canvas
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

136

379
138

139

Asger Jorn Asger Jorn

Il Delinquente (The Delinquent) De gule jne (Yellow Eyes)
1956 1953
oil on canvas oil on Masonite
Galerie van de Loo, Munich Galerie van de Loo, Munich

381
 141

140

Frank Auerbach Fateh Al-Moudarres

E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I Untitled
1962 1962
oil on paper board mixed media on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

383
 143

142

Rufino Tamayo Philip Guston

Terror csmico (Cosmic Terror) The Tormentors
1947 1947-48
oil on canvas oil on canvas
INBA/Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

385
144 145

Georg Baselitz Georg Baselitz

Groe Nacht im Eimer (Big Night down the Drain) Der Soldat (The Soldier)
1962-63 1965
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Private Collection Kunstmuseum Bonn, Permanent loan from a Private Collection

387
 Gerhard Richter
Neger (Nuba) (Negroes [Nuba])
1964
oil on canvas
Larry Gagosian

146

389
147 148

Jack Whitten Jack Whitten

Head I Head IV
1964 1964
acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas
Collection of the Artist, New York Collection of the Artist, New York

391
 150

149

Jack Whitten Jack Whitten

Head VII Head VIII
1964 1964
acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas
Collection of the Artist, New York Collection of the Artist, New York

393
151

A.R. Penck
Umsturz (Coup d'Etat)
1965
oil on canvas

395
 152

Leon Golub
LHomme de Palmyre
1962
lacquer on canvas
Hauser & Wirth, New York

397
153 154

Francis Newton Souza Francis Newton Souza

Head of a Man Thinking Two Saints (After El Greco)
1965 1965
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Collection Amrita Jhaveri Grosvenor Gallery, London

399
155

Maqbool Fida Husain

Man
1951
wood, metal, Masonite, oil
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem

401
156

157

Aln Divi On Kawara

Maska ticha (Mask of Silence) Thinking Man
1947 1952
oil on canvas oil on canvas
National Gallery in Prague Chiba City Museum of Art

403
 159
158

160

Maria Lassnig Maria Lassnig Alina Szapocznikow

Selbstportrt mit Ordenskette (Self-portrait with Livery Collar) Schwarzer Kopf des Vaters (Black Head of the Father) Head VII
1963 1956/57 1961
oil on canvas oil on fiberboard Lead
Klewan Collection, Munich Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow, Paris

405
 162

161

Tony Tuckson Marwan Kassab-Bachi

Black Woman, Half Length Das Bein
1956 1965
oil on paperboard oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Collection of the Artist

407
163
164

Luis Felipe No David Siqueiros

A donde vamos? O presente (Where Are We Going? Or Present) Cain in the United States
1964 1947
oil, paper collage, synthetic on canvas and wood pyroxlin on Masonite
Collection of the Artist Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Secretaria de Cultura INBA, Mexico City

409
 166
165

A.R. Penck Affandi

Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair) Pengemis Cirebon (Beggar in Cirebon)
1959-60 1960
oil on Masonite oil on canvas
Private Collection Museum Lippo, Jakarta

411
 168

169

167

Gerard Sekoto Jewad Selim Gerard Sekoto

Prison Yard Untitled Head of a Man
1944 1951 1962
oil on canvas oil on canvas watercolor on paper
Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah Grosvenor Gallery, London

413
 171

Ivan Koari c Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai

Figura (Figure) Agony
1956 1963
bronze oil on hardboard
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth

170

415
Section Introduction
Alejandro Anreus
Ekaterina Degot
Anneka Lenssen
Gao Minglu
Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan
Plates

4
REALISMS
 A
n important aesthetic feature of the Cold War binary was the
Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern and
Central Europe. Here, to a greater extent than in the Western
countries, institutional appropriation came before artistic
production, not after it. Yet accounts of this category are often narrow. Even
in the heyday of its governmental enforcement, Socialist Realism was not
a single style. Under Mao Zedong, Chinese artists produced large official
portraits of the chairman and scenes depicting model workers, but they also
made traditional ink paintings, if adding appropriate symbols of the new
order, such as the red flag. In the Soviet Union, art from the 1940s to Joseph
Stalins death in 1953 is primarily characterized by affirmative images of labor
and, especially, by heroic images of party leaders. During the post-Stalinist
REALISMS thaw, genre work influenced by the nineteenth-century Wanderers school
of Russian painting became more prominent, as well as the severe style,
influenced by Soviet art of the 1920s and early 30s. Outside the Soviet Uni-
on there was considerably more latitude for officially sanctioned artists,
and their works, while depicting authorized subjects, introduced personal
drawing styles and Surrealist elements. The Realisms section of the exhi-
bition also features the similarly ideological and popular work of artists in
other parts of the world and from different points on the political spectrum,
from the United States to Mexico, Western Europe, and the Middle East.
Along with some works of moderate size intended for museums, this section
emphasizes enormous public works, popular prints, and documentation.

Introduction 419

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO REALISM
AFTER 1945? FIGURATION AND POLITICS
IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Alejandro Anreus
4. Realisms
I
n the early 1920s the Mexican muralists Jos Clemente Oroz-
co, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others created a
figurative language that was monumental, narrative, and pub-
lic. Their styles had certain visual connections with European
trends associated with the return to order in art after World
War I, and shared an ideological agenda fueled by the evolving
politics following the consolidation of the Mexican Revolu-
tion in the early 1920s. In the period between the two Euro-
pean world wars, Mexican muralism was one of the most influential
avant-garde movements in the Western hemisphere, affecting artists in
1
both Latin America and the United States. The height of the presence
and influence of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros among the internation-
al avant-garde coincided with the antifascist and Popular Front poli-
tics of the 1930s. After the war, however, their place in the discourse of
modern art dramatically shifted: they went from key avant-garde art-
2
ists before 1945 to ideological and aesthetic casualties of the Cold War.
By the late 1940s, Riveras art had
settled into a mannered and senti-
mental vocabulary that bordered on
the folkloric. This was not the case
with either Orozco or Siqueiros. In
1944 Orozco began the easel work
La victoria (Victory; fig. 1), a violently
painted piece depicting a grotesque
female nude waving a flag. She is sur-
rounded by a burning ocean with ex-
plosions on the distant horizon, while
a horde of skeletal Holocaust survivors
gesticulates and screams to her low-
er right. The overall palette is of reds,
oranges, purples, and dirty browns.
Orozco, a former anarchist, saw the
emerging postwar world as fraught Fig. 1. Jos Clemente Orozco. La victoria (Victory). 1944. Oil on canvas, 5162 cm.
with new holocausts, atomic explo- Collection Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, INBA, Mexico City
sions, and a noxious Pax Americana.
Two years before his death, in 1949, he completed a series of large pan-
el paintings titled Los teules (The White Gods). Superficially about the
brutal encounter between the Spanish conquistadors and the natives
of Mexico, they are also about empire and colonialism, as ruthless in
the late 1940s as in the 1500s. Toward the end of Orozcos life, his re-
alism had evolved into a language where bold drawing and an acidic
palette served an enraged expressionism.
In 1946, Siqueiros was readmitted to the Mexican Communist Party.
Expelled from it in 1930,3 he had remained a vociferous theorist of
mural painting and a hardline Stalinist throughout the 1930s and early
40s. In 1944, back in Mexico after a period of exile, he created the Centro
de Arte Realista, a platform for his definition of a politically charged, non
illustrative realism. 4 The following year he received a mural commission
from the Mexican government wherein he continued his technical and
Alejandro Anreus
formal experimentation. If in 1932 Siqueiros had defined his realism as
dialective-subversive painting rooted in an antianecdotal formal-
ism,5 after World War II he began to utilize the terms critical realism,
new integral formalism, and new realism6 to define his production.
At the same time, he began to critique apolitical artists like Rufino
Tamayo and the academic Socialist Realism of the USSR and its allies.
Ironically, while Siqueiross mural work became a parody of itself
in the 1950s, his easel pictures from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s
continued to be engaging in their formal concerns while their content
acquired a powerful symbolic dimension. Even so, the postrevolutionary
Mexican state that had stabilized its identity and power after World War
II was cleverly able to co-opt the formal vocabulary of both Siqueiros and
Rivera while divesting it of its original revolutionary content. When the
novelist Jos Revueltas, in 1967, accused both the late Rivera and the still
active Siqueiros of having painted murals that functioned as ideological
fetishes and deformed concepts serving the national myth of Mexico
promoted by the Mexican state,
Revueltas was lucidly framing the con-
tinuity of Mexican muralism after 1945.7
Photography became a source
of imagery for Siqueiros; in the years
from 1945 to 1956, he came to believe
that photography could replace draw-
ing as the primary preparatory medi-
um for painting, and he himself would
pose and set up the shots. 8 A work like
Nuestra imagen actual (Our Current
Image, 1947), which is based on a pho-
tograph of the artist, manifests a trou-
bling combination of force (the muscu-
lar body) and alienation (a dense stone
for a head, container of both the intel-
lect and the senses). Thus Siqueiros
represents the West as a powerful mon-
ster whose redemptive option may be a
Communist revolution. Can en los Estados Unidos (Cain in the United
States, 1947; plate 164) takes up a theme Siqueiros had depicted earlier:
the lynching of African Americans. A white mob, with strong white
bodies but the heads of birds of prey, forms a unit that drags a tied-up
black man from a jail cell. In such a work Siqueiros is not just referenc-
ing the continuing reality of lynching in the worlds leading capitalist
democracy but possibly also reflecting the brutality of colonialism for
people of color.
In the 1950s, Siqueiross life became a kind of road movie through-
out the Third Worldhe visited China, India, Egypt, and Cuba, arguing
for a kind of realism that had a social function but did not degenerate into
Soviet Socialist Realism, which was academic, formulaic, and mechani-
cal.9 His visit to Egypt seems to have impacted the early work on paper of
Inji Efflatoun, with its massive forms and social content. In India he was
421
feted and embraced by the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, but artists
such as the Progressive Artists Group preferred the mythic and paint-
erly work of Rufino Tamayo.10 In Europe, Siqueiros's efforts to propose
an alternative to Socialist Realism found common ground with fellow
Communist painters like Renato Guttuso and Jlio Pomar. Yet where
their paintings became more expressive in the 1960s, and politically
embraced Euro-Communist positions by the 1970s, the Mexican could
not evolve and grow.
Paradoxically, Siqueiross attempt to practice and promote a real-
ism that had social agency, pictorial rigor, and ran counter to Soviet of-
ficialdom, was critically absorbed by artists who embraced an irreverent
figuration in the early 1960s, such as Argentinas Antonio Berni (19051981)
and Carlos Alonso (b. 1929).11 After the end of Juan Perns dictatorship in
Fig. 2. Antonio Berni. La gran tentacin o La gran ilusin (The Great Temptation or the Great Illusion).
1962. Oil, wood, burlap, canvas, paper, ornaments, iron, cardboard, plastic, glass, glue,
lithographic image and feathers on plywood, 245241.5 cm.
Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Argentina, Bernis work began to emerge from a barren and mechanical
period; while remaining grounded in the principles of his essay Nuevo
realismo of 1936, he adapted formal strategies from both Abstract Ex-
pressionism and Pop.12 Recycling the detritus of consumer society as
the pictorial matter of his paintings, he told the telenovela-like stories
of the slum boy Juanito Laguna and the seamstress-turned-prostitute
Ramona Montiel. In the world of these personages, atomic explosions,
environmental degradation, and the pursuit of materialism la U.S.A.
are everyday threats. Through formal disruptions and narrative parody
Berni renewed realism with a certain tongue-in-cheek ferocity. Alonso,
a Communist from 1945 to late 1967, has always believed in the human
figure as the vehicle through which we can, with an incorruptible mem-
ory, fix the wounds that reality leaves on us. 13 Between 1960 and 1965
he produced an extraordinary group of works combining drawing and
422
collage and depicting butchers at work, the kitchens and bedrooms of
working-class people, and solitary children playing in abandoned urban
parks. The works took on the rough, ragged surface of arte povera to
communicate a harshness akin to Italian neorealism in all its medi-
ums. Rejecting sentimentality for a kind of brutalism, Alonsos realism
is charged with an existentialist despair that could be the grounding
of political rebellion. Marta Traba, an art critic very much associated
with the rise of the New Left, would see Alonsos work, and particularly
his drawings, as a critical eye, a brave deformer, an inventor capable of
interminable transpositions. When Argentinean art loses all meaning,
Alonso dives into the abyss of the human condition, he becomes tempo-
ral, historical, critical, ethical. 14 Between 1966 and the mid-70s, Alonsos
drawings and paintings would echo the loud colors, flatness, and collage
strategies of Pop art, yet since then, and up to the writing of this essay,
he has been painting and drawing with a realism that simultaneously
converses with the realist tradition and collects the fragmentation and
emptiness of contemporary life.15
In 1959, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and its eventual
self-definition as Marxist-Leninist, brought forth polemics among art-
ists and intellectuals in favor of either realism or formal experimenta-
tion. Fidel Castro put an end to these polemics in a speech to intellec-
tuals at the Biblioteca Nacional in June 1961, rejecting Socialist Realism
and allowing experimentation unless it was critical of the revolution:
Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing. 16
By 1965, the real as expressed through realism had long left behind
Siqueiross strategies. The realities of a postatomic, consumerist world
bursting with anticolonial revolutions had found a more convincing
4. Realisms
4 In May of 1940, Siqueiros and a number of his assistants attempted an assassination of
Fig. 3. Carlos Alonso. Carnicero N 2 (Butcher No. 2). 1965.
Crayon, graphite, ink, and collage on paper, 150100 cm.
Collection of the Artist.
representation in a brutalist neo-figuration.17 It would take artists like
Argentinas Luis Felipe No, Cubas Antonia Eiriz, and others to redefine
the real as tattered, bloated, and ragged human images. With his usual
intellectual clarity, Berni would write that the new and most realistic art
to emerge in the 1960s would need to partake of and critique a world of
imported aesthetic chewing gum or of drinking a Coca-Cola type of uni-
versalism, where artists arent as alienated as the rest by the publicity
of the mass media controlled by transnational monopolies.18 An art like
Bernis, made materially of recycled garbage and from the perspective of
the disempowered and the marginal, who nevertheless are drowning in
Coca-Cola and chocolate candy bars, would be the most realistic rep-
resentation of the world that emerged after World War II.
Alejandro Anreus
1 Latin American artists as diverse as Eduardo Abela (Cuba), Antonio Berni (Argentina), Can-
dido Portinari (Brazil), and Jos Sabogal (Peru) were influenced by Mexican muralism. In the
United States their impact is visible in the work of John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn,
and Charles White, the early work of Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, and the postWorld War
II work of both Leon Golub and Rico Lebrun.
2 Not only was entry to the United States denied to both Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Sique-
iros, but their works and Jos Clemente Orozcos in the permanent collection of New Yorks
Museum of Modern Art were moved from the main galleries to marginal spaces like hallways,
next to the restrooms, etc. The panel depicting Lenin in Orozcos mural at The New School for
Social Research was covered throughout the 1950s. Their mention in the literature became
minimal. See Alejandro Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2001), pp. 11011.
3 Siqueiross expulsion from the Communist Party was due to his chaotic personal life and in-
ability to follow orders in that regard, not to policies or aesthetics. Interview between the author
and Raquel Tibol, May 27, 1995, Mexico City.
Leon Trotsky in his Coyoacn home. Siqueiros was arrested and questioned; eventually, with
help from the poet Pablo Neruda, he fled to Chile and spent the years 194143 traveling, lec-
turing, and painting in South America and Cuba. Trotsky was assassinated by Stalinist agent
Ramn Mercader on August 20, 1940.
5 See Siqueiros, Palabras de Siqueiros, ed. Tibol (Mxico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Econmica,
1996), pp. 6278. He first used this term in a lecture at the John Reed Club, Los Angeles, on
September 2, 1932. This and all translations from the Spanish by the author.
6 He uses these terms in pamphlets, articles, and lectures such as No hay ms ruta que la
nuestra (1945), Hacia una nueva plstica integral (1948), and La crtica de arte como pretexto
literario (1948), in ibid., pp. 25257, 28792, 293307.
7 Jos Revueltas, Escuela mexicana de pintura y novela de la revolucin, in Cuestionamien-
tos e intenciones, vol. 18 of Revueltass Obras Completas (Mxico, D.F.: Era, 1978), pp. 24174.
8 See Siqueiros, La funcin de la fotografa, initially published in the magazine Hoy, August
4, 1945, repr. in Palabras de Siqueiros, pp. 22731.
9 Politically Siqueiros remained a rigid Stalinist until his death in 1974, supporting the invasions
of both Hungary and Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Unlike his fellow Stalinist and friend
the poet Pablo Neruda, he was unable to reinvent himself through the New Left in the 1960s.
10 See Siqueiros, Me llamaban el coronelazo (Mxico, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1977), pp. 44760. In his
posthumously published memoirs Siqueiros describes these stops in his road movie as not
simply triumphs but instances of confrontation with the new formalism promoted by the United
States and the retardaire naturalism of Soviet Socialist Realism. In a sense, he was reviving
his many travels of the 1930s, when he acted as an evangelist for muralism in both the United
States and Latin America. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s he was paradoxically both
a cultural ambassador for the Mexican culture industry and an avowed Communist. Although
jailed from August 9, 1960 to July 13, 1964 for his involvement in an unauthorized strike by
railroad workers, once released he would assume his representation of the Mexican Mural
movement for the state.
11 As a former Communist but active fellow-traveler, Berni exhibited his work in the Warsaw
Pact nations at the height of the Cold War. His prints in particular were well received by young
artists in Czechoslovakia in 1959 and Poland in 1966 and 1968.
12 Berni, El nuevo realismo, Forma (Buenos Aires) no. 1 (August 1936): 8, 14. In this key text
Berni called for a realism that was not a simplistic imitation of the style of Czanne or Picasso,
but an interpretation of ones own era with its new phenomena and realities, the spirit and origi-
nality of the moment.
13 Carlos Alonso, in a questionnaire from the author, December 3, 2009. On Alonsos history
see Alejandro Anreus, Carlos Alonsos Anatomy Lesson, Third Text 24, no. 3 (May 2010): 353
60. Alonsos slow but steady disillusionment with the Argentinean Communist Party reflects his
responses to Stalinism, the repression of workers in East Berlin in 1953, and the invasions of
Hungary in 1957 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
14 Marta Traba, Dos dcadas vulnerables en las artes plsticas latinoamericanas: 195070,
(Mxico, DF: Siglo Veintiuno, 1973), pp. 7778.
15 In July 1977, Alonsos daughter Paloma, a university student and activist, was disappeared
by the military junta that was ruling the country with the support of the U.S. government. The artist
and the rest of his family had to flee the country for their own safety, living in exile in Italy and Spain
until returning in 1981, two years before democracy was restored through the election of Ral
Alfonsin in 1983. This personal tragedy recharged Alonsos commitment to a political realism.
16 See Robert E. Quirk, Fidel Castro (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 38185.
17 The work of the Otra figuracin group in Argentina, Antonia Eiriz in Cuba, and Jacobo Borg-
es in Venezuela are prime examples of this neo-figuration.
18 Berni, Escritos y papeles privados (Buenos Aires: Tema Grupo Editorial, 1999), pp. 137, 140.
423
 R
ussias October Revolution of 1917 may have
announced itself to the world with a blare of
brand-new abstract geometrical shapes, but it
was in figurative images with a classical pedi-
gree that the new society recognized itself, and
it would maintain this commitment to realism
as its main visual and epistemological tool until
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and
beyond. Discussions in the early 1930s canonized the formula Socialist
Realism, even if the radical left-wing scene preferred proletarian real-
ism, dialectical-materialist realism, and other terms.1 In any case, re-
or an artist in the provinces. No independent art criticism was possible,
corrections to dominant aesthetic paradigms were imposed by party
decree, and the stakes were high: an attack on an artist in the central
press would almost certainly lead to expulsion from the artists union, a
loss of commissions, exclusion from teaching positions, and ultimately
a kind of social death.
TRIUMPHALIST
DECOLONIZATION

I
alism marked the difference from the previous dominant tendency in
Russian art. Futurism, insofar as it was deemed that the future anticipat-
ed by the Futurists, had now become everyday. Socialist was meant to
demarcate this new realism from bourgeois nineteenth-century realism,
thought to have betrayed itself and started the descent into modernist for-
malismthe main adversary of Socialist Realism for many years to come.
By the 1930s, the Soviet avant-garde had grown dissatisfied with
modernist art, which they saw as translating social alienation into its
symbolic representation through flatness and fragmentation. Instead,
Communist artists gravitated toward holistic, synthetic forms that de-
fied social alienation rather than mimicking it. The radical left shifted
toward various forms of documentary, photomontage, and film (a ten-
mmediately after World War II (which in the Soviet Union was giv-
en the deeply felt name the Great Patriotic War), in party decrees
and in the public sphere, the rhetorics of class struggle and inter-
nationalism disappeared and resistance to the bourgeois order
received a cultural interpretation. The Soviet victory over Nazism (Jap-
anese imperialism was too far away from Moscow to be acknowledged),
achieved through Joseph Stalins tactical reconciliation with the Russian
Orthodox Church, among other things, was seen as a victory over Western
colonial dominance. (To some extent this may have been justified, since
Hitlers policies in Eastern Europe were implicitly colonial.) The cultural
war on the West became intense after 1946, when campaigns against

COMMITMENT TO HUMILITY
Ekaterina Degot
dency they called factography), but also toward politically engaged
figurative painting. In its violent rejection of autonomous art, seen as
a comfortable bourgeois institution, this postabstract propagandistic
realism set out to be destructive rather than descriptive.
The new institutional system stood almost unchanged from the
1930s to the early 1990s. In an unprecedented challenge to earlier pat-
terns of individual production, division of labor, and the market, the new
art positioned itself as an element of the new, noncapitalist public sphere.
Artworks were ideally to be produced collectively (or at least, more real-
istically, through advance collective discussions among producers) and
were intended for a mass audience that, also ideally, would engage with
them through political debate. In the total absence of a private market,
production would rely on state commissions, which in turn were distrib-
uted through artists unions and cooperatives. Murals, public sculptures,
illustrated books, film, and photography allowed access to the masses,
but easel painting was also integrated into this system through a vital
emphasis on distribution through the media: publishing houses issued
art magazines and postcards by the millions of copies, constituting the
staple of the Soviet art system alongside traditional museums. To some
extent, originals kept in museums were seen as master copies for further
reproductions, whether mechanical or, more often than not, manual.
During the Stalinist periodthat is, until 1953the initial egal-
itarian impulse of this system was violently repressed. Debates within
artists unions, once to some extent democratic, stopped. A politically
servile artistic bureaucracy emerged, negotiating enormous fees that
made its members extremely well off in comparison to an average worker
so-called rootless cosmopolitanism and kowtowing to the West
were declared. In 1948, an aggressive press campaign ostracized dozens
of theorists and critics, almost exclusively of Jewish descent. Basically,
internationalism and modernism were stigmatized as Jewish.
Victors over the West took classical Western art as booty both
literally and metaphorically. Vasiliy Yakovlevs Portrait of Georgy Zhukov
(1946; plate 172), a neoacademic tour de force, shows Marshal Georgy
Zhukov, a Russian commander during the battle for Berlin, riding on a
mighty white stallion. He triumphs not just over Nazi Germany and Ger-
man cultureboth swastika banners and medieval churches are shown
falling behind himbut over the whole European tradition of neo-ba-
roque portraiture, which Yakovlev proudly appropriates and tames just as
Zhukov tames his horse. (Besides being a painter, Yakovlev ran the res-
toration department of Moscows Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts,
where he specialized in restoring paintings by Rubens. Secular painting
was imposed on Russia in the eighteenth century by Peter the Great;
some 200 years later, in a triumphalist justification of ancient self-col-
onization, Yakovlev was claiming the right to the Western style because
the West had now betrayed its true westernness, having embraced
modernism.
In a different but related dynamic, this antiinternationalist de-
colonization was accompanied by colonization of the Soviet Unions
own margins, called national republics in an assumption that Russia
was not one. The artists of the non-Russian republics were expected
to represent their regions life in a style bearing no resemblance to its
traditional art, since the decorative qualities of traditional arts were

Chapter
4. 2Realisms
Form Matters Ekaterina Degot 425

Fig. 1. Semyon Chuikov. Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia. 1948. Oil on canvas, 120 x 95 cm.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
seen as a kind of formalism. In 1947, the Ilya Repin Leningrad Insti-
tute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture set up a studio of na-
tionalities to prepare young artists from outside the European tra-
dition for the vicissitudes of drawing from nature. Semyon Chuikovs
Doch Sovetskoi Kirgizii (Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia, 1948; fig. 1), for
example, was praised as a successful example of the cultural awak-
ening not just of a girl from the steppes, who prioritized study over
tending sheep, but of Kirgiz national realist painting, a previously
unknown genre. The republics were forced to embrace a high culture
represented by a generic realist visual language interpreted as the na-
tional Russian style. Russian culture, understanding itself as supra-
national, was spread abroad, too: in the 1950s, the painter Konstantin
Maksimov was sent to China to teach the methods of realist art there.
REALISM OF THE POSSIBLE
Soviet realist aesthetics were heavily influenced by Vladimir Lenins famous
essay Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution (1908), in
which Lenin praised Tolstoy as a genius who has drawn incomparable
pictures of Russian life.2 This pictorial metaphor brought the narrative
and the visual into a dialectical embrace that later critics had in mind
when they tended to evaluate each art through the criteria of the other. A
realist text had to be as vivid as a painting, while a realist painting, without
losing its sensuous credibility, had to encompass the whole range of real-
ity, the fullness of its connections and relations, past and futuresome-
thing that only a novel could perhaps have at least hoped to offer.
One new genre promised just that: thematic painting, a political
statement embedded in a visual narrative. A paradigmatic example is
Fyodor Shurpins Utro nashei rodiny (Morning of our Motherland, 1946
48; plate 173), a portrait of Stalin significantly never positioned as a por-
trait of Stalin: it claimed a higher ambition. The narrative here, however,
is minimalist to say the least: there is almost nothing to be seen but the
indirect glow of the sun and the figure of Stalin. Yet the viewer is asked
to imagine a magnificent future. In 1946, in a country devastated by the
recent war, to ask for that sort of imagination was to ask for the superla-
tive public-spirited exertion that in the Soviet Union would come to be
called shock work. One can, and probably should, dismiss this painting
for its utter glorification of the tyrant, but it also marks an important shift
in Soviet realism from the actual to the potential. A later Soviet dictionary
of aesthetics would argue that artistic reflection is high aesthetic selec-
tiveness, orientation to the possible and the probable.3 For Soviet critics,
realism had to represent not so much the current reality as hopes for a
better one; this sort of realism presupposes possibility beyond already
existing reality, as Ernst Bloch put it, describing the warm movement in
Marxism.4
The haunting of the real by the possible also challenges the norma-
tive idea of quality. If the audience had to discern a Communism yet to
come in a still imperfect reality, why would it not foresee painting
itself in its different statebetter, stronger, closer to the ideal, as if created
by one of the classic humanist painters, realists avant la lettre, whom
Soviet painters and art historians idolized during the entire Soviet period.
If, through their painterly style, artists expressed the ambition to be
a Rembrandt or a Velzquez, a Zurbarn or a Chardin (and many did),
they were showing themselves at their best not just in an aesthetic but in
an ethical sense. And since they knew they were not Velzquez after all,
they also demonstrated humility. The viewer might then give them the
benefit of the doubtBlochs principle of hopeby looking at what the
painting might have been, might still become, rather than at what it was
and at the limitations it had.
The theory of Socialist Realism as an epistemological tool was
based on Lenins theory of reflection, which stated the correlation be-
tween objective reality and cognition, but in both directions: according
to Lenin, cognition mirrors reality in an active, transformative way,
bringing out the best of it (and that, one can deduce, works better than
cognition per se, only possible through a process of necessarily limited
approximations).5 Slavoj iek is right to see Lenins theory as implicitly
idealistic, since the very idea of mirroring divides objective reality and
consciousness.6 Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, signed by Stalin
(but not necessarily written by him) and published in 1950, goes still far-
ther, proclaiming the relative independence of societys superstructure
from its basesomething that was never contested, even during the
years of de-Stalinization, and became the most important ideological
platform for arts seeking the ideal.
THE POWER OF TRUTH
On March 5, 1953, Stalin died; in February 1956, the 20th Congress of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union condemned his cult of personality
and called for a return to Leninist norms of party life. That opened the
short period of socialism with a human face, which ended in 1968 when an
even more humanly faced socialism in Prague was crushed by Soviet tanks.
The partys greeting to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Art-
ists, in 1957, called for works providing a feeling of genuine aesthetic
pleasure and joy for millions, which enrich their spiritual world, which
ennoble and elevate man.7 The assumption that rich and noble were
positive qualities was rather unexpected. In the same way, the autono-
my of art was partly rehabilitated, insofar as artists gained it de facto.
Artists unions now controlled media distribution and museum acqui-
sitions, and by the 1960s, at least in Moscow and Leningrad, had turned
into a relatively privileged caste of professionals isolated from the rest of
society. For the artists of the austere style of the early 1960s, as well as
for the first generation of conceptualists later in the decade, this auton-
omy enabled a self-reflexive process: both groups were reflecting on the
choices made in the 1920s, the figurative turn in the first place.

426 4. Realisms Ekaterina Degot 427

 Austere style (surovyj stil) was a term invented by critics to
describe the work of young artists of the time (Pavel Nikonov, Viktor
Popkov, Tahir Salahov and others) who developed a sober and mon-
umental visual language and linked the sensuous to the political. 8
Their protagonistseveryday heroes, workers, almost exclusively
Fig. 2. Geliy Korzhev. Homer. 1960.
Oil on canvas, 290 x 140 cm.
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
maleare represented as anti-Stalinist political subjects who do not
just follow orders but are architects of their own destiny, who combine
physical strength with independent minds, and whose labor on behalf of
society allows them time for their own intellectual development. In con-
trast to the mythomaniac art of the Stalinist period, artists of the aus-
tere style insisted on truthfulness. That did not mean more credible
428 4. Realisms
representation, i.e., less idealization, but rather a more rhetorical pres-
ence of Communist ideals in everyday life. This is what is at stake in
Popkovs Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station (196061; plate 175),
which stages an artificial, theatrical mise-en-scne. This limelight com-
position is rooted in a Brechtian alienation effect and the breaking of the
fourth wall, but also, digging deeper, in the famous Hegelian idea that
the essence reveals itself, which remained central to Soviet realism.
The artists of the austere style were supported by the critic Nina
Dmitrieva, who herself was influenced by Mikhail Lifshitz, the main
Marxist theorist of realism. Lifshitz, who in the 1930s had worked close-
ly with Gyrgy Lukacs and published an important anthology of early
Marxist literature on the role of art, was committed to the idea of real-
Fig. 3. Geliy Korzhev. Raising the Banner. 1960. Oil on canvas, 156 x 290 cm.
State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
ism as a cognitive tool and sensuous instrument in the search for truth.
Truthfulness for Lifshitz was the representation of what, after Hegel, he
called veritas reithe truth of things, the best in them, their ideal projec-
tion. The very fact of revealing something in sensuous form was already
considered aesthetic, but the highest form of this revelation would be the
revelation of the universal inside and through the unique.
The idea of the hard ascension, physical as well as spiritual, toward
the ideal, the universal, toward something that transcends even the notion
of class, is at the core of Geliy Korzhevs iconic triptych Communists (1957
60). In the central panel a worker raises a heavy flag that has fallen from
the hands of a dead comrade (fig. 3); to the right, The Internationale, two
brave horn-players raise their instruments and defy death in a battle in the
Russian Civil War (fig. 4). In the lefthand panel, Homer, we see what all this
was for: in a studio after the war, two former soldiers copy, meticulous-
ly and modestly, a bust of Homer, elevating themselves above their own
background and past to the universalist and classless level of the human-
ist culture of European antiquity (fig. 2). This ennoblement and elevation
is achieved, notably, through mimetic copying, an activity a dedicated
realist like Korzhev identified with. And it was precisely this copying
that, for him, opened the door to the immensity of the absolute truth
that transcends any categorization, be it epistemological or sociological.
The category of the generalvseobschchee, a term that can also
be translated as universal, overall, generic in the sense of going
beyond divisions, or common in relation to propertywas extreme-
ly important for Soviet Marxists (Lifshits, Evald Iljenkov) as well as for
literary and art criticism. The general is the abstract that has overcome
Fig. 4. Geliy Korzhev. The Internationale. 195758.
Oil on canvas, 285 x 128 cm. State Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg
its abstractness, the concrete that is deeply reflected in its concreteness,
the realistic that is more than just representation, the proper and unique
that opens up toward a higher level of generalization. It is high culture and
philosophical thinking that have freed themselves from their historical
limitations and joined the common, classless future. The contemporary
theorist Keti Chukhrov points out that in Soviet aesthetics, art, even
Ekaterina Degot
though it might exist within the harsh conditions of class society or
might be produced by the bourgeoisie, exists and realizes itself as art
regardless of this class society, albeit under its influence. According to
this standpoint, shared by many Soviet aestheticians, all art must be
potentially proto-communist.9
Only through a specific Soviet attitude to copying and reproduc-
tion, however, could this potential be fulfilled. In the bourgeois institu-
tion of art, the classical heritage is instrumentalized as the mechanism
of the production of elites, but what Korzhev assumes, in his own work
as well as in antique sculptures, is not a unique object for individual con-
sumption, rare, expensive, and hard to find, but a potential for immedi-
ate mass reproduction, reaching millions. The true character of these
reproductions, however, directly correlates with the degree of realism of
the original. Abstract painting is easily reproducible, but this reproduction
has no value; the truth of the reproduction can only be guaranteed by the
memory of the primal scene of an artist copying from nature.
1 See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1998), pp. 14041.
2 The essay is available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/sep/11.htm
(accessed May 2016).
3 Estetika. Slovar (Moscow: Izdatelstvo politicheskoe literatury, 1989), p. 246.
4 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 195459, excerpted in Richard Noble, ed., Utopias,
Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery, and Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 2009), p. 44.
5 Vladimir Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, 1915.
6 Slavoj iek, Afterword: Lenins Choice, in Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of
Writings from February to October 1917, ed. iek (London: Verso, 2002).
7 Iskusstvo no. 4 (1957): 3.
8 The translation severe style is common, but has a punitive note absent from the original
Russian term, which rather stresses asceticism.
9 Keti Chukhrov, Classical Art and Human Resignation in Soviet Marxism, in Georg
Schllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan, eds., Sweet Sixties: Specters and Spirits of a Parallel
Avant-Garde (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
429
 O
ne September evening in 1959, a large
crowd filled Cairos el-Gomhoreya Square
in protest against the recently announced
French plan to conduct nuclear-weapons
testing in the Algerian Sahara. Their group
contained many students from the decolo-
nizing nations of the Third World, present
in Cairo to attend an Afro-Asian Youth
Conference. Delegations of young Somalis, Indonesians, and others had
gone to the square holding signs reading No to de Gaulle and No to
nuclear bombs in Africa. 1 There they heard both students and Egyp-
tian government officials deliver speeches denouncing imperialism
from a central stage decorated with the image of a mushroom cloud
exploding over the African continent and flanked by a doubled No! in
EXCHANGEABLE REALISM
Anneka Lenssen
Fig. 1. La! Ya Di-jawl (No! Oh, De Gaulle).
Editorial feature in the Egyptian magazine al-Musawwar, September 11, 1959
English and in Arabic. The events National Union organizers had suc-
ceeded in staging a photogenic rally. The Egyptian magazine al-Mu-
sawwar printed a stunning full-spread image showing the protesters
facing off against the motifs of industrial warfare, thereby conceptually
linking the cause of Algerias active struggle for independence from
France to the collective fate of the Arab countries, the African conti-
nent, and the entirety of the colonized world (fig. 1).2
The Afro-Asian liberation struggle so pictured would have real
historic consequences. And yet, like any show of solidarity, its images
also worked to sustain a number of simulations, including, in this case,
promotion of the moral authority of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel
Chapter
4. 2Realisms
Form Matters Anneka Lenssen
Nasser. Egypt had already claimed military leadership of the Arab bloc,
a position of influence that, as of February 1958, included a complete
but ultimately temporary political union with Syria as the United Arab
Republic (UAR).3 By also taking a lead in Afro-Asian solidarity, the
critical geopolitical entity inaugurated at the Bandung Conference
in 1955, Egypt claimed still greater bargaining power. 4 All this played
out as Nasser pursued increasingly repressive security measures
at home, carrying out mass arrests of Communist Party members,
including Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun (in Cairo) and Syrian artist
Nazir Nabaa (in Damascus).
To interpret artistic realism in the United Arab Republic, or in
another of the Arab countries pledged to the antiimperialist cause
in 1959, is to negotiate the paradoxes of an international system of
self-representation that turned upon matters of moral fortitude
and human goodness, often in tension with actual policies or expe-
riences. Many Arab art critics called for an art that engaged reality,
but the works of art they prized typically drew their authority not
from conformity to observable appearances but rather from the
authenticity of the artists intentions and capacities.5 As the young
Syrian artist Ghazi al-Khaldi put it in March 1959, it was impossible
to separate the artist from his production, for both emerged from
the same experience of life.6 To al-Khaldi, a painting or other art
object would need to be evaluated in an organic continuum with social
and physical forces, which made an artists sovereign expression less
important than his or her demonstration of humanity.7
431
 These realist expectations would increasingly find sustenance in a
developing circuitry of government exchange programs that kept art-
ists and artworks mobile across the Second and Third Worlds, thereby
demonstrating the universal exchangeability of the cause. Syrian artists,
for example, began to study in the Eastern bloc in addition to the Italian
academies they had once preferred, with Elias Zayyat going to Sofia, Bul-
garia, in 1956 and Abdul Manan Shamma to Moscow in 1958. In 1959, the
Moroccan artist Farid Belkahia, who had been studying in Paris, left for
Prague, where he hoped to observe a Communist approach to culture
and where he was able to mix with left-wing writers and artists passing
through on their way to Beijing or Moscow. 8 That same year, Egypt sent
Hamed Owaisa consummate painter of the worker and of populist
causesto Poland to stage two exhibitions, and the Moroccan artist
Ahmed Cherkaoui undertook a years study in Warsaw beginning the
following year. Exchanges of collective exhibitions proliferated at the
same time. Poster art by Eastern European designers became a fixture
in the National Museum of Damascus, with Syria returning the favor
with touring exhibitions of painting, sculpture, and folk arts. In Bagh-
dad, an exhibition of watercolors, woodcuts, and antique masterpieces
sent from Beijing impressed students with its technical virtuosity.9
Given the diversity and volume of these artistic exchanges, it is
instructive to consider the nature of the training offered to those who
took fellowships abroad. Notably, the positive character of the realist
paradigm hinged upon the cultivation of recognized skill, typically
via the highly structured environment of a national academy. From
the memoirs of Iraqi artist Rafa al-Nasiri, for example, we learn that
the Chinese exhibit in Baghdad motivated him to pursue a four-year
fellowship at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, where he
immersed himself in a refined tradition of master printmaking.10 His
time at the academy, 195963, coincided with the extreme hardships of
the Great Leap Forward, but his recollections focus on the estimable
skill of instructors such as Li Hua and his own student work attends
to the quotidian and the wholesome. His woodcut Chinese Girls (1961),
for example, depicts two figures lacing ice skates, preparing to enjoy
Kunming Lake in the wintertime (fig. 2).
From the progress reports submitted for Egyptian students, who
also went to Beijing, it is possible to glean further detail about intend-
ed outcomes. Heba Enayat and Tomader Turki (a married couple)
attended the Central Academy in 195762, completing sequences of
trainingone year of national painting, twenty-six months of wood-
cut, thirty-four months in studio workrooms, and nine months of
study tours in the countrysidethat resulted in the ability to, among
other skills, depict different Chinese minorities, render figures, land-
scape, flowers, and birds in national styles, and print woodcuts in
both the Western and the Chinese manner.11 The final year of degree
study included individual work and an exhibition, but even these fell
under a single, shared framework of evaluation. Enayat and Turki
earned nearly identical commendations, having each succeeded
in extracting something nutritive from Chinese traditional art and
432 4. Realisms
having applied it to their own creative work. 12 The sheer iterability of
these exchanges gave them an ideological power. Within this circuit
of ongoing and collective effort, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Chinese artists
alike might take something nutritive from Chinese traditional art.
Artists worked synthetically, acting as sensitive instruments for
conveying the vitality of cultural inheritance.
Back in Cairo, the College of Fine Arts was admitting increasing
numbers of students from other Arab states, including a large contin-
gent from Syria, which did not yet have its own degree-granting art
school. The curriculum, in accordance with the populist emphases of
Nassers government, brought field observation of Egypt-in-construc-
tion to the fore, sending art students to depict the Aswan High Dam
Fig. 2. Rafa Al-Nasiri. Chinese Girls. 1961.
Woodcut print, 1520 cm. Courtesy Rafa Nasiri Studio
project (it would be launched officially in 1960, with the help of Soviet
financial credits, expertise, and equipment) and to produce portraits
of members of the urban proletariat.13 The Syrian contingent included
al-Khaldi, who in 1959 wrote a charming article on life in Cairo to be
published back home in al-Jundi, the cultural magazine of the Syrian
military.14 Al-Khaldis essay is particularly concerned with conveying
the esprit de corps between himself and his roommates, fellow Syrians
Burhan Karkutli and Hisham Zamriq, and provides detailed accounts
of each ones routines and personality quirks. Zamriq, we learn, awoke
at sunrise, took a cigarette and coffee, and went to the college to paint,
then returned at noon to prepare a meal and nap, followed by work at
home on still life or portrait exercises and nights devoted to listening to
classical music. Karkutli, by contrast, preferred to fill his days convers-
ing with the neighborhood children. Fig. 3. Hamed Owais. At the Aswan Dam. 1965.
Oil on canvas, 9985 cm. State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow
So anchored in the dailiness of artistic life, al-Khaldis article helps
to point to one other crucial aspect of the realism produced by this
international circuitry of studentship, which is that it needed to con-
tinue moving and undergoing exchange. Neither Cairo nor Damascus
could contain the work that these artists hoped to do. Al-Khaldi tells his
Anneka Lenssen 433
readers how he and Zamriq daydreamed about escaping aristocratic
Cairo and going to Mexico to study its school of humanist realism.15
They had come to imagine a future world order in which a youthful art-
ist needed only his or her talent to flourish, not permission or financing
from the authorities. Al-Khaldis article even concludes with a glimpse
of that very future, reporting that Karkutli had just left Egypt for Spain,
where he would try to use his humanity as currency. Carrying no
money, the Syrian artist instead held a sign announcing, I am an Arab
student continuing my study at my own expense. I paint pictures for
five piasters. 16
If these young Syrian artists hoped to find ways to mobilize them-
selves and their work more directly, then others in the system would
continue to pursue the calm realism of observation rooted in shared
humanity. Owais is the exemplary figure in this regard. Nearly twenty
years older than the College of Fine Arts students, he had been formed
by the upward-mobility discourses of the 1930s and 40s and had then
come into professional prominence after the 1952 revolution as a visual
interpreter of a strong and populist Egypt.17 His oeuvre includes grand
visions of Nasser in his role as a great leader, as in the well-known 1957
painting Nasser and the Nationalization of the Canal, which places the
president in the center of the lucrative Suez trade nexuses he had re-
claimed for Egyptian control, buttressing him with a sea of expectant
though not yet exultant citizens (plate 191). But Owaiss revolution was
almost always an anticipatory rather than a finished one; his subjects
appear wary, and even consumed by the precarity of their lives. In
Peasant Family (1959), for example, we see both father and mother scowl
with anxietyan emotion Owais recognized as universal to any work-
ing familyon their move toward an unknown future. Even paintings
ostensibly devoted to solidarity, such as WeThe People (1960), cast the
faces of the participant typesurbanized builder, agricultural worker,
and peasant motherin gray shadow, as if to foreclose the possibility of
an allegorical reading. 18
Because Owais maintained such a principled commitment to the
quality of immediacy in his pictures, his occasional deviance from
this norm becomes all the more compelling as his testimony shifts to
the larger system of exchange. Consider, for example, his 1965 painting
of the Aswan High Dam, now in the collection of the State Museum of
Oriental Art in Moscow (fig. 3). Tucked into a riveted contraption high
above the newly created Lake Nasser reservoir, men work on the con-
struction of transmission towers and power grids. Here Owais depicted
a vertiginous space of labor, bringing together several perspectival
modes, from a birds-eye view of the barges to an assembly of cascading
pipes and braces. And, unusually for him, he opted to denote his human
actors by means of abstract geometry, giving the two hard hats the per-
fect circular shape of cogs. Presumably, Owais intended to convey the
awesome power of human and nonhuman collaboration in the painting,
linking flesh to steel and water to electricity. Yet in using this schematic
shorthand, he also left the immediacy of his realism behind, signaling
submission to industrial power.
434 4. Realisms
This is not to suggest that Owais had lost faith in the necessity of
national development (indeed, in this work he would seem to be inter-
ested in conveying a technological sublime). Rather, it is to note that the
ostensible subject of Owaiss paintinga triumphant model of state-led
developmenthad begun to slip from grace. As Owais well knew, the
same art students who had formed their political consciousness in the
heyday of Afro-Asian solidarity had, by 1965, grown impatient with the
bureaucracy that once had promised to liberate them. Before the end of
the decade, many would come to seek immediacy in direct action, em-
bracing the new man heroism of guerrilla resistance and embedding
their work in armed struggle.19
1 La! Ya Di-jawl, al-Musawwar, September 11, 1959.
2 Ibid.
3 I thank Nalini Sairsingh and Allison Gordon for their assistance in tracking imagery of
Afro-Asian solidarity produced in the UAR, 195861.
4 For discussion of how Bandung articulated a critical geopolitical entity see Anthony
Gardner and Charles Green, Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global, Third Text 4,
no. 123 (July 2013): 446.
5 See Clare Davies, Arts Writing in 20th-Century Egypt: Methodology, Continuity, and
Change, ARTMargins 2, no. 2 (June 2013): 1942.
6 Ghazi al-Khaldi, Sanna Kamila fi al-Qahira min Rassamayn min al-Aqlim al-Suri, al-Jundi,
March 31, 1959, p. 34. On similar qualities in literary realism see Fredric Jameson, A Note on
Literary Realism in Conclusion, in Matthew Beaumont, ed., Adventures in Realism (London:
Blackwell, 2007), p. 261.
7 I explore this organic mode of nationalist aesthetics in greater detail in my forthcoming
book Being Mobilized, a study of painting and populist politics in Syria and the Arab East,
193067.
8 See Kenza Sefrioui, La revue Souffles, 19661973. Espoirs de rvolution culturelle au
Maroc (Casablanca: ditions du Sirocco, 2012), p. 339.
9 See Rafa Nasiri: 50 Years of Printmaking, ed. Vincenza Russo (Milan: Skira, 2013), p. 25.
10 Ibid.
11 Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq al-Qawmiyya), Delegations file, 4031-103334.
12 Ibid.
13 See Khaldi: 50 Years of Painting, 19502000 (Paris: Union of Plastic Artists/Unesco, 2000),
and Nazeer Nabaa: An Eye on the World An Eye on the Soul (Damascus: Tajalliyat Gallery, 2009).
14 Al-Khaldi, Sanna Kamila fi al-Qahira.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. Burhan Karkutli would go from Spain to Morocco, where he lived for several years,
working as a graphic designer for the Union nationale des tudiants du Maroc, among other
activist groups.
17 On pedagogical attitudes before 1952 see Dina A. Ramadan, Cultivating Taste, Creating
the Modern Subject: Sawt el-Fannan and Art Criticism in 1950s Egypt, MESA Bulletin 42, no.
1/2 (Summer/Winter 2008): 2631, and Patrick Kane, Egyptian Art Institutions and Art Ed-
ucation from 1908 to 1951, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 44, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 4368.
18 The painting is reproduced in Galina Lassikova, Contemporary Painting and Graphic Works
of Arab Countries in the Collection of the Moscow State Museum of Oriental Art: Catalogue
(Moscow, 2007), p. 30.
19 On this subsequent phase see Kristin Ross, New Men, in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: De-
colonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994),
pp. 15596; Anneka Lenssen, The Plasticity of the Syrian Avant-Garde, ARTMargins 2, no. 2
(June 2013): 4370; and Davies, Decolonizing Culture: Third World, Moroccan, and Arab Art
in Souffles/Anfas, 19661972, Essays of the Forum Transregionale Studien (February 2015).
Anneka Lenssen 435
 I
n twentieth-century Chinese art history, the years from 1945
to 1965 were the first two phases of Maos revolutionary mass
art. The third phase, from 1966 to 1976, was the Cultural
Revolution. Although the year 1945 fell under the calendar
of the Republic of China (ROC), ruled by Chiang Kai-Sheks
Kuomintang (KMT) government, it had a dual historical mean-
ing, marking both the end of World War II (and the beginning
of the Cold War) and the beginning of the year full-scale Civil
War (quanmian neizhan or jiefang zhanzheng) between Maos Commu-
nist army and the KMT (194649). Maos army ultimately defeated the
KMT, allies of the United States, and the aftermath of the victory was the
establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949.
From 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976, revolu-
tionary mass art, or Socialist Realism, was the dominant and official
art form. Although this art was highly influenced by Soviet Socialist Re-
alism, it cannot be considered only an import from the Soviets; it also
arose out of Chinas own historical legacy from the late Qing dynasty,
which ended in 1911, and the early ROC period (191249), and specifically
of Revolution in Art, a Chi-
nese intellectual movement
that emerged in the first two
THE HISTORICAL LOGIC OF CHINESE decades of the twentieth
century and was strongly
NATIONALIST REALISM FROM THE 1940s antitraditional and ration-
alist. Mao had never given
TO THE 1960s up his ambition to establish
Chinas nationalistic realism
Gao Minglu as a realism combining rev-
olutionary realism as well as
revolutionary romanticism.1
We can trace the beginning
of this nationalist realism
to 1942, and it peaked dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution.
Maos realism pushed art to
serve people and the masses
Fig. 1. Shi Lu. Beyond the Great Wall. 1959. Ink and color on paper, 91.5132.5 cm.
as he always claimed, but in National Museum of China, Beijing
an extremely popular way.
In the early twentieth century, when many European modernists
considered realism a dead genre, their Chinese counterparts saw it as the
force that could rescue them from literati art (wenren hua), a conserv-
ative style dating back to the tenth century. Literati art required a high
level of technique. Focusing on landscape (shanhui) and birds-flower
(huaniao) painting, it dealt with neither court politics nor social com-
mentary, instead valuing contemplative, meditative self-expression. For
late-Qing reformers such as Kang Youwei, literati art was ridiculous:
How can those who paint just for fun in their spare time capture the
true character of all things on earth? It is totally wrong to regard the lite-
2
rati spirit as the orthodox school of painting.
4. Realisms
The second decade of the century, following the establishment
of the ROC in 1911, saw a series of movements in art and literature first
advocated not by artists and writers but by influential Chinese thinkers
and philosophers such as Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Kang Youwei, Liang
Qichao, and Lu Zheng. In 1918, Chen, a leader of the New Culture Move-
ment and, in 1921, the first chairman of the Chinese Communist Party,
was explicit in his call for a revolution in literature (wenxue geming) and
a revolution in art ( yishu geming).3 The revolutionary change he sought
in art was to abandon the traditional style of ink painting known as Four
Masters (Si Wang) and find a modern Western form suitable to the fu-
ture establishment of a modern Chinese art. The primary demand was
for a Chinese art and literature that would be as rational and modern as
science and would create an art for peoples life ( yishu wei rensheng).
Although this movement was still intrinsically born of an elite
modern culture, it shifted the direction of art from a traditional, culti-
vated art of and for the literati to an art that, although elite, was aimed
at enlightening the masses. Eventually, because of the continuing in-
fluence of Marxism, the dynamic activity of the Association of Left
Wing Writers (zuoyi zuojia
lianmeng) and the Association
of Left Wing Artists (zuoyi
meishujia lianmeng, both es-
tablished in Shanghai in
1930), and the outbreak of
the Second Sino-Japanese
War in 1937, this revolu-
tion in art ( yishu geming)
was transformed into Maos
revolutionary art (geming
de yishu). Further manifested
as making art for the en-
lightenment of the masses
( yishu hua dazhong), it final-
ly became Maos popular
art for and by the masses
(dazhonghua yishu). 4
The humanist con-
cerns of the early 1930s
were further developed by the left-wing art movement, including the
Woodcut Movement and the group known as Street Art (Zouxiang shi-
zi jietou de yishu). Both were based in Shanghai, the former being led by
Lu Xun, one of the most influential modern Chinese writers, and the
latter favoring literature and art, including music, film, and graphics,
that represented the life of the urban working class.5 The proletarian
sympathies of the Woodcut Movement ultimately led these artists to
consider art more a moral instrument than their contemporaries did,
for example a modernist group led by Lin Fengmian, Shanghais Storm
Society, and a group of traditional ink painters including Qi Baishi, Pan
Tianshou, and Chen Shizeng, who viewed their art as a locus of tradition.
Gao Minglu 437
Consequently, the Woodcut Movement and other left-wing artists con-
verted to Maos revolutionary art principles and distinguished them-
selves as a radical avant-garde force. After the Long March (193435),
many artists from this group traveled to Yanan, the headquarters of
the Communist Party. This was when this previously elite avant-garde
turned to Maos proletarian mass art (wuchanjieji dazhong yishu).
This transition was accomplished under Maos 1942 Great
Rectification in Yanan (Yanan zhengfeng yundong), where he gave
a speech, the Speech on Literature and Art at the Symposium in
Yanan (zai yanan wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua; widely known
as the Yanan Talk), that is undoubtedly the most concentrated
and comprehensive expression of his thoughts on art.6 It was in the
Yanan Talk that he first clearly asserted that we are advocates of So-
cialist Realism. Maos proletarian mass art was obviously influenced by
Soviet Socialist Realism, which had been formally established as an ar-
tistic method at the First Congress of Soviet Writers, in Moscow in 1934.
Like Joseph Stalins theory then, the Yanan Talk argued that art should
serve the worker, the peasant, the soldier, and the revolution. But Maos
mass art went farther than Soviet Socialist Realism: in particular, art was
to carry a Chinese nationalistic style (zhongguo qipai) and it was to be
Fig. 2. Quan Shanshi. Heroic and Indomitable. 1961.
Oil on canvas, 233217 cm. National Museum of China, Beijing
popular, was to make the masses happy to hear and see (xiwen lejian).7
Rather than transform the revolutionary masses, art was to be received by
them in this particular popular way; it was the artists themselves who were
to be reeducated by the masses, eventually becoming proletarianized.
The purpose of revolutionary art, then, was not only to change the
point of view on revolutionary reality, the way of thinking about and
438
representing it, but also to convert the artists identities. This was to
be a thorough transformation: Mao said, If you want to merge with
the masses, you have to make up your mind to undergo torturous long-
term temptation and endurance. 8 For him, popularization or mass
style (dazhonghua) meant that intellectuals needed to abandon their
bourgeois visual language and to adopt the language of peasants and
workers. Otherwise they were engaging in mere popularlessness or
small circles (xiaozhonghua). 9
After the Yanan Talk was published in 1942, Maos slogan Art shall
serve the worker, the peasant, and the soldier became a guideline for
artists. From the mid-1940s to 1965, Maos revolutionary mass art went
through two phases. The firstthe phase discussed above, from an elite
avant-garde art influenced by European expressionism, especially the
German woodcut, and manifesting a bourgeois sympathy for the pro-
letariat, to a proletarian revolutionary art embodied by a folk/realistic
style, still mainly in woodcutlasted until the early 1950s. The art was
simple, economical, and made to serve not only the peasants but war
propaganda. The second shift took place between the early 1950s and
the start of the Cultural Revolution. This phase saw a shift from a prop-
agandistic art characterized by folk simplicity to a propagandistic art in
a refined, academic style influenced by the Soviets: in the early 1950s,
Soviet and Chinese artists visited each other often to exchange ideas
and exhibit their work. From 1953 to 1956, twenty-six significant Chinese
artists studied at the Repin Institute of Art in Leningrad, and in 1955 the
Soviet painter Makchmobk.M held a training class in the Chinese
Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which some of Chinas most
promising artists attended during this period.10 The impact of the Soviet
influence was not really felt, however, until the late 1950s, and particular-
ly around 1959, the ten-year anniversary of the founding of PRC.
In the first half of the 1950s, early in the second phase of Maos art,
two phenomenathe New Year Painting Movement (xinnianhua yundong)
and the debates on the reformation of traditional ink paintingdemon-
strated the newly founded nations need for a renewal of nationalist iden-
tity. For a thousand years, the Chinese had enjoyed buying and hang-
ing new year paintings (nianhua) in their homes at the Chinese New
Year. These pictures were mainly colorful woodcuts, showing images
and subjects of good omen. After Maos Yanan Talk they became effec-
tive revolutionary media and were widely produced in the Communist-
controlled Liberation Area ( jiefang qu). After the founding of the PRC,
the Chinese government immediately launched the New Year Painting
Movement to develop this legacy for purposes of national propaganda.
On November 23, 1949, the official newspaper Peoples Daily published a
mandate promoting new year painting. In the early 1950s, the genre was
developed on a large scale to eulogize Mao, the Communist Party, and
the new life through which the working people would become masters
of the country.
Since the early 1950s, artists had grappled with the problem of how
to represent this new life under the Communist party and to integrate
a distinctly Chinese style with Western realism. Jiang Feng and others
4. Realisms
advocated transforming traditional Chinese painting through the in-
tegration of Western techniques of sketching and drawing from life.
Although some Chinese traditional artists opposed this idea, many
did make life drawings, a technique never previously applied to tra-
ditional ink painting. The use of a traditional style of landscape
painting to describe the industrial landscape ( gongye shanshui) also
became fashionable. The works of Li Keran, Fu Baoshi, Shi Lu, and
other artists had far-reaching effects during this innovative era.
In his ink painting Beyond the Great Wall (1954; fig. 1), for instance,
Shi Lu used railroad tracks cutting through the Great Wall, along
with an unseen train, its presence indicated through the presence of
a Mongolian family watching it come, as metaphors for the effects
of industrialization and socialist modernization on the new nation.
The painting also involved another metaphor, one of unification, in
the form of the Mongolian family gazing at the out-of-frame train.
Although the Great Wall was a symbol of the past, when it had blocked
the nomad people beyond it from approaching Han society, it was in
transition to join the new. A parallel approach appears in an early oil
painting by Dong Xiwen, Spring Comes to Tibet (1954), in which a group
of Tibetan women watch the approaching bus connecting Tibetan
and Han people. Like the railroad in Shi Lus painting, the bus was
a symbol of modernization. Meanwhile, regardless of the paintings
political subject matter, its color, composition, and historical topic
all reveal the early-1950s pursuit of an original model for a national-
ist style. Even later, when the Soviet-influenced Socialist Realist style
reached its peak, the art of the early period of the Peoples Republic of
China retained a strong tendency toward nationalism.
In fact the greatest influence on the Chinese artists of the 1950s
was not Soviet Socialist Realism but the art of the nineteenth-century
Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), notably Ilya Repin and Vasili Surikov. Chi-
nese artists of course learned of the school through the Soviets, who had
begun to advocate for it in the early 1930s. There were several reasons
why these Russian painters affected the Chinese so deeply. First, most
of the Peredvizhniki painters came from the lower class, and so were in-
clined to feel that art should serve the needs of the people and should
align itself with their emotions and sentiments. Second, these painters
paid attention to national traditions in their choices of both artistic lan-
guage and topic. Third, they were essentially romantic. Chinese artists
long misunderstood them as critical realists, but the critical realists were
really the previous generation of Russian artists, who had exposed the
dark side of society and held an elite view of social inequality. The Wan-
derers instead expressed their own feelings in their paintings, affirming
the masses hopes for the future by depicting their daily lives. Fourth,
Chinese artists admired and emulated the skillful academic tech-
niques of the Peredvizhniki.11 Before this time in China, artists such as Xu
Beihong, Wu Zuoren, and others had studied in France and been ex-
posed to European academic art, but they were few in number and had
no major influence during this period. Most Chinese artists had no
opportunity to view European academicism directly, they could learn
Gao Minglu
some aspects of it from the Peredvizhniki. This accumulation of aca-
demic skills, combined with a romantic approach, paved the way for the
advancement and refinement of Maoist art in the late 1950s and the first
half of the 1960s.
In the burst of nationalism at the time of the Great Leap Forward,
in 1958, Mao replaced the slogan Socialist Realism with Combining
revolutionary realism with revolutionary romanticism. This had two
implications. First, it reflected Maos nationalist consciousness and
his desire to distinguish China from the Soviet Union. This tendency
had manifested previously; in 1956, for example, Lu Dingyi, Maos
Fig. 3. Sun Zixi. In Front of Tiananmen Gate. 1964.
Oil on canvas, 153294 cm. National Museum of China, Beijing
head of propaganda, had stressed an opposition to national nihilism
and wholesale Westernization, terms used in the 1950s to warn artists
not to follow the Soviet example unquestioningly.12 Second, it reflected
Maos approach to proletarian art, more romantic and utopian than the
art of any other national ideology.
It is clear that Maos ultimate model of art combined a nationalist
style with a peasants distaste for elite expression and academicism.
From the late 1950s until 1966, however, art practice seemed orient-
ed against Maos ideas, especially after the political changes incurred
when he resigned as national chairman and was replaced by Liu Shaoqi,
in 1959. The change was a result of the failure of Maos Great Leap
Forward policy the previous year. In comparison with Maos radical
revolutionary sentiment, Liu took a more realistic, constructive, and
professional approach to national affairs. Under his leadership, art
moved toward a more academic socialist model.
A number of the finest Maoist popular artworks created in this
style appeared between 1958 and 1964, after several years of Soviet-
ization. These pictures used academic realist techniques to depict
romantic and symbolic themes. Works portraying models of heroism,
for example, include Zhan Jianjuns Five Warriors on Langya Mountain
(1959) and Quan Shanshis Heroic and Indomitable (1961; fig. 2). These
oil paintings, by artists who had trained either in the Soviet Union or
under Soviet artists in the 1950s, produced a number of what I call
academic Socialist Realist works (xueyuan shehuizhuyi xianshizhuyi).
Sun Zixis painting In Front of Tiananmen Gate (1964; fig. 3) is another
439
such piece. The large clay sculpture Rental Collection Yard (1965; fig. 4),
too, made by a team of sculptors at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts,
highlighted conflicts in the class-struggle drama but was cast with
academic realistic techniques that had never been achieved before.
Works with a monumental symbolic significance were gradually
replacing plotted storylines. Their styles are quite different from the
simple narration of Yanan woodcuts and the works sometimes called
tu youhua (folk oil paintings) produced in the early 1950s by artists
such as Dong Xiwen. The folk oils continued to be made, however, often
depicting the happy lives of the people and usually focusing on peas-
ant topics.
Fig. 4. Ye Yushan and sculptors from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts.
Rental Collection Yard (detail). 1965. Clay. Liu's Manor Museum, Dayi County
In 1963, a movement to rectify literature and art began and
seemed to interrupt this peak of aestheticized Socialist Realism. In
terms of cultural ideology, this reflected the final confrontation between
the concepts of Maoist mass art and 1930s left-wing art and literature.
Within the previous decade, Mao had launched several political and liter-
ary rectification movements to criticize and remove certain intellectuals,
including well-known representatives of the 1930s left wing. They were
punished because, despite their efforts at accommodation, they could not
abandon the idea of the autonomy of art, and the creation of art according
to superior professional standards, in contradiction of Maos theory
that art should serve as a tool reflecting the thoughts of the masses.
440
Extremely dissatisfied, Mao finally launched the Cultural Revo-
lution against the capitalist headquarters (zichanjieji silingbu) that he
alleged Liu represented within the Party. The goal was to liquidate sev-
enteen years (pipan shiqinian), the years from 1949 to 1966. Mao also
negated the direction of the Cultural Ministry by giving it a new name,
Ministry of bel-esprit and beauty (Caizi jiaren bu). For more than twen-
ty years, from the 1940s to the 60s, he had undertaken a campaign of
rectification to reeducate the leftists and early avant-gardists, but it end-
ed in frustration and disappointment. In 1966, he finally abandoned the
avant-garde artists of the time by launching the proletarian Cultural
Revolution.
Meanwhile, on the global level, Maos extreme nationalism dur-
ing the Sovietization period to a certain degree planted an antagonism
against the older Soviet brother, which grew until the early 1960s, the
lead-up to the Cultural Revolution, when the two nations cordial re-
lationship ended. Finally, during the period of the Cultural Revolution
(196676), the Red Guard launched a violent attack on Soviet-influenced
academic Socialist Realism. It is the art of the Cultural Revolution, in
particular Red Guard art, that defines the uniqueness of Maos art, which
can be considered a perfect synthesis of revolutionary and mass art.
At this point Chinese art history returned to the original thesis
of the revolutionary masses or Red pop from the Yanan Talk. The
difference was that the proletarian masses were no longer the objects
served by art; instead they became the masters of art. Workers and peas-
ants could be artists, as exemplified by Luda and Yangquans workers art
and the peasants pictures of Huxian county. In giving the lower classes
the right not only to appreciate art but also to maintain their own dis-
course in the creation and interpretation of art, Mao rejected and under-
mined all modernist and elite socialist theories of popular culture.
4. Realisms
Author's Note: Parts of this essay previously appeared in my book Total Modernity and the
Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011).
1 In his talk at the Second Conference of the Eighth National Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party, in 1958, Mao Zedong said, The methodology of our proletarian literature
and art is the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism. This princi-
ple was later officially conveyed through leading members of the Chinese Writers Association,
such as Zhou Yang. See Mao Zedong Sixiang Dacidian (Shanghai: Shanghai Dictionary Press,
1993), p. 804.
2 Kang Youwei, Travels in Eleven European Countries, quoted in Lawrence Wu, Kang You-
wei and the Westernisation of Modern Chinese Art, Orientations, March 1990, pp. 4748.
3 Chen Duxiu, Meishu geming, in Xinqingnian 6, no. 1 (January 1918): 8586.
4 See Gao Minglu, Lun Mao Zedong de dazhongyishu moshi, Ershiyi shiji (Hong Kong
Chinese University) no. 20 (December 1993): 6173.
5 For more on the Woodcut Movement see Shirley Sun, Lu Xun and the Chinese Woodcut
Movement, 19291935, PhD diss., Stanford University, 1974, and Tang Xiaobing, Origins of
the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008).
6 Mao Zedong, Zai yanan wenyi zuotanhui shangde jianghua (Talks on the Yanan forum on
literature and art), in Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong Xuanji) (Beijing: Peoples
Press, 1967), 4:80435. Available in Eng. trans. online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/
archive/mao/selected-works/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm (accessed June 2016). The speech
has two parts: an introduction, given on May 2, 1945, in Yanan, and a conclusion on May 23.
7 Ibid. Mao first mentioned xiwen lejian in 1938, after he watched a Shanxi opera (qin-
qiang) with some villagers. See Ai Sike, Yanan wenyi yundong jisheng (Beijing: Culture and
Art Press, 1987), pp. 7778.
8 Mao, Speech on Literature and Art at the Symposium in Yanan, in Selected Works of Mao
Zedong (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 3:73.
9 Mao, Oppose Stereotyped Party Writing (Fandui dangbagu, February 8, 1942), Selected
Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Peoples Press, 1967), 3:798. Also in English version Se-
lected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, 3:63, where dazhonghua is translated as mass style and
xiaozhonghua as small circles.
10 Of the twenty-six artists, Qian Shaowu, Li Tianxiang, Chen Yongjiang, and Chen Zunsan
went in 1953; Xiao Feng, Lin Gang, Quan Shanshi, Qi Muer, and Zhou Zheng in 1954; Deng
Shu, Guo Shaogang, Wang Baokang, Ji Xiaoqiu, Ma Yuanhong, Zhou Benyi, Shao Da Zhen, Xi
Jingzhi, Chen Peng, and Luo Gongliu in 1955; and Zhang Huaqing, Xu Minghua, Feng Zhen,
Li Jun, Dong Zuyi, Tan Yongtai, and Wu Biduan in 1956. Xiao Feng, interview with the author,
2008. Xiao was the previous president of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.
11 On the Peredvizhniki see Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), pp. 7697. My argument here is also inspired by Marian Mazzone,
Chinas Nationalization of Oil Painting in the 1950s: Searching Beyond the Soviet Paradigm,
graduate seminar paper, History of Art 976 (Modern Chinese Art), Ohio State University, 1991.
12 Lu Dingyi, Baihua qifang, baijia zhengming, Peoples Daily, June 13, 1956.
Gao Minglu 441

REALISM AS INTERNATIONAL STYLE
Nikolas Drosos and Romy Golan
4. Realisms
V
asiliy Yakovlevs Portrait of Georgy Zhukov
(1946; plate 172) and Andrzej Wrblewskis
Rozstrzelanie z Gestapowcem (Executed Man,
Execution with a Gestapo Man, 1949; plate 10)
represent the split aftermath of the war. The Soviet
marshal is depicted on horseback against the ru-
ins of conquered Berlin, replete with crushed Nazi
emblems and an apocalyptic sky, in an infinite
quotation of equestrian portraits, from Jacques-Louis David back to the
Romans. Against this public display of triumph, Wrblewskis private
picture is a flashback to 1939, when, as a boy in Wilno, Poland (today
Vilnius, Lithuania), the artist had his life turned upside down by a double
invasionfirst by the Nazis, then by the Soviet army, within one month.
The Nazis summary executions of civilians gave way to more violence
when the country was soon liberated by the Red Army. Wrblewski
shows a young man the upper half of whose body is capsized and trapped
inside the lower half, a cadavre exquis of Polands wounded body politic.
Between him and the viewer is a Nazi executioner in jodhpurs, seen from
the back. Rozstrzelanie z Gestapowcem ghosts one brand of realismone
strangely akin to Mag rittes realist Surrealisminside another one:
Soviet Socialist Realism as it was being solidified and exported to the
Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. There had in fact been a previ-
ous ghosting: a few months earlier, Wrblewski had painted an abstract
image on the recto of the canvas.1
In the Soviet Union, the first years after the war were marked by
the final triumph of Socialist Realism. Known as zhdanovshchina after its
architect, Andrei Zhdanov, a prominent member of the Politburo and
founder of Cominform (the organization created in 1947 to coordinate
among international Communist parties), this was the culmination of
a process formally begun in 1934 at the First Congress of Soviet Writers,
in which Zhdanov had been a protagonist. Contrasted with naturalism,
which was seen as a disinterested and therefore ideologically suspect
form of mimesis, Socialist Realism in essence involved an affirmative
aesthetic judgment. It involved clearly defined criteria codified by sever-
al, often interchangeable and overlapping terms: narodnost, for example,
a people-ness that conveyed nationally and ethnically specific forms
as well as popular artistic sensibilities. Others were typichnost (the
focus on typical situations in order to supersede the depiction of super-
ficial phenomena and explore essential truths) and ideinost (ideologi-
cal content), or more specifically klassovost (class consciousness). Most
consequential, even among fellow travelers beyond the Iron Curtain,
was partiinost (party-mindedness), a key Leninist principle that stipu-
lated partisanship as an antidote to the objectivity that the bourgeoisie
claimed to employ to mask its interests. If art was to be realist, it had
to take a firm political stance. Dutifully following such prescriptions,
Dmitrii Mochalskiis Vozvrashchenie z demonstratsii (Oni videli Stalina) (Re-
turn from the Demonstration [Theyve Seen Stalin], 1949; fig. 1) manages
to transform even a saccharine genre painting of cheerful children into a
clear political statement.
Nikolas Drosos und Romy Golan
Fyodor Shurpins Ytro nashei Rodiny (Morning of our Motherland,
194648; plate 173) combines the traditional academic genres of landscape
and portraiture into an ideologically unequivocal image. The war is over
and an aged Joseph Stalin has removed his khaki military overcoat and
contemplates the vastness of the Soviet empire. Punctuated by transmis-
sion towers, the landscape alludes to Lenins famous dictum that Com-
munism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.
The same trope of vastness appears in Young America (1950; plate 185), by
Andrew Wyeth, who stated in an interview that it represents the vast-
ness of America and American history.2 The Soviets and their allies
did not own realism; Wyeths brand, although increasingly marginal-
ized by the triumph of abstraction at the time, had a native pedigree in
the American Regionalist school of the 1930s, whose populism can be
seen as a home-bred narodnost. Shurpins celebration of electrification,
though, contrasts sharply with Wyeths pastoral mood. The ubiquitous
cars on the new American highways are banished from Wyeths paint-
ing in favor of a singular bike, whereas the Soviet landscape exaggerates
Fig. 1. Dimitri Mochalski. Vozvrashchenie z demonstratsii (Oni videli Stalina)
(Return from the demonstration [Theyve seen Stalin]). 1949.
Oil on canvas, 69 x 131 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
a mechanization that was actually still lagging. Belonging to parallel
universes, these paintings share an affirmative, triumphant approach to
reality, fittingly for the superpowers, arguably the only ones to emerge
truly victorious from the war.
CULTURE WARRIORS AND
FELLOW TRAVELERS
The death of Zhdanov, in 1948, fell in the same timeframe as the estab-
lishment of the peoples republics of Eastern Europe in East Germany,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, as
well as of the Peoples Republic of China. This initiated a Soviet cul-
tural rayonnement and the exportation of a mature, highly crystallized
Socialist Realism to this newly formed bloc. A spectacular case of tech-
nical transfer took place when the quintessentially Western medium of
443
oil painting was eagerly adopted by Maos party officials. As they well PAINTINGS IN CIRCULATION Rivera, Jos Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the tres of Socialist Realism and an increased circulation of Soviet and Eastern
understood, no medium could better deliver both the pictorial evi- grandes of Mexican muralism. With works like Siqueiross Madre camp- European art in the West. In the 1956 Biennale, the Soviet Pavilion includ-
dentiary detail necessary for what Roland Barthes called the reality Until the mid-1950s, Soviet paintings barely circulated outside the esina (Peasant Mother, 1929), El Sollozo (The Sob, 1939), and Cain en los ed many iconic works, such as Semyon Chuikovs Doch Sovetskoi Kirgizii
effect and the aura necessary to sanction a rewriting of Chinas his- Communist bloc, leading Andr Breton to ask in 1952, Why is contem- Estados Unidos (Cain in the United States, 1947; plate 164), politically en- (Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia, 1948). An emblem of Socialist Realisms
3
tory. Konstantin Maksimovs Warrior of the Chinese Revolution (1955) is a porary Russian painting being hidden from us?6 Yet this was also a time gaged realism gained center stage. As Rivera boasted back home, It is expansion into the various Soviet republics, as well as of the imperative
token of this artistic exchange. Maksimov was a respected Soviet acad- of increasing traffic of realist paintings across the Iron Curtain. In a one- in an important victory over art purism in a place that had been until for national character in art, the painting showed a Central Asian girl
9
emician whom the Chinese government beckoned to teach the picto- way pilgrimage that aimed at Moscow but did not reach it before the end of now the shrine of this tendency. Emboldened by their success, Gut- on her way to school. As such, and fittingly exhibited in the most inter-
rial formulas of Socialist Realism in their country. Since he assumed the decade, Western Communist painters exhibited systematically in the tusos envoi to the following, 1952 Biennale was a huge history painting, national of art exhibitions, it symbolized both the global aspirations of
an active role in the spread of Socialist Realism beyond Soviet borders, Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe.7 This is how paintings from La battaglia di Ponte dellAmmiraglio (The battle of Ponte Ammiraglio, the Soviet system and its purported respect for cultural difference. En-
his painting can be read as the self-portrait of an artist enlisted in the Andr Fougerons cycle Pays des mines, his 1951 tribute to the striking coal 195152) depicting scores of red-shirted Garibaldini disembarking in visioned as a method adaptable to all cultures, Socialist Realism was
cultural wars of the time. miners of northeast France, are to be found today in collections in Olo- Parlermo in 1860 to spearhead thus presented as always al-
While China aimed to mouc, Warsaw, and Bucha- the Italian Risorgimento.10 ready global. The Pavilions
be more Zhdanovist than rest (fig. 2). Similarly, Renato Stalins death in the curator, German Nedoshivin,
the Zhdanovists, in France Guttusos marching peas- spring of 1953 ushered in a remarked, We are inclined to
and Italy, the two Western ants in Occupazione delle terre moment of confusion. The consider our art as an initial
nations with the largest incolte in Sicilia (Occupation negative attitudes toward stage on a long road turned
Communist parties, real- of Uncultivated Land in abstraction in Stalins time toward the future. Now, in
ism was one option among Sicily, 194950), a denun- take on a tone of quasi-panic many countries, art passion-
many, and the term served ciation of the perennially in Guttusos Boogie-Woogie ately seeks to return to real-
more as a marker of polit- impoverished condition of (1953; plate 181), his con- ism. Soviet Art also follows
ical engagement than as a Italys South, ended up in tribution to the 1954 this road.12 Lo and behold,
strict stylistic category. If the Akademie der Knste Biennale. It depicts a group of the Soviets had now become
the Soviets purged all signs in East Berlin. 8 teenagers dancing frenetical- fellow travelers! Yet arguably
of formalism, holding Against these ideolog- ly in front of Piet Mondrians they had arrived in Venice too
the horizon of reference to ical alignments, the Polish Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942 late, at the end of the political
sanctioned nineteenth-cen- artist Wojciech Fangors 43), its neoplasticist language system that had sustained
tury precursors such as Postaci (Figures, 1950; plate of right angles and primary Socialist Realism, and against
Ilya Repin, the French and 178) occupies a more ambig- colors mimicked by their a growing network of realist
the Italians were open to a uous territory. Unlike Sovi- garishly colored, checkered works in which Siqueiros and
modicum of stylization, Fig. 2. Andr Fougeron. Terres cruelles from Pays des mines series. 1951. et counterparts that never clothes. Guttusos visual pun Guttuso were central nodes,
Oil on canvas, 170250 cm. Muzeum umen Olomouc
namely the Picasso-isms (Olomouc Museum of Art) quite depict the capitalist demotes one of Mondrians Fig. 3. Fernand Lger. Les Constructeurs. 1951.
overshadowing their Soviet
inherited from the Spanish other, this painting inter- best-known works to the sta- Oil on canvas, 160200 cm. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow comrades.
artists immensely influential Guernica (1937). Operating within capi- nalizes the binary logic of the Cold War, playing out the East/West tus of disco decoration. Iron- While the fortunes of a
talist societies, Western Communist artists swapped the affirmative confrontation both in clothing and in different pictorial modes of re- ically, in Venice it hung in the Giardinis Central Pavilion, just a few steps global abstraction not necessarily aligned with the United States is now
Soviet model for a critical stance toward life in the West, focusing on alism: the affirmative Soviet and the critical and in this case almost from the American Pavilion, which that year was acquired by New Yorks well documented, that of a global realism independent of Moscows com-
4
scenes of class struggle. Boris Taslitzkys Riposte, dating from 1951 and parodic Western. The result is a tongue-in-cheek picture that strik- Museum of Modern Art, the proud owner of Mondrians painting. (The mand remains elusive. A case in point is the Egyptian artist Hamed
shown at the Paris Salon dAutomne the same year, depicts a riot in 1949 ingly breaks with orthodox realism, staging an unlikely encounter Museum would retain ownership of the Pavilion until 1986.) And yet, in a Owais, who exhibited in Venice in 1952, the year of Gamal Abdel Nassers
when police unleashed dogs on dock workers near Marseille who had between a proletarian couple and a smartly dressed Western wom- curious mirror effect, a similar jousting between realism and abstraction Egyptian Revolution. Owaiss encounter with left-wing artists such as
refused to load arms on ships bound for Frances neocolonial war in an. The couple are construction workers standing in front of a mon- unfolded in the American Pavilion itself that year, with the odd curatorial Guttuso and the Mexican muralists had taken place in Venice earlier
Indochina (plate 182). umental building typical of Stalinist Poland; she wears a little sum- pairing of the Social Realist Ben Shahn with the Abstract Expressionist on, and was formative for his socially engaged realism, already influ-
The United States had its own contingent of fellow travelers. As mer dress decorated with words such as Wall Street, London, and Willem de Kooning.11 enced by Egypts Group of Modern Art.13 His Nasser and the Nationaliza-
Alice Neel, considered by many a pioneer of Socialist Realism in Amer- Coca-Cola, as well as the spectacular sunglasses made famous by Meanwhile the Soviet Pavilion stood empty, as it had been since tion of the Canal (1960; plate 191) depicts a foundational moment for the
ican painting, declared in 1951, I am against abstract and non-objec- Peggy Guggenheim, who emerged as the doyenne of American and 1934, the year Socialist Realism was adopted as the Soviet Unions modern Egyptian state, and one that led to the Suez Crisis of 1956,
tive art because such art shows a hatred of human beings. East Harlem European abstraction at the 1948 Venice Biennale. official style. Soviet art would not return to the Biennale until 1956, with a setback for France and Britain in the Middle East but a success for
is like a battlefield of humanism, and I am on the side of the people The year 1950, when Postaci was painted, was in fact the only year an ambitious retrospective of about 160 works from three generations the Soviet Union and its relationship with Egypt. Exalting and affirm-
here, and they inspire my paintings. 5 The dandyish pose struck by the during the postwar period when Poland did not participate in the of artists. A few months earlier, Nikita Khrushchevs Secret Speech of ative in the Soviet mode and probably based on a photograph, the
young Georgie Arce in his portrait by Neel is but a thin veneer over the Biennale. It was also the year of a backlash against the victory of ab- February 25 had denounced Stalin and his crimes in a closed-door session painting is nonetheless executed in the faux-naf manner of Riveras
violent life of teenagers of color in Spanish Harlem. straction at the previous Biennale: what attracted critics attention this of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The murals. Owaiss work is an example of an increasingly global realist
time was the Mexican Pavilion, which featured realist works by Diego ensuing Khruschev Thaw brought a loosening of the strict formulas mode, this time committed to a nationalist and anticolonial cause.

444 4. Realisms Nikolas Drosos und Romy Golan 445

With decolonization and the emergence of new states, realisms twin
functions of affirmation and critique operated in an increasing variety
of political contexts.
The long pictorial tradition of a victimized yet heroic peasantry
continued to empower artists to voice a strong Jaccuse! against re-
gimes of political domination. The Portuguese artist Jlio Pomar thus
painted the monumental female rice-pickers in Etude para Ciclo do Arroz II
(Study for Rice Cycle II, 1953; plate 183) under the dictatorship of Antnio
Salazar, while Ismail Shammouts scenes of fleeing peasants in Beginning
of the Tragedy and A Sip of Water, also of 1953, voiced the calamity of the
unfulfilled national aspirations of the Palestinians (plates 286, 287).14
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Chuikovs prominent acknowledgment of the Kirghiz girls race is sig-
nificant within the Cold War context. In the early 1950s, Soviet prop-
aganda often contrasted the rampant racial segregation in the United
States with the equality affordedin theory, at leastto all the races
and nationalities of the Soviet Union.15 In both cases access to education
was crucial. In his History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas (1955;
plate 176) John Biggers adapts the idioms of Rivera and Thomas Hart
Benton, which he had encountered while studying at the Hampton
Institute, Virginia, in the 1940s, to produce a mural on the history of the
first black school in the area.16 Replete with portraits of contributors to the
schools history, Biggerss realism is a thoroughly engaged one. This particu-
lar work was made a year after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision
Brown v. Board of Education, a key moment in the civil rights movement.
Almost a decade later, school desegregation in the South was still
lagging. Norman Rockwell, hitherto known for saccharine illustrations
of wholesome American life, faced the problem head-on in his first as-
signment for Look magazine, producing a foldout commemorating the
tenth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The Problem We All
Live With (1964) depicts Ruby Bridges, the first African American girl
to be integrated into a white school in New Orleans, escorted there by
U.S. marshals for her protection. Heavily reliant on John Steinbecks
detailed description of the incident in his Travels with Charlie (1962),
Rockwells meticulously rendered painting is a transcription of a tex-
tual realism into a pictorial one.17
DIVERGENT REALISMS
In the early 1960s the internal reforms of the Soviet system during the
Thaw eventually led to the revision of high Socialist Realism into a
new form of painting, alternatively called severe or contemporary
style. 18 While still fitting the established prescriptions for realism,
446 4. Realisms
works such as Viktor Popkovs Stroiteli Bratskoy GES (The Builders of
Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station, 1960; plate 175) and Tahir Salahovs
Remontniki (Maintenance Workers, 1961) rejected the unfettered op-
timism of their predecessors in favor of a more somber, introverted
reflection on labor. Standing on the construction site of a hydroelectric
power station in Irkutsk or the oil rocks of Baku in Azerbaijan, these
workers toiling on the periphery of the Soviet Empire come closer to
non-Soviet forms of realism in other media, such as the depictions
of the working class in Italian neorealist cinema during the preced-
ing decades. Arbeitpause (Break, 1959; plate 177), by the East German
Willi Sitte, further updates the representation of labor by shifting the
focus to rest and leisure. His construction worker sits on scaffolding high
in the sky, relaxed, legs crossed, a cigarette between his fingers, absorbed
in a book. The lightheartedness of this painting may have owed a debt
to Fernand Lgers series Les Constructeurs (Construction Workers; fig. 3),
which had circulated east of the Iron Curtain in the previous years.19
Chinese Communism, on the other hand, remained entrenched,
resistant to the pressures of de-Stalinization. Quan Shanshis Unyielding
Heroism (1961), painted at the apex of the Sino-Soviet split, embodies
China standing its ground. Shanshi had studied at the Repin Institute of
Art in Leningrad. This work, executed in the painterly late Socialist Real-
ist style, is one of the most famous among those selected by the party for
display in the National Museum of China. In Jia Youfus Marching across
the Snow-Covered Mount Minshan (1965; plate 188) a Socialist Realist image
of Mao leading his Long March is superimposed on a monochromat-
ic mountain landscape, signaling a new direction in the 1960s, that of
a fusion of traditional and Western techniques. While the medium and
technique are Western, the flat bright colors and the graphic ornamental
pattern of the mountain peaks aim to evoke Chinese New Year prints.
BEYOND THE FRAME
When Siqueiros completed De Porfirismo a la Revolucin (From the Dicta-
torship of Porfirio Daz to the Revolution, 195765; plate 186), his vast, un-
dulating mural for the Castillo de Chapultepec in Mexico City, the mural
had already been a native format for decades. Siqueiros heightened the
drama by compressing his multifigure composition around a specific, ex-
plosive historical event. The year is 1906, when Mexican workers went on
strike to demand equal pay with American miners working alongside them
at the Canadea Consolidated copper mines, a scene that typifies the ex-
ploitation of Mexicos natural resources by foreign powers during the Daz
regime.20 Glorifying the anti-imperialism of the early years of the Mexican
Revolution at a time of continuing neocolonial American involvement in
Latin America, Siqueiross mural has implications both specific and glob-
al. Simultaneously a style, a method, and a political stance, realism always
carried an intrinsic mandate: to point to social and geopolitical realities be-
yond the frame. Its global ambition was unmatched in the postwar period.
Nikolas Drosos und Romy Golan
1 See ric de Chassey and Marta Dziewanska, eds., Andrzej Wrblewski: Recto/Verso
(Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2015).
2 Andrew Wyeth, quoted in American Realist, Time 58, no. 3 (July 16, 1951): 72, 75, cited
in Francine Weiss, Kindred Spirits: Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth, in David Cateforis, ed.,
Rethinking Andrew Wyeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 145.
3 See Chang-Tai Hung, Oil Paintings and Politics: Weaving a Heroic Tale of the Chinese
Communist Revolution, Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (October 2007):
783814, and Maos New World: Political Culture in the Early Peoples Republic (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2011).
4 See Jeannine Verds Leroux, Lart de parti. Le parti communiste franais et ses peintres
194754, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 28 (June 1979): 3355, Sarah Wilson,
La Beaut Rvolutionnaire? Ralisme Socialiste and French Painting 19351954, Oxford Art
Journal 3, no. 2 (October 1980): 6169, Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), and Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo. La
politica culturale artistica del PCI dal 1944 al 1956 (Milan: Mazzotta, 1973).
5 Alice Neel, quoted in Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the
Communist Movement, 19261956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 248.
6 Andr Breton, Pourquoi nous cache-t-on la peinture russe contemporaine? Arts, January
11, 1952.
7 See Antoine Baudin, Why is Soviet Painting Hidden From Us?: Zhdanov Art and Its In-
ternational Relations and Fallout, 194753, in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds.,
Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 22756.
8 See Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, How the West Corroborated Socialist Realism in the
East: Fougeron, Taslitzky, and Picasso in Warsaw, Biuletyn Historii sztuki 65, no. 2 (2003):
30329, and Remapping Socialist Realism: Renato Guttuso in Poland, in Jrme Bazin, Pas-
cal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Com-
munist Europe (19451989) (Budapest: Central University Press, 2016), pp. 13950.
9 Diego Rivera, quoted in El Nacional, June 18, 1950, and quoted here from Philip Stein,
Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), p. 187.
10 See John Berger, A Socialist Realist Painting at the Biennale, The Burlington Magazine 94,
no. 595 (October 1952): 294, 29697.
11 Francis K. Pohl, An American in Venice: Ben Shahn and the United States Foreign Policy
at the 1954 Venice Biennale or Portrait of the Artist as American Liberal, Art History 4, no. 1
(March 1981): 80113.
12 German A. Nedoshivin, U.R.S.S., in XXVIII Biennale di Venezia (Venice: Alfieri Editore,
1956), pp. 5089.
13 See Liliane Karnouk, Contemporary Egyptian Art (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995).
14 See Jlio Pomar, Alexandre Pomar, and Natala Vital, Jlio Pomar. Catalogue raisonn (Paris:
Diffrence, 2001), and Gannit Ankori, Palestinian Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
15 In response to this pressure, the U.S. Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Fair contained an
exhibit on civil rights Unfinished Business. See Michael L. Krenn, Unfinished Business: Segrega-
tion and U.S. Diplomacy at the 1958 Worlds Fair, Diplomatic History 20, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 591612.
16 See Ollie Jensen Theisen, Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers (Denton:
University of North Texas Press, 2010).
17 See Karal Ann Marling, Norman Rockwell (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), and Maureen
Hart Hennessey and Anne Knutson, eds., Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999).
18 See Matthew Bown and Matteo Lafranconi, eds., Socialist Realisms: Soviet Painting 1920
1970 (Milan: Skira, 2012).
19 See Antoine Baudin, Les Constructeurs de Fernand Lger. De la Place Smolensk la
Valle de la Chevreuse, ou quelques tribulations dun chantier pictural, Matires no. 2 (1998):
6875, and Jrme Bazin, Le ralisme socialiste et ses modles internationaux, Vingtime
sicle. Revue dhistoire 109 (JanuaryMarch 2011): 7387. A prominent painting in the series
was donated to the Soviet Union in 1969 by Lgers widow, Nadia Khodasevich, and is now in
the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
20 See Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums,
and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
447
 REALISMS
Plates

John Biggers Vasiliy Yakovlev Hamed Owais Willi Sitte

Beauford Delaney Jia Youfu Jlio Pomar Boris Taslitzky
Inji Efflatoun Gelij Korschew Viktor Popkov Chua Mia Tee
Wojciech Fangor Li Xiushi Fjodor Schurpin Andrew Wyeth
Renato Guttuso Alice Neel David Alfaro Siqueiros
 173

172

Vasiliy Yakovlev Fyodor Shurpin

Portrait of Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of the Soviet Union The Morning of our Motherland
1946 1948
oil on canvas oil on canvas
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

451
174

175

Geliy Korzhev Viktor Popkov

Raising the Banner The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Power Station
1957-60 1960
oil on canvas oil on canvas
The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

453
176

John Biggers
The History of Negro Education in Morris County, Texas
1955
cont crayon and gouache on paper
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York

455
 178

Willi Sitte Wojciech Fangor

Arbeitspause (Break) Postaci (Figures)
1959 1950
oil on hardboard oil on canvas
Museum der bildenden Knste Leipzig Museum Sztuki, odz

177

457
179

180

Beauford Delaney Alice Neel

Portrait of James Baldwin Georgie Arce
1945 1953
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art The Estate of Alice Neel, New York

459
 Renato Guttuso
Boogie-Woogie
1953
oil on canvas
Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto

181

461
Boris Taslitzky
Riposte
1951
oil paint on canvas
TATE, London

182

463
183

185

184

Jlio Pomar Jlio Pomar Andrew Wyeth

tude para Ciclo do Arroz II (Study for Rice Cycle II) Resistncia (Resistance) Young America
1953 1945 1950
oil on Masonite oil on Masonite egg tempera on gessoed board (Renaissance Panel)
Private Collection, Lisbon Cmara Municipal de Lisboa/Museu de Lisboa, Lisbon Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

465
 187

186

David Alfaro Siqueiros

From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution
Inji Efflatoun
- The People in Arms (detail)
195765 Portrait of a Man
mural 1958
Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional oil on canvas
de Antropologa e Historiar, Mexico City Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

467
188

Jia Youfu
Marching Across the Snow-Covered Mount Minshan
1965
ink and color on paper
CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

469
189

Li Xiushi
Morning
1961
oil on canvas
CAFA Art Museum, Beijing

471
 191
190

Hamed Owais
Chua Mia Tee Al Zaim w Ta'mim Al Canal
Epic Poem of Malaya (Nasser and the Nationalisation of the Canal)
1955 1957
oil on canvas oil on canvas
National Gallery Singapore QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

473
Section Introduction
Pedro Erber
Andrea Giunta
Mari Carmen Ramirez
Plates

5
CONCRETE VISIONS
 W
hile the abstract style that dominated the postwar interna-
tional world was primarily materialist and gestural, prewar
geometric abstraction did persist, albeit with an impetus
quite distinct from that of European prewar artists. In South
America, Neoconcrete art united the vitalism of Joaqun Torres Garca with
European modernism and became an entirely independent phenomenon.
Modernist forms were adopted early on, in parallel to a nationalist develop-
mentalism that did not simply stand against Western capitalism but figured
in competition with it. Concrete art in Latin Americaby the Mad group,
for examplewas quickly followed by Neoconcretism, its forms apparently
similar but quite different in spirit. As Lygia Clark said, We use the term neo-
concrete to differentiate ourselves from those committed to nonfigurative
CONCRETE VISIONS geometric art and particularly the kind of concrete art that is influenced by
a dangerously acute rationalism none of which offers a rationale for the
expressive potential we feel art contains. Instead, South American Neo-
concrete art was imbued with an antirational vitalism, made socially spe-
cific, physically participatory, and psychologically liberating. In this sense, it
rhymes with the nonprogrammatic, everyday formalism of artists around
the world whose geometric art eschewed the rationalism and, still more
broadly, the authority and dogmatism of earlier avant-garde movements.

Introduction 477
 L
ygia Papes Livro da criao (Book of creation, 195960)
is a set of fifteen three-dimensional geometric compo-
sitions, made in gouache on cardboard, intended to be
handled and interacted with by viewers, and entirely
without words. It can at first be hard to think of each
of the individual compositions as pages of a book. If
anything it may be the works titleand perhaps some
knowledge of Papes creative trajectory and aesthetic af-
filiationsthat first suggest to the viewer its identity as a (very special) kind
of artists book and its place within the context of the experimental poetry
practiced by members of the Rio de Janeirobased Neoconcrete group.
In its absence of words and letters, Livro da criao is not alone
among book works of Papes such as Livro da arquitetura (Book of
OUT OF WORDS: THE SPACETIME
OF CONCRETE POETRY
Pedro Erber
Fig. 1. Lygia Pape. Livro do tempo (Book of Time). 196163.
Tempera and acrylic on wood, 365 parts, 16163 cm (each). Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
Architecture, 195960; plate 240) and the monumental Livro do tempo
(Book of Time, 196165; fig. 1), in which she stretched the concept of
the book even further by attaching its 365 compositions to the wall,
eliminating the interactive aspect of the previous pieces. Indeed,
some of the most radical poetic experiments of the postwar years in
Brazil and beyond lack verbal language. In 1964, working with photo-
graphs cut from printed media, the So Paulobased concrete poet
Augusto de Campos produced Olho por olho (Eye for eye), a poignant
5. Concrete Visions
commentary on the suspicion and paranoia that dominated the early
days of Brazils military dictatorship. In Japan during the same period,
the avant-gardist Kitasono Katue published plastic poems composed
of photographed newspaper cutouts, some of them including foreign
(mostly French) writing and others containing no writing at all (fig. 2).
But can such works still be called poetry? If they are entirely without
words, what would make them belong to the realm of poetic experimen-
tation rather than to that of the plastic arts?
Suspending for a moment any verdict on the poetic identity of such
works, it is worth examining how they came to be designated as poems:
that is, through their continuity and dialogue with a certain trajectory in
the materialization of poetic language, a trajectory seen in a significant
share of avant-garde poetry in the postwar era. If, following the critics
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, the Conceptual art of the late 1960s and
1970s has been repeatedly described in terms of the dematerialization
of the art object, postwar avant-garde poets performed the opposite
operation.1 Emphasizing the visual and vocal aspects of verbal language,
they pursued a radical materialization of the poetic word, a process that
culminated, in some cases, in the disappearance of verbal language from
poetic composition.
Pedro Erber 479
 The search for a concrete form of poetic expressionfor poems that
could not just create but be their own objects, rather than representing ex-
ternal reality through what was often described as the partial or abstract
means of communication characteristic of verbal discoursewas one of
the strongest and most original marks of postwar experimental poetry. It
also gave poetry an unheard-of proximity to, indeed an overlap with, the
visual arts. As Kitasono, quoting the French art historian Michel Ragon,
put it in his 1966 essay A Note on Plastic Poetry, The era of the spoken
word is past and the era of the written word is ended. We have reached
the era of image.2 A widespread sense of the limitations of verbal lan-
guage, particularly as it is phonetically represented in modern Western
script, and an attempt to overcome those limitations emerged contem-
poraneously in the work and programmatic writing of poets throughout
the world. But not by chance, it was concrete poetrya transnational
poetic practice and in dialogue with a carefully chosen set of texts from
a wide range of literary traditionsthe time and space (or spacetime,
as they termed it, after James Joyce) of poetry and, more generally, of art
in all its diverse forms. As Augusto de Campos elaborated elsewhere,
the concrete poets took seriouslyindeed almost literallyJean-Paul
Sartres claim that while prose understands words as signs, poetry must
understand them as things. 4
The Noigandres group were certainly not the first to incorporate
graphic space as a meaningful element of poetic expression. In fact
these poets were keen on acknowledging their predecessors, regarding
their experiments as part of a lineage that extended back to Guillaume
Apollinaires Calligrammes and, most significantly, to Stphane Mallarms
Coup de ds. Even further back, it is possible to trace the origins of
visual poetry in European languages to at least the Hellenistic peri-

Fig. 3. Ferreira Gullar. Onde. 1959.

Acrylic on wood and vinyl, 4040 cm. Collection Ferreira Gullar

Fig. 2. Kitasono Katsue. Prosprit solitaire. 1974.
Gelatin silver print, 15.5 x 13 cm.
avant-garde movement started by the Brazilian poets Dcio Pignatari and
the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, together with Ulm-based
Swiss-Bolivian poet Eugen Gomringerthat most characteristically em-
bodied such aspirations, to the point of becoming nearly synonymous
with postwar visual poetry.
Concrete poetry: tension of word-things in spacetime, reads the
Plano-piloto para poesia concreta (Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry), the
movements manifesto, which was signed by Pignatari and the Campos
brothers and published in 1958 in the fourth issue of the groups journal,
Noigandres.3 One of many definitions of the scope of their endeavor
provided in this brief text, the sentence introduces not only a conver-
gence between word and thing but an attempt to theorizethrough
od, with Simias of Rhodess axe-shaped poem from the third century B.C.5
Yet it was precisely because of its historical consciousness, and its
self-reflective and explicitly theoretical attitude toward the literary tra-
dition and toward poetic composition itself, that concrete poetry came
to occupy a hegemonic position in postwar visual poetry and poetics.
Borrowing the adjective concrete from music and the visual
arts, the Noigandres group proposed to bring poetic technique up
to date, to synchronize it with other realms of artistic creation. On
the one hand, they argued, in the work of Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers,
and others, time had intervened in painting, an art of space par excel-
lence; on the other, Anton von Webern and his followers had introduced
space into music, which is fundamentally an art of time. 6 Meanwhile,

480 5. Concrete Visions Pedro Erber 481

poetry occupied a more ambivalent position, since both its spatial and
its temporal aspects could be taken as crucial depending on whether its
written or its recitative form were privileged. Since its historical origins
lay in spoken words, though, its temporal aspect could fairly be said to
have predominated, and the mobilization of space for communicative
potential is accordingly what first and most clearly distinguished con-
crete poetry (a quality that resonated with a number of contemporane-
ous poetic trends, notably Pierre Garniers spatialisme). Yet this empha-
sis on space was coupled with a heightened focus on the poems vocal,
recitative element. Borrowing again from Joyce, the Noigandres poets
referred repeatedly to the verbivocovisual essence of poetic compo-
sition. Indeed, in emphasizing space, it was ultimately the temporal
aspect of poetry that their poems most deeply challenged and trans-
formed. A clear example appears in the poems collected in Augusto de
Camposs volume Poetamenos (Minuspoet, 1953), such as lygia fingers
and dias dias dias (days days days), in which the use of graphic space
and different-colored types was also meant to function as a guide for
recitation in multiple voices.
The concrete poets were fascinated with Sino-Japanese ideo-
graphic script. Through the work of Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa,
they discerned in the ideogram a model for poetic composition that
could share the advantages of nonverbal [visual] communication with-
out giving up the words virtuality.7 What interested them, more than
the actual role of the ideogram as an element of Chinese and Japanese
writing systems, was its function as a method of composition based on
directanalogical, not logical-discursivedisposition of elements, in
brief, as the other of Western linear script. 8 In opposition to the linear
succession of apprehensive acts prescribed by phonetic script, the ideo-
gram model was thought to allow for the synchronous apprehension of
multiple meanings in a single act.
The project of concrete poetry might sound like a rather formal-
istic utopia but it is worth emphasizing that what was at stake here was
also to some extent a geopolitical endeavor. In the ideographic model
of composition the concrete poets envisioned the basis for a new mode
of transnational, translingual communication based on the lowest
common denominator of languagea mode that could almost dis-
pense with the need for translation.9 In challenging linguistic borders
they sought to establish a universal poetic syntax and ultimately a new
kind of poetic universalism. Indeed, the Campos brothers dedication
to the theory and practice of translation from a wide range of languages
was an aspect of their conscious effort both to overcome the suppos-
edly peripheral position of Brazilian culture in the global panorama of
cultural exchange and to challenge the center/periphery model in gen-
eral. Transnationalism was an important feature of postwar artistic
culture, but few artists were more actively engaged than the concrete
poets in creating connections across national borders and in establish-
ing an international community around an artistic ideal. In this con-
text synchronization also implied the establishment of transnational
contemporaneity by creating direct ties with artists in distant locales,
482 5. Concrete Visions
including periphery-to-periphery connections that could (ideally, at
least) dispense with mediation by the center.
One example of such periphery-to-periphery connections was the
long exchange between Brazilian and Japanese avant-garde poets during
the 1950s and 60s. For the most part, the Noigandres poets relationship
to ideographic writing remained on an ideal and ideological level. Consid-
ering their strong interest in non-Western scripts, their failure to mention
previous examples of visual poetry written in non-Western scripts, or of
contemporary visual poets writing in Chinese and Korean, would be re-
markable were it not an omission they shared with most European writers
and scholars at the time.10 But they did forge a connection with Japanese
poets that left an enduring mark on the panorama of avant-garde poetry
in both countries. Introduced by Pound, Haroldo de Campos and Kita-
sono corresponded for years, and translated and published each others
poems. In 1960, the poet L. C. Vinholes, stationed in Tokyo as a Brazil-
ian diplomat and well acquainted with the Japanese poetic avant-garde,
organized an exhibition of Brazilian concrete poetry at the National
Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, further facilitating this exchange. Lat-
er on, the Japanese poet Niikuni Seiichi allied himself with the concrete
movement, publishing a Japanese translation of the Noigandres poets
Plano-piloto. 11 Even today, the resonance of Brazilian concretism can
be spotted in the work of Gz Yoshimasu, one of Japans most impor-
tant contemporary poets.
Temporality, a fundamental issue for concrete poetry from its ear-
liest stages, was also a crucial site of dissent between the Rio-based poet
and critic Ferreira Gullar and the Noigandres poets of So Paulo, a dissent
that culminated in Gullars publication of the Neoconcrete Manifesto in
1959.12 For Gullar, the synchrony envisioned by the Noigandres group was
a useless pursuit. The concrete poem, he claimed, could at most provide
the illusion of such simultaneity, since reading, unlike the act of viewing a
painting, inevitably implies a succession of instants; it cannot take place
in a single apprehensive act.13 In lieu of the search for synchrony, for the
embodied, material relationship with the poem as a concrete thing Gullar
proposed a poetics of duration, and he created devices to return the act of
reading to its fully embodied essence. Since his first book-poems of 1956,
he had been experimenting with the embodied temporality of the act of
reading. With odd-sized pages containing as little as one single word, the
book-poem calls attention to the act of reading as a participatory activity
entailing as much bodily as intellectual praxis. Later on, in his spatial po-
ems, words were hidden beneath a sort of wooden lid, and revealed only
upon the lids removal by the reader/participant (fig. 3).
With their increased emphasis on the bodily character of the act of
reading, first in the simple act of turning pages and later in more com-
plex ways to uncover writingsuch as by lifting objects and even walk-
ing down stairsNeoconcretism brought poetry closer to things and,
to some extent, farther from words. Gullars Poema enterrado (Buried
Poem, 1960), in which the viewer must literally enter the poem and re-
move several objects in order to unveil a single word, can be regarded as the
climax of this process. Yet Papes books bring concrete poetry to an even
more radical level, insofar as they entirely eliminate verbal discourse from
poetic composition. While Gullar put a sudden end to his Neoconcrete
poetic experiments, afraid of having wandered too far from the poetic
field and into the realm of the plastic arts, Pape refused to give up on
the poetic identity of her wordless books. In their ambiguous position
between poetry and the visual arts, between artistic practice and theo-
retical speculation, such works remain as open questions, both short-
ening and expanding the distance between words and things in the
spacetime of concrete poetry.
1 See Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972,
1973 (reprint ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), also Lippard
and John Chandler, The Dematerialization of Art, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson,
eds., Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 4651.
2 Kitasono Katue, Zokei-shi ni tsuite no noto [A Note on the Plastic Poem], Kaban no naka
no getsuya: Kitasono Katue no zokei-shi [Moonlight in a bag: The plastic poems of Kitasono
Katsue] (Tokyo: Kokusho, 2002), p. 61.
3 Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Dcio Pignatari, Plano-pilto para poesia
concreta, Noigandres 4 (1958), Eng. trans. as Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry in Haroldo de
Campos, Novas. Selected Writings (Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 218.
5 Augusto de Campos, Poesia Concreta, in Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and
Pignatari, Teoria da Poesia Concreta. Textos crticos e manifestos (19501960) (So Paulo:
Edies Inveno, 1975), p. 34.
6 On Simias of Rhodess Axe see Luis Arturo Guichard, Simias Pattern Poems: The Mar-
gins of the Canon, in Hellenistica Groningana: Beyond the Canon, ed. Annette Harder et al.
(Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2006), p. 91.
7 Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Pignatari, Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry, p. 218.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., p. 217.
10 Ibid., p. 218.
11 On modernist visual poetry in Taiwan and its relationship to the transnational avant-garde
see Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 7491. On the political underpinnings of visual poetry in
colonial Korea and the poetics of Yi Sang see Travis Workman, Imperial Genus: The Formation
and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan (Oakland: University of California Press,
2016), pp. 24048.
12 See L. C. Vinholes, Intercmbio, Presena e Influncia da Poesia Concreta Brasileira
no Japo, available online at www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=43689&cat=
Artigos (accessed March 2016).
13 Ferreira Gullar et al., Manifesto Neoconcreto [Neoconcrete Manifesto] in Suplemento
Dominical do Jornal do Brasil, March 22, 1959, repr. in Aracy Amaral, ed., Projeto Construtivo
Brasileiro na Arte, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1977),
pp. 8084.
14 Gullar, Letter to Augusto de Campos, in Gullar, Experincia neoconcreta: momento limite
da arte (So Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007), p. 113.
Pedro Erber 483
 T
he German occupation of Paris in 1940 shocked
the international intelligentsia with the realization
that the world as they knew it was coming to an
end. The question arose of where the new center
of modern art would emerge.1 Underlying this
question was the construction of the logical nar-
rative of modern art, whose crucial city was now
plunged into a void. It was no longer possible to
expect the next step to come from Paris; to go there to see its art was
equally unthinkable. Europe was showing signs of defeat, but modern
art remained absorbed by the idea of the future.
The metropolises of South America, though involved in the war in
different ways,2 had not experienced it directly. The artists and intellec-
tuals of Europes desperate diaspora found new interlocutors in these
cities. By then, the narrative of modern art as a succession of move-
ments had been established and its lessons adopted all over the world. If
art was to be defined by the impulse of innovation characteristic of the
avant-gardes, its movement could be taken up anywhere. The sense of
mission that permeated the avant-gardes was no longer an exclusively
European matter.
Journeys to new territories began to take place before the war and
intensified once it began. In 1934, after a long absence in Europe and
poet Murilo Mendes, and the Argentine abstract artist Lidy Prati. They
also reproduce works by Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
After the war, visual artists, poets, and musicians moving between
So Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Santiago, Chile, created a
regional formation around abstract aesthetic programs. In 1939 the
Argentine artist and poet Godofredo Iommi had arrived in Chile, where
he eventually joined the faculty of Valparasos architecture school, the
Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseo, and cofounded the Ciudad abierta
(Open city), a utopian community in the countryside outside that city.
In Buenos Aires abstract art was a symbolic capital in dispute, as the
Arturo initiative broke into groups: Mad (which included Kosice, Arden
Quin, Rothfuss, Martn Blaszko, and Diyi Laa) and the Asociacin Arte
Concreto-Invencin, or AACI (which included Maldonado, Alfredo
Hlito, Ral Lozza, Juan Mel, and others), from which Lozza separated in
1947 to create the Perceptismo group. Each group generated its own
manifestos and magazines (Boletn Arte Concreto Invencin, Mad, Perceptis-
mo, Arte Nuevo, etc.). While the AACI focused on the rational principles
of concrete art in the line initiated in Holland by Theo van Doesburg,
Mad was closer to Dada in its introduction of games and its coexistence
of different approaches.
The poetics of the concrete artists are not understandable through
the genealogy of Torres-Garca, earlier Buenos Aires abstract artists

SIMULTANEOUS ABSTRACTIONS AND New York, Joaqun Torres-Garca had returned to his native city of
Montevideo, Uruguay, intending to found a new school. The following
(Emilio Pettoruti, Juan Del Prete, Lucio Fontana), or the traditions of
European abstraction. Their solutions came, more exactly, from the out-

POSTWAR LATIN AMERICAN ART
Andrea Giunta
year he gave a lecture proposing a School of the South: I have said
School of the South because in reality our North is the South. There
should be no North for us, except in opposition to our South now we
know what our true position is, and is not the way the rest of the world
would like to have it.3 The most eloquent aspect of this strategy of de-
centering was the inversion of the map of the South American continent
with the south at the top, the north at the bottom, and Montevideo as the
new center. Torres-Garcas program of Universalismo constructivo (Uni-
versal constructivism) elaborated on and exceeded elements not only
of European Surrealism and abstraction but of pre-Columbian art, and
proposed a new model of abstraction.
The young abstract artists of Buenos Aires, Argentina, across the
Rio de la Plata from Uruguay, visited Torres-Garca to understand his
program but soon excluded its symbolic elements. The exchange is not-
ed not to suggest genealogy but to highlight the effects of the European
diaspora, and its relationship to the young Latin American artists who
looked at the cultural deposits of the European avant-garde as toolboxes.
Invention was the word used to name their creative place in the
new map of the world. The term appeared in the single issue of Arturo
magazine, published in 1944 by the young Argentine artists Gyula Kosice,
Toms Maldonado, and Edgar Bayley and the Uruguayans Rhod Rothfuss
and Carmelo Arden Quin. Its pages trace a regional map: Torres-Garca,
the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (founder thirty years earlier of the
literary movement Creacionismo, or Creationism), the Portuguese artist
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (in exile in So Paulo, Brazil), the Brazilian
breaks and the dispersion of the principles of both historical and recent
European abstract avant-gardes: Mondrian and de Stijl, French Art Con-
cret, Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus, the Swiss Allianz group, and the
Konkrete Kunst exhibition, organized by Max Bill in Basel in 1944. The
South American artists understood these avant-gardes as repositories of
ideas from which to create new visual concepts. Two such, in 1945, were
the shaped canvas (explained by Rothfuss in Arturo), and the coplanar
structure, in which interrelated elements activated the plastic relevance
of the surrounding space.
The artists were analyzing paintings by Europeans such as
Malevich and Mondrian, subverting their postulates, and proposing the
next step. They presented themselves as artists of the international ab-
stract avant-garde. It is important to understand, however, that these
young artists had not visited Europe and had not seen the original works.
(The South American museums of the time had no European abstraction
in their collections.) They extracted their conclusions and generated their
solutions from a print culture made up of texts as well as of reproductions.
To the extent that the printed images they saw flattened or eliminated tex-
ture and modified color, the available reproductions diverted the original
programs. Years later Kosice remarked, What I wanted was to be unlike
anyone else.4 From that perspective the art of the European avant-gardes
was more loot than heritage.
It is also important to understand that these artists were working to
conceive a new society. In 1945, the Argentine Communist Party newspa-
per, Orientation, named Hlito, Maldonado, Manuel Espinosa, and Claudio

Chapter
5. Concrete
2 Form
Visions
Matters Andrea Giunta 485

Fig. 1. Grete Stern. Photomontage for Mad, Ramos Meja, Argentina. 194647.
Gelatine silver print, 59.849.4 cm. Courtesy Archivo Lafuente
486 5. Concrete Visions
Girola as artists of the concrete movement who adhered to the Party. It
was the time of the populist democracy of Juan Domingo Pern, which
the Buenos Aires intelligentsia associated with the fascist regimes that had
been overthrown in Europe. Unlike the Nazis, Peron never persecuted ab-
stract art, but it was not his regimes preferred style.5 In response, the artists
activated the oppositional and emancipatory meaning that abstraction
had taken on in the context of the European war. The stance reinforced
their representation of themselves as avant-garde both aesthetically and
politically. They believed that it was possible to join Marxism with con-
crete art, which, however, the Communist Party condemned. Maldonado
read the polemics between Elio Vittorini and Palmiro Togliatti in Milan
and between Andr Breton and Tristan Tzara in Parisdebates over ar-
tistic independence in relation to the aesthetic choices of the Communist
Party. Making a similar attempt to allow for an abstract alternative within
the Argentine Communist Party, he failed and left the Party in 1948.
Postwar abstract innovation spread in a complex network
through Latin America. In Chile it reached its peak in Valparasos Es-
cuela de Arquitectura, the Ciudad abierta project to integrate archi-
tecture with landscape and with Latin American roots, and the de-
velopment of the various abstract programs of artists such as Gustavo
Poblete, Ramn Vergara Grez, and Matilde Prez.6 Bayley and Arden
Quin visited Brazil in 1942, establishing contacts reflected in Arturo.
In 1947, the magazine Joaquim, produced in Curitiba, Brazil, published
the AACIs Invencionista manifesto along with reproductions of several
Argentine works, among them Maldonados and Lozzas shaped-can-
vas and coplanar structures. In 1950 the Argentine critic Jorge Rome-
ro Brest lectured in So Paulo and in 1951 he was a jurist in the first
Bienal de So Paulo (where his support for abstract art allowed the
main prize to go to Bills Tripartite Unity of 194849, a steel sculpture
shaped as a Mbius strip). That same year, Maldonado and Prati visited
the Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa in Rio de Janeiro. Romero Brests
magazine Ver y Estimar included collaborations with Bill and Mathias
Goeritz, a German artist residing in Mexico.
Brazil also developed its own chronology of postwar abstraction. In
1945, the Askanasy gallery in Rio de Janeiro presented the Exposio de
arte condenada pelo III Reich (Exhibition of Art Condemned by the Third
Reich);7 in 1947, the Prestes Maia gallery in So Paulo organized the ex-
hibition 19 Pintores (19 painters), which included works by Luiz Sacilot-
to and Lothar Charoux. Here they came in contact with Waldemar
Cordeiro, an Italian who had arrived in So Paulo in 1946. Abstraction
was well installed in Brazil by 1949, when Cordeiro and Charoux pub-
lished the single issue of the magazine Novissimos, including work by the
poets (and brothers) Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Cordeiro was
the engine of the manifesto and exhibition Ruptura, which opened at the
Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo in 1952. In 1954, the artists group
Grupo Frente exhibited at the Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos in Rio de
Janeiro. Led by Ivan Serpa, Frente included artists such as Lygia Clark,
Lygia Pape, and (by its second exhibition, at the Museu de Arte Moderna
do Rio de Janeiro in 1955) Hlio Oiticica.
Andrea Giunta
In Brazil, Mondrian and Bill were also repertoires to explore. In 1957,
when the strength of the concrete-art movement was waning, Clark
wrote a fictional letter to Mondrian, asking the dead master whether she
should break with the group. In 1958, her paintings began to question the
boundaries of the frame, opening it to space (Unidades 17; fig. 2). The
edge of the work became a living border, the line began to breathe; form acti-
vated space, and planes became a mobile, flexible structure whose shapes
depended on the viewers decisions in manipulating them. (Kosice had
explored this kind of mobility in works such as Roy, of 1944.) By 1963,
form had dissolved in experience: Caminhando (1964), arising out of the
phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, asks us to cut a paper Mbius
strip with scissors, generating knowledge through the experience of
creating ephemeral forms.
Fig. 2. Lygia Clark. Unidade VI. 1958. Industrial paint on wood, 3030 cm.
Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Oiticica likewise disturbed orthogonality in his Metaesquemas
(195758; fig. 3, plate 207) and invaded space with his Relevo espacial
(Spatial Relief, 1959; plate 226). Both he and Clark embarked on works
involving textures, materials, movement, and the body: Oiticica investi-
gated exterior space with his Parangols, Clark explored inner perception
with her therapies using perceptual objects. Oiticicas Blide vidro 05
Homenagem a Mondrian (Glass Fireball 05 Homage to Mondrian; plate
110), of 1965, subverted Mondrian. Visually it might almost have been a
poetic version of a Molotov cocktail, appropriate in a climate of growing
politicization under Brazils dictatorship, 8 yet the work was not a weapon
but a texture empowered with color to impregnate the skin of the viewer
who touched it. Clark and Oiticica can be seen as introducing a powerful
critique of the evolutionary model of modernity, destabilizing its auton-
omy by inserting life itself (space, motion, bodies) into its abstract forms.
487
 It is important to remember the the second Bienal de So Paulo, in
1953, included a Mondrian exhibition. The presence of these paintings in
Brazil allowed artists to discover that their surfaces were not homoge-
neous, as the Argentine concrete artists had understood them to be.
These were not mere structures; between the lines it was possible to
see underlying colors, to feel the artists hand moving over the canvas.
The Neoconcrete Manifesto, written by Ferreira Gullar in 1959, which
questioned rationalistic interpretations of Mondrian, was now seen as
the destroyer of surface, plane, and line, the creator of a new space that
surpassed rational readings of his works.9 Papes Livro da criao (Book
of Creation, 195960) set shapes in motion: simple geometric figures,
metaphors of a story (the creation, the first discoveries).
Fig. 3. Hlio Oiticica. Metaesquema. 1958.
Gouache on cardboard, 39.557 cm. Collection MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Goeritz joined the faculty of the Universidad de Guadalajaras
Escuela de Arquitectura in 1949, organizing an exhibition and educa-
tional program there. He described the school to Romero Brest as a
new Bauhaus. 10 Artistic abstraction was difficult to establish in Mexico,
home of the figurative mural; Goeritz did so through an alliance with
architecture. His Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City (195253)
was conceived as an experimental museum; its courtyard, where Walter
Nicks rehearsed a ballet with choreography by Luis Buuel, con-
tained a black serpent of welded metal. Thematic elements of Mexican
culturegolden altarpieces, pumpkins, the snake, the use of colors
derived from popular traditionstransformed Goeritzs vocabulary.
488 5. Concrete Visions
Breaking the limits of architecture, Goeritz activated the imaginary of
the avant-garde.
The European migrs included two women artists who repre-
sent unique experiences, isolated from the avant-garde formations.
Both developed self-contained bodies of work. Mira Schendel, born in
Zurich and living in Milan, came to So Paulo in 1949. Escaping from
the persecution of war and forced to change her country and her lan-
guage, Schendel developed intimate, sober monochrome forms, barely
distinguishable from their context. Born in Hamburg, Gertrude Gold-
schmidt (Gego) emigrated to Venezuela in 1939 to escape the Holo-
caust. Her three-dimensional drawings made of metal rods and wires
seem to invade space through the use of lines and transparencies.
Gegos works, drawing in space while modeling the human milieu,
led to a critique of the concept of sculpture.11 The repetition of lines
and the reduction of visual resources in both her work and Schendels
has parallels in the work of Agnes Martin in the United States and of
Nasreen Mohamedi in India. Schendel, Gego, and Mohamedi also share
an abstract repertoire that seems to be connected with the trauma of
war and exile. In this sense, the abstraction of the postwar period con-
stituted a language with which to imagine a future or a resource with
which to investigate interiority and develop the trauma of desolation.12
The various bodies of abstract art in Latin America were not pe-
ripheral episodes of European modernity. Departing from similar
references, they carried out innovative strategies conceived from
different contexts. In this regard, Latin American, European, and
North American postwar avant-gardes were simultaneousor, put
differently, after 1945 they were all in a peripheral position toward the
historical avant-gardes.13 These modern interventions established im-
aginaries that subverted the European traditions, whose projects of
the future had exploded with the war. Latin American artists used their
splinters as materials for reimagining the world.
1 See Harold Rosenberg, On the Fall of Paris, Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (December 1940):
44048.
2 Brazil declared war on the Axis in 1942, Argentine in 1944, and Chile in 1945.
3 Joaqun Torres-Garca, speech delivered at the Asociacin Cristiana de Jvenes, Monte-
video, February 1935, in Torres-Garca, Universalismo Constructivo (Buenos Aires: Poseidon,
1944), pp. 21319.
4 Gyula Kosice, in Gyula Kosice in Conversation with Gabriel Prez-Barreiro (New York and
Caracas: Fundacin Cisneros, 2012), p. 39.
5 In 1949, Juan Perns minister of education, Oscar Ivanissevich, called abstract art per-
verse, but abstraction was included in an exhibition on Argentine art at the Museo Nacion-
al de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, in 1952. Abstract artists were also in the Argentine rep-
resentation at the second Bienal de So Paulo, in 1953. See my Avant-Garde, Internationalism
and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 2754,
and Mara Amalia Garca, El arte abstracto. Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil
(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2011).
6 Mara Berros, Invisible Architecture and the Poetry of Action, in Erica Witschey (ed.),
Drifts and Derivations: Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies, (Madrid: Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, 2010), pp. 7281; and Cristina Rossi, Redes latinoamericanas de
arte constructivo, Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios en Diseo y Comunicacin (Universidad
de Palermo) 60, (2016): 103125.
7 The exhibition included works by Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Alfred Kubin, Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff, Lasar Segall, and Wilhelm Woeller.
8 The review of the exhibition Tucumn Arde (Rosario and Buenos Aires, 1968) in the
French magazine Robho also connected the aesthetic and the political avant-gardes. See
Dossier Argentine: Les Fils de Marx et Mondrian, Robho (Paris) no. 56 (1971): 1622.
9 Ferreira Gullar, Manifiesto neo-concreto, Jornal do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro), March 22, 1959.
10 Mathias Goeritz and Jorge Romero Brest had met in Spain during the experience of the
Escuela de Altamira (194849). See Andrea Giunta, Goeritz/Romero Brest. Corresponden-
cias (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Teora en Investigaciones Estticas Julio E. Payr, Facultad
de Filosofa y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2000), p. 46.
11 See Catherine de Zegher, Gegos Traces of Traces, in Gego: Between Transparency and
the Invisible (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, and Buenos Aires: malba Coleccin Costantini,
2006), pp. 5077.
12 See Abigail Winograd, The Trauma of Dislocation and the Development of Alternative
Abstractions in Latin America: Renegotiations of Space, Experience, and Self in the Work
of Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) and Mira Schendel, in Transnational Latin American
Art from 1950 to the Present Day (Austin: The Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art
and Meeting Margins, 2010), available online at http://utexasclavis.org/wp-content/up-
loads/2012/10/2009_FORUM_PAPERS.pdf (accessed June 2016).
13 See Giunta, Farewell to the Periphery: Avant-Gardes and Neo-Avant-Gardes in the Art of
Latin America, in Concrete Invention. Coleccin Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Reflections on
Geometric Abstraction from Latin America and Its Legacy (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofa, 2013), pp. 10517.
Andrea Giunta 489
 T
DESTRUCTION/CONSTRUCTION
he end of World War II generated radical changes
of unprecedented scale and intensity across the
globe. In conferences in Tehran, Yalta, and Pots-
dam, the planet was divided into areas or blocs
encompassing everything from geopolitics to
economics to art and culture. At the same time,
the devastation produced by the destruction of
urban centers and the generation of millions of
victims (both dead and living) in Europe, Russia, and East Asia led to the
decline of Europes civilizational prestige and world dominance and to
the rise of the United States as a hegemonic superpower. Fueled by tech-
nology, unparalleled prosperity, and the assimilation of the consumer-
oriented American way of life, U.S. ascendancy ushered in a new era of
rational planning and organization. Under the advertising image of the
postwar reconstruction effort (the Marshall Plan, for example), an urban
and industrial revolution of unrivaled scale provided the foundation for
a postwar economic and military-industrial complex. Last but not least,
the period also saw the displacement of traditional cities by large-scale
preplanned models of suburban living and social organization.1
This tense dynamic of destruction and construction found power-
The concrete push, far from being limited to Europe, operated in
a transnational mode and had multiple centers.2 It appeared not only in
the United Stateswhich succeeded war-torn Paris as the international
center for artbut in Japan, the Americas, and Eastern Europe, places
that had been in a dialogic relationship with Western modernism. The
fact that the concretist impulse did not follow the worn-out center/
periphery axis speaks volumes about an innovative participation that
negated all trace of obedient dependency, erasing the stigma of being
derivative. Indeed, ideas about the need to implement concreteness
in art circulated openly at the global level, not only in the hegemonic
centers of the West but in countries recently liberated from colonialism,
such as India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Korea, and Nigeria, where artists en-
gaged actively in back-and-forth sui generis dialogue with international
modes of geometric and constructive art.

THE NECESSITY OF CONCRETENESS: ful expression in everything from architecture to urban planning and the
visual arts. In Europe, it became embodied in a new kind of figure emerg-

A VIEW FROM THE (GLOBAL?) SOUTH
Mari Carmen Ramrez
ing from the debris, inspiring the visceral humanism of a vital part of post-
war painting and sculpture. Yet the postwar decades also produced forms
of concrete and geometric art, linked to architecture and urban design,
that reset the stage for a type of positivistic aesthetic rationalism moving
from Russian Constructivism to the International Style (an offspring of
World War I), from the Bauhaus to the Hochschule fr Gestaltung Ulm,
the schools postwar reincarnation. The ideas of precision, purity, and
even an undeniable minimalism at play here were indicative of the urge to
start anew by constructing the construct at stake: modern societies ca-
pable of erasing in a stroke the chaos generated by the six-year devastation. Fig. 1. Max Bill. Dreiteilige Einheit (Tripartite Unity). 1948/49.
Stainless steel, 113.583100 cm. Museu de Arte
This overarching tendency toward rational organizationtoward analyti- Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo

cal and synthetic insight, farsighted cognitive approaches, and grid-based

functionalism, as in the BauhausI term the necessity of concreteness.
Yet the rational impulse animating this project was not untouched
by the humanism that was emerging from postwar circumstances. This
drive manifested itself in the active presence of the subject, whether art-
ist or viewer, within the concrete proposal. The articulation of this new
subjectivity embedded in the concrete was particularly relevant for art-
ists from the emergent countries and regions of what I call the Global
South. There, the universal parameters of concrete trends provided a
partial vehicle through which to participate in the construction of new
postwar societies, while in the process articulating alternative forms
of modernism. The presence of this new subjectivity in turn radically
transformed Eurocentric manifestations into unique, off-center theo-
retical and artistic proposals.
CORRECTIVE TO UNDERDEVELOPMENT
The exhaustion broadly experienced by Europe after 1945 sharply
contrasted with the economic momentum of younger, previously mar-
ginalized geopolitical enclaves. In this volatile context, the necessity
of concreteness was nurtured not only by the need to reconstruct and
update national societies but by the possibilities offered by a tabula
rasa to these developing countries and regions. This was particularly
the case in Latin America, which emerged during this period as a key
scenario for activity and innovation in concrete art. Having benefited
economically from World War II, major countries of the region, notably
Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, set in motion national projects
of modernization that impacted the cultural sphere through a will to be

5. Concrete Visions Mari Carmen Ramrez 491

updated and modern. In the words of the Brazilian critic Mrio Pedrosa, TRANSNATIONAL BRIDGES vernacular paradigms of geometric and concrete art. Although Ellsworth of 1960, a massive swath of contorted steel in the stylized shape of a
we [Brazilians] are condemned to modernity.3 The 1959 Cuban Revo- Kelly is seldom considered in this context, he can be said to have fulfilled serpent (plate 229). By capturing the actual condensation of water inside
lution also provided the framework for the development of a politicized The transnational network that supported the postwar concrete art a hinge role between the postwar Paris avant-garde and the American a pristine cube of transparent Plexiglas, Hans Haacke, in Condensation
geometric and concrete art movement. 4 In such a context (as Nicolau movement can be seen as operating on the basis of what in Spanish Minimalists. The London-trained Pakistani writer and painter Anwar Cube (1963; plate 211), can be said to have contaminated orthodox con-
Sevcenko has argued for Brazil), the need for systemic organization are called bisagras, hingeskey agents for a specific conception of art Jalal Shemza was one of the first artists to introduce modern geometric cretism. By contrast, in the Nigerian artist Erhabor Emokpaes Struggle
based on accurate, objective, and specific focione possible translation that in terms of its originality was relevant for the avant-garde on both abstraction in his home country while shuttling back and forth between between Life and Death (1963; plate 241), the inclusion of handprints to the
of concretenesswas an intrinsic aspect of the periods developmen- sides of the center/off-center axis. The cases of concrete- and con- there and London. In Lebanon, Saloua Raouda Choucair is considered sides of a finely textured black and white circle gives what is essentially a
talist push.5 It could accordingly be argued that if in Europe the concrete structive-art pioneers Joaqun Torres-Garca, in Uruguay, and Max Bill, the first Arab artist to exhibit abstract painting, combining elements of geometric composition a life/death symbolism. At the core of the idea of
project aimed at correcting the chaos left by the war, in Latin America and in Switzerland, serve to anchor this point. Torres-Garca (most of postwar Parisian abstraction with Islamic designs. Similarly, the Indian concreteness espoused by these postwar artists is an inherent grasp of
other supposedly peripheral enclaves it became a corrective to the endem- whose career preceded the postwar period, so that he is not included Nasreen Mohamedi produced exquisite drawings in dialogue with U.S. abstraction (whether subjective or not) as imbued with traces of the nat-
ic lag of modernization generated by colonialism and underdevelopment. in the present exhibition) spent his life between Europe (Italy, France, Minimalism. In postwar Japan, the Gutai group (represented in Postwar ural world. This contradiction serves as the starting point for the origi-
The Latin American developmentalist momentum ran paral- and Spain), the United States (a short period in New York in the early by Tanaka Atsuko, Sadamasa Motonaga, and Kazuo Shiraga) emerged as nality of several off-centered postwar experimental proposals.11
lel to the European recovery, in 1920s), and Latin America (Mon- a powerful catalyst for radical experimental art that combined elements The new forms of concretism, while anchored in the postwar ra-
good part because of the increase tevideo), contributing in all places of the European avant-garde (exemplified by tachism, the ZERO group, tional project and its exaltation of objective principles, had more flexible
in exports from the region due to to key theoretical and practical de- and Yves Klein) with elements of Japanese theater and Zen philosophy. formal and conceptual parameters than prewar manifestations, a free-
the Marshall Plan. The optimism velopments. Combining elements dom they expressed through unconventional resources: color, chance,
generated by the consequent eco- of Surrealism, Dada, and concrete hand-drawn lines, visible brushwork, organic surfaces, nonindustrial
nomic boom and developmental and constructive art, he arrived at materials, destabilized grids. For Bill, color was not an end in itself
pushexemplified by the estab- a unique abstract language that he A DIFFERENT KIND OF
lishment of steel foundries (Mon- coined Constructive Universalism.
CONCRETENESS: VERSIONS,
terrey and Monclova in Mexico; He not only imported the idea of
Volta Redonda and Voturantim concrete art to Uruguay but was a
INVERSIONS, SUBVERSIONS
in Brazil) and automobile plants decisive influence in the Ro de la As Hctor Olea has suggested in a discussion of the artist as theoreti-
in the regionnot only propelled Plata region for the Argentinean cian as a mark of artistic practice in Latin America, 8 the historical and
the search for universal languag- Mad and Arte Concreto-Invencin political conditions of the postwar period functioned to mold concrete
es as a means of expression but groups, respectively represented art movements into heterogeneous versions, inversions, and subversions
also inspired the hope that these in this exhibition by Gyula Kosice of the original model outlined in 1930 by Theo van Doesburg in his man-
countries could finally claim their and Toms Maldonado. As for Bill, ifesto Base de la peinture concrte (Basis of Concrete Art). This seminal
place on the world stage. In the already influential in Europe before text spelled out a fairly rigid credo for concrete art based (once again)
cultural realm, the establishment the war (albeit with a stalled career), on principles of universality, rationalism, and self-referentiality. (As
of the Bienal de So Paulo in 1951; he emerged after it as the rightful German theoretician Max Bense stated, Alles Konkrete ist nur es selbst
the construction of Braslia in heir to Theo van Doesburgs vision [What is concrete is that which is itself].)9 Van Doesburgs conditions
195661, the Ciudad Universitaria of a rational, scientifically or math- would manifest themselves in art above all through a rejection of the art-
in Mexico City in 195254, and the ematically based notion of concrete ists subjectivity in favor of visual precision and clarity, as well as through
Ciudad Universitaria in Caracas art. Ironically, however, his teach- the complete absence of references to the natural world. From this point
in 1954; and the experimental ac- ings were more quickly assimilated of view, as illustrated by Bills White Square (1946), an avowed aim of the
tivities of the Instituto Torcuato in Latin America than in Europe, concrete artist was to erase any trace of individuality or subjectivity in
di Tella in Buenos Aires (195870) providing a turning point for major favor of lines, colors, and sleek surfaces that in their objective status Fig. 3. Anwar Jalal Shemza. Square Composition 3. 1963.
stand as emblems of the utopian artistic movements in Brazil and would come close to industrially produced objects. Oil on hardboard, 6161 cm. Courtesy the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza

thrust of that decade. The con- Fig. 2. Toms Maldonado. Untitled. 1945.
Argentina. In 1951, the first Bienal
crete poetry movement (195285) Tempera on board, 7960 cm. Private Collection. de So Paulo awarded Bill a prize
put Brazil at the same level of ex- for his sculpture Dreiteilige Einheit
perimental innovation as Germany and Japan, and there were also (Tripartite Unity, 1948; fig. 1). This paradigmatic work embodied the
developments in industrial and graphic design and in photography, 6 principlesForm-Funktion-Schnheit (Form, function, beauty)of the
all of which paved the way for the concrete sensibility. Swiss masters version of concrete art, establishing his version of the
concrete-art canon in Latin American soil.7
To these crucial figures must be added many artists who not only
pioneered modern art in their countries of origin but, more important,
served as active bisagras for the creative translation of both central and
These fundamental traits of concrete-art orthodoxy proved easy
for postwar concrete artists to renounce, instead favoring more icono-
clastic approaches that nevertheless sought to take advantage of the uni-
versality of concretism. In Untitled (1945; fig. 2), for example, Maldonado
consciously quoted from Kazimir Malevichs well-known Suprematist
painting Painterly Realism of a Boy with a KnapsackColor Masses in the
Fourth Dimension (1915). Rather than merely copy the original, though, he
rearranged Malevichs black and red abstract shapes against the white
background, anthropomorphizing the relationship between them.10
Goeritz employed a similar strategy in a monumental steel sculpture
but a basic element of the Kraftfelder (energy fields), or objectively
determined chromatic progressions, that distinguished concrete art
from abstract art in general.12 Yet in the hands of postwar artists, the use
of color sequencing seemed to hinge more on chance and subjectivity
than on any scientific principle of chromatic behavior. The Brazilian
artist Waldemar Cordeiro and the Cuban Sand Dari, for example,
used the type of chromatic progression favored by Bill in, respectively,
Movimento (1951; plate 217) and Sin titulo (Untitled) (c. 1950; plate 216),
yet whereas the Swiss artist followed strict rules of sequencing and

492 5. Concrete Visions Mari Carmen Ramrez 493

interaction, they favored a more dynamic, purely rhythmic approach
to color and form. Cordeiro introduces noncanonical secondary colors
such as purple and green, while Dari transforms sequences into circles
activating space. Meanwhile Kelly, for his well-known Spectrum Colors
Arranged by Chance (1951)a series of eight large collages that launched
his lifelong investigation of color,
represented in the exhibition by
numbers V and VIII (plates 214,
215)began with a mathemati-
cal system that paired numbered
slips of paper to eighteen differ-
ent hues, yet made the end result
a product of chance.
Other versions of postwar
concrete art adopted formal
principles and elements derived
from vernacular traditions and
local contexts. In Shemzas Square
Composition 3 (1963; fig. 3) and
Square Composition 6, the grain of
the wood support is left deliber-
Fig. 4. Lygia Pape. Book of Creation Walking (detail). 1959.
ately exposed, inserting an ele- Gouache on cardboard, 18 parts, 30300.2 cm (each).
ment of the natural world into
the blend of symmetry and asymmetry that grounds these arrange-
ments of circles and half-circles over squares. In a similar vein, Choucairs
interlocking modular grid-sculptures (plates 234, 235) are made out
of terra-cotta and biscuit clay, preindustrial elements that speak to
long-standing Islamic material traditions. In works such as Big Red
(1964), the African American painter Daniel LaRue Johnson created
compositions of squares within squares that merge painting with frag-
ments of objects from everyday life.
BEYOND WHAT IS CONCRETE
Insofar as these artists were unable to ignore the new subject of the
postwar era, their proposals were invariably infused with subjectivity.
This tense contradiction had a deep impact on the theory and practice
of the avant-garde groups under consideration. The most radical man-
ifestation of the trend appeared in Brazil, where the almost overnight
shift from a referential, figurative discourse to a self-referential, nonob-
jective plastic one went hand in hand with the articulation of a kind of
participative viewerthe subject of the emerging social order. Whether
grounded in a Marxist model of productionas in early Constructive art
trends and later in Concretismoor supported by the type of existential
humanism (tempered with a dose of phnomnologie de la perception and
Gestalttheorie) shown later by Neoconcretismo, both tendencies ultimately
sought the projection of subjectivity, first through the values of pure
494 5. Concrete Visions
vision (afterimage, retinality), later through an immersive experience
encompassing the senses (touch, the gaze, and the like).13 Hence in Lygia
Clarks concrete works, exemplified by the Superficies moduladas
(Modulated Surfaces) series (195759; plate 202), the incised line takes on a
life of its own, functioning first to articulate the work, then to inscribe the
surrounding space, and ulti-
mately to establish a relation be-
tween subject and object. This
feature is further explored in the
series known as Bichos (Critters),
hinged aluminum structures
that, like Daris Untitled,
Transformable Structure (c. 1950s),
require the viewers action to ma-
nipulate them (plates 203, 218). By
contrast, in Lygia Papes Livro da
criao (Book of Creation, 195960;
fig. 4), each book page is ren-
dered as a colorful, autonomous
geometric composition for the
viewer to manipulate playfully,
creating his or her own storybook
version of humanitys origins.
The incorporation of the subject in concrete art went hand in hand
with the transition from two-dimensional supports to unconventional
objects and forms. That transition can be read as the ultimate exaltation
of concrete art on the part of experimental artists seeking to reimagine
art by erasing the line between it and everyday life. Tanakas Work (Yellow
Cloth) (1955; plate 236) consists of a monochrome painting made of
yellow cloth; it shows no traces of the human hand but exists as a self-con-
tained object. In a similar vein, color becomes a concrete entity in Alu-
sio Carvos Cubocor (1960; plate 209), made of oil and pigment applied
to a block of cement. And, after a long process that begins with Hlio
Oiticicas two-dimensional Metaesquemas (195758; plate 207), it takes
on a body in his Relevos espaiais (Spatial Reliefs; plate 226), Blides (plate
110), and Parangols.14 It was through such strategies that artists in Rio de
Janeiro (though not in So Paulo, where the parameters of concrete art
were set more rigorously) sought an antagonist stance against advanc-
es in physics and mechanics that widened the horizons of objective
thought and led those responsible for deepening the artistic revolu-
tion to an ever increasing rationalization of the process and purposes
of painting.15 In this way they came to restore the vital dimensioni.e.,
the subjective, expressive, and phenomenological dimensionthat had
been dismissed, according to the Neoconcrete Manifesto, by the conse-
cration of the objectivity of science and the precision of mechanics.
The exaltation of concreteness certainly pushed these proposals beyond
the dangerous rationalist extreme, opening the way for a radically new
artistic subjectivity.16
Mari Carmen Ramrez
Some parts of this text first appeared in The Necessity of Concreteness: An Abstract Art
That Is Not an Abstraction, my keynote address at the symposium Postwar: Art Between the
Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965, Haus der Kunst, Munich, May 2124, 2014.
1 On these transformations see Nicolau Sevcenko, Brazilian Concretismo: Introductory
Remarks on Postwar History and Culture, in Hctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramrez, eds.,
Building on a Construct: The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art at the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009), pp. 1314.
2 Important in this regard is the fact that many of the concrete artists in Latin America
were migrs from Central or Eastern Europe, which helped them to operate transnationally.
Gyula Kosice, for example, came to Argentina from what is today Slovakia; Mathias Goeritz, to
Mexico from Germany (present-day Poland); Waldemar Cordeiro, to Brazil from Italy; Gego, to
Venezuela from Germany; Sand Dari, to Cuba from Romania.
3 The Brazilian critic Mrio Pedrosa wrote, Through the fate of our formation, we [Brazil-
ians] are condemned to modernity. Braslia, a Cidade Nova, a paper presented at the 1959
AICA Congress BrasliaSntese das Artes, in Acadmicos e Modernos, ed. Otlia Arantes
(So Paulo: EDUSP, 1998), 3:41213.
4 The Cuban Concretos came together in 1959 at the Diez pintores concretos (Ten concrete
painters) exhibition, Galera de Arte Color-Luz, Havana. They included Dari, Luis Martnez
Pedro, and Lol de Soldevilla, the groups leader.
5 Sevcenko, Brazilian Concretismo, p. 13.
6 See Alexander Wollner, Art and Design: Discovery and Attitude, in Olea and Ramrez,
eds., Building on a Construct, pp. 8399.
7 On Max Bills arrival on the Brazilian and Argentinean scenes and his reception there see
Mara Amalia Garca, Max Bill on the Map of Argentine-Brazilian Concrete Art, in ibid., pp.
5368, and El arte abstracto. Intercambios culturales entre Argentina y Brasil (Mexico City:
Siglo XXI Editores, 2011).
8 Olea, Versions, Inversions, Subversions: The Artist as Theoretician, in Ramrez and Olea,
Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (Houston: The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 44352. See also the nine-
ty-two documents on Latin American theoretical premises translated into English in the same
book, pp. 45339.
9 Max Bense, epigraph to the Portuguese edition of Kleine Aesthetik (So Paulo: Editora
Perspectiva, 1978).
10 See Sean Nesselrode, Art for Partisan Life: Nonobjectivity Translated to Buenos Aires,
194448, ICAA Documents Project Working Papers, No. 3, November 2013, pp. 313. Avail-
able online at http://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/Portals/0/WorkingPapers/13.296%20
ICAA%20Working%20Papers3.rd4.pdf (accessed July 2016).
11 Many South American avant-garde manifestations feature what I have identified else-
where as a constructive will. These include the vital structures of Joaquin Torres-Garca,
exemplified by his toys and wood constructions of the 1920s and 30s; the cutout frame and
flexible sculptures proposed by the Buenos Airesbased Grupo Mad in the mid-1940s; and,
finally, the most radical works of Neoconcrete artists Lygia Clark and Hlio Oiticica. See my
Vital Structures: The Constructive Nexus in South America, in Ramrez and Olea, Inverted
Utopias, pp. 191201.
12 On color as a polemical and divisive element of the Brazilian constructive art of the 1950s
see Ramrez, Between corpus solidum and quase-corpus: Color in Concretismo and Neocon-
cretismo, in Ramrez and Olea, Building on a Construct, pp. 27191.
13 The Concretismo movement in Brazil was led by the So Paulobased Grupo ruptura,
founded in 1952 by Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Lothar Charoux, and Lus Sacilotto. Follow-
ing the theoretical principles elaborated by Van Doesburg in 1930 and further developed by
Bill, the Concretos promoted objectivity and mathematical and geometrical logic as the de-
terminants of the final aesthetic form. Neoconcretismo came together in March 1959, when
the Manifesto neoconcreto was published in Jornal do Brasil. It was signed by a group of
Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo artists that included Clark, Oiticica, Amlcar de Castro, Alusio
Carvo, and Willys de Castro. The group focused on the reincorporation of subjectivity and
the experience of both real time and space in the experience of the viewer-as-participant.
As Olea has argued, the term Neoconcreto is a misnomer that does not capture the true
objectives of the group, which was trying to abandon Concretismo altogether. See Olea,
Waldemar Cordeiro: From Visible Ideas to the Invisible Work, in Olea and Ramrez, eds.,
Building on a Construct, p. 136.
14 See Ramrez, The Embodiment of Color: From the Inside Out, in Hlio Oiticica: The Body
of Color, exh. cat. (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), pp. 6468.
15 Ferreira Gullar, Clark, Lygia Pape, et al., Neoconcrete Manifesto, Eng. trans. in Olea,
Versions, Inversions, Subversions, document 50, pp. 49697.
16 Ibid.
495
 CONCRETE VISIONS
Plates

Carl Andre Waldemar Cordeiro Ellsworth Kelly Ivan Picelj

Rasheed Araeen Sand Dari Julije Knifer Carol Rama
Wifredo Arcay Pedro de Ora Gyula Kosice Ad Reinhardt
Max Bill Erhabor Emokpae Toms Maldonado Dieter Roth
Anthony Caro Gego (Gertrud Louise Robert Morris Rhod Rothfuss
Alusio Carvo Goldschmidt) Sadamasa Motonaga Anwar Jalal Shemza
Enrico Castellani Mathias Goeritz Albert Newall Lol Soldevilla
Saloua Raouda Choucair Hans Haacke Hlio Oiticica Aleksandar Srnec
Lygia Clark Carmen Herrera Lygia Pape Tanaka Atsuko
 193

Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) Max Bill

Vibracin en negro (Vibration in Black) 22
1957 1953/1980
aluminum painted black marmor
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Kunstmuseum Winterthur

192

499
194

195
Carmen Herrera Gyula Kosice
Iberia No. 25 Variation in Blue
1948 1945
acrylic on burlap oil on canvas
Lisson Gallery Gyula Kosice, Buenos Aires

501
 Anthony Caro
Capital
1960
steel, painted orange
Barford Sculptures Ltd., London

196
 198

197

Toms Maldonado Rhod Rothfuss

Trayectoria de una ancdota (Trajectory of an Anecdote) Composicin Mad (Mad Composition)
1949 1946
oil on canvas enamel on wood
The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

505
199

200

Carol Rama Lygia Clark

Tovaglia (Table Cloth) Contra Relevo (Counter Relief)
1951 1959
tablecloth, Plexiglas industrial paint on wood
Archivio Carol Rama, Turin Private Collection, So Paulo

507
201 202

Lygia Clark
Lygia Clark Planos em superfcie modulada no. 1
Casulo (Cocoon) (Planes on a Modulated Surface No. 1)
1959 1957
automotive paint on metal Industrial paint on wood
Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

509
 204

203

205

Lygia Clark Lygia Clark

Lygia Clark Bicho Sem Nome (Untitled Critter) Bicho em si (Critter in Itself)
Bicho Caranguejo Duplo (Critter Double Crab) 1960 (replica) 1960 (replica)
1960 (replica) aluminium aluminium
aluminum The Associao Cultural O Mundo de The Associao Cultural O Mundo
The Associao Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro de Lygia Clark, Rio de Janeiro

511
206 207

Anwar Jalal Shemza Hlio Oiticica

Meem Metaesquema
1964 1955
oil on canvas gouache on paper
Butcher Family Collection Private Collection, So Paulo

513
 209

210

Ad Reinhardt Alusio Carvo Robert Morris

Untitled (Composition #104) Cubocor (Color Cube) Box with the Sound of its Own Making (exhibition copy)
1954-60 1960 1961
oil on canvas pigment and oil on cement wood, internal speaker
Brooklyn Museum, New York Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Original work: Seattle Art Museum

208

515
211

212

Hans Haacke Carl Andre

Condensation Cube (exhibition copy) Timber Piece (Well)
1965/2006 1964/70
Plexiglas, water wooden railway sleepers (28 pieces)
MACBA. Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona Museum Ludwig, Cologne

517
213

Ellsworth Kelly
Red Yellow Blue White
1952
dyed cotton
Philadelphia Museum of Art

519
214 215

Ellsworth Kelly Ellsworth Kelly

Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance V Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance VIII
1951 1951
collage on paper collage
Private Collection Private Collection

521
 217

216

Sand Dari Waldemar Cordeiro

Sin ttulo (Untitled) Movimento (Movement)
c.1950 1951
collage, pencil, ink, and watercolor on four tempera on canvas
paper panels on cardboard Museu de Arte Contempornea
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London da Universidade de So Paulo, So Paulo

523
 Sand Dari
Sin Ttulo (Estructura Transformable)
(Untitled [Transformable Structure])
c. 1950s
oil on wood elements, dimensions variable approximately
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

218
219 220

Lol Soldevilla Lol Soldevilla

Sin ttulo (Untitled) Sin ttulo (Untitled)
c.1960 1954
mixed media on wood in artist's frame bronze and wood
Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

527
 Julije Knifer
Meander in the Corner
1961
oil on canvas
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

221
222
Ivan Picelj Aleksandar Srnec
Composition XL-1 Construction 53
195256 1953
oil on canvas brass wire
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb

223
224
Enrico Castellani Enrico Castellani
Superficie angolare nera (Black Corner Surface) Superficie angolare bianca (White Corner Surface)
1961 1961
acrylic on shaped canvas acrylic on canvas with reliefs and hollows
Fondazione Prada, Milan HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning

225
 227

226
Hlio Oiticica Rasheed Araeen
Relevos espacial My First Sculpture
1960 1959 (1975)
painting on cut-out wood steel
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Aicon Gallery, New York

535
 228

Rasheed Araeen
Burning Bicycle Tyres
1959 (1975)
9 photographic prints on paper
Aicon Gallery, New York

537
 Mathias Goeritz
The Serpent
1953
painted wood
Reconstruction authorized by Instituto Nacional
de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City

229

539
 231

230

Pedro de Ora Albert Newall

Sin ttulo (Untitled) Composition No. 3
1959 1957
acrylic on canvas mounted on cardboard oil on board
Private Collection, Coconut Grove Private Collection

541
232

233
Wifredo Arcay Albert Newall
Proposition III Helmet Head
1962 1956
relief painting on wood oil on board
The Mayor Gallery, London Private Collection

543
234

Saloua Raouda Choucair Saloua Raouda Choucair

The Poem Poem
1960 1963-65
wood wood
Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah Museums Department Collection of the Artist

235
236

Tanaka Atsuko
Work (Yellow Cloth)
1955
commercially dyed cotton
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

547
 Sadamasa Motonaga
Work (Water)
1956
installation
Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd

237

549
238

Dieter Roth Dieter Roth

Bilderbuch (Picture Book)
1957 (1976)
artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages
Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne
239
Bilderbuch (Picture Book)
1955 (1962)
artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages
Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne

551
 Lygia Pape
Livro da Arquitetura (exhibition copy)
195960
tempera on cardboard
Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro

240

553
241

Erhabor Emokpae
Struggle Between Life and Death
1963
oil on board
Private Collection

555
 6
Section Introduction
Zainab Bahrani
Catherine Grenier
Courtney Martin
Tobias Wofford
Damian Lentini
Plates

COSMOPOLITAN
MODERNISMS
 P
art of modernitys allure has been cosmopolitanism, read as
sophistication, worldliness, and openness, the commingling of
cultures, ideas, and populations. But the loss of place for artists
migrating from one culture or national frontier to another casts
a deep shadow on this romantic ideal. Following the massive upheavals
resulting from World War II, the terms of cosmopolitanism shifted radically.
Massive populationsrefugees, stateless people, and diasporaswere mo-
ving between continents, countries, and cities, forming dispersed lines of
displacement, migration, exile, affinities, and settlements. New hybridi-
ties, as some scholars have put it, emerged when citizens of colonies and
former colonies studied in the West, whether formally or informally, or
when refugees fleeing oppression left their homelands to find safe places
COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS elsewhere. Postwar artists combined international-style abstraction with
indigenous, traditional, or local imagery, creating new aesthetics. Parti-
cularly widespread was a kind of gestural mark-making that was as much
iconic as it was indexical. That mark-making invoked identity and levels of
meaning through allusion to language and legibility, challenging the uni-
versality of the modern. Artists from the Middle East and South Asia ex-
plored the Arabic letter; Japanese artists looked to traditional calligraphy.
Conversely, Western artists adopted these practices and forms as well. The
cosmopolitan was not always or only oriented toward the West: magazines
such as Black Orpheus reveal a pronounced pan-African and pan-Arabic
field of reference, and routes of travel included the destinations of Mexico
and China, Nigeria and Senegal, as well as Paris, New York, and London.

Introduction 559

M
odernism, the aesthetic of mo- outside a story that the West tells itself about its own uniqueness.
dernity, is the main term used to Most accounts of modernist art involve a similar narrative that defines
describe what have come to be con- it as a purely Western development including a rejection of an earlier,
sidered the most creative and most representational aesthetic regime. Even if this pure modernism looked
advanced arts of the twentieth cen- to objects from other cultures, such as African masks, that move is
tury. As the word is mostly under- seen as a Western discovery of aesthetic value in those objects since
stood, whether in academic or in art itself is described as a Western phenomenon, unknown to the rest
popular thinking, modernism is a of the world. Art historians have pointed out that these accounts have
group of styles or systems of art that, by being avant-garde, make a funda- occluded certain movements even within the corpus of twentieth-
mental break with the past and in some way anticipate the future. Often century Western art, for example feminist art.
obscured in thinking about these definitions, though, is to what extent Modernism depends upon a historical logic that follows a single line
wmodern is a comparative historical term. Modernism too is clearly a or direction over time. According to the rules of this internal logic, both
historical marker, in that it has been understood as the aesthetic manifes- modernity and the modernist paradigm in art must be exclusionary. In
tation of the Western turn toward recent years this notional frame-
modernity, a phase in the histor- work, which is certainly not lim-
ical narrative of the path toward ited to art, has been increasingly
(so-called) advanced civilization.1 questioned. Some of these myths
In these terms the modernist art have been revived in current
movement of the Iraq of 194060 writings on the Middle East, Afri-
may be seen as something of a ca, and Asia; today, the question
contradiction: by definition a sys- of why the West was able to mod-
tem of Western art, modernism ernize while these other places
is not considered an authentic could not or cannot appears in-

BAGHDAD MODERNISM Middle Eastern aesthetic, just

as historical writing conceives
Zainab Bahrani of modernity itself as a Western
2
category. But this triumphalist
discourse of modernism is un-
convincing, even if some of the
earliest modernist artists in the
Fig. 1. Group portrait of the
Middle East also came to believe Ruwad (Pioneers) Group.
in that story of progress.
Before discussing those artists, we must remember that the meth-
od of global cultural comparison is basically a historians technique
and is especially associated with the European historical writing of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the questions of inter-
est were those of the origins of capitalism and of the Industrial Revo-
lution in Europe. In the realm of visual art, the claims of modernism
can perhaps be made only in a teleological history in which realistic or
accurate representation must be seen as a precursor, in the same way
that, for many economic historians, feudalism must be a precursor of
capitalism. Is it possible that the idea of modernity needed this teleo-
logical history in order to cast the abrupt rupture we call modernism as
art? Did modernist art need its opposite, its colonial other, its heart of
3
darkness?
It is clear that modernity, seen as a historical phase, has mean-
ings that are fundamentally political. The notion of modernity is a part
of a teleological history whose internal logic centers Western Europe
as its own pinnacle; modernity is therefore impossible to understand
creasingly in both popular and
academic discourse. 4 But the
teleological idea of a characteris-
tically Western evolution toward
modernity has also been con-
tested, in critiques that describe
the Western story of modernity,
and of the historical phases that
led up to it, as a narrative frame
5
imposed on the wider world. Such conceptual frameworks may be-
come normalized, however, to the point that they seem almost scientific
facts. Take the calculation of time, where the Gregorian calendarthe
Christian calendarhas become universalized as a secular, scientific,
neutral time. The calculation of time is of course directly related to the
frame of historical and art-historical periodization. If time can be calcu-
lated in terms different from but as accurate as the Gregorian calendar,
and if its correct calculation cannot be claimed by one culture (since it
was almost everywhere reckoned according to natural occurrences
the seasons, the movements of the sun and the moon, and so on), this is
also the case with art.6
The comparison of secular time to the art-historical notion of the
autonomy of modernist art may seem a stretch, but the two are not so
different: both require an almost mystical leap in which a local view is
seen as universally correct. Both also understand activities common to
all human beings as unique to the West, and both take ideas inextrica-
bly linked to politics and religion as part of a secular and autonomous

6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Zainab Bahrani 561

 realm, untethered to any cultural and political context. For Jacques
Rancire, politics revolves around the question of who has the ability
to see and speak about a situation, what may be said or what may not
be said, the visible and the sayable; this is the realm of both political
representation and aesthetic practice.7
ANTICOLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL
ART IN IRAQ 194060
Iraq is commonly represented today as a land with no secular, modern,
or contemporary intellectual traditions. Yet a public exhibition of mod-
ernist Iraqi art opened in Baghdad on November 14, 1941. A group of
artists called Jamiyat asdiqa al fan (Friends of Art) had organized this
Fig. 3. Khalid Al Rahal. Women in the Hammam.
1947. Relief sculpture
exhibit soon after the failed 1941 revolt against British rule, and two
more exhibits followed in 1943 and 1946. In 1950, during the continuing
struggle to end the British occupation of the country, some of the art-
ists who had exhibited in that show formed a new group called Ruwad
Fig. 2. Jewad Selim. Monument of Freedom. 196061. Bronze relief mural,
Courtesy Dr. Nada Shabout (Pioneers), which expanded on the earlier group and included many of
its members (fig. 1). These artists saw saw themselves as participating
in a cosmopolitan art world. A second group, Jamaat Baghdad lil Fan
al-Hadith (the Baghdad Group for Modern Art), was formed soon after,
in 1951. Led by Jewad Selim, the Baghdad group went farther in seeking
to express a liberating sensibility for the new nation, now freed of both
British colonial and Ottoman imperial rule. Selim sought an art form
that was modern yet based on local heritage. The Baghdad group artists
experimented with ancient Mesopotamian and other traditional artis-
tic genres and styles, combining them with influences from Western
Europe and North America, where many of them had studied. 8
562 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Zainab Bahrani
During these years leading to and following the 1958 revolution that
overthrew the monarchy (which had been established under the British
Mandate in 1921), Iraqi artists were not seeking to imitate the West, as
some earlier Arab modernists had done elsewhere.9 This was a time of
optimistic belief in the future of a secular state. Among the artists of
the Ruwad and Baghdad groups, Selim had the greatest influence on the
countrys modernist art and indeed, beyond that, its anticolonial political
modernity. His Tahrir Monument, or Monument of Freedom (fig. 2), erected
in Baghdad after the revolution, became the principal symbol around
which a new national identity was formed. Like most public art, it was
commissioned by the state, which, however, never lived up to the artists
dreams of freedom for the people.
In looking for new forms to represent new men and womennew
citizens of the new postcolonial stateSelim turned to Near Eastern
antiquity. He called this turn istilham al turath, a return to the past
in order to find the present.10 The Tahrir Monument, a massive con-
tinuous bronze relief on a white travertine background, thus refers to
Assyro-Babylonian monumental art and cylinder seals.11 Linear in
composition, the monument reads from right to left, like a visual ver-
sion of Arabic text that at the same time refers to the Mesopotamian
past. Selim and the other artists in the Ruwad and Baghdad groups
consciously set out to formulate an art that would be a political in-
tervention both within and beyond Iraq. They underscored a secular
national identity that they sought to define by formulating an artistic
idiom in itself revolutionary. They did so in conversation with, not in
isolation from, the modernism that they had encountered in the West;
yet the influence of the pastthen emerging in excavations across the
land and entering the archaeological museum in Baghdad, where sev-
eral of them spent long periods working and studyingis resoundingly
clear. Khalid al Rahal, for example, often took the people of Iraq as
563
subject matter, but his early works echo the forms of Mesopotamian non-Euro-American modernism is even contradictory in the sense
art. His 1947 relief Women in the Hammam (lost or destroyed in the 2003 that it undermines the category of modernism itself.
war), representing women in the public baths, shows the emphatic sinu- The museum of modern art in Baghdad was largely destroyed in
ous lines and solid bodies of an Assyrian relief (fig. 3). the war of March and April of 2003, its collections looted and sold.
These experiments of the 1950s and 60s were vital in the develop- The modernist and postcolonial tradition created by mid-twentieth-
ment of modern art not just in Iraq but across the entire Arab world. Given century Iraqi artists has been erased from the archives of the countrys
the countrys history of occupation, the artists of the Ruwad and Baghdad past. Iraqs modernism is now a faint and distant dream, like the inde-
groups wanted an art designed for the new postcolonial state, but their pendent state that the artists had imagined was the future.
nationalism was not based on religious, ethnic, or sectarian identities.
It was idealist in its revolutionary vision of arts role in the nation, in the
same way that the postcolonial state of that moment was idealist. The
artists came from various backgrounds and did not privilege the religious
and ethnic categories that are today such a focal point. They also included
among their number women artists such as Selims younger sister,
Naziha Selim (who had studied art in Paris), and Madiha Omar, whose
foregrounding of the Arabic letter would have a major influence on Arab
art. After 1968, the Pan-Arabist movement took over much of the artists
rhetoric, a departure both in ideals and in ideology.
At the same time that the artists of the 1940s through the 1960s
consciously looked for inspiration in what they saw as their heritage,
they acknowledged influence from Western Europe, where several had
studied, and thought of their work as experimental, as modern, as par-
ticipating in modernism, and as an art for the new nation state. Is this
art then simply a colonial hybrid that mixes East and West, traditional
Islamic decorative arts and modern art? Are we bound to define it in
the oppositional terms of the usual operative duality of modernity? If
modernism is a clear and even a primary category for describing the 1 On the historiographic assessment of modernism as an exclusionary category see my
essay Modernism and Iraq, in Zainab Bahrani and Nada Shabout, eds., Modernism and Iraq
most experimental works of art in the first part of the twentieth cen- (New York: Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 2007), pp. 1122.
tury, what are its criteria? Some would list abstraction, the breaking up 2 On the place of modernity and the politics of time in historical writing see Jack Goody, The

of pictorial space, the turning away from figurative art, but of course Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
3 See Olu Oguibe, In the Heart of Darkness, Third Text 23 (Summer 1993): 38.
Western European artists did not invent these modes of expression. 4 For the Middle East, this viewpoint is exemplified in the work of Bernard Lewis; see, for ex-
In Islamic art, for example, these criteria would be quite suitable ample, his What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (London: Orion
House, 2002). The recent popular diagnosis of radical Islam as a response to a modernity that
for describing what falls under the traditional. This is why the artists
it cannot tolerate may be seen as falling into this tradition.
of Ruwad and the Baghdad group did not see themselves as imitating 5 See, e.g., Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
Western modernism. Rather, having been exposed to it, they looked to (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); J. M. Blaut, The Colonizers Model of the World: Geo-
graphical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: The Guildford Press, 1993); Andre
their own past and found it to be a familiar aesthetic. In Selims words,
Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California
they saw modernism as an explosive continuation of the past. 12 Press, 1998); John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cam-
If Western modern art is thought of as emancipating art from bridge University Press, 2004); and Deborah Howard, Venice and the East (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000).
representation, in the Middle Eastern context representational art nev-
6 See my Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (London: Reak-
er achieved the prominence, or the exclusive equation with fine art, that tion, 2014).
it once had in the West. The understanding of modernism as a break 7 Jacques Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum Press,
2006), p. 13.
with mimetic representation runs into a kind of contradictory limit
8 See Shabout, Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (Gainesville: University Press
here, since abstraction and nonmimetic art forms are conventional of Florida, 2007).
and even conservative aspects of high art in the Islamic tradition. 9 Shabout describes a different and conflicted emergence of modernism in Egypt, for ex-
ample. See ibid., chapter 1.
There, the characteristics of modernism that diverge from representa- 10 See ibid., p. 28.
tion merge with older modes of artistic production. The charac- 11 It is interesting to note that in 2004, after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the overthrow
teristics of an epistemic shift dissolve. If modernist art is seen as an of Saddam Hussein, Coalition Provisional Authority and Interim Iraqi Government members
discussing pulling the Tahrir Monument down, following a widespread policy, both official and
exclusionary Western category of autonomous art, art that occurs unofficial, of removing public art.
elsewhere can only be considered a pale imitation. Yet this kind of 12 Quoted in Bahrani and Shabout, eds., Modernism and Iraq, p. 27.

564 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Zainab Bahrani 565

 F
or several years now there has been a growing from a politically correct aura, or would prompt fears of a neo-imperi-
awareness of the necessity to renew the con- alist, globalizing intent.
ventional discourse on modern art. Under the The task I undertook with the Modernits plurielles (Plural
momentum of cultural studies and the political modernities) collection at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, attempted
revision of twentieth-century history, art histo- to provide a few answers to these questions. This completely
rians have opened up new axes of research that new presentation of the museums collection, on view from October
upset the established discourse on artistic mod- 2013 to March 2014, was the result of three years of research car-
ernism. By opening the door to new artists and ried out by a large team of curators and young academics.1 Echoing
new criteria of inclusion, art history has been drawn into an essential initiatives by universities and international museums, and unprec-
change. The unified, linear, progressive narrative established after edented in scale for the Centre Pompidou, it laid the foundation of
World War II is in crisis. It must be updated and reestablished on new a historical revision. Based on a critical reconsideration of twenti-
grounds. We are committed to this path by the critical reconsidera- eth-century art history, it was the first milestone in a debate on the
tion of Western modernity and the context of globalization, especially interpretation and public presentation of this rich period of modern art.
since societies are now experiencing The preparation of the project
the reemergence of communitarian- raised questions for which we were not
isms and nationalisms. really prepared. In a museum, the question
The challenging of dominant dis- of updating art history has both practical
courses and established hierarchies, and political meanings. What to show, how
and acceptance of the inadequacy of to show it, and in what direction should
the existing diagram in considering the the collection develop? These three ques-
international history of art, are urgent tions are fundamental, and their answers
dictates for both academics and cura- affect the future of the museum as an in-

PLURAL MODERNITIES: A HISTORY tors. Faced with the question of writ-

ing art history and catering to a wide,
stitution. Yet they are little discussed, and
museums of modern art have only rarely

OF A COSMOPOLITAN MODERNITY diversified public, the museum has a

central position and a particular role. In
been substantially transformed since the
development of the Alfred Barr model
Catherine Grenier its educational mission, and in its pres- (fig. 1), the chronological and phylogenet-
entation of its collections as an art his- ic model (an art history of movements)
tory concretized in actual artworks, the developed by Barr at The Museum of
museum bears intellectual and political Modern Art in New York, of which he was
responsibility for the story that it tells. the founding director in 1929, and wide-
Internationally most curators under- ly adopted by Western museums since,
stand this, and recent meetings of the superseding the historical and geograph-
International Committee for Museums ical Louvre model. The creation of a
and Collections of Modern Art have year museum protocol adequately address-
by year become more geographically di- ing the demands generated by the evolu-
versified. But if the museums position is Fig. 1. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s chart illustrating the development
tion of models of thought is a challenge,
crucial, it is also complex and uncom- of modern art, 1936 and probably even the principal chal-
fortable: complex because most muse- lenge, facing the museum of tomorrow.
ums have neither the collections nor the research staff that would enable Inspired by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the muse-
them to undertake a presentation of a new, global, plural art history; and um was from the outset a place dedicated to knowledge, founded on
uncomfortable because, when a museum does have the required works, a universalist conception of culture and intended to participate in the
this rewriting would involve a change in habits that could shock, not the individuals emancipation and growth. As an interface between creation
general public (my experience in several nonconformist presentations and the world, the museum is a depository of artistic riches, but it also
has taught me that the public is much more open-minded than the sup- proposes a reasoned history of art for the publics pleasure and edifica-
posedly informed assume), but the museums own staff and habitus. tion. As a place of the interpretation and construction of meaning, and
Misunderstandings can also create resistances and protests against a re- a bridge between the past, the present, and the future, the museum
writing of art history that would see the great masters of the traditional plays a key role in the social arena. This role has only become more
narrative of modernity effaced or obliterated by newcomers benefiting important in the present period of uncertainty and change, when the

6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Catherine Grenier 567

need to understandto understand art, history, the worldprevails
over the mere quest for aesthetic pleasure.
The museum occupies an influential public dimension, and it would
be naive to underestimate its role as a political organ. In a world in which
knowledge is both growing and transforming its own nature, the inde-
pendence of the museum in relation to conservative traditions and offi-
cial discourses, and its capacity to evolve and to question itself, should be
guarantors of its integrity and of its satisfactory execution of its mission.
The art history deployed in the museum may seem objective but is in fact
Fig. 2. Installation view of The Other Story at the Hayward Gallery,
London, c. 1989. Courtesy Rasheed Araeen
an intellectual construction, a narrative that the institution legitimizes.
A chronological presentation provides no more guarantee of objectivity
than an interpretative narrative, because it is the product of a system of
inclusion and exclusion based on criteria subject to contestation. A history
of artistic revaluations has shown us that these criteria are far from univer-
sal and immutable. Thus when the historical presentation of artworks is
the chosen model, it must receive a revaluation of its pertinence.
The usual narrative of the art history of the first half of the twenti-
eth century has until now been based on a certain conception of moder-
nity rather than on a genuinely historical presentation of the sequence
considered. The works (or artists) designated as modern are not those
belonging to the modern period but those subscribing to certain values
of artistic modernity. The big picture of art history, as it has been dis-
pensed until now by museums, is thus based on a typology of move-
ments, classified according to progressive criteria and articulated in a
genealogy. The artists highlighted are those whose work corresponds to
established canons, and who have a role in the collective history through
their implication in these modernist movements.
This oversimplified, teleological, and self-referential concep-
tion developed and crystallized during the period of recostruction
following the two world wars. The retrospective organization of the
history of modern art was both the product of a crisis of Western mo-
dernity and the expression of a will to surpass that crisis by strengt-
568
hening progressive values. In the name of artistic radicality and
following the concept of classification, it underestimated or left to one
side many individual and collective expressions regarded as hybrid or
local, late or antimodern. In todays very different historical and poli-
tical context, the values and ideologies that have sustained this model
are in question. Research by historians and in the social sciences has
raised our awareness of the political dimension of art history and of its
close correlation with the writing of history. Thus the canonical history
presented in museums appears partial and obsolete; it takes into ac-
count neither the plurality of modernities produced in different parts
of the world nor even the diversity and wealth of Western modernity,
which has been progressively subjected to processes of simplification
and exclusion.
This model must be reformed to allow the introduction of a com-
plexity and diversity that will enrich our understanding of the modern
period. The museum must develop no longer one but several narratives
capable of restoring the plurality of modernities. This task was doubly
important for a French museum capable of reviving the memory of an
exceptional period. Between 1900 and 1940, hundreds of artists flocked
to Paris from all over the world to constitute the most cosmopolitan art
scene of all time. Yet the richness and diversity of this population and its
artistic expression have been considerably diminished in the narrative
of the foundation of modernity. Recent revaluations of female artists,
and even of some artists whose aesthetic was defined by one of the mod-
ernist movements, have not sufficed to reestablish the multifariousness
of what has been inappropriately termed the School of Paris. Thus
various expressionisms, notably those of many artists from Central
Europe, and various realisms that the all-encompassing embrace of
the return to order consigned to the category of antimodern, were
marginalized by the history of modernism. A less ideological and more
historical approach, and a challenging of overexclusive discriminatory
criteria, are now changing the picture. One consequence of this new
open-mindedness has been the revaluation of American, Latin Amer-
ican, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern artists, many of whom were
recognized in their time but then ignored.
On a worldwide scale, the hindsight with which we can regard
the now historical period of the twentieth century allows us to view it
through a more multifaceted prism informed by research in different
fields of knowledge. Postcolonial studies have undertaken a critique of
the West-centered history of art, prompting a new appreciation of the art
forms practiced in non-Western countries and in zones hitherto consid-
ered peripheral. Cultural studies and visual studies have also played Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965 which provides an unprece-
their part in upsetting hierarchies and taking a different view of under-
estimated or neglected areas such as womens art, forms of art linked
to minorities, and marginal or local aesthetics. Reintegration into the
world as a whole tends to challenge the Western modes of classifying and
understanding art. Discriminative criteriamodern, antimodern,
pioneering, late, major, minorlose their legitimacy. A new dy- Translated from French by David Wharry
namic has been established that has ended the scorn for the art of non-
6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
developed and provincial cultural zones. The study of influences has
been superseded by the study of exchanges, transfers, and resistances.
Complexity is being reintroduced and highlighted. The hybrid and
heterogeneous have regained their positive dimension. Historical deter-
minism is being put into perspective and chronological frameworks are
becoming more supple. The frontiers between work of art and handi-
craft and tribal art are falling into question. Even the most established
terminologymodernity, avant-garde, contemporary artnow
reveals ambiguities and incoherencies.
The museum must follow historical and critical studies closely. To
become a place of both expression and synthesis for the research and
revaluation processes undertaken in the field of modern and contem-
porary art history, it must change paradigm and engage in a historial
hermeneutic of art and art history. As Hans-Georg Gadamer advocated,
one gains a fuller understanding of oneself by reflecting on the other (the
past, otherness), without denying ones own identity.2 When the Ameri-
can critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard declared, in 1980, that feminisms
greatest contribution to the future of art has probably been precisely its
lack of contribution to modernism, she was opening the way for a
reconsideration of the values of modernism far exceeding womens art.3
When the Pakistani-born British artist Rasheed Araeen proposed The Oth-
er Story, that of those men and women who defied their otherness and
entered the modern space that was forbidden to them, he was stressing
the questioning of the framework of modernism that the artists con-
cerned were aiming to both penetrate and transform. He added: Would
it be possible to inscribe this story within the master narrative of modern
art history?4
The first response by museums to the challenge to the linear dia-
gram of modern art history was exhibitions focusing on territories to be
rediscovered, followed by a thematic presentation of their collections.5
Plural Modernities broadened the principle of a re-presentation of the
museums collection to a no-longer-thematic but general and historical
reconsideration of art history. Our project was to offer the public a new,
open-ended, off-center vision of twentieth-century art. But this vision
had absolutely no pretention to becoming canonical. The evolution of
research and critical and historical thought is posing questions that are
far from being resolved, and whose interest lies more in their mode of
raising questions than in the production of new assertions. The critical 1 After March 2014, the installation remained open in a modified version until May 2015.
2 See Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 1960, Eng. trans. as Truth and Method
deconstruction of the established history now underway must be fol-
(London: Sheed and Ward, 1969).
lowed by reorganization and proposals of new basic premises. Plural 3 Lucy R. Lippard, Sweeping Exchanges: the Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the
Modernitieslike the present, the very ambitious project, Postwar: Art 1970s, Art Journal 40, nos. 12 (1980): 36265.
4 Rasheed Araeen, Introduction: When Chickens Come Home to Roost, in The Other Story:
Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), p. 11.
dented panorama of the postwar periodhave, I hope, been major steps 5 New Yorks Museum of Modern Art was the first to do this, in 1999, followed shortly by
toward the reimagining of a cosmopolitan and cross-border cultural Tate Modern, London, when it opened in 2000, then by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2013.
Some museums, such as Tate Modern and the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofa,
community, a community that will benefit from a revitalized view of the Madrid, even adopted this more-thematic-than-historical mode on a permanent basis. Plural
diversity and interactivity of modern art. Modernities benefited from these examples, as did previous thematic experiments at the
Centre Pompidou: Big Bang. Destruction et cration dans lart du XXe sicle, which I curated
in 2005, Mouvement des images in 2006, and Elles@centrepompidou in 2009. The recent
reopening of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, was an ambitious example of
a reconsideration of art history taking into account the diversity of the American scene.
Catherine Grenier 569
 A
fter World War II, Britain entered a prolonged
period marked equally by its success in the
war and the destruction of its major cities
during the Blitz. Like its neighbors on the Con-
tinent, Britain spent the first few years after
the war mourning the loss of life in a publicly
gendered mannerin the form both of actual
deaths of young men and of the deads lost
potential to enrich the country as fathers, workers, and citizensand
rebuilding its cities. Unlike its neighbors on the Continent, Britain was
undergoing a radical shift from an empire to, perhaps, only an island.
Almost immediately after the war, its largest colony, the Indian subcon-
tinent, left its control. In the summer of the following year, the arrival
of the ship Empire Windrush from Jamaica brought with it the first wave
of migration from the Anglophone Caribbean. Simultaneously, waves
of white Britons were emigrating out, through a scheme engineered by
the government, to the remaining far reaches of the Commonwealth
Australia, Canada, and New Zealandfor the promise of better lives
and to maintain some degree of Englishness there.1 Added to this shift
was the Americanization of Britain by way of the consumer goods being
imported into the country, providing an escapist imperialism through
every film watched, comic book read, and candy bar sold.
American Painting in February 1959. If the first show introduced British art-
ists to American painting, the second solidified the sense that the sphere
of art had shifted to New York and that to be an artist required at least a
visit there to experience this new phenomenon and ideally a permanent
relocation there to fully participate in its largesse. In the same manner that
men of working age and young families were solicited with opportunities
in the Commonwealth, British artists went to the United States in great
numbers. The American influence also occasioned a split in style. Artists
working nonrepresentationally before the war, such as Barbara Hepworth,
Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Victor Pasmore, attributed their inter-
est in abstraction to their interactions with artists in Paris. After the war
abstraction became heavily identified with the United States, and rep-
resentational painters such as Francis Bacon came to be seen as holdouts
against American imperialisms intense artistic chauvinism.3

EXILES, EMIGRS, AND COSMOPOLITANS: Postwar Londons art world was a convex mirror of the citys expe-
rience of rebuilding after the destruction of the war. Most of Londons

LONDONS POSTWAR ART WORLD
Courtney J. Martin
museums had closed in 1939, just before or immediately after Britain
entered the war, in September 1939. With their closures, their collec-
tions went into storage across the country for safekeeping. During the
first part of the war, many artist migrs, such as Marcel Breuer, Naum
Gabo, Piet Mondrian, and others, had sought refuge in Britainmost
often, though, fairly briefly, in transit to the United States. British artists
had previously looked to Paris as the standard-bearer of modernism, but
once the war entered its deep phase, they could no longer travel to the
Continent or exchange mail back and forth with it. When the collections
returned and the museums reopened, in late 1945 and 1946, most artists
Fig. 1. Frank Bowling with his painting Mirror (1966),
had been without daily contact with art for more than five years. One of c. 1966. Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive

the first major exhibitions to open after the war was a show of works by
Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso at the Victoria and Albert Museum in
1945, reflecting the aesthetic dormancy of the war period and the expec-
tation that artists, collectors, and patrons would return to Paris once the
war was over.2
Almost immediately after the war, however, artists focus on Paris be-
gan to wane, replaced by an interest in New York that reflected the broader
national desire for American popular culture. In the decade following the
war, the U.S. government supported major traveling exhibitions of Amer-
ican art, organized by New Yorks Museum of Modern Art and filled with
the collections of a new patronage class of Americans who almost exclu-
sively acquired abstract painting. Modern Art in the United States: A Selection
from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York traveled to the
Tate Gallery in January 1956 and was followed a few years later by The New
The presence of artists from the Commonwealth and from the
former Empire in Britain had long been a feature of Londons art world.
Many artists came as students to attend art school, to obtain certifica-
tion as art teachers for use in their home countries, or to bring their art
to a larger public. This was the case, for example, with Rasheed Araeen,
Frank Bowling, Avinash Chandra, Ben Enwonwu, Ibrahim El Salahi,
Iqbal Geoffrey, Donald Locke, Althea McNish, David Medalla, Ronald
Moody, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Francis Newton Souza, and Aubrey Williams,
all of whom came to London between the end of the war and the early
1960s. Most of the Commonwealth artists who came to Britain were
male and middle and upper class. A good number of these artists inte-
grated into British life, though not necessarily into its art world, which
in the 1950s and 60swas largely defined by a few galleries in Mayfair

6. Chapter
Cosmopolitan
2 Form
Modernisms
Matters Courtney J. Martin 571
offering modern European and British art to a small number of British
patrons. Most British artists got by on teaching or public commissions,
rather than gallery sales or patronage, but the incoming artists were
rarely hired as permanent staff in art schools or offered public funding.
Stuart Hall categorized the wave of artists who came to Britain between
1945 and 1970 as creating a problem space that challenged the insecure
4
British art world and its nationalist art history.
Immigrant artists often found themselves in the cultural spaces
of their home nations. Opened in Earls Court in 1955, the West Indian
Students Centre was intended as a social center for West Indian stu-
dents (primarily those affiliated with the West Indian Students Union)
in London. In due course it became a gathering place and event venue
for West Indians in all sectors. As such, it was one of the main meeting
sites for the Caribbean Artists Movement (cam), a cultural and liter-
ary movement primarily composed of Caribbean writers resident in
5
Britain. Its founders were Ed-
ward Kamau Braithwaite, John
La Rose, and Andrew Salkey.
Textile artist McNish, sculptor
Moody, and painter Williams
were active members. Like film-
maker Horace Ov, Bowling,
originally from British Guiana,
was friendly with the group,
but was not a member, though
he is often described with-
in the discourse of Caribbean
cultural practices in Britain.
Bowlings relationships centered
around artists from the Regent
Street Polytechnic and later the Fig. 2. Installation view of The Achievements of Jsus-Rafael Soto 1950-1965:
15 years of Vibrations. A Retrospective Exhibition at the Signals Gallery, London, 1965.
Royal College of Art and the
6 Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 1. By the close of the 1980s Rasheed Araeen would gather all of
Slade School. From his school
years he was considered alongside those figurative painters, such as
Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Leon Kossoff, whom R. B.
Kitaj would anoint the School of London. Paintings such as Swan I and
Swan II (both 1964; plates 264, 265) show that Bowlings figuration was
heavily guided by a nationally influenced Pop art and mid-century design
aesthetic, because British monarchs can claim ownership of all un-
marked and unclaimed mute swans in open water in England and Wales.
After the dominance of American art became accepted, a good
number of artists who might have journeyed to Britain for schooling, or
to be a part of a larger art community, chose New York instead. Souza,
for example, showed with Gallery One in London beginning in 1955, but
by the 1960s had moved to New York. Similarly, Chandra, whose work
vacillated between semiabstract and fully nonrepresentational painting
while in London, moved to New York in 1965. By the mid-1960s, Bowling
too moved to New York, to paint abstractly and to write about art from
a politicized perspective, removing himself from the British figuration/
572 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
abstraction binary and inserting himself into a wider market for abstract
painting.7 It seems reasonable to suggest that there was a politicized link
between the reception of abstraction in Britain, the strong New York art
market, American imperialism, and the limited possibilities for non-
white abstract artists in Britain in the mid-twentieth century.
For those who stayed in London, Britains transition from an empire
to a consolidated nation bankrupted by World War II constantly inter-
rupted their practices. The loss of the countrys colonies from 1947 into
the mid-1960s only added to its uphill battle to rebuild its cities in the
decades following the Blitz. Araeen, from Karachi, is often linked to oth-
er artists from the subcontinent who found their way to London after
the war, such as Chandra, Geoffrey, Shemza, and Souza, and all are often
folded into the terminal loss (of family, country, religion, self, class, sta-
tus, civility) narrative of the exile. 8 But Araeen was only an acquaintance
of these artists, and of the predicament attached to their practices in
London.9 At some point between
leaving Karachi and settling in
London, he associated himself
with concerns of race, class, and
imperialism that aligned him
closely with Pan-Africanism,
black (American) nationalism,
and the Non-Aligned Move-
ment, which, in turn, brought
him into regular contact with
artists who considered them-
selves avant-garde and with the
predominantly African-Caribbe-
an antiracist activists who were
responding to the restrictive pol-
icies doled out to African and
Courtesy England & Co, London Asian immigrants in Britain.
That Araeen found himself be-
tween these two groups, who did not have organic connections to each
other, speaks to his cosmopolitan status in London as both an artist and
an activist.
In the 1960s, Araeen and Medalla became involved in artists
groups that employed performance, rather than objects, as protest,
while both became leading practitioners of Conceptual art. Araeen
met Medalla in the fall of 1965 at Jsus-Rafael Sotos first solo show at
the Signals Gallery (fig. 2). 10 The gallery began in 1964 as the Centre
for Advanced Creative Study, a collaborative avant-garde space run by
Medalla, writer Guy Brett, Paul Keeler, Marcello Salvadori, and Ger-
man migr Gustav Metzger, the author of the Auto-Destructive Art
Manifesto (1960). Signals had a companion publication that, in addi-
tion to reporting on events at the gallery, featured free-form art pro-
jects and writing about international art, a task enhanced by Medallas
contacts in the United States and his frequent travel to Asia, Europe,
and South America.
Along with the Indica Gallery (active 196567), Signals (active
196466) incubated an avant-garde arts scene in London. The mix of
artists, musicians, actors, and social activists who frequented it turned
the gallery into an international social space as much as an exhibition
space. The American expatriate and kinetic artist Liliane Lijn, for exam-
ple, moved from Paris to London at the gallerys invitation.11 The Greek
kinetic artist Takis (Panagiotis Vassilakis), Lijns ex-husband and a mem-
ber of the Guerrilla Art Action Group (gaag), a more radical arm of New
Yorks Art Workers Coalition, showed in the gallery. Brazilian Neocon-
crete artists Hlio Oiticica and Lygia Clark exhibited important works at
Signals before having major exhibitions elsewhere.12 The Brazilian artist
Sergio Camargo showed there and worked on the gallerys bulletin. The
Venezuelan artist Alejandro Otero had his first European retrospective
at Signals, and the Chinese artist Li Yuan-Chia showed there as well. As a
major port for artists seeking refuge from other places, the gallery allowed
them to fold into the wave of immigration that swept Britain after the
war. Signals was unself-consciously multiracial at a time when most
London galleries would not have represented nonwhite and non-Euro-
pean artists.
If these artists were misplaced in the rhetoric of exile, how then do
we describe the internationalism born of immigration that produced the
cosmopolitan atmosphere of Londons art world? Perhaps one way is to
acknowledge that in our efforts to move beyond the East/West binary,
we often overlook the fact that there was never a singular West. By the 1 On postwar British emigration see Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizen-
ship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).
same token, why do we assume that the postwar, a term that points 2 In the exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, Henri Matisse showed paintings completed
directly to the period after World War II, was a period of sameness? between 1896 and 1944 while Pablo Picasso showed only works made during the war.
The London art world at mid-century was in a kind of limbo between 3 This account follows British painter Patrick Herons description of American arts influence
on the British in his essay The Ascendancy of London in the Sixties, Studio International 172,
its old attachments (Paris) and its new entanglements (New York), not no. 884 (December 1966): 28081. Heron later called the presence of American art in Britain
completely divorced from or settled into one or the other. The arrival of cultural imperialism: see A Kind of Cultural Imperialism?, Studio International 175, no. 897
new artists from its former empire further destabilized it. If, as histori- (February 1968): 6264. In both essays he adopted language used to describe the U.S. re-
lationship to the third world, and specifically Vietnam, to define American arts hegemonic
ans have already made clear, the postwar period was not economically, relationship to British art and artists.
intellectually or politically resolved well into the twentieth century, 4 Stuart Hall, Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three Moments in Post-war History, History
neither was its art history.
these artists for the exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain (London: South
Bank Centre, 1989), on view at the Hayward Gallery from November 29, 1989, to February 4, 1990.
5 Frank Bowlings participation in cam is cited in, e.g., a letter from Edward Braithwaite to Colin
Rickards, February 6, 1967. George Padmore Institute, London.
6 Bowling was in residence at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 195759, before that art
school merged with Chelsea Polytechnic in 1964 to form the Chelsea School of Art.
7 On Bowlings activities in New York see Kellie Jones, Its Not Enough to Say Black is Beau-
tiful: Abstraction at the Whitney 19691974, in Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction
(London: Institute of International Visual Arts, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006),
and Courtney J. Martin, Theyve All Got Painting: Frank Bowlings Modernity and the Post-1960
Atlantic, Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, exh. cat. (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool,
2010), pp. 4857.
8 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 173.
9 Acquaintance is a fair word to describe Araeens personal and professional relationships
with each of these artists. Unlike him, the others came to London unquestionably acknowledged
as artists or art students.
10 The Achievements of Jsus-Rafael Soto 19501965: 15 Years of Vibrations. A Retrospective
Exhibition was organized by Paul Keeler for the Signals Gallery, London, October 28December
24, 1965.
11 Liliane Lijn, National Life Story Archive (F7815F7825), British Library.
12 See Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo, Oiticica in London, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2007).
Courtney J. Martin 573
 C
osmopolitanism often invokes fantasies of Brady first sought to exhibit Enwonwus work at New Yorks Muse-
unmediated cultural exchange, free of polit- um of Modern Art, but she found limited interest there. A letter of Bradys
ical and cultural borders. But cosmopolitan describes MoMA director Rene dHarnoncourts response to her sugges-
encounters are always enabled by the net- tion: He feels that the Museum of Modern Art can only show the highly
works through which people, objects, and sophisticated and the type of art that they are sure will be accepted by
ideas circulate. These networks both facilitate the critics. He feels Africa is in a state of flux and that, while the material
cultural exchange and structure its possibili- should definitely be shown, it should be shown more from the sociologi-
ties. Nothing can be truer of the underlying cal basis.3 Apparently mainstream American art audiences were not yet
networks that connected African and African American artists during ready for contemporary African art. Yet the network of galleries and uni-
the postwar period. The decades following World War II saw unprece- versities through which the Harmon Foundation traditionally promoted
dented exchange between African artists and their diasporic American African American artists readily embraced the opportunity to exhibit
counterparts, made possible by important institutions through patronage works by Africans. In October 1950, the art gallery at the historically black
and organization. Yet in engaging with these institutions, artists also Howard University, in Washington, D.C., featured Enwonwus first solo
confronted postwar discourses of racial belonging, the struggles against
colonialism and for civil rights, and even the politics of the Cold War.
Institutions like the Harmon Foundation and the American Society of
African Culture, for example, as well as forums like the First Congress of
Negro Writers and Artists, in 1956, created contexts in which artists and
artworks were entangled in a global terrain laden with the pressures of
nationalism and the tensions of racial and cultural kinship. In fact these
networks and the subjects that created them were often spaces in which
the dialectic between national affinities and other global connections
were tested.

THE BLACK COSMOPOLITANS

Tobias Wofford
AFRICAN ARTISTS IN AMERICA:
THE HARMON FOUNDATION
Black internationalism had precedents before 1945,1 but it wasnt until
after World War II that the United States hosted its first exhibitions of con-
temporary African art. In 1949, the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., displayed a traveling survey of South African art. The show included
only one black artist, the painter Gerard Sekoto, who, despite his marginal
status in the exhibition, was praised in Time magazine for his vivid,
straight-speaking pictures of fellow natives in their tumbledown subur- Fig. 1. Vincent Kofi. Awakening Africa. 195960. Bronze,
ban locations or moving through the rolling South African countryside.2 Courtesy National Archives, College Park, Maryland

Arguably the first major solo show of an African artist in the United
States took place in 1950, when the director of the Harmon Foundation,
Mary B. Brady, began to consider the possibility of exhibiting the work of
the Nigerian modernist Ben Enwonwu. It was not a coincidence that the
American debut of contemporary African art was facilitated by the Har-
mon Foundation: established in 1922, the foundation was best known for
its large-scale patronage and sponsorship of African American artists.
Further, not only did the foundation facilitate the exhibiting of work by
black artists in the United States but its grants and awards helped Afri-
can American artists to travel to artistic capitals like Paris. In this sense
the foundation was also a major patron of the black internationalism of
the interwar period.
exhibition in the United States. Enwonwu also undertook a well-received
lecture tour and was celebrated in New York with an elaborate reception
sponsored by the Harmon Foundation and hosted by African American
artists Richard Barth, Ellis Wilson, Jacob Lawrence, and Elton Fax.
Spurred by the success of Enwonwus exhibition, the Harmon
Foundation continued its support of African artists, organizing artist
visits and using its vast network of contacts with exhibition venues to
facilitate shows of contemporary African works. Venues like the Merton
Simpson Gallery in New York and the Howard University Museum be-
came important spaces of encounter between African artists and Amer-
ican audiences. Over the remaining seventeen years of its existence, the

6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Tobias Wofford 575

Harmon Foundation introduced a broad canon of important African
modernists to the United States. 4 The Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghos-
sian, for example, first exhibited in the United States at a Harmon Foun-
dation exhibition in 1961.5 Having received the first of numerous solo
shows at the Merton Simpson Gallery the following year, he soon estab-
lished himself as an important artist in the U.S. and, after assuming a
professorship at Howard University, he became an important interloc-
utor for the emergent Black Arts Movement. Other African modernists
Fig. 2. Poster for the Second Conference of Negro Writers and Artists
by Gerard Sekoto, c. 1959
found similar success under the patronage of the Harmon Foundation,
which promoted and collected Sekotos work, for example. The Ghanaian
sculptor Vincent Akweti Kofi spent time in the United States under the
patronage of the Harmon Foundation and the State Department. While
assumptions of the Harmon Foundations core mission and were latent
throughout American art-critical discourse.
A MEETING IN PARIS, 1956
American art networks were just one environment of connection be-
tween African and African American artists in the postwar period.
African and African American artists met and exchanged ideas at global
events such as the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, in Paris in
1956, and its sequel in Rome in 1959. In fact Enwonwu presented a paper
at the first event and Sekoto designed the poster for the second (fig. 2)
(the poster for the first having been designed by Pablo Picasso). During
these events, black cultural workers from around the world tested and
debated their political and cultural bonds.
Living in self-imposed exile in Paris, James Baldwin attended the
1956 congress, where writers, artists, and intellectuals from throughout
Africa and its diaspora filled the Amphitheater Descartes at the Sorbonne
for four days of papers and debates that considered the position (indeed
the very possibility) of black culture at a moment of global transition.
The congresses were in a way political gatherings, being explicitly tied
by their organizers to the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, which
had sought to reorient global politics as Europes colonial grip on much
of the world loosened. 8 With their overt emphasis on culture, however,
the events were equally concerned with imagining the role of the in-
dividual artist in this shifting world order. They saw African culture as
potentially unifying and politically liberating on a global level, and im-
agined black artists and writers as agents in an ascendance to a hitherto
denied equality with Europe and the West. As the organizers described
the first congress in the published proceedings, During those days at
the Sorbonne we went through some exhilarating hours of fervor and en-
thusiasmand, in spite of the diversity of our origins, backgrounds and
convictions, the unanimity which emerged had nothing artificial about
it. This Congress was a great event in the conscience of the world.9
While clearly moved by the event, Baldwin responded to the 1956 Fig. 3. Jacob Lawrence. Meat Market. 1964. Tempera and gouache on paper, 76.857.8 cm.
congress less optimistically than its organizers did. In his essay Princes Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York

in the U.S., Kofi created a bronze cast of his work Awakening Africa (1959
60; fig. 1) and exhibited in New York and in historically black colleges and
universities (HBCUs) in the American South.6
All of these contemporary African artists lived cosmopolitan lives,
training in Europe and engaging in a mix of modernist styles and various
traditional methods and imagery. Yet American curators and critics
most often saw their work as representing an authentic access to Africa.
The New York Times offered an enduring but limited interpretation of
Boghossians work: An Ethiopian artist industriously paints scenes and
figures from his native country. 7 In the American context, contempo-
rary African artists and their works were variously absorbed into the
discourses of racial and cultural difference that formed the underlying
and Power he pointed to the many complexities and contradictions in-
herent in the international network that the congress represented.10 For
one, the question of black culture (the meetings unifying premise) was
already a point of debate. But even political unity was tenuous for this
diverse and international group, because, while the attendees seemed
to agree on the need to end the racism and colonialism facing people of
African descent, they were not unanimous on the political strategies by
which to gain this end. This was clear at the beginning of the proceed-
ings when a letter from W. E. B. Dubois was read aloud, informing the
conference that he had been denied a passport to leave the United States
and insinuating that the members of the American delegation were little
more than agents of American imperialism. Dubois asserted, Any
American Negro travelling today must either not care about Negroes or
say what the State Department wishes him to say. 11
Throughout Baldwins observations of the congress, one perceives
the precarious position of the cultural worker attempting to mediate
this tangled and shifting cultural and political terrain. For Baldwin, the
American writer Richard Wright exemplified this dilemma. Like Baldwin,
Wright lived in Paris as an expatriate in order to escape American racism.
He participated in the congress, and, like others, found himself ambiv-
alently situated between his national affiliation and the international
network the congress had created. Both the American delegation and
the African organizers claimed him as their spokesman. The poet and
future president of Senegal, Lopold Senghor, went so far as to deliver a
paper identifying the African elements of Wrights poetry. Yet as Baldwin
observed, In so handsomely presenting Wright with his African herit-
age, Senghor rather seemed to be taking away his identity. 12
Wrights dilemma was not unique. As much as the Congresses of
Negro Writers and Artists sought to bring artists together under the
umbrella of a shared global African culture, they also highlighted the
varied political affiliations and cultural differences of their attendees.
Overall, the meetings underlined the ambivalent intersectionality of
the cosmopolitan artist.

576 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Tobias Wofford 577


Fig. 4. Installation view of Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (1941) and sculpture
by Vincent Kofi, presumably at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan, 1962
AMERICAN ARTISTS IN AFRICA:
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF
AFRICAN CULTURE
The 1956 congress concluded with the formation of the Socit Africaine
de Culture (SAC), headed by Alioune Diop, the Senegal-born editor of
the journal Prsence Africaine. Inspired by the undertaking, the Amer-
ican delegation to the congress, headed by John A. Davis, established
the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) with the mission
of broadening knowledge of the cultural contributions of Africans and
people of African descent.13 Beginning in 1957, AMSAC organized con-
ferences, sponsored publications, offered financial support to SAC, and
in 1961, expanded its operations with offices in Nigeria. Duboiss warn-
ing to the 1956 congress about the American delegation were at least half
right, however: much of the funding that made AMSACs productivity
possible were funneled to the society by the American Central Intelli-
gence Agencya fact that was likely known to AMSACs leadership.14
Still, AMSACs activities in Nigeria were hugely important in foster-
ing direct connection between African American artists and African art
networks. The society granted a number of important African American
artists their first exposure to the African continent, and in the 1960s,
578 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
as Chika Okeke-Agulu has described, AMSACs exhibition spaces in
Lagos were one of the citys most important art venues.15It hosted exhi-
bitions not only by African American modernists but by contemporary
African artists such as Vincent Kofi.16 AMSACs major achievement was
the organization of a 1961 festival in Lagos that brought thirty-three
African American artists, musicians, and writers to Africa, including
Hale Woodruff, Nina Simone, and Langston Hughes.
Lawrence achieved one of the most successful debuts in Nigeria
under AMSACs sponsorship. His work was featured in a solo exhibition
at the Lagos galleries in 1961, and the artist undertook a ten-day trip to
Nigeria that year under AMSACs patronage. Other exhibitions featuring
panels of the artists Migration of the Negro (194041) followed in 1962.
Lawrence was so taken with his experience in Nigeria that he returned
with his wife for an eight-month stay made possible by the connections
fostered during his initial visit.17 While in Nigeria, he attended numerous
AMSAC events in Lagos and engaged with the artistic debates circulat-
ing in the newly independent country. Okeke-Agulu has convincingly
argued that the work Lawrence created in Africa was deeply influenced
by the sensorial experience of Nigerias cities.18
In light of American political policy in independence-era Africa,
AMSACs activities were increasingly viewed with distrust as rumors
circulated of the societys funding sources. When the society partici-
pated in organizing the American delegation to the groundbreaking
Fig. 5. Ben Enwonwu and Jacob Lawrence, presumably at the Mbari Artists
and Writers Club, Ibadan, 1962
First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, a number
of observers considered the delegations curatorial choices with suspi-
cion. In memoirs of his African travels, Hoyt Fuller, the American ed-
itor of Negro Digest, accused AMSAC of actively attempting to restrict
exchange between black radicals in the United States and African in-
dependence movements.19 The CIAs financial support of AMSAC was
eventually made public in a New York Times report in 1967.20 The society,
which had already closed its Lagos offices a year earlier, now became
much less active, until it eventually suspended activities in 1969. 21
Allegations of censorship and propaganda are difficult to substantiate,
but in AMSACs role as a sponsor for the circulation of African American
artists throughout Africa, its possibilities were almost certainly limited
by the Cold War paranoias of the CIA.
The postwar decades saw unprecedented exchange between
African American and African artists. In the cosmopolitanism that re-
sulted, however, artists were never free from the cultural and political
tensions of a more connected world. If anything, they became more
keenly aware of their varying positions in the shifting global terrain
created by African liberation, the push for civil rights in the United
States, and the long shadow of the Cold War. Their works responded
poetically to this intersectional and conflicting context, often focusing
intensely on the precarious position of subjectivities caught epistemically
between the traditional and the modern and geopolitically between the
West and Africa. Circulating on a global stage with the mobility of the
jet age, and facilitated by increasing numbers of artists groups, institu-
tions, and forums, African and African American artists developed new
strategies for mediating the tensions of being black cosmopolitans.
1 See Theresa A. Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and
Sculptors in the City of Light, 19221934 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University
Press, 2001), and Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature Translation and
Practice of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).
2 Touring Africans, Time 54, no. 6 (August 8, 1949): 53.
3 Mary Beattie Brady, letter to James Vernon Herring, July 11, 1950. Box 12, Jeff Donaldson
Papers, circa 19602005, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
4 See Evelyn S. Brown, Africas Contemporary Art and Artists (New York: Harmon Foundation,
1966).
5 The exhibition included a broad range of contemporary art from Africa and was held at
the Phelps-Stokes Fund, New York, December 28, 1961January 19, 1962. See Harmon
Foundation, Art from Africa of Our Time (New York: Harmon Foundation, 1961).
6 See ibid., p. 29, and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization
in Twentieth Century Nigeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 15960.
7 This Week around the Galleries, New York Times, March 4, 1962.
8 See James Baldwin, Princes and Powers, Encounter 8, no. 1 (January 1957): 52.
9 Modern Culture and Our Destiny, in The First International Conference of Negro Writers
and Artists, Proceedings, Prsence Africaine, special issue, JuneNovember 1956, p. 3.
10 Baldwin, Princes and Powers, pp. 5260.
11 W. E. B. Dubois, quoted in ibid, pp. 5253.
12 Baldwin, Princes and Powers, p. 58.
13 American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), pamphlet, n.d. Southern Historical Collection
#4340, Allard Kenneth Lowenstein Collection, Manuscripts Department at the Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available online at through Jstor at www.aluka.
org/stable/10.5555/al.sff.document.low139_42_01 (accessed May 2016).
14 See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2008).
15 See Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 228.
16 See Brown, Africas Contemporary Art and Artists, p. 29.
17 See Carroll Greene, oral history interview with Jacob Lawrence, October 26, 1968. Ar-
chives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online at www.aaa.si.edu/collec-
tions/interviews/oral-history-interview-jacob-lawrence-11490 (accessed May 2016).
18 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 172.
19 Hoyt W. Fuller, Journey to Africa (Chicago: Third World Press, 1971), p. 92.
20 Neil Sheehan, 5 New Groups Tied to C.I.A. Conduits, New York Times, February 17, 1967, p. 1.
21 Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer, p. 222.
Tobias Wofford 579
 T
racing the paths along which artists and their art-
works traveled during the postwar period brings
out a striking pattern: one begins to glimpse a
series of networks and exchanges that challenge
the standard linear trajectory associated with
the term avant-garde. Artists did not simply
advance from their birthplace toward one of
the metropolises of Western modernism (Lon-
don, Paris, and, increasingly, New York) commonly cited as the sites of
the eras major exhibitions;1 rather, they moved in multiple directions.
The attempt to map these cross-cultural networks reveals a nuanced
world of cross-fertilization circumventing the tired binary of centers
and peripheries.
To this end the idea of artists and artworks existing within trans-
national or cosmopolitan networks proves useful in considering how
COSMOPOLITAN CONTAMINATIONS:
ARTISTS, OBJECTS, MEDIA
Damian Lentini
Fig. 1. Paul Keeler and David Medalla installing the work of Lygia Clark at
the Signals Gallery, London, 1965. Courtesy England & Co, London
exhibitions and schools have shaped discourses on modern art. It also
provides a way of transcending the nationalist frameworks vocifer-
ously championed by critics writing in the shadow of the Cold War,
arguments concealing the fact that the wide history of human cul-
ture is a story of movements and meetingsof routes rather than
roots, as James Clifford has pointed outwith identities consist-
ently shifting and modifying one another at the point of their mutual
6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
encounter. 2 The history of postwar modernisms needs to be seen as
an acceleration of the already nomadic tendency of both artists and
artworks, with exhibitions and places of residence providing mo-
ments in which these various trajectories coalesced. These moments
bring about what Kwame Anthony Appiah sees as the mutual contam-
ination process brought about by encounters with strangers. He notes,
The early Cynics and Stoics took their contamination from the places
they were born to the Greek cities where they taught; cosmopolitan-
ism was invented by contaminators whose migrations were solitary. 3
According to Appiah, rather than simply reinforcing entrenched or
monolithic ideas of culture, the cross-pollination caused by the in-
creased circulation of people and objects results in the twin commit-
ments of pluralism and what he calls fallibilism: the sense that our
knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of
new evidence.4
Not only were these contaminations an intrinsic component of
postwar artistic networks, they also produced a plurality of modernisms,
including those that would initially appear removed from this discourse.
Edward Saids idea of contrapuntal reading helps to explain the im-
portance of even supposedly counter-discourses within a cosmopolitan
reading of exhibitions and exchanges. In the counterpoint of Western
classical music, Said notes, various themes play off one another, with
Damian Lentini 581
only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the
resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay
that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal
principle outside the work. 5 Following this line of thought, a contra-
puntal reading of modern exhibitions seeks not to privilege any specific
narrative but to reveal the wholeness of overlapping and intermeshed
histories of modern art and their mutual influence upon one anoth-
er. If a fugue can contain two, three, four or five voices [which] are all
part of the same composition, [and yet] are each distinct,6 a reading of
modernism as univocal can be replaced with one that demonstrates a
simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history and of those
other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating
discourse acts. 7
Finally we need to think of the spaces in which this cosmopolitan
exchange and contamination take place in terms of Nikos Papastergiad-
iss idea of the stoa, that area on the edge of the Athenian agora where
the school founded by the Stoic Zeno gathered to discuss the principles
of cosmopolitanism. 8 For Papastergiadis the arcades of the ancient stoa
were a liminal zone independent of the more established spaces of the
Athenian polis:
I imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical
consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for
criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation and
sociality without the duty of domestication. The stoa is the pivot point
at which the public and private spheres interact and from which the
cosmopolitan vision unfolds. 9
Using the metaphor of the stoa in thinking about the temporary spaces
in which art and artists converged allows us to transcend the more uni-
versalizing tendencies of cosmopolitan theory that have developed since
the time of Immanuel Kant. We can instead begin to consider the way
these transnational gatherings allowed a contamination of ideas that
contributed to postwar global modernisms.
INTERPERSONAL CONTAMINATIONS:
CITIES AND SCHOOLS
Cosmopolitan contamination occurs when people from different cul-
tures meet and exchange ideas face-to-face. In the context of postwar art,
this kind of contact was most prevalent within the cities to which artists
flocked, perhaps to study at an art school or simply to situate themselves
within the vibrant cosmopolitan culture of the metropolis. In terms of
study, the primary destination for artists was once again Europe, espe-
cially the capitals of Paris, London, and Rome. Colonial and linguistic
ties brought students to Paris, which attracted many from North Africa,
and to London, which drew from the wider Commonwealth. Italy was
also a popular destination, especially for artists from countries with a
more ambiguous relationship to the West, such as Egypt, Syria, Iran,
Lebanon, and Turkey.10 Outside Europe, the United States, and espe-
cially New York, benefited from the presence of the many artists and in-
tellectuals who emigrated there before and during World War II, many
of whom took up teaching positions at American universities and art
schools and stayed on when the war ended.11
Despite the opportunities available in these cities, the concentra-
tion of artists in one place produced a highly competitive atmosphere,
with success proving elusive for many, regardless of their national affilia-
tion. As the biographies of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lew-
is, and even Romare Bearden show, the New York art world of the 1940s
and 50s was a conflicted space for African American artists in terms of
the difficulties of encounter, negotiation, and multiple affiliation in a
social world polarized by boundaries of race and ethnicity.12 For many
artists like Bearden, the influx of European artists to New York would
in later decades produce a converse migration to cities such as Paris.
Converse migration also manifested among the many artists who,
having studied at a European academy, stayed on in the hope of engag-
ing in the discourse of contemporary art but found themselves exclud-
ed from that discourse, which still favored a predominantly national
identity.13 Unlike their prewar forebears, many of these figures arrived
in these cities as modern artists, having already obtained a degree
or established a reputation for themselves before their arrival. Accord-
ing to Stuart Hall, the motivation of a figure such as Francis Newton
Souzawho arrived in England in the immediate postwar period with
both an arts degree and an established reputation as one of the found-
ers of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay (which also comprised
Maqbool Fida Husain, Krishen Khanna, and Mohan Samant)was not
altogether different from that in which Picasso and others went
to Paris: to fulfill their artistic ambitions and to participate in the
heady atmosphere of the most advanced centers of artistic innovation at
that time. The promise of decolonization fired their ambition, their sense
of themselves as already modern persons. It liberated them from any
lingering sense of inferiority. Their aim was to engage the modern world
as equals on its own terrain.14
Yet for artists such as Souza and Avinash Chandra, from India;
Anwar Jalal Shemza, from Pakistan; Ugo Egonu, from Nigeria; and the
British Guianaborn Frank Bowling, exclusion was evident the moment
they set foot in the city. Bowling, for example, was told that his work was
to be omitted from the important New Generation exhibition at Lon-
dons Whitechapel Gallery in 1964 because England is not yet ready for
a gifted artist of colour. 15 Like African American artists in New York,
these London-based artists found themselves in a sort of liminal space
in relation to the wider institutional establishment: simultaneously
in one of the centers of mid-century modernism yet locked out of a
discourse to which they contributed.
Moreover, even when these artists were included in group exhibi-
tions, their participation was often circumscribed by being organized
around colonial and geographic frameworks. A group called the Young
Commonwealth Group, for example, participated in exhibitions at the
renamed Commonwealth Institute (formerly the Imperial Institute)
from 1962 onward.16 Although it facilitated important exhibitions of
British-based artists in the early 1960sits inaugural show Common-
wealth Art Today, or the two versions of the Commonwealth Biennial of
Abstract Artmany of its shows grouped artists according to their
country of birth, rather than their residence, and inherently favored
colonial-settler countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.17
Where the Commonwealth Institute failed, other spaces
emerged as platforms for the exhibition of what Kobena Mercer has
Fig. 2. Pierre Restany, Yozo Hamaguchi, Umbro Apollonio, Ciril Velepic and Mr. and Mrs.
Augustini in lively discussion at the Biennale Grafike, Ljubljana, 1963.
Courtesy of Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Museum of Modern Art and
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana
dubbed postcolonial internationalism. 18 These included the New
Vision Group (1951) and the subsequent New Vision Centre (1956);
the international cosmopolitanism embraced by Victor Musgrave at
his Gallery One (1953), which exhibited artists such as Souza, Shemza,
and Chandra as British artists;19 as well as the Grabowski Gallery (1959),
which similarly fostered a global outlook.20 Just as important were
the early activities of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), whose
definition as a hearth [around] which the artists and his audience can
gather aptly summarized the stoalike nature of its activities and re-
sulted in important solo exhibitions of the likes of Princess Fahrelnissa
Zeid and Wifredo Lam.21 The most distinct space for Londons cosmo-
politan spirit was the Signals Gallery, opened in 1964 by David Medalla
and Paul Keeler. Medalla had arrived in London, via Paris, from the
Philippines in 1960 and promptly organized exhibitions with Keeler
on kinetic art.22 They opened Signals in a warehouse space in the citys
West End, starting with a show by Takis, followed by solo exhibitions of
Sergio de Camargo and Lygia Clark (fig. 1). Framing its program around
new approaches to contemporary artrather than attempting to
reinscribe the works within nationalist paradigmsSignals provided
a space where artists from across the globe could encounter one an-
other; many of the artists who exhibited at Signals would install their
own exhibitions, as well as contribute to the gallerys Newsbulletin.
Indeed, with premises bigger than even the ICAs space on Dover
Street, Signals could rightly claim to be a more successful hearth
than the older and more established ICA.
MOVING OBJECTS: BIENNIALS
The most prevalent stoas of cosmopolitan exchange were exhibitions,
which facilitated the circulation of both artists and artworks. The most
evident examples were the many international art biennials that took
place in the decades after World War II. Unlike biennials before 1945,
these second wave events were distinctly global in purview.23 Between
1948 and 1964, for example, the Venice Biennale increased the number of
national pavilions from sixteen to thirty-four, including for the first time
representations from Egypt, Israel, Japan, Uruguay, Iran, India, Turkey,
and the Philippines.24 There were also newer biennials that reflected this
paradigm shift. While the first few iterations of the documenta exhibi-
tion series, begun in Kassel, West Germany, in 1955, in no way resembled
the global survey of contemporary art that it is today,25 the global nature
of this second wave was evident in the Bienal de So Paulo (1951), the
Biennale de la Mditerrane (Alexandria, 1955), and the biennials in Tehran
(1958), Paris (1959), and Saigon (1962), not to mention the many graphics
biennials in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, beginning
with the first Biennale Grafike in Ljubljana in 1955.
Many of these eventswith the exception of So Paulo and Paris
were overtly conservative, focused on unfashionable media (graphics),
or persisted with the Venetian model of national pavilions. Yet they
were also characterized by an atmosphere of international friendship
and collegiality. Thus the first artistic director of the Bienal de So Paulo
spoke of placing the modern art of Brazil in living contact with the art
of the rest of the world,26 while the organizers of the remarkableand
sadly singularbiennial staged in war-ravaged Saigon could claim that
the event would serve as a gathering place where Vietnamese artists and
artists from countries friendly to Vietnam may meet in an atmosphere
of friendly understanding and brotherhood.27
What is particularly noticeable about the invitation extended to
countries friendly to Vietnam (Argentina, China, Korea, Morocco,
and the United States), and about similar lists of participant nations at
other biennials, is the way so many transcended the usual East/West
binary of those decades. Rather than isolating artists within national
pavilions, many of these biennials actively sought to create shared
territory between artists from various countries. In the Biennale de
la Mditerrane, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Spain, Syria,
and Yugoslavia were to share a common denominator [that] is
properly Mediterranean.28 Despite the evident soft politics at play

582 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms Damian Lentini 583

hereevidenced by the direct involvement of Gamal Abdel Nasser in
the organization of the Biennale de la Mditerranebiennials such
as these were also able to bring together hitherto disconnected groups
of artists and other interested parties. Gardner and Green therefore
note that their importance lies less in the assemblage of artworks
than in the gatherings of artists, commissioners, writers and publics
from within and outside a given region. Biennials allowed people to
acquire visas and cross frontiers that would have been extremely diffi-
cult, if not necessarily impossible, to cross without the justification of
attending the exhibition.29
This form of gathering is evident
from a photograph taken at the 1963
Biennale Grafike in Ljubljana, in which
the likes of the critic Pierre Restany,
the artist Yozo Hamaguchi, the Ven-
ice jury-member Umbro Apollonio,
the Slovenian curator Ciril Velepi,
and the Rome-based publishers Mr.
and Mrs. Augustini appear in lively
discussion at the center of the ex-
hibition space (fig. 2). Images such
as this testify to the way biennials
staged in the liminal zones between
the East/West divide were able to en-
gender transcultural networks and
partnerships that were in many ways
just as open as those born in more
established cities, such as Venice,
30
and perhaps more so. What events
such as these point to is that fact that
although the notion of cosmopoli-
tanism was explicitly condemned in
many of the Stalinist states of Eastern
Europe (where it was used as an um-
brella term for a wider range of per-
secutions that masked racist and/or
Fig. 3. Issue no. 10 of the magazine Black Orpheus with a cover design
anti-Semitic undertones), 31 transna-
tional partnerships were nonetheless
prevalent throughout the so-called East, not only in relation to de-
bates on modernism but also within the vast networks of exhibitions
32
and discussions around socialist realist art. Indeed, when viewed
as a critically engaged counter-modernismrather than simply an
instrument of USSR propagandathe influence of artists practicing
in Communist-friendly countries such as Belgium, Italy, and France
is just as prevalent as that of those from the Soviet Union, as is clear
from the exhibition of works by the likes of Renato Guttuso and An-
33
dr Fougeron, and from the many trips and exchanges made by David
Alfaro Siqueiros during this period.
584 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
In other countries the spaces opened up by cyclical exhibitions of art
completely obviated such simple bifurcations and instead fostered a series
of vibrant networks that operated parallel to the more common East/West
exchanges taking place in cities such as Venice. Emblematic of this is the
so-called concrete-kinetic-conceptual nexus that emerged in the wake of
the Bienal de So Paulo.34 Building on the already strong network among
Latin American artists in Europethe many exchanges between the Ar-
gentina-based Mad group and artists practicing in Paris, for example35 the
Bienal generated a range of new transatlantic partnerships, with groups like
Brazils Grupo Ruptura being distinctively cosmopolitan in composition.36
In addition to drawing artists to
Latin America, the Bienal also indirect-
ly engendered the formation of cosmo-
politan networks in Europe the range
of artists from Latin America, for exam-
ple, who, having encountered Max Bill
at the So Paulo Bienal, later traveled
to study under him at the Hochschule
fr Gestaltung, Ulm. Of the first wave
of graduates, Almir Mavignier would
be crucial in the formation of the bian-
nual Nove Tendencije (New tendencies)
exhibitions that took place in Zagreb
in the 1960s and 70s and similarly in-
volved artists from a range of nations.37
Although the first of these exhibitions
were hardly a critical success, the artist
Manfredo Massironi notes that those
who took part in the series recognized
its importance in providing an oppor-
tunity for meetings between many
artists from diverse parts of Europe
who, not being personally acquaint-
ed, could witness for themselves the
striking affinity between the works. 38
Therefore, much like the afore-
by Ibrahim El Salahi, 1961 mentioned biennials, the greatest
legacy of the Nove Tendencije exhibi-
tions was the manner in which it created a stoa-like space for artists
from all over the world to meet and exchange ideas.39
VIRTUAL COSMOPOLISES
I
n other parts of the world, cosmopolitan contaminations involved
not only the circulation of people but movement through oth-
er forms of media. Among other things, the postwar period was
defined by a rapid growth in the circulation of art, ranging from the
increased distribution of magazines and periodicals to the frequency
of large-scale touring exhibitions that traveled around the world. The
Soviet Union and especially the United States were particularly active
in organizing and sending works of art to all corners, 40 with the Inter-
national Program of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art producing a
bilateral movement of artists and artworks in and out of the city. 41
In many of the worlds metropolises, this circulation of objects,
magazines, and photographs supported the creation of what Partha
Mitter terms a virtual cosmopolis, a condition that he sees among
the prewar Bengali intelligentsia, who largely negotiated modernity via
print media rather than through contact with Europeans. As Mitter
notes, members of this community may never have known one an-
other personally, and yet shared a corpus of ideas on modernity. The
hybrid city of the imagination engendered elective afnities between the
elites of the center and the periphery on the level of intellect and crea-
tivity.42 This idea of the virtual cosmopolis is a crucial component in
understanding the work of an artist such as Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko,
who, without leaving the Soviet Union, was nevertheless able to engage
with the art of various modernisms through Nikolai Akimovs extensive
library at the Theatre Institute in Leningrad. 43 In a similar vein, mem-
bers of the Gutai group in the far-flung town of Ashiya, Japan, were able
to draw on Yoshihara Jiros extensive library in order to develop what
they considered an international common ground where the arts of
the East and the West will influence each other.44 As is demonstrated by
Yoshiharas publication and circulation of the Gutai journalwhose cir-
culation reached Jackson Pollock and Allan Kaprow in New York, Michel
Tapi in Paris, and Heinz Mack in Dsseldorfthe Gutai artists saw
themselves as active participants in this virtual cosmopolis, organizing
joint exhibitions and publications with the likes of Tapi and viewing
themselves as contributing to the discourse of postwar modernism.
Nowhere is this reciprocity more evident than in the text Continuit et
avant-garde au Japon, which Gutai published with Tapi, Haga Tru, and
the publisher Ezio Gribaudo in 1962 and which challenges the standard,
derivative reading of Japanese art by linking the practices of Pollock,
Alfonso Ossorio, Mark Tobey, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), and
the like to a distinctly Japanese-centered Zen tradition and to this open,
symbiotic, and dynamic vision, to this world of living interparticipation.45
As the members of Gutai understood, the ability to participate in a
virtual cosmopolis was contingent on language and communication
hence their decision to publish the Gutai journal in both Japanese and
English. Mitter notes that hegemonic languages such as English and
Spanish spread by colonial rule were crucial in the formation of pre-
war modern groups. 46 In Africa, similarly, the notion of a common
linguistic identity before the outbreak of World War II was initially
shaped by artists and writers living abroad, 47 whose experiences of
travel and migration informed identities at odds with the claim of the
nation-state to be the primary basis of collective belonging. 48 After the
hostilities ended, many of the French colonial countries to the south of
the Saharan divide united around the idea of a pan-African identity, a
Damian Lentini
shift that resulted in engagement with the artistic and political ideals
of the Ngritude movement. This idea was further advanced by two
major postwar conferencesthe Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in
Manchester in 1945, and the First International Congress of Black Writ-
ers and Artists, in Paris in September 1956that called for the end of
colonialism, as well as the development of a common African identity
transcending the nation-states that had been inscribed by the colonial
powers. 49
In addition to events such as these, the fostering of a common
pan-African cosmopolis was facilitated by print media, particularly,
in the Francophone world, the journal Prsence Africaine, and in the
Anglophone world Black Orpheus, which sought to connect the cos-
mopolitan activities of writers and artists in Nigeria to the wider
diaspora across the English-speaking Black Atlantic.50 The magazine's
editor, Ulli Beier, drew on an extensive global network to present the work
of artists who he believed were confronting historical and cultural con-
ditions comparable to those faced by Africans; he dedicating significant
space in the journal to the works of diasporic artists such as F. N. Souza
in London and Jacob Lawrence in New York.51
Beier also sought to combine his work on Black Orpheus with the
exhibition program that he developed at the Mbari Artists and Writers
Club in Ibadan. Comprising a caf, a Lebanese restaurant, and an
open-air courtyard, the Mbari Club functioned as a stoalike space; it was
located in the middle of a central marketplace and facilitated discus-
sions, exhibitions, and performances that could in theory be attended
by anyone. Here Beier sought to bring significant artists and works from
America, Asia and Europe to Nigeria for the first time, making the club
a space where the international dimension of postcolonial modernism
became manifest.52 In addition to diasporic artists living in Europe and
the United States, Mbaris exhibition program included the work of
Africa-based artists on both sides of the Sahara, extending the parame-
ters of pan-Africanism beyond the linguistic and colonial barriers that in
many ways divided the continent. Particularly influential in this regard
were exhibitions by the Sudanese artists Ibrahim El Salahi and Ahmed
Mohammed Shibrain and the Ethiopian painter Skunder Boghossian,
all complemented by articles in Black Orpheus (fig. 3). Mbari and Black
Orpheus were important conduits for the work of artists from across the
four major continents who were at the forefront of defining modern-
isms inspired by the experience of colonization, racial discrimination, and
the encounter between Western modernity and indigenous cultures.53
As all of these case studies demonstrate, the development of postwar
art and culture was indelibly shaped by cosmopolitan exchanges, both at
the level of human interaction and through the circulation and distribu-
tion of artworks and print media. A contrapuntal reading of these various
sites of cosmopolitan exchange can thus destabilize hitherto rigid catego-
rizations of culture and identity, demonstrating instead how artists
networks are in fact worldly, productive sites of crossing: complex, unfin-
ished paths between local and global attachments.54
585

1 See, for example, Bruce Altshulers histories of exhibitions: The Avant-Garde in Exhibition:
New Art in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994); Salon to Biennial: Exhi-
bitions That Made Art History, vol. 1, 18631959 (London: Phaidon, 2008); and Biennials and
Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. 2, 19622002 (London: Phaidon, 2013). Both
of the latter focus on Europe and the United States, with the exception of one Gutai exhibition.
2 On nationalist frameworks, one thinks of texts such as Harold Rosenberg's American
Action Painters, Artnews 51, no. 8 (December 1952); Clement Greenbergs American-Type 22 See David Medalla, Signals, in Araeen, The Other Story, pp. 11518.
Painting, Partisan Review 22 (Spring 1955); or even Irving Sandlers book The Triumph of
American Painting (New York: Praeger, 1970). The quotation of James Clifford is from Routes:
Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard
University Press, 1997), pp. 113.
3 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Nor-
ton, 2006), p. 112.
4 Ibid., p. 144.
5 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 5960.
6 Said, quoted in Colin Symes, The Paradox of the Canon: Edward W. Said and Musical
Transgression, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 27, no. 3 (2006): 309.
7 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 51. See also Geeta Chowdhry, Edward Said and Contra-
puntal Reading: Implications for Critical Interventions in International Relations, Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 36, no. 1 (December 2007): 105, and An Interview with Ed-
ward Said, in The Edward Said Reader, ed. Moustafa Bayami and Andrew Rubin (New York:
Vintage Books, 2000), pp. 41944.
8 See Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012),
pp. 8182.
9 Ibid., pp. 9192.
10 See Martina Corgnati, ed., Italia. Artisti arabi tra Italia e Mediterraneo/Italy: Arab Artists
between Italy and the Mediterranean (Milan: Skira, 2008), pp. 2327.
11 The key text on this phenomenon remains Serge Guilbauts How New York Stole the Idea
of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1984).
12 Kobena Mercer, Introduction, in Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 11.
13 This phenomenon was hardly confined to cities such as London and New York. Ernest
Mancoba, a central figure in the Northern European CoBrA group, is often omitted from ac-
counts of their development. See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Modern African Art, in Okwui Enwe-
zor, ed., The Short Century, exh. cat. (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2001), p. 31;
or Willemijn Stokvis, Cobra 3 Dimensions: work in wood, clay, metal, stone, waste, polyester,
bread, ceramics (London: Lund Humphries, 1999), p. 16.
14 Stuart Hall, Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three Moments in Post-war History, His-
tory Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 5.
15 Frank Bowling, quoted in Rasheed Araeen, In the Citadel of Modernism, in Araeen, ed.
The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery,
1989), p. 40;this essay also discusses the exclusion alienation felt by the likes of Shemza and
Ibrahim El Salahi while attending lectures at the Slade School of Fine Art. The predilection for
selecting an increasingly small group of white male artists to represent Britain in internation-
al exhibitions is discussed in Eddie Chambers, Coming In from the Cold: Some Black Artists
586 6. Cosmopolitan Modernisms
Are Embraced, in Chambers, Eddie, ed., Things Done Change: The Cultural Politics of Recent
Black Artists in Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), pp. 21011.
16 As Bowling observed, the Young Commonwealth Group comprised artists from places
like Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, Jamaica, Canada, Singapore, India, South Africa,
Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and a couple of very good sculptors from the southern part of Rhodesia.
Quoted in Leon Wainwright, Frank Bowling and the Appetite for British Pop, Third Text 22,
no. 2 (March 2008): 196.
17 See Sarah Scott, A New Commonwealth: The Exhibition Commonwealth Art Today and
the Opening of the Commonwealth Institute (1962), in Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw,
Kiera Lindsay, and Stuart Mcintyre, eds., Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Pro-
duction, Institutions (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2004), p. 708. In terms of the space
allocated to each nation in Commonwealth Art Today, only India could come close to the prom-
inence granted Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom; the Australian contingent was
lauded as the richest of all (Robert Wraight, Commonwealth Art Today, The Tattler, Novem-
ber 21, 1962), while contributions from Ceylon, Nigeria, and East Africa were dismissed as
semi folk paintings or works that were semi-lost between this and the supposed London
art school (Other Exhibitions, Apollo Magazine, November 1962).
18 Mercer, Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling, in Mercer, ed.,
Discrepant Abstraction (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 186.
19 See Courtney J. Martin, Anwar Jalal Shemzas Art World in London: 195660, in Iftikhar
Dadi, Calligraphic Abstraction: Anwar Jalal Shemza, in Dadi, ed., Anwar Jalal Shemza, exh.
cat. (London: Ridinghouse, 2015), p. 30; and Victor Musgrave, Introduction, in Gallery One
Ten Years, exh. cat. (London: Gallery One, 1963), n.p.
20 See Mercer, Black Atlantic Abstraction, p. 186.
21 Herbert Read, Introduction, in Forty Years of Modern Art 19071947: A Selection from
British Collections (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1948), p. 1.
tral European University Press, 2016), pp. 31416.
23 On the idea of first, second, and third waves of biennials see Anthony Gardner and 40 For an admittedly biased account of the reasons behind Soviet-led exchanges see Karen
Charles Green, Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global, Third Text 27, no. 4 (July
2013): 44255; Gardner and Green, South as Method? Biennials Past and Present, in
Making Biennials in Contemporary Times: Essays from the World Biennial Forum no 2, So
Paulo, 2014, pp. 2836, available online at http://icco.art.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/
Making-Biennials-in-Contemporary-Times_Home-Print.pdf?faa01f (accessed June 2016);
and Gardner and Green, Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created
Contemporary Art (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).
24 See Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale 194864: Italy and the
Idea of Europe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 15577.
25 See Walter Grasskamp, To Be Continued: Periodic Exhibitions (dOCUMENTA, for Ex-
ample, Tate Papers no. 12 (October 2009), available online at www.tate.org.uk/research/
publications/tate-papers/be-continued-periodic-exhibitions-documenta-example (accessed
June 2016); and Chin-Tao Wu, Biennials without Borders?, New Left Review 57 (MayJune
2009): 15.
26 Lourival Gomes Machado, Introduco, in I. Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de So
Paulo: Catlogo, exh. cat. (So Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo, 1951), p. 14.
27 H E Vu-Van-Mu et al., First International Exhibition of Fine Arts of Saigon, exh. cat. (Sai-
gon: Tao-n Garden, 1962), p. 6. Quoted here from Gardner and Green, South as Method?
Biennials Past and Present, p. 31.
28 See Gardner and Green, Biennials of the South, p. 445.
29 Ibid., p. 450.
30 In addition to Ljubljana, the inaugural Biennale der Ostseelnder (Biennial of Baltic states),
in the East German city of Rostock in 1965, allowed for creative exchange among artists
across a wide spectrum of styles and ideologies. See Elke Neumann, Kunst am Meer des
Friedens. Die Biennale der Ostseelnder, eine Ausstellung mit internationale Beteiligung in
der DDR und ihr Einfluss auf die Kunsthalle Rostock, in Jrg-Uwe Neumann, ed., 1965/2015.
Die Biennale der Ostseelnder. Der Ursprung der Kunsthalle Rostock, exh. cat. (Rostock: Kun-
sthalle Rostock, 2015), pp. 831.
31 See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp.
20610.
32 The art historian Martin Warnke has provocatively argued that whereas Western Euro-
pean artists were almost exclusively fixated on the art capitals of Paris, London, and New
York, artists from socialist countries such as the GDR had a far broader artistic experience,
traveling and working in countries such as Bulgaria, Cuba, India, Italy, Poland, and the USSR,
including the Soviet states of Central Asia. See Warnke, Gibe s den DDR-Knstler?, in M.
Flake, ed., Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Staat. Die Kunst der Parteien und Massenor-
ganisationen der DDR (Berlin: Ars Nicolai, 1994), pp. 4047.
33 See Sarah Wilson, Picasso/Marx and Socialist Realism in France (Liverpool: Liverpool
Damian Lentini
University Press, 2013), and Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, How the West Corroborated
Socialist Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitzky and Picasso in Warsaw, Biuletyn historii
Sztuki 2, no. 65 (2003): 30329.
34 See Guy Brett, A Radical Leap, in Dawn Ades, ed., Art in Latin America: The Modern Era,
18201980 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 253.
35 Maria Llusa Borr, Mad en el Pars de los aos cincuenta in Maria Llusa Borr, ed.,
Arte Mad, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, 1997), pp. 102-7.
36 See Ana Maria Belluzzo, The Rupture Group and Concrete Art, in Mari Carmen Ramrez
and Hctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, exh. cat. (New Ha-
ven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 2039. The core members of the Ruptura
Group were Lothar Charoux (Austria), Waldemar Cordeiro (Italy), Geraldo de Barros (Brazil),
Kazmer Fjer (Hungary), Leopold Haar (Poland), Luiz Sacilotto (Brazil), and Anatol Wladyslaw
(Poland).
37 As the critic Matko Metrovic recalls, the idea for the inaugural Nove Tendencije exhibition,
in 1961, came about through a chance meeting between himself and Mavignier, who had
just visited the Venice Biennale. See Jerko Denegri, The Condition and Circumstances That
Preceded the Mounting of the First Two New Tendencies Exhibitions in Zagreb 19611963,
in Margit Rosen, ed., A Little Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computers
Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 19611973, exh. cat. (Karlsruhe: ZKM
Center for Art and Media, and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), pp. 1926.
38 Manfredo Massironi, Ricerche visuali, in Situazioni dellarte contemporanea. Testi della
conferenze tenute alle Galleria nazionale darte moderna di Roma (Rome: Edizioni Librarte,
1976), p. 56.
39 See Ljiljana Kolesnik, Zagreb as the Location of the New Tendencies International Art
Movement, in Jrme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, eds., Art Beyond
Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 19451989 (Budapest and New York: Cen-
Dawisha, Soviet Cultural Relations with Iraq, Syriah and Egypt 195570, Soviet Studies, 27
(3), July 1975, 41842
41 See Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War
(London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 26778.
42 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 19221947
(London: Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 1314.
43 See Ekaterina Andreeva, Yevgeny Mikhnov: Endless Multitudes, exh. cat. (Saint Peters-
burg: Novy Museum, 2010), pp. 2425.
44 See Yoshihara Jiro, A Statement by Jiro Yoshihara: Leader of Gutai, Martha Jackson Gal-
lery press release, September 17, 1958. Quoted in Alexandra Munroe, All the Landscapes: Gu-
tais World, in Ming Tiampo and Munroe, eds., Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York:
Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2013), p. 21. For an extensive list of such texts see Tiampo,
Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 18485.
45 Haga Toru, The Japanese Point of View, in Avant-Garde Art in Japan (New York: H. N.
Abrams, 1962), n.p., quoted in ibid., p. 30.
46 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p. 14. See also Keith Moxey, A Virtual Cosmopolis:
Partha Mitter in Conversation with Keith Moxey, The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (September 2013):
38192.
47 As Okeke-Agulu has observed, the development of a Pan-African artistic identity nec-
essarily had to be developed in Europe, for, with the exception of Egypt and South Africa, it
would take the aftermath of World War II to set the stage for modern art on the continent
itself. Okeke-Agulu, Modern African Art, p. 30.
48 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Its Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
49 See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers Landscape (Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 4978.
50 The transnational intention of the program was indicated from the outset, with the name
Black Orpheus coming from the title of Jean-Paul Sartres introductory essay to Lopold
Sdar Senghors collection of negritude poetry. The best analysis of the activities of the vari-
ous Mbari clubs, and of the influence of Ulli Beier and Black Orpheus, is Okeke-Agulu's book
Postcolonial Modernism. Art and Decolonialization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2015), esp. pp. 13181.
51 See Omidiji Aragbabalu (a pseudonym of Beiers), Souza, Black Orpheus 7 (1960): 16
21, 4952, and Beier, Two American Negro Painters, Black Orpheus 11 (1962): 2527.
52 Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism, p. 152.
53 Ibid., p. 154.
54 Clifford, Mixed Feelings, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Think-
ing and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998), p. 362.
587
 COSMOPOLITAN MODERNISMS
Plates

Affandi Uzo Egonu Uche Okeke Gazbia Sirry

Fateh Al-Moudarres Ibrahim El Salahi Sadequain Francis Newton Souza
Siah Armajani Erol (Erol Akyavas) Jewad Selim Mark Tobey
Alexander Skunder Boghossian Eva Hesse Twins Seven Seven Susanne Wenger
Frank Bowling Jacob Lawrence Anwar Jalal Shemza Ramss Younan
Avinash Chandra Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko Ahmed Shibrain Charles Hossein Zenderoudi
242
243

Uche Okeke
Francis Newton Souza
Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead)
1961 Degenerates
oil on board 1957
National Museum of African Art, oil on board
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Aicon Gallery, New York

591
244

245

Twins Seven Seven Alexander Skunder Boghossian

Devil's Dog Night Flight of Dread and Delight
1964 1964
ink and gouache on paper oil on canvas with collage
Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

593
Susanne Wenger
Yemoja
1958
batik
Neue Galerie Graz

246

595
 248

247

Ibrahim El Salahi Uzo Egonu

Vision of the Tomb Mask with Musical Instruments
1965 1963
oil on canvas oil on canvas
The Africa Center, New York Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

597
249

250

Gazbia Sirry Fateh Al-Moudarres

The Fortune Teller Icon of Moudarres
1959 1962
oil on canvas oil and gold leaf on canvas
Collection of the Artist, Cairo Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah

599
251

252

Jewad Selim Affandi

Baghdadiat Mexico, Mother and Child
1956 1962
mixed media on hardboard oil on canvas
QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha Museum Lippo, Jakarta

601
 Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko
Composition (on a White Background)
Late 1950s
oil on canvas
The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg

253

603
254

255

Ibrahim El Salahi Mark Tobey

The Prayer Verso i Bianchi (Towards the Whites)
1960 1957
oil on Masonite tempera on paper
Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin

605
 257

256

Ahmed Shibrain Erol (Erol Akyavas)

Untitled The Glory of the Kings
1963 c. 1959
ink on paper oil on canvas
Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth The Museum of Modern Art, New York

607
258

259

Siah Armajani Anwar Jalal Shemza

Shirt #1 The Fable
1958 1962
cloth, pencil, ink, wood oil on hand dyed cloth on mountboard
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York The Estate of Anwar Jalal Schemza, London

609
260

261
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi Ramss Younan
The Sun and the Lion Arabesques
1960 1961
ink, watercolor and gold paint on paper mounted on board oil on board
Grey Art Gallery. New York May and Adel Youssry Khedr Collection, Cairo

611
262
263

Sadequain Sadequain
Seascape with Three Boats Cactus
20th century 1960
oil on wood oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Mr. Taimur Hassan c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

613
 Frank Bowling Frank Bowling
Swan 1 Swan II
1964 1964
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Private Collection Collection of the Artist, London

264 265

615
266 267

Eva Hesse Eva Hesse

Untitled (Study for or after "Legs of a Walking Ball") Untitled
1965 1965
ink and gouache on paper ink and gouache on paper
Private Collection, Munich Museum Wiesbaden

617
 Gustav Metzger
Drawings
194559/60
different materials on paper
Collection of the Artist

268

619
 270

269

Avinash Chandra Jacob Lawrence

Early Figures Four Sheep
1961 1964
oil on board gouache on paper
Leicestershire County Council, Artworks Collection Andrew and Ann Dintenfass

621
 7
Section Introduction
Galia Bar Or
Atreyee Gupta
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Plates

NATIONS SEEKING
FORM

N
ationalism was a word in constant motion during the
postwar period. Artists in the United States and Europe
often declined to align themselves with their national
governments, which had proven corrupt and militaristic.
Nationalism had a different valence, though, for artists in countries that had
newly struggled for and won independencesuch as China, Cuba, India and
Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Nigeria, the Philippines, Senegal, South
Africa, and Thailandand these artists sought cultural forms to shape
new national identities. Nigerian artists, for example, played institutional
roles, acting on their commitment to the importance of culture in esta-
blishing identity. There was a struggle to define what was truly national in
regional identities, apparent, for example, in the debate between advoca-
NATIONS SEEKING FORM tes of discarding cultural tradition, in the effort to become both indepen-
dent and modern, and artists who saw indigenous identity as central to a
new nationhood. In many countries the choice would be described as one
of East versus West, with the West representing Europe, the future, educa-
tion, and technological progress and the East representing indigenous
knowledge, non-Western identity, the past, and tradition. How, then, to sup-
port locally distinctive cultural self-confidence? Artists in the Progressive
Artists Group that flourished in India in the years after independence in 1947
found different solutions, including international exhibitions and local institu-
tion-building. In the United States, on the other hand, artists involved with
the civil rights movement challenged racially biased notions of American
identity, although their work could also take on a nationalist coloration.

Introduction 625
 A
t first glance Naftali Bezems drawing Untitled
of 1952 (fig. 1) looks like a placard promoting
the New Man. Its compositional structure
recalls the Communist symbol, except that
neither a hammer nor a sickle but a pickaxe is
clasped like a vise by the figures hand, while
his bare arm is tattooed with a number, send-
ing us to a reversal of this compact drawings
apparent gestalt and to a different context for its urgency. The work-
ers pose frames a singular face, whose bushy eyebrows, wide-open,
inward-gazing eyes, a long gash along the cheek at the corner of the
CHANNELS FOR DEMOCRATIC
ITERATION
Galia Bar Or
Fig. 1. Naftali Bezem. Untitled. 1952. Charcoal on paper, 40.556 cm.
Collection of the Artist
mouth, and swollen under-eye bags signify a traumatic time concurrent
with the time of the New Man. This is a refugee, a survivora multifac-
eted portrait in the role of a worker, strained, desperate, yet resolute and
self-conscious. Bezem, born in 1924 in Essen, Germany, had arrived in
Palestine at the age of fifteen. His parents and family had been murdered
in Auschwitz.
This essay thus opens with a first-person-plural statement of the
political (we refugees), a move that Hannah Arendt followed precisely
in her own seminal article We Refugees, written in 1943, and that she
acutely problematized in her own opening sentence by emphasizing an
7. Nations Seeking Form
antinomy between the articles title and its subject: In the first place we
don't like to be called refugees. She added later, The less we are free to
decide who we are or to live as we like, the more we try to put up a front, to
hide the facts, and to play roles.1 My choice of this drawing was determined
by the gaze that it casts on the problematic present moment of 2016, in
Israel, in the Middle East, and in the world as a whole. This picture of a past
seems to gleam into the picture of the present, giving it a new context, at
the center of which is the incompatibility that Arendt posited behind the
charged connection between memory-building and society-building.
The portrait, as noted, was drawn in 1952four years after the cre-
ation of the State of Israel, established in part as a solution to the refugee
crisis created by World War II. A decade earlier, with the triad of state,
territory, and nationality offering no solution to wartime refugees, most
of the democratic countries had closed their gates, abandoning outsid-
ers to concentration camps and to deathand signifying the collapse, at
a time of urgent need, of the French Revolutions legacy of human rights.
In Bezems drawing, beneath his role as a worker in a new society, the
refugee/survivor component asserts an inviolable ethical obligation that
challenges the representational space of the sovereign state.
The time period reflected in the drawing is that of the worldwide refu-
gee experience following World War II, particularly the displaced-persons
Galia Bar Or 627
camps and population transfers in many of the countries of Europe. In
the Middle East, too, the ArabIsraeli War of 1948 (actually November
1947March 1949) and the establishment of the State of Israel had turned
hundreds of thousands of Arabs into refugees who would become part
of a distinct nation among the Arab nations; and 1.2 million Jewish refu-
gees, half of them survivors of the Holocaust and half of them from Arab
countries, were on their way to Israel, to become part of a separate nation
among the Jewish dispersions. The presence of refugees on a large scale
is a defining characteristic of the Israeli situation, over and above what is
happening in Europe today. In the course of just a few years, refugees from
Europe and the Arab countries tripled the Jewish population of the region,
producing a profound demographic change. Against the threat of chaos,
and with a statist melting-pot idea in mind, David Ben-Gurion, Israels first
prime minister, adopted a state-centered policy oriented to the West.
Bezems drawing proposes a problematization of a sovereign
national identity and represents the beginnings of an art critical of
constitutive contradictions during the early years of the state. Does
the drawing propose a class identity that takes precedence over a
state-citizen identity? In the same year, Bezem completed a large paint-
ing that would become iconic: To the Aid of the Seamen, relating to the
Seamens Revolt in the port of Haifa, a strike that received extensive
support on the left and among kibbutzim in the area. The strike was
directed against Mapai, the political party dominant in both the govern-
ment and the Histadrut (the General Federation of Labour in Israel).
In a role unusual for a trade union organization, the Histadrut owned
major branches of the states economy, including the shipping company.
Bezems complex image of a man who is both a worker and a refu-
gee/survivor also problematizes statist national identity: refugees in a
new country are expected to forget their former allegiance and to become
patriots. As Arendt poignantly noted in 1943, writing as a refugee in the
United States, no one wants to hear about refugees, concentration camps,
and death.2 This was also the case in Israel, although the nations status as
a land of refuge had been the principal rationale for its establishment.
Almost all of its artists were refugees and new immigrants themselves,
having arrived after the states establishment or not much earlier.
At about the same time that Bezem drew this portrait, Yosef
Zaritsky, leader of the New Horizons (Ofakim Hadashim) artists group,
painted Yehiam (1952; plate 282). Most of the New Horizons painters
barely engaged with the subjects of the refugees or the transit camps for
immigrants, a subject identified instead with critical, social, figurative
art. This may seem surprising, since the first New Horizons exhibition,
held at the Tel Aviv Museum in 1948, was identified with the character of
the state, being seen as the dominant representative of Israeli identity.
Yet the New Horizons artists hardly related either to the refugee status,
a major aspect of consciousness in the region at the time, or to the sub-
jects of Judaism, war, bereavement, loss, national revival, pioneering,
and so on.
Zaritskys generation, which had arrived in Palestine in the 1920s
(many of them refugees from the infamous pogroms carried out while
628 7. Nations Seeking Form
Symon Petliura was a leader in Ukraine), had been exposed to the winds
of the Russian Revolution, believed in universal values, and was largely
opposed to the style and themes of the Bezalel Art School, the nation-
al art school established in Jerusalem in 1906. Bezalel art may be seen
as serving a Zionist secularization of collective and religious patterns
in Jewish thoughtthe idealization of ancient landscapes and heroes,
the evocation of the cyclical mythic substructure of Jewish memory,
the recurrent cycle of persecutions and divine redemptions. The figure
of the eternal Jewish exile (which stems from and challenges an anti-
Semitic myth) found powerful expression in a large iconic painting
of 1899 by Shmuel Hirschenberg that hung in the foyer of the Bezalel
Museum.3 For the New Horizons artists, on the other hand, the dia-
logue with the Jewish fate and with exile was a matter of the past.
They believed in a new society based on equality, and many were
founders of kibbutzim, laying the social, cultural, and institutional
foundations for a modern regional orientation. They strove for an art
relating to intimate matters of humanity and society and conducting a
dialogue with contemporary currents of the time. This local art would
aspire first and foremost to be normal; it seeks to stand in a sound
relation to the art of the world.4
Zaritsky painted Yehiam on a large sheet of unsized rough burlap,
leaving the margins bare and using rapid, drawinglike brushstrokes
and a free, seemingly unmediated touch. It shows the Yehiam kib-
butz, located near the Lebanon border and next to an Ottoman-era
fort, as a force of life in the shadow of charged historical events. The
pair of brown horses, the mother-and child-silhouette in the center,
the red sign of the artists hand (above), and the expanse of green fuse
the power of art with the vital momentum of life in the kibbutz and
in nature. This nation-building landscape contains a veiled allusion to
contemporary experience: Kibbutz Yehiam had become a symbol in
the 1948 war, and most of its founders, its fighters, were Holocaust sur-
vivors from Hungary who had only recently arrived in Israel. But Zarit-
skys abstract art eschewed programmatic idealization, expressionism,
dramatization, and messianic mythization. The New Horizons artists
emphasized modernism, universalism, local art, and national
distinctiveness, and sought inspiration not only from the West but
also from the East (in color, scale, structure, and the distinctiveness
of the local light).
Concurrently with the abstractionists, political artists were also Fig. 2. Yosl Bergner. Road Builders. 1952. Oil on board, 3744 cm.
Private Collection
active in the 1950s, among them Ruth Schloss, who painted refugees in
transit camps (plate 283) and whose subjects included social conflicts
and the expropriation of Arab lands. For these socially directed figura-
tive artists, confrontation with the refugee situation was inseparable
from remaining open and critically alert to the local human and politi-
cal spectrum. They believed in fraternity between Israelis and Arabs but
seldom engaged with the Nakba, the Palestinian exodus during the 1948
war, or with Palestinian refugees, a constitutive subject in Israeli reality
that found powerful expression in works by Palestinian artists such as
Ismail Shammout (plates 286, 287).
Galia Bar Or 629
 Paintings of refugees did emerge outside the canonical art scene,
however, for example Yosl Bergners Road Builders (1952; fig. 2). While
Schloss and Bezem were born in Germany and in their youths had stud-
ied at the Bezalel school under Mordecai Ardon, a student of the Bau-
haus, Bergner had grown up in Jewish Warsaw, in a home suffused with
Yiddish literature. He made this workshowing a group of refugees,
from both Yemen and Europe, building a roadsoon after his arrival in
Israel. The subject was a legitimate one in left-wing circles, but the paint-
ings style was influenced by the Jewish artists of the School of Parisex-
pressionistic artists such as Emmanuel Man-Katz and Chaim Soutine,
for exampleand, to insiders, echoed the unpopular national art of the
Fig. 3. Moshe Kupferman. Untitled. 1964. Oil on canvas, 13095 cm.
Collection of the Artist
Bezalel Academy. It therefore found no local interpretative context. In
retrospect, the painting arouses interest in its representation of a Yemeni
refugee as a road-building worker, a Yemenite pioneer, a depiction that
challenges local memories of the road-building pioneers of the 1920s as
primarily immigrants from Eastern Europe.
During and after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, interest
revived in components of Jewish identity that had been suppressed in
the nation-building melting pot project: Judaism, the Holocaust, the
Diaspora. Israels Ministry of Education, for example, founded a Center
for the Cultivation of Jewish Consciousness. Abstract and avant-garde
artists now felt pressure from both above and below. In Israel and
630 7. Nations Seeking Form
elsewhere during that decade, the dominant model of leading cultural
figures underwent a change, with the gradual fading of the generation
that had seen avant-garde art as an inseparable part of building a free and
democratic society after the era of fascism.
The New Horizons artists remained active during this period, joining
up with a younger avant-garde generation and succeeding in maintaining
their exposure and recognition. Toward the end of the century, however,
the art discourse in Israel gradually changed, and New Horizons began
to be criticized on the ground that its abstract modernism had seemingly
veiled the conflictual reality of the Holocaust, social struggle, and Arab and
Jewish refugees. Indeed, Israeli art underwent a Copernican revolution:
in the spirit of postmodern critical cultural discourse, modern art was
now no longer seen as an alternative space emancipated from the grip of
political state ideologism, but as an art that served and justified the nation
state, its class and other demarcations, and its injustices. This period saw
renewed discussion of the social art of the 1950s, most of whose artists
had already dispersed by the end of the states first decadesome moved
abroad, others gradually changed and were no longer active in the so-
cial field. Despite this turn in the discourse, young artists such as Igael
Tumarkin and Moshe Kupferman who had been fostered by New Horizons,
and who had joined with that group at its last exhibition (at the Ein Harod
Museum in 1963), continued to inspire later generations in Israel.
Kupferman (born in 1926) had been among the founders of
Kibbutz Lohamei HaGhettaot (Ghetto fighters kibbutz), which was
established by survivors of the Holocaust and of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising. He considered his encounter with Zaritsky (18911985) a
second birth,5 but developed a very different kind of art, replacing the
idea of the painting as a window (a composition with illusionistic depth)
with that of the painting as a wall or blocked panel (fig. 3). Kupferman de-
scribed Zaritsky as an optimist, a pioneer continuing to paint beautiful
paintings as though hed been charged with a different responsibility.6
His own responsibility, he said, was consciousness of loss, and the feel-
ing that it is impossible to advance without bumping into something.7
Kupfermans is a performative painting that accumulates signs of
time, sediment after sediment. It was not until 1999 that he produced
paintings relating explicitly to the Holocaust, a series dedicated to the
Museum of the Child in the Ghetto Fighters Museum in his kibbutz.
In the present exhibition, the section Nations Seeking Form, in
addition to its reference to colonialism, inversely echoes the stateless
Arendts resolute refusal of a new national identity, an unpopular op-
tion for the refugee as a political subject. Kupferman, also skeptical,
turned after the war to the kibbutz and to art. His work from 1964 on-
ward was made after the end of a period when national vitality involved
a project of solidarity, justice, and equality. Now a new phase was re-
quired, a transformation of nationalism. If there was ever a chance
for that, it was blocked by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip in 1967 and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. From
a current perspective, with the burgeoning of a mythic, indeed messi-
anic discourse of victimhood that gives backing to the ongoing occu-
pation and to the blocking of a political horizon, the nexus of Arendt,
Bezem, and Kupferman is alive and kicking. For all its failings, it poses
the challenge of a postnational option and the assimilation of a post-
Zionist discourse among the Arab and Jewish communities (the call
for which is growing nowadays)a reinterpretation of collective mem-
ory and a reactivation of integrative deep structures that allow for the
other. For all its blind spots, the art scene in Israel has always subverted
nationalistic banalization via the complexity of memory, provoking
alternative thinking. In this sense the community of artists, histori-
ans, sociologists, and others still presents, perhaps against the odds,
significant channels for democratic iteration.
Translated from Hebrew by Richard Flantz
1 Hanna Arendt, We Refugees, in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile
(London and Boston: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 110, 115.
2 Ibid., p. 111.
3 The Bezalel generation had experienced harsh anti-Semitism following the Dreyfus Affair
in France and the pogroms in Russia in the early twentieth century.
4 Eugen Kolb, Where We Stand, Itim, September 14, 1947 (in Hebrew).
5 See Benjamin Harshav, Moshe Kupferman, in Moshe Kupferman: The Rift in Time (Tel
Aviv: Givon Art Gallery, 2000), p. 125.
6 Moshe Kupferman, Homage to Stematsky, Studio 15 (October 1990): 10 (in Hebrew).
7 Moshe Kupferman in a Conversation with Stuart Klawans, 1995, in Kupferman, In Addition
to the Expected, ed. Galia Bar Or (Ein Harod: Mishkan Museum of Art, 2012), p. 12 (in Hebrew).
Galia Bar Or 631

I
was staring at a news item that baffled me, wrote the nationalisms and internationalisms, and the complexity of related post-
African American author and mid-century civil-rights war cultural configurations. What in fact transpires when the nation
activist Richard Wright. I bent forward and read the item takes representational form?
a second time. Twenty-nine free and independent nations The nationan imagined cultural artifact, of courseoccupies a
of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, profoundly ambivalent place in relation to the nation-state, a sovereign
to discuss racialism and colonialism What was this? geopolitical entity that is governed through jurisprudence in the name
I scanned the list of nations involved I began a rapid
calculation of the population of the nations listed and,
when my total topped the billion mark, I stopped, pulled off my glasses
and tried to think. 1 The meeting in question was a gathering of leaders
and delegates of newly independent Asian and African nations in Band-
ung in the summer of 1955. Wright continues, And what had these na-
tions in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but their past relationship
to the Western world This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind
of judgment upon that Western world!2
Wrights use of the word judgment in this instance was perhaps
not entirely misplaced. Indeed, he may have intuitively understood the
Bandung Conference as a soliloquy addressed to Western imperialism.
The solidarities forged in Bandung eventually led to the formalization of
the Non-Aligned Movement under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru of
India, Sukarno of Indonesia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Josip Broz
Tito of Yugoslavia, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The inclusion first of

AFTER BANDUNG: TRANSACTING THE the former Yugoslavia in 1961 and subsequently of parts of Latin Ameri-
ca significantly expanded the horizon of political affinities that had been

NATION IN A POSTCOLONIAL WORLD imagined and instituted at the Bandung meeting.

Wright, however, was quick to see beyond the immediate political
Atreyee Gupta implications of Bandung:

I called my wife and when she came into the living room I said to her:
Look here, twenty-nine nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in a
place called Bandung.
Why are they meeting?
Read this, I said, giving her the newspaper.
Why, thats the human race!
Exactly. And that is why I want to go.3

As an African American deeply invested in the postwar civil rights

movement in the United States, Wright perceived the Bandung Confer-
ence as an event whose vectors exceeded the geopolitical borders of the
twenty-nine participating nations.
Fig. 1. Maqbool Fida Husain. Between the Spider and the Lamp. 1956.
Indeed, Wrights initial reflections were not far off the mark. Despite Oil on board, 125229 cm. Estate of M.F. Husain, London

internal tensions, the political multilateralism inaugurated at Bandung

rendered a deep fissure in the monopoly of Westernism, not just over
the definition of internationalism but also in the discursive delineation
of postwar humanism. As such, the intellectual and artistic vectors of
this new humanism demand examination. But this, in itself, is not the
central concern of this essay. Rather, for us, the Bandung moment opens
up a portal, both within and outside of the nonaligned axis, to reflect on
the interrelatedness of the nation and the world, their attendant forms of
of a community to ensure internal economic and political stability and
a place in the international world order. The end of World War I ushered
in the League of Nations, making the nation-state, rather than the im-
perial dynasty, the legitimate international norm. With the conclusion
of World War II and the subsequent success of decolonization move-
ments, the nation-state tide reached full flood, in the words of Benedict
Anderson. 4 In the aftermath of the war, almost all nation-statesin both

7. Nations Seeking Form Atreyee Gupta 633

 the capitalist and the socialist blocs and across the nonaligned worlds
were responding to the demands of their own political constituencies
for a more robust economy, social welfare, public infrastructure sys-
tems, and postwar reconstruction programs. This was the basis for the
global rise of what has been described as developmental nationalism, a
particular form of nationalism that internalized an ideology of modern-
ization in order to attain developmental goals within a relatively short
timeframe. As such, developmental nationalism assumed different
shapes and proportions in dispersed parts of the world. In essence, how-
ever, it remained everywhere closely aligned with the operations of the
state. Allied with the nation-state, developmental nationalism remained
dialectically linked to the idea of the nation as well. But nowhere was it
equivalent to the nation. The place of culture in relation to developmen-
tal nationalism and the nation-state remained equally nebulous.5
The United States, for instance, had already begun to assess its place
in the postwar international world order even before the conclusion of
World War II, and made internationalism a priority. Among other things,
this included extending technological support and financial aid to devel-
oping countries in a bid to emerge as the most powerful nation-state in
the new world order. By and large, the dominant history of the art of the
United States corresponded to this larger political schema. Thus the dis-
cursive delineation of what we now recognize as American art shifted,
first from nationalism to internationalism, and then from international-
ism to universalism.
Culturally, however, as Serge Guilbaut writes, The situation was
somewhat paradoxical. In order to be international and to distinguish
their work from work done in the Parisian tradition, and forge a new
aesthetic, the younger painters were forced to emphasize the specif-
ically American character of their work.6 Guilbauts reference here, of
course, is to the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, such as Jack-
son Pollock, but the basic argument could be extended to Abstract Ex-
pressionisms antithesis, Pop art, and to artists such as Andy Warhol and
Jasper Johns. Yet here too was an uncertain traction between nationalism
and internationalism, and between internationalism and universalism.
While in the early 1960s, Katy Siegel writes, Pop was taken as signify-
ing both America and capitalism, articulating the peculiar affinity
of the two, American art was subsequently described as increasingly
important, as if its Americanness was incidental both to its formation
and importance. 7
However, the dialogic tension between the nation, nationalism,
and the nation-state discernible in the American context did not find
conceptual correspondence in the newly independent countries of Asia
and Africa, where artistic and intellectual impulses remained ground-
ed not only in the materiality of practice and the language of form but
also in the aspiration for political sovereignty. The nationalist political
movement in India, for instance, became articulated as a demand for
Fig. 2. Gazbia Sirry. A Black American. 1965. Oil on canvas, 10073 cm.
Gezira Center for Modern Art, Cairo
state power fairly early in the anticolonial struggle, under the rationale
that India as a nation required a self-governing nation-state. That is, The
nation-state was immanent in the very hegemonic project of imagining
634 7. Nations Seeking Form Atreyee Gupta
and normalizing a national community, as Gyan Prakash puts it. 8 Thus
the obdurate demand for sovereignty, here tantamount to the demand
for a nation-state, was already constellated as a demand for a postcolo-
nial modernity unique to both the cultural entity called the nation and
the legislative entity called the nation-state. If the nation was primordial,
the nation-state was but its modern manifestation. If the nations culture
was primordial, then this primordial tradition too had to be melded with
modern forms. Representational tactics then necessitated a funambu-
list negotiation of traditional forms with a modernist tenor. That Indian
artists and intellectuals pursued this with much acumen and agility is
demonstrated in Maqbool Fida Husains 1956 Between the Spider and the
Lamp, a painting that has often been described as a metaphor for mod-
ern India (fig. 1).9
The canvas is divided into three broad chromatic sections upon
which is placed a tightly composed figural tableau, each schematic figure
distinctive yet situated squarely in a certain common geographic ter-
rain. We may call this terrain the nation. The figures seem to be drawn
from both fifth-century classical sculptural traditions and the playful
forms internal to the contemporaneous vernacular cultures of urban
and rural India. The chromatic division too is reminiscent of preco-
lonial manuscript paintings. Husain, it would seem, has invented an
iconography that recovers available cultural resources to activate a
distinctively modernist impulse. The terse pull between the lamp in
the upper register and the spider in the bottom thus cryptically alludes
to two polesthe illumination of progress and the intractable pull of
the pastthat frame Indias coming into being as a sovereign modern
nation-state. Yet even as the line of text in the top register of the paint-
ing appears to invaginate the artists virtuosity within a certain con-
ception of ethnic origins, the juxtaposition of idiosyncratic symbols
with a random selection of Devanagari alphabets creates an anagram
that only the artist can decode.
The Indian artists perceptual nativism, then, was neither a simple
return to autochthonous roots nor purely a sign of recursive national-
ism. What of the dark-skinned figure in starkly white attire, reminiscent
as much of the premodern Indic sculpture that adorns the walls of tem-
ples as of Egyptian figural imagery of the pharaonic periods, which had
captured the artists imagination during a 1953 trip to Egypt? How could
art historians have missed such a deliberate incursion of the image of
the otheran emblematic figure from a different ethnographic narrative
of originsin a now celebrated allegory of the modern nation? Husain
said of his first experience of Egypt, For the next few years, I conscious-
ly tried to incorporate the two-dimensional structure of Egyptian art in
my paintingsthe desensualized, primal feminine form. 10 He was not
the only artist to do so in the 1950s: an Indian artist who had succeeded
in that regard was Mohan Samant, Husain notes.11 Does the intrusion
of the figure of the other then open up the imagination of the sovereign
nation to what lies outside its geopolitical borders? What transpires when
the nation achieves representational form in a mode that is fundamen-
tally transnational?
635
 Surely is it of some relevance to us that this imaginative transgres- Nassers military regime, however, quickly exhausted the initial eu- We seem to have come full circle. The utopian political potential
sion occurred, quietly but deliberately, in the immediate aftermath of phoria of nationhood. By the 1960s, Sirrys oeuvre too changed: It is of Bandung disperses in the hands of governing nation-states. Yet the odd
that commanding gathering of the newly independent nations of Asia almost as if the celebratory formdespite the obvious willful deskill- palimpsest of desires, objectives, and undertakings that we have tracked
and Africa in Bandung? Wright said of that same gathering, I felt I had ing in her drawing of human figuresearlier in the decade had turned across discrete parts of the world circuitously returns us to the initial
12
to go that meeting; I felt that I could understand it. By this time Wright to a more sober, more meditative, and in some sense more labored promise of the Bandung moment. We are perhaps all too accustomed to
had embraced voluntary exile in Paris, but he remained committed to paint application and more symbolic figural representation, as Chika thinking in terms of national cultures: we script art histories that follow
the African American struggle. To be sure, his passion for an emergent Okeke-Agulu writes .15 the demarcations of national cartographies, we speak in terms of postwar
transnational, antiimperialist, and antiracist struggle was not a sup- But now Sirry amplified the iconography of the disenfranchised American art, Egyptian art, or Indian art. Against this grain, Bandung
plement for his investment in the concomitant fight against racism in Egyptian citizen into a universal figure symbolizing the struggle for offers a passage, as it were, into a different ideation of the nation in rep-
the United States. Rather, he linked his global interests with the black sovereignty as such. Take, for instance, the 1965 painting A Black Amer- resentation, one that brings into sharp focus creative transactions in the
American vernacular in a number of ways. This connection is established, ican (fig. 2), which she completed during a visit to California in the mid- political and cultural vocabulary of solidarities outside the nation-state.
for example, in the humorous dis- 1960s. This was one of the first Often, such transactions precipitated an explicitly transnational politics,
cussion of the color of interplan- paintings in which the African as in the case of Wright or of Sirrys Black American. Equally often, such
etary travellers that appears at the American body appeared in her maneuvers pressed against the boundaries of the nation-state, as in Hu-
beginning of The Outsider, as Paul work. Compositionally, though, sains Between the Spider and the Lamp. Without doubt, such creative naviga-
13
Gilroy has pointed out. she referred to an earlier work, tions are constitutive of what we conventionally mean when we invoke the
The Non-Aligned Movement the 1961 painting Martyr. Like the figure of the nation in relation to representation. But they cannot be easily
did not articulate a political iden- African American figure, the folded into art historys established narratives of postwar art, as they fun-
tity common to all participating martyr is placed on a ground un- damentally rupture the folds of national art histories. Thinking in terms
nations. Nor did it seek an eco- marked except for the presence of of Bandung, then, demands a constant alertness to such ruptures so that
nomic and political philosophy a single tree, its branches magnif- the traces of the otherother ethnographic narratives, other solidarities,
distinct from that of capitalism or icently intertwined with a burn- the other that lies outside narratives propelled by the nation-statecan be
socialism. Even as the participat- ing sun. Unlike the 1965 painting, made present in the nation as it takes on conceptual form once again.
ing countries disagreed on sev- Martyr referred to the suppression
eral accounts, they concurred in of dissent under Nassers military
their opposition to imperialism in rule. With A Black American, a na- 1 Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company,
any form, in any part of the world. tional iconography of dissent was 1956), p. 11.
2 Ibid., p. 12.
Consequently, despite whatever transposed onto a global canvas 3 Ibid., p. 14.
paucity the Bandung moment may to reference the African American 4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

have had as a political philosophy,
it nevertheless laid the ground-
work for the global emergence of a
critical, postcolonial, antiimperial,
intellectual ethic. Wrights interest
in Bandung can be explicated with-
in this framework. In retrospect, it
would appear that Husain too was Fig. 3. Jack Whitten. Hide and Seek. 1964. Acrylic on canvas, 71.560.7 cm.
responding to this imperative in In-
dia, as was his contemporary Gaz-
bia Sirry in Egypt.
Like Husains, Sirrys early career coincided with the nations
coming to sovereignty under a modernist political leader, in Egypts
case Nasser. Sirry was a member of the Group of Modern Art, which
sought to articulate a modernist form in dialogue with the priorities of
postrevolutionary Egypt. Thus, in keeping with Nassers international-
ist civilizational aspirations, her early works combined the visual lan-
guage of the Paris avant-garde with Arabic forms and the art of ancient
Egypt, ciphering the nations pharaonic, Arabic, African, and colonial
14
legacies into the nation-states present. The brutal machinations of
struggle for civil rights. Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 113.
5 On developmental nationalism and its cultural effects in developing economies see Sumit
In the United States, Sarkar, Nationalism and Poverty: Discourses of Development and Culture in 20th-century
the end of World War II had not India, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 42945. Eric Hobsbawm too argues for a
distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms in the European context; see Hobsbawm,
been accompanied by the de-
Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
mise of Jim Crow laws, as many versity Press, 1990).
had hoped. In the 1960s, several 6 Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Free-
dom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 175.
artistsincluding Jack Whitten,
7 Katy Siegel, Since 45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art (London: Reaktion
whose work incorporated mate- Books, 2011), p. 12.
Courtesy Jack Whitten Studio rial composites of the civil rights 8 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 202.
movementwould address the
9 Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives (New Delhi: Oxford
nation-states selective endowment of civil liberties. Although articu- University Press, 2001), p. 105.
lated as a form of nationalism, the African American question never- 10 Maqbool Fida Husain, quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M.F.
Husain (New Delhi: Indus, 1994), p. 92.
theless came under the purview of the House Un-American Activities
11 Ibid.
Committee, in part owing to perceived links with a range of transna- 12 Wright, The Color Curtain, p. 14.
tional arrangements.16 These included the Non-Aligned Movement, 13 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
2012), p. 148.
whose intellectual armature connected the African American move- 14 See Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art: 19102003 (Cairo: The American University of
ment with analogous struggles in Asia and Africa. Yet the right to dis- Cairo Press, 2005), pp. 8588.
sent was under siege in several parts of the nonaligned world, including 15 Chika Okeke-Agulu, Politics by Other Means: Two Egyptian Artists, Gazbia Sirry and Ghada
Amer, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 6, no. 2 (2006): 11749, 133.
Egypt. Through iconography, the Egyptian artist then enunciated an 16 See Brenda Gayle Plummer, In Search of Power: African Americans in the Era of Decoloni-
explicitly transnational politics of equality against all odds. zation, 19561974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 222.

636 7. Nations Seeking Form Atreyee Gupta 637

 A
t the Second Congress of Black Writers and about postcolonial literatures critical relationship with both Western
Artists, in Rome in 1959, the Martinican phi- traditions and African cultures was aligned with the ideas and work of
losopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon emerging artists in different parts of the continentartists simultane-
presented his most vehement critique of ously inspired by the postwar rhetoric and practice of independence
Negritude, the race-affirming literary move- and national liberation and committed to the invention of new forms.
ment founded by francophone writers based Yet because his vision of revolutionary national culture in Africa only
in Paris in the 1930s. Fanons speech, per- allowed for radical literature and art aimed at raising mass national con-
haps the most controversial at the event, was sciousness, Fanon missed the ideological significance of the artistic and
historic and timely, for it gave voice to a new generation of African and
African-diasporic intellectuals that had begun to emerge out of the long
shadows of Negritudes racial discourse and aesthetics. Motivated by
the gathering postwar movements for African political decolonization,
Fanon declared, in one of his most memorable statements, that each
generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it,
or betray it.1 At the Rome congress and in his previous work he left no
doubt of his conviction that the mission for the postwar generation of
Africans was revolutionary decolonization, a process and task that the
people of Algeria had begun and to which he committed his time as both
a psychiatrist and a political theorist.2
Not only was Fanon convinced of the crucial role culture must play in
national liberation, he saw political independence as incomplete if the bat-

FANON, NATIONAL CULTURE, tle for decolonization was not also won on the terrain of culture and cul-
tural production. In other words, for Fanon, culture was both instrument

AND THE POLITICS OF FORM and object of the struggle for independence. His critique of the literature
and ideology of Negritude and his argument for a national culture reso-

IN POSTWAR AFRICA
Chika Okeke-Agulu
nated with postwar African artists whose work grappled both rigorously
and passionately with problems of art and culture, the nation, and political
sovereignty. Fanons national culture, I want to argue, in its broader sense
Fig. 1. Cover of the first edition of Frantz Fanon's Les Damns de la Terre
encompassed the postcolonial modernism of postwar African artists. (The Wretched of the Earth), 1961

Fanon argued that the new African intellectual and cultural elite
had to do three things: first, build on and transcend the important race-
based ideological work of the Negritude and pan-Africanism of the pre-
vious generation; second, shift the terrain of critical engagement from
the racial to the national, for every culture is first and foremost nation-
al; 3 and third, develop a truly national culture the legitimacy of which
would depend on the extent to which it catalyzed and participated in
the liberation struggle. What is clear from the work of young postwar
African modernists is that while they were for the most part in agree-
ment with Fanons first two propositions, they all but sidestepped his
instrumentalist understanding of national culture, and this is primarily
because, in various ways, they were simultaneously sympathetic to the
legacies of the modernist avant-garde yet, because of their experiences
of colonialism, engaged in the politics of form. As a result, my account
of the work of exemplary artists of this period will both demonstrate the
timeliness of Fanons intervention at the Rome congress and testify to
the limitations of his understanding of progressive arts formal, concep-
tual, and ideological possibilities in the era of African decolonization.
While Fanons analysis of national culture focuses on literature, and
while his familiarity with modern African art is suspect, his argument
literary modernists who were engaged in the politics of form.4 Moreover,
his insistence on the instrumentality of national culturethat it must
primarily serve as a catalyst for mass political action, utopian as such
claims can be for the expressive artsinvolved a misunderstanding of
the significant work of writers and artists who, like him, were convinced
of art and cultures ideological imperative but unlike him knew that
popular action is only a part of a broader process of demolishing the
knowledge infrastructure upon which colonialism depended. That
is, the politics of form in which postwar African artists were engaged
extended the discursive horizon of Fanons theory of decolonized and
decolonizing national culture, although in ways that he himself might
not have appreciated at the time.
I do not suggest that Fanons writing on national culture influenced
the work of all of the young, ambitious African artists of the independence
generation. Rather, these artists, like Fanon, contemporaneously recog-
nized the momentousness of the national independence and liberation
movements and thus sought to imagine the role of art and culture in
the process of attaining political sovereigntybut also, and this is cru-
cial, how political sovereignty could catalyze the development of artistic

7. Nations Seeking Form Chika Okeke-Agulu 639

 forms expressive of the impending or newly attained postcolonial sub- spiral motif, or segments of itan Uli sign for the sacred python, itself
jectivity. The case of the Nigerian artist Uche Okeke and of his fellow the messenger of Ana, the Igbo earth goddess and guardian of crea-
members of the Art Society at the Nigerian College of Art, Science and tivity. Here Okeke laid claims both to the modernist penchant for for-
Technology, Zaria, is relevant here.5 mal invention and vigorous experimentation and to his Igbo/Nigerian
Six months after Fanon delivered his speech at the Rome congress, cultural heritage, without subordinating his artistic freedom to
Okeke, unaware of that event or of Fanons work and ideas, delivered either one.
the first of three anniversary speeches to the Art Society. 6 With politi- The approach of mining specific forms associated with Nigerian
cal independence less than a year away, and inspired by the work of Jos cultures, and subjecting them to modernist formal protocols and rheto-
Clemente Orozco and the Mexican modernists, Okeke warned against ric, is equally evident in the neo-archaic terra-cotta sculptures of Okekes
the danger of glorifying the past to the detriment of the future, empha- Art Society colleague Demas Nwoko, who not only used ancient Nok and
sizing instead the artists responsibility to the urgent task of establishing Ife terra-cotta as inspiration but also developed a firing technique based
what he called a national art schoolby which he referred not so much to on methods used by traditional potters in northern Nigeria. The mod-
a collective style as to a decolonized Nigerian art world and its enabling ernist vision expressed at Nigerias independence by Okeke, Nwoko, and
institutions. The making of this national school, he argued, would re- the Art Society was a marked departure from the work of the preceding
quire a paradoxical yet generative mix of the experimental rigor of the ar- generation, especially Ben Enwonwu, Nigerias best-known artist of the
tistic avant-garde and the ideological fervor of the cultural nationalists;
but it would also depend on the Nigerian artists readiness to draw as
much as possible from what we consider in our clear judgement to be the
cream of these influences, and wedding them to our native art culture.7
One year later, on the eve of Nigerias political independence from Brit-
ain, Okeke elaborated on this question of the postcolonial modernists
relationship with alien/European and native/Nigerian artistic traditions
by introducing a concept he called natural synthesis.8
Whereas in 1959 Okeke had invoked the revolutionary work of the
Mexican muralists, in the October 1960 speech he laid out his vision of
what he called a new art culture for independent Nigeria. That involved
establishing an ideological link between this national school of art and
the earlier work of the Negritude writers, along with the then popular
notion of African personality advanced by Nigerian and African
political nationalists of the postwar period. Between the texts of the
two speeches can be found the core of Okekes theory of postcolonial
modernism: commitment to the invention of new formal languages and
simultaneously to participation in the production of and identification
with a new, sovereign, postcolonial community. The formal and concep-
tual protocols of this modernism thus entailed a bifocal articulation of
the artists claim to creative freedom and artistic experimentation and
the deployment of the resulting work to fulfilling the equally important
role of building new postcolonial cultures and nations.9
The translation of Okekes natural-synthesis theory to his studio
practice, sometime in 1962, saw him transform his work through a rig-
orous experimentation with the linear lyricism of the Uli body drawing Fig. 3. Ibrahim El Salahi. They Always Appear #4.
and mural art of the Igbo people of Nigeria (fig. 2). Within the span of one 196465. Oil on canvas, 45.730.5 cm. Newark Museum.
Purchase 2014 Contemporary Art Society of Great Britain
year, he moved from a fascination with the color and expressive sensi- Fund. Acc. n. 2014.34

bilities of fauvism and post-Cubist figural stylization to an emphasis

Fig. 2. Uche Okeke. Five Heads. 1962. Ink on paper,
1914 cm. Newark Museum. The Simon Ottenberg
Collection, gift to the Newark Museum, 2012.
Acc. n. 2012.38.42.1-3
on organic, gestural lines, abstract and symbolic forms, and negative/
positive space, and to the creation of compositions that might well be
visual equivalences of the lyric dance movement of the Igbo. This radi-
cal shift testifies to the depth of his internalization of the Uli aesthetic,
and indeed this new work was dominated by the polysemic agwo.lagwo.
postwar period.10 Enwonwu was a graduate of the Slade School of Fine
Art, at University College London, where he studied from 1944 to 1947.
On his return to Nigeria in the late 1940s, despite his appointment as
art adviser to the colonial government, he often criticized foreign influ-
ences on Nigerian art education and administration; in his own work,

640 7. Nations Seeking Form Chika Okeke-Agulu 641

his attraction to the Negritude of Lopold Senghor led to paintings and
sculptures of masks, masquerades, and dancing figures, an affirmation
of Senghors claim that the dance, masked or otherwise, is second nature
to black Africans. If Enwonwu gave visual form to the racial aesthetic of
Negritude in ways unmatched by any Nigerian or African artist of his
time, Okeke, Nwoko, and the Art Society, representative of the genera-
tion that came of age in the independence decade, vivified and extended
Fanons notion of national culture as a form of political practice within
the context of decolonization.
Beyond Nigeria, Sudanese contemporaries of the Art Society at the
Khartoum Technical Institute, among them Ibrahim El Salahi, Ahmed
Shibrain, and other members of the so-called Khartoum School, asked
similar questions to which they devised remarkably analogous formal
and conceptual answers. Salahi, for instance, trained at the Slade like
Enwonwu, though a decade later. There, following studies of Impres-
sionism, he immersed himself in the prevailing progressive realism
associated with the painter and Slade professor William Coldstream
and, moreover, in the radical abstraction of Parisian modernists and
their British counterparts such as David Bomberg. Back in the newly
independent Sudan in 1957, and shaken by public rejection of his Slade-
era pictures, he rethought his formal language, compelled by the desire
to engage and communicate with his Sudanese audience. His next step
was to take up Arabic calligraphy. Fully aware of its sacred and ritual sig-
nificancehe was the son of a respected Islamic scholar and calligra-
pherSalahi experimented with it initially as a communicative medium
but soon and more significantly as a formal resource. Out of this raw cal-
ligraphic material he fashioned organic, abstract notations that when
reconstituted on the picture surface yielded highly stylized composi-
tions, with occasional passages of abstract patterns inspired by Nubian
and other Sudanese craftwork (fig. 3).
In Morocco, young artists led by Farid Belkahia trained in French
art academies only to return home set on upending the orientalist cur-
riculum of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca, which to them had be-
come an anachronistic vestige of French cultural colonialism. Drawing
on avant-garde sensibilities acquired in Europe, Belkahia, in his own
work and in the curriculum he established as the new director of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, pressed for a new national art and expressive
culture derived from imagery and techniques inspired by traditional
Moroccan crafts, Amazigh tifinagh scripts and occult signs, and Arabic
calligraphy. Similarly, Ahmed Cherkaoui, another leading modernist
who died shortly after returning to Morocco from France, developed
his own form of semantic abstraction that depended on his translation of
Amazigh imagery through pictorial protocols he learned from studying
the work of the European painters Paul Klee and Roger Bisire.
I had suggested earlier an apparent disjunction between Fanons
theory of national culturethat is, of culture as a weapon for revolu-
tionary action in the context of decolonizationand the work of post-
war artists who, like him, advocated a new national art and culture yet
were unwilling to surrender their individual, ardently modernist artistic
642 7. Nations Seeking Form
visions, as he might have wished. Moreover, their work, because it nei-
ther unmistakably declaimed the bare lives of the colonized masses nor
is saturated with stridently anticolonial messages, might qualify as what
Fanon called inert dregs of gratuitous actions.11 To Fanon, postcolo-
nial formal invention was justifiable only to the extent that it delivered
Fig. 4. Demas Nwoko. Nigeria in 1959: Colonial Officers. 1960.
Oil on canvas. Collection of the Artist.
effective revolutionary content. The artists, on the other hand, believed
that form itselfas languagewas a legitimate site of a decolonizing pol-
itics, and a ground for postcolonial aesthetics and ethics without which
it would be impossible to imagine or participate fully in the political and
discursive reinvention of national cultures after empire. Nevertheless, in
acknowledging what he described as scattered, valiant attempts to re-
animate the cultural dynamic, and to give fresh impulses to its themes,
its forms, and its tonalities,12 Fanon came close to recognizing the sig-
nificance of what was then a growing, continent-wide effort by postwar
artists, motivated by the rhetoric and spirit of national independence, to
decolonize the colonial cultural infrastructure and the imperial mod-
ernisms associated with it.
Chika Okeke-Agulu
1 Frantz Fanon, On National Culture, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 206.
2 Apart from Wretched of the Earth, other works of Fanons based on the Algerian experience
include Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1964) and A Dying Colonialism
(New York: Grove Press, 1965).
3 Frantz Fanon, On National Culture, p. 216.
4 The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe often told of a formative encounter with his English
teacher at University College, Ibadan, who first asserted that Achebes writing lacked form, then
later, without explanation, disavowed that assessment. This experience convinced Achebe that
form and ideology are intimately connected. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, was his way of
engaging in the politics of literary form. See Christa Clarke, Uche Okeke and Chinua Achebe:
Artist and Author in Conversation, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual
Culture 1 (July 2007): 14758.
5 See Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-
Century Nigeria (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), for a comprehensive account of
the work and ideas associated with Okeke and the Art Society in the 1950s and 60s.
6 For a fuller account of the Art Society see ibid., chapter 3.
7 Uche Okeke, Growth of an Idea, in Art in Development: A Nigerian Perspective (Nimo, Nigeria:
Documentation Centre, Asele Institute, and Minneapolis: African American Cultural Center, 1982), p. 1.
8 Okeke, Natural Synthesis, in ibid., p. 2.
9 In his study of the work of the playwright Wole Soyinka, the literary scholar Biodun Jeyifo
calls these two apparently contradictory aspects freedom (the writers identification with his
postcolonial community) and complexity (the unflinching commitment to formal experimen-
tation). See Jeyifo, Introduction, in Jeyifo, ed., Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and
Complexity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 922.
10 See Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist
(Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2008).
11 Fanon, On National Culture, p. 233.12. Ibid., p. 237.
12 Ibid., p. 237.
643
 NATIONS SEEKING FORM
Plates

Thomas Bayrle Daniel LaRue Johnson Larry Rivers Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
Melvin Edwards Krishen Khanna Ruth Schloss Andy Warhol
Inji Efflatoun Norman Lewis Ismail Shammout Jack Whitten
Ben Enwonwu Mawalan Marika Yohanan Simon Yosef Zaritsky
Raymond Hains Iba N'Diaye Mitchell Siporin
Robert Indiana Malangatana Valente Ngwenya Sindoedarsono Sudjojono
Jasper Johns Uche Okeke Emilio Vedova
271

272

Emilio Vedova
Europa 1950
Jasper Johns
194950 Flags
oil on canvas 1965
Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, oil on canvas with raised canvas
Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna di Ca'Pesaro, Venice Collection of the Artist

647
273

274

Robert Indiana Larry Rivers

The Confederacy Alabama The Last Civil War Veteran
1965 1961
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

649
275

276

Jack Whitten Norman Lewis

Birmingham Bonfire
1964 1962
aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking, and oil on plywood oil on canvas
Collection of Joel Wachs, New York The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

651
 Andy Warhol
Mustard Race Riot
1963
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection, Munich

277

653
278
279

Daniel LaRue Johnson

Melvin Edwards
Freedom Now, Number 1
196364 Mojo for 1404
pitch on canvas with Freedom Now button, broken doll, 1964
hacksaw, mousetrap, flexible tube, and wood welded steel
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Collection of the Artist

655
280 281

Melvin Edwards Melvin Edwards

His and Hers Texcali
1964 1965
welded steel welded steel
Collection of the Artist Collection of the Artist

657
 Yosef Zaritsky
Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz)
1951
oil on burlap mounted on canvas
Tel Aviv Museum of Art

282

659
 284

283

Ruth Schloss Mitchell Siporin

Maabarah (New Immigrants Camp) Endless Voyage
1953 1946
oil on canvas oil on canvas
Mishkan Lomanut, Museum of Art, Ein-Harod University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

661
 286

285
287

Yohanan Simon Ismail Shammout Ismail Shammout

Shabbat on the Kibbutz Beginning of the Tragedy A Sip of Water
1947 1953 1953
oil on canvas oil on canvas oil on canvas
Tel Aviv Museum of Art Private Collection Private Collection

663
 Iba Ndiaye
Tabaski, Sacrifice du Mouton (Tabaski, Sacrifice of the Sheep)
1963
oil on canvas
Collection Rpublique du Sngal

288

665
289

Ben Enwonwu
Going
1961
oil on canvas
University of Lagos

667
 291

292

290

Uche Okeke Inji Efflatoun Inji Efflatoun

Aba Revolt (Women's War) Trees Behind the Wall The Queue
1965 c. 1960 1960
oil on board oil on canvas on wood oil on canvas
Estate of the Artist, Nimo Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo

669
 293
Malangatana Valente Ngwenya
Untitled
1961
oil on canvas
Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth

671
294

295

Sindoedarsono Sudjojono
Pertemuan di Tjikampek yang Bersedjarah
Krishen Khanna (Historic Meeting in Tjikampek)
News of Gandhiji's Death 1964
1948 oil on canvas
oil on canvas Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in
Collection of Rathika Chopra & Rajan Anandan, New Delhi Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta

673
296

Mawalan Marika
Sydney from the Air
1963
natural pigments on bark
The National Museum of Australia, Canberra

675
 Thomas Bayrle
Kennedy in Berlin
1964
lithograph on cardboard
Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main

297

677
 299

298

Raymond Hains Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl

Paix en Algrie (Peace in Algeria) OUI Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs
1956 1958
decollaged posters on canvas ripped posters mounted on canvas
Collection Ginette Dufrne, Paris Private Collection

679
 8
Section Introduction
Jea Denegri
Walter Grasskamp
Anne Massey
Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner
Plates

NETWORKS, MEDIA &

COMMUNICATION

NETWORKS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION
A
t its conclusion, Postwar shifts the understanding of art engaged
with mass culture away from consumer goods, and the signs,
symbols, and logos that advertised them, and instead toward
the circulation, distribution, and communication of those
signs via technology and broadcast networks. Artists looked at represen
tation, particularly as it manifested a new, global capitalism; they also took
the airmail letter, radio, and television as subjects. The British artists in the
Independent Group were oriented toward popular cultures technological
aspects, from transistors to robots. The artists of the Fluxus movement and
others experimented with the new medium of broadcast television, hoping
to reach an audience beyond the art gallery. Communication also underlay
the systems theories of cybernetics, which appealed to an international ar
ray of artists rooted in a variety of aesthetic and political orientations. It had
particular appeal for artists seeking affinities across national boundaries.
The 1961 Nove Tendencije (New tendencies) exhibition in Zagreb, for example,
featured works by twenty-nine artists from Argentina, Austria, Brazil,
France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia; this new optical and
kinetic art sought to transmit information on a fundamental, physiological
wavelength, transcending the cultural specifics of language. All of these
artists sought an art adequate to a world conceived as a single entity: the
paradigm that dawned in the exhibitions introduction becomes conscious
and fully developed in its conclusion. The final section of Postwar, with its
focus on communication and circulation, conflict and control, serves as
a bookend to the shows beginning in the technical invention, epistemo
logical shift, and political reordering emblematized by the atomic bomb.
Introduction 683
 B
etween 1961 and 1973, a series of five interna
tional exhibitions were held in Zagreb, in what
was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia, under
the title Nove Tendencije (New Tendencies). The
idea was originally suggested by Almir Mavignier,
a German artist born in Brazil, and the shows
were organized by Zagrebs contemporary-
art museum, the Galerija suvremene umjet
nosti. With theoretical elaboration by the critics Matko Metrovi and
Radoslav Putar, the 1961 exhibition featured members of the international
artists groups ZERO, GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel), Gruppo
N, and Azimuth (Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni); a number of
individual artists from outside Yugoslavia; and two local artists, Julije
1
Knifer and Ivan Picelj. Nove tendencije 2 followed in 1963, Nova tendencija
3 in 1965, Tendencije 4 in 196869, and Tendencije 5 in 1973, with dozens of
artists participating from Europe
and farther afield.
Both artists and organizers
felt the need for a wide international
network that would connect not
ART IN THE NETWORK OF only their artistic but their ideo
logical positions. They were linked
TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIA AND by their interest in experiment
ing with new technology and by a
MASS COMMUNICATION:
leftist orientation that positioned
them against the domination of
the art market. It is important to
NEW TENDENCIES note that on the political stage
the establishment of these exhibi
Jea Denegri
tionsand especially of the first,
in 1961coincided with the emer
Fig. 1. Pierro Manzoni. Merda dartista n. 68 (Artist's Shit no. 68). 1961.
gence of the Non-Aligned Move Tin can and printed paper, 4.866 cm. Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan
ment, a global group of developing
nations with Yugoslavia as one of the founders. This is not to say that the
Nove Tendencije exhibitions fell under the patronage of any official state
politics. On the contrary, the exhibitions artists and organizers shared
a fundamental belief in international collaboration based on advanced
political positions and the use of new technologies, at the same time
respecting the ethical integrity of each participant. Indeed Nova
Tendencija 3, in 1965, organized in Yugoslavia while the country was a
member of the Non-Aligned Movement, included artists from both the
Soviet Union (Moscows Dvizheniye group) and the United States (the
Anonima group, from Cleveland)the first time such artists exhibited
together on the international art scene.
An article of Metrovis from 2010 unveils some previously un
known facts about the concept and organization of the Nove Tendencije
exhibition of 1961. In a letter to the author that year, Manzoni wrote that
he had sent three works to the exhibition: a tin can (Merda dartista, 1961;
fig. 1), a scroll from the Linee (Lines) series, and an Achrome painting, of
8. Networks, Media & Communication
which, he said, the line is more important than the painting.2 Manzoni
also voiced apprehension about Mavignier as the creator of the exhibi
tion concepta well-founded worry since Mavignier, in charge of choos
ing the works for the 1961 show, accepted and exhibited only the paint
ing. This history was long unknown in professional circles, but today it
is clear that this decision of Mavigniers had a far-reaching influence not
just on the thematic physiognomy of the first Nove Tendencije exhibition
but on the fundamental orientation of this international art movement
in all its aspects.
During both the first Nove Tendencije exhibition in 1961 and the
second in 1963, many personal and conceptual realignments occurred
among the participating artists. Metrovi writes, In quite a short time,
the new movement showed an extraordinary speed in its formal execu
tion, but also a split in its ideology.3 On the Italian art scene one symp
tom of this split was the exhibition Arte programmata (Programmed
Art), organized in Milan in 1962
by Bruno Munari, under the pa
tronage of the Olivetti company,
and with a catalogue essay by
Umberto Eco. Displacing the ro
mantic fervor of Manzonis nuova
concezione artistica (new artistic
conception), these program-ori
ented artists, such as Munari and
Enzo Mari, were often designers
by trade. Mari would be invited to
conceptualize the third exhibition
in Zagreb, now with a title in the
singular, Nova Tendencija 3 (New
Tendencies 3), in 1965. His concept
revolved around the topic of the
divulgation of research samples.
At the same time, the Paris GRAV
group also changed its basic orientation, moving to advocate art as
spectacle, viewer engagement, instability, and programming.4
The absence of some participants in the first exhibition from the
show of 1965, and the large number of newcomers in that year, were signs
of organizational, operative, and ideological crises within the movement
that the exhibitions showcased. (These crises would be surmounted by
the new thematic foci of Tendencije 4 and Tendencije 5.) In the same year
as the third exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized
an exhibition titled The Responsive Eye, curated by William Seitz, which
received a mixed response from the participants in the Nove Tendencije
shows. While Mavignier wrote that during the opening and the grand
exhibition in New York, which can be called historical, he thought with
gratitude of Zagrebs contribution to it,5 Manfredo Massironi, a mem
ber of Gruppo N from Padua, saw in the show the unacceptable influence
of the U.S.-dominated institutional and market system and pronounced
it a Pyrrhic victory and a first-class funeral procession.6
Jea Denegri 685
 The staging of the Nove Tendencije exhibitions in Zagreb owes a debt The Zagreb exhibitions integrated the citys art scene firmly in related
to the activities of the EXAT-51 (Experimental Atelier 1951) group there events abroad, while also contributing to the wider cultural mediation
a decade earlier. The group announced itself by issuing a manifesto in of the art scenes of West and East, as well as to those of the nonaligned
December of 1951; its members were Picelj, who would participate in a nations.
number of the Nove Tendencije exhibitions beginning in 1961, and Vlado The Nove Tendencije movement was not strictly confined to a his
Kristl, Vjenceslav Richter, and Aleksandar Srnec, who would variously torical period and has lately been gaining attention from younger art
participate beginning in 1963. The EXAT-51 manifesto argued for a synthe historians and curators. Recent exhibitions devoted to it include Die
sis of visual art, architecture, and design; its members produced paintings Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europische Knstlerbewegung 19611973, at the
in the manner of postwar geometric abstraction. Another antecedent to Museum fr Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, (20067),8 Bit International
the Nove Tendencije movement was Zagrebs Gorgona group (195966), [Nove] tendencije. Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb 19611973,
whose members, including Knifer, Metrovi, Putar, and Josip Vanita at the Neue Galerie, Graz (2007), and the Zentrum fr Kunst und
similarly featured among its exhibitors, organizers, and theoreticians.7 Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (20089). This latter show generated
Fig. 2. Josip Vanita. Silver Line 1965 III 2. 1965. Oil on canvas, 140180 cm.
Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb
Earlier on, in the 1920s, Zagreb had been the city of the Zenitism an extensive publication, A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a
movement and of Ljubomir Micis Zenit magazine, whose pages were Magazine, and the Computers Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit
graced by texts and reproductions of works by Vasily Kandinsky, Lajos International, 19611973.9
Kassk, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Vladimir Bit International was a magazine published by the Galerija su
Tatlin, Lszl Mholy-Ngy, and Karel Teige, as well as by local artists vremene umjetnosti between 1968 and 1972. It produced a number of
such as Josip Seissel/Jo Klek. There were also the magazines Dada Tank topical issues: Theory of Information and the New Aesthetics, with
and Dada Jazz, published by Dragan Aleksi and featuring contributions texts by Max Bense and Abraham Moles; Computers and Visual
by Richard Huelsenbeck, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. Research, with texts by Herbert W. Franke, Karl Gerstner, Leslie Mezei,
The exhibitions, then, were part of the very complex artistic at Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Michael A. Noll, Ji Valoch, and others;
mosphere of postwar Yugoslavia, following the denunciation of the Design, with texts by Gui Bonsiepe, Tomas Maldonado, and others;
then-reigning ideology of Socialist Realism and paving the way for a The Word Image: Posie Concrte, edited by Vera Horvat Pintari and
unique form called Socialist Modernism. Working in the same vein as others; and Television, with texts by Eco, Renato Barilli, Gillo Dorfles,
the EXAT-51 and Gorgona groups, the local Nove Tendencije artists created Martin Krampen, Pierre Schaeffer, and others. Especially significant
a complex of artistic phenomena whose radicalism makes it stand out were the magazines international colloquiums, seminars, symposiums,
strongly from the mostly moderate local version of Socialist Modernism. work meetings, and less formal gatherings, arranged to discuss current
686 8. Networks, Media & Communication
and professional problems but also establishing personal connections,
successful collaborations, and close friendships.
The legacy of the Zagreb exhibitions remains fully evident today.
These five shows initiated many discussions on the problematics of
contemporary art practices, ranging from postwar Concrete art and
Neo-Constructivism through monochrome painting, kinetic art, and the
use of computers in art-making to the emergence of Conceptual art. This
wide conversation enveloped a great number of participants, involving
international networking, artists' groups, collaborations, and interperson
al communications that served as a platform for constructivist and activ
ist thinking in a time of the unstoppable expansion of the mass media.
In his essay Die Utopie der Neuen Tendenzen (The Utopia of the
New Tendencies) Rasmus Kleine comes to this pertinent conclusion:
The environment in which Nove Tendencije were created was, in es-
sence, from the very beginning filled with optimism and hope. Although
the consequences of World War II were still felt, young artists were look-
ing ahead to what they thought would be a better future. Advances
in technology and science were no longer considered a threat. The
declared goal of Nove Tendencije was to answer this development and
reconcile art, science, and technology. The works in Nove Tendencije
aimed to make their viewers reflect on and understand the changed
conditions of real life.10
The first of these exhibitions was not a surprising case, in Mavi
gniers no doubt well-meant phrase. It could not have happened with
out an existing artistic foundation in Zagreb, a foundation of which
the EXAT-51 and Gorgona groups were a part. The artists and theoreti
cians who initiated and participated in the Nove Tendencije exhibitions
were aware that they were continuing a regional tradition in culture
and art, a distinct Other line in ideological opposition to the pre
vailing moderate modernism. That line ran from the historical avant-
gardes of the 1920s, including Zenitism and Dadaism, through EXAT-51
and Gorgona to Nove Tendencije. The fourth exhibition, in 196869,
and the fifth, in 1973 opened up new topics, such as the use of com
puters,11 visual and concrete poetry, and Conceptual art.12 In doing
so they fulfilled a far-reaching vision of the creators of the first Nove
Tendencije. (Someone particularly to be noted here is Boo Bek, the
director of the Galerija suvremene umjetnosti at the time.) That vi
sion was to build an organizational and presentational platform in plat
form in the local context, although also international and with biennial
continuity, and gathering innovative artists and directions from succes
sive generations. Indeed these exhibitions became significant events in
Europe, as were the retrospective shows examining them in Ingolstadt
and Karlsruhe.
Translated from the Croatian by Dorotea Fotivec.
Jea Denegri
1 The Nove Tendencije exhibition, 1961, is listed as one of the significant exhibitions of
that year in Jrgen Harten, Benjamin Buchloh, Rudi Fuchs, Konrad Fischer, John Matheson,
and Hans Strelow, eds., Prospekt/Retrospect: Europa 19461976 (Cologne: Verlag der Bu-
chhandlung Walther Knig, 1976). The catalogue also lists Bewogen bewegung (Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam), 40 au-dessus de Dada (Galerie J, Paris), Le Nouveau Ralisme
Paris et New York (Galerie Rive Droite, Paris), Avantgarde 61 (Stdtisches Museum, Trier)
as notable shows of that year. Participating artists were Marc Adrian, Alberto Biasi, Enrico
Castellani, Ennio Chiggio, Andreas Christen, Toni Costa, Piero Dorazio, Karl Gerstner, Gerard
von Graevenitz, Rudolf Kmmer, Julije Knifer, Edoardo Landi, Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack, Piero
Manzoni, Manfredo Massironi, Almir Mavignier, Franois Morellet, Gotthart Mller, Herbert
Oehm, Ivan Picelj, Otto Piene, Uli Pohl, Dieter Rot, Jol Stein, Paul Talman, Gnther Uecker,
Marcel Wyss, and Walter Zehringer. The participants in Nove Tendencije 2, in 1963, were
Marc Adrian, Getulio Alviani, Giovanni Anceschi, Vojin Bakic, Davide Boriani, Martha Boto,
Enrico Castellani, Andreas Christen, Gianni Colombo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Ugo Rodolfo Demarco,
Gabriele De Vecchi, Piero Dorazio, Equipo 57, Hctor Garcia-Miranda, Karl Gerstner, Gruppo N,
Dieter Hacker, Julije Knifer, Vlado Kristl, Enzo Mari, Julio Le Parc, Heinz Mack, Almir Mavignier,
Francois Morellet, Gotthart Mller, Henk Peeters, Ivan Picelj, Uli Pohl, Karl Reinhartz, Vjenceslav
Richter, Francisco Sobrino, Helge Sommerrock, Aleksandar Srnec, Klaus Staudt, Jol Stein,
Miroslav utej, Paul Talman, Luis Tomasello, Gnther Uecker, Grazia Varisco, Gerhard von
Graevenitz, Ludwig Wilding, Jean-Pierre Yvaral, and Walter Zehringer.
2 See Matko Metrovic, Nepoznate podrobnosti, Fantom slobode 3 (2010): 20715.
3 Metrovic, Razlozi i mogu cnosti povijesnog osvjecivanja, Nove Tendencije 3 (Zagreb:
Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1965), pp. 1315.
4 Luciano Caramel, GRAV: Groupe de recherche dart visuel 19601968 (Milan: Electa
Editrice, 1975), n.p.
5 Mavignier, Nove tendencije 1slucaj koji iznenaduje, in Tendencije 4 (Zagreb: Galerija
suvremene umjetnosti, 196869), n.p.
6 See Massironi, Appunti critici sugli apporti teorici allinterno della Nuova tendenza dal
1959 al 1964, Nova tendencija 3 (Zagreb: Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, 1965), pp. 2331,
and Ricerche visuali, Situazioni dellarte contemporanea (Rome: Edizioni Librarte, 1976), pp.
5063.
7 Metrovic also wrote the key theoretical texts Nove spoznaje u likovnoj umjetnosti
(1962), Ideologija Novih tendencija (1963), Metodologija i utopija (1963), Scijentifikacija
kao uvjet humanizacije (1963), and Razlozi i mogucnosti povijesnog osvjecivanja (1965).
Gorgona members also organized exhibitions by two participants in the first Nove Tendencije
exhibition at Studio G in Zagreb: Morellet in 1962 and Dorazio in 1963.
8 See Die Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europische Knstlerbewegung 19611973, ed. Tobias
Hoffman and Rasmus Kleine (Ingolstadt: Museum fr Konkrete Kunst, 2006)
9 A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computers Arrival in Art:
New Tendencies and Bit International, 19611973, ed. Margit Rosen in collaboration with
Peter Weibel, Darko Fritz, and Marija Gattin (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011).
10 Kleine, Die Utopie der Neuen Tendenzen, Die Neuen Tendenzen, ed. Hoffman and
Kleine, pp. 3846.
11 Tendencije 5 had a Computers and Visual Research section, including the artists
Vladimir Bonacic, Waldemar Cordeiro, Herbert Franke, Miljenko Horvat, Auro Lecci, Manfred
Mohr, Georg Nees, John Whitney, Edward Zajec, Vilko iljak, and others.
12 Tendencije 5s Conceptual Art section included Giovanni Anselmo, John Baldessari,
Daniel Buren, Radomir Damnjanovic-Damnjan, Braco Dimitrijevic, Douglas Huebler, Jannis
Kounellis, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Blint Szombathy, Ilija
okic, Goran Trbuljak, and others.
687
 N
early all of the media we know today already
existed in the postwar periodposters and
advertising, daily newspapers and illustrated
magazines, books and the theater, records
and the radio, movies and television, exhibi
tions and catalogues, panel paintings and wall
paintings, photography and collage, graffiti
and comic strips. They existed, however, in a
state that in retrospect seems to be one of underdevelopment. One can
hardly imagine the international divide between the media technolo
gies that prevailed at the time: while the United States possessed high
ly advanced media such as television and could thus conduct intense
internal communications across an entire continent, other countries
remained in a kind of haze, for their audiovisual media were still un
derdeveloped and the radio and print media were the main sources of
information. It was not until two decades after the war that the audio
visual and electronic media became sources of information with enor
mous scope and a major presence in the
everyday life of consumers in Europe and
Japan as well as in North America. They
now provided the matrix of self-percep
tion for modern societies increasingly
organized around them politically and
TRUE GRID economically. Meanwhile, literature and
the theater, the classic media of social
Walter Grasskamp self-perception, began to become less im
portantand even art began to fear for
itself.
Thus it is not surprising how harm
less and antiquated some of the media
that artists examined aggressively at the
time appear today. Hindsight allows the Fig. 1. Karl Otto Gtz. Density 10:3:2:1. 196263. Felt-pen on card-
impression that the artists overestimated board on canvas, 200260 cm. Private Collection
their adversaries. This applies above all to
the posters that Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques (Mah de la)
Villegl and Wolf Vostell tore in such a way as to produce shredded pal
impsests of advertisings unfulfilled promises. The artists had evidently
realized that the utopian perspectives of art had dwindled in the face
of the rewards of the consumer world. Yet it was art itself that had once
advanced the prospects of the poster, since one can see the lithographs
of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as the very first examples of modern art
designed for public space. The billboard, though, was now an adversary
that the affichistes pulled out of public space into art galleries and mu
seums, as if it was only in their own traditional territory that they could
conquer it. Instead of appropriating images from the new media world
and assembling them into new contexts as collages, as the Dadaists had
done, the affichistes added their own destructions to the ones that they
found, until the billboards looked like scores for an urban image war. The
newspaper and the book also had to put up with unfriendly acts, be it
8. Networks, Media & Communication Walter Grasskamp
Gerhard Rhm rendering a newspaper illegible or Dieter Roth putting a
book through a meat grinder.
Other artists tried to turn their media adversaries into allies. Lucio
Fontana, for example, adopted neon, generating elegant installations out
of this new, gaudily colored, hyperactive kind of light that had entered
the outdoor advertising vocabulary of hotels, movie theaters, and de
partment stores. Tanaka Atsuko tested a painterly combination of colors
and light fixtures. Destruction or imitation: these appear to have been
the first recipes of a postwar art using the urban street media of the post
er, neon, and illuminated advertising.
The first pan-European postwar art movement developed not out
of the examination of media, however, but out of the prewar traditions
of Constructivism. The was the New Tendencies movement, whose
protagonists included Alvir Mavignier, the members of Pariss influ
ential GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel), and the ZERO artists,
for instance with Heinz Macks gridded mirror foils and the nailheads
arranged into dot grids by Gnther Uecker. The lingua franca of New
Tendencies was the abstract grid, its se
mantics was geometry, its syntax was
repetition, and its pragmatics was the
inclusion of the audience in the pictori
al narrative, which came alive through
movements of the viewers eyes and shifts
of the viewers position. The great utopi
an promise of New Tendencies lay in this
inclusion of the viewer, which, however,
hardly got beyond a motor-sensual prop
osition, although some artists aimed for
more extensive political demands.1
New Tendencies first manifested
with the Nove Tendencije exhibition in 1961
in Zagreb. This Croatian capital was locat
ed in a territory of the Warsaw Pact, where
Moscows aesthetic restrictions against
formalist modernism were generally obeyedexcept in Marshal Titos
Yugoslavia, in which Croatia then lay. Accordingly, in the early 1960s,
Zagreb was able to provide postwar European modernism with a forum
for constructivist and kinetic artists.
With its grids and patterns, its use of light and electrical impulses,
New Tendencies attracted leading theorists of the time, from Abraham
Moles to Max Bense. The possibilities of the computer were addressed as
early as the fourth exhibition in the Zagreb series, Tendencije 4, in 1968.2
In postwar European modernism, then, Zagreb constituted a kind
of antithesis of Paris, which had embraced art informel. Here techno-
constructivist and gestural-abstract traditions confronted one another,
each attempting to take up and continue classic modernist positions from
before the war. Surprisingly, there were also positions in between. Among
the most spirited art informel painters, for example, was K. O. Gtz, who,
inspired by his wartime experiences as an intelligence officer in front
689
of a radar screen, made grid paintings through statistical-metrical
3
trials, and filmed their development, in 195962 (fig. 1; plates 328, 346).
Gtz was also important as a teacher: with Joseph Beuys and Gerhard
Hoehme, he influenced the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf during the
period when Gerhard Richter was studying there, and Sigmar Polke, who
would take up very different grids.
The cut-out and horizontally arranged airmail stickers in the panel
pictures of Yayoi Kusama also come across as grids, but can be read pri
marily as representatives of what was a widespread approach at the time
but is marginalized today: mail art. Through letters and other pieces of
mail fashioned out of paper, its representa
tives established international networks out
side of the trade channels and hierarchies of
the art market. In the age of email, this seems
rather touching, but many artists made of it
an opportunity to establish associations be
yond commercial or political control. If noth
ing else, the predigital mail art community
was important for communication across
the Cold War Iron Curtain, which, after the
beginning of the construction of the Berlin
Wall on August 13, 1961, would divide the de
velopment of postwar European art for nearly
three decades.
In 1965, when the transatlantic triumph
of New Tendencies, Op art, and kinetic art ap
peared to have arrived with the exhibition The
Responsive Eye at The Museum of Modern Art in
New York, the competition was already stand
ing by: Pop art. In Axle (plate 304) of the previous
year, one of his unmistakable syntheses of silk Fig. 2. John-Paul Stonard. Copy of Richard Hamilton's collage
screen printing, panel painting, and newsprint, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? zi and Hamilton had taken up the interest
(1956), using original source material. 2014. Mixed media and
Robert Rauschenberg had already completed collage on paper, 24.534 cm. Courtesy John-Paul Stonard
a pictorial ramble through the media, against
which, however, he did not seem to be waging war, as the affichistes were
against the poster. His mixtures opened up a wide media panorama in
which other colleagues of his generation were also establishing themselves.
Andy Warhol too seized on the cheap industrial technique of the silkscreen,
and on the possibilities it opened for celebrating the brands and celebrities
of popular culture. Like Rauschenberg, Warhol saw the mass media less as
competitors than as a new visual world that could inspire and actually in
tervene in art. New York Pop now reflected the alliance between the mass
media and American industrialized consumer culture. For these artists,
the grid of the silkscreen became a legitimate pictorial language, one that
they no more tried to denounce than did Roy Lichtenstein, who ironically
monumentalized it as a structural element of his paintings. Like the Swed
ish artist yvind Fahlstrm and Herv Tlmaque (born in Haiti, active
in France), Lichtenstein drew on the comic strip, enlarging its coarse rep
resentational techniques and motifs, as if fighting a duel in the museum.
690 8. Networks, Media & Communication
The colored dots of industrial offset printinga kind of technolog
ical Impressionismalso engaged artists such as Richard Hamilton and
Sigmar Polke. As the smallest component of both the print media and
Pop art, the dot aimed not at the responsive eye but at responsive de the magazines that had retained their original color (fig. 2). 6 This recon
sire, the viewers Pavlovian dependence on the stimuli of consumer and
media society. Hence the attempt to define the grid as a purely formal
element of postwar art, as Rosalind E. Krauss did in 1978, falls short, for
the Op art grid that developed out of Constructivism has a different root
from the grid isolated from mass media. 4
One important medium in this context was the magazine, a leading
media genre in the first postwar decades,
providing consumers with a weekly update
of their world view. At first these magazines
were entirely in black-and-white; in 1954,
the availability of color, even just for a part
of each issue, was enough of a novelty that it
provided the name for the magazine Bunte
Illustrierte (colored magazine), which has
been produced by the German publishing
house Burda ever since. As it had been for
Dada, the magazine was the main source
of early Pop arts motifs and images. For
two British artistsHamilton and Eduardo
Paolozziwho invented Pop art well before
it received its name, and before it was even
something whose development they want
ed to determine, the magazines that served
as sources were specifically American.
Years before New Yorkbased artists such as
Lichtenstein and Warhol became interested
in the comic strip or the soup can, Paoloz
that the spokesman of the Independent
Group at Londons ICA, Lawrence Alloway,
had shown in the early 1950s for a Pop art that he understood popular
consumer culture to be. Magazines gave them photo spreads and adver
tisements that made visible the sophisticated consumer culture of the
United States, a culture that could only be dreamed of in Europes period
of postwar shortage. Paolozzi and Hamilton got their motifs from these
magazines and processed them into collages.5
This cannot be better illustrated than by the collage Just what is it
that makes todays homes so different, so appealing?, which Hamilton, to
gether with assistants, produced in 1956, using clippings from magazines
sent to London from the United States by John McHale. In this collage,
Hamilton took stock of a historical moment in which the television set
penetrates the brightly lit consumer cave of a modern urban couple, who
already own a tape recorder and whose window looks out on the neon
of a movie-theater marquee. The collage was not conceived as an au
tonomous artwork, incidentally, but as a motif for the poster for the ICA
exhibition This is Tomorrow. In 2007, together with Hamilton, the British
art historian John-Paul Stonard meticulously reconstructed the collages
visual sources, then put together a new version, using archival copies of
struction can be retrieved from the Internet worldwide; sixty years ago,
when This is Tomorrow opened, one could not in ones wildest dreams
have imagined an approaching media society in which ones percep
tion of art and media would be influenced not by the grids of offset dots
but by pixels.
In retrospect, for many people televisionits visual illusion creat
ed no longer from static grids, not yet from pixels, but from electronic
scan linesmay have been the decisive new medium of the postwar
period. In Europe, television first became generally relevant in the early
1960s, when black-and-white television sets became affordable while
American living rooms were already dominated by color sets. The ar
tistic examination of the new mass medium began hesitantly, at least
in Europe. While Francis Bacon seems to have placed his Man in Blue I
in the cold, blue, flickering light with which black-and-white television
sets used to color the rooms they were watched in as early as the year
of the painting, 1954, it was not until ten years later that Uecker covered
this piece of media furniture with one of his grids of nails, while Vostell
added the television image to the billboard as his new visual adversary.
Television played a greater role in American Pop art. When Warhol began
painting the icons of commercial art and American consumer socie
ty, he had a television constantly turned on; he did not transfer tele
vision images directly into his paintings at the time, but he lived (and
painted) in a culture already permeated by television. One has to agree
with Helmut Schanzes observation that Pop art and television do not
bear the arbitrary relation to one another of mere contemporaneity.
Rather, they are intimately related to one another. The connecting 1 See Hans Dieter Huber, The Dream of an Interactive Artwork, in Die Neuen Tendenzen/
The New Tendencies/Nove Tendenzije: Eine europische Knstlerbewegung, 19611973, ed.
element is popularity. 7 Tobias Hoffmann and Rasmus Kleine, exh. cat. for Museum fr Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt
Yet television did not become an art form in itself until Nam June (Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 2006), pp. 29196.
2 See Herbert W. Franke, The New Tendencies in ZagrebComputer Art, in ibid., pp.
Paik began outwitting the cathode ray tube. Having metamorphosed
3036.
from composer to visual artist in the German network of Fluxus artists, 3 See K. O. Gtz, ed. Joachim Jger, Udo Kittelman, Walter Smerling, and Alexander Klar,
Paik chose to use the new visual technology not only for electronically exh. cat. for Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen Berlin, et al. (Cologne: Wienand, 2013),
pp. 15657.
disrupting the transmitter but also for taking possession of its means of
4 Rosalind E. Krauss, Grids, 1978, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modern-
production. 8 This became possible in New York in 1965, when he was able ist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 822. The differences in the grid were
to acquire the first portable video recorder, the analog Portapak by Sony, explored in the exhibition Rasterfahndung (Tracing the grid) at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in
2012; see Simone Schimpf, Tracing the Grid: The Grid in Art after 1945, Rasterfahndung:
and became a pioneer of an entirely new art genre: video art. This move
Das Raster in der Kunst nach 1945, ed. Ulrike Groos and Schimpf, exh. cat. (Cologne: Wien-
signaled the end of a type of modern postwar art that had attempted to and, 2012), pp. 27477, esp. p. 276.
tie in with classic modernism and the art of the prewar period. A new 5 See Walter Grasskamp, The Phantom of the MediaWhat We Talk about When We Talk
about Pop, in Ludwig Goes Pop, exh. cat. for Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vien-
story beganone about the artistic examination of new media.
na, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (Cologne: Walther Knig, 2014), pp. 12758.
6 See John-Paul Stonard, Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamiltons Just what is it that
Translated from German by Rebecca van Dyck makes todays homes so different, so appealing?, The Burlington Magazine no. 1254 (Sep-
tember 2007): 60720.
7 Helmut Schanze, The Most Popular Art: Popkultur, Fernsehen und die Anfnge der Me-
dienwissenschaft, in Stefan Greif et al., eds., Popkultur und Fernsehen. Historische und sthe-
tische Berhrungspunkte (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 2738. See also Horace Newcomb,
TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Anchor, 1974).
8 Nam June Paik stated that he came to video art by way by K. O. Gtz. See Schimpf, Tracing
the Grid, p. 276.
Walter Grasskamp 691
 T
he Independent Group, which met at the Insti
tute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, from
1952 to 1955, is important to rethinking the post
war cultural map, not least because it comprised
creative practitioners from a broad range of disci
plines. The architects Alison and Peter Smithson,
James Stirling, Colin St John Wilson, and John
Voelcker contributed to the vibrant debates, as
did the critics and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, and
Toni del Renzio. They combined forces with Englands leading younger-
generation artists of the dayMagda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel
Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, and William Turnbull
plus the popular-music producer Frank Cordell and the graphic designer
Edward Wright.
The ICA instigated the formation of the Independent Group and of
1
fered support throughout its existence. The group ran a series of closed
seminars covering an expansive range of topics and also fed into the
ICAs public program, generating cutting-edge exhibitions and talks.
It has conventionally been art-historically classified under the heading
Fathers of Pop, a seductive narrative that continues to dominate ac
counts of its significance. But there is far more to the Independent Group
than this linear, diachronic read
REFRAMING THE ing. As Henderson commented,
I suspect that the open and inde
INDEPENDENT GROUP terminate aspect of the groups en
quiry is rapidly being overthrown
Anne Massey (or lost, rather) in the simplistic
interpretation that it existed to give
birth to Pop Art. Post hoc ergo
propter hoc.2 A networks-based
reading is more closely aligned to
the approach of the group, which
explored the new technological
era of the 1950s from a cross-dis
ciplinary perspective. The coming
together of creative practitioners
Fig. 1. Installation view of the exhibition 3 Collagists: New Work by E.L.T. Mesens,
from varied national backgrounds, John McHale, Gwyther Irwin at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1958
the trauma of war, and the dawn
ing of the media age are the themes explored in this essay.
The diaspora experienced by individual Independent Group mem
bers contributed to its unique world view. Because the group has been
hitched to the U.K./U.S. trajectory of Pop art, other global points of
reference have been underplayed. It is highly significant, however, that
Paolozzi was the son of Italian immigrants, and that Wrights mother
was Chilean and his father Ecuadorian. When he was born his father
was vice-consul of Ecuador and based in Liverpool. Del Renzio was
born in Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), Russia, of Russian and Italian par
ents, and Magda Cordell, ne Lustigova, was born in Hungary but fled
to escape the Nazis, first to Egypt, then to Palestine as a Jewish refugee.
8. Networks, Media & Communication
Such a singular configuration of European and South American influ
ences fed into the Independent Groups broad cultural understanding
and its purchase on the life and languages of nation states beyond the
shores of England.
This unique array of origins and backgrounds was augmented by
wartime experiences. The trauma of war, combat, and internment was
a significant shared experience for the members of the Independent
Group. Most directly, Henderson and Turnbull had seen active service
in the Royal Air Force (RAF) as pilots. As Turnbull recalled, It was a new
kind of way of seeing the world. It certainly made me have a totally differ
ent attitude as to what was visually the reality.3 Henderson flew for three
years before, suffering from nervous exhaustion, he was given the lighter
duty of delivering gliders. He would recall, My nerves felt like stripped
wires and I now think of one of those ancient electrical systemsLey
den Jarswith a stale tartar of corrosion on the glass, around the brass
terminals and the wires, untaut, fly-encrusted and looped irrelevantly
around.4 Since Paolozzis parents were Italian migrs, he had been clas
sified as an enemy alien and was interned for three months in Saught
on Prison, Edinburgh; his father, grandfather, and uncle were drowned
when their ship was torpedoed en route to Canada. Some Independent
Group members had even been brought together by war: after joining the
RAF, Frank Cordell had done intel
ligence work in Palestine, where
he met his future wife, Magda,
who was working there for the
British forces, intercepting wire
less signals.
These wartime experiences
gave the Independent Group not
only a shared sense of trauma but
also a familiarity with technolo
gy that distinguished them from
earlier British-based creative col
lectives. Hamilton had been too
young to join the war effort direct
ly and used his drawing skills train
ing and working as an engineering
draughtsman for the Design Unit
Group, an engineering design office, and then for EMI (Electric & Musi
cal Industries, formerly His Masters Voice) at a time when the company
was helping the war effort with the development of radar and microwave
devices. Banham served an apprenticeship as an engine fitter at the Bris
tol Aeroplane Company, working long and demanding shifts there dur
ing the war before changing careers to study art history. Technology was
a shared enthusiasm for the Independent Group and provided the foun
dation for a rich network of relationships, ideas, and practices. Moreover,
Independent Group experiences during and after World War II provided
specialist, hands-on knowledge of networks, media, and communica
tion for its members.
Anne Massey 693
 The Independent Group came together in the early 1950s and the
group members both encouraged and chided one another, working to
challenge the status quo of the London cultural scene by discussing and
exhibiting subjects beyond the accepted limits of fine art. This included
material drawn from popular culture and the burgeoning world of tech
nology. Indeed, science and technology lay at the heart of Independent
Group closed meetings throughout its existence. The first full session,
organized by Banham, included talks by the De Havilland helicopter
designer J. S. Shapiro on The Helicopter as an Example of Technical
Development and by Norman Pirie, a leading microbiologist, on the
Fig. 2. Installation view of the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art at Institute of Contemporary
Arts, London, 1953
topic Are Proteins Unique? At group meetings during the second, full
session of 1955, guest speakers challenged the members with glimpses
into the futuristic world of communication theory. McHale, who co-
organized this series with Alloway, invited the cybernetic expert E. W.
Meyer to speak on Probability and Information Theory with accom
panying Shannon diagrams and examples of coding. McHale had already
explored the significance of new technology with his collage books
Palimpcestuous and Secret Life of a Talisman, which had been shown in the
1954 ICA group exhibition Collages and Objects. The exhibition had been
organized by Alloway and designed by McHale and also included McHales
important Transistor collages (plate 335), which drew directly from
early communication theory with diagrammatic representations of signal,
encoder, and decoder. This show is also a key example of the way in which
the Independent Groups activities fed into the ICAs public program.
As an important conduit for the exhibition and discussion of global
avant-garde practices, the ICA, founded in 1946, broadened the Inde
pendent Groups horizons. In 1950, for example, it hosted the group show
Paintings from Haiti; the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam exhibited there in
1952; the international CoBrA group gained British exposure through the
ICA, with Karel Appel and Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) enjoying
separate shows there in 1957 and Asger Jorn the following year; and in 1957
the ICA showed Guy Debords film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howl
ings for Sade, 1952; plate 347). Debord was then a member of the Letterist
International, and his offer of this controversial screening was snapped
up by Alloway, then the ICAs assistant director.5
The Independent Group benefited from what was on offer at the
ICA and contributed extensively to the institutions public program
throughout the 1950s, organizing talks and pushing the boundaries of
exhibition practice. Henderson, the Smithsons, Paolozzi, and Ronald
Jenkins, for example, were the self-appointed editors of the images and
layout that constituted the seminal show Parallel of Life and Art at the
ICA in 1953 (fig. 2).6 The exhibition comprised 122 images printed on dif
ferent-sized panels that were hung from the ceiling, placed on the walls,
and even casually propped against the wall at floor level. The images
were appropriated from the mass media and from the realm of science,
particularly the specialist diagrams and photographs used in biology
and geology, and were messed withblown up, stressed, stretchedso
that the exhibition explored a darker side of human existence as well as
the inner workings of nature and technology. These images were entirely
in black and white, not the glossy Technicolor celebrated in the main
stream Pop art of the future. The show was divided into fourteen catego
ries, of which the first was Anatomya dissection of a frog, sections of
a tree, but also technical images. Perhaps the most striking was a picture
of a dismembered typewriter, but there was also a diagram of two radio
valves and a view of a television chassis from beneath.
Building on raw wartime experiences, a gritty physicality, and a
fascination with technology, the Independent Group looked outward
and assimilated into its practice new theories and approaches taken
from the nascent study of communication theory. Understandably, the
trauma of the past recurred in the present, but the groups shared aim
was to supersede these difficult memories through the dreams embod
ied in titles such as This is Tomorrow, The House of the Future, and The
Future of the Future.7
This is Tomorrow was an exhibition held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
in the autumn of 1956. The participants were divided into twelve groups,
and it is the Group 2 exhibit, created by Hamilton, McHale, and Voelcker,
that usually attracts the most attention owing to its proto-Pop credentials.
Group 12, however, is of the most interest from the network perspective.
Created by Alloway, del Renzio, and the architect Geoffrey Holroyd, the
exhibit consisted of an interactive tack board holding a changing display
1 See Anne Massey, The Mother of Pop? Dorothy Morland and the Independent Group,
of newspaper cuttings.8 The Group 12 section of the exhibition catalogue
Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 2 (2013): 26278.
included Shannon-like diagrams and two charts that include the terms 2 Nigel Henderson, comments on Peter Karpinskis essay The Independent Group, 195255,
punched tape cards and magnetic surfaces wire tape discs, perhaps and the relationship of the Independent Groups discussion to the works of Hamilton, Paolozzi
and Turnbull, 19521957, unpublished manuscript, May 1977, p. 1. Courtesy Peter Karpinski.
the first mention of the computer in a British exhibition catalogue. The en
3 William Turnbull, interviewed in Beyond Time: William Turnbull, produced by Alex Turnbull
try analyzes the challenge of incorporating art and architecture: Seeing and Peter Stern, 2011.
art and architecture in the general framework of communications can 4 Henderson, unpublished ms prepared for Nigel Henderson: Photographs of Bethnal Green
(Nottingham: Midland Group, 1977). Quoted in Henderson and Christopher Mullen, Nigel
reduce these difficulties by a new sense of what is important.9
Henderson (Norwich: Norwich School of Art Gallery, 1982), p. 26.
Learning from the approach of the Independent Group, we may 5 See Gregor Muir and Massey, ICA 194668 (London: ICA, 2015), p. 115.
benefit by looking beyond narrow disciplinary constraints and forg 6 Private view card, Parallel of Life and Art: An Exhibition of Documents through the Medium of
Photography, ed. Eduardo Paolozzi, Henderson, Alison and Peter Smithson, and Ronald Jenkins,
ing new articulations with media and communication. Only then can
September 10, 1953.
a fuller view of the networks in place be identified and explored. That 7 This Is Tomorrow was the title of a 1956 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery to which
this approach resonates with the groups expansive approach points former members of the Independent Group contributed. The House of the Future was a project
designed by the Smithsons for the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition, Olympia, London. The Future
to its perennial significance. Looking at the Independent Group, and of the Future was a book published by fomer Independent Group member McHale (New York:
reframing it using the criteria of media and communication, opens Braziller, 1969).
up a fresh understanding that sheds light on the group beyond the 8 Geoffrey Holroyd has recently donated the exhibition materials to the AD&A Museum,
University of California, Santa Barbara. See www.museum.ucsb.edu/news/feature/313
usual Pop art tradition and links it with a broader and more meaning (accessed March 14, 2016).
ful narrative. 9 This is Tomorrow (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956), n.p.

694 8. Networks, Media & Communication Anne Massey 695

 I
n 1948, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener an
nounced the creation of a new and universal science: cybernet
ics, or the study of control through communication. At one
level Wiener was simply heralding the arrival of digital com
puters. Such machines sought feedback from the information
systems around them and so made fitting modes for the ways
that people navigated the world, he explained. Soon he and a
wide array of scientists and popular writers would be compar
ing computers to the human brain. At the same time, Wiener was also
introducing a new way of thinking about the organization of the natural
and social worlds. All systems, he later explained, could be thought of as
communication systems. As such, they could be regulated through the
exchange of messagesbetween people, between societies, between
machines of all kinds.1 To live effectively, he wrote, is to live with
adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the
essence of mans inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.2
This cybernetic vision set the terms for any number of fields in the
postwar era: international diplomacy, management science, psychology,
biology, computer scienceand, far more than many remember today,
art. Though it arose alongside digital computing, cybernetics quickly
became a universal discipline.3 It was as much an aesthetic project as
an intellectual one, and its preoccupation with messages and with
Cybernetics and its cognate discipline, information theory, of
fered an egalitarian alternative. In cybernetics, every person could be
imagined as an information system equal to every other; every society
could be thought of as in principle equal to every other as well. From our
own time, imagining human beings as mirrors of machines might sound
somehow dehumanizing, but in the 1940s the reverse was true. In the
fascist theories of race promoted by Japan and Germany, properties of
the human body such as skin tone and head shape had been the basis of
discrimination. By dematerializing that body, by arguing that it was sim
ply a pattern of information like any other, cybernetics offered a glimpse
of a world of universal equality, a world without race.
Claude Shannons information theory performed a similar trick,
emphasizing the vehicle bearing the message rather than the message
itself. According to Shannon, a message was nothing more than a pat

THE CYBERNETIC VISION systems shaped artistic production across multiple media. Its trust
in communicationrather than forceas a means of social control

IN POSTWAR ART
Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner
opened a bridge between the worlds of art and international relations. Its
vision of the world as a system of information networks helped to legiti
mize global networks of artistic production and circulation.
The faith that pattern and order were one, across all systems, also
allowed artists, scientists, and politicians to imagine themselves
engaged in a single collective project. Alongside the rise of information
theory and the global diffusion of television, cybernetics shaped the
aesthetics and circulation of Abstract Expressionism, drove a global fas
cination with multimedia, and, by the 1960s, even drew artists toward
the neoliberal networks of communication and circulation that we
Fig. 1. Portrait of Norbert Wiener in a classroom at
inhabit today. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusets, May 1949

tern discerned amid chaos. To communicate was to see patterns; form

was both aesthetic and social order. In that sense, messages mattered
THE HUMANISM OF FORM WITHOUT less than communication as such. In the The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (1948), later published as a book with Warren Weaver,
CONTENT

I
n the 1940s, cybernetics appealed in large part because it seemed
to embody democratic ideals. As World War II developed, many
Americans ascribed the rise of Adolf Hitler to the power of
the mass media. Radio, newspapers, and movies all seemed to
require audiences to enter into something like the top-down, one-
to-many authority structure of fascism. Married to Nazi propa
ganda, such systems were thought to turn ordinary Germans into
unthinking monsters. 4
Shannon carefully distinguished between form and content in his defi
nition of information. In fact, for Shannon, content as we might under
stand it colloquially meant little. He observed, Frequently the messages
have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some
system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic as
pects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.5
What does it mean to eschew semantics in the communication of
a message? Heralding the inception of the digital age, Shannons highly
technical reading was preoccupied with the engineering problem of the

8. Networks,
ChapterMedia
2 Form
& Communication
Matters Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner 697
potential for messages to be quantified as data, and thus easily transmis
sible as mathematical pattern. The media of such communications, there
fore, would assume primary importance over what those messages might
actually mean. Information, as Weaver put it, must not be confused
with meaning.6
Even as Weaver and Shannon were redefining information, artists,
art historians, and critics were elaborating a similar approach to ques
tions of form and medium. This was a time, after all, in which the meth
odological investments of formalism, and the nascent art-historical
interests of semiotics, were debated by the most advanced thinkers and
critics on art. The language of Abstract Expressionism, famously linked
to Jackson Pollocks innovations of 1947, could wordlessly telegraph the
tragic and the sublime without being reduced to stable narrative or lit
eral content. Pollocks skeins and drips of poured paint might well index
the artists desire to communicate, but they could simultaneously be
interpreted as a comment on the medium of painting itself as a field of
gestural inscription.
The language of medium specificity, bedrock to postwar art criti
cism, would increasingly converge with other questions of communi
cation in the ensuing decades. In Avant-Garde and Kitsch, the critic
Clement Greenberg could write, Content is to be dissolved so com
pletely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in
whole or in part to anything not itself.7 Written in 1939, the statement
bears decisively on the politics of aesthetic autonomy and stakes a claim
for modernisms resistance to both commodification and the recruit
ment of art as propaganda. But by the 1950s and 60s, a particular notion
of Greenbergian formalism, and abstract art by extension, had hardened
into a period style. In the language of information theory, we could call it
a code that was itself a message.
In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism would indeed assume a con
troversial ambassadorial function as a weapon of the cold war. 8 Its
power in that role depended less on any literal messages about the Unit
ed States the work seemed to send than on the power of American artists
to express themselves, coded in the terms of communication. By 1952,
when New Yorks Museum of Modern Art established its Internation
al Program of Circulating Exhibitions, for example, many agreed with
Weaver that the pictorial arts belonged alongside written and oral speech
as humane modes of communication. The Museums program made
visible the notion that art could transparently communicate in ever wid
ening spheres of transnational influence: art itself became a node ani
mating a network. Its express purpose was to circulate modern art as a
new kind of communications medium, however opaque the language of
its inaugural idiom, Abstract Expressionism, might be.
698 8. Networks, Media & Communication
THE ART OF THINKING TOGETHER
In the early 1950s, policy-makers and artists alike turned to commu
nication as a way to model and manage the tensions that seemed to
threaten the globe. At the United Nations, at UNESCO, and perhaps,
most famously, at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations in
1955, diplomats gathered in the hope that conversation itself might dif
fuse potential international conflicts. Military and political leaders in the
West turned to operations research, a new science of decision-making,
first associated with the British war effort, that brought together ex
perts from diverse disciplines to address increasingly complex military
questions unanswerable by any one specialization.9 During the Cold War,
such interdisciplinary initiatives found a new home in the institutions that
would come to be known as think tanks. Although today principally
associated with public policy and market issues, the think tank was his
torically grounded in Cold War defense questions, ranging from the en
gineering of spacecraft to second-strike capability, from game theory to
the early Internet.10 Its various members, hailing from mathematics, logic,
engineering, anthropology, psychology, and history, spoke the language
of operations research, cybernetics, and information and systems theory.
This language enabled Cold War think tanks to pioneer the devel
opment of interdisciplinary platforms and collaborative forms of knowl
edge production, and to become the home of what historian of science
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi has called the cold war avant-garde.11 Think
tanks such as the RAND Corporation and the Hudson Institute occa
sionally partnered with artists in exploring issues around communica
tion, media technology, and control.12 Artists themselves generalized
the rhetoric of such institutions in the coming decades, redirecting their
ideological interests to more progressive, sometimes radical ends, and
continuing to mine the humanizing dimensions of cybernetics, as for
mulated in the previous decade.13 As if miming the logic of think tanks,
many artists groups confronted questions of media, technology, inter
action, and spectacle as a collective and interdisciplinary enterprise. In
keeping with the expansive nature of such pursuits, these networks were
often transnational in their reach. The Signals Group, a loose-knit move
ment founded in 1964 by David Medalla, Paul Keeler, and Guy Brett,
would include artists and critics from Brazil, the Philippines, Venezue
la, Greece, England, and Colombia. Based in London, they were known
for their postwar experiments in kinetic art, as well as for a newsletter
broadcasting their engagement with new developments in science and
Fig. 2. Claude Shannon at the Bell Telephone Laboratories with an electric mouse that can learn its
technology. The name of the group itself flagged an abiding interest in way round a maze after a single training run, May 1952
communication over time and space.14
In this regard, Signals followed on the example of Britains Inde
pendent Group, which some at the time actually called a think tank.
Founded in 1952, the group coalesced around Londons Institute of
Contemporary Art.15 Its members met to analyze, study, and debate
questions of technology, mass media, communications, and the built
environment in the wake of Britains postwar reconstruction and the
Marshall Plan. They mounted a host of experimental exhibitions drawing
Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner 699

Fig. 3. Lon Ferrari. Carta a un general (Letter to a General). 1963. Pen and ink on
paper, 48.131.1 cm. Courtesy Fundacin Augusto y Lon Ferrari
700 8. Networks, Media & Communication
on the visual languages of media and advanced design culture. Con
sisting of critics (Alloway, Reyner Banham), architects (Alison and Pe
ter Smithson), and artists (Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton), this
loose-knit organization also produced works of art based on the raw
material they studied. They coined the notion of Pop art well before their
American colleagues. And they took an approach to the technologies
and media of popular culture that echoed the humanism of Wieners
cybernetics. As the artist John McHale put it, If on the surface we were
concerned with technology in many senses, our preoccupations were
with the social implications of that technology we saw that technology
expanded the human range.16
McHales collage work is exemplary in this regard. In 1956 he would
leave London to study art at Yale University with Josef Albers. Histories of
the Independent Group narrate this transatlantic sojourn as one in which
McHale immersed himself in American media culture in all its postwar
excess. Like an ethnographer collecting field samples, he returned to
London with a trunk overflowing with glossy magazines, newspapers,
and advertisements, the material of which would find its way into his later
collages. But even before this trip, McHale was making work that attend
ed to the most fundamental conditions of media communication. In his
Transistor series (1954; plate 335) he attempted to visualize the logic of
this new invention by pasting geometric scraps of newsprint or maga
zines in stuttering, broken lines, recalling both avant-garde collage and
informatics diagrams like Shannons. Transistor technology, introduced
in 1948, ushered in new possibilities for quicker, more portable and expe
dient communication across different media platforms: television, radio,
andmost criticallycomputers. McHales series gave abstract form
to these modes of communication, suggesting how raw data might be
organized by a human or mechanical brain into discrete messages.17
THE COMMUNICATION OF POLITICS IN
THE 1960SOR NOT
B
y the early 1960s the Independent Group had disbanded,
with Alloway and McHale departing for the United States.
Artistic engagement with their critical preoccupations,
however, was only intensifying. Performance, painting,
sculpture, and multimedia construction all internalized new cultures
of management and organization and spoke to a new range of geopolit
ical circumstances. In the United States, the cybernetic logic of com
munication, in which form was content, helped give rise to Marshall
McLuhans famous dictum The medium is the message. Along the
way, and particularly in the United States, the political ambitions of
the 1940s often melted away. In the global south, however, the reverse
was often true. There, artists such as the Argentine Len Ferrari en
twined a celebration of communication networks with a sharp critique
of American foreign policy.
Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner
The notion that the world itself might be a medium of commu
nication arrived on the New York art scene in 1957 with the musician
John Cage. Since World War II, Cage had worked to dismantle the hi
erarchies of sound that he believed characterized mainstream Europe
an music and to replace them with events that could reveal the sounds
made by the world itself to attentive listeners. Most famously, he had
staged 433a performance in which a person sat at a piano for four
minutes and thirty-three seconds while the audience listened to what
ever sounds the room around them might generate. In 1957 and 1958,
Cage taught courses in experimental music composition at the New
School to figures such as Allan Kaprow and Dick Higgins. Cages stu
dents built on his aesthetic to create what came to be called Happen
ings around the city. In 1959, for instance, Kaprow staged a series of
six events, separated by the ringing of a bell, at the Reuben Gallery. The
action took place in three rooms simultaneously and featured patterns
of movement, sound, and silence occurring seemingly at random.
As a mode of performance, Happenings broke down the tradi
tional divisions between theater and stage, audience and actor, in ways
that many at the time read as radical. Their formal preoccupations also
echoed Cages and Wieners fascination with patterns of communi
cation. Much as Cage encouraged his listeners to hear every sound as
beautiful, Kaprow urged his audiences to see every movement around
them as art. At a Happening as in Wieners cybernetics, everything
belonged to a system of overlapping patterns of signification. 18
Yet for all their formal innovation, Happenings in fact discarded
the political ambitions of earlier decades. In the 1940s, to imagine the
world as a system of interlocking information patterns was to imagine
global equality and an America without prejudice. In the Happen
ings of the 1960s, that political vision melted away and old patterns
of misogyny and racism reappeared. Except for figures like Carolee
Schneeman, most all of the leading protagonists in the Happenings
were young white men. At the same time, naked or near-naked women
became a standard feature in them. Despite the rise of the civil rights
movement, Happenings rarely dealt with race. On the contrary, as a
wave of countercultural rebellion began to rise across America in the
late 1960s, Kaprow asserted that local causes, such as civil rights and
peace movements and things like that are not essential philosophical
problems.19
Such a view would likely have revolted Wiener. And it may well have
angered artists in other countries at the same timeparticularly those
outside the European and American centers of political and military
power. Consider the work of Ferrari, who lived and worked under dicta
torships in both Argentina and Brazil.20 Ferraris practice engaged art as a
form of revolutionary communication but implicitly asked: to what end?
In the early 1960s, he produced a series of remarkable ink drawings
sometimes in collaboration with writersexploring the relationship be
tween word and image. Fields of densely written script, both calligraphic
and abstract, could take on the force of a singular image, if withholding
anything like content or meaning. In the series Carta a un general (Letter
701
to a General, 1963), for example, we encounter a field of graphic inscrip
tion, at once elegant and obscure, that demands to be read (fig. 3).
However, as Andrea Giunta notes in speaking to the works oscillations
between legibility and abstraction, Although we cannot read what the
letters say, they refer to a complex social and individual impossibility.21
That Ferraris drawings are addressed to an imaginary general
prompts questions about the military, censorship, and the transparency
of communication in the context of postwar Latin America; for his
part he referred to the work as a hidden letter (my emphasis).22 In his
best-known piece, however, the artist was plainspoken about his polit
ical engagements. In 1965, invited to produce an installation for one of
Buenos Airess most vanguard arts institutions, the Instituto di Tella,
he created La civilizacin occidental y cristiana (The Western Christian
Civilization; plate 322), a store-bought figurine of the crucified Jesus,
mounted on a model of a U.S. fighter jet. One of several works in the
show blasting the imperial ambitions of the United States in Vietnam,
this grotesque crucifix, updated for the Vietnam era, was taken down
before it even had its official public airing. Ferraris gesture was a blocked
message, serving notice to the dream of communication that systems
discourse had envisioned in the immediate postwar era.
IF THE SYSTEM ISNT THE MESSAGE,
WHAT THEN?
I
n the contrast between Kaprows attitudes towards civil rights and
peace movements and the Vietnam-driven work of figures such
as Ferrari's we can glimpse a tension in the relationship between
art and communication that continues to haunt us today. On one
hand, the form of the Happenings reflected the legacy of Wieners egal
itarianism. There as in Wieners cybernetics, hierarchies crumbled and
everything seemed to mean. On the other, their embrace of patterned
action as the source of meaning also marked the end of the political
ambitions of the 1940s and the emergence of a new mode of social con
trol. Audiences at Happenings may have believed that they could pay
attention to whatever they liked, and so could imagine themselves as
free individuals, but the scenes that surrounded them had been care
fully choreographed and the actions selected for them.
In the decades since, as computer networks have made real the vi
sion of a single communication system that can interlink the globe, we
have come to inhabit ever more numerous and more carefully curated
semiotic environments. Like viewers at a Happening, we may imagine
that we are newly free to participate in events around us. Yet the terms
of our participation have been carefully set, and not by us alone. From
personal branding of social media to the networked interactions of
relational aesthetics, artists and audiences alike live and work within
systems of communication designed and built by invisible others. In
such a world, we need to ask how art can communicate new social or
702 8. Networks, Media & Communication
aesthetic possibilities. Can we turn away from our embrace of com
munication systems? From the engineering sensibility of Shannon and
Weaver that underlies them? And what will we make when we do?
Perhaps Ferraris work offers us one way out. As it suggests, we
might still be able to turn away from the fantasy of easy global intercon
nection, a fantasy born and promoted in the United States across the
Cold War and a fantasy that now travels on the back of American com
munication technologies that first sprang into being within the Cold War
defense establishment. Perhaps now more than ever, we might be able to
remember that fighter-bombers are more than patterns of information.
And their victims are too.
Pamela M. Lee and Fred Turner
1 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1988), p. 16.
2 Ibid., p. 18.
3 Geoffrey C. Bowker, How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 19431970,
Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 108.
4 See Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia & American Liberalism from World War
II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 1516.
5 Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urba-
na: University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. 31.
6 Weaver, Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, in The
Mathematical Theory of Communication, p. 8
7 Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde and Kitsch, 1939, repr. in Art and Culture (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1961), p. 6.
8 See Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War, in Francis Frasci-
na, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2000),
pp. 14755. See also the other essays in Part 2 of this book, on revisionist approaches to
Abstract Expressionism and the Cold War.
9 On operations research see Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics
of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997).
10 The most famous think tank was the RAND Corporation, first conceived in 1945 as
Project RAND. Project RAND was a collaboration forged between Douglas Aircraft and the
U.S. Army Air Forces under General Henry (Hap) H. Arnold, who, near the end of the war,
recognized the need for the military to partner with industry. By 1949, however, the think
tank was an independent, incorporated research center that could bring together prominent
scholars from across the sciences, social sciences and even humanistic disciplines. General
histories of RAND include Alex Abella, Soldiers of Reason (New York: Harcourt, 2008).
For specific histories of the think tank and art, see Pamela M. Lee, Aesthetic Strategist:
Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism, October 138
(Fall 2011): 1536.
11 Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonu-
clear War (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005).
12 On the infamous partnership between RAND and the Art and Technology Program at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, see Lee, Eros and Technics and Civilization in Chrono-
phobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 534.
Also see Ghamari-Tabrizi on the Cold War Avant-Garde at RAND, pp. 4061.
13 In the 1960s, both Fluxus and the Raindance Corporation would poach the language of
the think tank in terms of their collaborative and media-centric dimensions (Raindance was a
pun on RAND).
14 On the Signals Group see Lee, Study for an End of the World, in Chronophobia, pp.
12528.
15 On the Independent Group as a cultural think tank see John Walker and Sarah Chaplin,
Visual Culture: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 45. See
also William Wilson, The Young Boy Network that Went Pop: Postwar Britain and the Aes-
thetics of Plenty, at the Temporary Contemporary profiles Pop Beginnings, November 6,
1990, Los Angeles Times, available online at http://articles.latimes.com/1990-11-06/enter-
tainment/ca-4108_1_fine-arts (accessed June 2016).
16 John McHale, quoted in David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and
the Aesthetics of Plenty, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1980), p. 87.
17 Robbins, John McHale, in ibid., p. 87.
18 See Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings,
Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Performances (New York: Dial Press, 1968);
Mariellen R. Sandford, Happenings and Other Acts (London and New York: Routledge, 1995);
and Judith F. Rodenbeck, Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011).
19 Allan Kaprow, quoted in Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means, pp. 13031.
20 Lon Ferrari was forced into exile from Argentina in 1976; his son Ariel, who remained
behind in Buenos Aires, was disappeared in 1977. See Andrea Giunta, Leon Ferrari: A Lan-
guage Rhapsody, in Luis Prez-Oramas, Tangled Alphabets: Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel,
exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), pp. 4657.
21 Ibid., p. 50.
22 Ferrari, quoted in ibid., p. 50.
703
 NETWORKS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATION
Plates

Thomas Bayrle Karl Otto Gtz Yoko Ono Takamatsu Jiro-

Romare Bearden Richard Hamilton Nam June Paik Tanaka Atsuko
Joseph Beuys Lynn Hershman Leeson Eduardo Paolozzi Herv Tlmaque
Derek Boshier - o-
Jikken Kob Sigmar Polke Gnther Uecker
Bruce Conner Tadeusz Kantor Robert Rauschenberg Stan VanDerBeek
Guy Debord Gyula Kosice Joaquim Rodrigo Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
Charles and Ray Eames Almir Mavignier Dieter Roth Wolf Vostell
Uzo Egonu Mohammed Melehi Gerhard Rhm Andy Warhol
yvind Fahlstrm Francois Morellet Ed Ruscha Yuri Zlotnikov
Len Ferrari On Kawara Jess Rafael Soto
300 301

Gyula Kosice On Kawara

Estructura lumnica Mad 6 (Luminescent Mad Structure No.6) LAT.3125N, LONG. 841E
1946 1965
neon gas, Plexiglas, and wood box acrylic on canvas
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

707
 Joaquim Rodrigo
Kultur 1962
1962
tempera on canvas
Museu Nacional de Arte Contempornea
Museu do Chiado, Lisboa

302

709
 Takamatsu Jiro
Strings in Bottles
1963 (reproduction 1985)
mixed media
The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu

303

711
304

Robert Rauschenberg
Axle
1964
oil and screen print on canvas
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

713
305

306

Sigmar Polke
Rasterzeichnung (Portrt Lee Harvey Oswald)
(Raster Drawing [Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald])
1963
posterpaint and pencil on paper
Private Collection
Andy Warhol
Thirty-Five Jackies (Multiplied Jackies)
1964
silkscreen and acrylic on canvas
MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

715
 Herv Tlmaque
My Darling Clementine
1963
oil on canvas, collages, painted wooden box,
rubber doll, Plexiglas
Centre Pompidou, Paris, Muse national d'art
moderne Centre de cration industrielle

307

717
 309

308
Derek Boshier Uzo Egonu
Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things Man Stealing a Shoe for His Wife
1961 1965
oil on canvas collage, cuttings from magazines, and guoache on paper
Museu Coleo Berardo, Lisbon Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery, London

719
310 313

311 312 314

Eduardo Paolozzi
Lessons of Last Time
1947
printed papers on card
TATE, London
Eduardo Paolozzi Eduardo Paolozzi Eduardo Paolozzi Eduardo Paolozzi
It's a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your Disposition I was a Rich Man's Plaything Windtunnel Test Yours Till the Boys Come Home
1948 1947 1950 1951
printed papers on card printed papers on card printed papers on card printed papers on card
TATE, London TATE, London TATE, London TATE, London

721
 316

315

Romare Bearden Romare Bearden

Conjur Woman Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue
1964 1964
photo projection on paper collage
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson

723
317
Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
Rue Jacob, 5 dcembre 1961
1961
ripped posters mounted on canvas
Private Collection

725
 319

320

318

Dieter Roth
Literaturwurst (Martin Walser: Halbzeit)
(Literature Sausage[Martin Walser: Halftime])
1967
chopped book, pressed into sausage form,
dissected and framed by the Artist
Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg
Dieter Roth
Dieter Roth Klner Divisionen (Cologne Divisions)
Daily Mirror Book 1965
1961 150 pages cut out of the Klner Tageszeitung,
150 pages cut-out of newspapers, adhesive binding adhesive binding, cardboard cover
Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg

727
321

Len Ferrari
Joseph Beuys La civilizacin occidental y cristiana
Fluxusobjekt (The Western Christian Civilization)
1962 1965
mixed media plaster, wood, and oil
Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Fundacin Augusto y Len Ferrari.
Loan of Lothar Schirmer, Munich Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires

322

729
323 324

Lynn Hershman Leeson Lynn Hershman Leeson

Breathing Machine
1965
Plexiglas on wood, sound, sensors, wax,
cast face, wig, make-up
Collection of the Artist
Caged Woman
1965
cage, make-up, wax, wig, wire and tape recorder,
Plexiglas, wood, sensor and sound
Collection of the Artist, New York

731
325

Eduardo Paolozzi Eduardo Paolozzi

Robot Standing Figure
c. 1956 1958
bronze bronze
Grosvenor Gallery, London Museu Coleo Berardo, Lisbon

326
327 328

Karl Otto Gtz

Richard Hamilton Statistisch-Metrische Modulation 20:10:4:2
Respective (Statistical-Metric Modulation 20:10:4:2)
1951 1961
oil on canvas on board felt pen on paper
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester Private Collection

735
329

330
Jess Rafael Soto
Sin ttulo (Estructura cintica de elementos geomtricos)
Almir Mavignier
(Untitled [Kinetic Structure of Geometric Elements]) Konvex-Konkav II (Convex-Concave II)
1956 1962
paint on Plexiglas and wood with screws oil on canvas
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Collection of the Artist, Hamburg

737
 332

331

Mohammed Melehi Franois Morellet

Quadrettini 4 Double Grids 0, 225, 45, 675
1963 1960-61
acrylic on canvas oil on wood
Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb

739
 Yuri Zlotnikov
Signal Systems
1957-62
tempera and watercolors on paper
Collection of the Artist, Moscow

333

741
 335

336

334 Gerhard Rhm

L'Essentiel de la grammaire (The Essence of Grammar)
Ed Ruscha John McHale 1962
Hurting the Word Radio #1 Transistor German grammar in 6 plates,
1964 1954 painted over with India ink, foldable
oil on canvas paper collage Generali Foundation Collection Permanent
The Menil Collection, Houston Yale Center for British Art, New Haven loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

743
 337
Charles Eames and Ray Eames
A Communications Primer
1953
16mm color film, 21 30
Eames Office LLC, Los Angeles
Tanaka Atsuko >
Electric Dress
1956 (reproduced in 1986)
synthetic paint on incandescent
lightbulbs electric cords and control
Takamatsu Art Museum
338
339

340

Gnther Uecker Nam June Paik

TV Zen for TV
1963 1963/90
TV, table, nails TV, wooden case, magnet
Private Collection Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

747
341

343

342

Wolf Vostell
Sun in Your Head
Bruce Conner Jikken Ko-bo-
1963 A MOVIE Ginrin (Silver Wheel)
16 mm black-and-white film, transferred to video (U-Matic) 1958 (digitally restored 2016) 1955
in 1967; restored and digitalized on DVD in 2006, 5' 30'' 16mm black-and-white film, 12' 35mm film transferred to DVD, 11' 57''
The Wolf Vostell Estate, Bad Nauheim Conner Family Trust and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd, Tokyo

749
344

346

345 347

Yoko Ono
Cut Piece
Stan VanDerBeek 1965
Breathdeath black-and-white film at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York
Karl Otto Gtz Guy Debord
1964 City in March 1965 Density 10:2:2:1 Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howling for Sade)
16mm black-and-white film, 15' 8 1962-63 1952
The Estate of Stan VanDerBeek Collection of Yoko Ono Yoko Ono 8mm black-and-white film, 5' 54'' 35mm black-and-white film, 64'

751
348

Wolf Vostell
You are Leaving the American Sector
1964-65
Spray paint on silk, screen print on canvas
Museum Folkwang, Essen

753
 350

< Thomas Bayrle

Mao und die Gymnasiasten
Tadeusz Kantor
(Mao and the Schoolboys) Signez sil vous plait! (Sign, Please!)
1965 1965
plywood, particle board, oil paint, electric motor mixed media
Museum Wiesbaden Moderna Museet, Stockholm

349

755
351

yvind Fahlstrm
Dr. Schweitzers Last Mission
196466
variable polyptych, tempera on panel, metal, plastic
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

757
SELECTED DOCUMENTS
Compiled by Daniel Milnes and Megan Hines
 1 Arturo [journal]
no.1, Summer 1944, Buenos Aires, Argentina 6 Fourteen Americans [exhibition catalogue]
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
3 1945: Revista mensual hecha por pintores, grabadores, September 11-December 8, 1946, USA
escritores, dibujantes, fotografos en defensa del progreso
social de Mxico (1945: Monthly review for Painters,
Engravers, Writers, Drawers, Photographers in defense 8 Luciano Fontana
of social progress in Mexico) [journal] Manifesto Blanco. 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina
no. 2, December 1945, Mexico City, Mexico
2 Angry Penguins [journal]
Max Harris and John Reed (eds.). December 1945,
Melbourne, Australia
7 Arte Concreto Invencin [journal]
no. 1, August 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina

4 Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung (General German Art Show) [invitation card]

Stadthalle Nordplatz, Dresden, August 25-October 31, 1946, Germany
9 La Part du Sable [journal]
ed. Georges Henein, Ramss Younan. No. 1, February 1947,
Cairo: dition La Part du Sable, Egypt
11 Prsence Africaine [journal]
no.1, November-December 1947, Paris/Dakar,
France/Senegal

10 Willi Baumeister
5 Mundo Literrio (Literary World) [journal] Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art). 1947,
no. 24, October 19, 1946, Lisbon, Portugal Stuttgart: Curt E. Schwab Verlagsgesellschaft, Germany

761
 18 Progressive Art Group [revised manifesto and brochure for first group exhibition]
Baroda/Mumbai, 1949, India

12 Tigers Eye [journal] 14 New Horizons [exhibition poster]

no. 1, October 1947, Westport, CT, USA Museum Tel Aviv, 1948, Israel 19 Al-Fikr al-Hadith: Majalla Shahriya lil Fan wa al-Thaqafah
al-Hura (Monthly Journal for the Free Arts and Culture) [journal]
Jameel Hamoudi (ed.). no. 4, c. 1949, Baghdad, Iraq

13 Arte Mad universal [journal]

no. 0, 1947, Buenos Aires, Argentina

21 Renmin meishu (Peoples Art) [journal]

No. 1, February 1, 1950, Beijing, China

20 Cobra. Bulletin pour la coordination des investigations

artistiques lien souple des groupes exprimentaux Danois
(Hst), Belge (Surrealiste-rvolutionnaire) et Hollandais
(Reflex) [journal]
no. 1, March, 1949, Copenhagen, Denmark

15 Zone 5 [exhibition poster]

Galerie Franz, Berlin, September 4-October 20,
1948, Germany

17 The First National Art Exhibition [exhibition

catalogue] National Beiping Arts College,
Beijing, July 2-16, 1949, China

23 Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in our Time)

[exhibition catalogue]
16 XXIV Esposizione internazionale darte: Biennale de Venezia 22 VOKS Bulletin [journal] Mathildenhhe, Darmstadt, July 15-September 3, 1950,
(24th Venice Biennial) [exhibition poster] no. 65, 1950, Moscow: USSR Society for Cultural Federal Republic of Germany
The Giardini, Venice, May 29-September 30, 1948, Italy Relations, Soviet Union

763
 24 Hushang Irani
The Nightingales Butcher Manifesto in:
Khorous Jangi (Fighting Cock) [journal]. Tehran, May 6, 1951, Iran 29 Vrtice [journal] 30 Michel Tapi. Un art autre (Art of Another Kind)
no. 7, July 1952, Coimbra, Portugal 1952, Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, France

25 Iskusstvo (Art) [journal]

January-February, 1951, Moscow, Soviet Union

31 Realismo [journal]
No.1, June 1952, Milan, Italy

32 Noticias de Arte (Art News) [journal]

no.1, September 1952, Havana, Cuba
27 Fourth Experimental Workshop Presentation
- o- event]
[program for Jikken Kob
Joshi Gakuin Auditorium, Ichigaya, Tokyo,
August 9, 1952, Japan

28 Prima Esposizione del Movimento

Nucleare (First Exhibition of the Nuclear Art
Movement) [exhibition poster]
Amici della Francia,
Milan, March 16-24, 1952, Italy

26 I Bienal do Museu de arte moderna de So Paulo (First So Paulo Biennial)

[exhibition catalogue]
Museu de arte moderna de So Paulo, So Paulo, 33 Lothar Charoux, Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Kazmer Fjer,
October-December 1951, Brazil Leopoldo Haar, Luiz Sacilotto, Anatol Wladyslaw
Manifesto ruptura. 1952, So Paulo, Brazil

765

35 Marg [journal]
vol. 8, no.1, 1954, Mumbai, India
40 Premire Biennale de la Mditerrane
(First Biennial for the Arts of Mediterranean Countries)
36 Aim Azar [exhibition catalogue]
Les inquiets [publication]. 1954, Cairo: Imprim- Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts, Alexandria, July 26-Sep-
erie Franaise, Egypt tember 15, 1955, Egypt

34 Second Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpturel [exhibition poster]

Stable Gallery, New York, January 11-February 7, 1953, USA

41 documenta I [exhibition poster]

Fridericianum, Kassel, July 16-September 18, 1955,
Federal Republic of Germany

42 Yoshihara Jiro
Gutai Manifesto in: Geijutsu Shincho . vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1956), Japan
38 1st Gutai Art Exhibition[invitation card]
Ohara Kaikan, Tokyo, October 19-28, 1955, Japan

37 Gutai [journal]
Yoshihara Jiro and Shozo Shimamoto (eds.).
no. 1, January 1955. Nishinomiya, Japan

43 Quadrum [journal]
no. 1, May 1956, Brussels, Belgium

39 Lahore Art Circle Group Exhibition 44 The Baghdad Exhibition of Painting and
[exhibition catalogue] Sculpture [exhibition catalogue] 45 Semina [journal] no. 2, December 1957,
Lahore, 1955, Pakistan Al-Mansur Club, Baghdad, February, 1957, Iraq San Francisco, CA, USA

767
 47 The First Tehran Biennial [exhibition catalogue]
Abyaz Palace Building within the Golestan Palace Complex, Tehran, April 1958,
Iran
46 a.
no. 2, March 1957, Buenos Aires, Argentina 51 Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts
[cast and instructions]
Reuben Gallery, New York, October 4, 6-10, 1959, USA

52 Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Amlcar de Castro, Cludio Mello e Souza, Frank Weissmann,
Reynaldo Jardim, Theon Spandis
Manifesto neoconcreto (Neo-concrete manifesto) in: Jornal do Brasil [journal]. Rio de Janeiro,
March 22 1959, Brazil

48 Guy Debord, Asger Jorn

Mmoires: structures portantes dAsger Jorn 1958.
France: L'Internationale situationniste.

53 60 Fine Art Exhibition [leaflet]

Deoksugung Palace, Seoul, October 5-14, 1960, Korea

49 Noigandres
no. 4, 1958, So Paulo, Brazil

49 Noigandres [journal]
no. 4, 1958, So Paulo, Brazil 55 Ulli Beier
Art in Nigeria. 1960, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, United Kingdom

50 Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and

Afro-American Literature [journal] 54 Wall Art Exhibition [leaflet]
No. 6, November 1959, Ibadan: Ministry of The exterior walls of the Deoksugung Palace, Seoul,
Education, Nigeria October 1-15, 1960, Korea

769
 57 Nove tendencije (New Tendencies) [exhibition poster]
Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, August 3-September 14, 1961, Yugoslavia

56 Arte Normativo Espaol [exhibition poster] 62 Exhibitions to be held on the occasion of the First International
Ateneo de Valencia, Valencia, March 12-26, 1960, Spain Congress of African Culture [exhibition catalogue]
ed. Frank McEwen. National Gallery, Salisbury, August 1-September
30, 1962, Southern Rhodesia

63 Georg Baselitz, Eugen Schnebeck. 2. Pandmonium (Second Pandemonium) [poster]

Berlin, Spring, 1962, Federal Republic of Germany

59 Bewogen Beweging (Moved Movement)

[exhibition poster]
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
March 10-April 17 1961, Netherlands

58 Gorgona [anti-magazine]
no.1, 1961, Zagreb, Yugoslavia

64 Festival of Misfits [invitation card]

Gallery One, London, October 23 1962, United Kingdom

61 Otra figuracin (Another Figuration)

[exhibition catalogue]
60 Zero [journal] Galeria Peuser, Buenos Aires, 65 Group 1890 [exhibition catalogue]
no. 3, July 1961, Dsseldorf, Federal Republic of Germany August 23-September 6, 1961, Argentina Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, October 2029, 1963, India

771
 66 Lantern. Journal of Knowledge and Culture
[journal]
vol. 12, no. 3, March 1963, Pretoria: Association
for the Advancement of Knowledge and Culture,
South Africa
71 Yoko Ono
Grapefruit. 1964, Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, Japan

67 Leben mit Pop Eine Demonstration fr den kapitalistischen Realismus

(Living with Pop A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism) [invitation card, recto and verso]
Bergeshaus, Dsseldorf, October 11-October 25, 1963, Federal Republic of Germany

70 Petition of the Aboriginal people of Yirrkala

August 14, 1963, Australia

68 XII Convegno internazionale artisti, critici e studiosi

darte (12th Convention of Artists, Critics and 73 Nassir Chora, Mahmoud Hammad, Fateh Al-Moudarres, Elias Zaiat
Scholars of Art) [poster] [exhibition catalogue]
Rimini, September 28-30, 1963, Italy Gallery Siwann, Damascus, June 1965, Syria

72 Carolee Schneemann, Meat Joy [poster]

69 George Maciunas. Fluxus Manifesto Judson Memorial Church, New York, November 16-18,
1963 1964, USA

773
 74 Erste Bienniale der Ostseelnder
(First Biennial of the Baltic Sea Countries)
[exhibition catalogue]
Museum der Stadt Rostock, Rostock,
July 4-August 8, 1965, German Democratic Republic

75 Stano Filko, Alex Mlynarcik. Invitation to

Happsoc [invitation sheet]
Bratislava, May 2-8, 1965, Czechoslovakia

76 David Medalla
mmmmm. Manifesto in: Signals Newsbulletin, vol.1, no.8,
June-July, 1965, United Kingdom

77 Spiral [exhibition catalogue]

One Forty-Seven Christopher Street, New York, May 15-June 5, 1965, USA

78 Shomei Tomatsu
11:02 Nagasaki. 1966, Tokyo: Shashindojin-sha, Japan
 A Erol Akyavas
Shafic Abboud
Born 1926 in Bikfaya, Lebanon
Died 2004 in Paris, France
Shafic Abboud studied at the Acadmie
Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) (Leba-
nese Academy of Fine Arts) under Csar
Gemayel (18981958) before he went
to Paris in 1947. There he studied at the
cole nationale suprieure des Beaux-
Arts (National School of Fine Arts) and
frequented the studios of Jean Metzinger
(18831956), Fernand Lger (18811955),
and Andr Lhote (18851962). He returned
to Lebanon in 1949 and held his first solo
show of figurative paintings in Beirut in
1950. The following year he resettled in
Paris. During the first half of the 1950s
Abboud developed an admiration for the
art of Pierre Bonnard (18671947), Roger
Bissire (18861964), and Nicolas de Stal
(19141955). With the support of the art
critic Roger van Gindertael (18991982),
Abboud had his first Parisian exhibition
of abstract works in 1955. He was invited
to the Salon des ralits nouvelles (Salon
of New Realities) in Paris and was the only
Arab artist included in the first Paris Bien-
nale in 1959. As a painter Abboud is re-
nowned for the subtle incorporation of his
Lebanese roots, namely his childhood mem-
ories and the landscape of Mount Lebanon,
into his masterfully balanced compositions,
as well as for his balanced use of color. He
traveled often and consistently returned to
ARTISTS BIOGRAPHIES
his homeland, where he played a major role
in Beiruts cultural and artistic life.
Affandi
Born 1907 in Cirebon, Java
Died 1990 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Affandi was a self-taught artist who is re-
garded as a leading figure within the modern
art movement in Indonesia. He is known for
his expressionistic painting style from the
1950s, with colorful swirling lines of thick
impasto directly applied on the canvas with
the tube or his fingers. However, his early
works from the 1930s and 40s drew on a
more impressionistic style. Affandis sub-
jects were always grounded in reality. In his
early years he depicted his family and sur-
roundings at home, while he focused on his
journeys throughout Indonesia and around
the world. In the 1930s Affandi was involved
in the Lima Bandung artist group. At the
time of Indonesias independent movement
in the 1940s Affandi took part in several
artists associations, including the Pelukis
Rakyat (Peoples Painters) and Asosiasi
Pelukis Indonesia (Indonesian Painters As-
sociation), and encouraged the fight against
the Dutch occupation. Affandi gained inter-
national recognition when he represented
Indonesia at the Venice Biennale in 1954
(where he won a prize) and the Bienal de
So Paulo in 1956. Later he was honored
with notable prizes and teaching appoint-
ments in the United States and Indonesia.
776
Born 1932 in Istanbul, Turkey
Died 1999 in Istanbul, Turkey
Erol Akyavas began his painting career in
the early 1950s when he studied under
Bedri Rahmi Eyboglu (19111975) at the
Gzel Sanatlar Akademisi (Academy of Fine
Arts), Istanbul. He then studied at the Ac-
cademia di Belle Arti di Firenze (Academy
of Fine Arts in Florence) and at the studios
of Andr Lhote (18851962) and Fernand
Lger (18811955) in Paris. From 1954 to
1960 Akyavas studied architecture with
Mies van der Rohe (18861969) at the Illi
nois Institute of Technology, Chicago, be-
fore moving to New York in 1967. Akyavass Andre is mostly known for his early assem-
paintings during nearly fifty years reflect his
shifts in approach and emphasis. He was
particularly interested in the cultural heri
tage and traditions of his homeland, which
he expressed through modern Western
styles. His large-scale paintings addressed
such universal issues as space, time, and
causation, often expressed in dualities.
Akyavas experimented with geometrical
abstraction, employed the Arabic letter-
form as calligraphic abstraction, and in-
cluded iconic Ottoman symbols or motifs,
along with such visual elements as walls,
architectural forms, and even human im-
prints. In 1961 he became the first Turkish
artist to be represented in the collection of
the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with
his work The Glory of the Kings (1959).
Fateh Al-Moudarres
Born 1922 in Aleppo, Syria
Died 1999 in Aleppo, Syria
Fateh Al-Moudarres is recognized as a lead-
ing figure in the development of modernism
in Syria. His early, realist painting drew in-
spiration from sources within Syria, such
as Christian and Muslim iconography and
Assyrian antiquities. During his studies at
the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of
Fine Arts) in Rome, from 1954 to 1960,
Moudarres was influenced by modern art
movements, particularly Surrealism. He
began to incorporate abstraction into his
painting at this time, blending the traditions
of Syrian art with Western techniques and
stylistic developments. When he returned
to Syria, Moudarress painting became in-
creasingly political. From 1967 he turned
from non-objective painting to social
themes, critiquing the upheaval to Syrian
families and social relationships wrought
by modern life. He was acutely concerned
about the damage to Syrias rural population
due to the agricultural crisisa situation
which forced the artist himself to move to
Damascus in the 1960s. He continued his
studies at the cole nationale suprieure
des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine
Arts) in Paris for three years in the 1970s.
Moudarres subsequently became an influ-
-
ential teacher at Jamiatu Dimashq (Univer-
sity of Damascus). Through his use of rich
color coupled with thick, roughened paint,
Moudarres depicted everyday people and
their ordinary problems with an air of loss
and mourning.
Carl Andre
Born 1935 in Quincy, MA, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Carl Andre studied at the Phillips Academy
boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts,
from 1951 to 1953 and afterward traveled
to France and England, returning deeply im-
pressed by the site of Stonehenge. In 1956
he moved to New York, where he lived and
worked closely with his former classmates
Frank Stella (b. 1936) and Hollis Frampton
(19361984). During this time Andre was
introduced to the writing of Ezra Pound
and developed an increasing interest in the
work of Constantin Brncusi (18761957).
gaged with the recognition of black and
bled wood sculptures and his Equivalents
seriesflat, rug-like arrangements of grid-
ded metal elements first displayed at his
one-man show in 1965 at Tibor de Nagy
Gallery in New York. Aside from sculpt-
ing Andre wrote more than 1000 poems,
which follow the construction principles of
serialism. From 1960 to 1964 he worked
for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which later
influenced his art and personal comport-
ment. In 1969 Andre joined the Art Workers
Coalition, a group of artists pushing for po-
litical and museum reform. He was included
in the Minimalist group exhibition Primary
Structures at New Yorks Jewish Museum in
1966 and received a 1970 retrospective at
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, also
in New York.
Karel Appel
Born 1921 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Died 2006 in Zurich, Switzerland
Karel Appel studied at the Rijksakademie
van Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy
of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam during the early
1940s. He co-founded the Nederlandse
Experimentele Groep (Dutch Experimental
Group) in 1948, which merged later that
year with artists in Copenhagen and Brus-
sels to form the avant-garde collective
CoBrA. Influenced by folk, childrens, and
modern art, Appel created a controversial
mural called Vragende Kinderen (Question-
ing Children) in 1949 for Amsterdams city
hall; it was covered up for ten years. Appel
settled in Paris in 1950, and after two years
detached himself from CoBrA. He then be-
came part of an artistic movement centered
around the critic Michel Tapi (19091987)
known as art informel (or art autre). Appel is
best known for his expressive and colorful
paintings depicting fabulous creatures and
masks, but he also experimented fruitful-
ly in other mediums and artistic fields. He
was awarded solo shows at the Palais des
Beaux-Arts (Palace of Fine Arts), Brus-
sels, in 1953 and at Martha Jackson Gal-
lery, New York, in 1954. He received the
UNESCO Prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale
and the Guggenheim International Award in
1960. His later work included a collabora-
tion with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926
1997) in the 1980s.
Rasheed Araeen
Born 1935 in Karachi, Pakistan
Lives and works in London, UK
Rasheed Araeen left his homeland of Pakis
tan in 1964 and moved to the United King-
dom. Before this decisive step he underwent
no artistic education, but was trained and
worked as a civil engineer in Karachi. Be-
fore his migration he had already produced
works of art such as ink paintings, sketch-
es, photographs, and Minimalist-inspired
sculptures. In those early works, like his
Hula Hoop series (195961), he showed
an interest in wavelike movement and
curved forms. Soon after his arrival in Lon-
don he started to produce his well-known
geometric sculptures. These modular units
consisted of open display structures cre-
ated from colored wood in which vertical
and horizontal lines are held together by
a network of diagonals. Since the 1970s
Araeens work has become politically en-
Asian artists within the British postwar art
scene. He joined the British Black Panther
movement in 1972 and founded three art
journals: Black Phoenix (1978), Third Text
(1987), and Third Text Asia (2008). He
also curated two famous exhibitions: The
Essential Black Art in 1988 at the Chisen-
hale Gallery and The Other Story at the Hay-
ward Gallery in 1989.
Wifredo Arcay
Born 1925 in Havana, Cuba
Died 1997 in Paris, France
Wifredo Arcay studied at the Academia
Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro
(National Academy of Fine Arts of Saint
Alexander) in Havana, then moved to Paris
on a grant in 1949. There he studied at the
Acadmie de la Grande Chaumire from
1949 to 1950 and frequented the Atelier
dArt Abstrait, becoming a part of the
post-Cubist geometric abstraction move-
ment. Arcay set up his first studio at the
villa of Andr Bloc (18961966) in Meudon
in 1951, where he met artists like Theo
van Doesburg (18831931) and Fernand
Lger (18811955). In 1953 he introduced
serigraphy to France and realized Matres
dAujourdhui (Todays Masters), an edition
of twelve silkscreen prints honoring the
prewar aesthetics of abstraction, followed
by a second edition (Jeunes Peintres dAu-
jourdhui [Todays Young Painters], 1954)
dedicated to a younger generation of ab-
stract artists. In the late 1950s and early
1960s Arcays practice evolved from easel
painting into reliefs designed for architec-
tural space. He joined the Constructivist
Groupe Espace in 1953, and from 1959 to
1961 he was a member of the Cuban group
Los Diez Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete
Painters). Although Arcay spent two-thirds
of his life in France he regularly sent works
to Cuba and represented his home country
in exhibitions abroad, such as the 1955
Bienal de So Paulo.
Siah Armajani
Born 1939 in Tehran, Iran
Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN, USA
Siah Armajani migrated to the United
States in 1960. He studied philosophy
and mathematics at Macalester College in
Minneapolis; at the same time he started
making artworks. He had early success
with his painting Prayer (1962), which was
exhibited and purchased by the Walker Art
Center. This piece, like his other works of
that time, shows a dense, abstract structure
composed of excerpts of poems from the
777
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (includ-
ing the Sufi writers Rumi and Hafez), which
Armajani transcribed by hand onto the can-
vas using black ink. From the late 1960s
Armajani developed an interest in American
vernacular building techniques, which led to
the creation of his first model bridges. Those
early attempts were followed by freestand-
ing sculptures and bigger architectural
efforts such as reading rooms, bridges
and poetry gardens. His focus on public
art was inspired by his belief in demo-
cratic ideals put forward by thinkers like
Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882). His
early exhibitions included Art by Tele-
phone at the Museum of Contemporary
Art Chicago in 1969, Information at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1970,
and Documenta, Kassel (1972; 1982; 1987).
Frank Auerbach
Born 1931 in Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in London, UK
Frank Auerbach was sent to England by his
parents in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution
of Jewish people in Germany. His parents
died in a concentration camp. From 1947
to 1953 he attended the evening painting
class of David Bomberg (18901957) at
Borough Polytechnic in London, where he
met Leon Kossoff (b. 1926). He first studied
at Londons St Martins School of Art from
1948 to 1952, and afterward at the Royal
College of Art until 1955. Auerbach taught
at several institutions, including secondary
schools and the Slade School of Fine Art in
London. He lived and worked most of his life
in Camden Town, London, and repeatedly re-
turned to the people and urban landscapes
near his studio. Auerbachs paintings were
never entirely abstract but were always
grounded in his close reality. He is known
for his thick impasto technique, as well as
for his painstaking attempts to achieve the
image he wants. He sometimes scraped his
canvases dozens of times before realizing
a finished work. Auerbach is considered
a central figure of the so-called School of
London alongside artists such as Francis
Bacon (19091992) and Lucian Freud
(19222011). In 1986 he represented Brit-
ain at the Venice Biennale and was award-
ed, with Sigmar Polke (19412010), the
Golden Lion prize.
B
Francis Bacon
Born 1909 in Dublin, Ireland
Died 1992 in Madrid, Spain
Francis Bacon, a self-taught artist, became a
leading figurative painter of the postwar era.
In 1927 he visited Berlin and Paris, where
he was inspired by the work of Nicolas
Poussin (15941665) and Pablo Picasso
(18811973). He created his first artworks
that year, attending the free European
Academies in Paris. Late in 1928 or early in
1929 Bacon settled in London and started
a short career as an interior decorator and
furniture designer. Nearly a decade later he
was included in the 1937 exhibition Young
British Painters at Thomas Agnew & Sons,
778
along with artists such as Graham Sutherland
(19031980). His breakthrough came in
1944 with the triptych Three Studies for Fig-
ures at the Base of a Crucifixion, widely con-
sidered his first mature work. Bacon would
go on to paint distorted human figures and
scenes that evoke alienation, violence, and
suffering. Throughout his career Bacon
worked in sequences and created variations
on motifs. He drew on both Christian and
mythological themes and found inspiration
in the works of other artists, such as Diego
Velzquez (15991660) and photographer
Eadweard Muybridge (18301904). His first
major retrospective was held at Tate Gallery,
London, in 1962.
Enrico Baj
Born 1924 in Milan, Italy
Died 2003 in Vergiate, Italy
Enrico Baj was a central figure of the Italian
neo-avant-garde. He was associated with
Dada, Surrealism, art informel, CoBrA, and
Arte Nuclearea movement he co-founded
with Sergio Dangelo (b. 1932). Baj was a
critic of Italian fascism, fleeing to Geneva
in 1944 to avoid conscription in the Italian
army under Mussolini. After World War II,
Baj returned to Milan, studying at both the
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Brera
Academy of Fine Arts), where he had begun
his studies in 1938), and the law department
at the Universit degli Studi di Milano (Uni-
versity of Milan). At Brera, Baj was exposed
to Abstract Expressionism. By 1955 Baj
had begun to create collages, using ribbons,
patterned fabrics and wallpapers, army
decorations, and furniture scraps to create
kitsch satire. His best-known found-object
series was his sharply critical Generals.
In 1960 Bajs work had its New York debut
in the exhibition Surrealist Intrusion in the
Enchanters Domain at DArcy Galleries,
curated by Marcel Duchamp (18871968)
and Andr Breton (18961966). Baj again
collaborated with Duchamp on Homage
to Marcel Duchamp, a reimagining of the
Mona Lisa with the artists face, in 1965. In
1961 Baj was included in The Art of Assem-
blage at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, and in 1964, he was featured in the
Venice Biennale.
Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg
Kern)
Born 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany
Lives and works in Munich, Germany
Georg Baselitz began his artistic training in
1956 at the Hochschule fr bildende und
angewandte Kunst (College of Fine and
Applied Arts) in East Berlin. After he was
expelled in 1957 he continued his studies at
the Hochschule fr bildende Knste (College
of Fine Arts) in West Berlin, from which he
graduated in 1962. From 1960 onward he
created challenging, often provocative works
in a figura tive style later categorized as
Neoexpressionism. His crude, emotionally
charged painting style reflected his interest in
reviving the tradition and sources of German
Expressionist painting, such as non-West-
ern art and art brut, for the postwar era. His
first solo exhibition in 1963 at Galerie Wer-
ner & Katz in West Berlin caused a scandal,
when his works Die groe Nacht im Eimer
(The Big Night in the Bucket; 1962/63) and
Der nackte Mann (The Naked Man; 1962)
were confiscated by the public prosecutor
for infringement of public morality. In 1969
Baselitz created his first upside-down paint-
ing (Der Wald auf dem Kopf [The Forest on
Its Head]); in the 1970s, he developed his
finger-painting technique. Besides painting
he also worked in sculpture and printmaking.
Baselitz taught at the Staatliche Akademie
der Bildenden Knste (State Academy of
Fine Arts) Karlsruhe and at the Universitt der
Knste (University of the Arts) Berlin. He was
included in Documenta, Kassel (1972) and
showed at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich,
Cologne, and New York throughout the 1970s.
Thomas Bayrle
Born 1937 in Berlin, Germany
Lives and works in Frankfurt am Main,
Germany
Thomas Bayrle was a weavers apprentice
from 1957 to 1959, and afterward studied at
the Werkkunstschule (Art College) in Offen-
bach until 1961. While he first concentrated
on commercial art his focus soon shifted to-
ward different printing techniques, such as
lithography and etching. With Bernhard Jger
(b. 1937) he founded Gulliver-Presse in 1962
and quickly acquired renown as a printer and
publisher of artists books. In Bayrles artistic
practice his preference for graphics and print-
ing merged with his fascination for machines
and a critical approach toward mechanization
and mass culture. Serial repetition within grid
structures became the guiding principle of
his works, which were related to American
Pop art. He created images (Superform)
out of repeated small logos, figures, or pic-
tograms, evoking the mechanics of global
capitalist production. Bayrle sometimes also
included controversial political personages
in his works and real machines like en-
gines (e.g , Kennedy in Berlin and Mao und
die Gymnasiasten [Mao and the Athletes];
both 1964). From the late 1970s he worked
with film and later became a pioneer of com-
puter-generated and animated art. He taught
at the Stdelschule in Frankfurt am Main from
1975 to 2007 and was repeatedly featured
in the Venice Biennale (2003; 2009) and
Documenta, Kassel (1964; 1977; 2012).
Romare Bearden
Born 1911 in Charlotte, NC, USA
Died 1988 in New York, NY, USA
Influenced by his New York upbringing
during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance,
Romare Beardens art reflects the diverse
cultural heritage of African American life.
Bearden originally studied education and
held positions as a social worker. During
the mid-1930s, Bearden worked a car-
toonist for the Baltimore Afro-American
and took evening classes at the Art Stu-
dents League with German Dada artist
George Grosz (18931959). While his
earliest works recalled the social realism
of Mexican mural painting, Bearden soon
incorporated references to Abstract Ex-
pressionism, Japanese woodcarving and
African tribal cultures. After serving in the
U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, Bearden
studied in 1950 at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Upon his return to New York, he became
more involved in social activism. In 1963
Bearden co-founded Spiral, a group of Af-
rican American artists who discussed the
civil rights struggle. He was also instrumen-
tal in establishing the Studio Museum in
Harlem in 1968 and Cinque Gallery in 1969.
During the 1960s Bearden came to favor
collage as a technique for political art. He
exhibited Prevalence of Ritual, one of his
best-known collage series, in a 1971 solo
show at the Museum of Modern Art. He re-
ceived many honors, including the National
Medal of Arts in 1987.
Mieczysaw Berman
Born 1903 in Warsaw, Poland
Died 1975 in Warsaw, Poland
While studying graphic design and ty
pography at the Szkoy sztuki dekoracyjnej
w Warszawie (School of Decorative Arts) in
Warsaw, Mieczysaw Berman became inter-
ested in Russian Constructivism. Bermans
Constructivist collages, begun in 1927,
also show the influence of Dadaists such
as Lszl Moholy-Nagy (18951946), Kurt
Schwitters (18871948), and Hannah Hch
(18891978). Berman often initiated his
photomontages, which would become his
primary medium, from personal experience.
In 1930 Berman discovered the overtly po-
litical photomontages by John Heartfield
(18911968) in the magazine Arbeiter-Illus-
trierte-Zeitung (Workers Illustrated News-
paper). As a result of Heartfields influence,
Berman moved away from Constructivism
to use the medium of photomontage poli
tically. With Franciszek Bartosek Berman
co-founded the Warsaw Artists Group (also
known as Phrygian Cap)an organization,
active from 1934 to 1938, that was affiliated
with the Polish Communist Party. The group
organized two exhibitions in Warsaw (1936)
and Krakow (1937). Berman received the
gold medal for poster design at the 1937
Exposition internationale des Arts et des
Techniques appliqus la Vie moderne
(International Exposition of Art and Tech-
nology in Modern Life) in Paris. He spent
World War II in the Soviet Union, where he
contributed to the Polish-language Soviet
occupation newspaper Red Banner. After
the war he published satirical drawings and
photomontages in magazines like Szpilki
(Pins) and illustrated writings by Stanisaw
Jerzy Lec (19091966).
Antonio Berni
Born 1905 in Rosario, Argentina
Died 1981 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Antonio Berni received a scholarship to
study in Europe in 1925. He first traveled
to Spain and afterward settled in Pa r University in 1946, where he received his
is, where he attended the workshops of
Andr Lhote (18851962) and Othon
Friesz (18791949) at the Acadmie de
la Grande Chaumire. After a brief return
to Argentina, Berni lived in Paris again
from 1927 to 1930. During this time he
created Surrealist works and stu died
Marxist politics. Back in Argentina in the
early 1930s, the dire political and social si
tuation caused a significant shift in Bernis
artistic approach. He established the Nue-
vo Realismo group in 1933 and began his
lifelong involvement with political art, ques-
tioning social injustice and inequity. That
same year Berni collaborated with David
Alfaro Siqueiros (18961974) on a mu-
ral (Plastic Exercise). Bernis social realist
style was characterized by its large scale,
narrative qualities and realistic rendering.
In the mid-1950s Berni turned to as-
semblage, using found trash materials
and industrial waste. Beginning in 1958
Berni embarked on a series of prints and
assemblages detailing the plights of fic-
tional stock characters of Juanito Laguna
(a disadvantaged youngster) and Ramona
Montiel (a prostitute). Berni represented Ar-
gentina at the 1962 Venice Biennale, where
he received the Grand Prix for printmaking.
Joseph Beuys
Born 1921 in Krefeld, Germany
Died 1986 in Dsseldorf, Federal Republic
of Germany
Joseph Beuys was one of the most influen-
tial and controversial artists of postwar Ger-
many. He began his artistic training in 1947
at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Ds-
seldorf. In 1953, the year of his graduation,
he held his first solo exhibitions in Krane-
burg and at the Von der Heydt Museum in
Wuppertal. In 1958 he used the materials
fat and felt for the first time. Beuys, who had
been a Luftwaffe volunteer during World
War II, built his artistic practice around the
myth of him being rescued by nomadic Tartar
tribesmen, who wrapped his cold and in-
jured body in animal fat and felt, after his developed its Bauhaus-based curriculum,
plane crash in 1944. In his actions and
installations, such as Wie man dem toten
Hasen die Bilder erklrt (How to Explain His sculpture Dreiteilige Einheit (Tripartite
Pictures to a Dead Hare; 1965) he often
included evocative objects and materials
associated with his rescue and drew upon
elements of shamanism. As a professor at
Kunstakademie Dsseldorf from 1961 to
1972, Beuys fought for free admission to
art education for everyone and pursued
his holistic approach to art in society and
politics. He participated in every Docu-
menta from 1964 to 1989. The Moderna
Museet in Stockholm organized his first
international exhibition in 1971. His first
retrospective was held at the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979.
John Biggers
Born 1924 in Gastonia, NC, USA
Died 2001 in Houston, TX, USA
John Biggers began his studies in 1941 at
Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he met
his early mentor Viktor Lowenfeld (1903
1869) and studied with artists Charles
White (19181979) and Elizabeth Catlett
(19152012). After serving in the navy he
followed Lowenfeld to Pennsylvania State
doctorate in art education in 1954. Big-
gers is best known for his murals on the
human condition. An early one (Dying Sol-
dier, 1943) was shown at the Young Negro
Art exhibition organized by Lowenfeld in
1943 at the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. Biggers moved to Houston in 1949,
where he established the art department
at Texas Southern University. He taught at
this institution for more than thirty years. In
1957 Biggers received a UNESCO grant,
which enabled him to become one of the
first African American artists to travel to
Africa. He visited Ghana, Togo, Benin, and
Nigeria. After his sojourn Biggers created
the richly illustrated book Ananse: The Web
of Life in Africa, published in 1961, and de-
veloped a system of visual icons inspired by
African motifs and symbolism. His later work
became concerned with depicting matriar-
chal systems (opposed to European patriar-
chy) and quilt-like geometry.
Max Bill
Born 1908 in Winterthur, Switzerland
Died 1994 in Berlin, Germany
Max Bill was one of the most avid propo-
nents of the principle of order and sought
to align almost all of his designs within
what he termed mathematical thinking,
which he considered the basis of human
experience. He first trained as a silversmith
in Switzerland before studying at the Bau-
haus in Dessau, Germany (192729). In
the 1930s he was influenced by the ideas
of De Stijl movement (191731; also known
as Neoplasticism), especially as put forth
in its manifesto, The Basis of Concrete Art
(1930), by the Dutch artist Theo van Does-
burg (18831931). Using this essay as a
basis for his own investigations into con-
crete forms, Bill later organized the seminal
exhibition Konkrete Kunst (Concrete Art) at
the Kunsthalle Basel in 1944.
In 1953 Bill co-founded the Hochschule
fr Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm,
where he both designed the building and
which later integrated science and art. Bill
exhibited extensively in the postwar period.
within her oeuvre.
Unity; 1950), which won first prize at the
Bienal de So Paulo in 1951, influenced the
emergence of Concrete art in Latin Amer-
ica. Bills work has been exhibited exten-
sively, including the first three Documenta,
Kassel (1955; 1959; 1964); and retrospec-
tives at the Kunsthaus Zrich (196869);
the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New
York; the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art (1974); and the Solomon R. Guggen-
heim Museum, New York City (1988).
Alexander Boghossian
Born 1937 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Died 2003 in Washington, DC, USA
The Armenian-Ethiopian artist Alexander
Boghossian (also known as Skunder) first
studied art formally in Europe after he was
awarded a scholarship by the Ethiopian gov-
ernment in 1955. He studied for two years in
London at St Martins School, Central School,
and the Slade School of Fine Art. He then
spent nine years in Paris, where he studied
and taught at the Acadmie de la Grande
Chaumire. He returned to Ethiopia from
1966 to 1969 and then emigrated to the Unit-
ed States in 1970, where he taught at the his-
torically black Howard University from 1972 to
2001. Boghossian was involved in the Ngri-
tude movement (an extension of Pan-African-
ism), and his art brought together European
techniques with materials like bark and animal
skins. His colorful paintings were inspired by
Surrealism, as well as Coptic and West African
art. Boghossian depicted prismatic abstract
color compositions or dreamlike worlds, of-
ten including mythical creatures. He became
the first contemporary African artist whose
work was purchased by the Muse d'art
moderne de la ville de Paris (in 1963) and the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (in 1965).
Lee Bontecou
Born 1931 in Providence, RI, USA
Lives and works in Orbisonia, PA, USA
Lee Bontecou trained at the Art Students
League in New York from 1952 to 1955. In
1954 she attended the Skowhegan School
for Painting and Sculpture in Maine and
learned to weld. During her stay in Italy from
1957 to 1958 on a Fulbright scholarship
she used soot in her drawings for the first
time. Upon her return to New York in 1958
she started to experiment with small-scale
wall-mounted sculptural assemblages, soon
developing her signature style and tech-
nique. These constructions, made by fas-
tening fabric to steel fragments that are
arranged in swirling forms with dark cen
tral voids, evoke technological, mechanical,
geological, and biological motifs. Bontecou
had her first solo show in 1960 at Castelli
Gallery in New York. The following year she
was included in The Art of Assemblage at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her
early success led to her withdrawal from the
public art sphere in the 1970s. She taught
at Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1991 and
worked on a new series of artworkslarge
mobile-like sculptures hanging from the ceil-
ing. Together with earlier vacuum-formed
plastic sculptures of plants and marine or-
ganisms, these galaxies made of wire and
ceramics mark a completely new approach
Lives in New York, NY, USA, and London,
Derek Boshier
Born 1937 in Portsmouth, UK
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Derek Boshier gained attention for his
paintings while studying at the Royal Col-
lege of Art in London from 1959 to 1962.
With fellow students like David Hockney
(b. 1937) and Allen Jones (b. 1937), he
was one of the pioneers of British Pop
art. Influenced by the writings of Marshall
McLuhan, Vance Packard, and John
Kenneth Galbraith, Boshier drew on the
iconography of British and American mass
culture and made references to current
political events and issues during the early
1960s, with a critical rather than celebra-
tory attitude. Boshier was included in Ken
Russells 1962 documentary Pop Goes the
Easel. Later that year, Boshier went to India
on a one-year scholarship and experiment-
ed with the narrative strategies of Hindu
symbolism. Back in England he changed
his style repeatedly: he turned to hard-
edge and geometric abstraction, produced
politically radical Conceptual art, created
elemental shaped sculptures in a Minimalist
manner, and returned to painting with com-
ical figures. Boshier took up different medi-
ums like drawing, printmaking, collage, film,
books, sculpture, installation and photogra-
phy. His collaboration with music groups like
The Clash, and David Bowie (19472016)
introduced his work to a broader audience.
He represented Britain in the 1963 Paris
Biennale and held teaching positions in
London and Texas.
Vladimr Boudnk
Born 1924 in Prague, Czechoslovak Republic
Died 1968 in Prague, Czechoslovakia
Vladimr Boudnk was sent to a forced labor
camp in Germany during World War II. After
the war he studied printmaking in Prague
from 1945 to 1949 and subsequently
evolved into an influential figure in Czech
postwar art. From the late 1940s to the
late 1950s he became a pioneer of hap-
penings, and in the 1960s he created work
that involved the participation of psychiat-
ric patients. He became the founder and
major representative of Explosionism and
formulated the movements principles in a
number of manifestos. During the 1950s
and 60s he invented experimental print-
ing techniques inspired by his experiences
working in different factories during and
after the war. For his active prints, which
he began in 1954, he treated Duralumin
sheets with industrial tools and materials
(such as nails, pieces of metal, or blades
of lathes), or burned them with oxyacety-
lene. His structural prints (begun in 1959)
were created through the fixation of mate-
rials like sand, pieces of fabric, and emery
paper to the plate. With these innovations
Boudnk realized powerful compositions
that he produced in different colors and
limited numbers. He befriended the author
Bohumil Hrabal (19141997) while they
worked together at an ironworks and appears
as a character in several of Hrabals novels.
Frank Bowling
Born 1936 in Bartica, British Guyana
UK
Frank Bowling migrated to London in 1950.
In 1959 he received a scholarship to the
Royal College of Art and graduated three
years later with the silver medal in painting
(David Hockney [b. 1937] won the gold).
Associated at the time with Pop art, Bowl-
ing mounted his first solo showImage in
Revoltat Londons Grabowski Gallery in
1962. A travel scholarship then enabled him
to visit South America and the Caribbean.
Bowling quickly abandoned figurative,
postcolonial art for abstraction. In 1966 he
moved to New York, where, bolstered by the
African American community, he developed
his Map Paintings (combining Color Field
techniques and stenciled images of South
America, Australia, and Africa). Bowling
received Guggenheim fellowships in 1967
and 1973 and was a contributing editor to
Arts Magazine from 1969 to 1972. In 1971
he received a solo show at the Whitney
Museum and befriended critic Clement
Greenberg (19091994), who encouraged
his abstract direction. Bowlings later series
include his Poured Paintings and reliefs
built up with Styrofoam. Bowling splits his
time between studios in London and New
York. In 2005 Bowling became the first
black artist to be elected a member of En
glands Royal Academy of Art.
Alberto Burri
Born 1915 in Citt di Castello, Italy
Died 1995 in Nice, France
Trained as a physician, Alberto Burri began
to paint while he was a prisoner of war in
Hereford, Texas, during World War II. Upon
his release and return to Rome in 1946 he
quit his former career and set up a studio.
Burri had his first solo exhibition in 1947
at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome,
showing paintings of landscapes and still
lifes. He traveled to Paris shortly thereafter,
779
where he was influenced by the work of
Joan Mir (18931983) and Jean Dubuffet
(19011985). Burri started to experiment
with unusual pigments and resins in the
early 1950s, creating sculptural canvases
and assemblages blurring the line between
painting and relief sculpture, such as his
Gobbi (hunchbanks). Burri mostly utilized
materials which were associated with his
experience at the camp in Texas, like burlap,
wood, tar, and sheet metal. His most famous
series are his Sacchi (sacks)cut, torn
and stitched burlap pieces in monochrome
colors. Burri was the subject of a midcareer
retrospective in 1957 at the Carnegie Mu-
seum of Art in Pittsburgh. He was awarded
the UNESCO Prize at the 1959 Bienal de
So Paulo and the Critics Prize for his solo
show at the 1960 Venice Biennale.
Rhythm, 1958); and Cromticas (Chro-
matic; 195760), a series of paintings
without frames. In 1959, Carvo signed the
Neoconcrete Manifesto, along with such
artists as Lygia Clark (19201988) and
Lygia Pape (19272004). In his neo-con-
crete period, Carvo explored color as mat-
ter. During this period he participated in the
group shows Ausstellung Brasilianischer
Knstler (Exhibition of Brasilian Artists) at
Haus der Kunst, Munich, in 1959, and Konk-
rete Kunst (Concrete Art) in Zurich, in 1960,
and was a visiting professor at the Hoch-
schule fr Gestaltung (College of Design)
in lm, Germany. After returning to Brazil in
1963, he was active as a teacher and graphic
designer. During the 1960s and 70s he pro-
duced kinetic works incorporating everyday
materials, such as bottle caps, nails, and
string. He returned to canvas painting in the
late 1970s; his pictures of the 1990s ref-
of Chicago and Black Mountain College
in North Carolina. In 1961, Chamberlains
unique approach led to his inclusion in The
Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art. During the late 1960s, Chamber-
lain expanded his sculptural vocabulary to
urethane foam, galvanized steel, aluminum
foil, and brown paper bags. Even his pho-
tographic experiments, which he began in
1977, retained his instinctive, motion-driven
approach. Moving the camera in sharp
gestures across the room, Chamberlain
generated the illusion of bending space,
cross-referencing his sculptural achieve-
ments. Since his inclusion in the biennials
of So Paulo (1961) and Venice (1964),
Chamberlain has received major solo ex-
hibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York (1971 and 2012),
theMuseum of Contemporary Art Los An-
geles (1986) and the Stedelijk Museum in
During the early 1960s he abandoned fig-
urative painting and realized his distinct
artistic language, painting large canvases
with abstract yet symbolically rich forms in
vibrant colors and with highly textured sur-
faces. Throughout his career Cherkaoui trav-
eled frequently between Europe and North
Africa and participated in exhibitions such
as the 1962 Salon de Mai and 20 Peintres
trangers (20 Foreign Painters) at the Muse
dArt Moderne (Modern Art Museum) Paris
in 1963. Following his death in 1967 an ex-
hibition titled Hommage Cherkaoui (Hom-
age to Cherakoui) was mounted at the Paris
Biennale and the Salon of Sacred Arts at
the Muse dArt Moderne.
Saloua Raouda Choucair
Born 1916 in Beirut, Lebanon
Lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon
de Janeiro (Museum of Modern Art in Rio
de Janeiro). That same year she moved to
Paris, where from 1972, she spent several
years teaching at the Sorbonne and devel-
oping therapeutic methods of engagement
with objects. In 1976, Clark retuned to
Brazil. For about a decade she abandoned
art completely for therapeutic techniques.
Clarks greatest legacy lies in stretching
the potential of art toward a bodily and
mindful experience.
Bruce Conner
Born 1933 in McPherson, KS, USA
Died 2008 in San Francisco, CA, USA
Bruce Conner studied art at Wichita Uni-
versity and the University of Nebraska, re-
ceiving a BFA in 1956. He also attended
the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the
Soon after, he began the Popcretos se-
ries together with Augusto de Campos
(b. 1931). In 1968 Cordeiro began to ex-
plore computer art and in 1971 he organized
Artenica in Brazila pioneering exhibition
and conference on art and technology.
Magda Cordell
Born 1921 in Hungary
Died 2008 in Sloan, NY, USA
Hungarian artist Magda Cordell (lat-
er McHale) fled to Egypt and Palestine
as a refugee during World War II. There
she worked as a translator and met her
first husband, the composer Frank Cor-
dell (19181980), with whom she set-
tled in London in the early 1950s. The
couple shared their studio with Magdas
later husband, the artist John McHale
became evident in his kinetic sculpture
series Estructuras transformables (Change-
able Structures), first exhibited in 1956. La
ter he explored movement, light, and sound in
films and theater.
Guy Debord
Born 1931 in Paris, France
Died 1994 near Bellevue-la-Montagne,
France
Guy Debord, a French Marxist intellectual,
was a co-founder of the revolutionary Sit-
uationist International (SI), in 1957, in Alba,
Italy. The other founders were his wife,
the novelist and critic Michle Bernstein
(b. 1932) and the author and artist Asger
Jorn (19141973). Because SI condemned
the theory of industrial, mass-produced
art and the related obsession with com-
by the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
traveled to five cities.
Pedro de Ora
Born 1931 in Havana, Cuba
Lives and works in Havana, Cuba
Pedro de Ora created his own visual vocab-
ulary that combines elements of hard-edge
and organic abstraction in a limited palette,
primarily black, white, red, and purple. He
briefly trained at the Academia de Bellas
Artes San Alejandro (Academy of Fine Arts
Saint Alexander) in his youth but had to quit
for financial reasons. During the 1950s,
when he worked in abstraction, he published
El Instante Cernido (Sifting Instantly; 1952
53), his first book of poems. After de Ora
met Lol Soldevilla (19011971), they trav-
eled to Venezuela for his first solo exhibition

C
Anthony Caro
Born 1924 in New Malden, UK
Died 2013 in London, UK
Anthony Caro studied engineering at
Christs College in Cambridge. During
vacations he took art classes and worked
in sculptor Charles Wheelers (18921974)
studio. After serving in the Royal Navy from
1944 to 1946, Caro pursued sculpture in
London at Regent Street Polytechnic and
the Royal Academy. In the early 1950s Caro
assisted Henry Moore (18981986) and
began teaching at St Martins School of Art.
Caros early sculptures were expressive and
figurative. In 1959 he met the critic Clement
Greenberg (19091994), who encouraged
his use of industrial materials. On Caros
first trip to the United States in 1959 he
met sculptor David Smith (19061965),
as well as several Color Field painters. The
erence the pure geometry of graffiti and
other objects.
Enrico Castellani
Born 1930 in Castelmassa, Italy
Lives and works in Celleno, Italy
Enrico Castellani received his diploma from
the Accademia di Belle Arti diBrera (Brera
Art Academy) in Milan in 1952. Afterward he
studied both art (at the Acadmie Royale des
Beaux-Arts [Royal Academy of Fine Arts]
and architecture (at the cole Nationale
Suprieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre
[National School of Visual Arts of the Cam-
bre] in Brussels. Castellani resettled in Milan
in 1956, where he met contemporary artists
such as Piero Manzoni (19331963) and
Lucio Fontana (18991968). In 1959 Cas-
tellani and Manzoni founded the critical jour-
nal Azimuth and the Galleria Azimut, where
Castellani held his first solo show in 1960.
Castellanis non-referential, self-reflexive art
practice treated the canvas as an object. He
showed his first relief monochromes, Super-
Amsterdam (1996).
Avinash Chandra
Born 1931 in Simla, British India
Died 1991 in London, UK
Avinash Chandra graduated from Delhi
Polytechnic Art School in 1952 and taught
at the institution from 1953 to 1956. In
1954, he was awarded first prize in the First
National Exhibition of Art, New Delhi, and
his painting Trees (1954) was acquired by
the citys newly founded National Gallery
of Modern Art. During the early 1950s he
was also a member of the progressive art-
ists movement Delhi Silpi Chakra. In 1956
Chandra moved with his artist wife, Prem
Lata, to London, where he had his first
British solo show in 1957 at the Imperial
Institute. Chandras art reached other parts
of Europe in the early 1960s, and he re-
ceived the 1962 Prix Europen (European
Prize). He was the first Indian artist to be
exhibited both in Documenta, Kassel (1964)
and at Tate Britain (1965). While his early
Saloua Raouda Choucair began her art
studies in Beirut in the mid-1930s, fre-
quenting the studio of Moustafa Farroukh
(19011975). Later she trained under Omar
Onsi (19011969) and developed an en-
thusiasm for Islamic art and architecture
while traveling in Egypt in 1943. Her 1947
show at the Arab Cultural Gallery in Beirut
was one of the first abstract exhibitions in
the region. In 1948 she moved to Paris,
where she took life drawing classes at the
cole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts)
and trained in the studio of Fernand Lger
(18811955). In 1950 her inclination toward
geometric shapes and Arabic letters led her
to organize LAtelier de lArt Abstrait (Stu-
dio of Abstract Art) with other avant-garde
artists. During this time Choucair created
her first non-objective works, showing early
experimentation with repeated forms. She
returned to Beirut in 1951. Choucair worked
in different mediums and materials but be-
came especially noted for her wood and
stone sculptures, such as her Poems se-
ries, realized as modular systems or forms
University of Colorado on a scholarship.
From 1957 onward he lived and worked in
San Francisco, where he quickly became
affiliated with the countercultural Beat
Generation. Conner is known for his use of
found-object assemblage in collage, sculp-
ture, painting, photography, printmaking,
performance, and film. A pioneer of Amer-
ican experimental cinema and rhythmic
editing, Conner wove together decontex-
tualized fragments of found footage and
cinematic marginalia, such as newsreels,
B-movies, stock footage, educational and
industrial films. A Movie (1958) was his
breakthrough work in this genre. He was
also noted for his innovative structural em-
ployment of music (Cosmic Ray, 1961) and
his critical approach to mainstream media
and various themes of postwar American
society, like the assassination of John F.
Kennedy (Report, 1967) or the threat of
nuclear war (Crossroads, 1976). The re-
nowned Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles gave
Conner a solo show in 1962. Conner was
also included in the 1967 exhibition Funk
Art, featuring figurative work from the
(19221978). They contributed to founding
the Independent Group (IG), a British art
collective that anticipated Pop art, in 1952.
Cordell was heavily involved in organi
zing the IG exhibition This Is Tomorrow at
Londons Whitechapel Gallery in 1956. All
her life Cordell considered herself a pain
ter above all, although her most productive
phase as an artist was during the 1950s.
Cordells paintings show distorted female
figures and were often compared to works
of Jean Dubuffet (19011985) and art brut.
Lawrence Alloway (19261990) also read
atomic influences and a relationship to Abs
tract Expressionism in her work. When she
and McHale moved to the United States in
1961, he worked with Buckminster Fuller
(18951983) at Southern Illinois University.
The McHales started to pursue an academ-
ic career in futurology, and established the
Center for Integrative Studies at the State
University of New York Binghamton in
1968. Later she taught futurology and art
in Houston, Texas, and Buffalo, New York.
modities, the art of SI sympathizers was
redirected from the creation of specific
objects and instead toward a general cri-
tique of capitalist culture. Debords book
La Socit du spectacle (The Society of the
Spectacle) (1967) detailed how the con-
sumption of images had replaced authentic
human interaction, arguing that the result-
ing spectacle culture was the hallmark of
late capitalism. Many consider this book to
be a key manifesto of the Paris Uprisings
that took place in May 1968 because many
of the protesters used slogans from this
text. After SI was dissolved in 1972, Debord
focused on filmmaking (including a film ver-
sion of La Socit du spectacle, 1973) and
writing, including the sequel Comments
on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.
Suffering from the effects of a lifetime of
excessive drinking, Debord committed sui-
cide at his property in Champot, near Bel-
levue-la-Montagne, on November 30, 1994.
Willem de Kooning
Born 1904 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands
at Galera-Librera Sardio, Caracas (1957).
That same year, the couple founded Galera
de Arte Color-Luz in Havana, which became
a meeting place for Diez Pintores Concretos
(Ten Concrete Painters), a group of artists
working in geometric abstraction (195861).
De Ora became the groups archivist and
documented the Cuban local art scene. He
represented Cuba in various exhibitions
abroad, and from 1961 onward played a vital
role in national cultural organizations, includ-
ing the Unin Nacional de Escritores y Arti-
stas de Cuba (National Union of Writers and
Artists) and the Consejo Nacional de Cultura
(National Council of Culture). De Ora re-
ceived the National Designer Award from the
Cuban Book Institute (2011) and the Cuban
National Visual Arts Award (2015).
Niki de Saint Phalle
Born 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Died 2002 in San Diego, CA, USA
Niki de Saint Phalle was a self-taught art-
ist who spent most of her childhood in New

following year he made his first abstract
steel sculptures, and in 1961 he created
his first polychrome work. Caros break-
through came in 1963 with a solo exhibi-
tion at Whitechapel Gallery in London. His
brightly painted, sprawling abstract sculp-
tures were displayed without pedestals,
prompting a new relationship between art
and spectator. He was included in Primary
Structures at the Jewish Museum in New
York in 1966 and the 1969 Bienal de So
Paulo. Caro also worked with bronze, silver,
lead, stone, wood, and paper. In the 1970s
he abandoned color in his work, and later
returned to figuration.
Alusio Carvo
Born 1920 in, Belm, Par, Brazil
Died 2001 in Poos de Caldas, Minas
Gerais, Brazil
Brazilian artist Alusio Carvo began his ca-
reer as an illustrator and figurative painter.
After receiving a government scholarship
for art teachers, he moved to Rio de Janeiro
in 1949. There he attended free classes
with the geometric abstractionist Ivan Serpa
at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de
Janeiro. Under Serpas influence, Carvo
joined the avant-garde Grupo Frente in the
1950s, producing rigorous works such as
the black-and-white linear spiral Ritmo Cen-
trpeto-Centrifugal (Centripetal-Centrifugal
ficie nera (Black Surface in Relief), in 1959,
for which he created depressions on the
canvas with a nail gun. He would continue to
use methods like puncturing and embossing
to create rhythmic spatial reliefs. Castellani
further explored perceptual effects in his
Angolare (Angular) series (196065), com-
prised of corner-shaped canvases deformed
by concave and convex shapes. In 1967 he
produced Ambiente bianco (White Environ-
ment), his first room-sized installation. In the
early 1960s he became associated with the
German artist group ZERO and was included
in several ZERO exhibitions. He represented
Italy in the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1966,
1984 and 2003.
John Chamberlain
Born 1927 in Rochester, IN, USA
Died 2011 in New York, NY, USA
John Chamberlain is renowned for as-
sembling automobile parts into abstract
constructions of vivid shapes and color.
Although this makes him an acclaimed rep-
resentative of Junk Art, his spontaneous,
gestural work with industrially fabricated
material has earned him associations with
Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Mini-
malism. Chamberlain began what would be-
come his distinctive body of work in the late
1950s, when he moved to New York upon
completing his studies at the Art Institute
paintings were townscapes and landscapes
rendered in mostly intense colors, often
accompanied by swirling suns and moons,
he slowly moved toward a more sexually
explicit style with layered, rounded forms
and bodies in the 1960s and 70s. After re-
ceiving a John D. Rockefeller scholarship in
1965, Chandra moved to New York in 1966.
He returned to London in 1973.
Ahmed Cherkaoui
Born 1934 in Boujad, Morocco
Died 1967 in Casablanca, Morocco
Ahmed Cherkaoui trained under a callig-
rapher in Casablanca before he moved to
Paris in 1956, shortly following Moroccos
independence. There he studied at the cole
des Mtiers dArt (School of Art Trades) un-
til 1959, then continued his studies at the
cole nationale suprieure des Beaux-Arts
(National School of Fine Arts) for another
year. In 1961 Cherkaoui spent a year at the
Akademia Sztuk Pieknych (Academy of Fine
Arts) in Warsaw, where he increasingly exper-
imented with burlap (collages) and mixed
media. Upon his return to Morocco and later
that year to France, his interest in Moroccan
forms (Amazighi symbols, Islamic calligra-
phy, tattoos, and handicrafts like pottery
and jewelry) grew along with his European
influences (Roger Bissire [18861964],
Paul Klee [18791940], and Surrealism).
comprised of similar units. Despite her early
success in Paris, where in the early 1950s
she showed in the Salon des ralits nou-
velles and had a solo exhibition at Galerie
Colette Allendy, Choucairs work was not
widely recognized outside Lebanon until her
2013 retrospective at Tate Modern in London.
Lygia Clark
Born 1920 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Died 1988 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lygia Clark began studying art in 1947 with
architect Roberto Burle Marx. Her early
paintings are aligned with the mid century
Brazilian Constructivist tendencies. Clarks
understanding of form and its sensuous
qualities intensified when she studied with
Fernand Lger (18811955) in Paris from and took part in the inaugural exhibition
1950 to 1952. Upon her return to Brazil, she
became part of Rios avant-garde Concre-
tist Grupo Frente in 1954. She co-founded
the Neoconcrete movement in 1959, be-
coming a leading figure with Hlio Oiticica.
At that time she shifted her focus from the
art object toward art as a participatory pro-
cess. With her aluminum hinged Critters
(1960) series, which won the sculpture
prize at the 1961 Bienal de So Paulo, she
began to invite the spectator to actively en-
gage with her work. In 1968 she conceived
her penetrable installation The House Is the
Body for the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio
Bay Area, at the University Art Museum in
Berkeley, California.
Waldemar Cordeiro
Born 1925 in Rome, Italy
Died 1973 in So Paulo, Brazil
A leading digital artist in Brazil, Waldemar
Cordeiro spent the first twenty years of his
life in Italy, where he studied art in Rome
and started to work as a newspaper cari-
caturist in 1943. Living in Brazil from 1946
to 1948, he painted in a figurative, Expres-
sionist style and worked as a journalist and
art critic for the newspaper Folha da Manh.
He returned to Italy in 1948, finally settling
in So Paulo the following year. Cordeiro
created his first abstract paintings in 1948
began a nine-year correspondence with the
Do Figurativismo ao Abstracionismo (From
Figurative Art to Abstraction; 1949) at the
Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo (So
Paulo Modern Art Museum; MAM/SP). He
founded the Ruptura Group in 1952 and
emerged as its leader, writing a Concrete
art manifesto and mounting the groups
first exhibition that year at MAM/SP. From
1951 he participated in several editions of
the Bienal de So Paulo. In 1953 Cordeiro
established Jardins de Vanguarda, a land-
scape design company. He traveled to
Europe in 1964 and was introduced to
American Pop art at the Venice Biennale.
D
Sand Dari
Born 1908 in Roman, Romania
Died1991 in Havana, Cuba
Sand Dari first encountered Surrealist
artists and writers while studying law in Par-
is from 1926 to 1932. During the 1930s he
worked as an art critic and caricaturist for Ro-
manian and French publications. In 1941 he
migrated to Cuba where, in the late 1940s, he
committed himself to art. His early lyrical ab-
stractions, called Composiciones (Compo-
sitions) were exhibited in solo shows in 1949
at the Lyceum in Havana and Carlebach
Gallery in New York. That same year Dari
Buenos Aires-based artist Gyula Kosice (b.
1924), which led to Daris participation in
Mad exhibitions and his contribution to the
magazine Arte Mad. From 1950 onward Dari
became a leading representative and pro-
moter of abstract art and Concretism in
Cuba. He co-founded the magazine Noticias
de Arte (Art News) in 1952 and became a
member of the group Diez Pintores Con-
cretos (Ten Concrete Painters) from 1958
to 1961. Dari exhibited in the 1952 Venice
Biennale and three editions of the Bienal de
So Paulo (1953; 1955; 1957). His interest
in movement and spectator involvement
Died 1997 in East Hampton, NY, USA
Willem de Kooning attended night class-
es at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten
en technieken (Academy of Fine Arts
and Techniques) in Rotterdam while he
worked as an apprentice at a design and
decoration firm from the age of twelve. He
migrated to the United States in 1926, ar-
riving in New York City the following year.
De Kooning soon befriended modernists
such as Arshile Gorky (19041948) and
Stuart Davis (18921964). During the Great
Depression he joined the artists Artists Un-
ion (1934) and designed murals for the Fed-
eral Art Project (1935). In the late 1940s and
early 1950s, he became a leading artist of
the highly influential movement alternately
labeled as action painting, Abstract Ex-
pressionism, or the New York School. This
new mode of entirely abstract painting was
based on emotion, bodily involvement, and
gesture. His first solo exhibition was held at
Charles Egan Gallery in New York in 1948.
The critically acclaimed show included his
now-famous black-and-white paintings. De-
spite his early success with abstraction, de
Kooning continued to explore new styles,
methods and mediums, such as drawing,
sculpture and lithography. Inspired by ges-
tural abstraction and Cubism yet attracted
by figurative painting, de Kooning embarked
on his groundbreaking Woman series in
1950. His 1968 retrospective, organized
York. In 1950 she made her first paintings
and two years later moved to Paris, where
she studied acting. After an emotional
collapse in 1953 she turned to art, which
had a therapeutic effect. In 1955 Saint
Phalle moved to Spain where she was in-
spired by Antonio Gauds work, especially
his Park Gell in Barcelona. Back in Paris
she met her future husband, Jean Tinguely
(19251991), with whom she shared an ar-
tistic and emotional relationship from 1960
onward. She first attracted attention as an
artist in the early 1960s with her shooting
paintingsrelief-like assemblages of plas-
ter and concealed paint containers, which
she shot from a distance. Those pieces
introduced elements of chance, specta-
cle, and performance. Subsequently Saint
Phalle made women and eros her primary
subject matter. In 1965 she created her
first Nanasrounded, colorfully patterned
archetypal female figures. Saint Phalles
notable commissions include Hon (1966), a
building-sized reclining Nana for the Mod-
erna Museet Stockholm. She also collabo-
rated on large-scale projects with Tinguely,
like the Stravinsky Fountain (1982) in Paris.
Her ambitious Tarot Garden in Tuscany, a
twenty-year effort, was unveiled in 1998.

780 781

Beauford Delaney
Born 1901 in Knoxville, TN, USA
Died 1979 in Paris, France
A key figure of the Harlem Renaissance,
Beauford Delaney apprenticed with painter
Lloyd Branson (18531925) in Knoxville
before beginning his art studies in Boston
in 1924. He moved to New York in 1929.
He participated in the 306 group of Af-
rican American painters led by Charles
Alston (19071977) in Harlem, but as a
gay artist, he also maintained a studio and
bohemian circle on Greene Street in Green-
wich Village. He depicted the neighbor-
hood in many paintings in the late 1940s.
Delaney gained recognition for his portraits
of prominent African Americans, such as
Duke Ellington. In 1930 some of these
portraits were shown at the Whitney Mu-
seum Studio Galleries in New York. During
his time in New York Delaney established
lifelong friendships with the novelists Henry
Miller (18911980) and James Baldwin
(19241987). In 1953 he followed Bald-
win to Paris, where he lived for the rest of
his life. Delaney suffered mental illness in
France but continued to work and exhibit.
His art moved from representational pastel
portraits and street scenes to completely
abstract paintings of an Expressionist man-
ner. Always using thickly applied paint and
bright colors, Delaneys painting style re-
called the techniques of the French Fauves
and van Gogh. Shortly before his death, the
Studio Museum in Harlem organized his
first retrospective.
Aln Divi
Born 1900 in Blato u Podebrady, Bohemia,
Austrian Empire
Died 1956 in Prague, Czechoslovakia
After decades as a forgotten outsider artist
embracing moody, symbolic content, painter
Aln Divi has received sustained critical
attention since his death. Born in Bohemia,
he moved to Paris in 1926 to focus on his
work, where he experimented with Cubism
and Expressionism. With other expatriates,
he formed the House of Czechoslovak Cul-
ture in 1939 to protest the German occupa-
tion. When France entered World War II, the
groups members were arrested for espio-
nage. Divi spent six months at the brutal La
Sant Prison, and an additional few years
in concentration and internment camps.
The harsh treatment he endured and the
graffiti he witnessed in his solitary-confine-
ment cell at La Sant deeply influenced his
work. After his release in 1942, he moved
to New York City. In this period he created
landscapes and work later termed art brut,
based on the images scrawled on the walls
of his former prison cell. Divi returned to
Prague in 1947 and enjoyed brief suc-
cess with a memoir of his time in La Sant.
Following the Communist coup dtat in
1948, however, he had limited opportuni-
ties and turned to spiritual themes, such as
Christ of the Blacks. His work was finally
rediscovered after the Communists were
ousted in 1989.
782
E
Charles & Ray Eames
Born 1907 in Saint Louis, MO, USA / Born
1912 in Sacramento, CA, USA
Died 1978 in Saint Louis, MO, USA / Died
1988 in Saint Louis, MO, USA
Charles Eames briefly studied architec-
ture at Washington University in St. Louis,
establishing an architecture practice in
1930. Ray Eames (born Bernice Alexandra
Kaiser) came to New York in 1933, where
she trained at the Hans Hofmann School
and was among the first generation of Abs
tract Expressionist painters. The couple met
at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michi-
gan in 1940, where Charles headed the in-
dustrial design department. After their mar-
riage in 1941 they moved to Los Angeles.
After Charles Eames and Eero Saarinens
(19101961) first experiments with molded
plywood in 1940winning the Museum of
Modern Arts 1940 Organic Design in Home
Furnishings competitionthey received a
U.S. Navy commission for plywood stretch-
ers and leg splints during World War II. With
access to new techniques they developed
a design vocabulary that was essential for
their innovative postwar approach. Focus-
ing on a sculptural aesthetic, functionality,
affordability, and cutting-edge materials
like plywood and plastic, the Eameses
made significant contributions to modern
design and architecture. They constructed
their famous avant-garde house in 1949 in
Los Angeless Pacific Palisades, as part of
Arts & Architecture magazines Case Study migrated to England at the age of thirteen.
House program. From the mid 1950s on-
wards the Eameses also worked as pho-
tographers and filmmakers.
Melvin Edwards
Born 1937 in Houston, TX
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Melvin Edwards is best known for his
sculpture series Lynch Fragments, based
on the civil rights movement, and for his
large-scale public art projects. He once
commented that after he had watched steel
being welded as a child, he knew he wanted
to be a sculptor. After graduating from the
University of Southern California in 1965,
he had his first solo exhibition at the Santa
Barbara Museum of Art. He soon began his
teaching career, which parallels his career
as a sculptor. In 1967 Edwards moved to
New York, where he became the first Afri-
can American sculptor honored with a solo
exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Amer-
ican Art, in 1970. His Lynch Fragments
series comprises small reliefs composed
of sharp-edged forms and such objects as
chains, locks, and toolsall charged with
meaning. The series was born out of his ex-
perience of the civil rights movement in the
1960s, but a second phase dealt with the
Vietnam War and later works explore African
American identity and his travels in Africa.
Inji Efflatoun
Born 1924 in Cairo, Egypt
Died 1989 in Cairo, Egypt
Inji Efflatoun was a Marxist and feminist
painter. After her parents divorce when
Efflatoun was a young child, she was raised
by her mother, whose determination as a
single working woman proved inspiration-
al. Efflatoun was introduced to Marxism
during her studies at the Lyce Franais
du Caire, joining a Communist youth party
in 1942. Her art tutor, Kamel al-Tilmisani
(19151972), introduced her to the Surre-
alist group Art and Liberty. As a feminist
activist, Efflatoun co-founded the Rabitat
Fatayat at jamia wa al ma ahid (League of
University and Institutes Young Women)
in 1945, and in the late 1940s, she wrote
political pamphlets linking class and gender
oppression with imperialism. She stopped
painting from 1946 to 1948. After visit-
ing Luxor, Nubia, and the Egyptian oases
Efflatoun began to portray the Egyptian
working class, particularly womens strug-
gles. She exhibited in the 1952 Venice Bien-
nale and 1953 Bienal de So Paulo. In 1956,
Efflatoun befriended the influential Mexican
muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (18961974).
Efflatoun was imprisoned for her Communist
activities in 1959 under the rule of president
Gamal Abdel Nasser. She began painting
again in prison, depicting the difficult real-
ity of prison life. After her release in 1963
Efflatouns painting style moved from social
realism to lighter, more textured scenes of
the working class.
Uzo Egonu
Born 1931 in Onitsha, Nigeria
Died 1996 in London, UK
Uzo Egonu studied painting and won first
prize in a school art competition before he
Ministry of Information in 1953. Following
There he studied painting and typography
under L. J. Daniels and Gilbert Spencer at
Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, Lon-
don (194952). He then traveled to study
the European masters and classical African
art. In 1953 he settled in Paris, eventually
visiting Denmark, Finland, and Italy. Upon
returning to England, Egonu set up a studio
in London, and during the 1960s he devel-
oped his unique synthesis of modern art
(especially Cubism and Pop art) and African
visual languages (Nigerian ornamentation,
circular composition, and birds-eye views),
blurring the lines between figuration and
abstraction. Although Egonu briefly visited
his homeland only once, his compositions in
painting, collage, and printmaking reveal a
lasting bond with African issues, especially
the 1966 anti-Igbo pogrom and the Nigeri-
an Civil War. In 1964 Egonu had a solo show
at the Woodstock Gallery, London, and he
also gained attention in Nigeria for his art.
His work has been exhibited in Europe and
Africa and he was honored with several
medals and prizes. In 1989 his work was in-
cluded in the landmark exhibition The Other
Story at Hayward Gallery, London.
Ibrahim El Salahi
Born 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan
Lives and works in Oxford, UK
Ibrahim El Salahi developed a profound in-
terest in Arabic calligraphy, both as a means
of communication and as purely aesthetic
form, and engaged with the natural colors,
symbolism, and decorative traditions of his
homeland. He studied at the School of De-
sign at Gordon Memorial College in Khar-
toum (194952) and in 1954 received a
scholarship to study at the Slade School of
Fine Art, London. After he returned to Khar-
toum in 1957, following Sudans liberation
from British colonial rule, he began to teach
at Khartoum Technical Institute. For the
next three years (195861) he struggled
to discover his own style within the many
aesthetic and cultural influences to which
he was exposed (Islamic, African, Arab, and
Western). He emerged as a leading artist
of the Khartoum School and associated
with the Mbari Club in Ibadan, Nigeria. Af-
ter his release from a sudden imprisonment
without trial in Sudan (1975) he moved to
Doha, Qatar, and later settled in Oxford,
England, in 1998. Based on his experiences
in prison, El Salahi adopted a graphic black-
and-white style between the late 1970s and
mid-1990s. In 2013 he became the first Af-
rican artist to be honored with a retrospec-
tive at Tate Modern, London.
Erhabor Emokpae
Born 1934 in Benin City, Nigeria
Died 1984 in Lagos State, Nigeria
Erhabor Emokpae began working in a ro-
mantic and ethnographic figurative style,
and later in abstraction. He is known for his
paintings featuring legendary individuals in
African history and for his lifelong artistic
focus on the theme of dualism. His earliest
artistic influences date back to his child-
hood, especially the Benin guild of carvers.
In 1951 he moved to Lagos and attended
the Yaba Technical Institute. He also stud-
ied privately with a graphic artist and be-
came a commercial artist for the Federal
Nigerias independence (1960), Emokpae
gained recognition in the emerging mod-
ern Nigerian art scene. His contributions
to cultural policy and his efforts to redefine
public perception of contemporary modern
Nigerian art began when he helped organize
the Eastern Nigeria Festival of Arts (1956
59). During the 1960s and 70s, Emokpae
served as secretary for the newly founded
Society of Nigerian Artists and the Lagos
Arts Council. After working as a graphic
artist for the advertising agency Lintas, he
finally decided to become a profession-
al painter and muralist. Some of his most
acclaimed works are for the 1977 Second
World Festival of Black Arts (FESTAC) and
the National Arts Theatre building, Lagos.
Ben Enwonwu
Born 1917 in Onitsha, Nigeria
Died 1994 in Lagos, Nigeria
Ben Enwonwu studied at Government Col-
lege in Ibadan and Umuahia from 1934
to 1939. From 1941 to 1944 he taught at
Edo College in Benin City and trained as an
apprentice in the guild of Benin bronze cast-
ers. His early artistic success earned him a
study abroad scholarship in 1944. Within
the year he moved to London, where he re-
ceived a fine arts diploma from the Slade
School in 1947 and a masters degree
in anthropology from University College
London in 1948. Enwonwu emerged as a
successful figurative painter and sculptor in
wood and bronze, representing an African
modernist style which combined traditional
elements with a classical Western training.
In 1946 Enwonwu participated in the Exposi-
tion Internationale (International Exhibition)
at the Muse dArt Moderne, Paris. In 1954
he became the youngest member of the
Order of the British Empire in the Common-
wealth. He was Cultural Advisor to the Fed-
eral Government of Nigeria from 1968 to
1971. In 1971 he became the first professor
of fine art in Nigeria at the University of Ife-
Ife (retiring in 1975) and a visiting artist at
Howard University, Washington, DC.
F
yvind Fahlstrm
Born 1928 in So Paulo, Brazil
Died 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden
The work of yvind Axel Christian
Fahlstrm drew on Pop art, mass media,
and underground culture. His parents
sent him to live with relatives in Sweden
in 1939, where he remained during World
War II. In 1948 he became a Swedish cit-
izen and soon began to study art history
and classical studies at the University of
Stockholm. Fahlstrm supported himself
with journalism, poetry, theater, translations,
and criticism in the 1950s and 60s. At a
solo show at Gallery Numero in Florence
(1953), he exhibited his drawing Opera, and
his Manifesto for Concrete Poetry was pub-
lished in 1954. He received scholarships to
study in Italy (1958) and France (1960). In
1961, on a grant from the Sweden-Amer-
ica Foundation, he moved to New York,
where he rented the studio once occupied
by Robert Rauschenberg (19252008); existential themes. That same year, Fattah
Jasper Johns ((b. 1930) was his neighbor.
Fahlstrm is known for his early attempt
to create artworks that were variable (us-
ing magnets) and therefore interactive.
He was concerned with the mechanisms
of economics and politics, including the
manipulation of information and data. His
art includes Pop imagery and comic strips,
and besides visual, theatrical, and literary
works, he produced films and radio plays.
Fahlstrm represented Sweden at the 33rd
Venice Biennale (1966) with his installation
Dr. Schweitzers Last Mission.
Wojciech Fangor
Born 1922 in Warsaw, Poland
Died 2015 in Warsaw, Poland
Wojciech Fangor was a painter, sculptor, and
graphic artist. During World War II he stud-
ied with Tadeusz Pruszkowski (18881942)
and Felicjan Szczesny Kowarski (1880
1948), and in 1946 he graduated from the
Akademia Sztuk Pieknych (Academy of
Fine Arts), Warsaw, where he later taught
(195361). His early paintings showed his
interest in Impressionism, Expressionism,
and Cubism, but he gained wider recogni-
tion after he adopted Socialist Realism. His
most famous paintings of that time are Dane
liczbowe (Figures; 1950) and Matka korean-
ski (Korean Mother; 1951). From 1953 to
1961 Fangor worked as a newspaper illus-
trator and poster artist, and co-founded the
Polska Szkoa plakatu (Polish School of
Poster Art). In the late 1950s he created
his first optical paintingsabstractions of
blurred, vibrantly colored circles and amoe-
ba-like forms, calling his discovery Pozyt-
ywne miejsca iluzoryczne (Positive Illusory
Space). He also worked as a set designer
and architect. In 1958 Fangor and Stanisaw
Zamecznik (19091971) installed their inno-
vative environment Badania w przestrzeni
(A Study in Space) at the New Culture Salon,
Warsaw. Fangor moved to the United States
in 1966 and became the first Polish artist to
have a solo show at the Solomon R. Guggen-
heim Museum, New York, in 1970. He later
returned to figurative painting, creating his
television paintings, which reflect the visual
effects of this medium.
Ismail Fattah
Born 1934 in Basra, Iraq
Died 2004 in Baghdad, Iraq
Ismail Fattah studied at the Baghdad In-
stitute of Fine Arts, receiving his degree in
painting in 1956 and sculpture in 1958. Fat-
tahs early sculpture was traditional and figu-
rative. But under the tutelage of Jewad Selim
(19191961)a founder of the Iraqi mod-
ern art movementFattah experimented
with form and media, including plaster. Fol-
lowing his studies Fattah moved to Italy,
where in 1962 he won first prize in sculp-
ture in a competition for Arab artists. Fattah
earned further degrees in sculpture from
the Accademia di Belle Arti (Academy of
Fine Arts) and ceramics at the Accademia
di San Giacomo (San Giacomo Academy),
both in Rome. In 1965, an exhibition of Fat-
tahs painting and sculpture at Baghdads
National Museum of Modern Art trans-
formed contemporary Iraqi art. Fattahs
work, completed in Rome, moved away from
regional subjects, representing universal,
joined the faculty of the Baghdad Institute
of Fine Arts, initially teaching ceramics and,
from 1969, sculpture. Fattah was a mem-
ber in two influential groups: the Baghdad
Modern Art Group and the New Vision col-
lective. Fattah is known for his public sculp-
ture in Baghdad, the most famous of which
is the Nusb Al-Shahid (Martyrs Monument).
Fattahs design was chosen through a com-
petition in 1981 and completed in 1983.
Jean Fautrier
Born 1898 in Paris, France
Died 1964 in Chtenay-Malabry, France
Jean Fautrier was a painter, printmaker, and
sculptor who is best remembered for his
work in tachisme, a non-geometric abstract
style that emphasizes spontaneous brush-
work, drips, and scribble-like marks. His fa-
ther and grandmother raised Fautrier in Paris
until 1908, when he moved to London with
his mother. He began his artistic training at
Londons Royal Academy of Arts in 1912,
briefly transferring to the Slade School of
Fine Art in search of a less conventional,
more experimental practice. He then be-
gan to paint independently in the galleries
and museums of London, particularly from
the work of the romantic landscapist J.M.W.
Turner (17751851). He returned to France
in 1917 to serve in the French Army. Fautrier
struggled as an artist in the 1930s, working
as a ski instructor and running a jazz club in
the French Alps between 1934 and 1939,
during which time he painted very little. Dur-
ing and after World War II, Fautrier illustrat-
ed books by Georges Bataille (18971962)
and Paul luard (18951952). The Gestapo
briefly detained Fautrier in 1943; later,
while in hiding, he completed his Otages
(Hostages) series, which attracted critical
attention. Muse d'art moderne de la ville
de Paris hosted a retrospective of Fautriers
work in 1989.
Len Ferrari
Born 1920 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Died 2013 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Len Ferrari was a self-taught artist who
worked in a wide range of mediums. He
began his artistic career in Italy, working as
a sculptor, in the 1950s. By 1955 he had
his first solo show in Milan, and that same
year he returned to Argentina. He soon ex-
panded his artistic production to ceramics,
collage, painting, and drawing, working in
plaster, cement, wood, and stainless steel
wire. Beginning in the early 1960s he
adopted conceptual strategies and his first
Written Paintings and Written Drawings the paint became one, the color functioned
emerged. With these nearly calligraphic
pieces he explored the boundaries be-
tween lines and words. Ferrari is mostly
known for his social and political concerns,
which are reflected in his art. His famous La
Civilizacin Occidental y Cristiana (Western
Civilization and Christianity, 1965) was
among his first artworks protesting the
United States military intervention in Viet-
nam. In 1976 he left Argentina for political
reasons and exiled himself in Brazil. There
he applied the technique of heliography to
create series of plans, mapping sections
of labyrinthine worlds with sarcastic notes.
Ferrari also wrote critical essays and in-
vented new musical instruments. He was
honored with many awards and prizes and
returned to Argentina in 1991.
Lucio Fontana
Born 1899 in Rosario di Santa F,
Argentina
Died 1968 in Comabbio, Varese, Italy
Lucio Fontana is known as the founder of
spatialism and for his association with arte
povera. His family moved to Italy in 1905,
but he returned to Argentina in 1922 to help
in his fathers sculpture studio. After setting
up his own studio in 1924 he received sev-
eral important public commissions. Fontana
studied at the Accademia di belle arti Brera
in 1928; participated in the Venice Biennale
(1930); and had his first solo show at the
Galleria del Milione, Milan (1931). During the
1930s he experimented with abstracted fig-
ures, geometrical forms, and ceramic sculp-
ture at Albisola (193539). In 1940 Fontana
moved again to Argentina, and taught at
several institutions. His contact with young
artists inspired him to write the Manifesto
bianco (White Manifesto, 1946) and he
began to use the phrase concetto spaziale
(conceptual space) as titles for some works.
Back in Milan in 1947 Fontana joined the
spazialismo movement and signed the Man-
ifesto dello Spazialismo (Spatialist Manifes-
to). Fontana combined sculpture, fluores-
cent paint, and black lights for his Ambiente
spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Ambience in
Black Light; 194849), to be viewed in a
darkened room. Fontana visited New York
in 1961 for a show of his work at the Martha
Jackson Gallery; he also designed sets and
costumes for La Scala, Milan, in 1966.
Helen Frankenthaler
Born 1928 in New York, NY, USA
Died 2011 in Darien, CT, USA
Helen Frankenthaler was an Abstract Ex-
pressionist painter whose career spanned
six decades. After graduating from Ben-
nington College in Vermont (1949), she
studied at the Art Students League in New
York, took art history courses at Columbia
University, and studied painting with the
Abs tract Expressionist Hans Hofmann
(18801966). Her first solo show was held
at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, in
1951. Through her friendship with art cri
tic Clement Greenberg (19091994) she
met many leading artists of the New York
School. Frankenthaler achieved her break-
through with her painting Mountains and
Sea (1952), which featured her new soak-
stain technique, using thinned oil paint on
untreated canvas. While the canvas and
as both coloring and drawing, resulting in
abstract, colorful, calligraphic, large-scale
paintings. Her painting style proved high-
ly influential in the upcoming Color Field
painting of the 1960s. Frankenthaler was
also active in sculpting, ceramics, set de-
sign, and printmaking (especially wood-
cuts). In 1958 she married artist Robert
Motherwell (19151991). Her first retro-
spective was held at the Jewish Museum
in New York (1960). She taught at several
renowned universities and earned many
prizes and awards, including the National
Medal of Arts in 2001.
G
Ivo Gattin
Born 1926 in Split, Yugoslavia
Died 1978 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia
Ivo Gattin was one of Croatias foremost
practitioners of art informel. He gradua
ted from the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti
(Academy of Fine Arts) in Zagreb in 1953.
Gattins approach to painting was antiex-
pressive, directly addressing materiality. He
used such substances as resin, wax, and
cement on the surfaces of his early pictorial
works of 195657, later turning to burning
his canvases and incorporating burlap to
create reliefs in irregular shapes. Working
in Milan from 1963 to 1967, Gattin created
encyclopedia drawings and a manifesto,
among other works. Gattin was associated
with the radical Conceptual art collective
Gorgona Group, which included Julije Knifer
(19242004) and Dimitrije Baicevi c (also
known as Mangelos) (19211987). The
group produced exhibitions, a magazine of
artist projects, and events in Zagreb from
1959 to 1966. The artists tendency toward
nihilism and metaphysical irony, according
to art historian and curator Nena Dimitrijevic,
sharply contrasted with the Yugoslavian
state-approved social realism at the time.
Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt)
Born 1912 in Hamburg, Germany
Died 1994 in Caracas, Venezuela
Gego was an artist and sculptor whose
work peaked in the 1960s with geometric
783
abstraction and kinetic art. After studying
engineering and architecture at the Hoch-
schule fr Technik (University of Applied
Sciences) Stuttgart (193238), she fled
Germany in 1939 and moved to Venezuela,
where she worked as an architect and fur-
niture designer during the 1940s. In 1956,
in Caracas, she created her first three-di-
mensional works. Between 1959 and 1967
she visited the United States to participate
in various workshops (Treitel-Gratz metal
fabricators, New York) and to experiment
in lithography and other mediums. Her wa-
tercolors, spatial installations, engravings,
Goeritz settled in Spain, where he began to
paint. In 1948 co-founded the free-minded
artists association, Escuela de Altamira (Al-
tamira School). The following year he moved
to Mexico, where Ignacio Daz Morales invit-
ed him to teach at the Escuela de Arquitectu-
ra of the Universidad de Guadalajara (School
of Architecture, University of Guadalajara;
until 1954). In 1953, in his seminal architec-
tural project Museo Experimental El Eco (Eco
Experimental Museum), Goeritz presented
his Manifiesto de la Arquitectura Emocional
(Emotional Architecture Manifesto) and La
serpiente de El Eco (The Serpent of El Eco,
solarization and photograms. Gtz held his
first solo show in 1946 at the studio Rasch,
Wuppertal. The following year his mono-
types were exhibited in Paris, catching the
attention of CoBrA artists. In 1949 Gtz
became the groups first German member,
turning entirely to abstraction. He co-found-
ed the Frankfurt Quadriga group three years
later and developed his signature squee-
gee technique (Rakeltechnik), emerging
as a leading German art informel representa
tive. His grid paintings (Rasterbilder)
of the early 1960s, as well as his televi-
sion art experi ments from World War II
He began to work in abstraction in the late
1940s and became part of the first genera-
tion New York School after settling in New
York in 1950. In the late 1960s Guston
returned to a less abstract, more figurative
style, in which he addressed many of the
political themes from his earlier work.
Renato Guttuso
Born 1911 in Bagheria, Italy
Died 1987 in Rome, Italy
Renato Guttuso, who painted monumental
museums trustees. Haacke received an
award from the National Endowment for the
Arts in 1978 as well as other notable priz-
es. In 1993, for example, he represented
Germany at the Venice Biennale and won
the Golden Lion award, together with Nam
June Paik.
Raymond Hains
Born 1926 in Saint-Brieuc, France
Died 2005 in Paris, France
The art of Raymond Hains reflected his inter-
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofa (Central National Art Museum of
Queen Sofia), Madrid (2014).
Hershman is also regarded as a strong voice
Weaver Hawkins
Born 1893 in London, UK
Died 1977 in Willoughby, Australia
Harold Frederick Weaver Hawkins had
studied to become an art teacher before
enlisting in World War I. After sustaining
serious injuries to his right arm during the
Battle of the Somme in 1916, he learned to
creating interactive works in photography,
video, film, installation, performance, and
Internet-based media. Her work integrates
art with social commentary and technology.
Husain won the national awards Padma Shri
within the feminist movement. Questions of
(constructed) identity, privacy, surveillance,
and the relationship between real and vir-
tual worlds as well as between humans and
machines are constantly addressed in her
body of work. She is probably best known
for her series centered on the fictional char-
acter Roberta Breitmore (197378). In her
later work she continued to pioneer new
won a Golden Bear in the 1967 Berlin In-
ternational Film Festival. In 1971 he was a
special invitee (along with Pablo Picasso
{18811973}) to the Bienal de So Paulo.
(1966), Padma Bhushan (1973), and Padma
Vibhushan (1991). However, the artist was
criticized in India for his satirical representa-
tion of religious figures. Death threats and
lawsuits by Hindu extremists led to Husains
permanent departure from India in 2006.

and paper weavingswhich use line as the
fundamental elementreveal her investi-
gations into structure, space, transparency,
and viewer interaction. While her works made
between 1957 and 1969 were based on
equidistant, parallel lines, her Reticulreas
(Networks), Troncos (Trunks), and Esferas
(Spheres) consist of crossed lines creating
net-like structures. From 1976 onward she
abandoned preconceived concepts in her
series Dibujos sin Papel (Drawings without
Paper) and Bichitos (Small Bugs). From
1958 to 1977 Gego committed herself to
teaching. In 1979 she received the Premio
Nacional de Artes Plsticas de Venezuela.
Alberto Giacometti
Born 1901 in Borgonovo, Switzerland
Died 1966 in Chur, Switzerland
The sculptor Alberto Giacometti began his
formal training in 1919 at the cole des
Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) and the
cole des Arts Industriels (School of Indus-
trial Arts), both in Geneva. During the early
1920s he traveled in Italy and afterward
moved to Paris, where from 1922 onward,
he studied sculpture at the Acadmie de la
Grande Chaumire. He established his first
studio in Paris in 1925 and showed an early
interest in the traditional arts of Africa and
Oceania. In the 1930s Giacometti joined the
Surrealist movement and created his Ob-
1953), one of his first large-scale sculp-
tures. After moving to Mexico City in 1954
he concentrated on public abstract sculp-
tures, which he often executed with other
artists and architects, such as Luis Ramiro
Barragn Morfn Torres de Satlite (Towers in Documenta, Kassel (1959) and in the
of Satlite; 1957). In the late 1950s Goeritz Venice Biennale (1958; 1968).
initiated his Mensajes dorado (Golden Mes-
sages) series of spiritually motivated mono
chrmatic, abstract images, in gold leaf on
wood. From 1961 onward Goeritz returned
to his former large-scale, collaborative prac-
tice and also worked in Jerusalem.
Leon Golub
Born 1922 in Chicago, IL, USA
Died 2004 in New York, NY, USA
American painter Leon Golub first studied
art history at the University of Chicago and
earned an MFA degree from the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago in 1950. During World War
II he served as a cartographer in the U.S.
Army, mostly stationed in Europe. After the
war he worked as a teacher and received
some attention for his early artistic work.
From 1959 to 1964 he lived in Paris and
later moved to New York. In 1959 his work
was featured in the New Images of Man
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, among such artists as Willem
de Kooning (19041997), Francis Bacon
(19091992), and Jackson Pollock (1912
onward, proved pio neering. Gtz was an
editor of Meta maga zine from 1948 to
1953 and an influential professor at the
Kunstakademie (Art Academy), Dssel-
dorf, from 1959 to 1979. He participated
1930s to become an artist in Rome. Be-
cause of military service (19351937) he
Marcos Grigorian
Born 1925 in Kropotkin, Russia
Died 2007 in Yerevan, Armenia
Marcos Grigorian and his Armenian family
immigrated to Iran from Russia in 1930. He
-
studied at the Kam al-al-Molk Art School in
Tehran from 1948 to 1950. After gradua
ting he moved to Rome, where he received
a degree from the Accademia di Belle Arti
(Academy of Fine Arts). Upon his return to
Tehran in 1954 he opened the modern art
gallery Esthtique and initiated a collec-
tion of Iranian coffeehouse paintingsa
folk genre. In 1956 he participated in the
Venice Biennale for the first time, and two
years later returned as an Iranian delegate
and an International Jury member. In 1958
he organized the first Tehran Biennial. With
his late 1950s mural series The Gates of
Auschwitz Gregorian became one of the
first artists to commemorate the Holocaust.
Around the same time he initiated his ac-
claimed Earthworks series, in which he
created textured surfaces by fixing materi
paintings of historic and current subjects, est in language, the play of words, and verbal
became a leading figure in Italian Socialist associations. His artistic practice was not
Realism. He was also an illustrator, sce- confined to one style, technique, or medium
nic designer, critic, writer, and politician. but spanned an unpredictable range, from
He abandoned his law studies in the early photography to found-object installations,
sculptures, and Web-based collages. He and his family settled in Australia in 1935.
had enrolled in a sculpture workshop in Hawkinss work explored the consequences
temporarily relocated to Milan, where he Rennes at the cole rgionale des beaux-
came in contact with such artists and in- arts (Regional School of Fine Arts) in 1945
tellectuals as Renato Birolli (19051959), but soon abandoned his studies and moved
Giacomo Manz (19081991), and Lucio to Paris, where he became an appren-
Fontana (18991968), who shaped his ar- tice to photographer Emmanuel Sougez
tistic and political attitude. In 1937 Guttuso (18891972). Hains began to create his
finally settled in Rome, where he execu abstract Hypnagogic Photographs through
ted his first large-scale realist composition the use of mirrors and by experimenting
commenting on contemporary Italian life, with different photographic techniques. In
Volo da Etna (Flight from Etna; 193738), 1949 Hains reconnected with his former
which won the Bergamo award in 1938. classmate at Rennes, the mixed media
That year he also had his first solo show artist Jacques Villegl (b. 1926). For the
at the Galleria Cometa. Guttuso joined the next twelve years the two collaborated to
Italian Communist Party in 1940 and com- create dcollages of torn posters from the
pleted his masterpiece, Crocifissione (Cru- streets billboards and became known as
cifixion), in the following year. When he was affichistes, forming an opposition to Ameri
forced to leave Rome during World War II can Abstract Expressionism and French art
in 1943, he committed himself to the anti- informel with their ready-made paintings.
fascist resistance movement. After the war In 1960 Hains co-founded the Nouveaux
he co-founded the Fronte Nuevo delle Arti Ralistes (New Realists) and participated in
(New Arts Front). In the second half of the the groups first exhibition. Among his many
1940s Guttuso traveled to Paris and met international exhibitions, Hainss work was
Pablo Picasso (18811973), with whom he included in The Art of Assemblage (Museum
shared a lifelong friendship. of Modern Art, New York, 1961), the Venice
Biennale (1964) and Documenta, Kassel
(1968; 1997).
paint and draw with his left hand. To avoid
the stigmatized label of wounded artist,
he briefly created art under the pseudonym
Raokin in 1927, but later became known as
Weaver Hawkins. After traveling widely, he
of the modern age, from drawings of wor
kers to moralistic works about atomic war
to spiritual paintings. His style exhibits influ-
ences from such movements as Vorticism,
Surrealism, and Social Realism. He was a
founding member of both the Contemporary
Art Society of New South Wales, of which he
was president in 1952 and again from 1954
to 1963, and the Sydney Printmakers group.
He had his first retrospective at the Art Gal-
lery of New South Wales in 1976.
Carmen Herrera
Born 1915 in Havana, Cuba
Lives in New York, NY, USA
Cuban-born painter Carmen Herrera took
private drawing lessons as a child, and as
a teenager in the 1930s she was sent to
Paris for further studies. After returning to
Havana around 1935 she studied archi-
tecture at the Universidad de La Habana
(Univeristy of Havana) for about two years.
After marrying English teacher Jesse Loe-
wenthal in 1939, the couple moved to New
York, where she studied at the Art Students
media art: her video Lorna (19791983)
was the first interactive videodisc and
she was the first to use touch-activated
screens for Deep Contact: The Sexual
Fantasy Videodisk (198486).
Born 1928 in New Castle, IN, USA
Lives and works in Vinalhaven, ME, USA
Eva Hesse
Born 1936 in Hamburg, Germany
Died 1970 in New York, NY, USA
Eva Hesse is best known for using synthetic
materials such as latex, fiberglass, and
plastics in her post-Minimalist sculptures. In
1939 she and her family fled Nazi Germany
and moved to New York. She first studi
ed art in 1952 at the School of Industrial
Art, then at Brooklyns Pratt Institute. She
subsequently studied drawing at the Art
Students League of New York in 1953
and enrolled at Cooper Union the following
year. After that, she attended the School of
Art at Yale University, graduating in 1959,
then worked as a textile designer in New
York. In the early 1960s she mostly pro-
duced drawings, which were first exhibited
in 1961, and had her first solo show, at the
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, in 1963.
Hesse lived in Germany in 1964, working
for the textile manufacturer Friedrich Arn-
hard Scheidt. During this time she traveled
in Europe, experimented with materials, and
began to work in relief and sculpture. Re-
turning to New York, Hesse produced her
I
Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark)
Robert Indiana is a pivotal figure in the de-
velopment of assemblage art, hard-edge
painting, and Pop art. He attended Arse-
nal Technical High School in Indianapolis,
known for its strong arts curriculum. Af-
ter graduation in 1946 he joined the U.S.
Army Air Corps (later U.S. Air Force) and
in 1949 began his studies at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. Before gradu-
ating in 1954, Indiana spent time in France
and Italy and enrolled at the University of
Edinburgh, where he wrote poems that he il-
lustrated, typeset, and printed at Edinburgh
College of Art. Later that year he moved to
New York. In 1956 he met Ellsworth Kelly
(19232015), who helped him establish a
studio in an abandoned warehouse at 31
Coenties Slip. From 1960 onward Indiana
produced wall-hung assemblages and free-
standing sculptures that he called herms.
By 1961 he had begun his series focused
on the illusory American dreamthe first of
these paintings, The American Dream I, was
acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. In
1962 he had his first New York solo exhi-
bition at the Stable Gallery. He probably is

jects series, tactile sculptures charged with
energy and symbolism. Giacomettis enduring
involvement with the human figure eventual-
ly led to his dissociation from the Surrealists
in 1935. He attained his mature style in the
late 1940s, characterized by slim, elongated
1956). In response to the Vietnam-era
peace movement, Golubs paintings were
always engaged with themes of war, hu-
man brutality, and power. His large-scale
paintings depict human figures and their
brutal actions in an expressionistic style.
als like sand, earth, and ashes to canvas.
He lived in the United States from 1962 to
1970 before returning to Iran. In the 1970s
he joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tehran
University and founded the Independent
Artists Group. Gregorian established the
H
League. There she met fellow artists Wifredo first freestanding sculptures in synthetic most famous for incorporating stenciled let-
Richard Hamilton Lam (19021982) and Barnett Newman materials. In 1968 she gained wider recog- tering in his work. Among his most famous
Born 1922 in London, UK (19051970). In the late 1940s Herrera nition thanks to her show Chain Polymers works is LOVE (1966).
Died 2011 in North End, UK relocated to Paris, where she participated at Fischbach Gallery in New York. The fol-
Hans Haacke four times in the annual Salon des ralits lowing year she was also included in the ex-
Born 1936 in Cologne, Germany Richard Hamilton was a painter and collagist nouvelles at the Muse d'art moderne de la hibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes

figures, captured in seemingly banal upright
postures (standing, walking, sitting). In those
sculptures he expressed his distinct perspec-
tive on spatial relations by isolating the fig-
ures from the spectators space, by means of
pedestals or cages. Giacomettis works have
been presented in countless exhibitions and
he is one of the best-known sculptors of the
twentieth century. His many honors include
the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice
Biennale (1962) and the Guggenheim Inter-
national Award for Painting (1964).
Mathias Goeritz
Born 1915 in Danzig, Germany
Died 1990 in Mexico City, Mexico
German-born architect, artist, and writer
Mathias Goeritz studied drawing at the Ku
nstgewerbe- und Handwerkerschule (Arts
and Crafts and Artisan School) Berlin-Char-
lottenberg while studying philosophy and art
history at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University
in Berlin (PhD, 1940). During World War II he
migrated to Spanish Morocco, where he lived
and taught from 1941 to 1944. After the war,
He would scrape paint from the canvas to
create a rough, blistered surface. Golub is
also known for his portraits, based on pho-
tographs of powerful public figures. In 2000
the Dublin Museum of Modern Art honored
him with a major retrospective.
Karl Otto Gtz
Born 1914 in Aachen, Germany
Lives and works in Niederbreitbach-
Wolfenacker, Germany
Karl Otto (K.O.) Gtz studied at the Kunst-
gewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School),
Aachen, from 1932 to 1933. Around that
time he created his first abstract paintings,
along with Surrealist works. Despite his
painting and exhibition ban from 1935 to
1945 imposed by the National Socialists,
his conscription in the German army from
1936 to 1938, and the destruction of most
of his early works during the Dresden bomb-
ing of 1945, Gtz never stopped producing
art. During the 1930s and 40s he executed
splatter paintings and experimented with
collage and photography techniques like
Arshile Gorky Gallery, New York, in 1980 and
the Near East Museum of Yerevan in 1993.
Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein)
Born 1913 in Montreal, Canada
Died 1980 in Woodstock, NY, USA
Philip Guston was an artist of the first-gener
ation New York School whose later paintings
led the transition to Neoexpressionism. He
moved with his family from Montreal to Los
Angeles at age six. Beginning in 1927 he
attended the Manual Arts High School,
where he met his fellow student Jackson
Pollock (19121956). In 1930 Guston
attended the Otis Art Institute on a schol-
arship but left after three months. He was
already politically aware by age eight-
een, and when his mural depicting racial
injustice for the Marxist-leaning John Reed
Club in Los Angeles (1931) was defaced
by police, the incident only escalated his
ideological bent. In the mid-1930s Guston
painted murals for the U.S. Works Progress
Administration, as well as in Mexico (The
Struggle Against War and Terror, 1935).
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Hans Haacke is a conceptual artist whose
works often carry distinct political overtones.
Haacke studied at the Public Works Aca
demy (Staatliche Werkakademie), Kassel,
from 1956 to 1960 and then worked at
Atelier 17 in Paris. In 1961 he earned a
scholarship to attend the Tyler School of
Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, and
in 1963 he moved to New York. He has
spent most of his career teaching art at a
number of American institutions, except
from 1963 to 1965 and other brief periods
when he taught in Germany. For his public
projects he has applied investigative and
demonstrative methods in order to uncov-
er financial and institutional interrelations
and interferences within the art market. He
has also shown an interest in physics, for
example in his Condensation Cube (1963).
In 1971 his planned solo show at the Solo-
mon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York
was canceled by museum director Thomas
Messer because several works in the ex-
hibition raised critical questions about the
business and personal connections of the
whose early works are considered the first
examples of Pop art. Hamilton first studied
at Saint Martins School of Art before World
War II, and later at the Royal Academy and
the Slade School of Fine Art. In the early
1950s he began exhibiting at Londons new
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), where
he also took part in the inaugural meeting
of the Independent Group. After seeing
the proto-Pop art Bunk collage series
(194752) by Eduardo Paolozzi, Hamilton
began to produce promotional pieces for the
Group; none more influential than Just what
is it that makes todays homes so different,
so appealing? (1956), a poster he designed
for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the
Whitechapel Gallery (1956). This collage is
widely considered as the beginning of the
Pop art movement.
Hamiltons work was featured in major
exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London
(1970; 1992); Documenta, Kassel (1968);
the Solo m on R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York (1973); and the Bienal de So
Paulo (1989). A major posthumous retro
spective was organized by the Tate Mod-
ern, London, in collaboration with the
ville de Paris. During those years Herrera
encountered many other artists and be-
gan to simplify her compositions. First she
painted compositions of contrasting optical
forms by arranging small, geometric forms
in three or more bold colors. She then began
to explore the infinite possibilities of formal
simplicity. She also experimented with sym-
metry and asymmetry in sharp-edged chro-
matic planes and with shaped canvases and
monochrome sculpture-paintings. In 1954
Herrera finally settled in New York and con-
tinued painting. In 2016 the Whitney Muse-
um of American Art in New York organized
her first retrospective.
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Born 1941 in Cleveland, OH, USA
Lives and works in San Francisco, CA,
and New York, NY, USA
Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson
studied at Case Western Reserve Uni-
versity in Cleveland and at San Francisco
State University, where she earned her
MFA degree. She works cross-media, often
Become Form at Kunsthalle Bern.
Maqbool Fida Husain
Born 1915 in Pandharpur, India
Died 2011 in London, UK
One of the best-known Indian modernists,
Maqbool Fida (M.F.) Husain drew from
different Indian cultural sources to create
his narrative paintings. His inspirations in-
clude Hindu and other religious figures, the
vibrant color and action of festivals, historical
events, dance, and the daily lives of contem-
porary Indians. Husain studied calligraphy
in Baroda, but was primarily self-taught. In
1935 he began painting billboard advertise-
ments for Bollywood movies. Husain mount-
ed his first exhibition in 1947 at the Bombay
Art Society. After the Partition of India and
Pakistan later that year, Husain co-founded
the Progressive Artists Group. In the early
1950s Husain traveled to Europe, where he
had a solo show in Zurich in 1952 and was
deeply influenced by meeting Paul Klee
(18791940) and other Cubist masters. Hu-
sains short film Through the Eyes of a Painter
J
Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins)
Born 1923 in Long Beach, CA, USA
Died 2004 in San Francisco, CA, USA
In his paintings and collages, which of-
ten incorporate images from mythology,
fables, symbols, chemistry, or alchemy,
Jess created absurd and complex picto-
rial worlds. He took the name Jess after
separating from his family in the late 1940s.
While studying chemistry at the California
Institute of Technology, he was drafted into
the U.S. Army in 1943 and was assigned to
the Army Corps of Engineers and worked
at the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, on the production of plutoni-
um for the atomic bomb, until 1946. After
completing his degree in radiochemistry he
began to study painting and to question his
involvement with nuclear energy. He en-
rolled at the California School of Fine Arts
(now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1949,
where he studied with Abstract Expressionist

784 785

Clyfford Still (19041980) and figura-
tive painter Elmer Bischoff (19161991),
among others, and had his first solo show
at the Helvie Makela Gallery, San Francisco,
in 1950. Throughout the 1950s he experi-
mented with narrative and technique in still
lifes, portraits, and landscapes, some of
which he likened to creation myths. During
this period he also began making collages,
which he called paste-ups; works from his
Translation series (begun in 1959) incor-
porated literary texts.
Jia Youfu
Born 1942 in Suning, Hebei province,
China
Lives and works in Beijing, China
In his paintings, Jia Youfu often combines
the monumental landscape tradition of
the Northern Song period (9601127 AD)
with dramatic composition and light and
dark contrast. In 1960, Jia Youfu began
his studies at the Central Academy of Fine
-
Arts (CAFA, or Zhongy - Meish
ang Xuyu)
in Beijing. He later studied under the noted
landscape painter Li Keran (19071989), at
the School of Chinese Painting, where he
learned the Western technique of contrast.
As a student, Jia Youfu often traveled to
paint the Taihang Mountains in his home
province of Hebei, a site that remains a
source of artistic inspiration. His monumen-
tal ink paintings of the mountains combined
traditional Chinese landscape painting
with contemporary innovations, both in his
brushstrokes and in his subjects. Jia Youfu
graduated from CAFA in 1965. From 1967
to 1977, during the Cultural Revolution, he
taught theater design at the Zhongy - -
ang
Xj Xuyun (Central Academy of Drama)
in Beijing, and in 1977 he began to teach
traditional landscape painting at CAFA,
where he remains on the faculty.
Jikken Kobo
Active 195158 in Tokyo, Japan
Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop),
founded in Tokyo in 1951, was a multimedia
arts collective whose members included com-
posers, visual artists, set and lighting design-
ers, engineers, and musicians. By combining
various art forms, their goal, in the words of
their founder Shuzo Takiguchi (19031979),
was to achieve an organic combination that
could not be realized within the conventions
of a gallery exhibition, and to create a new
style of art with social relevance, closely
related to everyday life. Partly inspired by
the Bauhaus and the Surrealistsand con-
temporary to the creative experiments at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina
Jikken Kobo created performances as com-
plex, multi-layered installations, with the art-
ists participating in the creation of the entire
mise-en-scne. Jikken Kobo also pioneered
experiments with new media, entering into
creative partnerships with Sony, for exam-
ple, and creating collaborative works that
combined technologies, such as cassette
recorders and slide projectors, with tradi-
tional Japanese forms. Although they pre-
date other groups, such as Gutai, the work of
Jikken Kobo is only recently being celebrat-
ed outside of Japan, thanks to their inclusion
in important exhibitions at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York (2012), and Tate
Modern, London (2013).
786
Jasper Johns
Born 1930 in Augusta, GA, USA
Lives and works in Sharon, CT, USA, and
Saint Martin
Rendering symbols of identity and every-
day imagery (such as the American flag,
body parts, and sequences of letters and
numbers) with brushy strokes and collaged
elements, Jasper Johnss approach bridges
the traditions of appropriation and Expres-
sionist art. Johns studied at the University of
South Carolina in 1947 and 1948. He moved
to New York City later that year, where in
1949 he briefly attended Parsons School of
Design. In 1952, Johns was drafted into the
army and stationed in Sendai, Japan. Upon
his return to New York in 1953, he became
acquainted with his future romantic partner
Robert Rauschenberg (19252008), as
well as John Cage (19121992) and Merce
Cunningham (19192009). They embarked
on multidisciplinary collaborations that resis
ted the prevalent tendencies of Abstract
Expressionism. Considered a Neo-Dadaist,
Johns began re-creating imagery such as
flags, maps and targets. He later worked
with stenciled numbers and letters, relocat-
ing attention from the unique to the stand-
ardized. Johns received his first gallery solo
show at New Yorks Leo Castelli Gallery in
1958, from which the Museum of Modern
Art purchased four paintings, including
Flag (195455) and Target with Four Faces
(1955). Johns was awarded the Grand Prize
for Painting at the Venice Biennale in 1988
and showed at every Documenta between
1964 and 1977.
Asger Jorn (born Asger Oluf Jrgensen)
Born 1914 in Vejrum, Jutland, Denmark
Died 1973 in rhus, Denmark
Asger Jorn, along with Guy Debord (1931
1994) and Michle Bernstein (b. 1932), was a
co-founder of the revolutionary avant-garde
Situationist International movement. Jorn
first studied teaching at the Vinthers
Seminarium, Silkeborg, before moving to
Paris in 1936 to study painting; first with
Wassily Kandinsky (18661944) and later
with Fernand Lger (18811955) at the
Acadmie Contemporaine (Contempo-
rary Art Academy). Jorn returned to Den-
mark in 1937, studying at the Kongelige
Danske Kunstakademi (Royal Danish Acad-
emy of Fine Arts), Copenhagen, before the
German occupation of Denmark in 1942,
after which he joined the citys Communist
resistance. The postwar period was Jorns
most productive. He was a co-founder of
the avant-garde CoBrA group in Paris in
1948 and was a key figure in the Interna-
tional Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus,
a CoBrA offshoot. With the French lettrist
Guy Debord, he helped form the Situation-
ist International in 1957. Jorns work was
exhibited widely in the 1950s and 60s, in-
cluding major exhibitions at the Kunsthalle
Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
and the Louisiana Museum, Denmark. Most
famously, he refused the 1964 Guggen-
heim Prize, responding to the announce-
ment with a scathing telegram that accused
the museum of trying to promote itself by
including an artist against his will.
K
Tadeusz Kantor
Born 1915 in Wielopole Skrzy nskie,
Austria-Hungary
Died 1990 in Krakw, Poland
Tadeusz Kantor is best known for his
achievements as a theater director and for
his groundbreaking plays for Teatr Cricot 2,
but he also worked as a stage director, pain
ter, set designer, actor, writer, art theoretician,
and teacher at the Akademia Sztuk Pieknych
(Academy of Fine Arts) in Krakw. While
studying painting there from 1934 to 1939,
Kantor staged his first plays. During World
War II he remained committed to theater
and founded his own Teatr niepodlegosci
(Theatre of Independence) in 1942. After
the war he co-founded the Group of Young
Artists, helped to mount the first exhibition of
modern art at Krakws Art Palace in 1948,
and began working as a stage designer at
the Stary Teatr (Old Theatre) in Krakw.
Kantor became a leading figure in the
postwar modern art scene in Poland, seizing
Western artistic developments, including art
informel, conceptualism, and happenings.
From 1948 onward he painted distorted
figures and forms in a post-Cubist style. In
1955, after visiting Paris, he executed more
abstract and improvisatory works. He later
began to create his emballagescomposi-
tions of discarded objects, such as umbrellas,
bags, and envelopes.
Marwan Kassab-Bachi
Born 1934 in Damascus, Syria
Lives in Berlin, Germany
Kassab-Bachi moved to Berlin in 1957,
where he studied at the Hochschule
fr Bildende Knste (College of Fine
Arts) with Hann Trier (19151999). He
began painting portraits while work-
ing at a fur factory from 1962 to 1970.
In 1963 he began associating with fu-
ture Neue Wilden artists Georg Baselitz
(b. 1938) and Eugen Schnebeck (b. 1936).
Kassab-Bachi describes the 1970s as a
turning point in his art, when he had a vision
of a face that morphs into a landscape. He
returned to the motif throughout his career.
Kassab-Bachis knowledge of Abstract
Expressionism and tachisme can begin to
be seen in the same decade. His portraits
are archetypes, individual yet universal.
Kassab-Bachi uses color judiciously
sometimes using only four or five hues
creating his faces through a fluid blending
of paint, emphasizing the paintings flat
surface. The flattened figures are situated
within unidentifiable settings, isolating them
and emphasizing the paintings surface.
Kassab-Bachi was a visiting professor in
painting from 1977 to 1979 at the Hoch-
schule fr Bildende Kunst (College of Fine
Arts), where he was appointed full professor
in 1980. He taught at the school until 2002.
He became the first Arab member of Ger-
manys Akademie der Knste (Art Academy)
in 1994.
Ellsworth Kelly
Born 1923 in Newburgh, NY, USA
Died 2015 in Spencertown, NY, USA
Ellsworth Kelly studied art in Brooklyn,
Boston, and Paris from 1941 to 1949, with
an interruption because of military service
during World War II from 1943 to 1945.
After completing his studies, he traveled
in France, where he met many noted ar
tists such as the sculptor, painter, and poet
Jean Arp (18861966) and the sculptor,
painter, and photographer Constantin
Brncusi (18961957). Kelly had his first
solo show at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre,
Paris, in 1951; his first solo exhibition in
New York was at the Betty Parsons Gallery
in 1956. He is famous for his geometrical
abstract paintingsarrangements of care-
fully composed rectangles of mostly in-
tense colors. Kelly produced multi-panel
paintings and monochrome canvases of
unusual shapes that intersect both painting
and sculpture. He also made freestanding
sculptures from the late 1950s onward.
He was commissioned to create a number
of notable public artworks, and beginning
with his first retrospective in 1973, his
work has been acknowledged in numerous
retrospective exhibitions.
Krishen Khanna
Born 1925 in Lyallpur, British India
Lives and works in Gurgaon, India
Krishen Khanna was a largely self-taught
artist who attended Imperial Service College
in Windsor, England, from 1938 to 1942
and the Government College in Lahore
from 1942 to 1944. He started his career
as a banker, relocating to Shimla after the
Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
He eventually moved to Bombay, where he
associated with the members of the Pro-
gressive Artists Group. He was invited to
join them in 1949. His first solo exhibition
in 1955 was held at USIS, Chennai. Khanna
became internationally known for his Ex-
pressionist brushwork, exuberant lines and
energetic colors within figurative paintings.
His recurrent themes include biblical sub-
jects, the portrayal of musicians, as well as
the direct and symbolical depiction of Indias
ordinary life and its important moments in
history. Khanna took part in the biennials
of Tokyo (1957; 1961), So Paulo (1960), tant international collections, including the
Venice (1962), and Havana (1991). In 1962,
Khanna became the first Indian artist to
receive a Rockefeller Grant. He traveled
to Japan that year, then spent the years of
1963 and 1964 in the United States (Wash-
ington, D.C., and New York). He received
the Padma Shri in 1990.
Kim Kulim
Born 1936 in Sangju, North Gyeongsang
Province, Korea
Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea
Kim Kulim, known as Koreas first avant-
garde artist, has worked in film, light, per-
formance, and land art, often stretching
the limits of a given medium. Primarily
self-taught, he moved to New York after
he dropped out of college and became
involved with the Art Students League of
New York, participating in a number of
group exhibitions. Back in Korea, he held
his first solo exhibition in 1958 at Daegu
Information Center, and soon expanded
his artistic practice beyond painting. In the
1960s Kim began to emphasize the mate-
riality of painting in a radical way. For his
artistic deconstructions he often used
burned plastics, vinyl, and metal bits along-
side oil paint. He incorporated ready-made
objects in his painted canvases, created in-
stallation art, and staged performances. He
played a leading part in several artist collec-
tives (Painting 68, A.G. Group, The Fourth
Group) and brought many firsts to the Ko-
rean art world. He filmed Koreas first ex-
perimental movies, Munmyeong, Yeoja, Don
(Civilization, Woman, Money; 1969); and
1/24 (Cho) ui Uimi (The Meaning of 1/24
Second; 1969), staged the nations first
body painting performance, initiated the
first Korean mail art Maeseu Midieo ui
Yumul (The Relics of Mass Media, 1969);
and was responsible for Koreas first exam-
ples of land art Chujeog e Hyeonsang Eseo
(From Phenomenon to Traces; 1970).
Julije Knifer
Born 1924 in Osijek, Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes
Died 2004 in Paris, France
Julije Knifer began his career with a se-
ries of sketched self-portraits in ink and
mixed-media, making them into a kind of
diary from 1949 to 1952, during his stu
dies at the Akademija likovnih umjetnosti
(Academy of Fine Arts), Zagreb (195157).
While developing his own style, he experi
mented with abstraction, gradually aban-
doning recognizable imagery. Within two
years of completing his studies he defined
the basic elements of his lifelong artistic
approach. He radically reduced his formal
repertoire to the meander in ever-changing
variations through the opposition of black
and white, horizontal and vertical. In 1959
he co-founded the Gorgona Group, and
between 1961 and 1973 he participated in
four New Tendencies exhibitions at the Gal-
lery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. Knifer
explored the meander in different genres,
including geometric abstraction, neo-Cons
tructivism, anti-art, and neo-avant-garde,
but his work consistently focused on the
element of time. Although Knifer mostly
exhibited in Croatia, Germany, Italy, and
France, his works are included in impor-
Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. He repre
sented Croatia at the Venice Biennale in
2001, and a major retrospective was pre-
sented at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Zagreb, in 2014.
Ji r Kolr four. Although he studied art at the Acade-
Born 1914 in Protivn, Austro-Hungarian
Empire
Died 2002 in Prague, Czech Republic
A self-taught artist, Jir Kolr began cre-
ating collages using text and images
collected from magazines at age twenty.
Collage expressed Kolr s feelings of a
divided Europe before and during World
War II. After the war, it provided an outlet
for Kolr s critique of the Czech Republics with flexible joints, followed by other articu-
Soviet-controlled Communist government.
Kolr innovated new techniques within the
medium, including confrontage, froissage,
and rollage. Kolr is perhaps better known
as a writer. Echoing the fractures of his
collage, Kolr s poetry explores themes of
destruction. He published his first collec-
tion, Rodn list (Birth Certificate), in 1941.
He was a member of Group 42 during World
War II. In 1945, he moved to Prague to work
as an editor. That same year he joined and
withdrew from the Communist Party. Kolr
was imprisoned by the Communist govern-
ment in the 1950s, and his writings were
blacklisted in 1949 and during the 1960s.
He first exhibited abroad in 1963, in Lon-
don. Kolr won first prize at the 1969 Bie-
nal de So Paulo, and had a retrospective
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in
New York in 1975. After signing the protest
docu ment Charter 77, Kolr was banned
from the Czech Republic. He moved to
Paris in 1980, returning to Prague after the
Velvet Revolution of 1989.
Geliy Korzhev
Born 1925 in Moscow, USSR
Died 2012 in Moscow, Russia
Geliy Korzhev was one of the leading propo-
nents of the chiseled severe style of pain
ting, which emerged during a period of So-
viet ideological reorientation following the
death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Between
1939 and 1944 Korzhev studied at the
Moscow State Art School, continuing his
training at the Surikov Institute until 1950.
His first exhibitions took place in 1954 at
the beginning of the so-called Khrushchev
Thaw. Korzhevs early work was dominated
by history paintings, referencing both World
War II and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Al-
though never an official Communist Party
member, Korzhev served as chairman of the
Union of Soviet Artists Moscow branch. He
later distanced himself from political topics
and entered into dialogue with art-histori-
cal themes. The Mutants series from the
1980s, which depicted grotesque scenes
inhabited by men and monsters, combined
references to Renaissance painting with
elements of contemporary Western and
Soviet culture. Following the death of his
parents in 1986, Korzhevhimself an athe-
istbegan work on a series of somber bibli-
cal scenes. Korzhevs work received official
state endorsement, and in 1972 he was
awarded the title of Peoples Artist of the
Soviet Union.
Gyula Kosice
Born 1924 in Koice, Czechoslovakia
Died 2016 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Gyula Kosice (Fernando Fallik) was in the
vanguard of kine tic and luminal art. His
family moved to Argentina when he was age
Wholeness; 195354), marked a turn to the
mias Libres (Free Schools), he considered
himself mostly self-taught. He co-founded
the magazine Arturo (1944), took part in the
first Arte Concreto Invencin (Concrete Art
Invention) exhibition (1945), and initiated
the avant-garde Mad movement in 1946,
writing the Mad manifesto and editing eight
issues of its journal, Arte Mad Universal group walks, and creating an anti-maga-
(Universal Madi Art). In 1944 Kosice created
Ryi (Roy), his first abstract wood sculpture
volumes. For the Venice Biennale in 1976,
lated metal sculptures (Escultura articulada
[Articulated Sculpture], 1946; Metro, 1950),
whose form could be manipulated by spec-
tators. He pioneered the use of Plexiglas
and neon for his Estructuras lumnicasi
series from 1946 onward and was the first
to introduce water as key element in his
Hydrosculptures, which he began in 1948.
During the later 1960s Kosices utopian
project Ciudad hidroespacial (Hydrospatial
City) presented models for town-planning
for space. He also created monumental
sculptures, including Victoria (1988) for the
Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and Monu-
ment to Democracy (2000) in Buenos Aires.
He represented Argentina in the Venice
Biennale (1964), exhibited his works in
nearly 200 shows; and was honored with
numerous awards.
Leon Kossoff
Born 1926 in London, UK
Lives and works in London, UK
Leon Kossoff, an Expressionist painter of
the so-called School of London, is most
noted for portraits, life drawings, and city-
scapes around London. Before serving in
Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Germany during
his military service from 1945 to 1948, he
took commercial art and drawing classes.
After the war, he studied at the St Martins
School of Art and the Borough Polytechnic
(1949 to 1953). His instructor was the
painter David Bomberg (18901957) and
a fellow student was the painter Frank Au-
erbach (b. 1931). Kossoff studied at the
Royal College of Art until 1956 then joined
Helen Lessores Beaux Arts Gallery in Lon-
don, where his work was featured in six
exhibitions. A major solo show was held at
the Whitechapel Gallery in 1972. Kossoffs
paintings are built of thick layers of paint ap-
plied with distinct and broad brushstrokes.
His favorite subjects are the areas where he
has lived as well as the people he sees on
the streets. He has often painted the book-
ing hall at Kilburn Underground. Along with
his career as an artist, Kossoff held teach-
ing positions at the Regent Street Polytech-
nic, Chelsea School of Art, and St. Martins
School of Art. In 1995 he represented
Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Ivan Koaric
Born 1921 in Petrinja, Yugoslavia
Lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia
Ivan Koaric , is a leading conceptual artist
of his generation. He creates humorous
work in a variety of media, from sculpture to
textual propositions, often rearranging pre-
vious works or returning to earlier ideas. Af-
ter completing his studies at the Akademija
likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts)
in Zagreb in 1947, Koaric focused on the
human figure. Osjecaj cjeline (A Feeling of
abstract. In 1960, following a short stint in
Paris, he joined Gorgona, a loosely orga
nized group with such artists as Dimitrije
Bai c evi c (Mangelos, 19211987) and
Josip Vanita (b. 1924). Gorgonas acti
vities included ephemeral actions such as
completing absurd questionnaires, taking
zine of artist projects. During the 1960s,
Koaric created sculptures of negative
neapolis (20089), introduced Kudos art to
Koaric created Hrpa (Heaps), piling his pre-
vious objects carelessly. For Documenta 11
in 2002, he exhibited the entire contents
of his studio. In 2007, the Museum of Con-
temporary Art Zagreb acquired his studio
collectionmore than 6,000 workswhich
he has reinstalled multiple times. In 2013,
Haus der Kunst mounted Freedom Is a Rare
Bird, Koaric s most comprehensive survey
exhibition to date outside of Croatia.
Lee Krasner
Born 1908 in Brooklyn, NY, USA
Died 1984 in New York, NY, USA
Lee (Leonore) Krasner, a noted Abstract Ex-
pressionist painter, is among the few female
artists to have received a retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984).
She first studied at the Womens Art School
of The Cooper Union, and then the National
Academy of Design (192832). Beginning
in 1934, during the Great Depression, she
worked for the Works Progress Administra-
tions Federal Art Project and later entered
Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in 1937.
While her early paintings reflected European
modernism, Krasner soon became involved
with the American Abstract Expressionists. In
1942 she participated in the exhibition Amer-
ican and French Painting at McMillen, Inc.,
in New York. She met fellow artist Jackson
Pollock (19121956) there, and they married
in 1945. The two proved to be highly influen-
tial for one anothers art. Her Little Images
series (194650), in a controlled dripping
technique, resulted in thirty-one small-scale
abstractions reminiscent of calligraphy and
hieroglyphics. For her collages in the 1950s,
Krasner recycled earlier works, but after
Pollocks death in 1956 she began to cre-
ate large-scale abstractions using broad
brushstrokes that required intensive physical
gestures. She had her first solo show in 1955
and had a retrospective at the Whitechapel
Gallery, London, in 1965.
Tetsumi Kudo
Born 1935 in Osaka, Japan
Died 1990 in Tokyo, Japan
Eschewing formal categorization and exis
ting artistic concepts, Tetsumi Kudo created
biomorphic sculptures and assemblages that
often incorporated grotesque renderings of
the human body in combination with man-
-
made items. He first enrolled at the Ato no
Asagaya kenkyujo - (Asagaya Institute of
Art) in 1953 and continued his studies at
the Toky- o- bijutsu kunitachidaigaku (To-
kyo National University of Fine Arts) from
1954 to 1958. Praised by the French art
critic Michel Tapi (10th Yomiuri Independ-
ent Exhibition, 1958) and labeled anti-art
junk by art critic Yoshiaki Tono (referring to
Kudos Proliferating Chain Reaction, 1959),
Kudos production performances and visual
works regularly invited controversy. His
artistic involvement with such themes as ra-
diation, reproduction, and impotence already
defined his early works. When he moved to
Paris on a scholarship in 1963 he gained in-
stant recognition with his legendary perfor-
mance Philosophy of Impotence. Throughout
his career he held exhibitions in Japan and
Europe, including the Venice Biennale (1976)
and the Bienal de So Paulo (1977). A major
retrospective at the Walker Art Center, Min-
a wide American audience.
787
Yayoi Kusama
Born 1929 in Matsumoto, Nagano
Prefecture, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan
Yayoi Kusama, known for her happenings
and the use of dotted patterns, is one of
the foremost contemporary artists of Japan.
She first studied traditional nihonga painting
in Japan, where she had her first solo show
in 1952. After immigrating to the United
States in 1957, she worked as an avant-gar-
de painter and sculptor. Her large-scale
Net painting series presented a system
of small, thickly painted loops covering the
entire surface in rhythmic undulations. Her
Accumulation sculptures of that time are
monochrome everyday objects (e.g., furni-
ture, boats) covered with soft, phallic forms
of different sizes. Yayoi Kusama covered the
surfaces of her paintings, sculptures, and
even entire rooms with sprawling, brightly
colored patterns (her signature feature being
the dot pattern) and often positioned herself
in the center of them, wearing similarly pat-
terned clothes to blend in with the art. From
the late 1960s onward she staged a variety
of provocative happenings (body-painting
events, antiwar demonstrations) and fur-
ther expanded her repertoire to include film
and fashion design. After Yayoi Kusama
returned to Japan in 1973, she began to
write novels and poems. Late in the 1980s
her work gained international recognition. In
1993 she represented Japan at the Venice
Biennale.
Daniel LaRue Johnson
Born 1938 in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Daniel LaRue Johnson was already active
in the Los Angeles art scene before he
studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in the
first half of the 1960s. Even as a student
he received noteworthy awards (Whitney
Fellowship, 1963) and had a solo exhibition
at the Rolf Nelson Gallery in Los Angeles
(1964). Johnsons art changed in response
to the violence of the civil rights movement,
and he began to create confrontational as-
semblages, such as Freedom Now, Number
1 (1963). He often combined found objects,
such as fragments of broken dolls, hack-
saws, and mousetraps, which he arranged in
wooden boxes and then painted (or tarred)
entirely black. In 1965 he received a Gug-
genheim fellowship, enabling him to study
in Paris with sculptor Alberto Giacometti
(19011966). After returning to the United
States (New York City) in 1966, Johnson
abandoned his black boxes and instead
began painting hard-edge abstractions with
vibrant colors, glossy surfaces, and precise-
ly painted contours. Johnson has also made
a number of large-scale commemorative
sculptures, in abstract, Minimalist forms.
His work has been exhibited at the Whitney
Museum of American Art, the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of
Modern Art, all in New York.
Maria Lassnig
Born 1919 in Kappel am Krappfeld
He emerged as a conceptual artist while
experimenting in sculpture, painting (with
spray paint), video, and film. Latham was
concerned with his own philosophy of time
and the critical examination of religious and
scientific systems of knowledge. In 1958 he
began to make assemblages and sculptures
using books that had been torn, partially
burnt, painted over, or otherwise demolished.
Latham became famous for his seminal ac-
tion in 1966, when he produced the first of his
so-called skoob works (books spelled back-
ward). While teaching at St Martins School of
Art, he invited his students to a quasi-ritual-
istic ceremony in which they chewed and spit
out pages of art critic Clement Greenbergs
book Art and Culture. Equating destruction
and creation, he then decanted the vestiges
of the book into a vial and returned it to the
schools library. Latham and his wife, Barbara
Stevini, founded the Artist Placement Group
in 1966.
Jacob Lawrence
Born 1917 in Atlantic City, NJ, USA
Died 2000 in Seattle, WA, USA
Jacob Lawrence is known for his vivid
scenes of everyday life among blacks.
When he was thirteen his family moved to
Harlem, where he attended an after-school
art program. He quit school at age sixteen,
but continued his interest in art. He frequently
visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, took
classes at the Harlem Art Workshop and
the Harlem Community Art Center, and later
studied at the American Artists School.
his graduate exhibition in 1958 he showed
Yeogsawa Sigan (History and Time), a plas-
ter object wrapped in barbed wire and spat-
tered with red and bluethe colors of both
communism and democracy. Other early
works include Glass (1969), a type of inoc-
ulation for a tree, and Jong-i Namu (Paper
Tree; 1970), an installation of shredded pa-
per hanging from branches. His works have
addressed the human body, sexuality, and
political strife. Early in his career he showed
in the 1969 Paris Biennale and the 1970
Bienal de So Paulo.
Lee Ufan
Born 1936 in Haman County, Korea
Lives and works in Kamakura, Japan
and Paris, France
Lee Ufan is a multimedia artist who emerged
as the leader of the Mono-ha (School of
Things) movement. He is also consider ed
a key figure in the so-called Korean mono
chrome painting movement. He initially inter-
rupted his studies at the Seoul Daehaggyo
(Seoul National University) in 1956 to study
philosophy at Nihon daigaku (Nihon Univer-
sity) in Tokyo, Japan, graduating in 1961.
His most representative works are series of
Minimalist abstractions produced by mak-
ing repetitive gestural marks on the canvas.
His Relatum sculpture series combines
large stones with industrial materials, such
as glass and iron or steel plates. In addition
to his artworks, he has produced a remark-
able amount of critical and philosophical
writing, including The Search for Encounter
Li Xiushi
Born 1933 in Jinzhou, Liaoning, China
Lives and works in Beijing, China
Li Xiushi is a Chinese landscape painter
who has managed to integrate oil painting,
a traditionally Western medium, with tradi-
tional Chinese ink painting in the painterly
mogu (boneless) style and contemporary
Chinese social realism. He first studied oil
-
painting at the Zhongy -
ang Meish
Xuyu
(Central Academy of Fine Art [CAFA]) in
Beijing, under the tutelage of the famous
social realist painter Dong Xiwen (1914
1973). Lis painting Cross the Yangtze River
(1959), which he completed while still a
CAFA student, achieved critical acclaim,
both in China and internationally. Li has
held positions in many national art institu-
tions of China, including founder and vice
president of the Chinese Research Insti-
tute of Fine Arts (1988) and director of the
China Oil Painting Society. He has also
worked with the Heilongjiang Artists As-
sociation. Li has been featured in Fine Arts,
a CAFA publication, and his work has been
included in the National Fine Arts Exhibition,
organized by the China Artists Association,
since 1962. In 1981, Li curated an exhibi-
tion of contemporary Chinese painters from
CAFA, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Fine
Art Academy.
Roy Lichtenstein
Born 1923 in New York, NY, USA
Died 1997 in New York, NY, USA
He received a scholarship to study at the
Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts
in 1929, graduating in 1932. In 1936 he
moved to New York, where he attended a
workshop by the Mexican muralist David
Alfaro Siqueiros (18961974). During the
Great Depression he worked in the Easel
Division of the Federal Art Project
(193940) then returned to Baltimore in
1940. Although Louis first painted in a
figurative, social realist style, after World
War II he began to move toward ab-
straction. In 1948, he began to work
with Magna, an acrylic resin paint that
he used for the rest of his life. In 1952,
Louis moved to Washington, D.C., where
he befriended the artist Kenneth Noland
(19242010). In 1953 Louis had his first
solo show and visited the New York studio
of Helen Frankenthaler (19282011). He
was deeply impressed by her soak-stain
technique, and his own experiments with
paint application resulted in three series
of colorful, large-scale paintings: Veils,
Unfurled, and Stripes. Louis destroyed citizen in 1961.
most of his Abstract Expressionist paintings
from 1955 to 1957.
Toms Maldonado
Born 1922 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lives and works in Milan, Italy
Artist, industrial designer, and semiologist
Toms Maldonado attended the Academia
Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Academy
of Fine Arts) in Buenos Aires. In 1944 he
co-founded the Asociacin Arte Concreto-
Town, where he joined a group of Trotskyite
artists. With the encouragement of artist
Gerard Sekoto, he completed his art stud-
ies at the University of Fort Hare. Mancoba
received a scholarship to study at the cole
nationale suprieure des Arts Dcoratifs
(National School of Decorative Arts) in Paris
in 1938. There he met Danish artist Sonja
Ferlov, whom he married in 1942. During the
German occupation of France in World War
II, Mancoba was sent to an internment camp
in St. Denis in 1940. The couple moved to
Denmark in 1947 and became involved with
the artist collective CoBrA (194851), of
which Mancoba was a founding member.
The avant-garde group, which inclu ded
Karel Appel (19212006) and Asger Jorn
(19141973), embraced Marxism and
tachism. Mancoba abandoned sculpture in
the 1950s and turned to painting, creat-
ing loose, abstract forms related to West
African Kota reliquary figures. After CoBrA
stopped exhibiting, Mancoba and his fam-
ily resettled in Paris; he became a French
Piero Manzoni
Born 1933 in Soncino, Italy
Died 1963 in Milan, Italy
Piero Manzoni, a largely self-taught artist,
made his earliest paintings at age seven
teen. By the time he first exhibited his
workin a group show in his hometown
in 1956he had already begun to experi
ment with anthropomorphic silhouettes,
multiple imprints of everyday objects, and
both traditional geometric elements and
totemic figuration, depicting spiritual and
everyday narratives. In the late 1950s and
early 1960s he created legendary illustra-
tions of the ancestral Djangkawu song cy-
cle on bark and in carved objects adorned
with feathers and ceremonial body designs.
Beyond his artistic success, Marika pas-
sionately advocated for indigenous rights.
He presided over the Rirratjingu during the
establishment of a Methodist mission in
Yirrkala in 1935 and was an informant to an-
thropologists Catherine and Roland Berndt.
In 1963 Marika was instrumental in sending
a petition on bark to the Australian House
of Representatives protesting the mining
of Yolngu land.
Maruki Iri & Maruki Toshi
Born 1901 in Hiroshima, Japan / Born
1912 in Hokkaido, Japan
Died 1995 in Tokyo, Japan / Died 2000 in
Tokyo, Japan
Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, who married
in 1941, were professional artists with
different backgrounds. While Maruki Iri
studied traditional nihonga painting (ink
painting), Maruki Toshi studied Western
art at the Joshibijutsudaigaku no joshi-k o-
(Joshibi Universitys Womens School of
Art and Design). He preferred large-scale
paintings, while she favored drawing and
illustrations. In 1948 the couple began
their lifelong artistic collaboration on the
subject of war and human tragedies, such
as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in

L (Carinthia), Austria
Wifredo Lam
Born 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba
Died 1982 in Paris, France
Through his work, Wifredo Lam sought to
revive the Afro-Cuban culture. Lams father
was Chinese and his mother was Cuban of
African descent. After briefly studying law,
he began to study painting at the Escue-
la de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) in
1918, and in 1923 he traveled to Madrid,
Spain, to study under Fernando lvarez de
Sotomayor y Zaragoza (18751960), who
also taught Salvador Dal (19041989).
In 1936 he revolutionized his practice af-
ter seeing an exhibition of work by Pablo
Picasso (18811973). He moved to Paris
in 1938, where Picasso encouraged Lam
to seek his own modernism, and the two
exhibited their work at the Perls Galleries,
New York, in 1939. Lams graphic works
illustrated many poems, including Andr
Bretons Fata Morgana (1940). In 1941, af-
ter being imprisoned in France by the Nazis,
Lam returned to Cuba, where his work was
reinvigorated by his African heritage. After
World War II, Lam traveled abroad, associ-
ating with the Italian avant-garde and the
Died 2014 in Vienna, Austria
Maria Lassnig was the first woman to win
the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1988.
She began to study art at the Akademie
der Schnen Knste (Academy of Fine
Arts) in Vienna in 1941, first under Wilhelm
Dachauer (18811951), who allegedly de-
clared her art degenerate, then studied
under Ferdinand Andri (18711956) and
Herbert Boeckl (18941966). Late in the
1950s, Lassnig described her primarily ar-
tistic concern as body awareness. Freed
from the constraints of realistic rendering,
she considered her inner sensations and
needs of her body as the most urgent re-
ality, which she depicted through paintings
of deformed bodies in meaningful colors.
After living in Paris from 1961 to 1968,
Lassnig moved to New York. She attend-
ed an animated film course at the School
of Visual Arts, which led to several noted
films, including Selbstportrait (Self-portrait;
1971). In 1980 she was appointed pro-
fessor at the Hochschule fr Angewandte
Kunst (Academy of Applied Arts), Vienna,
and later established an animated film
studio in her master class. Lassnig repre-
sented Austria at the Venice Biennale in
1980 and took part in Documenta, Kassel
(1982). At the Venice Biennale in 2013 she
Lawrence was inspired by the Harlem com-
munity and made its people and life his sub-
ject matter. He composed his pictures of
plain, often monochrome shapes painted
in bold colors. He first received recognition
for his paintings with a solo exhibition in
1938 at the Harlem YMCA. Early in the
1940s he created his famous sixty-panel
series, The Migration of the Negro (now
the Migration series). In 1946 he received
a Guggenheim fellowship, enabling him
to accomplish his War series, based on
the experiences of his tour of duty during
World War II, and took a teaching position at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Lawrence received numerous awards, in-
cluding the National Medal of Arts and held
more than two dozen honorary degrees.
His work is included in collections all
over the world.
Lee Seung-taek
Born 1932 in Kowon, Korea
Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea
A noted artist in sculpture and installation
as well as environmental and performance
art, Lee Seung-taek fled to South Korea
during the Korean War (195053). He be-
gan drawing portraits of American soldiers
at this time and continued after the conflict.
(1971) and The Art of Encounter (2004). Lee
Ufans first solo show was held in 1967 at
the Sato Gallery in Tokyo, and his work was
first shown in Europe at the Paris Biennale
(1971), where he represented Korea.
Norman Lewis
Born 1909 in New York, NY, USA
Died 1979 in New York, NY, USA
Norman (Wilfred) Lewis developed his own
style within the Abstract Expressionist
movement. After studying commercial de-
sign in high school he spent several years
as a seaman in South America and the Car-
ibbean. He began his painting career as a
social realist in the 1930s, when he stud-
ied at Columbia University, trained in the
studio of Augusta Savage (18921962),
and joined the Harlem 306 Group. He
emerged as a politically conscious artist,
worked for the Works Progress Adminis-
tration, and became deeply involved in the
Harlem art community. In the 1940s Lewis
created gestural, jazz-inspired works with
atmospheric effects in a bright, expressive
palette, with calligraphic lines arranged in
dynamic, swarm-like formations. He had a
series of solo shows at the Willard Gallery
in New York beginning in 1949 and was
included in the exhibition Abstract Painting
Roy (Fox) Lichtenstein was one of the first
and most widely recognized Pop artists. He
studied at the Art Students League of New
York in 1940. His college career was inter-
rupted by military service during World War
II, but he returned to Ohio State University
in 1945 to complete his BFA and earn a
masters degree (1949). He later held
teaching positions there and at other col-
leges. After his graduation he began to at the Hochschule fr Gestaltung (College
work in series and to adopt iconographies
from printed images, and he had his first
solo show at the Carlebach Gallery, New
York, in 1951. In 1960 he began to incorpo-
rate themes and images from mass media
and developed a unique style by mimicking
a basic newspaper reproduction process
(using Ben-Day dots), thus blending me-
chanical reproduction and hand drawing
techniques. He was part of the first group of
Pop artists, owing to a much-noticed exhi-
bition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York,
in 1962. His first retrospectives, in the late
1960s, were held at the Pasadena Art Mu-
seum; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;
and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York. Lichtensteins body of work in-
cludes more than 5,000 paintings, prints,
drawings, sculptures, and murals.
Invencin. The groups Manifesto Inven-
cionista (1946), co-written by Maldonado,
elaborates his theory supporting ration-
ality and objectivity over expressionism.
Maldonados early paintings were charac-
terized by geometric abstraction that played
with visual perception. On the invitation
of Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill, in 1954
Maldonado accepted a teaching position
cotton wadding, fiberglass, plush, and even
of Design) in Ulm, Germany, where he re-
mained until 1967, eventually becoming its
director. Maldonado moved the legendary
institution away from its Bauhaus princi-
ples, pioneering a streamlined approach for
mass-production design that is echoed in
todays technological products. Maldonado
moved to Italy in 1967, where he achieved
renown for his collaborations with Ettore
Sottsass for Olivetti and for his corporate
design work for the Gruppo Rinascente. His
landmark text, written in 1970, La speranza
progettuale, was translated into English in
1972 as Design, Nature, and Revolution:
Toward a Critical Ecology. Maldonado urged
designers to think about the problems
of environmental destruction and social
transformation in their work. He is emeritus
professor of environmental design at the
Polytechnic University of Milan.
the use of tar instead of paint. In 1957 he
took part in the exhibition Movimento Arte
Nucleare (Nuclear Art Movement) in Milan.
Inspired by a series of monochrome blue
works by the new realist artist Yves Klein
(19281962), Manzoni created his first
Achromes (1957)colorless canvases
with dimensional layers of gesso, clay, or
kaolin. For later Achromes works he used
and densely layered images. The Marukis
bread rolls. In 1958 he began his collabo-
ration with Enrico Castellani and Agostino
Bonalumi, co-founding an art gallery,
Azimuth. From the late 1950s onward,
Manzonis art became more conceptual.
In works like Artists Breath, Artists Shit,
Sculpture Eggs, Magic Bases, and Living
Sculptures (all from 196061), he explored
the ironic and critical role of the artist and
questioned the dynamics of the art market
and its object-bound mechanisms.
Mawalan Marika
Born c. 1908 in Yirrkala, Northeast Arn-
hem Land, Northern Territory, Australia
Died 1967 in Yirrkala, Australia
Mawalan Marika was the senior ceremonial
leader of the Rirratjingu clan in Northeast
Arnhem Land and an important indige-
nous Australian artist of the Yolngu people.
1945. Maruki Iri, who was from Hiroshima
and lost family members in the bombing,
arrived on the site only three days after the
bombing. His wife followed a few days later.
The urge to respond artistically to what they
had seen emerged from their inability to
forget the haunting memories, and during
the next thirty years they created fifteen
large folding-screen panels with complex
also produced collaborative works on other
atrocities of war, such as the Auschwitz
concentration camp and the Nanking mas-
sacre. Since the 1950s, their Hiroshima
Panels have been exhibited worldwide
and both artists have received honors and
prizes, including a nomination for the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1995 for their commitment
to nuclear disarmament and world peace.
Almir Mavignier
Born 1925 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lives and works in Hamburg, Germany
Brazilian artist Almir da Silva Mavignier
has pursued geometric abstraction, Op
art, and graphic design. After studying with
the Hungarian-born painter rpd Szens
(18971985) in 1946, Mavignier created
his first abstract paintings in 1949. After
his work was featured in a solo exhibition

CoBrA group. In 1964, Lam received the
Guggenheim International Award. His work
has been widely exhibited, including at the
Centre Georges Pompidou in 2015.
received the Golden Lion award for lifetime
achievement in the arts.
John Latham
Born 1921 in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia
Died 2006 in London, UK
The British conceptual artist John Latham
studied at the Chelsea School of Art in
London during the second half of the 1940s.
In the mid-1950s, he began working with
nonmaterial substances such as smoke,
wind, and fire after seeing a spindly figura-
tive sculpture by Alberto Giacometti (1901
1966) and a Saudi Arabian oil-burning fur-
nace on television. Lee Seung-taek received
an art degree from Hongik University,
Seoul, in 1959. As a student he created his
first works with Godret stones, traditionally
used for tying off strands of weaving, sus-
pended on cords from a horizontal bar. For
and Sculpture in America at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, in 1951. In response
to the civil rights movement he co-found-
ed the SPIRAL artist group in 1963 and
helped establish New Yorks Cinque Gallery
for minority artists in 1969. Lewis received
a Guggenheim fellowship in 1975 and had
a major retrospective at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts in 2015.
M
Morris Louis
Born 1912 in Baltimore, MD, USA
Died 1962 in Washington, DC, USA
Morris Louis was one of the foremost
proponents of Color Field abstraction, a
style more focused on color than gesture.
Ernest Mancoba
Born 1904 in Johannesburg, South Africa
Died 2002 in Paris, France
Ernest (Methuen) Mancoba was one of
the first successful black modern artists
in South Africa. He began woodcarving
in 1925 while studying at Grace Dieu, an
Anglican teachers college, and produced
a moder nist relief, African Madonna, in
1929. In 1935 Mancoba moved to Cape
The head of a veritable artistic dynasty, he
transgressed traditional gender divisions
by teaching his daughters as well as his
sons how to paint. Many of his family mem-
bersincluding his brother Mathaman,
son Wandjuk, and daughters Banduk and
Dhuwarrwarrare well-known artists. He
considered art an important tool in dissemi-
nating Yolngu culture and helped to pioneer
the marketing of cross-hatched bark pain
ting in the 1950s. His compositions include
at the Museum of Modern Art, So Paulo,
in 1951, he devoted himself to Concrete
art. From 1953 to 1958 Mavignier studied
at the Hochschule fr Gestaltung (College
of Design) in Ulm, Germany, with Josef
Albers, Max Bense, and Max Bill. In 1954 he
created his breakthrough color-point grid
series that causes optical vibrations. While
living in Paris in 1958, Mavignier joined the
radical ZERO group, whose artists rejected
color and expression for ephemeral events

788 789
and nontraditional materials. In 1961 he
co-organized Nove Tendencije (New Ten-
dencies), the first Yugoslavian exhibition
devoted to post-informel art, with the art
historian Marko Mestrovich and Bozo Bek,
director of the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Zagreb. Mavigniers work was included
in the Venice Biennale (1964), Documenta
(1964; 1968), and the kinetic and Op
art exhibition The Responsive Eye at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1965).
He taught at the Hochschule fr Bildende
Knste (College of Fine Arts) in Hamburg
from 1965 to 1990.
John McHale
Born 1922 in Glasgow, UK
Died 1978 in Houston, TX, USA
John McHale co-founded the Independ-
ent Group, a British Pop art movement
that grew out of a shared fascination with
Exploding Galaxy collaborative (1967), and
Artists for Democracy (197477). Medalla
has taught in Europe and the United States
his work has been included in many im-
portant exhibitions, including Documenta
(1972), Kassel.
Mohammed Melehi
Born 1936 in Asilah, Morocco
Lives and works in Marrakesh and Tangier,
Morocco
Mohammed Melehi is a significant figure
in Moroccan modernism. From 1953 to
1955, he studied at the cole des Beaux-
Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Ttouan, Mo-
rocco. Melehi subsequently spent six years
studying in Seville, Madrid, Rome, and Paris.
He received a Rockefeller Foundation
scholarship to study at Columbia Uni-
versity in New York from 1962 to 1964.
Melehi has used the motif of the wave
Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko
Born 1932 in Kherson, UDSSR
Died 1988 in Leningrad, UDSSR
Evgeny Mikhnov is a painter, graphic art-
ist, and theater designer. He first moved
to Leningrad with his mother in 1939.
From 1941 to 1944 he was an evacuee in
Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and from 1944
to 1946 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. He
returned to Leningrad in 1946, but was
sent to an artillery academy in 1947. He
attended night school while working as an
apprentice at the Sverdlov Factory in 1949.
In 1951 he studied in the Scandinavian
department of the First Leningrad Peda-
gogical Institute of Foreign Languages,
and transferred to the Theater Institute in
1954. There he studied under the theater
director and designer Nikolai Akimov
(19011969), who introduced him to Euro-
pean modernism. Mikhnov became one of
the first abstract artists in Russia. He was
Joan Mitchell
Born 1925 in Chicago, IL, USA
Died 1992 in Paris, France
Joan Mitchell is known for her Abstract Ex-
pressionist paintings in intense composi-
tions of distinct brushstrokes and bold colors
on pale backgrounds. She attended Smith
College in Northampton, Massachusetts
(194244) and the School of the Art Insti-
tute of Chicago, earning BFA (1947) and
MFA (1950) degrees. She lived briefly in
New York, but in 1948 moved to Paris on a
fellowship and traveled to Spain and Czech-
oslovakia. During this time Mitchell mainly
painted Expressionist landscapes, evolving
toward abstraction. She returned to New
York in 1949 and quickly became part of
the downtown avant-garde art scene, as-
sociating with such prominent New York
School artists as Franz Kline (19101962)
and Willem de Kooning (19041997). In
1951 she became one of the few female
in Paris, a group of Op art and kinetic artists
who created works with light, motors, and
sculptural materials and encouraged visitor
participation. Though Morellet was mostly
self-taught, he took some painting lessons
from a professional artist. From 1948 to
1975 he led his fathers toy car factory,
which allowed him the financial indepen
dence to work as an artist, in both Cholet
and Paris. In 1950 Morellet turned to abs
traction and had his first solo show at the
Galrie Creuze in Paris. His paintings, which
depict infinite structures of geometric or
stylized elements, reflect his application of
predefined rules that were also determined
by chance. In 1963 he began to use neon
tubes that rhythmically switch on and off,
which became his favored material for ob-
jects and installations. Morellet took part
in Documenta, Kassel (1964; 1968; 1977),
and in the Venice Biennale (1970), and in
1970 he contributed to the French pavilion
at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. Morellets first
(Nishinomiya Art School). After a short
figurative phase (adopting the croquis draw-
ing technique and elements of Fauvism),
he turned to abstraction in 1953. At the
invitation of Yoshihara Jiro- (19051972),
Sadamasa Motonaga became a member
of the Gutai Art Association. From 1955
to 1971 he created experimental and site-
specific works (installations) using natural
and industrial materials. His Work (Water)
(1956) for the second Gutai outdoor ex-
hibition is considered a seminal work with
its innovative concept of combining stable
materials (plastic) with ephemeral, fluid
elements (water, color, and light). After living
in New York from 1966 to 1967, he began
to use airbrush and acrylic paint, changing
his visual language to hard-edge yet round
shapes of bright, saturated colors. Motonaga
received many important prizes, including
the Japanese Art Grand Prix in 1983.
Institute (known as the Villa Massimo), and
in 1937, through a grant given by Edvard
Munch (18631944), he studied in Norway.
That same year, Nays paintings were
included in the infamous Nazi-organized
exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art)
in Germany. His ability to paint and exhibit
was severely curtailed at that time. Nay
was conscripted in 1940 and went with the
German infantry to France, where he paint-
ed in secret in a French artists studio. From
1945 to 1948 Nays work explored myth
and poetry, grappling with the trauma of
World War II. In 1950, Kestner-Gesellschaft
Hannover organized Nays first retrospec-
tive. Nay work became completely non-rep-
resentational after he moved to Cologne
in 1951. His work was shown in the Venice
Biennale (1956) and Documenta, Kassel
(1955; 1959; 1964).
Iba NDiaye
ignoring the rising abstract movement of
the postwar era. With her move to the Up-
per West Side in the 1960s, she made her
way back into the current artistic circles and
portrayed important artists, curators, and
gallery owners, such as the poet and wri
ter Frank OHara (19261966), Pop artist
Andy Warhol (19281997), and land artist
Robert Smithson (19381973). In 1974
she was honored with a major retrospec-
tive at the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York.
Albert Newall
Born 1920 in Manchester, UK
Died 1989 in Cape Town, South Africa
Albert Newall was a British-born painter and
photographer who settled in South Africa in
1947. He worked as an aerial photographer
before and during World War II, and later
commented that his work as an artist was in-

American mass culture and postwar tech-
nologies, in 1952. He had worked as a tech-
nician and volunteered for military service
in the Royal Marines during World War II,
but his relatively brief artistic career began
after the war. Though his first works were
based on the Constructivist style, he later
transitioned to Pop art and proto-Op art,
establishing his first London studio early
in the 1950s. In 1954 McHale co-curat-
ed the exhibition Collages and Objects at
Londons Institute of Contemporary Arts
(which he also co-founded), displaying col-
lages from his Transistor series along with
his interactive gaming collage, Why I Took
to the Washers in Luxury Flats (1954). In
1955 he received a fellowship to study color
theory and industrial design under Josef
Albers (18881976) at Yale University. He
returned to England with collected ephem-
era of American popular culture, especially
colorful magazines, which he used as raw
material for his art from 1956 to 1958.
After he moved to America early in the
1960s, he earned a PhD in sociology and
published extensively on the impact of tech-
nology and mass communications.
David Medalla
Born 1942 in Manila, Philippines
Lives and works in London, UK
David Medalla was a pioneer of land art,
kinetic art, and performance art. He was
only twelve years old when the poet Mark
van Doren (18941972), a professor of
English at New Yorks Columbia University,
recommended him for admission. There he
studied ancient and modern literature, dra-
ma, and philosophy, and met the Filipino
poet Jos Garcia Villa (19081997), who
encouraged Medallas interest in painting.
In the late 1950s, when he returned to
Manila, the Catalan poet Jaime Gil de
Biedma (19291990) and the painter
Fernando M. Zbel (19241984) became pa-
trons of his art. From the 1960s onward, how-
ever, he lived and worked in Europe, where
he was encouraged by the philosopher Gas-
ton Bachelard (18841962) and the artist
Marcel Duchamp (18871968). Medalla
often combined bubbles, sand, or neon with
glass or plastic structures. Medallas Cloud
Canyons (Cloud Gates) (1963), his first bub-
ble machine, was followed by many others
during the next thirty years. He was a found-
er and director of Signals Gallery (1964), the
in his painting since the 1960s in vari-
ous ways, typically with a bold color pal
ette and hard-edge lines. On his return
to Morocco, Melehi became a professor
of painting, sculpture, and photography
at the cole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine
Arts) of Casablanca. At this time Melehi
co-founded the Casablanca Group, who be-
lieved in exploring the tenets of modernism
through local Moroccan visual language and
traditions. Melehi was involved with the lef
tist journal Souffles from 1966 to 1969 and
was founding director of the cultural publi-
cation Intgral from 1972 to 1977. He orga
nized the first Moroccan open-air exhibition
in 1969 in Marrakesh. In 1978 he founded
an annual arts festival in his hometown,
Asilah. Melehi was the arts director at the
Ministry of Culture from 1985 to 1992
and Cultural Consultant to the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and Cooperation from 1999
to 2002.
Gustav Metzger
Born 1926 in Nuremberg, Germany
Lives and works in London, UK
The son of Jewish-Polish parents, Gustav
Metzger came to London in 1939 under
the auspices of the Kindertransport (Refu
gee Childrens Movement). He attended the
Cambridge School of Art in London and the
Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten
van Antwerpen (Royal Academy of Fine
Arts), Antwerp (194849), on a scholarship
from the United Kingdoms Jewish commu-
nity. During the 1950s he took on various
jobs and was politically active, protesting
rocket bases in the UK and promoting nu-
clear disarmament. In 1959 he developed
the concept of auto-destructive art and this happening, Minujn invited other artists
began to publish and write on the subject.
Based on the destructive potential of his
time, his work combined destruction and
construction, using bags of garbage, ex-
haust fumes, acid, and liquid crystals in his
work. In 1966 he organized the internation-
al Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) in
London with members of the Vienna Ac-
tionist and Fluxus movements as well as
psychologists, poets, and musicians such
as John Lennon. From the 1970s onward,
he created participatory art, with new tech-
nologies, and dealt with his personal history
and the theme of extinction.
influenced by the Arefiev Circle (the first members of the Eighth Street Club and
nonconformist group in Leningrad) and was included in the groundbreaking Ninth
Abstract Expressionism, especially the art Street Show. The next year Mitchell had
of Jackson Pollock (19121956). A prolific her first New York solo show and met the
abstract artist, Mikhnov experimented with poet Frank OHara (19261966), whose
a variety of techniques but also invented a poems (among others) inspired her work.
new style of painting with his Tube series From 1955 onward, she lived alternately
(195659). In 1959 Mikhnov accepted a job in New York and France until she settled
at the Zhivopis i dizayn kombinata (Painting in Vtheuil, a village in the northwestern
and Design Combine), the state organiza- suburbs of Paris, in 1968. One of her asso-
tion of freelance designers. He represented ciates in France was the artist Cy Twombly
Russia in the 1977 Venice Biennale. (19282011).
College in 1966, Morris studied engineer-
Marta Minujn Henry Moore
Born 1943 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Born 1898 in Castleford, UK
Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Died 1986 in Much Hadham, UK
Argentina
The British sculptor Henry Moore ex-
Marta Minujn is an acclaimed pioneer of pressed an interest in sculpture at an early
happenings, performance art, soft sculp- age. After serving in the army in World War
ture, and media arts. She initially studied at I (19171919), he studied at the Leeds
the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte School of Art. In 1925 he toured France and
(now Universidad Nacional de las Artes, or Italy on a scholarship. He then taught at the
National University of the Arts) until 1960. Royal College of Art, London, until 1932,
She then received a scholarship to travel to when he became head of the sculpture de-
Paris, where her work was featured in the partment at the Chelsea School of Art (until
exhibition Pablo Curatella Manes y 30 artis- 1939). Moores first one-man show was at
tas argentinos de Nueva Generacin (Pablo Londons Warren Gallery in 1928, followed
Manes and Thirty Argentines from the New by other exhibitions and public commis-
Generation) at the Galrie Creuze in 1960. sions. Influenced by primitive art and Surre-
During her three years in Paris, she explored alism, his work became more abstract, and
the local avant-garde art scene, created her in the 1930s he associated with several
first participatory works, and experimented artist groups, including the Seven and Five
with transforming hand-painted mattresses Society (later the Seven and Five Abstract
into interactive soft sculptures. Her lifelong Group) and Unit One. During World War
aesthetic concernsaudience involvement II he was commissioned to do a series of
and protesting the concept of the artwork drawings depicting people seeking shelter
as a permanent material objectreached in the London Underground. At first Moore
their first significant manifestation in 1963 mostly worked in wood and stone, while his
with La Destruccin (The Destruction). For later sculptures were often in cast metal.
His subjects included reclining figures,
to help destroy and burn some of her own family groups, and abstract, organic forms.
works. In 1966 she won a Guggenheim In 1977 he established the Henry Moore
Fellowshipescaping Argentina just as a Foundation, which encourages public ap-
repressive regime assumed powerand preciation of the visual arts. Throughout his
moved to New York. There she created career Moore earned many important prizes
her psychedelic Minuphone, a telephone and retrospective exhibitions.
booth wherein visitors who dialed a number
would suddenly hear sounds and see colors
on the glass panels and watch themselves Franois Morellet
on a TV screen in the floor. She returned to Born 1926 in Cholet, France
Buenos Aires in 1976. Died 2016 in Cholet, France
Franois Morellet produced drawings, pain
tings, objects, and installations. In 1960 he
co-founded GRAV (Groupe de Recherche
dArt Visuel, or Visual Arts Research Group),
retrospective was held in 1977 at the Na-
tional Gallery in Berlin; his last was in 2011
at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Robert Morris
Born 1931 in Kansas City, MO, USA
Lives and works New York, NY, USA
Robert Morris is a central figure of Minimal-
ism, process art, and performance. Prior to
moving to New York in 1960, where he re-
ceived an art, history degree from Hunter
(Nuclear Movement). The movement began in
ing, art and philosophy in Kansas City, San
Francisco, and Portland. He was drafted into
the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1952. Although
he first practiced painting, Morriss then-
wife, Simone Forti (b. 1935), introduced him
to dance and performance in California in
the 1950s. Morriss subsequent work consi
dered sculpture in the context of space and
time. Morris and Forti collaborated with the
postmodern Judson Dance Theater in the
early 1960s. In 1963 Morris mounted his
first solo exhibition of Minimalist sculpture
reviewed by Donald Judd (19281994)
at New Yorks Green Gallery. The following
year, Morris showed gray-painted polyhedron
sculptures at the same space, focusing on
the spatial relations between the objects and
the viewer. In 1966 he published his Notes
on Sculpture in Artforum and participated
in the exhibition Primary Structures at New
Yorks Jewish Museum. Later in the decade
he introduced more flexible materials like
felt into his work. In 1969 he produced an
ephemeral installation for Anti-Illusion: Pro-
cedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum.
Eventually, Morris became a pioneer of Land
Art and Conceptualism.
Jorn (19141973).
Sadamasa Motonaga
Born 1922 in Iga Ueno, Mie Prefecture,
Japan
Died 2011 in Takarazuka, Japan
Sadamasa Motonaga initially became fa-
mous for his drip paintings (using enamel
paint from 1957 onward), which were in-
spired by the traditional Japanese tech-
nique of tarashikomi, but he also made
silkscreen prints and picture books. He
began his artistic training in 1944 under
the painter Hamabe Mankichi (19021998)
and moved to Kobe, Japan, in 1952 to study
at the nearby Nishinomiya geijutsu gakko-
N
Movimento Nucleare (Enrico Baj,
Sergio Dangelo, and Joe C. Colombo)
Active 1950c. 1960 in Milan, Italy
The atomic bombings of Japan during World
War II by the United States and the subse-
quent Cold War nuclear arms race between
the US and the USSR strongly influenced
the development of the Movimento Nucleare
ier Pingusson); and the Acadmie de la
Milan in 1950 when Italian artists Enrico Baj
(19242003) and Sergio Dangelo (b. 1932)
curated an exhibition at Galleria San Fedele
titled Pittura nucleare (Nuclear Painting). Baj
began to use the mushroom cloud in his works
of the 1950s, while Dangelo had been influ-
enced by the free-ranging artistic expression
and folkloric elements of the CoBrA group.
Joe Colombo (19301971), an Abstract Ex-
pressionistinfluenced artist later known
as an industrial designer, joined the group in
1951. Manifesto tecnico della Pittura nucle-
are (Technical Manifesto), published in 1952
to accompany an exhibition in Brussels, con-
cretized the groups theories. In this screed
the artists sought to reinvent painting for the
atomic age, warn about the dangers of nucle-
ar technology, and criticize the uniformity of
contemporary painting. Dangelo spearheaded
Il Gesto (19551959), a journal affiliated with
the Movimento Nucleare. The movement is
historically associated with Eaismo (Atomic
Era-ism), founded by Voltolino Fontani in
1948 in Italy, and Salvador Dalis (19041989)
Mystical Manifesto from 1951. Movimento
Nucleare influenced artists internationally,
including Yves Klein (19281962) and Asger
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Born 1902 in Berlin, Germany
Died 1968 in Cologne, Germany
From 1925 to 1928 Ernst Wilhelm Nay stu
died painting at the Hochschule der Knste
(College of Arte) Berlin under the tutelage of
the German Expressionist painter Karl Hofer
(18781955). Nay was particularly interest-
ed in the paintings of Henri Matisse (1869
1954), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (18801938),
Caspar David Friedrich (17741840) and
Nicolas Poussin (15941665). Nay traveled
to Rome in 1931 to study at the German Art
Born 1928 in Saint-Louis,
French West Africa
Died 2008 in Paris, France
Iba NDiaye has been called the father of
Senegalese modern art. As a young artist
working for the cinema in his home town,
NDiaye developed a style that would in-
fluence his lifes work. He first trained as
an architect in Senegal, then in France: at
the cole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine
Arts), Montpellier; the cole des Beaux-
Arts (School of Fine Arts), Paris (Atel-
Grande Chaumire (194958). NDiaye
returned to Senegal when his country won
independence in 1959. There, at the re-
quest of President Lopold Sdar Senghor
(19062001), he founded the Departement
des Arts Plastiques (Department of Plastic
Arts) at the cole Nationale des Beaux-Arts
de Dakar (National School of Fine Arts of
Dakar), heading this department until 1967.
NDiaye participated in many exhibitions,
including the Salon dAutomne (Autumn
Salon), Paris (1962); the Bienal de So
Paulo (1963, where he won the bronze
medal); and the seminal exhibition Con-
temporary African Art at the Camden Arts
Centre, London (1969). In the 1970s he
divided his time between his Atelier la
Ruche, Paris, and his home in the Dordogne,
in southwestern France, where he painted
some of his best-known works, including
a series on the theme of the biblical ritual
slaughter of a lamb (the Tabaski series).
Alice Neel
Born 1900 in Merion Square, PA, USA
Died 1984 in New York, NY, USA
works. In 1944 he began to paint again,
Alice Neel is best known for her straightfor-
ward, often confrontational, portraits. After
working as a secretary (19181921) while
attending evening classes at the School of
Industrial Art in Philadelphia, she enrolled
at the Philadelphia School of Design for
Women (now Moore College of Art and
Design). She and her husband, Cuban art-
ist Carlos Enrquez Gmez (19001957),
traveled to Cuba in 1926 but moved to
New York City the following year. When
she moved to Spanish Harlem in 1938, she
began to paint incisive portraits of family
and friends, her Puerto Rican neighbors,
and people she met on the street. She
continued working in a figurative style,
spired by that mode of viewing the world, as
well as by his cave explorations. After early
painting experiments with Cubist and Surre-
alist styles, he turned to hard-edge abstrac-
tion in the late 1950s. Newall was included
in the exhibition South African Non-figurative
Art at the Bienal de So Paulo in 1959. His
photographs, like his paintings, reflect his in-
terests in geometry, patterning, and shadow,
recalling the compositional strategies of the
so-called New Objectivity photographers of
the early twentieth century. Newalls work
left a legacy to the people of South Africa:
The photography collection at Iziko Muse-
ums of South Africa, Cape Town, was es-
tablished in 1965, based on the gift of 135
prints by Newall from the Cape Tercentenary
Foundation. Since Newalls death, his work
has been shown in three historical surveys
of South African abstract painting mounted
at Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary
(SMAC) Gallery, located in Stellenbosch and
Cape Town.
Barnett Newman
Born 1905 in New York, NY, USA
Died 1970 in New York, NY, USA
Barnett Newman, who was part of the
New York School of Abstract Expression-
ists, is distinguished by his extreme formal
reduction and his challenging purism. He
first attended classes at the Art Students
League during his teenage years. It was
there that he met fellow abstract artist
Adolph Gottlieb (19031974). Newman
worked for his fathers clothing company
from 1927 until he became a part-time art
teacher in 1932. Early in the 1940s, he aban-
doned art and destroyed his Expressionist
reaching a breakthrough with Onement, I
(1948), his first monochrome work divided by
a vertical stripe, called a zip, which became
a signature feature of his work. His first solo
show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950,
was harshly criticized, but by the 1960s
critics began to warm to his work. His The
Stations of the Cross series (195866)
was shown at New Yorks Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum in 1966. Although
Newman produced a relatively small body of
work, he had a notable influence both on his
contemporaries and on future generations of
artists. Newman was also a prolific writer of
reviews, magazine articles, and essays on art
and music.

790 791

Malangatana Valente Ngwenya
Born 1936 in Matalana, Mozambique
Died 2011 in Matosinhos, Portugal
In his work, Mozambican painter and poet
Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, known as
Malangatana, combined fantastical imagery
with political themes. Trained as a tradition-
al healer, he moved to Loureno Marques
(now Maputo) at the age of twelve to find
work. After he discovered an interest in
art, he began taking classes at the college
Ncleo de Arte in the late 1950s. Malanga-
tana achieved success in his twenties with
vibrant paintings that spoke to the countrys
oppression under colonial rule, such as the
hellfire scene Juzo Final (Final Judgment).
In 1963 his poetry was published in Black
Orpheus magazine and in the Penguin
Books anthology Modern Poetry from Afri-
ca. Malangatana joined the guerrilla group
FREMILO (Front for the Liberation of Mo-
zambique) in 1964 and was later impris-
oned for eighteen months. After receiving
a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation in
1971, he studied ceramics and painting in
Portugal. Following the Mozambican revo-
lution in 1974, he rejoined FREMILO, which
became the ruling Communist Party. During
the Mozambican Civil War, his work entered
a blue period. Malangatana co-founded
the Mozambican Peace Movement and
helped to establish many cultural organiza-
tions, including the National Museum of Art
in Maputo. UNESCO named him an Artist
for Peace in 1997.
Hermann Nitsch
Born 1938 in Vienna, Austria
Lives and works in Austria
Hermann Nitsch is known for his experimen-
tal and multimedia art. He graduated from
the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt
(Experimental Graphic Institute of Vienna),
but turned to painting in the 1950s. He
was a member of the Wiener Aktionismus
(Viennese actionist movement) with Otto
Muehl (19252013), Gnter Brus (b. 1938),
and Rudolf Schwarzkogler (19401969).
In 1957 Nitsch invented the Orgien Mys-
terien Theater (Orgiastic Mystery Theater),
based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk,
or comprehensive artwork. The Orgien
Mysterien Theater is a six-day festival fea-
turing a variety of art forms and rituals, both
religious and pagan. The staging aims at lib-
erating the spectators religious, moral, and
sexual inhibitions by engaging all senses.
Nitschs controversial performance pieces
have involved blood, dead animals, and pas-
sive human actors. His splatter paintings
(Schttbilder) mingle paint and blood on
rough burlap canvases. In 1971 Nitsch ac-
quired a castle in Prinzendorf, near Vienna,
as the main venue for his Orgien Mysterien
Theater. In 1974 he met the gallery owner
and publisher Peppe Morra, who became
his agent, arranging his performances
and publishing his theoretical works. In
2007, Nitsch opened the Hermann Nitsch
Museum in Mistelbach, Austria. His work
has been exhibited widely in the U.S.
and Europe.
792
Luis Felipe No
Born 1933 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Argentinian artist and writer Luis Felipe
No studied painting and law before
co-founding the artist group Otra Figuracin
(Another Figuration) in 1961. Associated
with the neofiguration movement, the col-
lectives process-oriented, experimental
work reflected the turbulent social and po-
litical situation in Argentina in the 1960s.
I believe in chaos as a value, said No.
His Introduccin a la esperanza (Introduc-
tion to Hope; 1963), a nine-panel work
combining chaotic images of incited crowds
with protest-like placards extending from
it, won the Premio Palanza (Palanza Prize)
from the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (Torcuato
Di Tella Institute). Although Otra Figuracin
officially disbanded in 1963, the group did
participate in the Guggenheim International
Award exhibition in 1964. A year later,
No received a Guggenheim fellowship
and moved to New York. There he created
ephemeral, sculptural installations and pub-
lished the antiaesthetic pamphlet Antiestti-
ca. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1967,
where he opened a bar and created spatial-
ly complex installations with mirrors, inspir-
ing the absurdist elements in his 1974 novel
Recontrapoder. After a violent coup ousted
Isabel Pern from power, No moved to
Paris in 1976. In 1975 he returned to pain
ting, producing expressive landscapes and
innovating a crumpled technique on canvas.
He returned to Argentina in 1987.
Isamu Noguchi
Born 1904 in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Died 1988 in New York, NY, USA
Isamu Noguchi worked in a variety of media,
including sculpture, ceramics, architecture,
garden and theater design, lighting, and
furniture-making. He found inspiration in
both Japanese techniques and American
modernity, and collaborated with many
ar
tists, including choreographer Martha
Graham (18941991) and composer John
Cage (19121992). As the son of Japa-
nese writer Yonejiro- Noguchi (18751947)
and American writer Lonie Gilmour
(18731933), Noguchi often traveled be
tween Japan and the United States. He
worked as an intern for the monumental
sculptor Gutzon Borglum (18671941) in
1922, and after taking sculpture classes
he abandoned his premedical studies at
Columbia University in 1924 to pursue art.
Noguchi received a Guggenheim fellow-
ship in 1927 and assisted in the studio of
Constantin Brncusi (18761957) in Paris
for two years. His own first sculpture com-
mission was News (1938), symbolizing free-
dom of the press for the Associated Press
building at New Yorks Rockefeller Center.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941,
the backlash against Japanese Americans
caused his work to become more politicized
and he requested placement in an intern-
ment camp in Arizona. Noguchi received
many important prizes for his work; he
represented the United States at the
Venice Biennale in 1986.
O
Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai
Born 1942 in Zaria, Nigeria
Lives and works in Edo State, Nigeria
Hlio Oiticica Colette Omogbai is a pioneering Nigerian
Born 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil painter who identified as a Surrealist. She
Died 1980 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil received a degree in painting from the
Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and
Hlio Oiticicas investigations into the es- Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University,
sence of art led him to challenge the boun Zaria) in 1964, where she met artists of
daries between art, life, and the viewer. He the Zaria Art Society such as co-founder
began his artistic career in 1954, studying Uche Okeke (19232016). During her first
painting under Ivan Serpa (19231973) at solo exhibition, at Mbari Ibadan in 1963,
the Museu de Arte Moderna (Modern Art her works rejected academic realism for
Museum) in Rio de Janeiro. In 1955 he an expressionism verging on pure abstrac-
became a member of Grupo Frente and tion, with anguished figures and areas of
started to participate in numerous Concrete bright color. When she moved to Lagos
and Neoconcrete art exhibitions, then joined after graduating in 1965, her bold, formal
the Neoconcrete movement in 1959. In experimentation provoked critics to find
1970 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, her works unfeminine. She retaliated in a
which enabled him to move to New York, promodernist manifesto, Man Loves What
where he lived from 1970 to 1978. Through- Is Sweet and Obvious, published in Nigeria
out his career he questioned the two- magazine in 1965. Omogbai later studied at
dimensional picture plane (Metaesquemas the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and
[Metaschemes], 195758) and explored received a PhD in art education from New
viewer participation (Bilaterais [Bilateral], York University.
1959), ephemeral materials, the dimensions
of color (Invenes [Inventions], 195962),
and multisensory art (Blides, or exploding On Kawara
meteors). Important among his series are the Born 1932 in Kariya, Aichi Prefecture,
Parangols (mobile sculptures, costumes) Japan
and Penetrables (walkable color installa- Died 2014 in New York, NY, USA
tions), both of which were part of his seminal
work Tropiclia (1967), an immersive instal- On Kawara was a conceptual artist whose
lation that gave its name to the Tropicalismo paintings, drawings, postcards, books, and
movement. Besides being a visual artist, recordings were driven by his preoccupa-
Oiticica was also a prolific writer on tion with time as a measurement of human
art theory. existence. His early paintings were shown
at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in
Uche Okeke 1953. His first trip outside Japan in 1959
Born 1933 in Nimo, Nigeria initiated his lifelong penchant for traveling.
Died 2016 in Nimo, Nigeria On January 4, 1966, shortly after settling
in New York, On Kawara began his famous
Born in northern Nigeria to an Igbo family, Today series consisting of hundreds of
Uche Okeke (Christopher Uchefuna) Date Paintings. On a black or colored
co-founded the Zaria Art Society while background he would paint only the date
studying at the Nigerian College of Arts, when the work was made, in white letter-
Science, and Technology (now Ahmadu ing, using the language of his location for
Bello University, Zaria) in 1958. The groups that day. These visual records carry infor-
focus on indigenous art and culture coun- mation about Kawaras life and activities.
tered Zarias Western-orien ted colonial One Million Years (1969), his multivolume
curriculum. In 1960, the year that Nigeria work about the passage and marking of
achieved independence from Britain, the time, has been performed as a reading
Zaria Art Society published a manifesto and also recorded. It lists each year, in the
written by Okeke. The screed advocated million-year periods, before and after the
natural synthesis, a method of artistic works conception. On Kawara participated
creation bringing together elements of Eu- in many biennials, including those in To-
ropean and African traditions to forge indi- kyo (1970), Venice, and Kyoto (1976), and
vidual expressions of a modern Nigerian art. Documenta, Kassel (1972; 1982; 2002).
Okeke created his Oja seriesinspired by The first major retrospective of his work was
Igbo uli drawings, a swirling, linear tradition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
of wall decoration and body pain tingin in New York, in 2015.
1962, during time he spent in Lagos and
Munich. In 1963 Okeke co-founded the
Mbari Cultural Center Enugu in Nigerias Yoko Ono
eastern region, serving as director from Born 1933 in Tokyo, Japan
1964 to 1967. During the 1960s, Okeke Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
produced expressive paintings examining
Igbo myths, Christian themes, and alien- Yoko Ono is considered a daring innovator
ation. After the Biafran War (196770), in performance and Conceptual art. She
Okeke was appointed head of the art was born into an upper-class Tokyo family,
department at the University of Nigeria, but because her father, a banker, was trans-
Nsukka, where he institutionalized natu- ferred to San Francisco shortly before her
ral synthesis, creating courses in Igbo uli birth, she only came to the U.S. with her
techniques. His students included the artist mother two years later, in 1935. The fam-
El Anatsui (b. 1944). ily returned to Japan in 1937, but in 1940
they left for New York City, staying only
until 1941, after the Pearl Harbor bombing.
Ono lived in Japan during World War II, a
formative experience. In 1951 she became
the first woman to be accepted into the
philosophy department of Tokyos exclusive
Gakush-uin University, but she left after
just two semesters. After World War II she
returned with her family to the U.S. and en-
rolled in Sarah Lawrence College. There
she first learned about the work of artist
and composer John Cage (19121992),
who was later an influential mentor and col-
laborator. Ono met British singer-songwriter
John Lennon (1940-1980) at an exhibition
of her work in London (1966), and they were
married from 1969 until his death in 1980.
Onos work has been widely exhibited in- Nam June Paik
ternationally. In 2009 she was awarded the
Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement
at the Venice Biennale.
Alfonso Ossorio
Born 1916 in Manila, Philippines
Died 1990 in New York, NY, USA
Alfonso Ossorio combined Abstract Ex-
pressionism, art brut, and assemblage,
using nontraditional materials. In his youth
he was educated in England but in 1930
he moved to the United States, becoming
a naturalized citizen in 1933. From 1934 1978), and performance artist Joseph Beuys
to 1938 he studied fine art at Harvard Uni-
versity, then at the Rhode Island School
of Design (193839). After he met Betty ber 1962. The following year, his landmark
Parsons in 1941, she presented his work
at her gallery in New York. During World
War II he worked as a medical illustrator
for the U.S. Army in Illinois, painting in his
spare time. Ossorios first published work
was the book Poems and Wood Engravings
(1936). He is best known for his Congre-
gationsassemblages of shells, pearls,
glass eyes, animal bones, and driftwood
which he began in the late 1950s. He also
produced paintings and works on paper. In
1950 he returned to the Philippines to paint
The Angry Christ, a mural for the Chapel of
St. Joseph the Worker. Ossorio was a friend
of artists Jean Dubuffet (19011985) and
Jackson Pollock (19121956). On Pollocks
advice, in 1951, he acquired The Creeks,
an estate in East Hampton, where he
housed Dubuffets collection of art brut
(195161). Eduardo Paolozzi
Hamed Owais
Born 1919 in Beni Suef, Egypt
Died 2011 in Cairo, Egypt
Dissatisfied with his job as a metalworker,
Hamed Owais enrolled in the School of Fine
Arts in Cairo, graduating in 1944. Afterward
he studied at the Institute of Art Education
in Cairo under Youssef el-Afifi. In 1947,
Owais co-founded the Group of Modern
Art with artists including Gamal el-Sigini
(19171977), Gazbia Sirry (b. 1925), Zeinab
Abdel Hamid (19192002), and Youssef
Sida (19221994), which looked to the lives
of everyday Egyptians and viewed art as a
revolutionary agent of social change. Owais
painted the struggles of the Egyptian work-
ing class using a color palette inspired by
the city of Cairo. A turning point for Owaiss
practice was a trip to the 1952 Venice
Biennale (his work was shown in the 1952,
1954, and 1956 editions), where he en-
countered Italian social realism. He would
later find strong affinities with the Mexican
muralists, such as Diego Rivera (1886
1957). In 1956 he won the Guggenheim
International Prize. Owais was appointed
a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in
Alexandria in 1958, serving as its head from
1977 to 1979. From 1967 to 1969, Owais
studied in Madrid at the Real Academia
de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal
Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando).
P
Lygia Pape relentlessly experimented with
Born 1932 in Seoul, South Korea
Died 2006 in Miami, FL, USA
Nam June Paik is considered a leading
pioneer in video art. During the Korean
War (195053), his family immigrated to
Japan, where Paik studied at the University
of Tokyo. His dissertation focused on the
German Expressionist composer Arnold
Schoenberg (18741951), an influential
composer and music theorist. Paik then
studied at Munich University, where he met
artist-composer John Cage (19121992),
Fluxus co-founder George Maciunas (1931
Livro da Criacao (Book of Creation), 1959,
(19211986). Paik participated in the Fluxus
group, performing in Fluxfests in Septem-
ma marginal and cinema novo movements,
exhibition Exposition of Music-Electronic
Television was held at the Galerie Parnass,
Wuppertal, Germany. In 1964 Paik moved
to New York City, where he focused on the
use of television and video. At this time,
Paik also collaborated with cellist Charlotte
Moorman (19331991), blending classical
music with contemporary art. Paik taught
at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf (Dussel-
dorf Art Academy) from 1979 to 1996; his
work is in important collections worldwide
and has been exhibited internationally since
1962, including the Whitney Biennial (1977;
1981; 1983; 1987; 1989); Documenta, Kas-
sel (1977; 1987); and the Venice Biennale
(1984; 1993). South Korea awarded him the
Gold Crown, Order of Cultural Merit in 2007.
Died 2016 in Vadodara, India
Born 1924 in Edinburgh, UK
Died 2005 in London, UK
Eduardo Paolozzisculptor, collagist, print-
maker, and filmmakeris associated with
the development of British Pop art; his early
collages from the late 1940s and early
1950s incorporated American magazine
advertisements, paperback book covers,
and scientific illustrations. The son of Italian
immigrants, Paolozzi was interned for three
months after Italy declared war on Britain
in June of 1940. During that time his father
and grandfather were also detained, then
drowned when their ship to Canada was at-
tacked by a German U-boat. Paolozzi stud-
ied at the Edinburgh College of Art (1943)
and the Slade School of Fine Arts (194447),
where he met his future Independent Group
collaborators. Afterward, he worked in
Paris for two years and got to know sculp-
tors Alberto Giacometti (19011966) and
Constantin Brancusi (18761957), who in-
fluenced his later work. His relationship to
Surrealist artists and his rough-and-ready
aesthetic vision merged with his interest in
modern machinery and mass media. In the
early 1960s, for example, Paolozzi expand-
ed his sculptural techniques through his col-
laboration with industrial engineering firms,
eventually using aluminum. Paolozzi taught
at a number of art and design schools in
Britain and Germany from 1949 until his
retirement in 1994, the last one being the
Akademie der Schnen Knste (Academy
of Fine Arts) in Munich.
Lygia Pape
Born 1927 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Died 2004 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
training included evening classes at the
form, sculpture, printmaking, installation,
and film. By age twenty, she was a member
of the Rio de Janeirobased Grupo Frente
wing of Concrete art, a movement of self-
reflexive geometric abstraction. In 1959, she
signed the Neoconcrete manifesto with
Lygia Clark (19201988) and Hlio Oiticica artistic career and searched for means of
(19371980). The Neoconcretists broke with
the prevailing Concretist ethos, believing that
art should require active participation from
its viewers. Her early work alluded to hand-
icraft, such as the Tecelares (Weaving)
series of geometric woodcut prints shown
in the third Bienal de So Paulo (1955). Her
strongly simplified pictorial language that
asked the viewer to assemble a book. In the
1960s, she became involved with the cine-
Lcke, and from 1977 onward he rendered
combining documentary and satire. Pape
co-organized New Brazilian Objectivity, a
groundbreaking exhibition at the Museu de
Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (Museum
of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro), in 1967.
That same year she created Roda Dos
Prazeres (Wheel of Delights), in which view-
ers taste colored waters with flavors that
do not necessarily align with their hues.
Pape taught semiotics at the Universidade
Santa rsula (Saint Ursula University)
from 1972 to 1985 and became a profes-
sor of fine art at the Universidade Federal
do Rio de Janeiro (Federal University of
Rio de Janeiro) in 1983.
Jeram Patel
Born 1930 in Sojitra, British India
tion. Together with his fellow artist Georges
Jeram Patel was among several artists who
transformed Indian art in the late 1950s
and 1960s by developing a new visual iden-
tity and method of abstraction. Patel first
studied drawing and painting at the Sir J. J.
School of Art in Mumbai (195055), then
commercial design at the Central School
of Arts and Crafts, London (195759).
A trip to Japan in the late 1950s inspired
him to explore new media and techniques.
Back in India he co-founded the short-lived
but seminal Group 1890 in 1962 and took
part in their sole exhibition at the Lalit Kala
Akademi Gallery in New Delhi. During the
1960s he pioneered a new medium, bur
ning wood with a blowtorch and engraving
amorphous shapes on it, often against a
monochrome background of bold colors.
His other innovative styles included abs
tractionusing saturated, almost floating
shapes of black ink on paperor his dis-
tinctive and textured use of paint, especially
bold strokes of black. His delicate and evoc-
ative Hospital series (1966) is probably his
best known. Patel received several national
awards and was a professor (and later dean)
at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja
Sayajirao University of Baroda.
A. R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler)
Born 1939 in Dresden, Germany
Lives and works in Berlin and Dsseldorf,
Germany; Dublin, Ireland; and New York,
NY, USA
A. R. Pencks schematic yet complex ima
gery was influenced by his interest in
mathematics, cybernetics, and information
theory. He used archaic signs and symbols
to ensure universal comprehension and to
convey political meaning. His spare artistic
Kunsthochschule (Art University) Dresden
(195354) and a draughtsman appren-
ticeship, which he began in 1955. Despite
rejections of his applications to various art
academies in Dresden and East Berlin dur-
ing the mid-1950s, Penck rigidly pursued his
artistic expression beyond traditional styles.
In 1961 he created his first System- and
Weltbilder deploying a visual language that
straddled figuration and abstraction. Highly
abstracted, two-dimensional stick-figures
inhabited Pencks pictorial worlds and
led to the development of his Standart, a
has become the artists signature. In 1970
Penck became a member of the artist group
his signature figures and signs as wood
sculptures. In 1980 Penckwhose maver-
ick approach to art in East Germany had
always been troublesomemoved to West
Germany, where he was appointed profes-
sor at the Kunstakademie (Art Academy)
Dsseldorf in 1988. Penck participated in
the 1984 Venice Biennale and Documenta,
Kassel, from 1972 onward.
Pablo Picasso
Born 1881 in Mlaga, Spain
Died 1973 in Mougins, France
Pablo Picasso, considered one of the most
important artists of his time, worked in
many different styles, from figuration and
Neoclassicism to Surrealism and abstrac-
Braque (18821963), Picasso is credited
with developing Cubism. Picasso first studi
ed art with his father, then enrolled in the
Llotja School in Barcelona in 1895, and
later studied briefly at the Real Academia
de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Royal
Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando),
Madrid. After his return to Barcelona in
1899 he often traveled to Paris, settling
there in 1904. In Paris his style and choice
of subject changed: he abandoned his
so-called Blue Period (19014) and drew
inspiration from the circus during his Rose
Period (1905). From 1907 to 1909, inspired
by the works of Paul Czanne (18391906)
and African masks, Picasso painted Les
Demoiselles dAvignon (1907), which pres-
aged his next two stylistic periods, Analytic
Cubism (c. 190811) and Synthetic Cubism
(c. 191214). In 1916 Picasso began to col-
laborate on ballet and theater productions.
In 1936, deeply affected by the Spanish Civil
War, he painted his powerful Guernica (1937).
During his long career Picasso mastered a
broad spectrum of media, including paint-
ing, drawing, sculpture, collage, lithography,
and engraving.
793
Ivan Picelj
Born 1924 in Okucani,
Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes
Died 2001 in Zagreb, Croatia
After studying at the Akademija likovnih um-
jetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts) in Zagreb
from 1943 to 1946, Ivan Picelj co-founded
EXAT 51 (short for Experimental Atelier),
a Croatian avant-garde group that oper-
ated from 1950 to 1956. Influenced by
Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus,
the collective advocated geometric ab-
straction, spatial innovation, and synthesis
of all visual art forms. Picelj developed a
clean, modular style that translated from
gridded painting and sculpture to graphic
design. EXAT 51s first painting show was
held in Piceljs apartment in 1952. That
same year, Picelj was among the EXAT 51
members who showed at the seventh Salon
des ralits nouvelles in Paris. With EXAT
51, Picelj helped organize the first Zagreb
trijenale (Zagreb Triennial) in 1955 and es-
tablish the Studio industrijskog oblikovanja
(Studio for Industrial Design) in 1956. From
1961 to 1967 Picelj was a member of the
art movement New Tendencies, the first
group in Yugoslavia to survey cutting-edge
international contemporary practices such
as conceptual, kinetic, environmental, and
computer art. A successful designer of
graphics and international pavilions for
Yugoslavian artists, Picelj founded the pub-
lication Edition a in 1962. In 1965 Piceljs
work was included in the so-called Op art
exhibition The Responsive Eye at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio
Born 1902 in Alba, Italy
Died 1964 in Alba, Italy
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio originally trained
as a chemist in Alba before turning to
art in 1953. In 1955 he met Asger Jorn
(19141973), and together they co-founded
the Experimental Laboratory of the Imag-
inist Bauhaus in Pinot-Gallizios studio in
Alba, which attracted such artists as Enrico
Baj, Ettore Sottsass, Elena Verrone, and
Piero Simondo. The following year he and
Jorn organized the First World Congress
of Free Artists, a precursor to the founding
of the Situationist International in 1957.
During this time he also produced his most
famous series of works, the so-called pittura
industriale (Industrial Painting), created on
huge rolls of canvas that were spread across
drafting tables; paint was applied by means
of a series of mechanized rollers, along with
the help of multiple artists, and even children.
The longest of these, the Caverna di Antima-
teria (Cavern of Antimatter), was 145 meters
long (476 feet). It was first displayed at the
Galerie Ren Drouin, Paris, in 1959, where
it was draped around the gallery and sold
by the meter. During this period Pinot-Gal-
lizios work was also shown in important
exhibitions in Copenhagen and Munich. He
was honoured with a solo exhibition at the
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1960.
Sigmar Polke
Born 1941 in Oels, Germany
Died 2010 in Cologne, Germany
Sigmar Polkes Pop artinspired body of
work eschews categorization and a signature
794
style, yet irony and contradiction remain
its constants. Polke first trained as a glass
painter in Dsseldorf from 1959 to 1961,
then studied under Karl Otto Gtz (b.
1914) and Gerhard Hhme (19201989)
at the Staatliche Kunstakademie (State
Academy of Fine Arts) Dsseldorf until 1967.
In 1963 he co-founded the Pop-inspired
artist movement Kapitalistischer Realismus
(Capitalist Realism) with Gerhard Richter
(19372007), Konrad Lueg (19391996,
a.k.a. Konrad Fischer), and Manfred Kuttner
(b. 1937). In his paintings, Polke imitated
the Ben-Day dots of earlier print technology,
rendering images derived from photography
or advertising as blurred and semiabstract.
He also preferred experimental techniques
and unusual combinations of materials, for
example in his Fabric Pictures, in which
he used commercially printed fabrics as
background patterns for gestures and
motifs taken from earlier or contemporary
art. He layered images, experimented with
embossing, and created highly tactile sur-
faces. Polke taught at the Hochschule fr
Bildende Knste (University of Fine Arts)
in Hamburg for several years and recei
ved many prizes, including the Golden Lion
for Painting at the 1986 Venice Biennale
and the Japan Art Associations Praemium
Imperiale in 2002.
Jackson Pollock
Born 1912, in Cody, WY, USA
Died 1956 in Springs (East Hampton),
NY, USA
Best known for his drip paintings, Jackson
Pollock is a leading figure of Abstract Ex-
pressionism. Although his gesture-driven
splattering and pouring technique marks
the height of his artistic achievement, he
searched throughout his career to express
rather than illustrate emotions. Pollocks
early work shows traces of ethnographic
influences, deriving from early encoun-
ters with indigenous relics in the western
U.S. At Manual Arts High School in Los
Angeles he encountered theosophy, later
evoked in his works unconscious imagery.
Yet when Pollock arrived in New York in
1930, he followed a traditional education
in composition at the Art Students League
under regionalist painter Thomas Hart
Benton (1889-1975). From 1938 to 1942,
Pollock was employed by the Works Pro-
gress Administrations Federal Art Project,
where he discovered the work of Mexican
muralists Diego Rivera (18861957), Jos
Clemente Orozco (18831949), and David
Alfaro Siqueiros (18961974). Their meth-
od liberated Pollocks approach to scale
and paved the way for his first monumen-
tal painting entitled Muralcommissioned
by Peggy Guggenheim in 1943. In the late
1940s Pollock came to develop and estab-
lish action painting as an artistic expres-
sion of postwar existentialist mentality.
Pollock reached international acclaim dur-
ing his lifetime and was included in the
1950 Venice Biennale.
Jlio Pomar
Born 1926 in Lisbon, Portugal
Lives and works in Paris, France, and
Lisbon, Portugal
Jlio Pomar has explored both painting and
writing to express his ideas. He enrolled at
the Escola de Belas Artes Lisboa (Lisbon Ramas first solo show at the Gallery Faber
School of Fine Arts) in 1942 and trans- in Turin, in 1945, was shut down by the
ferred to the Porto Escola de Belas Artes fascist government and many of her works
(Porto School of Fine Arts) in 1944. Inspired were seized by the Turin police. Only in
by the Brazilian painter Cndido Portinari 1980, following an exhibition at the Palazzo
(19031962) and the Mexican muralists Reale (Royal Palace) in Milan, did her early
Diego Rivera (18861957), David Alfaro works become known to a larger audience.
Siqueiros (18961964), and Jos Clemente After that, her erotic drawing again became
Orozco (18831949), Pomar adopted neo- her primary theme. During the 1950s Ra-
realism to express his antifascist beliefs. His mas paintings moved toward abstraction
activism against the Salazar regime resulted and during the 1960s she started to create
in his expulsion from art school in 1946. multimedia works by incorporating found
After that, Pomar began to write for art and objects and everyday materials. In the
literature magazines and in 1947 held his 1970s among paint and text, syringes, can-
first solo show at the Galeria Portuglia in nulae, glass beads, and fingernails, her pre-
Porto. In 1950 Pomar studied the work of ferred material became rubber from tires. In
Francisco de Goya in Spain, which greatly the late 1960s and early 1970s Rama was
influenced his later works, such as Maria da in contact with such notable artists as Man
Fonte (1947). In Portugal during the early Ray (18901976), Andy Warhol (19281987),
1950s he experimented with watercolor, and Orson Welles (19151985). In 2003
gouache, ceramics, and printmaking, and she was awarded the Golden Lion for Life-
painted portraits of many intellectuals. In time Achievement at the Venice Biennale.
1956 he founded the cooperative Gravura.
After moving to Paris in 1963, Pomar began
to use acrylics for his colorful Neoexpres- Robert Rauschenberg
sionist paintings and collages, with ges- Born 1925 in Port Arthur, TX, USA
tural brushstrokes, dynamic compositions, Died 2008 in Captiva Island, FL, USA
and saturated colors. He created his first
found-object assemblages in 1967. Before he became an artist, Robert
Rauschenberg served in the U.S. Navy
Hospital Corps in San Diego during World
Viktor Popkov War II. In 1947 he began his art career by
Born 1932 in Moscow, USSR studying fashion design at the Kansas
Died 1974 in Moscow, USSR City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri,
followed by a stay in Paris. In 1948 he en-
Viktor Popkov is a leading protagonist of the rolled at Black Mountain College in North
severe or austere style of Soviet arta Carolina, where he studied under Joseph
paradigm shift from romanticism to social Albers (18881976) and met John Cage
realism manifested in the years immediately (19121992), among others. In the 1950s,
following Joseph Stalins death in 1953. In after traveling Europe and North Africa with
1948 Popkov was accepted to study drafts- Cy Twombly (19282011), Rauschenberg
manship at the Moskovskiy pedagogiches- befriended Jasper Johns (b. 1930) during
kiy institut iskusstv (Moscow Pedagogical his early years in New York. He soon became
Institute of Art), where he trained in both famous for his series of Black Paintings
fine arts and applied arts until 1952. He and White Paintings, which commented
continued his studies until 1958 at the cap- on Abstract Expressionism. Although
itals Surikov Insitute under the tutelage of Rauschenberg is often associated with Pop
Evgeny Kibrik (19061978). In the 1950s art, his work cannot be linked to one style
Popkov began to conduct field work at or movement. His notable Combined Pain
construction sites across the Soviet Union, tings series of sculptural collages reflect his
including the hydroelectric power station at lifelong practice of using various mediums,
Bratsk. The Bratsk power station became techniques, and materials, as well as his
the subject of Popkovs iconic painting from belief in the relationship between art and
1960. In the mid-1960s Popkov distanced life. In 1963 Rauschenberg earned an early
himself from industrial scenes and began to retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New
explore the grief-stricken facets of human York; the following year he was awarded
psychology brought about by the Great the grand prize for painting at the Venice
Patriotic War (the term used by Russians Biennale (1964).
to refer to the German-Soviet War). In 1967
the artist won a Diploma of Honor at the
Paris Biennale. In 1975 he was post- Ad Reinhardt
humously awarded the State Prize of the Born 1913 in Buffalo, NY, USA
USSR, one year after being tragically shot Died 1967 in New York, NY, USA
dead during a misunderstanding with a
cash-in-transit guard in Moscow. Ad Reinhardt (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich
Reinhardt), the son of Russian and German
immigrants, moved to New York in 1931. He
studied art history on a full scholarship at
R
Columbia University (193135), then at-
tended both the American Artists School
and the National Academy of Design. From
1936 to 1940 he worked for the Works Pro-
Carol Rama gress Administrations Federal Art Project,
(born Olga Carolina Rama) and from 1937 to 1947 he was a member of
Born 1918 in Turin, Italy the American Abstract Artists group (AAA).
Died 2015 in Turin, Italy Suspending his work and studies during
U.S. involvement in World War II, he attended
Carol Rama was a self-taught Italian artist New York Universitys Institute of Fine Arts
who is best recognized for her watercolors after the war. Besides painting, Reinhardt
depicting often bold and provocative ex- also became an influential art critic and the-
pressions of sexuality and sexual actions. orist and a talented caricaturist, producing
many provocative cartoons and illustrations.
From the late 1940s onward he taught at
several Americ an colleges and universities.
Reinhardt became famous for his black
paintings, which he first exhibited in 1955.
After experimenting with abstraction during
the 1930s and 1940s, Reinhardt began to
reduce his paintings more and more in re-
spect to form, color, gesture, and expres-
sion. His monochrome color-field paintings
in blue and red eventually culminated in
black paintings divided into linear fields of
subtly graduated black hues with green, red,
or blue undertones.
Gerhard Richter
Born 1932 in Dresden, Germany
Lives and works in Cologne, Germany
Gerhard Richters vast oeuvre, spanning
realism and abstraction, reflects personal
and collective experiences of rebuilding
German cultural identity in the aftermath
of World War II. Having studied painting at
the Kunstakademie (Art Academy) Dres-
den from 1951 to 1956, Richter began
his artistic career as a muralist in the for-
mer German Democratic Republic. Upon
encountering Abstract Expressionism at
Documenta, Kassel in 1959, Richter decid-
ed to flee to West Germany to pursue his
own painterly style. From 1961 to 1964 he
studied at the Kunstakademie (Art Aca
demy) Dsseldorf. The decade marked
an important period for Richters stylistic
development, along with his Kunstakade-
mie peers like Sigmar Polke (19412010)
and Konrad Lueg (19391996). The three
artists, with Manfred Kuttner (19372007),
staged the landmark installation Living
with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist
Realism in a Dsseldorf storefront in
1963. The next year, Richter held his first
solo exhibition at Dsseldorfs Galerie
Schmela. In the 1960s and 70s he began
depicting blurred ima gery, taking inspira-
tion from photographs and media. Since
the 1970s, Richter has divided his atten-
tion between figuration and abstraction,
leading to his squeegee paintings, glass
images, vanitas motifs of the 1980s, and
recent works utilizing digital printing tech-
niques. Richters has received multiple
retrospectives, and since 1972, he has
participated in five editions each of the
Venice Biennale and Documenta, Kassel.
Larry Rivers (born Yitzroch Loiza
Grossberg)
Born 1923 in the Bronx, New York, USA
Died 2002 in Southampton, New York, USA
Artist, saxophonist, and bohemian Larry
Rivers was born in the Bronx, a borough of
New York City. He met his lifelong friend,
jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, while the two
studied music at the Juilliard School in
194546. After studying painting with
the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman
(18801966) in 194748, he earned a
degree in art education from New York
University in 1951. Rivers started show-
ing lusty, figurative work in 1948. His
brushy version of American history pain
ting Washington Crossing the Delaware
(1953) anticipated Pop artists appropria-
tion of familiar imagery in the 1960s. As
part of the New York School, Rivers knew
many notables, including landscape painter
Jane Freilicher (19242014) and poet
Frank OHara (19261966). He famously
depicted OHara wearing only his boots in
1954, and in 1957 he was one of twelve
U.S. artists in the 4th Bienal de So Paulo.
A retrospective of his work toured five
American museums in 1965; that same
year he created his 76-panel multimedia
work The History of the Russian Revolution.
His documentary Africa and I, filmed with
Pierre Dominique Gaisseau, was aired on
the NBC television network in 1968. Ever
seeking new media, Rivers later worked with
video and neon.
Joaquim Rodrigo
Born 1912 in Lisbon, Portugal
Died 1997 in Lisbon, Portugal published artworks and manifestos by art-
Self-taught Portuguese painter Joaquim
Rodrigo began his career as a professor
of agronomy in 1938. In 1951, he start-
ed showing his work in exhibitions of the
collective Sociedade Nacional de Belas
Artes (National Fine Arts Society). During
the 1950s, after seeing work by Victor
Vasarely (19061997) and Piet Mondrian
(18721944) during a visit to Galerie Den-
ise Ren in Paris, he quickly abandoned fig-
uration for an abstract style. He exhibited in
the Primeiro Salo de Arte abstrata (First
Salon for Abstract Art) at Galeria de Maro
in Lisbon in 1954, the 4th Bienal de So
Paulo in 1957, and the Brussels Worlds Fair
(also known as Expo 58). Rodrigo changed
course in the 1960s as Pop art took off in Muse d'art moderne de la ville de Paris
Europe and the United States, by develop-
ing a non-naturalistic, symbolic style that in 1948.
blended figuration and abstraction. Vari-
ous critics have asserted the influence of
aboriginal and other indigenous practices
on Rodrigos works. His paintings from this
time contain sharp criticisms of colonialist
politics. M.L. (1961), for example, with its
red-soaked palette and African-inspired
forms, references the murder of Congolese
prime minister Patrice Lumumba. In 1972
Rodrigo received his first solo showa
retrospective at the SNBA.
Dieter Roth (born Karl-Dietrich Roth;
also known as Diter Rot)
Born 1930 in Hanover, Germany
Died 1998 in Basel, Switzerland
Dieter Roth was an exceptionally versatile
artist, working in drawing, painting, printma
king, sculpture, assemblage, installation, and
artist books. He was also a musician, poet,
and author. Four years after moving to Zurich
in 1943, he apprenticed in graphic design
under Friedrich Wthrich (1905 1980) in
Bern, and later designed textiles in Copen-
hagen from 1955 to 1957. After moving to
Reykjavik, he married Sigridur Bjrnsdttir.
Throughout his life Roth constantly changed
his location, with Reykjavik and Basel being
his primarily bases of activity. Roth produced
art works in almost any medium, often using
everyday materials, including food and oth-
er perishables. Among his lifelong artistic
concerns were books, prints, and multiples.
Roth briefly held a number of teaching posi-
tions at art schools in the United States, the
United Kingdom, and in Dsseldorf, Germa-
ny. In 1982 he represented Switzerland at
the Venice Biennale.
Rhod Rothfuss (born Carlos Mara
Rothfuss)
Born 1920 in Montevideo, Uruguay
Died 1969 in Montevideo, Uruguay
Ed Ruscha began his art studies at the
The theorist of the irregular frame, Rhod
Rothfuss pushed the boundaries of Cons
tructivism in his mature style by incorporat-
ing geometric and irregular shapes in his
brightly colored artworks. Born Carlos Mara
Rothfuss, he studied art in Montevideo
before moving to Buenos Aires in 1942.
There he joined the group that published
the single-issue magazine Arturo, including
Argentinian designer Toms Maldonado
(b. 1922), Uruguayan artist Carmelo Arden
Quin (19132010), and Slovak-born painter
Gyula Kosice (19242016). The magazine
first word paintings. Since then his interest
ists who favored geometric abstraction over
traditional figurative and symbolic painting.
In an article published in Arturo, Rothfuss
argued that shaped frames were neces-
sary for self-reflexivity in painting. In 1945
he participated in the first exhibition of the
Asociacin Arte-Concreto-Invencin (Asso-
ciation of Concrete Art-Invention). With Quin
and Kosice he formed Mad, a splinter group
that advocated for a universal Concrete art
incorporating music and other forms. The
group published a journal from 1947 to 1954.
Rothfuss participated in the most important
exhibitions of Mad art locally and internation-
ally beginning in 1947. His work represent-
ed Argentina in the first Salon des ralits
nouvelles (Exhibition of New Realities) at the
(Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris)
Gerhard Rhm
Born 1930 in Vienna, Austria
Lives and works in Cologne, Germany
Gerhard Rhm is noted for his work in acous-
tic art, including sound poetry and spoken
word. He studied at the Universitt fr Musik
und darstellende Kunst Wien (University of
Music and Performing Arts in Vienna) and
later took private lessons with the compos-
er Josef Matthias Hauer (18831959). In
the early 1950s he developed an outstand-
ing body of work, crossing the boundaries
between many different mediums. He also
experimented in drawing, visual poetry, and
photomontage, using such diverse tech-
niques as overpainting (lessentiel de la
grammaire [The Essentials of Grammar],
1962) and collage (Typocollagen [Type
Collage], 195563). He was one of Viennas
first Concrete poets and was a co-founder of
the Wiener Gruppe (c. 1954), which staged
the first happenings in Austria in 1958. His
interest in language and the ambiguity be-
tween meaning and form is manifest in his
poetry, music, and both visual and acous-
tic arts. Along with his investigations into
modes of expression through language, he
also strove to unveil its potential for so-
cial implications. In 1964 Rhm moved to
Germany, where he taught at the Hoch-
schule fr Bildende Knste (University of
Fine Arts), Hamburg, from 1972 to 1995.
His work was presented in numerous exhi-
bitions, including Documenta, Kassel (1977;
1987). Rhm has received many important
prizes, including the Austrian State Prize for
Literature in 1991.
Ed Ruscha
Born 1937 in Omaha, NE, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Chouinard Art Institute (now California
Institute of the Arts) after moving to Los
Angeles in 1956. He co-edited and co-pro-
duced the journal Orb in his final year, and
after graduation (1960) he worked as a
layout artist for an advertising agency in
Los Angeles. He had early success with
his pain tings and collages, which were
considered part of the Pop art movement
and were compared to the works of Jasper
Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg
(19252008). While traveling in Europe dur-
ing the summer of 1961, Ruscha made his
in words and typography became integral to
his body of work, including paintings, draw-
ings, prints, photographs, books, and films.
His images of words and phrases often
contain comic or satirical connotations, al-
luding to popular culture and life in Los An-
geles. Between 1963 and 1978 he worked
on sixteen small folded artists books that
feature photographs of his southern Cali-
fornia surroundings. During the late 1960s
and 1970s Ruscha was also noted for his
use of unconventional materials (gunpowder
and organic substances, such as food and
blood). Since 1982 his work has been the
focus of numerous retrospectives.
S
Sadequain
Born 1930 in Amroha, British India
Died 1987 in Karachi, Pakistan
Born into a family of Islamic calligraphers,
Sadequain (Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi)
drew on this aesthetic tradition through-
out his painting career. In 1944, Sade-
quain moved to New Delhi and worked
as a calligrapher for All India Radio. From
1946 to 1948 he studied at the University
of Agra. In 1947, after the partition of
the British Indian Empire, Sadequain
identified as Pakistani and joined the
Progressive Artists Group and the Pro-
gressive Writers Movement. Sadequains
work was exhibited at the residence of
Pakistani Prime Minister Huseyn Shaheed
Suhrawardy (18921963) in 1955. Sub-
sequently, he received a number of public
commissions for large-scale murals. No-
table examples include Treasures of Time
(1961) for the State Bank of soon-to-be
Pakistan, Karachi; Saga of Labor (1967)
for the Mangla Dam Power House, Azad
Kashmir; and Evolution of Mankind (1973)
in the entrance hall of the Lahore Museum.
Sadequains art heroicized the working
class and included symbols of struggle,
such as cacti. In 1960 Sadequain won
Pakistans national prize for painting and
left for Paris later that year. In 1961 he won
the laureate for artists under thirty-five at
the Paris Biennale. He returned to Pakistan
in 1967. Sadequains influence resulted
in the use of calligraphy becoming wide-
spread within Pakistani contemporary art.
795
Mohan Samant
Born 1924 in Bombay, British India
Died 2004 in New York, NY, USA
In his paintings, Mohan Samant linked his
native Indian culture with his experience
of immigration to New York City, where
he lived for almost forty years. In 1952,
Samant graduated from the Sir J.J. School
of Artwhere he studied under Basholi
miniature painter S.B. Palsikar (19171984)
and joined the Progressive Artists
Group. He won the gold medal from both
the Academy of Fine Arts of Calcutta and
the Bombay Art Society in 1956. That year,
he also showed in the Eight Painters exhibi-
tion curated by patron Thomas Keehn and
the 1956 Venice Biennale. Samant began
his travels abroad in 1957 and 1958, with
a scholarship to Rome and Egypt. From
1959 to 1964 he came to New York on
a Rockefeller grant, permanently relocat-
ing to the city in 1968. Samants process
involved making forms with wire and com-
bining them on canvas, creating primarily
abstract works with some narrative ele-
ments. He added materials to his paint,
such as sand and glue, and experimented
with paper and wire collage. He was in-
cluded in shows of the Progressive Artists
Group in New York during the early 1960s
as well as the important 1963 traveling
exhibition Dunn International.
Mira Schendel
(born Myrrha Dagmar Dub)
Born 1919 in Zrich, Switzerland
Died 1988 in So Paulo, Brazil
Mira Schendel, best known for her draw-
ings on rice paper, is considered one of
the most influential Latin American artists
of her time. In 1922, after her parents di-
vorce, her mother moved to Milan, where
Schendel later studied philosophy. Because
of her Jewish ancestry she was forced to
abandon her studies, and during World
War II she fled Italy and moved to Saraje-
vo. After the war she lived in Rome until
1949, when she received permission to set-
tle in Porto Alegre. There she studied life
drawing and sculpture and made paintings
and ceramics. Her first solo exhibition, in
1950, included portraits, landscapes, and
still lifes. In 1953 she moved to So Paulo,
where she met many other migr intellec-
tuals. From the 1960s onward Schendel
developed a spare artistic language of
geometric forms and linguistic elements.
She preferred ephemeral, translucent ma-
terials as well as paint, talc, brick dust, ink,
and watercolors. In 1964 she began her
famous monotype drawings on Japanese
rice paper: she first inked a sheet of glass,
traced free-floa ting lines into it with her
finger, and then pulled a rice paper print.
She also created three-dimensional objects
(Droguinhas) with knotted and intertwined
rice paper.
Ruth Schloss
Born 1922 in Nuremburg, Germany
Died 2013 in Kfar Shmaryahu, Israel
Ruth Schloss immigrated to Israel in 1937,
attending the New Bezalel School of Arts
and Crafts in Jerusalem from 1938 to
1942. After graduation, Schloss illustrated
adult and childrens books at the Sifriat
796
Poalim publishing house. Throughout her
career, Schloss worked outside of schools
or movements, though she is most fre-
quently identified as a social realist. Unlike
many Social Realists, however, she was
concerned with the fragility and loneli-
ness of individuals. Later her work would
be analyzed from a feminist perspective.
Despite her isolation from other contem-
porary artists and little public exposure,
Schloss practiced rigid discipline in her
painting, producing a large body of work over
the course of seven decades. After studying
at the Acadmie de la Grande Chaumire
in Paris from 1949 to 1951, Schloss spent
time on a kibbutz, but was asked to leave
because of her socialist beliefs. Schloss
returned to her parents home in Kfar
Shmaryahu in 1953, where she remained
for the rest of her life. She worked in a stu-
dio in Jaffa from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Schloss was included in group shows at
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Israel
Museum in Jerusalem. In 1991, the Herzliya
Museum of Contemporary Art held her
first retrospective.
Carolee Schneemann
Born 1939 in Philadelphia, PA, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Carolee Schneemann was just sixteen years
old when she received a scholarship to study
at Bard College in New York. When she was
expelled for her nude self-portraits, she en-
rolled at the School of Painting and Sculp-
ture at Columbia University. She returned
to Bard and later earned her BA in 1960,
and earned an MFA from the University of
Illinois. As a student, Schneemann exper
ienced first-hand male dominance in the
field of professional art, which led to her
lifelong occupation with feminist themes
and the exploration of the female body
in historic and social settings. Although
Schnee mann considers herself a paint-
er, she aims to extend visual principles
beyond the canvas, experimenting with
collage, sculp ture, photography, film, and
performance. In the early 1960s she used
paintings, photographs, and everyday
objects to create assemblages, either in-
spired by a historic personage (Sir Henry
Francis Taylor, 1961) or a familiar place
(Colorado House, 1962). She explored
the destructive-constructive potential of
fire in her Controlled Burning series, ex- commemorating Iraqs 1958 revolution.
perimented with film (Fuses, 1965), and
broke taboos on the notion of female sex-
uality (Meat Joy, 1964). Her provocative,
radical performances peaked in 1975 with
her now-legendary performance Internal
Scroll. She has taught and published
widely; in 2000 she received the College Art
Associations Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gerard Sekoto
Born 1913 in Botshabelo,
Eastern Transvaal
Died 1993 in Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Gerard Sekoto is considered one of the
most important figures in the development
of South African contemporary art. A self-
taught artist and musician, he gave up his
teaching career and moved to Sophiatown
in 1938 to become a full-time professional
artist. His paintings and drawings are unob-
structed records of the people, streets, and
scenes he encountered in Johannesburg,
Cape Town, and Pretoria. From 1939 onward,
he participated in group exhibitions and an-
nual exhibitions of the South African Acade
my. In 1940 his painting Yellow Houses:
A Street in Sophiatown became the first
work of a black artist to be purchased by
the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Once he be-
came one of South Africas leading artists,
two financially successful solo exhibitions
in Pretoria galleries enabled his self-im-
posed exile to Paris in 1947. Although he
managed to establish himself as a painter
and was regu larly represented in Parisi-
an galleries and international exhibitions,
Sekoto never lost ties to his homeland. As
a reaction to conflict in his native coun-
try during the 1960s, his works became
more political. In 1989 a retrospective of
his work was held at the Johannesburg
Art Gallery, and he received an honorary
doctorate from the University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Jewad Selim
Born 1919 in Ankara, Ottoman Empire
Died 1961 in Baghdad, Iraq
Jewad Selim is recognized as the father of
modern Iraqi art, whose teachings at the
Maehad Alfunun Aljamila (Institute of Fine
Arts), Baghdad, influenced a generation of
artists. From 1938 to 1940, Selim studied
art in Paris and Rome on scholarships. He
returned to Baghdad during World War
II and founded the sculpture department
at the Institute of Fine Arts, eventually
becoming the head of the department.
After the war, Selim attended the Slade
School of Fine Art, London. Selim formed
the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951.
In developing a contemporary Iraqi visual
language, Selim combined traditional Iraqi
iconographysuch as ancient Egyptian and
Mesopotamian sculpture, Babylonian and
Assyrian reliefs, and miniature painting
with innovations by contemporary Western
artists, like Aristide Maillol (18611944)
and Henry Moore (18981986). During the
1950s he primarily painted, creating a no-
table series called Baghdadiat in homage
to traditional Abbasid painting traditions.
His practice increasingly focused on sculp-
ture. An important public work is Nasb al-
Hurriya (Monument for Freedom, 196061),
a bronze relief mural in central Baghdad
During the completion of this work, Selim
had a heart attack and died at forty-one.
Prince Twins Seven Seven
(born Prince Taiwo Olaniyi
Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki)
Born 1944 in Ogidi, Nigeria
Died 2011 in Ibadan, Nigeria
Prince Twins Seven Seven started his
artistic career as a dancer and musician
in Nigeria. While traveling with a medicine
show in 1964 he came to Oshogbo and
spontaneously danced at an event of the
Mbari Mbayo Club, a group supporting Afri-
can arts. The German linguist and author Ulli
Beier (19222011), a promoter of Nigerian
art and culture, recognized Princes talent
and outstanding personality and convinced
him to remain with the group. That year
Prince attended a workshop by Beiers
wife, Georgina Beier, and created his first
pen-and-ink drawing, Devils Dog (1964).
From the beginning his works stood out,
due to their colorful palette and imaginative,
tightly woven imagery, mostly inspired by the
Yoruba folklore, religion, and everyday life.
His spontaneous compositionswhich
ignored rules of form, perspective, and
proportionfeature patterns based on tra-
ditional textiles. Prince became a leading
representative of the Oshogbo School and
a widely recognized, influential artist. His
work was exhibited in Oshogbo, Lagos,
Europe, and the United States, where he
settled in the late 1980s. In 1989 his work
was shown in the exhibition Magiciens de la
Terre (Magicians of the Earth) at the Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, and in 2005 he
was designated UNESCO Artist for Peace.
Ismail Shammout
Born 1930 in Lydda, Mandatory Palestine
Died 2006 in Amman, Jordan
Ismail Shammout was a Palestinian artist
and art historian. He and his family were
expelled from his hometown on July 12,
1948, by Israeli forces. His family settled
in a refugee camp in Gaza. Shammout en-
rolled in the College of Fine Arts Cairo in
1950, returning to Gaza in 1953. That year
Shammout, with his brother Jamil, held the
first exhibition by a contemporary Palestini-
an artist in Palestine. The exhibition included
Where to? (1953), a sobering oil-on-canvas
depiction of a family in exodus. A year lat-
er, Shammout was part of the Palestine
Exhibition of 1954 in Cairo, inaugurated by
president Gamal Abdel Nasser. Shammout
incorporated Palestinian traditions in his
realist painting, which commented on the
plight of Palestinians since 1948. In 1954,
he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Rome. He moved to Beirut in 1956, where
he married fellow artist Tamam al-Alkal.
Shammout became the Director of Arts and
National Culture for the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO) in 1965. In 1983, fol-
lowing the Israeli attack against the PLO in
Lebanon, Shammout moved from Beirut to
Kuwait, then Germany, and finally to Jordan.
Anwar Jalal Shemza
(born Anwar Jalal Butt)
Born 1928 in Shimla, British India
Died 1985 in Stafford, UK
than pictorial space, he created fissured
Anwar Jalal Shemza studied Persian, Ara
bic, and philosophy at Punjab University
in 1943, but then transferred to the Mayo
School of Arts in Lahore, graduating in
1947. He worked as a graphic designer;
edited the literary journal Ehsas (1950
1953); wrote plays for Radio Pakistan; pub-
lished several novels; and was represented
in individual and group exhibitions in Pakis
tan. In his art, Shemza combined principles
of Western modernism and abstraction with
traditional calligraphy and Islamic themes.
In 1952 he co-founded the Lahore Art
Circle, a group of young Pakistani artists
and writers interested in modernism and
abstraction. He moved to London in 1956
and attended the Slade School of Fine Art,
receiving his diploma in 1959. He later took
an advanced course in printmaking from
Anthony Gross (19051984) and co-foun
ded the Pakistan Group. In London, Shemza
exhibited alongside such artists as F. N.
Souza (19242002) and Avinash Chandra
(19311991), with solo shows at the New
Vision Centre (1959) and Gallery One
(1960). He briefly returned to Pakistan in
1960, but moved back to the UK that same
year. His work was included in the land-
mark exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian
Artists in Post-War Britain in 1989.
Ahmed Shibrain
Born 1931 in Berber, Sudan
Lives and works in Khartoum, Sudan
Ahmed Shibrain is a Sudanese painter and
educator. Shibrain studied in the Depart-
ment of Arts and Craft at the Khartoum
Technical Institute (KTI). At the time
Shibrain attended KTI, the institution, it
was the hub of contemporary African art
of the region. He also studied abroad at the
Central School of Art and Design in London.
Shibrain co-founded the influential Khartoum
School with Kamala Ishag (b. 1939) and
Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930) in 1960. The
group disbanded in 1975. The Khartoum
artists depicted primitive and Islamic ima
gery using abstracted Arabic calligraphy.
Shibrain wanted to define the contemporary
Sudanese identitya blend of Arabic, Afri-
can, and Islamic culturesafter the country
gained independence in 1956. He became
dean of the renamed departmentthe Col-
lege of Fine and Applied Artsin 1975.
Under Shibrains direction, it continues to
be a crucial institution for the contemporary
art of sub-Saharan Africa. Shibrain was an
officer for the Sudanese Ministry of Youth
and culture secretary for the Ministry of
Culture. His work was included in the 1967
Bienal de So Paulo and in Contemporary
African Art at the Museum of African Art in
Washington, D.C., in 1974.
- o- Shimamoto
Shoz
Born 1928 in Osaka, Japan
Died 2013 in Osaka, Japan
- o- Shimamoto began his artistic train-
Shoz
ing in 1947 in the painting studio of Jiro-
Yoshihara (19051972) at Kanseigakuin-
daigaku (Kwansei Gakuin University). Even
before graduating in 1950, he took part
in exhibitions (Seven Avant-garde Artists,
Kintetsu Department Store, Osaka, 1948)
and created his first revolutionary series,
Ana (Holes). Emphasizing materiality rather
and pierced surfaces in newspaper layered
with industrial paint. He became a founding
member of the influential Gutai Art Associ-
ation in 1954, and participated in many of
the groups exhibitions. In the later 1950s
- o- Shimamoto focused on action-based
Shoz
art. His paintings became testimonies of his
performance works, where he shot bags
of paint, crashed bottles of paint through
stones, or hurled them onto the canvas
from a helicopter, a crane, and a hot-air bal-
loon. Shimamoto was a founder of the mail
art movement in the 1960s. He was nomi
nated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996,
participated in the Venice Biennale (1999;
2003; 2007), and in the exhibition Out of
Actions: Between Performance and the
Object, 19491979 (1998) organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Kazuo Shiraga
- Prefecture, Japan
1924 Amagasaki, Hy ogo
- Prefecture, Japan
2008 Amagasaki, Hyogo
Kazuo Shiraga became interested in oil
painting when he was only fourteen years
-
old. He studied at Kaiga no Kyotofu Tachi
gakko- (Kyoto
- Prefectural School of Pain
ting) from 1942 to 1948, majoring in tra-
ditional nihonga painting. Possibly inspired
by the works of Jackson Pollock (1912
1956) (at Yomiuri dokuritsu-ten [Yomiuri
Independent Exhibition], Tokyo, 1951), he
began his unique approach of action paint-
ing: In 1953 he abandoned the brush in fa-
vor of painting directly with his hands. He
co-founded the Zero-kai (Zero Society) in
1952, and in 1955 joined the avant-garde
Gutai Art Association and performed Chal-
lenging Mud at the groups first exhibition.
Here, Kazuo Shiraga used his whole body
to sculpt a pile of mud. His rebellious, di-
rect approach resulted in his famous prac-
tice of painting with his feet. To do so, he
dripped paint onto the canvas and, using
his feet while swinging from a rope, paint-
ed multi-textured layers in broad strokes.
Through his association with Gutai (1955
1972), his work was shown across Japan.
In 1957 the French curator and collector
Michel Tapi (19091987) noticed Kazuo
Shiragas work and introduced it to the
European art market. His first solo show
in Europe was at the Muse National dArt
Moderne (National Museum of Modern Art),
Paris (1986), and he received the Osaka
Art Prize in 2002.
Fyodor Shurpin
Born 1904 in Kiryakinka
(Smolensk Province), Russian Empire
Died 1972 in Moscow, USSR
Like several artists of his generation, Fyodor
Shurpin came from a rural background and
produced a body of work that took coun-
try life and landscape as its subject. His
studies transported him from his humble
hometown in Smolensk Province to Mos-
cow, where he studied at the avant-garde
academy Vkhutemas (later Vkhutein) be
tween approximately 1922 and 1930.
Shurpin regularly participated in official
state exhibitions throughout the period of
Stalinist Socialist Realism and was also
invited to exhibit internationally. In 1948 Vogue, where he discovered the murals of
he tried his hand at official portraiture and Diego Rivera (18861957). He immigrated
created his masterpiece Utro nashei rodiny
(The Morning of our Motherland), which de-
picts Joseph Stalin in his resplendent white
uniform before the backdrop of a rural land-
scape. The paintingcommonly acknowl-
edged as the most famous portrait of the
leaderwas met with critical and popular
acclaim and earned Shurpin the Stalin Prize
in 1949. In 1954 the work was shown in
China as part of the influential exhibition of
economic and cultural achievements of the
-
USSR that took place at the Sulin zhanl
an
guan
(Soviet Union Exhibition Hall) in Beijing.
In 1969 Shurpin initiated the founding of
the Picture Gallery in the provincial town of
Shumyachi (Smolensk Province), to which
he donated fifty of his works.
Mitchell Siporin
Born 1910 in New York, NY, USA
Died 1976 in Newton, MA, USA
Mitchell Siporin was a social realist artist
who focused on labor issues. After his fami
ly moved to Chicago, he studied at the Art
Institute of Chicago (Crane College), and
in the early 1930s he worked as an illus-
trator for Esquire, The New Masses, and
Ringmaster. Siporin gained early attention
for his Haymarket series of drawings illus-
trating a notorious labor riot in Chicago in
1886 (193235). From 1937 to 1942 he mural movement. A successful painter of
painted public murals for the Works Pro-
gress Administration (WPA), including a
mural for in a St. Louis post office that was
the largest single government commission.
It is among the few WPA projects to show
social conflict. Siporin was represented in
the Century of Progress exhibition at the
Chicago Worlds Fair of 1933, and after
the U.S. entered the conflict of World War
II he joined the army, serving in North Africa
and Italy. He received a Guggenheim
Fellowship (1945) and the Prix de Rome
for painting (1949). Siporin began teach-
ing as director of the summer school pro-
gram at the School of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, in 1948. In 1951 he founded
the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis
University, where he taught until shortly
before his death.
Yohanan Simon (born Hans Yohanan)
Born 1905 in Berlin, Germany
Died 1976 in Tel Aviv, Israel
Yohanan Simon was an artist who lived and
worked internationally. He began his stu
dies in medicine at Universitt Berlin (Berlin
University) in 1924 before switching to the
fine arts department, first studying sculp-
ture and then painting. He continued his
studies at the Stdelschule in Frankfurt am
Main in 1926, under Expressionist artist Max
Beckmann (18841950). In 1928 Simon
moved to Toulon, France, where he studied
with the Fauvist artist Andr Derain
(18801954) and held his first solo exhibi-
tion in 1931. From 1931 to 1934 he studied
at the cole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine
Arts), Paris, and worked as a graphic design-
er for the journals Vu and Les Annales. He
moved to New York City in 1934 to work for
Among other exhibitions, Sirry has shown in
four editions of the Venice Biennale (1952;
to Mandatory Palestine in 1936 and was a
kibbutz member until 1953, creating posters
and illustrations for the kibbutz movement.
He produced a number of public murals
throughout Israel, painting daily life on the
kibbutz in the style of social realism. Simon
participated in the first Zionist-modernist
New Horizons Group exhibition in 1948. He
exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1948; 1958)
and the Bienal de So Paulo (1953).
David Alfaro Siqueiros
Born 1896 in Chihuahua, Mexico
Died 1974 in Cuernavaca, Mexico
David Alfaro Siqueiros constantly sought to
express his revolutionary Marxist ideas us-
ing equally revolutionary means (airbrush,
photographic projection) and new materials
(nitrocellulose pigments, plywood). In his
dynamic, figurative paintings and murals,
he developed a pictorial vocabulary and a
sculptural treatment of form, working with
a limited palette and dramatic light and
shadow. Siqueiros began his studies at the
Academia de San Carlos (Academy of San
Carlos) in Mexico City beginning in 1911. A
staunch Communist and radical antifascist,
Siqueiros interrupted his studies in 1914 to
join the Mexican Revolutionary Army. While
traveling in Europe from 1919 to 1922, he
met his fellow countryman, the artist Diego
Rivera (18861957). Back in Mexico City
the two artists, together with Jos Clemente
Orozco (18831949) founded the Mexican
monumental, political mural frescos, Siqueiros
received public commissions in Mexico and
executed mural projects in Los Angeles, New
York, and South America during the 1930s.
While in New York in the mid-1930s, he
founded the Experimental Workshop for
young artists, promoting collective practice
and new techniques. One of the students was
the young Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). In
1950 Siqueiros was one of the first Mexican
artists to participate in the Venice Biennale.
Gazbia Sirry
Born 1925 in Cairo, Egypt
Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt
Over a wide-ranging and prolific career,
Gazbia Sirry has painted strong Egyptian
women. She graduated from Cairos Higher
Institute for Arts Education for Women
in 1949 and completed further studies in
Rome, Paris, and London. In her painting she
sought to blend the traditions of Egypt with
European modernism. Politically, she was
influenced by the socialist politics of Presi-
dent Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Egyptian
Revolution of 1952. Sirry continuously inno-
vated and experimented in her artistic style.
Her early work resembled nave illustration,
evolving into Expressionism with thick, force-
ful applications of paint, and in the aftermath
of the Six-Day War of 1967, Sirrys former
realism became abstraction. Also in 1967,
Sirrys work was exhibited at the Brenken
Gallery in Stockholm, leading to international
recognition. She was an active contributor to
Cairos Contemporary Art Group. Sirry was
a professor in the painting department of
Jamieat Hulwan (Helwan University) and the
American University in Cairo. She received
the Prix de Rome for painting in 1952.
1956; 1958; 1984), two editions of the
Bienal de So Paulo (1952; 1963) and three
Alexandria Biennials (1959; 1961; 1963).
Lucas Sithole
Born 1931 in Springs, South Africa
Died 1994 in Pongola, South Africa
Lucas Sithole was a South African sculptor,
known primarily for his work with indigenous
woods. From age six he lived with his Swazi
grandmother, a famous potter, who greatly
influenced his career as an artist, teaching
him about African myths and tales and en-
couraging him to make small figures of ani
mals and people in clay. At age seventeen
he received a Springs Rotary Club scholar-
ship, which allowed him to enter Vlakfontein
Technical College. He intended to study
sculpture, but because there were no sculp-
tors on the faculty, he had to study crafts
like carpentry and welding instead. These
797
skills later proved valuable for his work as
a sculptor. In the late 1950s Sithole stu
died at the Polly Street Art Center, where he
met the South African artist Cecil Skotnes
(19262009). For his sculptures, Sithole
preferred to use the trunks of indigenous
trees, but he also worked in stone, bronze,
and sandstone. Many of his sculptures are
thin, elongated figures with either highly
polished or pitted and rough surfaces.
Although he never traveled outside South
Africa (except for Swaziland and Lesotho),
his work was exhibited internationally.
Willi Sitte
Born 1921 in Chrastava, Czechoslovakia
Died 2013 in Halle, Germany
Willi Sitte worked in a Socialist Realist
style with clear compositions and themes
of the working class. In his work he always
aimed to be understood by a wide audience.
Sitte first studied art at the Kunstschule
des nordbhmischen Gewer bemuseums
(North-Bohemian Museum of Applied Arts)
in Reichenberg (Liverec), from 1936 to
1939. He then transferred to the Hermann-
Gring-Meisterschule (Hermann-Gring
Master School) in Kroneburg (Eifel), until
he was expelled and sent to milit ary service
in the Soviet Union and Italy in the early
1940s. In 1944 Sitte managed to contact
the Italian resistance and deserted. In Italy
he traveled to Vicenza, Venice, and Milan,
attending classes at the Accademia di Brera
(Academy of Brera). His first solo show was
at the Gallery Dedalo in Milan in 1946. After
a short trip to his hometown, Chrastava, he
moved to Halle in 1947 and became a mem-
ber of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany
(Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands,
SED). There, he exhibited his work with the
artists association Die Fhre (The Ferry)
and in the Zweite Deutsche Kunstausstel-
lung (Se cond German Art Exhibition) in
Dresden. His life in the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) was marked by several
prizes and honors as well as nominations to
important committees and functions.
David Smith
Born 1906 in Decatur, IN, USA
Died 1965 in Shaftsbury, VT, USA
David Smith was an Abstract Expressionist
best remembered for his large steel sculp-
tures. After moving to New York in 1927,
he studied painting at the Art Students
League. Smith often supported himself by
welding and riveting, skills that later fig-
ured in his work. In 1929 he learned about
Picassos Project for Monument (1928) and
met the painter John Graham (18861961),
who introduced him to several avant-garde
painters and to the work of metal sculptor
Julio Gonzlez (18861942). Smith made
his first welded metal sculptures in 1933
and committed himself to sculpture from
1935 onward. His Medals of Dishonor se-
ries (193740) was inspired by his travels in
Europe and Russia. In 1938 he had his first
solo show and his sculpture Head (1938)
was purchased by the Museum of Modern
Art, New York. After he received a Guggen-
heim fellowship in 1950, his works expand-
ed in scale and became more abstract; he
later added color to some works. In 1962
the Italian government invited him to cre-
ate 27 sculptures for the Festival dei Due
798
Mondi (Festival of Two Worlds) in Spoleto. A
retrospective at the Solomon R. Gug-
genheim Museum traveled to the Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern,
London (20067).
Lol Soldevilla
Born 1901 in Pinar del Ro, Cuba
Died 1971 in Havana, Cuba
Lol Soldevilla (Dolores Soldevilla Nieto)
traveled to Paris in 1949, working as a cul-
tural attach in the Cuban Embassy and
studying sculpture at the Acadmie de la
Grande Chaumire. In 1950 she returned
briefly to Cuba, presenting sculptures and
paintings in her first two solo exhibitions.
Back in Paris in 1951 she took part in the
Atelier dart abstrait (Studio of abstract art)
and turned to geometric abstraction. Her
works of the 1950s, which mostly feature
geometric forms, include slender metal
sculptures (Stables), paintings reminiscent
of celestial alignments, and luminous re-
liefs inspired by her collaboration with the
Spanish kinetic artist Eusebio Sempere
(19231985). From 1951 to 1955 she par-
ticipated in the Salon des realits nouvelles
(Exhibition of New Realities), and in 1956
she permanently returned to Havana. There
she organized the exhibition Pintura de hoy.
Vanguardia de la Escuela de Paris (Painting
Today: Vanguard School of Paris; Palacio de
Bellas Artes, 1956) and opened the Galera
de Arte Color-Luz (Color-Light Art Gallery)
with Pedro de Ora (b. 1931) in 1957. The
gallery became central to the group Diez
Pintores Concretos (Ten Concrete Paint-
ers), which Soldevilla co-founded in 1958.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Soldevil-
las artistic output decreased, although
she taught at the Escuela de Arquitectura
(School of Architecture) in Havana (1960
61), edited the Communist newspaper Gr-
anma (196571), and founded the group
Espacio (1965) to mentor young artists.
Jess Rafael Soto
Born 1923 in Ciudad Bolvar, Venezuela
Died 2005 in Paris, France
The body of work by Jess Rafael Soto
synthesized abstraction, visual perception,
and participation. He first studied art in Ca-
racas but moved to Paris in 1950, where he
met op artist Victor Vasarely (19061997)
and kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925
1991). Soto first showed at the Galerie De
nise Ren in the 1955 exhibition Le Mouve-
ment (The Movement), which also included
work by the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp
(18871968). Sotos Espiral con Red (Spiral
with Red) comprised a solid and transpar-
ent sculptural layer painted with concentric
forms that seemed to vibrate before ones
eyesa reference to Duchamps Rotoreliefs
(1935). From 1951 to 1968, Soto partici-
pated in the Salon des ralits nouvelles, a
yearly survey in Paris focusing on abstract
art. In 1958 his work was featured in the
Venezuelan pavilions at both the Brussels
Worlds Fair (Expo 58) and the Venice
Biennale. In 1964 Soto was included in
Documenta Kassel and again in the Venice
Biennale. His breakthrough sculpture se-
ries, the Pntrables (The Penetrables;
196797) consists of vinyl or metal tubes,
hung from a gridwork, which viewers can
pass through. His hometown of Ciudad
Bolvar opened a museum dedicated to his
work in 1973.
Francis Newton Souza
Born 1924 in Saligo, British India
Died 2002 in Mumbai, India
Francis Newton Souza, often called
F. N. Souza, was one of the first painters to
achieve international renown in newly in-
dependent India. He initially attended the
Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai but was
expelled for participating in the Quit India
Movement in 1945. Two years later he
co-founded the Progressive Artists Group
in Bombay and soon became its intellectual
leader. Souza left for London in 1949 and
in 1955 he gained sweeping recognition
for his first solo show at the Gallery One
in London as well as for his autobiographi
cal essay Nirvana of a Maggot, which was
first published in Encounter magazine. In
1967 Souza received the Guggenheim In-
ternational Award and moved to New York,
where he remained until shortly before his
death. Souzas images often show distorted
human figures and heads drawn or painted
in a graphic style with distinct lines, brush-
strokes, and contours. His subjects range
from still lifes and landscapes to Christian
themes and the negotiation of human sex-
uality. Since the late 1980s he has been
honored with several retrospectives in India.
Aleksandar Srnec
Born 1924 in Zagreb,
Kingdom of Yugoslavia
Died 2010 in Zagreb, Croatia
Aleksandar Srnec worked in a variety of
media, including painting and kinetic sculp-
ture. He first studied at the Akademija
likovnih umjetnosti (Academy of Fine Arts)
at the University of Zagreb from 1943 to
1949. After graduation, he worked with the
architect Vjenceslav Richter (19172002)
and fellow artist Ivan Picelj (19242011) to
curate and design exhibitions of contempor
ary Yugoslavian art. In 1951, the three men,
along with other architects and the painter
and filmmaker Vladimir Kristl (19232004),
founded the Experimental Atelier, or EXAT
51. Their manifesto protested the Commu-
nist preference for social realist art, arguing
for abstraction as an instrument of social
change. EXAT 51 sought to bring together
art, architecture, and design to improve dai-
ly life. Out of EXAT 51 developed the Nove
tendencije (New Tendencies) movement,
which focused on kinetic and optical art.
Srnec began to make kinetic sculptures in
the 1950s, later adding light and highly pol-
ished metals into his work during the 1960s
and 70s. In 1999, he was awarded the
Vladimir Nazor Award for Lifetime Achieve-
ment, and in 2008 he received an award
from the Croatian Association of Artists.
A retrospective of Srnecs work was pre-
sented at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti
(Museum of Contemporary Art), Zagreb,
in 2010.
Frank Stella
Born 1936 in Malden, MA, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Frank Stella pioneered both post-painterly
abstraction in the 1960s and postmodernist
art from the 1970s onward. He studied his-
tory at Princeton University, where he be-
friended the abstract painter Walter Darby
Bannard (b. 1934) and art historian Michael
Fried (b. 1939). Stella moved to New York
in 1958 and, during the heyday of Abstract
Expressionism, developed a cool painting
style devoid of external reference. Stellas
Black Paintings of 1959 feature stripes of
black house paint separated by thin bands
of unprimed canvas. Fried described these
paintings as deductive, with the shape
of the canvas determining the patterning
therein. Stella first showed these works in
the exhibitions Three Americans (1959) at
Oberlin College, Ohio, and Sixteen Ameri-
cans (1960) at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York. In 1960 he began producing
shaped deductive canvases, using alumi-
num and copper paints. In his later, brightly
colored Protractor series, named after
Middle Eastern cities, he overlaid brightly
colored circular shapes. He showed widely
in the 1960s, including at Documenta,
Kassel (1968). In 1970, he became the
youngest artist to receive a retrospective at
the Museum of Modern Art. Since then his
work took a maximalist turn, and he has
incorporated three-dimensional, architec-
tural, and Expressionist elements.
Sindoedarsono Sudjojono
Born 1913 in Kisaran, Sumatra
Died 1985 in Jakarta, Indonesia
Sindoedarsono Sudjojono was a largely
self-taught artist, art critic, and writer who
shaped the development of Indonesian
modernism. During the Dutch colonial pe-
riod in Indonesia he fought for a genuinely
Indonesian art, free from European colonial
influences. He laid great emphasis on the
development of a personal artistic language
and focused on depicting the everyday lives
of Indonesian people during the Dutch colo-
nial regime, which began in the eighteenth
century. He rejected the predominant colo-
nial stylewhich he critically termed Mooi
Indi (Beautiful Indies)for its idealized
depiction of the Indonesian landscape. In
Indonesian Art Now and That of the Future
(1939) Sudjojono criticized Indonesian
artists for adopting this style. Sudjojono
helped to establish several artists asso-
ciations: Union of Indonesian Painters
(PERSAGI) (193738), Young Indonesian
Artists (SIM) (1946), and Peoples Painters
(1947). In 1950 he joined the Indonesian
Communist Party and adopted a social re-
alist style. In 1951 he traveled to Europe
and participated in the third Weltfestspiele
der Jugend und Studenten (World Festival
of Youth and Students) in East Berlin. His
body of work includes paintings, sketches,
drawings, public art, reliefs, and ceramics.
After 1959 he withdrew from politics and
instead focused on painting landscapes;
still lifes, and portraits.
Alina Szapocznikow
Born 1926 in Kalisz, Poland
Died 1973 in Praz-Coutant, France
Sculptor Alina Szapocznikow once ex-
plained that she was searching for form,
searching for the greatest expression
of sensuality or dramatic quality. After
spending several years in ghettos and
prisons during World War II, she moved to
Prague in 1945 to study art. From 1946
to 1948 she studied with Otokar Velmsky
and then at the Vysok kola Um e leck-
opr umyslov (Academy of Applied Arts),
in the studio of Joseph Wagner. She at-
tended the cole nationale suprieure des
Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts),
Paris, from 1948 to 1951, and returned
to Poland, where she immersed herself
in contemporary art and participated
in several competitions for public mon-
uments. Szapocznikow worked in many
traditional mediums, but was noted for
pioneering in new materials, namely poly-
ester and polyurethane. Her distinct artistic
approach was linked to her wartime incar-
ceration and chronic illness, and her sculp-
tures evoke Surrealism, Nouveau Ralisme,
and Pop art. Szapocznikow unremittingly
explored the human body (especially her
own), its impermanence and fragility, by
casting, fragmenting, reassembling, and
transforming it. Although the components
were modeled on real bo dies (often her
own), the resulting sculptures approached
the abstract, because she decontextualized
and rearranged disembodied parts (limbs,
lips, breasts, etc.). She was re presented
in the Venice Biennale in 1962 and finally
relocated to Paris the following year.
T
Takamatsu Jiro
Born 1936 in Tokyo, Japan
Died 1998 in Tokyo, Japan
Takamatsu Jiro was an influential artist
and art theorist. He majored in oil painting
at the Tokyo National University of Fine
Arts and Music, graduating in 1958. Dur-
ing the 1960s and '70s he developed a
diverse body of work, including sculpture,
photography, painting, drawing, and per-
formance art. He was a founding member
of the legendary artist collective Hi Red
Center (196364) and a key figure in the spectator, performative art, and new tech-
development of the Mono-ha (School of
Things) movement (196779). Takamatsu
Jiro questioned the material and meta-
physical foundations of art within his own
practice, while challenging the boundaries
between art and life (Moderu 1000-en (chu)
[Model, 1000-Yen Note], 1963). Besides his
actions and public interventions in Tokyo,
he primarily worked in series, of which his
Kage (Shadow) paintings (196498) and ed systems pulsing inside the human body.
his series Shashin no Shashin (Photo-
graph of Photograph; 197273) are among
the most influential. Besides being an artist
and theorist, Takamatsu also taught at the
Tamabijutsudaigaku (Tama Art University),
Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972. His first solo
show at the Tokyo Gallery in 1966 was
followed by seven other exhibitions at this
venue; he also participated in many important
group exhibitions, including the Venice
Biennale (1968), Paris Biennale (1969), and
Documenta, Kassel (1977).
Rufino Tamayo
Born 1899 in Oaxaca, Mexico
Died 1991 in Mexico City, Mexico
study drawing at the Academia Valls (Valls
Rufino Arellanes Tamayo was a figurative
painter who incorporated Surrealist influenc-
es in his work. He moved to Mexico City after
his parents died in 1911. Although he took
some drawing lessons and attended the
Escuela de Bellas Artes (School of Fine
Arts) in Mexico City, he mostly studied inde-
pendently. By age twenty-two Tamayo had
been appointed head of the Department of
Ethnographic Drawing at the Museo Nacional
de Arqueologa (National Museum of Archeol-
ogy) in Mexico City. There he worked with and
drew pre-Columbian objects, which inspired
his early still lifes and portraits. During several
years when he lived in Europe and the United
States, he adopted the styles of modern art-
ists, fusing them with themes from Mexican
folk culture. He was awarded commissions for
public murals by the Palacio Nacional de Bellas
Artes (National Palace of Fine Arts), Mexico
City (195253), and UNESCO, Paris (1958).
Unlike his fellow Mexican artists of that time,
Tamayo preferred easel painting and did not
strive to make his art the vehicle of political
change. He had a retrospective at the Instituto
de Bellas Artes (Institute of Fine Arts), Mexico
City (1948), and took part in the Venice Bien-
nale (1950). Working with Luis Remba in the
early 1970s, he invented mixografa (mixogra-
phy), an innovative relief-printing technique.
Tanaka Atsuko
Born 1932 in Osaka, Japan
Died 2005 in Nara, Japan
Tanaka Atsuko was a leading Japanese
avant-garde artist. She began studying art
-
at the Kyotoshiritsugeijutsudaigaku (Kyoto
City University of Arts) in 1950, but in
- -
1951 she transferred to the Ato no Osaka
ichi Kenkyujo- (Osaka Municipal Institute of
Art) to focus on modern Western art. Her
husband, artist Akira Kanayama (b. 1924),
founded Zero-kai (Zero Society) in 1952.
She first participated in Zero-kai, then joined
the Gutai Art Association in 1955. After a se-
ries of paintings and collages incorporating
numbers, she became interested in everyday
materials, such as commercially dyed tex-
tiles, electric bells, and lightbulbs. She also
created many innovative works involving the
where he secretly made drawings of the
nology. At the first Gutai exhibition in 1955,
Tanaka Atsuko showed her first electric and
participatory piece, Work (Bell). Her most
famous work, Electric Dress (1956), was
a wearable kimono-like sculpture made of
colorfully painted lightbulbs, which one critic
described as a powerful conflation of the tra-
dition of the Japanese kimono with modern
industrial technology. The lights represent-
the cole nationale suprieure des Arts
She later returned to painting in a visual vo-
cabulary, featuring networks of concentric
circles and circuitous lines on large-scale
canvases. Her work is included in several
important private and public collections, in-
cluding the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Lives and works in Singapore
Antonio Tpies
Born 1923 in Barcelona, Spain
Died 2012 in Barcelona, Spain
The painter, sculptor, and art theorist
Antonio Tpies became one of the most fa-
mous European artists of his time. He first
studied law at the Universidad de Barcelona
(University of Barcelona) but quit in order to
advertising. Showing great attention and af-
Academy), Barcelona, in 1944. Following
his interest in matter over draftsmanship,
he began to experiment with materials
and techniques such as collage, grattage
(scraping across a painted canvas to add
texture), and graffiti. In his paintings he
used marble dust, chalk, sand, and earth to
create scratched and uneven surfaces with
tactile and associative qualities. In some
later works, he even applied three-dimen-
sional objects. In 1948 Tpies co-founded
the avant-garde magazine Dau al Set
(Seven-Spotted Dice) and met Joan Mir
(18931983), with whom he shared a life-
long friendship. Tpies also worked closely
with many poets and writers and was a pro-
lific essayist and printmaker. His first solo
exhibition was held at Galeries Laietanes,
Barcelona, in 1950, when he also spent
several months in France on a scholarship
from the French government. His first exhi-
bitions in the United States were presented
in 1953. Tpies was honored with numer-
ous prizes and gained his first retrospective
at age 39, in 1962.
Boris Taslitzky
Born 1911 in Paris, France
Died 2000 in Paris, France
Boris Taslitzky was a socialist Realist pain
ter who depicted scenes of suffering and
death in war and revolution. His family
had fled Russia to France in 1905, where
Taslitzky studied at the cole nationale
suprieure des Beaux-Arts (National
School of Fine Arts) in the 1930s. He
joined the Association of Revolutionary
Writers and Artists in 1933 and two years
later joined the Communist Party. His fa-
ther had died in World War I and his moth-
er died at Auschwitz during World War II;
thus his paintings often reference the two
wars. Taslitzky first supported the French
Front populaire (Peoples Front), making
placards for political demonstrations. In
1940, while fighting against the Germans,
he was arrested but later escaped. In late
1941 he was recaptured and served two
years imprisonment. In 1944 Taslitzky was
sent to Buchenwald concentration camp,
was also working in collage and as-
atrocities and inhuman conditions there.
After the war he returned to Paris, where
his drawings were published as 111 dessins
faits Buchenwald (111 Drawings Made
at Buchenwald; 1946). Continuing the
heroic and figurative traditions of nine-
teenth-century painting, he painted politi-
callycharged scenes (Riposte, 1949), genre
scenes, and lanscapes. Taslitzky taught at
Dcoratifs (National School of Decorative
Arts) and worked as an illustrator for the
Communist press.
Chua Mia Tee
Born 1931 in Shantou, China
Chua Mia Tee, whose family fled to Singa-
pore in 1937 during the Sino-Japanese War,
studied art at the Nnyng Ysh Xuyun drawings were presented in his first solo
(Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts) from
1950 to 1952. After graduation he taught
at Nanyang Academy in 1956 and 1957;
later that year he commenced his career
as an illustrator and designer of books and
fection for his people and surroundings, he
created detailed painted and drawn records
of Singapores vanishing traditional urban
life and landscape. He captured important
scenes in Singapore history, as well as po-
litical and social concerns in paintings like
Gujia- y uyn
- li (National Language Class;
1959) and Zi zhgong - shtng (Workers in
the Canteen; 1974). Chua was also a re-
nowned portraitist who portrayed a number
of significant political and historical figures.
In 1974, when he gained much acclaim
for his first solo exhibition at the Rux-Ing
meish guan (Rising Art Gallery), Chua
finally decided to pursue art full-time, work-
ing predominantly in oil on canvas. His art-
works have been shown extensively abroad
(Indonesia, Thailand, Belgium, Germany,
Australia, and New Zealand). In 2015 Chua
received Singapores Cultural Medallion.
Herv Tlmaque
Born 1937 Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Lives and works in Paris, France
Herv Tlmaque left his Haitian homeland
in 1957 to escape a newly corrupt politi-
cal scene and moved to New York, where
he studied at the Art Students League
until 1960. During this time he discovered
Abstract Expressionism and the American
version of Surrealism, especially as repre
sented by Arshile Gorky (19041948).
After his graduation, Tlmaque aban
doned the United States because of his
discomfort with racism, politics, and the
then-pervasive Abstract Expressionism.
He moved to Paris, where he continued
his career as an artist and became a lea
ding figure in the French Pop art movement.
Most likely inspired by the appearance
of American and English Pop art at the
Venice Biennale in 1964, Tlmaque and
other French artists developed the Nar-
rative Figuration movement. Led by
the art critic Grard Gassiot-Talabot
(19292002), Tlmaque and other ar
tists mounted the famous group exhibition
Mythologies quotidiennes (Everyday My-
thologies; 1964), promoting their new
painterly approach. By that time Tlmaque
semblage as well as painting, sculp ture,
and graphic arts. His colorful composi
tions depict everyday objects within
sometimes confusing, sometimes banal
scenes, always suggesting his critical
under standing and appropriation of Pop
culture through mass media, advertising,
and comics.
Mark Tobey
Born 1890 in Centerville, WI, USA
Died 1976 in Basel, Switzerland
Mark Tobey is noted for his nonrepresenta-
tional works in multi-layered, allover brush-
strokes that evoke Asian calligraphy. He
studied painting at the Art Institute of
Chicago from 1906 to 1908 then worked
as a fashion illustrator in New York and Chi-
cago from 1911 onward. His early portrait
exhibition at Knoedler & Co., New York, in
1917. The following year he moved to Se-
attle, where he first came in contact with
the Bah faith and converted. His enduring
interest in East Asian philosophy and aes-
thetics (Chinese calligraphy, Persian and
Arabic script) was nurtured by his friendship
with the Chinese painter Teng Kuei and his
travels abroad. In 1925 Tobey left Seattle
799

for Paris, then traveled in Europe and the
Middle East for about two years. His journey
to China and Japan in 1934 eventually led
to the development of his white writings.
These abstract compositions in a subdued
palette, with dense layers of calligraphic
lines, were first exhibited in 1944 at the
Willard Gallery, New York. Tobeys art has
been featured in numerous solo and retro-
spective exhibitions since the early 1960s.
He received the Guggenheim International
Award (1956) and the International Award
for Painting at the Venice Biennale (1958).
Tony Tuckson
Born 1921 in Port Said, Egypt
Died 1973 in Sydney Australia
Tony Tuckson, a preeminent Australian ar
tist and Abstract Expressionist, worked in
pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolor, gouache,
and mixed media. His emphasis on line
and brushstrokes reflected his spontane-
ous and highly gestural approach. Tuckson
studied painting at the Hornsey School of
Art in London from 1937 to 1939 and at the
Kingston School of Art, serving in the Royal
Air Force from 1940 onward. When he was
sent to Sydney in 1946, he pursued studies
at the East Sydney Technical College for
three years. In 1949 Tuckson was deeply
impressed by an exhibition of aboriginal
art from Arnhem Land from the collection
of Ronald Berndt. After he became assis-
tant director, then deputy director (1957),
of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he
pioneered curatorial work in promoting and
exhibiting Australian aboriginal and Mela-
nesian art. Tuckson painted and drew his
whole life and produced some 450 pain
tings and more than a thousand drawings.
Although his work in later years was over-
shadowed by his museum career, he had
two solo shows at Watters Gallery in East
Sydney in 1970 and 1973.
Igael Tumarkin (born Peter Martin
Gregor Heinrich Hellberg)
Born 1933 in Dresden, Germany
Lives and works in Israel
Igael Tumarkin is a painter, printmaker,
and sculptor who created such memorials
as Holocaust and Revival (1971) in Rabin
Square, Tel Aviv, and a memorial to fallen
soldiers in the Negev. His father, Martin
Hellberg, was a German theater actor and
director. In 1935, when he was only two
years old, he moved from Germany to Israel
with his Jewish mother and his stepfather,
Herzl Tumarkin. After his military service in
the Israeli Sea Corps (195154), he studied
sculpture with Rudi Lehmann (19031977)
at Ein Hod, an artists village near Haifa.
Tumarkin returned to Germany in 1955 and
worked with the poet and playwright Bertolt
Brecht (18981956) at the Berliner Ensemble
and assisted the stage designer Karl von
Appen (19001981). He continued his work
as a sculptor and stage designer in Europe
until 1961. After traveling abroad and living
for several years in the United States, he
finally settled in Tel Aviv in the late 1970s.
His work has been shown internationally,
and he has received many awards, including
the prestigious Israel Prize, in 2004.
800
U
Gnther Uecker
Born 1930 in Wendorf, Germany
Lives in Dsseldorf, Germany
Gnther Uecker studied painting at the
Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weiensee (Berlin-
Weissensee University) from 1949 to
1953, where he was influenced by social
realism. He continued his studies in 1955
at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf (Dussel-
dorf Art Academy) under the Expressionist
printmaker Otto Pankok (18931966).
Uecker remained in Dsseldorf, where he
joined a vibrant emerging art scene and
became interested in the philosophies
of Buddhism and Taoism. His art prac-
tice had a turning point in 1957 when he
hammered nails into his canvases. Unit-
ing Buddhist meditation with art making,
Uecker explored the ritual repetition of
hammering and the reductive abstrac-
tion the nails shadows cast on canvas. In
1960, Uecker began to add kinetic com-
ponents, such as engines, to his works.
He was included among forty artists in a
series of one night pop-up exhibitions in
Dsseldorf organized by Heinz Mack
(b. 1931) and Otto Piene (19282014),
the founders of the anti-Expressionist
ZERO movement. Ueckers work was
displayed in an exhibition entitled Das
Rote Bild (The Red Image) on April 24,
1958. He joined ZERO in 1961. Later
he participated in Documenta, Kassel
(1968) and the Venice Biennale (1970).
After the ZERO group dissolved in 1966,
Uecker turned to Conceptualism, body art
and theatre design.
V Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl
Stan VanDerBeek
Born 1927 in New York, NY, USA
Died 1984 in Columbia, MD, USA
Stan VanDerBeek was a pioneering ex-
perimental filmmaker. He first studied art
and architecture at New Yorks Cooper
Union, graduating in 1952. He continued
his studies at Black Mountain College in
Asheville, North Carolina, where he met
such crucial influences and collaborators
as Buckminster Fuller (18951983), John
Cage (19121992), and Josef Albers
(18881976). While working on the chil-
drens television show Winky Dink and
You (broadcast 195357), VanDerBeek
developed innovative ways for viewers to
interact with the show. This experience,
and his collaborations with other artists
including Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), Allan
Kaprow (19272006), and Merce Cunning-
ham (19192009)led VanDerBeek to ex-
periment with what cinematic theorist Gene
Youngblood has called expanded cinema.
In the 1960s VanDerBeek worked with
computer programmer and physicist Ken
Knowlton (b. 1931), at Bell Laboratories
in New Jersey, to develop the language of
computer animation. VanDerBeek taught
animation and film at Columbia University
(196365) and at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technologys Center for
Advanced Visual Studies (196970). Van-
DerBeeks work was included in the Soft-
ware exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New
York, in 1970. His work was later exhibited at
the Whitney Biennial (1983) and the Venice
Biennale (2013).
Emilio Vedova
Born 1919 in Venice, Italy
Died 2006 in Venice, Italy
Emilio Vedova was a modernist painter and
a pioneer in Italys art informel movement. In
the mid-1930s he spent time in Rome and
Florence. He joined the Milanese anti-fas-
cist artists association Corrente in 1942,
and from 1944 to 1945 he worked for the
Italian resistance. In 1946 he signed the
Al di l di Guernica (Beyond Guernica) 1958, Vostell initiated happenings across
manifesto and co-founded the Nuova
Secessione Italiana (New Italian Seces-
sion) in Venice. Vedova first exhibited in the
Venice Biennale in 1948 and later received
the Grand Prize for Painting (1960) and
the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement
(1997). In the early 1950s his style shifted
from geometric abstraction to a spontane-
ous, gestural informalism. His series include
Scontro di situazioni (Collision of Situa-
tions), Ciclo della Protesta (Protest Cycle),
and Cicli della Natura (Cycles of Nature).
His first solo show outside Italy was at the
Catherine Viviano Gallery, New York (1951).
In 1960 Vedova designed lighting and cos-
tumes for Luigi Nonos opera Intolleranza
60. He created his first Plurimi (Many),
freestanding, hinged sculpture-paintings
made of wooden panels and metal frame-
works in the following year. His Absurdes
Berliner Tagebuch 64 (Absurd Berlin Diary
64) was first shown at Documenta, Kass-
el (1964). Vedova received many prizes,
including the Guggenheim International
Award (1956).
Born 1926 in Quimper, France
Lives and works in Paris, France
Jacques (Mah de la) Villegl is known for
making art from scraps of torn posters. He
began his painting studies in 1944 at the
cole des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts),
Rennes, where he met his fellow student,
Raymond Hains (19262005). From 1947
to 1949, Villegl studied architecture at the
cole suprieure des beaux-arts de Nantes
Mtropole (School of Fine Arts in Nantes
Mtropole). Dissatisfied with both fields of
study, he began to collect objects he found
on the Atlantic beaches and then to reas-
semble them as sculptures, such as Fils
dacierChausse des Corsaires, Saint-Malo came a successful commercial artist and il-
(Son of Steel, Corsairs Highway, Saint Malo;
1947). Villegl moved to Paris in 1949 and
reunited with Hains, who introduced him
to dcollage. From their first collaborative
work, Ach Alma Manetro (1949; named for
visible word fragments), and continuing
until 1954, the two artists ripped torn post-
ers from public billboards and glued them
onto their canvases. Villegl continued to
explore the artistic, documentary, and so-
ciocritical potential of this technique, which
he called affiches lacres (torn posters),
for more than five decades. While his ear-
ly works focused on word fragments, he
later became more interested in colors and
shapes. Villegl wrote Collective Realities in
1958, precursor to the Nouveau Ralisme
(New Realism) manifesto of 1960. Villegls
works have been featured in more than 100
exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.
Wolf Vostell
Born 1932 in Leverkusen, Germany
Died 1998 in Berlin, Germany
Wolf Vostell is known as a co-founder of the
Fluxus movement of the 1960s and '70s as
well as for his pioneering works in instal-
lation, happenings, and environmental art.
His education included studies at the cole
nationale suprieure des Beaux-Arts (Na-
tional School of Fine Arts) in Paris (1955)
and the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf (Dus-
seldorf Art Academy; in 1957). Starting in
Europe and New York. That same year, he
created the first installation to incorporate a
TV set (German View from the Black Room
Cycle, 195863). Appropriating the term
D-coll/age from the French language
in 1954, Vostell reintroduced the Dadaist
legacy of deconstructing consumerist
items (like street posters) as a means of
encouraging independent thinking. Vostells
artistic achievements earned him early
international recognition. He helped organ-
ize the Festum Fluxorum in Wiesbaden of
1962, among other events with the Fluxus
group. Vostell was granted major retro-
spectives at the Muse d'art moderne de
la ville de Paris (Modern Art Museum of
the City of Paris) and the Neue Nation-
algalerie (New National Gallery), Berlin,
in 1974, and participated in Documenta,
Kassel in 1977. In the 1980s, Vostell ex-
panded his practice into environmen-
tal art, creating immersive installations
for the FLUXUS-Train traveling across
Germany. He founded the Museo Vostell,
dedicated to his work, in 1976 in Malpartida
de Cceres, Spain.
W
Andy Warhol
(born Andrew Warhola)
Born 1928 in Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Died 1987 in New York, NY, USA
Andy Warhol was a pioneer in the American
Pop art movement of the 1960s. He initially
studied pictorial design at the Carnegie Ins
titute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon
University). After earning a BFA degree in
1949, he moved to New York, where he be-
Head series (1964). He often experiments
lustrator. He turned to painting and drawing
in the early 1950s, developing a whimsical
style based on traced photographs and
other imagery. In the early 1960s, as his
interest in American popular culture co-
incided with the emerging Pop art move-
ment, he adapted images from advertising
and commercial products. He then turned
from hand-painted canvases to large-scale
silkscreened images and began to feature
celebrity portraits and other cultural icons,
unveiling his new works in Andy Warhol:
Campbells Soup Cans at Ferus Gallery, Los
Angeles, in 1962. As Warhol described his
work, Once you got pop, you could never
see a sign the same way again. And once
you thought pop, you could never see Amer-
ica the same way again. Warhol broke the
boundaries between high and low art in his
famous New York studio, the Factory, ex-
panding the scope of his work to sculpture,
photography, experimental film, and video.
Susanne Wenger
Born 1915 in Graz, Austria
Died 2009 in Osogbo, Nigeria
Susanne Wenger is known both for her art
and for her commitment to restoring Yoruba
shrines in her adopted home of Osogbo,
Nigeria. Her career began with studies at
the Akademie der Schnen Knste (Aca Wols expanded his creative output in paint-
demy of Fine Arts), Vienna (193337), under
Herbert Boeckl (18941966). During
World War II she remained in Vienna and
Graz, joined the resistance, and helped
refugees, including the fantastic realist
Ernst Fuchs (19302015). She also made
her first Surrealistic drawings during this
period. After the war she worked for the
Communist childrens magazine Unsere
Zeitung (Our Newspaper) and co-founded
the Vienna Art Club in 1947. In 1946 she
traveled to Italy and Switzerland, exhibiting
at the Galerie des Eaux Vives (Gallery of
Living Waters). In 1949 she met the scholar
and author Ulli Beier (19222011) in Paris
and the two soon married and moved to
Nigeria. Wenger converted to Yoruba religion
while recovering from a serious illness and
eventually became a Yoruba priestess. She
divorced Beier in 1958 and married a lo-
cal drummer in 1959. Besides restoring a
Yoruba shrine to the goddess Osogbo, she
built monumental sculptures and made
large-scale textiles with a special batik and
dye technique. In 1965 Wenger founded the
artist group New Sacred Art with Osogbo
artists and craftsmen.
Jack Whitten
Born 1939 in Bessemer, AL, USA
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Jack Whitten works in gestural abstraction,
incorporating aspects of sculpture and col-
lage. During his premedical studies at Tus-
kegee Institute, Whitten discovered the leg-
acy of inventor, scientist, and artist George
Washington Carver (18601943). In the
late 1950s, while studying art at Southern
University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he
became involved in the civil rights move-
ment. Whitten moved to New York in 1960
and earned a BFA degree from Cooper
Union in 1964. During the 1960s, Whitten
created dynamic works, from brightly color-
ed abstractions to ghostly evocations in his
atrocities during the German occupation of
with color, technique, and materials (iron ox-
ide, dry pigments, crushed Mylar, ash, bone,
and blood). During the 1970s he created
textured surfaces with squeegees, rakes,
and Afro combs. In the 1980s he came to
consider paint as similar to skin, but in the
1990s, he began to create canvases with
small painted tiles. Whittens work has
been featured at the 55th Venice Biennale
(2013); MoMA PS1, New York (2007); and
the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
(2006). He received an honorary doctorate
from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014.
Wols
(Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze)
Born 1913 in Berlin, Germany
Died 1951 in Paris, France
A key figure of the tachisme movement,
Wols left his parents home in Dresden to
pursue art at age seventeen. Following a
photography apprenticeship in 1930 at
the Reimann-Schule (Reimann School) in
Berlin, he moved to Paris in 1932 at the
recommendation of Lszl Moholy-Nagy
(18951946). Acquainted with leaders of
the Parisian art scene such as Fernand
Lger (18811955), Amde Ozenfant
(18861966), and Hans Arp (18861966),
ing, writing, music, and photography during
the 1930s. In 1937, he was commissioned
to photograph the Worlds Fair in Paris. At
the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Wols
was sent to an internment camp near Aix-
en-Provence. In 1940 he fled to Cassis,
where he began creating drawings and
watercolors. With an increasing interest in
abstraction, Wols gradually shifted his fo-
cus from the line to the interplay between
color fields and to the dripping of paint.
Art critic Michel Tapi would coin the term
art autre (other art) to describe the oil
paintings that Wols began in 1946. Wols
held his first exhibition at Galerie Ren
Drouin in 1945; his second exhibition at
the gallery two years later earned him
widspread acclaim. His work was shown
posthumously in the first three editions of
Documenta, Kassel (1955; 1959; 1964).
Andrzej Wrblewski
Born 1927 in Vilnius, Lithuania
Died 1957 in the Tatra Mountains, Poland
Andrzej Wrblewski, who developed an
individual approach to realist painting, be-
came one of Polands foremost postwar
artists. After World War II he moved to
Krakow, where he studied art history at
the Uniwersytet Jagiellonski (Jagiellonian
University, 194548) and trained at the Ak-
ademia Sztuk Pi e knych (Academy of Fine
Arts, 194552). Even as a student he be-
gan to rebel against the predominant Kapist
style (colorism) that was promoted in Polish
academic circles. Searching for a unique
and personal style, free from ideology, he
inaugurated a Self-Teaching Art School at
the Akademia Sztuk Pieknych w Krakowie
(Krakow Academy of Fine Arts) in 1948.
His work in oil paint and gouache featured
elements of Surrealism and abstraction, in-
cluding geometric and stylized forms. In the
late 1940s he devoted himself to his Exe-
cutions series, depicting scenes of wartime
1940s. During the Great Patriotic War
Poland. Also during that time, as a critic and
theoretician, he published nearly eighty ar-
ticles on art and literature. He often painted
on both sides of the canvas, thus creating
challenging, often contradictory combina-
tions of recto and verso. In the early 1950s
he briefly adopted the social realist style,
and from 1955 onward he focused on the
family as his subject. He died in a mountain-
eering accident at age twenty-nine.
Andrew (Newell) Wyeth
Born 1917 in Chadds Ford, PA, USA
Died 2009 in Chadds Ford, PA, USA
Andrew Wyeth was a realist painter whose
work, as one critic put it, represented con-
tinuity and permanence in the face of insta-
bilities and uncertainties of modern life.
Wyeth began studying art in 1932 under his
father, the illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth
(18821945). Wyeths first solo showat
the Macbeth Gallery, New York, in 1936
was a complete success. Although his early
works were in watercolor, he soon changed
to egg tempera, a Renaissance-era me-
dium that demanded great care and deli-
cacy, allowing complexity and detail in his
canvases. Wyeths paintings blended vivid
landscapes and insightful portraits of the
land and the people around his hometown
of Chadds Ford, in rural Pennsylvania, and
his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One
subject was Christina Olson, a polio survi-
vor and friend of Wyeths wife, Betsy. Helga
Testorf, a neighbor in Chadds Ford, was an-
other notable subject. Wyeth received many
awards during his lifetime. He was the first
artist to receive the Presidential Medal of
Freedom (1963) and was the first living art-
ist to exhibit at the U.S. White House (1966).
In 1977 he made his first trip to Europe
to be admitted to the Acadmie des Beaux-
Arts (Academy of Fine Arts) in Paris.
Y Ramss Younan
Vasily Yakovlev
Born 1893 in Moscow, Russian Empire
Died 1953 in Moscow, USSR
After studying mathematics and physics,
Vasily (Nikolaevich) Yakovlev trained
from 1914 to 1917 at the Moscow School
of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
under Abram Arkhipov (18621930) and
Konstantin Korovin (18611939). Yakovlevs
study of the European old masters and
Russian icon painting was bolstered by his
role as a conservator for various institutes
and museums in Moscow. In the late 1920s
and early 1930s, he visited Western Europe
several times, including an extended so-
journ in Italy at the invitation of Maxim Gorky
(18691936) in 1932. Astaunchly conser
vative artist, Yakovlev sought to couple the
skill of Renaissance and Baroque painting
with the ideological program of Soviet so-
cialist realism. He produced many pain
tings, usually portraits, in a highly finished
academic style throughout the 1930s and
He broke with the French Surrealists that
(194145) Yako vlev visited the front to
study military life, and in 1946 he creat-
ed his iconic Portrait of Georgy Zhukov,
Marshal of the Soviet Union. Yakovlev twice
received the coveted Stalin Prize (1943;
1949), and in 1944 he was bestowed with
the title of Peoples Artist of the RSFSR. In
1952 Yakovlev began work on his last sig-
nificant project, supervising the restoration
of The Siege of Sevastopol (19024) by
Franz Roubaud (18561928).
-
Yosuke Yamahata
Born 1917 in Singapore
Died 1966 in Tokyo, Japan
-
Yosuke Yamahata is best known for his pho-
tographs of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945,
the day after the city was bombed by U.S.
forces at the end of World War II. He first
studied at Hosei University in Tokyo, but
left in 1936 before completing his studies
in order to begin working in his fathers
photographic company, G. T. Sun (Graphic
-
Times Sun). During World War II, Yosuke
Yamahata worked as a Japanese military
photographer in China and elsewhere in
Asia. After the bombing of Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945, he was sent to record the
-
bombs effects. Within twelve hours Yosu-
ke Yamahata took nearly 120 photographs
of the devastated landscape and the citys
survivors, the greatest immediate photo-
graphic documentation of Nagasaki or
Hiroshima by a single photographer. His
photographs were published in the Japa-
nese magazine Mainichi Shibun, but due
to postwar censorship they were not seen
widely until 1952, in the magazines Life and
Asahi Gurafu, in the book Kiroku-shashin:
Genbaku no Nagasaki (Photo-Record: The
Atomic Bomb of Nagasaki), and in the exhi-
bition and catalogue Family of Man (1955).
In 1965 he became violently ill with terminal
cancer, exactly twenty years after hisexpo-
sure to radiation at Nagasaki.
Born 1913 in Minya, Egypt
Died 1966 in Cairo, Egypt
Ramss Younan is recognized as one of
the founders of Egyptian Surrealism. He
finished his studies at the cole des Beaux-
Arts (School of Fine Arts) in Cairo in 1933
and became a secondary school art teacher
in 1934. From 1939 to 1946, Younan par-
ticipated in the Trotskyist group Art et Li
bert. He was involved in the publication of
a number of left-wing reviews, including La
Part du Sable (with poet Georges Henein,
19141973) and al-Tatawwurthe first
socialist magazine in Egypt. From 1942 to
1944, Younan edited Al Magalla al Gedida
(All-New Magazine), the first Trotskyist bul-
letin published in Arabic. Younan immigrat-
ed to France after World War II, showing in
the Expositions Surralistes Internationaux
(International Surrealist Exhibitions) in Paris
and Prague in 1947. In 1948, he published
a pamphlet with Henein, Notes sur une
ascse hystrique (Notes on a Hysterical
Asceticism), critiquing elements of Surre-
alist practice, particularly automatism and
the movements relationship to Marxism.
same year. Younan translated the writings
of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Arthur
Rimbaud in Arabic. He returned to Egypt
in 1956 and represented the country in the
1961 Bienal de So Paulo and the 1964
Venice Biennale.
801
Z while still an art student at Tehran School
Yosef Zaritsky
Born 1891 in Boryspol, Russian Empire
Died 1985 in Tel Aviv, Israel
Yosef Zaritsky was intimately connected
with the development of Israeli art. Zaritsky
studied at the Akademiya khudozhestv
(Academy of Art) in Kiev from 1910 to
1914. During World War I he was drafted
into the Russian army, serving from 1915
to 1917. In 1923 he immigrated to Jerusa-
lem, moving with his family to Tel Aviv in the
mid-1920s. There he became actively in-
volved in the citys cultural life, painting the
daily lives of the citys inhabitants, primari-
ly in watercolor. He went to Paris in 1927,
where he was inspired by the modernist
art he saw. With the New Horizons move-
ment in 1948, Zaritsky and his fellow art-
ists sought to promote progressive Zionist
modernism. Beginning in the 1930s, Zarit-
sky painted hundreds of watercolors of
Tel Aviv rooftops. The paintings became
increasing abstract and this period proved
a turning point for his practice. In 1948, he
became the Chairman of the Association of
Painters and Sculptors. He showed in the
1948 Venice Biennale. Zaritsky traveled to
Europe in the mid-1950s, where he mount-
ed a solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam in 1955.
Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid
Born 1901 in Bykada, Turkey
Died 1991 in Amman, Jordan
Fahrelnissa Zeid was one of the first women
to enroll at the Gzel Sanatlar Akademisi
(Academy of Fine Arts) in Istanbul in 1920.
She traveled to Paris in 1928, where she
studied at the Acadmie Ranson ([Paul]
Ranson Academy). Together with her first
husband, the novelist and writer Izzet Melih
Devrim (1887-1960), she traveled through-
out Europe and learned about European
modern art movements. Her second mar-
riage, to the Iraqi ambassador Prince Zeid
bin Hussein in 1934, also led to extensive
travel throughout Europe, the Middle East,
and the United States. It is not surprising,
therefore, that Zeids art shows influences
of Byzantine iconography and Sufism as
well as Western Fauvism (painterly quali
ties, bold colors) and Cubism (fractured
geometric forms). Although she became
most famous for her abstractions, Zeid also
painted portraits and scenes of everyday
life. In 1942 she joined and exhibited with
the D-Group in Istanbul. Two years later
she held her first solo show in Istanbul,
then exhibited work in London and Paris.
Her breakthrough came in 1950 with her
first New York show at the Hugo Gallery,
where she presented a series of large ab-
stractions. In 1975 Zeid moved to Amman,
Jordan, where she taught at the Royal Art
Institute and established the Fahrelnissa
Zeid Institute of Fine Arts.
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi
Born 1937 in Tehran, Iran
Lives and works in Paris, France
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi is considered
a pioneer of Iranian modern art. In 1960,
802
of Fine Arts, Zenderoudi inaugurated
Sagha Khaneh, a pictorial movement that
would revive the spirit of Eastern gestural
writing. The movement is named for water
dispensers around Tehran that are deco-
rated with popular illuminations or verses
from the Koran. Sagha Khaneh sought to
incorporate Iranian national, religious, and
folkloric elements. Zenderoudi soon re-
ceived recognition, winning awards at the
second Tehran Biennial and the Venice
Biennale (both 1960), the Bienal de Sao
Paulo (1961), and the Paris Biennale (1962).
In 1961 he moved to Paris, where he devel-
oped his calligraphic style. While his early
works remained figurative with patterns
of ornamental, calligraphic, and symbolic
elementssuch as Alyad (The Hand; 1959)
or Alshshams w alasad (The Sun and the
Lion; 1960)his later paintings focused on
the abstract qualities of Persian calligra-
phy. Zenderoudi once explained his goal of
global communication: Men the world over
are identical and can all read my work. What
matters is to achieve a harmony between
the person who created it and the spectator.
In 1972 his illustrated Quran won the UNE-
SCO annual award for most beautiful book.
Yuri Zlotnikov
Born 1930 in Moscow, USSR
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia
Yuri Zlotnikov was a pioneer of abstract art in
the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. Paintings, he
said, should reveal the laws of psychophys-
iological motor behavior and the nature of
reactions to color and form. He studied at the
Moscow Middle Art School for gifted children
in the 1940s and in the sculpture studio of the
Anna Golubkina muzey (Anna Golubkina Mu-
seum). In the 1950s, working with other art-
ists at the studio of Vladimir Slepyan (1930
1998), Zlotnikov sought a visual language
rooted in science and psychology. His first
abstract work, Schetchik Geygera (Geiger
Counter; 1956), was followed by his famous
Sistema signala (Signal System) series
(195762). Inspired by De Stijl painter Piet
Mondrian (18721944) and Suprematist art-
ist Kazimir Malevich (18781938), Zlotnikov
studied mathematics, cybernetics, and human
psychology. In compositions of small, colorful
geometric elements on a white background
he attempted to link human perception with
the communicative potential of abstraction.
After 1962 Zlotnikov returned to a figurative
style, and in the late 1960s he created sche-
matic compositions (Metaforikoy [Metapho-
rics]) inspired by music and mass movement.
He later favored a more impulsive, naive style
in his abstract improvisations. Zlotnikovs first
solo exhibition was held in 1962; the Moskovs-
kiy muzey sovremennogo iskusstva (Moscow
Museum of Modern Art) organized a major
retrospective in 2011.
Following page
Shozo Shimamoto creates a painting
by throwing bottles filled with paint against
a canvas at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition,
1956. Photo: Kiyoji Otsuji
804 805
 A Andrews, Julia Frances, Kuiyi Shen, and
Abaza, Mona. Twentieth-Century Egyptian
Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet
Shafei. Cairo: The American University in
Cairo Press, 2011.
Abraham, Itty, ed. South Asian Cultures of
the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in
India and Pakistan. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009.
Adamson, Natalie. Painting, Politics, and
the Struggle for the cole de Paris, 1944
1964. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.
Ades, Dawn, Guy Brett, Stanton L. Catlin,
and Rosemary O'Neill. Art in Latin America:
The Modern Era, 18201980. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Adorno, Theodor. Cultural Criticism and
Society. Written 1949, first published
1951; reprinted in Theodor W. Adorno.
Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 34. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1981. [To write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.]
Aguilar, Bertha, Mariana Sainz, and Azul
Aquino. Tiempos violentos: Reinterpretando
la Coleccin del Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil:
seminario de posgrado y exposicin de la
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico.
exh cat. Mxico: Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil;
New York: Americas Society, 2010.
Akademie der Knste (Berlin, Germany),
Inge Jens, Ulrich Dietzel, and Gudrun
Geissler. Zwischen Diskussion und
Disziplin: Dokumente zur Geschichte der
Akademie der Knste (Ost) 1945/1950 bis
1993. Berlin: Stiftung Archiv der Akademie
der Knste, 1997.
Akanji [Ulli Beier]. Wenger: An Example
of Afro-European Culture Contact. Black
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Orpheus 2 (1958): 2931.
Samir al-Khalil The Monument: Art, Vul-
garity, and Responsibility in Iraq, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.
Al Said, Shakir Hasan. Al-Bayyanat
al-Fanniyya f I lIraq. Baghdad, 1973,
3940. French translation in Silvia Naef,
Lart de lcriture arabe: Pass et prsent, Art of two Germanys: Cold War Cultures.
5859. Geneva: Slatkine, 1992.
Alexander, M. Darsie, and Bartholomew
Ryan. International Pop. exh cat. Minnea
polis: Walker Art Center, 2015.
Ali, Wijdan. Modern Islamic Art:
Development and Continuity. Gainesville,
FL: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Aliaga, Juan Vicente, ed. Desde el
Magreb al Mashreq: dilogos artsticos y
geopolticos sobre el norte de frica, Ori-
ente Prximo y el Mundo Islmico. Murcia:
Cendeac, 2012.
Alloway, Lawrence. The Arts and the
Mass Media. Architectural Design 28, no.2
(February 1958): 845. Mass audience,
mass communications, and arts. Critique
of Greenberg found at note 5. http://www.
tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-pa
pers/16/living-in-the-long-front#foot
note5_k9nc5fl (Accessed September 8,
2016)
Altshuler, Bruce. The Avant-Garde in
Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century,
New York: Abrams, 1994.
Ameline, Jean-Paul. Face l'histoire,
19331996: l'artiste moderne devant
l'vnement historique. exh. cat. Paris:
Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996.
Andrews, Julia F. Painters and Politics in
the Peoples Republic of China. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994.
Jonathan D. Spence. A Century in Crisis:
Modernity and Tradition in the Art of
Twentieth-Century China. New York:
Guggenheim Museum., 1998.
Anreus, Alejandro, Leonard Folgarait, and
Robin Adle Greeley, eds. Mexican
Muralism: A Critical History. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony.
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of
Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
Araeen, Rasheed. The Other Story:
Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain. exh.
cat. London: South Bank Centre, 1989.
Aupetitallot, Yves. GRAV, Groupe de
recherche d'art visuel, 19601968:
stratgies de participation: Horacio Garcia
Rossi, Julio Le Parc, Franois Morellet,
Francisco Sobrino, Jol Stein Yvaral: 7
juin-6 septembre 1998, MagasinCentre
d'art contemporain de Grenoble. exh cat.
Grenoble: Le Magasin, 1998.
Azoulay, Ariella, The Family of Man:
A Visual Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. In The Human Snapshot. Edited
by Thomas Keenan and Tirdad Zolgahdr,
1948. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.
B 19471980. Durham, NC: Duke University
Baere, Bart de, and Christian Hller.
L'Internationale: Post-war Avant-Gardes
between 1957 and 1986. Zurich: JRP/
Ringier, 2012.
Bahrani, Zainab, and Nada M. Shabout.
Modernism and Iraq. exh. cat. New York:
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery,
Columbia University, 2009.
Bar Or, Galia. Our Life Requires Art:
Art Museums in Kibbutzim. Sede Boqer:
The Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2010.
Barnouw, Dagmar. Germany 1945: Views
of War and Violence. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996.
Barron, Stephanie, and Sabine Eckmann.
Burstow, Robert. The Limits of
exh cat. New York: Abrams, in association
with the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, 2009.
, ed. Exiles + Emigrs: The Flight of
European Artists from Hitler. exh cat. Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, 1997.
Barson, Tanya, Peter Gorschlter, and
Petrine Archer Straw. Afro Modern:
Journeys through the Black Atlantic.
exh cat. Liverpool, [Eng.]: Tate Liverpool,
2010.
Baumeister, Willi. Das Unbekannte in der
Kunst (The Unknown in Art). Stuttgart:
Curt E Schwab, 1947.
Bean, Susan S., and Homi K. Bhabha.
Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after
Independence: from the Peabody Essex
Museum's Herwitz Collection. exh cat.
New York: Peabody Essex Museum in
association with Thames & Hudson, 2013.
Bearden, Romare. The Negro Artists
Dilemma. Critique 1 (November 1946): 22.
Beck, Ulrich. Cosmopolitan Vision.
Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2006.
Beier, Ulli. Neue Kunst in Afrika: Berlin:
Reimer, 1980.
Berger, Maurice, and Lynn Spigel.
Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the
Birth of American Television. exh cat.
New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Berggruen, Olivier, ed. Playing with Form:
Neoconcrete Art from Brazil. New York:
Dickinson, 2011.
Bill, Max. The Mathematical Approach
in Contemporary Art. Werk 3 (1949).
Reprinted in Arts and Architecture 71,
No. 8 (August 1954): 2021. Available
online at http://www.northeastern.edu/
seigen/1220DIR/MaxBillArticle.html
(accessed September 7, 2016).
Bohm-Duchen, Monica. Art and the
Second World War. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2013.
Bossaglia, Rossana, and Susanna Zatti. Il
Pop arte e l'Italia. Milan: Mazzotta, 1983.
Bown, Matthew Cullerne. Socialist Realist
Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998.
Braun, Emily, Megan M. Fontanella, and
Carol Stringari. Alberto Burri: The Trauma
of Painting. exh cat. New York: Guggen
heim, 2015.
Brito, Ronaldo. Neoconcretism: Apex and
Rupture of the Brazilian Constructivist
Project. 2nd ed. So Paulo: Cosac & Naify
Edices, 1999.
Brown, Paul, et al., eds. White Heat Cold
Logic: British Computer Art, 19601980.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Brown, Rebecca M. Art for a Modern India,
Press, 2009.
Bru Sascha, Benedikt Hjartarson, eds.
Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde,
Modernism, and the Fate of a Continent.
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009.
Budkowska, Marta, and Marcin Mutter
milch. Sztuka Polska wobec Holokaustu =
Polish Art and the Holocaust. Warsaw:
Zydowski Instytut Historyczny im.
Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2013.
Burri, Alberto. Words Are No Help.
In The New Decade: 22 European Painters
and Sculptors. Edited by Andrew Carnduff
Ritchie, 82. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1955.
Museum of Modern Art, 2014.
Modernist Art as a Weapon of the Cold
War: Reassessing the Unknown Patron
of the Monument to the Unknown Political
Prisoner. Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 1
(1997): 6880.
Buruma, Ian. Year Zero: A History of 1945.
New York: Penguin Press, 2013.
Butler, Rex. Radical Revisionism: An
Anthology of Writings on Australian Art.
Fortitude Valley, Queensland: Institute of
Modern Art, 2005.
C 19631968. exh. cat. So Paulo: Museu de
Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, Rachel
Weiss, and Lszl Beke. Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin,
1950s1980s. exh cat. New York: Queens
Museum of Art, 1999.
Carbone, Teresa A., Kellie Jones, Connie
H. Choi, Dalila Scruggs, and Cynthia Ann
Young. Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the
Sixties. exh cat. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Mu
seum; New York: The Monacelli Press, 2014.
Cardinal, Philippe, and Hoda Makram-
Ebeid. Le corps dcouvert. Paris: Hazan;
Institut du monde arabe, 2012.
Carvajal, Rina, Alma Ruiz, and Susan
Martin. The Experimental Exercise of
Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias
Goeritz, Hlio Oiticica, Mira Schendel. exh.
cat. Los Angeles: Museum of Contempo
rary Art, 1999.
Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The
Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the
Cold War. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
Centro de Arte Reina Sofa (Madrid).
Arte MAD: exposicin organizada por el
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofa. exh cat. Madrid: Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1997.
Csaire, Aim. Wifredo Lam des
Antilles. Cahiers dArt 2021
(19451946): 357359.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, 2000. Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007.
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method:
Toward Deimperialization. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Chike Dike, Paul, and Pat Oyelola, eds.
The Zaria Art Society: A New
Consciousness. Lagos: National Gallery
of Art, Nigeria, 1998.
China Artists Association. New Chinese
Painting Movement. Meishu, 1954.
Chiu, Melissa, and Sheng Tian Zheng.
Art and Chinas Revolution. exh cat.
New York: Asia Society; in association with
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Chong, Doryun, ed. Tokyo, 19551970:
A New Avant-Garde. New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.
Chong, Doryun, Michio Hayashi, Kenji
Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds. From
Postwar to Postmodernism: Art in Japan,
19451989: Primary Documents. exh cat.
New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.
Choucair, Saloua. How the Arab
Understood Visual Art. 1951; English
translation: ARTMargins 4, no. 1 (February
2015): 119128.
Clark, Lygia. On Ritual, c. 1960.
Translated in Lygia Clark:
The Abandonment of Art, 19481988.
Edited by Cornelia H. Butler and Luis
Prez-Oramas. 158. exh cat. New York:
Cobbing, Bob, and Peter Mayer, eds.
Concerning Concrete Poetry. London:
Writers Forum, 1978.
Cohen, Joan Lebold. The New Chinese
Painting, 19491986. New York:
Abrams, 1987.
Connelly, Matthew. Taking Off the Cold
War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict
during the Algerian War for Independence.
American Historical Review 105, no. 3
(June 2000): 73969.
Cordeiro, Waldemar, and Cacilda Teixeira
da Costa. Aproximaes do esprito pop,
Arte Moderna, 2003.
D
Dadi, Iftikhar. Modernism and the Art of
Muslim South Asia. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2010.
Daftari, Fereshteh, and Layla S. Diba.
Iran Modern. exh. cat. New York: Asia
Society Museum, 2013.
Dalmia, Yashodhara. The Making of
Modern Indian Art: The Progressives.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Day, Tony, and Maya H. T. Liem. Cultures at
War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression
in Southeast Asia. Ithaca, NY: Southeast
Asia Program, Cornell University, 2010.
807
de Kooning, Willem. What Abstract Art
Means to Me. Museum of Modern Art
Bulletin 18, no.3 (Spring 1951): 48.
Degot, Ekaterina. Moskva Berlin Berlin
Moskau, 19502000: Iskusstvo, sovre
mennyj vzgljad. Moscow: Trilistnik 2004.
Deliss, Clmentine. Seven Stories About
Modern Art in Africa. London:
Whitechapel, 1995.
Denegri, Jea. Constructive Approach
Art: Exat 51 and New Tendencies. Zagreb:
Horetzky, 2004.
Direche-Slimani, Karima. Bouayed
Anissa, Lart et lAlgrie insurge. Les Avant-Garde Art in Japan, 19451965: An
traces de lpreuve: 19541962, ENAG
Editions, 2005. Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la Mditerrane. 115116
(December 2006): 325329. Accessed
online, September 7, 2016, at http://
remmm.revues.org/2935.
Djuric, Dubravka, and Miko
uvakovic, eds. Impossible Histories:
Historic Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes,
and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia,
19181991. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003.
Dobrenko, Evgeny. Political Economy of
Socialist Realism. Translated by Jesse M.
Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2007.
, and Eric Naiman, eds.
The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and
Ideology of Soviet Space, Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2003.
Dossin, Catherine. The Rise and Fall of
American Art, 1940s1980s: A Geopolitics
of Western Art Worlds. London: Ashgate,
2015.
Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan
in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1999.
Drosos, Nikolas. Building Together:
Construction Sites in a Divided Europe
During the 1950s. In East West Central:
Re-Building Europe, 19501990. Vol. 1:
Re-humanizing Architecture: New Forms of
Community, 19501970. Edited by kos
Moravnszky and Judith Hopfengrtner.
Basel; Berlin: Birkhuser / De Gruyter,
2016.
Dubuffet, Jean. Anticultural Positions,
1951. Lecture, The Arts Club of Chicago.
At http://www.austincc.edu/noel/writings/
Anticultural%20Positions.pdf (accessed
September 7, 2016). Reprinted in Valrie
Da Costa and Fabrice Hergott Da Costa
and Hergott. Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writ-
ings and Interviews. Barcelona: Polgrafa;
New York: D.A.P. [distributor], 2006.
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War, Civil Rights:
Race and the Image of American
Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
Duggan, Christopher, and Christopher
Wagstaff. Italy in the Cold War: Politics,
Culture and Society 194858. Oxford:
Berg, 1995.
Duplaix, Sophie, et al. Paris-Delhi-Bombay.
exh. cat. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2011.
Dymschitz, Alexander. ber die for
malistische Richtung in der deutschen
Malerei,Tgliche Rundschau (19 and 24
November 1948). Reprinted in Elimar
Schubbe ed. Dokumente zur Kunst-,
Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, Vol.
1, 19491970. Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972,
97103.
808
E Garlake, Margaret. New Art New World:
Efflatoun, Inji, on painting while impris British Art in Postwar Society. New Haven,
oned in 1959. In Muthakirat Inji Aflatoun CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
(1993): 236244. Gerhold, Christiane-Valerie,
Efimova, Alla, and Lev Manovich, eds. Zur Kunstentwicklung im Libanon seit
Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture. 1950: kulturelle Identitt zwischen Orient
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, und Okzident. Saarbrcken: VDM Verlag
1993. Dr. Mller, 2008.
Eigner, Saeb, Isabelle Causs, and Gillen, Eckhart. German Art: From
Christopher Masters. Art of the Middle East: Beckmann to Richter: Images of a Divided
Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab Country. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag,
World and Iran. London: Merrell, 2010. 1997.
Elliot, David, et al. Reconstructions: Giunta, Andrea. Avant-garde,
Internationalism, and Politics: Argentine Art
Exhibition. exh. cat. Oxford, [Eng.]: Museum in the Sixties. Durham, NC: Duke University
of Modern Art, 1985. Press, 2007.
Enwezor, Okwui, ed. The Short Century: Godfrey, Mark. Abstraction and the
Independence and Liberation Movements in Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Africa, 19451994. Munich: Prestel, 2001. Press, 2007.
Enwonwu, Ben. Into the Abstract Jungle: Goeritz, Mathias. Arte abstracto o arte
A Criticism of the New Trend in Nigerian no figurativo?: (Prefiero el trmino arte
Art. Drum (Johannesburg, June 1963): abstracto como trmino generalizador
2529. y ya). Sur (Buenos Aires), no. 209210
Erber, Pedro R. Breaching the Frame: (March-April 1952): 159160.
The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Gokalp, Sbastien. Figuration Narrative:
Japan. Oakland: University of California Paris, 19601972. exh. cat. Paris: Ed. de
Press, 2015. Runion des muses nationaux, 2008.
Evers, Hans Gerhard, ed. Das Menschen- Golan, Romy. Muralnomad: The Paradox
bild in Unserer Zeit (The Image of Man of Wall Painting, Europe, 19271957. New
in Our Times). Darmstadt: Darmstdter Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Verlags-Anstalt, 1950. Goldman, Shifra M. Contemporary
Mexican Painting in a Time of Change.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
F Goscha, Christopher E., and Christian F.
Farmer, John Alan. The New Frontier: Art Ostermann. Connecting Histories:
and Television, 196065. exh. cat. Austin, Decolonization and the Cold War in South-
TX: Austin Museum of Art, 2000. east Asia, 19451962. Washington, DC:
Feist, Gnter, Eckhart Gillen, and Beatrice Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009.
Vierneisel. Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, Gtz, K. O. Elektronische Malerei und ihre
19451990: Aufstze, Berichte, Material- Programmierung. Das Kunstwerk 14 (June
ien. Berlin: Museumspdagogischer Dienst 1961): 1423.
Berlin in Zusammenarbeit mit der Stiftung Grasskamp, Walter. Ist die Moderne eine
Kulturfonds, 1996. Epoche?: Kunst als Modell. Munich: Beck,
Feldman, Hannah. From a Nation Torn: 2002.
Decolonizing Art and Representation in Greenberg, Clement. Abstract and
France, 19451962. Durham, NC: Duke Representational. Essay delivered as
University Press, 2014. Ryerson Lecture, Yale University, 1954.
Ferrari, Leon. La respuesta de la artista. Reprinted in Clement Greenberg:
Propsito 106 (Buenos Aires, Argentina), The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol.
(October 7, 1965): n.p. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 19501956.
Fischer, Joseph. Modern Indonesian Art: Edited by John OBrian, 186193. Chicago
Three Generations of Tradition and Change, and London: University of Chicago Press,
19451990. exh. cat. Jakarta: Panitia 1993.
Pameran KIAS; New York: Festival of Grenier, Catherine. Multiple Modernities,
Indonesia, 1990. 19051970: from the collections of the
Foulcher, Keith. Social Commitment in National Museum of Modern Art. exh cat.
Literature and the Arts: The Indonesian Paris: ditions du Centre Pompidou, 2014.
Institute of Peoples Culture, 19501965. Groys, Boris, and Charles Rougle.
Clayton, Vic.: Centre of Southeast Asian The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde,
Studies, Monash University, 1986. Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond.
Francis, Mark. Les annes pop: Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
19561968. exh cat. Paris: ditions du Press, 1992.
Centre Pompidou, 2001. Guadagnini, Walter. Pop art Italia:
Friedrich, Julia, and Andreas Prinzing. 19581968. exh. cat. Cinisello Balsamo,
So fing man einfach an, ohne viele worte: Milan: Silvana, 2005.
Ausstellungswesen und Sammlungspolitik Guha, Ranajit. History at the Limit of
in den Ersten Jahren nach dem Zweiten World-History. New York: Columbia
Weltkrieg. Cologne, Germany: Akademie University Press, 2002.
Verlag, 2013. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the
Frieling, Rudolf, Dieter Daniels, and Sybille Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expression-
Weber. Medien Kunst Aktion: die 60er ism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago:
und 70er Jahre in Deutschland = Media University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Art Action: The 1960s and 1970s in , and Manuel J. Borja-Villel.
Germany. Vienna; New York: Springer. 1997. Be-bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images
and All That Jazz, 19461956. exh. cat.
Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de
G Barcelona, 2007.
Gao, Minglu. Total Modernity and the Gullar, Ferreira. Experincia Neoconcreta:
Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Momento-limite da arte. So Paulo, SP:
Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Cosac Naify, 2007.
Gupta, Atreyee. In a Post-colonial Diction:
Postwar Abstraction as Aesthetics of
Modernization. Art Journal 72, no. 3 (Fall
2013): 3047.
Guttuso, Renato. On Realism, the
Present, and Other Things. Paragone 85
(Florence, 1957): 5374. Translated in
Theories and Documents of Contemporary
Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings.
Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz,
178179. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996.
H York: Prestel, 2015.
Hall, Stuart, and Sarat Maharaj. Modernity
and Difference. London: Institute of
International Visual Arts, 2001.
Hanna, Emily G., Lauren Haynes, and Abbe
Schriber. Spiral: Perspectives on an African
American Art Collective. exh cat. New York:
The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2011.
Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor's Shadow:
Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in
Senegal, 19601995. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004.
Harrison, Martin. Transition: The London
Art Scene in the Fifties. exh cat. London: Mer
rell, in association with Barbican Art, 2002.
Hassan, Salah, ed. Ibrahim El-Salahi:
A Visionary Modernist. exh cat. New York:
Museum of African Art, 2013.
Heathcote, Christopher, A Quiet
Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art,
19461968. Melbourne: Text Publishing,
1996.
Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans
and the Global Uranium Trade. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Entangled Geographies: Empire and
Technopolitics in the Global Cold War.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
Heibel, Yule F. Reconstructing the Subject:
Modernist Painting in Western Germany,
19451950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1995.
Held, Jutta. Kunst und Kunstpolitik, 1945
49: Kulturaufbau in Deutschland nauf dem
2.Weltkrieg. Berlin: Elefanten, 1981.
Henein, Georges. The Prestige of Terror.
Translated by Tom Ridgeway, 1945. http://
www.egyptiansurrealism.com/index.php?/
contents/the-prestige-of-terror/ (accessed
September 7, 2016).
Hermand, Jost, and Biddy Martin. Mod
ernism Restored: West German Painting
in the 1950s. New German Critique 32
(1984): 2341. Pollock, 1958. In Essays on the Blurring
Herrera, Mara Jos Porro. Pop!: la
consagracin de la primavera. exh. cat.
Buenos Aires: Fundacin OSDE, 2010.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes:
The Short Twentieth Century, 19141991.
London: Michael Joseph, 1994.
Holt, Claire. Art in Indonesia: Continuities
and Change. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1967.
Honisch, Dieter, Lucius Grisebach,
and Jrgen Schweinebraden. Kunst in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 19451985.
Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen
Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1985.
Hoptman, Laura, and Tomas Pospiszyl,
eds. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for
Eastern and Central European Art since the
1950s. New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2002.
Hughes, Robert. The Art of Australia:
A Critical Survey. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin
Books, 1966.
Hyman, James. The Battle for Realism:
Figurative Art in Britain During the Cold
War, 194560. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001.
I 27, 1964): 27. Also published as Elmnts
Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno.
Informalismo y nueva figuracin en la colec-
cin del IVAM. exh. cat. Museo Nacional de
Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, April 25May
28, 1995. Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura,
1995.
J King, Richard, ed. Art in Turmoil: The
Jachec, Nancy. Politics and Painting at the
Venice Biennale, 194864: Italy and the
Idea of Europe. Manchester, UK: Manches
ter University Press, 2007.
Joachimides, Christos M., Norman Rosen
thal, and Wieland Schmied, eds. German
Art in the 20th Century: Painting and
Sculpture, 19051985. exh. cat. London:
Royal Academy of Arts, 1985.
Jolivette, Catherine, ed. British Art in the
Nuclear Age. Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2014.
Jorn, Asger. Menneskedyret (The
Human Animal), [195051]. In Per Hofman
Hansen, Bibliografi over Asger Jorns
skrifter. Silkeborg, Denmark: Sikeborg
Kunstmuseum, 1988. English translation in
October 141 (Summer 2012): 5358.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe
since 1945. London: Penguin Books,
2005.
Jules-Rosette, Bennetta. Black Pairs:
The African Writers Landscape. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1998.
K Edited by Doryun Chong, 141142. New
Kane, Patrick M. The Politics of Art in
Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and
Nation-Building. London: I. B. Tauris, 2013.
Kantor, Tadeusz. Representation Loses
More and More Its Charm. Excerpt from
Carnet des notes, 1955. In Tadeusz
Kantor. Tadeusz Kantor: Metamorphoses.
Translated by Jerzy Lisowski, 2335. Paris:
Galerie de France, 1982; and Kristine
Stiles and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art: A Source-
book of Artists' Writings, 58. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996.
Kaprow, Allan. The Legacy of Jackson
Lee, Christopher J. Making a World after
of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, 19.
Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993.
Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism:
Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice
in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2007.
Karnadi, Koes, and Agung Hujatnikajen
nong. Modern Indonesian Art: From Raden
Saleh to the Present Day. Denpasar, Bali,
Indonesia: Koes Artbooks, 2006.
Karnouk, Liliane. Modern Egyptian Art,
19102003. Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 2005.
Katzenstein, Ins, ed. Listen, Here, Now!
Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the
Avant-Garde. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 2004.
Kazuo, Shiraga. Koi koso (Action Only),
Gutai 3 (October 1955). In Kazuo Shiraga:
Six Decades. Translated by Reiko Tomii,
6061. New York: McCaffrey Fine Art,
2009.
Kee, Joan. Contemporary Korean Art:
Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2013.
Khadda, Mohammed. Elmnts pour un
art nouveau, Revolution africaine 74 (June
pour un Art Nouveau. Algeria: U.N.A.P [Un
ion Nationale des Arts Plastiques], 1972.
Kholeif, Omar, and Candy Stobbs. Imper-
fect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern
to the Contemporary; Works from the
Barjeel Art Foundation. exh cat. London:
Whitechapel Gallery; Munich, London, New
Chinese Cultural Revolution, 196676.
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
Kirschenmann, Johannes, and Florian
Matzner, eds. Documenta Kassel, Skulptur
Mnster, Biennale Venedig. Munich:
Kopaed, 2007.
Knk, Milan. Actions for which at least
some documentation remains, 19621995,
Prague: Gallery, 2000.
. Aktual Schmuck, Czechoslovakia.
Cullompton, UK: Beau Geste Press, 1974.
Kolar, Jiri. Snad nic, snad neco [Maybe
Nothing, Maybe Something]. Literrn
noviny 14 (1965): 67. Reprinted in Jiri
Sevcik, et al. Cesk umen, 19381989
(Czech Art, 19381989), 290292. [An
swer to what is poetry in response to trips
to Auschwitz.]
Kolenik, Ljiljana. Socialism and Moderni-
ty: Arts, Culture, Politics: 19501974. exh.
cat. Zagreb, Croatia: Institut za Povijest
Umjetnosti, 2012.
Kusama, Yayoi A Woman Alone Entering
the International Art World, 1961. Reprint
ed in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in
Japan. 19451989: Primary Documents.
York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012.
Kuttner, Manfred, et al., Presserklrung
zur Ausstellung Kaiserstrae, May 1963.
Reprinted in Sediment, no. 7 (2004): 72.
L Twentieth Century. New York: A. A. Knopf,
Lahusen, Thomas, and Evgeny Dobrenko,
eds. Socialist Realism Without Shores. Dur
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Landau, Paul S., and Deborah D. Kaspin.
Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial
and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: Universi
ty of California Press, 2002.
of My Century: Reinventing the Language
Empire: the Bandung Moment and Its
Political Afterlives. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2010.
Lee, Pamela M. Aesthetic Strategist:
Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War, and a
Theory of Mid-Century Modernism. Octo-
ber 138 (Fall 2011): 1536.
Lee, Sarah, and Nguyen Nhur Huy. Essays
on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese
Art. Singapore: Singapore Art Museum,
2009.
Lenssen, Anneka. Adham Ismail's Radical
Arabesque (Syria, 19361952), Muqarnas
34 (forthcoming 2017).
, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, eds.
Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary
Documents. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, forthcoming 2017.
Lindey, Christine. Art in the Cold
War: From Vladivostok to Kalamazoo,
19451962. New York: New Amsterdam
Books, 1990.
Lindsay, Jennifer, and Maya H. T. Liem.
Heirs to World Culture: Being Indonesian
19501965. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012.
Lu, Ge. My understanding of the
combination of revolutionary realism and
revolutionary romanticism (We dui geming
xiansizhayi he geming langmanzhuyi jiche
de hijie), Fine Arts (Meishu) (February
1959): n.p.
L, Peng. A History of Art in 20th-Century
China. Translated by Bruce Gordon Doar.
Milano: Charta, 2010.
M Studies, 2008.
Malangatana, Valente. Valente Malanga
tana, Mein Leben, and Valente Malanga
tana, Warum ich male (Interview mit Julian
Beinart). In Ulli Beier, Neue Kunst in Afrika.
107116. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag,
1980.
Marotti, William A. Money, Trains, and
Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Ja-
pan. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2013.
Martin, Courtney J. Non-compositional
and Non-hierarchical: Rasheed Araeens
Search for the Conceptual and the Political
in British Sculpture. In Anglo-AmericanEx-
change in Post-War Sculpture, 19451975.
Edited by Rebecca Peabody, 122132. Los
Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum and Getty
Research Institute, 2011.
Martins, Srgio B. Constructing an
Avant-Garde: Art in Brazil, 19491979,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
Masey, Jack, and Conway Lloyd Morgan.
Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions
and their Role in the Cultural Cold War,
Baden, Switzerland: Lars Mller, 2008.
Mason, Catherine. A Computer in the Art
Room: The Origins of British Computer Arts
195080. Hindrigham, Norfolk, UK: JJG,
2008.
Massey, Anne. Out of the Ivory Tower:
The Independent Group and Popular
Culture. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 2013.
Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe's
1999.
McCabe, Cynthia Jaffee. The Golden
Door: Artist-Immigrants of America,
18761976. exh. cat. Washington, D.C.:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976.
McDonough, Tom. The Beautiful Language
Collection. Translated by Keith Blasing. St.
of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945
1968, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Mehring, Christine. Television Art's
Abstract Starts: Europe circa 19441969.
October 125 (Summer 2008): 2964.
Meier, Christian J. Die Dichotomie
Figuration versus Abstraktion in der
deutschen Kunst von 1945 bis 1985.
Basel: epubli, 2012.
Mercer, Kobena. Cosmopolitan
Modernisms. London: Institute of
International Visual Arts; Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005.
. Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
Mercer, Kobena, ed. Discrepant Abstrac-
tion. London: Institute of International
Visual Arts, 2006.
Mestrovic, Matko. Untitled. Published as,
The Ideology of New Tendencies, nove
tendencije 2. Exh. cat., Galerija suvremene
umjetnosti, Zagreb, 1963, n.p. Translated
in A Little-Known Story about a Movement,
a Magazine, and the Computers Arrival in
Art: New Tendencies and Bit International,
19611973. Edited by Margit Rosen et al.,
114117. Karlsruhe, DE: ZKM/Center for
Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2011.
Mesch, Claudia. Modern Art at the Berlin
Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold
War Germanys. London: Tauris Academic
Michalka, Matthias. Changing Channels:
Art and Television 19631987. exh. cat.
Cologne: Walther Knig; Vienna: MUMOK
Museum Moderner Kunst, 2010.
Mignolo, Walter D. Local Histories/Global
Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Mitchell, Timothy, ed. Questions of
Modernity. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mitter, Partha. The Triumph of Modernism:
Indias Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922
1947. London: Reaktion Books, 2007.
. Interventions. Decentering Modernism:
Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the
Periphery. Art Bulletin 90, no. 4 (2008):
53174.
Morgan, Jessica, and Flavia Frigeri, eds.
The World Goes Pop. exh cat. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2015.
Mudimbe, V. Y. The Surreptitious Speech
Prsence Africaine and the Politics of
Otherness, 19471987. Chicago: Universi
ty of Chicago Press, 1992.
Mufti, Aamir. Enlightenment in the Colony:
The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Post-
colonial Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007.
Mullen, Bill. Afro-Orientalism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Munroe, Alexandra. Japanese Art After
1945: Scream Against the Sky. exh. cat.
New York: Abrams, 1994.
Munsterberg, Hugo. The Art of Modern
Japan: From the Meiji Restoration to the
Meiji Centennial, 18681968. New York:
Hacker Art Books, 1978.
Muzei Liudviga and Gosudarstvennyi russ
kii muzei (Saint Petersburg, Russia). Re-
alism in Russian Art of the Second Half of
the 20th Century: From a Moscow Private
Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2012.
Muzej suvremene umjetnosti (Zagreb,
Croatia). exat 51 & New Tendencies:
Avant-Garde and International Events in
Croatian Art in the 1950s and 1960s. exh.
cat. Centro Cultural de Cascais, Portugal,
MayJune, 2001. Zagreb, Croatia: Muzej
suvremene umjetnosti, 2002.
N
Naef, Silvia. A la recherche d'une
modernit arabe: l'volution des arts
plastiques en Egypte, au Liban et en Irak.
Geneva: Slatkine, 1996.
Nakamori, Yasufumi Katsura. Picturing
Modernism in Japanese Architecture:
Photographs by Yasuhiro Ishimoto. Exh. cat.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Naqvi, Akbar. Image & Identity: Painting
and Sculpture in Pakistan, 19471997.
Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
809
Nelson, Adele. The Monumental and the
Ephemeral: The So Paulo Bienal and
the Emergence of Abstraction in Brazil,
19461954. PhD diss., New York
University, 2012.
Newman, Barnett. The First Man Was an
Artist. Tigers Eye, No. 1 (October 1947):
5760.
Noguchi, Isamu. Towards a Reintegration
of the Arts. Excerpted in Isamu Noguchi:
Essays and Conversations. Edited by
Diane Apostolos-Cappadona and Bruce
Altshuler, 2631. New York: H. N. Abrams
in association with the Isamu Noguchi
Foundation, 1994.
O Putzel, Howard. A Problem for Critics.
O'Brien, Elaine, et al., eds. Modern Art in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Intro-
duction to Global Modernisms. Chichester,
West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley
Blackwell, 2013.
Okeke, Uche. Zaria Art Society Manifes
to. Natural Synthesis (1960): 20809.
Okeke-Agulu, Chika. Postcolonial
Modernism: Art and Decolonization in
Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015.
rnek, Cangl, and agdas ngr. Turkey Rapaport, Brooke Kamin, and Kevin Stay
in the Cold War: Ideology and Culture.
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
P End of a Pen: Writing Pan-African Politics
Paris-New York (19051968). exh. cat.
Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1977.
Paris 1937Paris 1957: Crations en
France. exh. cat. Paris: Centre Georges
Pompidou, 1981.
Peabody, Rebecca, ed. Pacific Standard
Time: Los Angeles Art, 19451980. exh.
cat. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute
and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011.
Pedrosa, Mario. The Paradox of Modern
Brazilian Art, 1959. In Glria Ferreira and
Paulo Herkenhoff, eds. Mario Pedrosa: An
Anthology of Primary Documents. Translat
ed by Stephen Berg, 195. New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
, Glria Ferreira, and Paulo Herkenhoff.
Mrio Pedrosa: Primary Documents. New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
Petersen, Steven. Space-Age Aesthetics:
Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and the Postwar
European Avant-Garde. University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2009.
Pieprzak, Katarzyna. Imagined Museums:
Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010.
Piotrowski, Piotr. In the Shadow of Yalta:
Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe,
19451989. London: Reaktion Books,
2009.
Plummer, Brenda Gayle. In Search of
Power: African Americans in the Era of
Decolonization, 19561974. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Prschmann, Dirk, and Margriet Schave
maker, eds. ZERO. Translated by Jennifer
Taylor. exh. cat. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Mu
seum; Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther Knig, 2015.
Potts, Alex. Experiments in Modern
Realism: World-making, Politics, and the
Everyday in Postwar European and
American Art. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2013.
810
Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: A S Souza, Francis Newton. Text in catalog of
Peoples History of the Third World. New Sabapathy, T. K., and Susie Koay.
York: New Press, 2007. Modernity and Beyond: Themes in South-
Presentation par Snac de lunique east Asian Art. Singapore: Singapore Art
exposition collective, text for exhibition Museum, 1996.
organized by revue Terrases at Le Nombre Sadequain, S. M., and W. K. Bhatty. On
dor, Algier (21-31 October 1953). My Work as a Painter in Pakistan. Leonar-
Reprinted in Jean Snac. Visages dAlgerie: do 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 34547.
regards sur lart. Paris: ditions Paris- Salami, Gitti and Monica Blackmun
Mditerrane, 2002. 120-121. Vison, eds. A Companion to Modern
Price, Rachel. The Object of the Atlantic: African Art. West Sussex, UK: Wiley
Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Blackwell, 2013.
Spain, 18681968. Evanston, IL: North Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American
western University Press, 2014. Painting: A History of Abstract Expression-
Primus, Zdenek. Art is Abstraction: Czech ism. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970.
Visual Culture of the Sixties. Prague: Kant, Schadeberg, Jurgen. Sof'town Blues:
2003. Images from the Black '50s. Hurlyvale, SA:
African Book Centre, 1994.
Exhibition statement, 1945. Reprinted in Schimmel, Annemarie. Calligraphy and
Edward Alden Jewell Towards Abstract, or Islamic Culture. New York: New York
Away. New York Times, 1 July 1945, Arts University Press, 1984.
and Leisure, p. 22. Schimmel, Paul, ed. Destroy the Picture:
Painting the Void, 19491962. exh. cat. Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art;
R New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2012.
Ramrez, Mari Carmen, and Hctor Olea, Schllhammer, Georg, and Ruben
eds. Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art Arevshatyan, eds. Sweet Sixties: Specters
in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale and Spirits of a Parallel Avant-garde, Berlin:
University Press, 2004. Sternberg Press, 2013.
Sekoto, Gerard. I Am an African. Address Asia, and the Onset of the Cold War,
ton. Vital Forms: American Art and Design to Second Conference of Negro Writers
in the Atomic Age, 19401960. exh. cat. and Artists, organized by Society of African
New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art in Culture (Prsence Africaine), Rome, 1959.
association with H. N. Abrams, 2001. See also: N. C. Manganyi. Gerard Sekoto:
Ratcliff, Anthony James. Liberation at the I am an African: A Biography. Johannes
burg, SA: Wits University Press, 2004.
of Cultural Struggle. PhD diss., University Shabout, Nada M. Modern Arab Art:
of Massachusetts Amherst, 2009. Formation of Arab Aesthetics. Gainesville:
Reichardt, Jasia. Cybernetic Serendipity: University Press of Florida, 2007.
The Computer and the Arts. exh. cat. , Wassan al-Khudairi, and Deena Chalabi.
London; New York: Studio International, Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art. Doha:
1968. Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art;
Reid, Susan Emily, and David Crowley. Milan: Skira, 2010.
Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Shiff, Richard. Between Sense and De
Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe. Oxford; Kooning. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
New York: Berg, 2000. Shohno, Naomi. The Legacy of Hiroshima:
Reiko, Tomii. Radicalism in the Wilderness: Its Past, Our Future. Tokyo: Kosei
International Contemporaneity and 1960s Publishing, 1986.
Art in Japan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Sidharta, Amir. Depicting History: Indo-
2016. nesian Modernism in Transition: Selected
Restany, Pierre. 60/90: Trente ans de nou- Masterpieces from the Indonesian National
veau ralisme. Paris: La Diffrence, 1990. Gallery. Jakarta: Ministry of Culture and
Rock, David, ed. Latin America in the Tourism of the Republic of Indonesia, 2008.
1940's: War and Postwar Transitions. Siegel, Katy. Since '45: America and the
Berkeley: University of California Press, Making of Contemporary Art, London:
1994. Reaktion, 2011.
Rhrl, Boris. World History of Realism in Singh, Kishore. Mumbai Modern:
Visual Arts 18301990: Naturalism, Progressive Artists' Group, 19472013.
Socialist Realism, Social Realism, Magic exh. cat. New Delhi: Delhi Art Gallery,
Realism, New Realism and Documentary 2013.
Photography. Hildesheim; Zrich; New Siqueiros, D. A. Hacia el realismo en la
York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013. integracin plastic. Lecture, in Palabras de
Romijn, Peter, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Siqueiros. Edited by David Alfaro Siqueiros
Segal. Divided Dreamworlds?: The Cultural and Raquel Tibol, 371. Mxico: Fondo de
Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam: Cultura Econmica, 1996.
Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Smith, Bernard, Terry Smith, and
Rosen, Margit, ed. A Little-Known Story Christopher Heathcote. Australian Painting,
about a Movement, a Magazine, and the 17882000, South Melbourne, Vic.: Oxford
Computer's Arrival in Art. New Tendencies University Press, 2001.
and Bit International, 19611973, Karls Smith, Terry. Contemporary Art: World
ruhe, Germany: ZKM/Center for Art and Currents. London: Laurence King; Upper
Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall,
Rosenfeld, Allan, and Norton T. Dodge, 2011.
eds. Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Solt, Mary Ellen, ed. Concrete Poetry: A
Experience, 19561986. New York: World View. Bloomington: Indiana
Thames and Hudson, 1996. University Press, 1968.
Progressive Artist Group of Bombay
exhibition, July 7, 1949. Reprinted in
Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern depuis 1945. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale
Indian Art: The Progressives, 43. New
Dehli; New York: Oxford University Press,
2001. France 194554; New Images of Man.
Stonard, John-Paul. Fault Lines: Art in
Germany 1945-1955. London:
Ridinghouse, 2007.
Surez, Osbel, Mara Amalia Garca, and
Erica Witschey. Cold America: Geometric
Abstraction in Latin America (19341973).
Madrid: Fundacin Juan March, 2011.
Sullivan, Edward J., ed. Latin American Art
in the Twentieth Century. London: Phaidon
Press, 1996.
Summers, David. Real Spaces: World Art
History and the Rise of Western Modernism.
London: Phaidon, 2003.
Szapoczikow, Alina. Visual Artists on
Visual Art. Przeglad Kulturalny 16 (1957):
8. Also in Alina Szapoczikow. Translated
by Maja Lavergne, 148. exh. cat. Warsaw:
Galeria Zacheta, 1998.
T Third World Interventions and the Making
Tarling, Nicholas. Britain, Southeast
University Press, 2007.
19451950. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Taylor, Nora A. and Boreth Ly. Modern
and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art:
An Anthology. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia
Program Publications, Southeast Asia
Program, Cornell University, 2012.
Tiampo, Ming. Gutai: Decentering
Modernism. exh. cat. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011.
, and Alexandra Munroe, eds. Gutai:
Splendid Playground. New York:
Guggenheim Museum, 2013.
Tillich, Paul. A Prefatory Note by Paul
Tillich. In Peter Selz, New Images of Man.
exh. cat. New York: The Museum of
Modern Art, 1959.
To Belldo, Ramn. Le XXe sicle dans
l'art algrien. Paris: AICA Press, 2003.
Tredici, Robert Del. At Work in the Fields
of the Bomb. New York: Perennial Library,
1987.
Tronche, Ann. L'art des annes 1960:
chroniques d'une scne parisienne. Paris:
Hazan, 2012.
Turner, Fred. The Family of Man and the
Politics of Attention in Cold War America.
Public Culture 24, no. 1 (2012): 5584.
. Romantic Automatism: Art,
Technology, and Collaborative Labor in
Cold War America. Journal of Visual
Culture 7, no. 1 (2008): 526.
Twins Seven Seven. Chief Councillor
Twins Seven-Seven, Musik und Politik:
Interview mit Ulli Beier, November 1979.
In Ulli Beier, Neue Kunst in Afrika. Berlin:
Reimer, 1980.
U The Bombing of Nagasaki: A Photographic
Ushiroshoji, Masahiro. The Birth of
Modern Art in Southeast Asia: Artists and
Movements. Translated by Janet Goff.
Fukuoka City: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1997.
V Yiakoumaki, Nayia. This is Tomorrow. exh.
Viatte, Germain. Martine Franck, Venus cat. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010.
d'ailleurs: peintres et sculpteurs Paris Yong-na Kim. Modern and Contemporary
Art in Korea: Tradition, Modernity, and
Actes Sud, 2011. Identity. Elizabeth, NJ: Hollym, 2005.
, and Henry-Clyde Cousseau. Aftermath: Younan, Ramses. Variations on the Verb
to Cover, published in the first number of
London: Trefoil Books for Barbican Centre La Part du Sable (February 1947) (English
for Arts and Conferences, 1982. translation published in Grid N 5, Paris,
January 1987; also published by Abdel
Kader El-Janabi in http://www.egyptian
W surrealism.com/files/the-nile-of-surreal
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern ism.pdf) (accessed September 7, 2016).
World-System. New York and London: Yusuke, Nakahara. Locked-Room Paint
Academic Press, 1974. ing, 1956. In From Postwar to Postmodern:
Weart, Spencer. Nuclear Fear: A History of Art in Japan, 19451989: Primary Docu-
Images. Cambridge, MA: Harvard ments, 7883. New York: The Museum of
University Press, 1988. Modern Art 2012.
Wechsler, Jeffrey. Asian Traditions,
Modern Expressions: Asian American
Artists and Abstraction, 19451970. Z
New York: Abrams, 1997. Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget:
Wendl, Tobias, Bettina von Lintig, and Holocaust Memory through the Camera's
Kerstin Pinther, eds. Black Paris: Kunst Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
und Geschichte einer Schwarzen Diaspora. 1998.
Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2006. Zhdanov, Andrei. On the Opera, Velikaya
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Druzhba, by V. MuradeliDecree of the
Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.
of Our Times. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge February 10, 1948. In The Zhdanov
Decree. DSCH Journal, No. 9 (Summer
Westkunst: zeitgenssische Kunst seit 1998): 2124. Available online at: http://
1939. Edited by Laszlo Glozer. Cologne: dschjournal.com/wordpress/onlineart
DuMont, 1981. icles/dsch09_zhdanov.pdf (accessed
Wiehager, Renate, Nadine Brggebors, September 7, 2016).
and Astrid Silvia Schnhagen. Minimalism Zlotnikov, Yuri, thoughts on Signals
in Germany: The Sixties = Minimalismus in series: Leonid Prokhorovich Talochkin et
Deutschland : die 1960er Jahre. exh. cat. al. Drugoe iskusstvo, Moskva 19561976:
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. K Khronike khudozhestvennoi zhizni. 2:90.
Wilson, Sarah. Picasso/Marx and Socialist Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia galereia
Realism in France. Liverpool: Liverpool Moskovskaia kollektsiia: SP Interbuk,
University Press, 2013. 1991; and H.-P. Riese. Yu. Zlotnikov.
Winther-Tamaki, Bert. Art in the Nonkonformisty. Vtoroi russkii avantgard.
Encounter of Nations: Japanese and 19551988. Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 10,
American Artists in the Early Postwar Years. no. 1 (1997): 29. Noted in Yuri Zlotnikov.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. exh. cat. Moscow: State Russian Museum,
Wofford, Tobias. Reconsidering Black 2008.
Internationalism. In Melvin Edwards: Five
Decades. exh. cat. Edited by Catherine
Craft, 6073. Dallas: Nasher Sculpture
Center, 2015.
Wollaeger, Mark, and Matt Eatough, eds.
The Oxford Handbook of Global
Modernisms. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2012.
Wright, Gwendolyn. Building Global
Modernisms. Grey Room 7 (Spring 2002):
124134.
Wrblewski, Andrezej. Statement on the
1st Exhibition of Modern Art, 1948. Trans
lated in Andrzej Wrblewski: To the Margin
and Back. exh. cat. Edited by Magdalena
Zikowska et al., 3032. Eindhoven: Van
Abbemuseum, 2010.
Y
Yamahata, Yosuke. Photographing the
BombA Memo. In Atomized Nagasaki:
Record. Edited by Munehito Kitajima, n.p.
Tokyo: Daiichi Publishing, 1952. Trans
lated by Miryam Sas in Nagasaki Journey:
The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata,
August 10, 1945 = [Nagasaki jani]. San
Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995.
4445. Available online at: https://www.
exploratorium.edu/nagasaki/related/jour
neyYamahata.html (accessed September
7, 2016).
811
 Alejandro Anreus
Alejandro Anreus is Professor of Art His
tory and Latin American/Latino Studies at
William Paterson University, Wayne, New
Jersey. Anreus was curator at the Montclair
Art Museum (19871993) and the Jer
sey City Museum (19932001). He is the
author of Orozco in Gringoland: The Years
in New York (2001) and Luis Cruz Azace-
ta (2014), editor of and contributor to Ben
Shahn and the Passion of Sacco and Van-
zetti (2001), and coeditor of and contribu
tor to The Social and the Real: Political Art
of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere
(2006) and Mexican Muralism: A Critical
History (2012). His essays and articles have
appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, Arte-
Facto, Commonweal, and Encuentro de la
Cultura Cubana. A published poet, he is the
author of Memento mori (2010) and Los ex-
iliados suean (2013).
Ariella Azoulay
Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Cul
ture and Media and Comparative Literature,
Brown University, as well as a documenta
ry-film director and an independent curator
of archives and exhibitions. Her books on
photography include From Palestine to Is-
rael: A Photographic Record of Destruction
and State Formation, 19471950 (2011),
Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of
Photography (2012), The Civil Contract of
Photography (2008), and Am Deelle Lski
and Horizontal Photography (2013). She has
curated Enough! The Natural Violence of the
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
New World Order (F/Stop festival, Leipzig,
2016), Potential History (2012), Untaken
Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, Mod
erna galerija, Ljubljana; Zochrot), Architec-
ture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), and
Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem
Gallery of Art). She has directed Civil Alli-
ances, Palestine, 4748 (2012) and I Also
Dwell among Your Own People: Conversa-
tions with Azmi Bishara (2004).
Zainab Bahrani
Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Pro
fessor of Art History and Archaeology at
Columbia University, New York. Bahrani is
the author of numerous books and is the
recipient of several awards for her work on
ancient art, including a 2003 Guggenheim
grant and awards from the Getty Founda
tion, the Mellon Foundation, and New Yorks
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her most re
cent book, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and
the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (2014),
won the Lionel Trilling Book prize. She has
been the Slade Professor of the Fine Arts
at Oxford University and was previously a
curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Her curatorial work includes Modernism
and Iraq (2009).
Galia Bar Or
Dr. Galia Bar Or (PhD, Tel Aviv Universi
ty, Institute of History and Philosophy of
Sciences and Ideas; School of History) was
until 2016 the Director and Curator of the
Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. She
has published many books and catalogues
and her book Our Life Requires Art: Art
Museums in Kibbutzim won the Ben-Zvi
Prize in 2010. She curated the Israeli Pa
vilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture (with
Yuval Yaski, 2010), the Israeli Pavilion, So
Paulo Bienal (1996), the Israeli Pavilion,
Istanbul Biennale (1992), and numerous
exhibitions in Israel, Japan, Germany, and
France.
Homi K. Bhabha
Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of the Humanities, Director of the
Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Ad
visor to the President and Provost at Harvard
University. In addition to his most famous
work, The Location of Culture (1994); numer
ous co-edited volumes; and works in journals
such as Art Forum (regular contributor), Criti-
cal Inquiry, and Art in America; he has written
many essays on contemporary artists. His
forthcoming books will include a collection
of essays on contemporary diasporic art and
another on culture, security, and globalization.
Bhabha is a past jury member of the Venice
Biennale, serves on the Academic Commit
tee for the Shanghai Power Station of Art,
and holds honorary degrees from Universit
Paris 8, University College London, and Free
University Berlin. In 2012 he was conferred
the Government of Indias Padma Bhushan
Presidential Award in the field of literature
and education, and received the Humboldt
Research Prize in 2015.
Eastern Europe in its global context. He
Emily Braun
Emily Braun is Distinguished Professor at
Hunter College and the Graduate Center,
CUNY, and the Curator of the Leonard A.
Lauder Cubist Collection. In addition to her
book Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism:
Art and Politics under Fascism (2000) she
has written widely on Giorgio de Chirico,
Futurism, Giorgio Morandi, and the history
of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Italian art and criticism. Other publications
of hers have focused on twentieth-century
American art. Among the award-winning
exhibitions she has co-curated are The
Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and
Their Salons (2005) and Cubism: The Leon-
ard A. Lauder Collection (2014). She mostly
recently organized Alberto Burri: The Trau-
ma of Painting for the Guggenheim Muse
um, New York. That publication received the
Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue
Award and recognition for excellence from
the Association of American Art Curators.
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A.
Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor
of History, South Asian Studies, and Law
at the University of Chicago. He is the au
thor, among other titles, of Provincializing
Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (2000, 2008).
Ekaterina Degot
Ekaterina Degot is an art historian, writer,
and curator; Artistic Director at the Acade
my of Arts of the World, Cologne; and Pro
fessor at the Rodchenko Moscow School
of Photography. In 2014 she won the Igor
Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. She has
published Russian 20th Century Art (2000,
Trilistnik, Moscow), as well as various es
says on Soviet realism and the art of cultural
revolution, and has curated the exhibition
Struggling for the Banner: Soviet Art between
Trotsky and Stalin (Moscow Museum of Con
temporary Art, 2007). Her other curatorial
projects include Monday Begins on Satur-
day (with David Riff; First Bergen Assem
bly, Bergen, Norway, 2013). She coedited
Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society
in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (2013).
She lives in Cologne and Moscow.
Jea Denegri
Jea Denegri is an art historian and critic
based in Belgrade. He has curated numer
ous exhibitions, including the Yugoslavian
participation in the Paris Biennale (1971,
1976, 1983) and the Venice Biennale
(1976, 1982). He is a frequent contributor
to art magazines, newspapers, and exhibition
catalogues. His most recent publications
include Themes in Serbian Art 19451970:
From Socialist Realism to Kinetic Art
(2009) and the five-volume work Serbian Art
19502000 (2013).
Nikolas Drosos
Nikolas Drosos is an art historian special
izing in art and architecture from postwar
holds a PhD from the Graduate Center,
City University of New York. His disserta
tion, Modernism with a Human Face: Syn
thesis of Art and Architecture in Eastern
Europe, 19541958, examines the theory
and practices relating to the synthesis of
the artsthe integration of art into archi
tecturein the Soviet Union, Poland, and
Yugoslavia. He has been the recipient of
a Fulbright scholarship, a predoctoral fel
lowship at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., and a postdoc
toral fellowship at Columbia Universitys
Harriman Institute.
Okwui Enwezor
Okwui Enwezor is Director of Haus der
Kunst, Munich. In 2015 he was Director
of the Visual Arts in the 56th Biennale of
Venice. He served as Artistic Director of
several international exhibitions, including
La Triennale 2012, Paris; 7th Gwangju Bi-
ennale; 2nd Seville Biennial; Documenta 11,
Kassel; and the 2nd Johannesburg Bienni-
al, among others. He is the former Dean of
Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President
of the San Francisco Art Institute, and his
academic positions include Visiting Profes
sor at Columbia University, New York; the
University of Pittsburgh; and the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Enwezor
was Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at the
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University;
and in 2013 Global Distinguished Professor
at the Department of Art History at New
York University.
Pedro Erber
Pedro Erber is an Associate Professor in the
Department of Romance Studies at Cornell
University. He holds a PhD in Asian Studies
from Cornell University, an MA in philosophy
from Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do
Rio de Janeiro, and a BA in philosophy from
the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Erber is the author of Breaching the Frame:
The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and
Japan (2015), Poltica e verdade no pensa-
mento de Martin Heidegger (2004), and nu
merous articles on art and aesthetics, liter
ature, philosophy, and political thought. His
curatorial projects include The Emergence
of the Contemporary: Avant-Garde Art in Ja-
pan, 19501970 at Rio de Janeiros Pao
Imperial (JulyAugust 2016).
Gao Minglu
Gao Minglu is Research Professor in the
Department of History of Art and Archi
tecture at the University of Pittsburgh and
Professor and Head of the Fine Arts De
partment at the Sichuan Academy of Fine
Arts, Chongqing. His recent books include
Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in
Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (2011) and
The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chi-
nese Art (2005).
Romy Golan
Romy Golan is Professor of 20th Century
art at the Graduate Center, City University
of New York. She is the author of Moderni-
ty and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France
between the Wars (1995) and Muralno-
mad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe
19271957 (2009). Her recent publica
tions include Campo Urbano: Episodes
from an Unwritten History of Participation,
in Matilde Nardelli and Pierpaolo Antonel
lo, eds., Bruno Munari (2016); Vitalit del
Negativo/Negativo della Vitalit, October
no. 150 (Winter 2014); The Scene of a Dis
appearance in Giosetta Fioroni: LArgento
(The Drawing Center, New York, 2013); and
Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art in
the 1960s, Grey Room 49 (Fall 2012).
Walter Grasskamp
Prof. Dr. Walter Grasskamp is an art critic
and held the chair in art history at the Acad
emy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1995 to
2016, where he was vice-rector from 1999
until 2003. He was coordinating editor of
German Art in the 20th Century: Painting
and Sculpture 19051985 (Royal Acade
my, London, 1985) and author of numerous
essays and books dedicated to modern and
contemporary art, particularly with a focus
on postwar West Germany; museum and
exhibition history (with a focus on the doc
umenta exhibition series); art in the public
sphere (with a focus on Sculpture Projects
in Mnster); as well as pop culture and con
sumerism. His most recent publication was
The Book on the Floor. Andr Malraux and
the Imaginary Museum (2016).
813
Andrea Giunta
Andrea Giunta is Professor of Latin Amer
ican Art at the University of Texas, Austin.
An English edition of her book Avant-garde,
Internationalism and Politics: Argentine Art
in the Sixties was published in 2007.
Catherine Grenier
Heritage curator and art historian, Cathe
rine Grenier has been the Director of the
Fondation Giacometti, Paris, since 2014.
She previously served as deputy direc
tor of the Muse National dArt Moderne,
Centre Pompidou, where she curated
over thirty exhibitions of modern and con
temporary artists, including the Boltanski
installation for Monumenta 2009 at the
Grand Palais in Paris and more recently
the Plural Modernities exhibition and the
Martial Raysse retrospective at the Cen
tre Pompidou. Since joining the Fondation
Giacometti she has organised challenging
Giacometti exhibitions at the Galleria dArte
Moderna, Milan, the Fundacin Canal, Ma
drid, the Pera Mzesi, Istanbul, and the
Fonds Hlne & Edouard Leclerc, Lander
neau, Brittany. She has devoted numerous
publications to such contemporary artists
as Annette Messager, Christian Boltanski,
Sophie Ristelhueber, and Maurizio Cattelan,
and to modern artists including Salvador
Dal. She publishes essays regularly, includ
ing La Fin des muses? (2013) and more
recently La Manipulation des images dans
lart contemporain (2014).
Atreyee Gupta
Atreyee Gupta (PhD, 2011) is Jane Emison
Assistant Curator of South and Southeast
Asian Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her
research focuses on postwar art in relation
to the Cold War and the Nonaligned Move
ment, with a special emphasis on South
Asia. Other interests include global art his
tory and postcolonial studies. Her writing
has appeared in edited volumes and exhi
bition catalogues and in journals such as
Third Text, Yishu, and Art Journal. She has
received awards and fellowships from the
Social Science Research Council, the Getty
Research Institute, Haus der Kunst, and
the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin,
among others.
Salah M. Hassan
Salah M. Hassan is the Goldwin Smith
Professor and Director of the Institute for
Comparative Modernities and Professor of
Art History and Visual Culture in the Afri
cana Studies and Research Center and the
Department of History of Art and Visual
Studies, Cornell University. He is an art crit
ic, curator, and coeditor of Nka: Journal of
Contemporary African Art. He has written,
edited, and coedited a number of books,
including Darfur and the Crisis of Govern-
ance: A Critical Reader (2009), Diaspora,
Memory, Place (2008), Unpacking Europe
(2001), Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001), and
most recently Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary
Modernist, (2013) the companion book to
the retrospective of Ibrahim El Salahi that
premiered at the Sharjah Art Museum and
traveled to Tate Modern, London, in 2013.
814
He has curated major exhibitions at venues
including the Venice and Dakar Biennales,
the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rot
terdam, and the Sharjah Art Museum. In col
laboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation,
Hassan is working on two major exhibition
and book projects: The Khartoum School:
The Making of the Modern Art Movement
in Sudan (1945Present) and The Egyp-
tian Surrealists: When Art Becomes Liberty
(19381965), which are to premier in Shar
jah and Cairo in 2016.
Yule Heibel
Yule Heibel studied sculpture under Robert
Jacobsen at Munichs Academy of Fine Arts
before turning to art history. She studied
with Serge Guilbaut at the University of
British Columbia (MA) and with T. J. Clark
at Harvard (PhD). She subsequently taught
art history at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, Brown University, and Har
vard Extension School. Her publications
range from articles in peer-reviewed aca
demic journals and university-press-pub
lished books to popular magazine articles
(mostly on urban development and built
form) and blogs. She was cofounder of a
social-media and local news aggregator
based in Victoria, Canada. She currently
lives in Greater Boston and is working on a
collection of essays.
Geeta Kapur
Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based critic and cu
rator. Her essays are widely anthologized
and her books include Contemporary Indian
Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Es-
says on Contemporary Cultural Practice in
India (2000), and Critics Compass: Nav-
igating Practice (forthcoming). She was a
founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas and
a member of the advisory council of Third
Text. She is trustee and advisory editor of
Marg and editorial advisor of ArtMargins.
Her curatorial projects include Disposses
sion (1st Johannesburg Biennale, 1995),
Century City: Bombay/Mumbai 19922001,
Tate Modern, London (co-curation, 2001),
subTerrain, Haus der Kulturen der Welt,
Berlin (2003), and Aesthetic Bind, Che
mould, Mumbai (201314). She has been
a jury member of the Venice, Dakar, and
Sharjah biennials. She has been a mem
ber of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim
Museum, and is an advisory member of the
Asian Art Archive and an Advisory Board
member of the Tate Research Centre: Asia.
She lectures internationally and has held
visiting fellowships at the Institute of Ad
vanced Study, Shimla; the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library, Delhi; Clare Hall, Uni
versity of Cambridge; and Jawaharlal Nehru
University, Delhi.
Pamela M. Lee
Pamela M. Lee is the the Jeanette and Wil
liam Hayden Jones Professor in American
Art and Culture at Stanford University. She
is the author of the books Object to Be De-
stroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark
(2000), Chronophobia: On Time in the Art
of the 1960s (2004), Forgetting the Art
World (2012), and New Games: Postmod-
ernism after Contemporary Art (2012). Her
writing has appeared in October, Artforum,
Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Les
Cahiers du Muse national d'arte moderne,
Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, and other jour
nals. Lee is currently at work on Think Tank
Aesthetics: Mid-Century Modernism, the
Cold War and the Rise of Visual Cultue, a
book considering how the interdisciplinary,
cybernetic, and systems-based interests of
think tanks such as the RAND Corporation
sponsored new approaches to the study of
art and visual culture.
Anneka Lenssen
Anneka Lenssen is Assistant Professor
of Global Modern Art at the University of
California, Berkeley, with a focus on twen
tieth-century painting and visual practices
in global context and the cultural politics of
the Middle East. Her writing has appeared
in ARTMargins, Artforum, Bidoun, Ibraaz,
Springerin, and other venues. Forthcoming
publications include a coedited volume of
translated art writing from the Arab world,
Arab Art in the Twentieth Century: Primary
Documents, for the International Program at
the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She
is a Getty Residential Postdoctoral Fellow
for the 201617 year, where she is prepar
ing her first monograph, Being Mobilized, on
painting and popular politics in Syria.
Damian Lentini
Damian Lentini is an Australian art historian
and curator who has taught at the University
of Melbourne and at Federation Universi
ty, Ballarat, has worked on a variety of art
projects in Melbourne, Berlin, and Munich,
and is now based in Germany. His current
research examines the design and function
of contemporary exhibition spaces, particu
lar noncollecting sites such as Kunsthallen
and biennials, and he is currently completing
a book, The History of the Contemporary Arts
Centre, that emerged from his PhD disser
tation (2009, the University of Melbourne).
He was the 201516 Goethe Postdoctoral
Fellow at Haus der Kunst and is now working
there as a research fellow.
Courtney J. Martin
Courtney J. Martin is an Assistant Profes
sor in the History of Art and Architecture
department at Brown University. She was
previously Assistant Professor in the Histo
ry of Art department, Vanderbilt University;
Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow, History of
Art, at the University of California, Berke
ley; a Getty Research Institute fellow; and a
Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. In
2015 she received an Andy Warhol Foun
dation Arts Writers Grant. Before obtaining
a doctorate from Yale University in 2009,
she worked for the Ford Foundation. In 2012
she curated Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip . . . Frank
Bowlings Poured Paintings 19731978 at
Tate Britain. In 2014 she co-curated Minimal
Baroque: Post-Minimalism and Contempo-
rary Art at Rnnebksholm, Denmark. In
201516 she curated Robert Ryman at Dia:
Chelsea. She is the coeditor of Lawrence Al-
loway: Critic and Curator (2015) and editor
of Four Generations: The Joyner Giuffrida
Collection of Abstract Art (2016).
Anne Massey
Anne Massey is Professor of Design and
Culture, Associate Dean of Research, and
Head of the Graduate School at London
College of Communication. She studied
the history of modern art and design at
the University of Northumbria, where she
also completed her PhD, The Independ
ent Group: Towards a Redefinition. She
is the world expert on the interdisciplinary
history and contemporary significance of
the Independent Group. She has written
eight books, including Interior Design since
1900 (1990, 3rd ed. 2006), Blue Guide:
Berlin and Eastern Germany (1994), The
Independent Group: Modernism and Mass
Culture in Britain, 194559 (1996), Hol-
lywood beyond the Screen: Design and
Material Culture (2000), Out of the Ivory
Tower: The Independent Group and Popular
Culture (2013), and ICA 194668 (2015).
She has appeared on BBC television and
Channel 4 as well as lecturing nationally
and internationally.
Mark Mazower
Mark Mazower is Professor of History at
Columbia University, where he also directs
the Heyman Center for the Humanities. His
prize-winning books include Inside Hitlers
Greece: The Experience of Occupation,
19411944 (2001), which has recently ap Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj, and Lucio Fontana.
peared in a German translation; Dark Con-
tinent: Europes Twentieth Century (1998);
and Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians,
Muslims and Jews, 14301950 (2004). He
comments regularly on international affairs
for the Financial Times and his reviews have
appeared in the Guardian, The Nation, the
New York Times, and many other newspa
pers and magazines. He recently made a
film about the Greek refugee crisis with the
filmmaker Constantine Giannaris: called
Techniques of the Body, it premiered at the
Aladza Imaret, Thessaloniki, in June 2016.
He is currently writing a book about his fa
ther and his family.
Yasufumi Nakamori
Yasufumi Nakamori, PhD, is the Curator and
Head of the Department of Photography
and New Media at the Minneapolis Institute
of Art. His exhibitions and publications in
clude Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japa-
nese Architecture. Photographs by Ishimoto
Yasuhiro (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
2010), which received the 2011 Alfred H.
Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Col
lections, Libraries and Exhibitions from the
College Art Association, and For a New
World to Come: Experiments in Japanese
Art and Photography, 19681979 (The Mu
seum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015).
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Chika Okeke-Agulu is a poet, artist, curator,
and Associate Professor of Art History in
the Department of Art & Archaeology and
the Department for African American Stud
ies at Princeton University. He is the author
of Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolo-
nization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (2015)
and, with Okwui Enwezor, of Contempo-
rary African Art since 1980 (2009). He is
coeditor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary
African Art. His curatorial credits include
the Uche Okeke retrospective in Lagos in
1993, the Nigerian Pavilion at the 1st Jo
hannesburg Biennale (1995), Seven Stories
about Modern Art in Africa (1995), The Short
Century: Independence and Liberation
Movements in Africa, 19451994 (2001),
the Gwangju Biennale (2014), and Who
Knows Tomorrow (2010). Okeke-Agulu is a
columnist for The Huffington Post and main
tains the blog Ofodunka: Art. Life. Politics. In
2016 he received the Frank Jewett Mather
Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from
the College Art Association.
Stephen Petersen
Stephen Petersen teaches art history and
theory at the Corcoran School of the Arts
& Design at George Washington University,
Washington, D.C. He is the author of Space-
Age Aesthetics: Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein,
and the Postwar European Avant-Garde
(2009), which examines postwar art in light
of media and technology. His 2004 article
in Science in Context, Explosive Proposi
tions: Artists React to the Atomic Age, sur
veyed artistic responses to the atom bomb
in Europe and the United States in the
postwar decades. He has published sev
eral articles on the aesthetic and political
debates around art informel in the work of
He has also written about the exhibition
and critical reception of Picassos Guerni-
ca in postwar Italy, the sculptural work of
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richters
drawings, the photography of Andy Warhol,
and other topics.
Mari Carmen Ramrez
Mari Carmen Ramrez is the Wortham Cu
rator of Latin American Art and founding
Director of the International Center for the
Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at The Muse
um of Fine Arts, Houston. She was previ
ously Curator of Latin American Art at the
Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art and adjunct
lecturer in the Department of Art and Art
History, both at The University of Texas at
Austin. She has curated many exhibitions of
Latin American art, including Inverted Uto-
pias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (with
Hctor Olea, The Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, 2004), which the International
Association of Art Critics named the Best
Thematic Museum Show Nationally in the
United States for that year. At the ICAA,
Ramrez conceptualized and oversees the
Documents of 20th Century Latin Amer
ican and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and
Publications Project. In 2005 she was the
recipient of the Award for Curatorial Excel
lence granted by the Center for Curatorial
Studies at Bard College. She has published
widely on a broad range of topics, includ
ing the relationship of Latin American art to
identity politics, multiculturalism, globaliza
tion, and curatorial practice.
Richard Shiff
Richard Shiff is Effie Marie Cain Regents
Chair in Art at The University of Texas at
Austin, where he directs the Center for the
Study of Modernism. His scholarly interests
range broadly across the field of modern
and contemporary art and theory, with pub
lications that include Czanne and the End
of Impressionism (1984), Critical Terms for
Art History (coedited, 1996, 2003), Bar-
nett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonn (co
authored, 2004), Doubt (2008), Between
Sense and de Kooning (2011), and Ellsworth
Kelly: New York Drawings 19541962
(2014). Artists featured in Shiffs recent
essays have included Georg Baselitz, Mark
Bradford, Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas,
Zeng Fanzhi, Ellen Gallagher, Jasper Johns,
Donald Judd, Alex Katz, Per Kirkeby, Julie
Mehretu, Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet,
Pablo Picasso, David Reed, Bridget Riley,
Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Keith Sonnier,
Cy Twombly, and Vincent van Gogh.
Katy Siegel
Katy Siegel is the inaugural Eugene V. and
Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair in Modern
American Art at Stony Brook University and
Senior Programming and Research Curator
at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her books
include The heroine Paint: After Franken- published extensively on artists including
thaler (2015), Since 45: America and the Georg Baselitz, Mel Bochner, Chuck Close,
Making of Contemporary Art (2011), and
Abstract Expressionism (2011). She has
written catalogue essays on modern and
contemporary artists including Wols, Georg
Baselitz, Rosalyn Drexler, Al Loving, Frank
Stella, Magnus Plessen, Eberhardt Have
kost, Sharon Lockhart, and Sarah Sze, and
is a Contributing Editor at Artforum. Curated
exhibitions include Painting Paintings (Da-
vid Reed) 1975 (co-curated with Christo
pher Wool; Rose Art Museum, 2014), Light
Years: Jack Whitten, 19711974 (The Rose
Art Museum, 2013); The Matter that Sur-
rounds Us: Wols and Charline von Heyl (The
Rose Art Museum, 2014); and High Times
Hard Times: New York Painting, 196775
(ICI, traveling 20068). She is co-curator of
the American Pavilion at the 2017 Venice
Biennale, featuring Mark Bradford.
Terry Smith
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor
of Contemporary Art History and Theory in
the Department of the History of Art and
Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh
and Professor in the Division of Philoso
phy, Art, and Critical Thought at the Euro Criticism in 2015.
pean Graduate School. He is the author
of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and
Design in America (1993), Transformations
in Australian Art (2002), The Architecture
of Aftermath (2006), What is Contempo-
rary Art? (2009), Contemporary Art: World
Currents (2011), Thinking Contemporary
Curating (2012), and Talking Contemporary
Curating (2015). With Okwui Enwezor and
Nancy Condee he edited Antinomies of Art
and Culture: Modernity, postmodernity and
contemporaneity (2008).
Fred Turner
Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman
Chandler Professor in the Departments of
Communication and, by courtesy, Art and
Art History at Stanford University. He has
written extensively about the history of
American technoculture after World War
II. He is the author of three books: The
Democratic Surround: Multimedia and Amer-
ican Liberalism from World War II to the
Psychedelic Sixties (2013), From Counter-
culture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the
Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digi-
tal Utopianism (2006), and Echoes of Com-
bat: The Vietnam War in American Memory
(1996). Before coming to Stanford he taught
Communication at Harvards John F. Kenne
dy School of Government and MITs Sloan
School of Management. He also worked for
ten years as a journalist, writing about the
arts and the sciences for newspapers and
magazines ranging from the Boston Globe
Sunday Magazine to Nature.
Ulrich Wilmes
Ulrich Wilmes is Chief Curator of Haus der
Kunst. He was a co-organizer of Skulptur
Projekte in Mnster 1987 and has served as
the Curator of Portikus, Frankfurt am Main,
Curator of Contemporary Art and Deputy Di
rector of Lenbachhaus, Munich, and Deputy
Director of Museum Ludwig, Cologne. He
has curated numerous exhibitions and has
Hans Peter Feldmann, Dan Graham, Cristina
Iglesias, Jrg Immendorff, On Kawara,
Ellsworth Kelly, Per Kirkeby, Matt Mullican,
Gerhard Richter, Ulrich Rckriem, Ed Ruscha,
Wilhelm Sasnal, and Lawrence Weiner.
Sarah Wilson
Sarah Wilson is Professor of the History of
Modern and Contemporary art at the Cour
tauld Institute of Art, London. Recent publi
cations include The Visual World of French
Theory: Figurations (2010) and Picasso/
Marx and Socialist Realism in France (2013).
In 2015 she was co-curator for the First
Asian Biennale/Fifth Guangzhou Triennale.
She was principal curator of Paris, Capital
of the Arts, 19001968 (Royal Academy,
London, Guggenheim Bilbao, 20023) and
Pierre Klossowski (Whitechapel Art Gallery,
2006), and has been closely involved with
shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou,
Paris. Her research project Globalisation
before Globalisation continues. She is a
Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1997)
and was awarded the AICA International
Award for Distinguished Contribution to Art
Tobias Wofford
Tobias Wofford is an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Art and Art History
at Santa Clara University. He received a
PhD from the University of California, Los
Angeles. His research explores the meeting
of globalization and identity in the art of the
African diaspora since the 1950s. Wofford
is currently working on a book-length man
uscript that examines the multifaceted role
of Africa in contemporary African American
art. His research has been supported by
fellowships from the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts and the Mellon
Postdoctoral Program at Johns Hopkins
University. Most recently, he was the 2015
16 Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in
American Art at Smithsonian American Art
Museum in Washington, D.C.
815
 A Wifredo Arcay Romare Bearden Alexander Skunder Boghossian
Shafic Abboud Proposition III, 1962 Evening 9:10, 461 Lenox Avenue, 1964 Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964
Composition, 1954 relief painting on wood collage oil on canvas with collage
oil on canvas 36.860.36 cm 4727.9 cm 143.8159.1 cm
64.592 cm The Mayor Gallery, London Van Every/Smith Galleries, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh,
Collection Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui Davidson College, Davidson, NC Purchased with funds from the North
Siah Armajani Carolina State Art Society
Affandi Shirt #1, 1958 Conjur Woman, 1964 (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)
Pengemis Cirebon cloth, pencil, ink, wood photo projection on paper
(Beggar in Cirebon), 1960 80.676.2 cm 162.5127 cm Lee Bontecou
oil on canvas Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Untitled, 1962
89125 cm Purchase, 2011 NoRuz at The Met Benefit, gift of the Artist 1972.5 welded steel, epoxy, canvas,
Collection of Museum Lippo 2012 (2012.109) fabric, saw blade, and wire
Mieczyslaw Berman 172.7182.976.2 cm
Mexico, Mother and Child, 1962 Prayer, 1962 Apoteoza (Apotheosis), 1947 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
oil on canvas oil, ink on canvas mounted to board photomontage Gift of D. and J. de Menil 62.45
11999 cm 179.7128.9 cm 3120 cm
Collection of Museum Lippo Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocawiu Derek Boshier
Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1962 (National Museum in Wroclaw) Man Playing Snooker and
Fateh Al-Moudarres Thinking of Other Things, 1961
Icon of Moudarres, 1962 Frank Auerbach Wojna (War), 1944 oil on canvas
oil and gold leaf on canvas Shell Building Site, 1959 collage 190152 cm
149884 cm oil on board 3023.5 cm Museu Coleo Berardo
Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Art 122154 cm Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocawiu
Foundation, Sharjah Hartlepool Borough Council (National Museum in Wroclaw) Vladimr Boudnk
Aktivn grafika III (Active Graphics III), 1959
Untitled, 1962 E.O.W. Looking into the Fire I, 1962 Antonio Berni mixed media, paper
mixed media on canvas oil on paper board La pampa tormentosa 26.619.1 cm
69.899.7 cm 3127 cm (The Stormy Pampas), 1963 Nrodn galerie v Praze (National Gallery
QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis oil, tempera, wooden sticks, metals in Prague)
of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Gift of Sam and May Gruber in honor of (including sheet metal, corrugated metal
Kathy Halbreich, 1996 with paint residue, scrap and tinplate), Horizontly a vertikly
Carl Andre cardboard, imprint on paper, plastic (Horizontals and Verticals), 1959
Timber Piece (Well), 1964/70 B buttons, threads and fragments of lace mixed media, paper
wooden railway sleepers (28 pieces) Francis Bacon ontwo plywood panels 41.254.5 cm
213122122 cm Fragment of Crucifixion, 1950 300400 cm Nrodn galerie v Praze
Museum Ludwig Kln / Schenkung Ludwig oil, cotton wool on canvas Private Collection (National Gallery in Prague)
158.4127.49 cm
Karel Appel Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven Joseph Beuys Kompozice (Composition), 1960

LIST OF WORKS
Exodus n 1, 1951 Hirschdenkmler mixed media, paper
gouache and colored paper on brown Pope, 1955-56 (Monuments to the Stag), 1958/82 2331.4 cm
kraft pieces of paper applied on paper oil on canvas mixed media Nrodn galerie v Praze
10065 cm 195.9140 cm dimensions variable (National Gallery in Prague)
Fondation Gandur pour lArt, Genve, Brooklyn Museum, New York Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Salzburg
Switzerland. Courtesy Applicat-Prazan, Paris Gift of Olga H. Knoepke, 81.306 Krajina (Landscape), 1960
Fluxusobjekt, 1962 mixed media, paper
Hiroshima Child, 1958 Enrico Baj folding carton, grease, oil, broom, rubber 25.841.8 cm
oil on canvas Manifesto Nucleare BUM, 1951 ring and tin toy (in four parts) Nrodn galerie v Praze
162130 cm varnish and acrylic on canvas 47.34571.8 cm (box), (National Gallery in Prague)
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art 104943.6 cm 566.516.5cm (broom),
Private Collection 10.5718.5 cm (toy) Krajina (Landscape), 1960
Rasheed Araeen Stdtische Galerie im Lenbacchaus, mixed media, paper
Burning Bicycle Tyres, 1959 (1975) Georg Baselitz Leihgabe Lothar Schirmer, Mnchen 2648 cm
9 photographic prints on paper, Groe Nacht im Eimer Nrodn galerie v Praze
45.770 cm (each) (Big Night down the Drain), 1962-63 Verstrahlter Hangar (National Gallery in Prague)
Aicon Gallery oil on canvas (Radiated Hangar), 1962
185165 cm polystyrene, wood, animal hair and oil Strukturlni grafika
My First Sculpture, 1959 (1975) Privatsammlung 19.5 47.745,8 cm (Structural Graphics), 1960
steel Museum Schloss Moyland, Sammlung van mixed media, paper
45.745.738.1 cm Der Soldat (The Soldier), 1965 der Grinten Bedburg-Hau/Kreis Kleve 19.827.8 cm
Aicon Gallery oil on canvas MSM 02289 Nrodn galerie v Praze
194.5140 cm (National Gallery in Prague)
Before Departure Kunstmuseum Bonn, John Biggers
(Black Paintings) #1, 1963-64 DLG Privatsammlung Bonn The History of Negro Education Bez nzvu splenite
oil on canvas in Morris County, Texas, 1955 (Untitled Burnt Place), 1963
90.5993.5 cm Thomas Bayrle cont crayon and gouache on paper colored structural print, paper
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection Kennedy in Berlin, 1964 80330.8 cm 40.4 cm57 cm
lithograph on cardboard Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, Nrodn galerie v Praze
Before Departure 4361 cm New York (National Gallery in Prague)
Black Paintings) #4, 1963-64 Sammlung Deutsche Bank
oil on canvas Max Bill Bez nzvu - komposice podobn tvr i
911383.5 cm Mao und die Gymnasiasten 22, 1953/(after 1980) (Untitled), 1965
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection (Mao and the Schoolboys), 1965 marble mixed media, paper
plywood, particle board, oil paint, 78.578.560.5 cm 34.128.7 cm
Before Departure electric motor Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Nrodn galerie v Praze
(Black Paintings) #5, 1963-64 13653.514 cm Ankauf, 1984 (National Gallery in Prague)
oil on canvas Museum Wiesbaden
91121.53.5 cm
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

817
Frank Bowling Chua Mia Tee D Grand Tir - Sance de la Galerie J Man Stealing a Shoe for His Wife, 1965 Untitled, 1965 Mathias Goeritz Les nymphas (The Waterlilies), 1961
Swan I, 1964 Epic Poem of Malaya, 1955 Sand Dari (Big Shot Gallery J Session), 1961 collage, cuttings from magazines, and bronze El Serpente (The Serpent), 1953 torn posters on zinc sheet panel
oil on canvas oil on canvas Sin ttulo (Untitled), 1950s plaster, paint, string, fence, plastic on gouache on paper 36.51726.5 cm painted wood 100.5105.5 cm
112243 cm 107125.5 cm collage, pencil, ink, and watercolor on four chipboard, wire, mesh, wooden board, 5161 cm Artwork Courtesy Barjeel 428874407 cm Centre Pompidou, Paris
Courtesy a Private Collection Collection of National Gallery Singapore (4) paper panels on cardboard plastic balloons Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery Art Foundation, Sharjah D.R. Mathias Goeritz (1956) Muse national dart moderne/
92.540.43.8 cm 142.977.67 cm Courtesy L.M. Daniel Goeritz & Centre de cration industrielle
Swan II, 1964 Lygia Clark Private Collection, London Private Collection, Courtesy Ibrahim El Salahi Jean Fautrier Galera La Caja Negra, Madrid Achat 1995
oil on canvas Planos em superfcie modulada no. 1 Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris The Prayer, 1960 Sunset in Alabama, 1957 Reconstruction authorized by Instituto
112243 cm (Planes on a Modulated Surface N. 1), 1957 Sin ttulo Estructura transformable oil on Masonite oil on paper mounted on canvas Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Richard Hamilton
Courtesy the Artist and Hales Gallery industrial paint on wood (Untitled [Transformable Structure]) c. 1950s Aln Divi 61.344.5 cm 60 cm81 cm Mexico City, 2016 Respective, 1951
8760 cm oil on hinged wood elements Maska ticha (Mask of Silence), 1947 Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth Muse dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris oil on canvas on board
Alberto Burri The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 3949.5 cm oil on canvas Leon Golub 91.5122 cm
Sacco e oro (Sackcloth and Gold), 1953 The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Private Collection, London 5340 cm Self-Portrait of Suffering, 1961 Len Ferrari LHomme de Palmyre, 1962 Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK
burlap and gold on canvas Constructive Art, museum purchase Nrodn galerie v Praze oil on canvas La civilizacin occidental y cristiana lacquer on canvas (Wilson Loan 2006)
126111 cm funded by Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Guy Debord (National Gallery in Prague) 30.440.6 cm (The Western Christian Civilization), 1965 199336,5 cm
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri Endowment Fund. 2005.469 Hurlements en faveur de Sade Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth plaster, wood and oil Courtesy the Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Weaver Hawkins
(Howling for Sade), 1952 Jean Dubuffet 198122 cm Foundation for the Arts and Hauser & Wirth Atomic Power, 1947
C Casulo (Cocoon), 1959 35mm black-and-white film , 64 La dame au pompon, 1946 Funeral and the Crescent, 1963 Fundacin Augusto y Len Ferrari oil on hardboard
Anthony Caro automotive paint on metal mixed media and oil on canvas oil on hardboard Arte y Acervo Gorgona 6178.5 cm
Capital, 1960 42.52942.5 cm Willem de Kooning 80.664.7 cm 101.8 cm94.9 cm Gorgona Anti-Magazines (11 issues), Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales
steel, painted orange Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Black Untitled, 1948 National Gallery of Art, Washington, Herbert F.Johnson Museumof Art, Cornell Lucio Fontana 1961-66 Purchased 1976
245241.5132 cm oil and enamel on paper, mounted on wood Chester Dale Fund, 1986. 11.1 University. Gift of Mariska Marker Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept), 1949 mixed media
Courtesy Barford Sculptures Ltd. Contra Relevo (Counter Relief), 1959 75.9101.6 cm paper on frame 19.521.1 cm (each) Carmen Herrera
industrial paint on wood Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corps de dame - pice de boucherie Vision of the Tomb, 1965 100100 cm Marinko Sudac Collection Iberia No. 25, 1948
Alusio Carvo 1401402.5 cm From the Collection of Thomas B. Hess, (Womans BodyButchers Slab), 1950 oil on canvas Fondazione Lucio Fontana acrylic on burlap
Cubocor (Color Cube), 1960 Private Collection, So Paulo Gift of the heirs of Thomas B. Hess, 1984 oil on canvas 91.591.5 cm Karl Otto Gtz 4654.5 cm
pigment and oil on cement (1984.613.7) 11689 cm The Africa Center, formerly the Helen Frankenthaler Statistisch-Metrische Modulation 20:10:4:2 Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery
16.516.516.5 cm Bicho Caranguejo Duplo Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Museum for African Art Lorelei, 1957 (Statistical-metric Modulation 20:10:4:2),
Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro (Critter Double Crab) - replica, 1960 Woman, 1952 Sammlung Beyeler oil on untreated cotton duck 1961 Lynn Hershman Leeson
aluminium pastel and pencil on paper Erhabor Emokpae 190.5223.46.4 cm felt pen on canvas Breathing Machine, 1965
Enrico Castellani 4325,560 cm 61.641 cm E Struggle between Life and Death, 1963 Brooklyn Museum, New York 100130 cm Plexiglas on wood, sound, sensors, wax,
Superficie angolare bianca The Associao Cultural O Mundo Glenstone Charles and Ray Eames oil on board Purchase gift of Allan D. Emil, 58.39 Private Collection cast face, wig, make-up
(White Corner Surface), 1961 de Lygia Clark A Communications Primer, 1953 61122 cm 324242 cm
acrylic on canvas with reliefs and hollows Woman, 1953-54 16mm color film, 2130 Private Collection G Density 10:2:2:1, 1962-63 Courtesy the Artist and
7012070 cm Bicho em si - replica, 1960 oil on paper board Eames Office LLC, Los Angeles Ivo Gattin 8mm black-and-white film, 554 Bridget Donahue, NYC
HEART Herning Museum aluminum 90.861.9 cm Ben Enwonwu Red Surface with Two Slashes, 1962 Private Collection
of Contemporary Art 334250 cm Brooklyn Museum, New York Melvin Edwards Anyanwu, 1954-55 burlap, resin, pigment, Caged Woman, 1965
The Associao Cultural O Mundo Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, His and Hers, 1964 bronze 14589 cm Marcos Grigorian cage, make-up, wax, wig, wire and tape
Superficie angolare nera de Lygia Clark the Guennol Collection, 57.124 welded steel 210 cm Marinko Sudac Collection Untitled, 1963 recorder, Plexiglas, wood, sensor and sound
(Black Corner Surface), 1961 27.415.210.9 cm Private Collection sand and enamel on canvas 41.926.745.7 cm
acrylic on shaped canvas Bicho Sem Nome - replica, 1960 Beauford Delaney Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Gego (Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt) 76.263.5 cm Courtesy the Artist and
908427 cm aluminium Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945 Associates, New York, NY Going, 1961 Vibracin en negro Grey Art Gallery. New York University Art Bridget Donahue, NYC
Collezione Prada, Milano 262026 cm oil on canvas oil on canvas (Vibration in Black), 1957 Collection. Gift of Abby Weed Grey, 1975
The Associao Cultural O Mundo 55.945.7 cm Mojo for 1404, 1964 1142725.5 cm aluminum painted black Eva Hesse
John Chamberlain de Lygia Clark Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th welded steel University of Lagos 756043 cm Philip Guston Untitled, 1965
Wildroot, 1959 Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased 25.416.511.4 cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Tormentors, 1947-48 painted cord wrapped around plastic
automobile parts; iron, lacquered and welded Obra Mole (Soft Work) - replica, 1964 with funds contributed by The Daniel W. Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Erol (Erol Akyavas) Fundacin Gego Collection at the Museum oil on canvas tubing and ring in wood and metal
17513395 cm Industrial rubber Dietrich Foundation in memory of Joseph Associates, New York, NY The Glory of the Kings, c.1959 of Fine Arts, Houston, TR:2020-2004 103.9153.7 cm 26281.518 cm
MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst, 17348 cm C. Bailey and with a grant from The Judith oil on canvas San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Frankfurt am Main The Associao Cultural O Mundo Rothschild Foundation, 1998 Texcali, 1965 121.8214 cm Alberto Giacometti Gift of the Artist Purchased 1980 with contribution
Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Strher, Darmstadt de Lygia Clark welded steel The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Grande figure II (Tall Figure II), 1948-49 from The Friends of Moderna Museet
Inv. No. 1981/5 Untitled, c.1958 50.338.921.6 cm Gift of Mr. and Mrs. L. M. Angeleski, 1961 plaster Untitled, 1958
Bruce Conner oil on canvas Courtesy the Artist and Alexander Gray Accession Number: 130.1961 17316.534.5 cm oil on canvas Untitled, 1965
Avinash Chandra A MOVIE 1958 (Digitally restored, 2016) 76.263.5 cm Associates, New York, NY Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris 162.9191.1 cm ink and gouache on paper
Early Figures, 1961 16mm film (black-and-white, sound) , 12 Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, F Inv. 1994-0312 Private Collection. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 29.241.9 cm
oil on board Music: The Pines of the Villa Borghese, LLC, New York Inji Efflatoun yvind Fahlstrm Museum Wiesbaden
92122 cm Pines Near a Catacomb, and The Pines Portrait of a Man, 1958 Dr. Schweitzers Last Mission, 1964-66 La cage, premire version Renato Guttuso
Leicestershire County Council of the Appian Way, movements from Pines Pedro de Ora oil on canvas variable polyptych, tempera on panel, [The Cage (first version)], 1949-50 Boogie-Woogie, 1953 Untitled (Study for or after Legs of a
Artworks Collection of Rome (192324), composed by Ottorino Sin ttulo (Untitled), 1959 4556 cm metal, plastic bronze oil on canvas Walking Ball), 1965
Respighi, performed by the NBC Sympho acrylic on canvas mounted on cardboard Artwork Courtesy Barjeel dimensions variable 90.536.534 cm 169.5205 cm ink and gouache on paper
Ahmed Cherkaoui ny, conducted by Arturo Toscanini 50407.5 cm Art Foundation, Sharjah Moderna Museet, Stockholm Collection Fondation Giacometti,Paris Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di 28.541 cm
Le Couronnement (The Coronation), 1964 Courtesy of the Conner Family Trust and Private Collection, Coconut Grove, Florida. Inv. 1994-0180 Trento e Rovereto. Collezione VAF-Stiftung Privatsammlung Mnchen,
oil on canvas Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles Courtesy Tresart. The Queue, 1960 Wojciech Fangor Courtesy Barbara Gross Galerie
91119 cm oil on wood Postaci (Figures), 1950 La Clairire (The Clearing), 1950 H
FNAC 28551 Waldemar Cordeiro Niki de Saint Phalle 9035 cm oil on canvas bronze Hans Haacke Maqbool Fida Husain
Centre national des arts plastiques (France) Movimento (Movement), 1951 Fragment de lHommage au Facteur Cheval SAFARKHAN Art Gallery 100125 cm 58.765.352.5 cm Condensation Cube Man, 1951
tempera on canvas (Fragment of a Homage to Postman Muzeum Sztuki in dz Collection Fondation Giacometti, Paris (exhibition copy), 1965/2006 wood, metal, Masonite, oil
Saloua Raouda Choucair 90.195.3 cm Cheval), 1962 Trees behind the Wall, c1960 Inv. 2007-0223 Plexiglas, water 126.4248.91 cm
The Poem, 1960 MAC USP Collection (Museu de Arte paint, plaster, assemblage of small found oil on canvas on wood Ismail Fattah 767676 cm Peabody Essex Museum, Salem,
wood Contempornea da Universidade de objects, wire mesh on wooden board 2336 cm Reclining Man and Shield, 1960 Femme de Venise IX MACBA. Museu dArt Contemporani Massachusetts, USA
3416.513 cm So Paulo, Brazil) 30012018 cm SAFARKHAN Art Gallery bronze with brown patina on natural bronze (Woman of Venice IX), 1956 (cast 1958) de Barcelona Gift of the Chester and Davida Herwitz
Sharjah Art Museum, Private Collection, Courtesy base bronze with black patina Collection, 2001
Sharjah Museums Department Magda Cordell Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris Uzo Egonu 2015.312.5 cm 112.717.136.2 cm Raymond Hains E301146
Figure 59, c. 1958 Mask with Musical Instruments, 1963 QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum North Carolina Museum of Art, Paix en Algrie (Peace in Algeria), 1956
Poem, 1963-65 oil, acrylic on Masonite oil on canvas of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Gift of Sara Lee Corporation decollaged posters on canvas I
wooden sculpture 243.8152.4 cm 5161 cm 3933.5 cm Robert Indiana
39197.5 cm Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery Untitled, 1965 Collection Ginette Dufrne The Confederacy Alabama, 1965
Courtesy the Artist / The Foundation Buffalo, New York bronze with brown patina on bronze base oil on canvas
and CRG Gallery Gift of the Artist, 1995 2011.115.3 cm 177.8152.3 cm
QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum Miami University Art Museum
of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar

818 819
J Red Yellow Blue White, 1952 Ivan Koaric John Latham M Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Iba N'diaye Study for Bell Tower for Hiroshima, Little
Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins) dyed cotton; twenty-five panels in five parts Figura (Figure), 1956 Belief System, 1959 Toms Maldonado Auto-Destructive Art, 1960, remade 2004 Tabaski, Sacrifice du Mouton Bomb and Monument to Heroes, c. 1950
If All The World Were Paper And All The Height: 30.5 cm Width: 30.5 cm bronze books, plaster, metal, light bulb, Trayectoria de una ancdota glass, fabric, table, trash bag, paper, plastic (Tabaski, Sacrifice of the Sheep), 1963 pencil on paper
Water Sink, 1962 153.4375.9 cm 441419 cm paint on canvas on board (Trajectory of an Anecdote), 1949 and steel oil on canvas 30.641.9 cm
oil on canvas Width (Distance between each panel): Courtesy the Museum of 122.596.5 cm oil on canvas 30025010 cm 150200 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
96.5142.2 cm 55.9 cm Contemporary Art, Zagreb TATE: Purchased 2004 99.772.4 cm TATE: Presented by the Artist 2006 Collection Rpublique du Sngal and Garden Museum, New York
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami
Gift of the Artist in memory of Lee Krasner Little Red Mountain, 1960-62 Evgeny Mikhnov-Voitenko Alice Neel Memorial to Atomic Dead, 1952-82
Jia Youfu Anne dHarnoncourt, 2010 The Seasons, 1957 timber base, books, plaster, wires Ernest Mancoba Composition(on a White Background), Georgie Arce, 1953 graphite on tracing paper
Marching Across the Snow-Covered oil and house paint on canvas 1326464 cm Composition, 1951 late 1950s oil on canvas 47.384 cm
Mount Minshan, 1965 Krishen Khanna 235.6517.8 cm Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery oil on canvas oil on canvas 5565 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
ink and color on paper News of Ghandijis Death, 1948 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 61.551.52 cm 156218 cm Estate of Alice Neel and Garden Museum, New York
181439 cm oil on canvas Purchased with funds from Frances and Untitled (Roller painting), 1964 gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg The State Russian Museum 2016
In the collection of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing 83.883.8 cm Sydney Lewis by exchange, the Mrs. Percy spray paint on white duck Albert Newall Sculpture Study, 1952
Collection of Rathika Chopra & Rajan Uris Purchase Fund and the Painting and 318268 cm Untitled, 1962 Marta Minujn Helmet Head, 1956 pencil on paper
Jasper Johns Anandan, New Delhi, India Sculpture Committee 87.7 Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery oil on canvas My Mattress, 1962 oil on board 35.926.3 cm
Flags, 1965 8165 cm mattresses, cardboard, patching plaster 7045 cm The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
oil on canvas with raised canvas Kim Kulim Tetsumi Kudo Jacob Lawrence Moderna Museet, Stockholm and paint Private Collection and Garden Museum, New York
182.9121.9 cm Death of Sun II, 1964 The Flowing Movement and Its Four Sheep, 1964 200135105 cm
Collection of the Artist oil and object on wood panel Condensation in Mind, 1958 gouache on paper Piero Manzoni Courtesy Marta Minujn Composition No. 3, 1957 O
9175.3 cm watercolor on cotton fabric 56.276.8 cm Achrome, 1958 oil on board Hlio Oiticica
Daniel LaRue Johnson National Museum of Modern and 260275 cm Courtesy Andrew and Ann Dintenfass parts of canvas, impregnated Joan Mitchell 5161 cm Metaesquema, 1955
Freedom Now, Number 1, August 13, Contemporary Art, Korea Aomori Museum of Art with kaolin and glue on burlap Le Chemin des Ecoliers, 1960 Private Collection gouache on paper
1963-January 14, 1964 Lee Seung-taek 131972 cm oil on canvas 4056 cm
pitch on canvas with Freedom Now Three Circles, 1964 Philosophy of Impotence, 1959 Non-sculpture, 1960 MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst 194.9 96.8 cm Barnett Newman Private Collection, So Paulo
button, broken doll, hacksaw, mousetrap, Steel, oil on wood panel cord and resin on painted panel rope, paper and wood stick Frankfurt am Main Collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Beginning, 1946
flexible tube, and wood 181.591 cm 1244785 cm 13110631 cm Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Strher, New York oil on canvas Relevos especial (Spatial Relief), c. 1960
136.6140.518.9 cm Courtesy the Artist Private Collection Courtesy Gallery Hyundai, Seoul Darmstadt Estate of Joan Mitchell 101.675.6 cm paint on cut-out wood
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inv. No. 1981/20 The Art Institute of Chicago, 114.3114.325.4 cm
Given anonymously, 1965 Julije Knifer Yayoi Kusama Lee Ufan Lucky Seven, 1962 Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Accession Number: 4.1965 Meandar u kutu No. E.R.F., 1960 Pushed-Up Ink, 1964 Mawalan Marika oil on canvas Carter H. Harrison The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian
(Meander in the corner), 1961 mixed media ink on Japanese paper mounted on wood Sydney from the Air, 1963 2001894 cm Constructive Art, museum purchase
Asger Jorn oil on canvas 182.2146.7 cm 70554.5 cm natural pigments on bark Museu Coleo Berardo Malangatana Valente Ngwenya funded by the Caroline Wiess Foundation,
De gule jne (Yellow Eyes), 1953 two parts: 143199 cm; 143308 cm Courtesy Gagosian Gallery Private Collection 43.391.3 cm Untitled, 1961 2005.1023
oil on Masonite Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary On loan from the National Henry Moore oil on canvas
6251.5 cm Art, Zagreb Ladder, 1963 Norman Lewis Museum of Australia, Canberra Atom Piece, 1964-65 123.561.5 cm B17, Glass Blide 5,
Galerie van de Loo mixed media Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous bronze Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth Hommage to Mondrian, 1965
Jikken Ko-bo- 167.66696.5 cm Vibration, 1951 Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi 12092 cm glass, textile, water, pigment, cork
Il Delinquente (The Delinquents), 1956 Ginrin (Silver Wheel), 1955 Des Moines Art Center Permanent Oil on canvas Fire (Panel II) from Hiroshima Panels Didrichsen Art Museum Hermann Nitsch 3047.560 cm
oil on canvas 35mm film transferred to DVD, 1157 Collection; Gift of Hanford Yang, New York, 137.288.9 cm (series of 15 panels), 1950 Blutbild (Blood Painting), 1962 TATE: Purchased with Assistance from the
114 cm146 cm Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd 1970.38 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The John Indian ink and Japanese paper Franois Morellet fabric, blood on canvas American Fund for the TATE Gallery, TATE
Galerie van de Loo Axelrod Collection Frank B. Bemis Fund, 180720 cm 4 Double Grids 0, 225, 45, 675, 11080.56 cm Members and the Art Fund 2007
Jir Kolr L Charles H. Bayley Fund, and The Heritage Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels 1960-61 Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung
K Rasierklingengedicht Wifredo Lam Fund for a Diverse Collection oil on wood Ludwig Wien Uche Okeke
Thadeusz Kantor (A Poem of Razors), 1962 Lunguanda Yembe, 1950 Atomic Desert (Panel VI) from Hiroshima 8080 cm acquired in 1983 Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961
Signez sil vous plat! assemblage, cords and razor blades on oil on canvas Bonfire, 1962 Panels (series of 15 panels), 1952 Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary oil on board
(Sign, Please!), 1965 cardboard, wooden frame with glass screen 130.497 cm oil on canvas Indian ink and Japanese paper Art, Zagreb Luis Felipe No 92121.9 cm
mixed media 46.234.23 cm Museu Coleo Berardo 162.6126.7 cm 180720 cm A donde vamos? O presente National Museum of African Art,
261194 cm Neues Museum Nrnberg, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels Robert Morris (Where are we going? Or Present), 1964 Smithsonian Institution,
Moderna Museet, Stockholm Leihgabe der Stadt Nrnberg Seated Woman, 1955 gift of the Estate of Norman Lewis 1981.1.2 Box with the Sound of its Own Making oil, paper collage, synthetic on Gift of Koanne B. Eicher and Cynthia,
oil and charcoil on canvas Almir Mavignier (exhibition copy), 1961 canvas and wood Carolyn Ngozi, and Diane Eicher, 97-3-1
Marwan Kassab-Bachi Geliy Korzhev 130.897.7 cm Li Xiushi Konvex-Konkav II wood, internal speaker 260255 cm
Das Bein (The Leg), 1965 Raising the Banner, 1957-60 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Morning, 1961 (Convex-Concave II), 1962 24.824.8 cm Courtesy Luis Felipe No Aba Revolt (Womens War), 1965
oil on canvas oil on canvas Garden, Smithsonian Institution, oil on canvas oil on canvas Original work: Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, oil on board
81100 cm 156290 cm Gift of Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, 1978 101301 cm 1511105 cm Gift of Mr and Mrs Bagley Wright Isamu Noguchi 182.912.9 cm
MARWAN The State Russian Museum 2016 Photo: Cathy Carver In the collection of CAFA Art Museum, Beijing Courtesy Almir Mavignier Humpty Dumpty, 1946 Artists Estate, Courtesy Asele
Sadamasa Motonaga ribbon slate Institute, Nimo
On Kawara Gyula Kosice Maria Lassnig Roy Lichtenstein David Medalla Work (Water), 1956 149.952.744.5 cm
Thinking Man, 1952 Variation in blue, 1945 Schwarzer Kopf des Vaters Atom Burst, 1965 Cloud Gates-Bubble Machine, 1965/2013 installation Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Colette Oluwabamise Omogbai
oil on canvas oil on canvas (Black Head of the Father), 1956/57 acrylic on board stainless steel, methacrylate, water pump, various dimensions Purchase 47.7a-e Agony, 1963
10065.3 cm 88606 cm Alternative Work Details: Portrt des Vaters 6161 cm water, soap, acrylic Motonaga Archive Research Institution Ltd oil on hardboard
Chiba City Museum of Art Gyula Kosice (Kopf) (Portrait of the Father [Head]), 1956 Collection of the Modern 320300300 cm Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey, New York Memorial to Man, 1947 6950.5 cm
oil on fiberboard Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina wallpaper Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth
LAT.3125N, LONG. 841E, 1965 Estructura lumnica Mad 6 6048 cm Purchase, The Benjamin J. Tillar Memorial Sofia, Madrid Movimento Arte Nucleare dimensions variable
acrylic on canvas (Luminescent Mad Structure No.6), 1946 Maria Lassnig Foundation Trust Long-term loan of Bar Galera, Nuclear Composition, 1951 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation Alfonso Ossorio
83.596.35.3 cm neon gas, Plexiglas, and wood box Sao Paulo, 2014 oil and enamel on paper glued on canvas and Garden Museum, New York Full Mother, 1951
Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 605012 cm Selbstportrt (Self-Portrait), 1957 Morris Louis 97.567 cm oil, enamel on canvas
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Alternative work details: Selbstportrait, Charred Journal: Firewritten II, 1951 Mohammed Melehi Collezione Privata Bell Tower for Hiroshima, 1950 (1986) 129.596.5 cm
Ellsworth Kelly Museum purchase funded by Caroline bereits aufgelst (Self-Portrait, already acrylic (Magna) on canvas Quadrettini, 1963 terra-cotta, wood Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery,
Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance V, 1951 Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. dissolved), 1957 / 89.576 cm acrylic on canvas N 128.678.778.7 cm LLC, New York
collage on paper 2004.1655 Figur auf Holz (Figure on Wood), 1956 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek 120100 cm Ernst Wilhelm Nay The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
9999 cm oil on wood Gift of Marcella Louis Brenner Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco Augen (Eyes), 1963 and Garden Museum, New York Rescue, 1961-62
Estate of the Artist Leon Kossoff 78.849 cm Untitled (Jewish Star), c.1951 oil on canvas mixed media on panel
City Building Site, 1961 Maria Lassnig Foundation acrylic on canvas Gustav Metzger 200160 cm Sculpture Study, c. 1950 121.8244.2 cm
Spectrum Colors Arranged oil on board 86.472.4 cm Drawings, 194559/60 Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Kln ink wash on paper Philadelphia Museum of Art:
by Chance VIII, 1951 123.8159.4 cm Selbstportrt mit Ordenskette The Jewish Museum, New York different materials on paper, 25.436.2 cm Gift of the Artist, 1969
collage on paper Private European Collector (Self-portrait with Livery Collar), 1963 Gift of Ruth Bocour in memory of various dimensions Meteor, 1964 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation
9999 cm oil on canvas Leonard Bocour, 1997 -126 Courtesy Gustav Metzger oil on canvas and Garden Museum, New York
Estate of the Artist 10073 cm 200160 cm
Sammlung Klewan Courtesy Aurel Schreiber, Berlin

820 821
Hamed Owais Pablo Picasso Robert Rauschenberg Klner Divisionen (Cologne Divisions), 1965 Colorado House, 1962 Shozo Shimamoto Sin ttutlo (Unitled), c. 1960 The String in the Bottle Nr. 1126, 1963-85
Al Zaim w Tamim Al Canal (Nasser and Massacre en Core The White Painting (two panel), 1951 150 pages cut out of the Klner Tageszei wood, stretchers, wire, fur, strips of painted Sakuhin (Work), 1955/92 mixed Media on wood in artists frame bottle, black cotton rope
the Nationalisation of the Canal), 1957 (Massacre in Korea), 1951 oil on canvas tung, adhesive binding, cardboard cover canvas, bottles, broom handle, glass galvanized steel painted on both sides 99994 cm 176 cm
oil on canvas oil on plywood 182.9243.8 cm 22.3 cm shards, flag, photograph, plywood base 123244 cm Gordon Family Collection, Los Angeles, CA The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy
109134.7 cm 110 cm210 cm Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg 154.9132.181.3 cm Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo;
QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum ninv. MP 203 Courtesy the Artist and P.P.O.W., Jesus Rafael Soto Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;
of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Dation 1979 Axle, 1964 Literaturwurst New York; Galerie Lelong, New York; Fyodor Shurpin Sin ttulo (Estructura cintica de elementos Fergus McCaffrey, New York
Prt du Muse national Picasso-Paris oil and screen print on canvas (Martin Walser: Halbzeit), 1967 Hales Gallery, London The Morning of Our Motherland, 1946 geomtricos) [Untitled (Kinetic Structure of
P 275.76104.7 cm chopped book, pressed into sausage form, oil on canvas Geometric Elements)], 1956 The String in the Bottle Nr. 1128, 1963-85
Nam June Paik Ivan Picelj Museum Ludwig Kln / Schenkung Ludwig dissected and framed by the Artist Gerard Sekoto 166232 cm paint on Plexiglas and wood with screws beer bottle (Ashai),
Zen for TV, 1963/90 Composition XL-1, 1952-56 52.542.512 cm Prison Yard, 1944 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow 55.255.633 cm cotton rope (black and white)
476837 cm oil on canvas Ad Reinhardt Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg oil on canvas The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Muse 297 cm
TV, wooden case, magnet 10081 cm Untitled (Composition #104), 1954-60 71,561,5 cm Yohanan Simon um purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie Courtesy the Museum of oil on canvas Rhod Rothfuss gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg Shabat on the Kibbutz, 1947 Law Accesions Endowment Fund, 2010.76 Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo;
1993 Gift of the Artist Contemporary Art, Zagreb 281.3108.66,4 cm Composicin Mad (Mad Composition), 1946 oil on canvas Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;
Brooklyn Museum, New York enamel on wood Head of a Man, 1962 6555 cm Francis Newton Souza Fergus McCaffrey, New York
Eduardo Paolozzi Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio Gift of the Artist, 67.59 86.449.8 cm watercolor on paper Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art Degenerates, 1957
I Was a Rich Mans Plaything, 1947 La sirena e il pirata The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. 48.931.8 cm oil on board The String in the Bottle Nr. 1129, 1963-85
printed papers on card (The Mirmaid and the Pirate), 1958 Gerhard Richter Museum purchase funded by Caroline Grosvenor Gallery Mitchell Siporin 143.5175.3 cm bottle, green electric cord
35.923.8 cm mixed media on canvas roll Sargtrger (Coffin Bearers), 1962 Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund. Endless Voyage, 1946 Aicon Gallery 176 cm
TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 177095 cm oil on canvas 2004.1658 Jewad Selim oil on canvas The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy
Galerie van de Loo 135180 cm Untitled, 1951 111.1123.8 cm Head of a Man Thinking, 1965 Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo;
Lessons of Last Time, 1947 Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen Gerhard Rhm oil on canvas University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City oil on canvas Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;
printed papers on card Sigmar Polke Pinakothek der Moderne LEssentiel de la grammaire 48544 cm University acquisition, 1947.44 6650.8 cm Fergus McCaffrey, New York
22.931.1 cm Rasterzeichnung (Portrt Lee Harvey Oswald) 1979 erworben von PIN. Freunde (The Essence of Grammar), 1962 Artwork Courtesy Barjeel Collection Amrita Jhaveri
TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 [Raster Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey der Pinakothek der Moderne German grammar in 6 plates, painted Art Foundation, Sharjah David Alfaro Siqueiros The String in the bottle Nr. 1131, 1963-85
Oswald)], 1963 over with India ink, foldable Cain in the United States, 1947 Two Saints (After El Greco), 1965 square bottle, black electric cord
Its a Psychological Fact Pleasure posterpaint and pencil on paper Bomber (Bombers), 1963 46.568.2 cm Baghdadiat, 1956 pyroxylin on Masonite oil on canvas 227.5 cm
Helps your Disposition, 1948 94.869.8 cm oil on canvas Generali Foundation Collection mixed media on hardboard 7793 cm 101.576 cm The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy
printed papers on card Privatsammlung 130.4180.62.5 cm Permanent loan to the Museum 98.5169 cm Coleccin Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil Grosvenor Gallery Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo;
36.224.4 cm Stdtische Galerie Wolfsburg der Moderne Salzburg QM/QF - Mathaf: Arab Museum Secretaria de Cultura INBA, Mexico City Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;
TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Jackson Pollock of Modern Art, Doha - Qatar Aleksandar Srnec Fergus McCaffrey, New York
There Were Seven in Eight, c.1945 Neger (Nuba), [Negroes (Nuba)] 1964 Ed Ruscha From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz Construction 53, 1953
Windtunnel Test, 1950 oil, enamel and casein on canvas oil on canvas Hurting the Word Radio #1, 1964 Twins Seven Seven to the Revolution - The People in Arms, brass wire The String in the Bottle Nr. 1132, 1963-85
printed papers on card 109.2259.1 cm 145200 cm oil on canvas Devils Dog, 1964 195765 mural 1083.546 cm beer bottle (Kirin), white electric cord
24.836.5 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Larry Gagosian 150.2140 cm ink and gouache on paper dimensions variable Marinko Sudac Collection 297 cm
TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund and The Menil Collection, Houston 73.5113.8 cm Secretara de Cultura-INAH-MEX The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy
purchase, 1980 Larry Rivers 1971-30 DJ Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth Reproduction authorized by the Instituto Frank Stella Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo;
Yours Till the Boys Come Home, 1951 Accession Number: 429.1980 The Last Civil War Veteran, 1961 Nacional de Antropologa e Historia Arbeit macht frei, 1958 Stephen Friedman Gallery, London;
printed papers on card oil on canvas S Ismail Shammout enamel on canvas Fergus McCaffrey, New York
36.224.8 cm Number 23, 1948 209.6163.8 cm Sadequain A Sip of Water, 1953 Gazbia Sirry 215.5 cm308.6 cm
TATE: Presented by the Artist 1971 enamel on gesso on paper Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Seascape with Three Boats, 20th century oil on canvas The Fortune Teller, 1959 Private Collection Rufino Tamayo
57.578.4 cm Foundation purchase, Phyllis C. Wattis oil on wood 4560 cm oil on canvas Terror csmico (Cosmic Terror), 1947
Shattered Head, 1956 TATE: Presented by the Friends of the Fund for Major Accessions 57.281.3 cm Private Collection 52882 cm Sindoedarsono Sudjojono oil on canvas
bronze on stone base TATE Gallery (purchased out of funds 2009.13 Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Courtesy the Artist and Zamalek Pertemuan di Tjikampek yang Bersedjarah 10676.2 cm
3230.523 cm provided by Mr and Mrs H.J. Heinz II Gift of the Government of Pakistan, 1980 Beginning of the Tragedy, 1953 Art Gallery, Cairo (Historic Meeting in Tjikampek), 1964 Coleccin/INBA/Museo Nacional de Arte,
Private Collection, London and H.J. Heinz Co. Ltd.) 1960 Joaquim Rodrigo (2016.12) oil on canvas oil on canvas Mexico City
Kultur 1962, 1962 4868 cm Lucas Sithole 153.5106 cm
Robot, c.1956 Julio Pomar tempera on canvas Cactus, 1960 Private Collection Lazarus I, 1961 Collection: Museum of Modern Tanaka Atsuko
bronze Resistncia (Resistance), 1945 73 cm92 cm oil on canvas bronze and Contemporary Art in Nusantara Electric Dress, 1956 (reproduced in 1986)
48.514.58 cm oil on Masonite Museu Nacional de Arte Contempornea 90120 cm Anwar Jala Shemza 195 cm (Museum MACAN), Jakarta, Indonesia synthetic paint on incandescent lightbulbs
Grosvenor Gallery 33 cm73 cm Museu do Chiado, Lisboa, Portugal Mr. Taimur Hassan c/o Grosvenor Gallery City Wall, 1960 Courtesy Laurie Slatter electric cords and control
Cmara Municipal de Lisboa / oil on board Alina Szapocznikow 1658080 cm
Standing Figure, 1958 Museu de Lisboa Dieter Roth Mohan B. Samant 55.825.4 cm Willi Sitte Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Takamatsu Art Museum
bronze Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1955 (1962) Green Square, 1963 Private Collection, NY Arbeitspause (Break), 1959 Warsaw Ghetto II, 1957
1755131 cm tude para Ciclo do Arroz II artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages synthetic polymer paint, oil on hardboard patinated plaster and iron filings Work (Yellow Cloth), 1955
Private Collection, Courtesy (Study for Rice Cycle II), 1953 34321.5 cm sand, and oil on canvas The Fable, 1962 200122 cm 144.573 cm commercially dyed cotton and glue,
Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris oil on Masonite Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne 175.4132.1 cm oil on hand dyed cloth on mountboard Museum der bildenden Knste Leipzig Courtesy the Estate of Alina three parts
63132 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 6847 cm Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski / 100208 cm / 100202 cm / 100377 cm
Lygia Pape Private Collection Luis de Carvalho Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1957 (1976) Gift of Mr. George M. Jaffin, 1963 The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza David Smith Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Livro da arquitetura (Book of Architecture) e Oliveira, Lisbon artist book, spiral-bound, 14 pages Accession Number: 334.1963 Perfidious Albion, 1945 Purchased through prior gift of Andrew
exhibition copy, 1959-60 24231 cm Composition in Three Parts, 1963-64 bronze and cast iron Head VII, 1961 Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckles
tempera on cardboard Viktor Popkov Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne Mira Schendel oil on canvas on hardboard 36.511.46.7 cm lead Fuller Bequest, 2013
12 pieces, each 30302 cm The Builders of Bratsk Hydro-Electric Untitled, 1963 8055 cm Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, 19.516 cm
Projeto Lygia Pape Power Station, 1960 Bilderbuch (Picture Book), 1957 (1976) tempera and plaster on canvas The Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas Courtesy the Estate of Alina Antoni Tpies
oil on canvas artist book, spiral-bound, 23 pages 100100 cm Meem, 1964 Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanislawski / Forma negra sobre quadrat gris
Jeram Patel 183302 cm 25.522.53.5 cm Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection oil on canvas The Maidens Dream, 1949 Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris (Black Form on Grey Square), 1960
Untitled, 1961 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne 91.591.5 cm bronze mixed media on canvas
oil on Masonite board Ruth Schloss Butcher Family Collection 7352.157.4 cm T 162162 cm
91.4121.9 cm R bok 4 A, 1961 Maabarah (New Immigrants Camp), 1953 The Estate of David Smith /courtesy Takamatsu Jiro Collection Fundaci Antoni Tpies, Barcelona
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Carol Rama artist book, spiral of hand-cut cardstock, oil on canvas Ahmed Shibrain Hauser & Wirth The String in the Bottle Nr. 1124, 1963-85
Tovaglia (Table Cloth), 1951 45 pages 8160 cm Untitled, 1963 Coke bottle (1L), vinyl rope Boris Taslitzky
A.R. Penck tablecloth, Plexiglas 31401.7 cm Mishkan Lomanut, Museum of Art, ink on paper Lol Soldevilla 30.56 cm Riposte, 1951
Elektrischer Stuhl (Electric Chair), 1959-60 123123 cm Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne Ein-Harod 7645.7 cm Sin ttulo (Untitled), 1954 The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy oil paint on canvas
oil on Masonite Courtesy Isabella Bortolozzi and Archivio Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth Bronze and wood Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo; 210310 cm
4341 cm Carol Rama Daily Mirror Book, 1961 Carolee Schneemann 393425.5 cm Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; TATE: Presented by the Friends
Private Collection 150 pages cut-out of newspapers, Conversions, 1961 Kazuo Shiraga Private Collection Fergus McCaffrey, New York of the TATE Gallery 1998
Ovale Nero (Black Oval), 1961 adhesive binding wood, paint, rope, metal on board Work II, 1958
Umsturz (Coup dtat), 1965 mixed media and oil on canvas 22 cm 142.2104.1 cm oil on paper, mounted on canvas
oil on canvas 5035 cm Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg Courtesy Private Collection, London 183243 cm
96200 cm Aishti Foundation, Beirut -Lebanon Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
Private Collection

822 823
Herv Tlmaque Wolf Vostell Wols (Alfred Otto Woldgang Schulze) Charles Hussein Zenderoudi
My Darling Clmentine, 1963 Deutscher Ausblick, 1958-1959 aus dem Composition jaune The Sun and the Lion, 1960
oil on canvas, collages, painted wooden Environment Das schwarze Zimmer (Yellow Composition), c.1947 ink, watercolor and gold paint on paper
box, rubber doll, Plexiglas (German View from the Black Room Cycle), oil on canvas mounted on board
194.524525 cm 195859 7392 cm 106.7147.3 cm
Centre Pompidou, Paris dcollage, wood, barbed wire, tin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,National Grey Art Gallery. New York University Art
Muse national dart moderne/ newspaper, bone, television with cover galerie. 1972 erworben durch das Land Berlin Collection. Gift of Abby Weed Grey, 1975
Centre de cration industrielle 115.513030.5 cm
Achat 1991 Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum fr Andrzej Wrblewski Yuri Zlotnikov
Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur Sonce i inne gwiazdy 4 works from the series
Mark Tobey (Sun and other Stars), 1948 Signal Systems, 1957-62
Verso i Bianchi (Towards the Whites), 1957 Sun in Your Head, 1963 oil on canvas tempera and watercolors on paper
tempera on paper black/white Film, 530 90120 cm each 81,557.5 cm
11271 cm Original 16 mm, transferred into Video Muzeum Sztuki in dz Collection of the Artist
GAM - Galleria Civica dArte (U-Matic) in 1967
Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino Restored and digitalized on DVD in 2006 Liquidation of the Ghetto/
The Wolf Vostell Estate, Bad Nauheim Blue Chauffeur, 1949
Tony Tuckson Oil on canvas
Black Woman, Half Length, 1956 You are Leaving the American Sector, 1964 89120 cm
oil on paperboard 123451.5 cm Private Collection
9970 cm spray paint on silkscreen
Collection: Art Gallery of New South print on photo canvas Executed Man, Execution with a
Wales - Gift of Margaret Tuckson 1977 Museum Folkwang, Essen Gestapo Man, 1949
oil on canvas
Igael Tumarkin W 12090 cm
Aggressiveness, 1964-65 Andy Warhol Private Collection
iron Mustard Race Riot, 1963
2188760 cm 2 parts; acrylic and Young America, 1950
Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art silkscreen ink on canvas egg tempera on gessoed board
289.2208.3 cm (Renaissance Panel)
U Udo und Anette Brandhorst Sammlung 82.6115.1 cm
Gnther Uecker Courtesy the Pennsylvania Academy of
TV, 1963 Thirty-Five Jackies (Multiplied Jackies), 1964 the Fine Arts. Joseph E. Temple Fund
TV, table, nails silkscreen and acrylic on canvas
1188080 cm 255.7286.86.1 cm Y
Private lender MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst Vasiliy Yakovlev
Frankfurt am Main Portrait of Georgy Zhukov,
V Ehemalige Sammlung Karl Strher, Marshal of the Soviet Union, 1946
Stan VanDerBeek Darmstadt oil on canvas
Breathdeath, 1964 Inv. No. 1981/58 206153 cm
16mm black-and-white film, 15 The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Copyright Estate of Stan VanDerBeek Susanne Wenger
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Yemoja, 1958 Yoko Ono
New York. batik Cut Piece, 1965
170252 cm black-and-white film at Carnegie Recital
Emilio Vedova Neue Galerie Graz Hall in New York City in March 1965
Europa 1950, 1949-50 8
oil on canvas Jack Whitten Collection of Yoko Ono
123 cm12618 cm Birmingham, 1964
Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking, and oil Yosuke Yamahata
Galleria Internazionale dArte Moderna on plywood Nagasaki Journey, 1945
di CaPesaro 42.240.6 cm gelatine silver prints
Collection of Joel Wachs Courtesy Daniel Blau
Berlin, 64, 1964
relief, paper, iron, mixed media on wood Head I, 1964 Ramss Younan
10512118 cm acrylic on canvas Cristaux Rocheux (Rocky Crystals), 1960
Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca 27.927.9 cm oil on fiberboard
Vedova, Venezia Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; 5988 cm
ZenoGallery, Antwerp Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung
Jacques Villegl Ludwig Wien
Palissade aux palmiers Head IV, 1964 acquired in 1978
(Fence with Palm Trees), 1957 acrylic on canvas
ripped posters mounted on wood 3325.4 cm Arabesques, 1961
111.545.53 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; oil on board
Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie ZenoGallery, Antwerp 9061 cm
GP & N Vallois, Paris May and Adel Youssry Khedr Collection, Cairo
Head VII, 1964
OUI - Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, 1958 acrylic on canvas Z
ripped posters mounted on canvas 38.138.1 cm Yosef Zaritsky
681003 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; Yehiam (Life on the Kibbutz), 1951
Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie ZenoGallery, Antwerp oil on burlap mounted on canvas
GP & N Vallois, Paris 208228 cm
Head VIII, 1964 Collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Rue Jacob. 5 dcembre 1961, 1961 acrylic on canvas
ripped posters mounted on canvas 38.138.1 cm Fahrelnissa Zeid
1142253 cm Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth; My Hell, 1951
Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie ZenoGallery, Antwerp oil on canvas
GP & N Vallois, Paris 205528 cm
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Collection
Sirin Devrim and Prens Raad Donation

824
 A Ardon, Mordecai 630 Belting, Hans 43 Bundestag Elections 62
AI, Ahmad Abdel 224 Arendt, Hannah 25, 26, 40n35, 40n45, Ben-Gurion, David 628 Bunte Illustrierte 690
A Little-Known Story about a Movement, 627, 628, 631 Benjamin, Walter 351 Buuel, Luis 488
a Magazine, and the Computers Arrival in Arikha, Avigdor 348 Bense, Max 493, 686, 689 Burda 690
Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, Aristotelian 345 Benton, Thomas Hart 446, Buren, Daniel 687n12
19611973 686 Armajani, Siah 230, 271, 608 Bergen-Belsen 26 Burri, Alberto 215, 216, 217, 218, 227, 230,
A Problem for Critics 56n19 Arnold, General Henry H. 703n10 Bergner, Yosl 630 233, 293
A Woman in Berlin 147 Art and Liberty Group (JFH) 231n8 Bergson, Henri 53, 235 Buruma, Ian 40n29
A Young Photographers Statement: Art brut 215, 224, 347 Berlin Wall 43, 690 Butler, Reg 347, 347
I Refute Mr. Natori 139n11 Art in Nigeria 243 Berman, Mieczysaw 202
Abboud, Shafic 286 Art Informel 213, 216, 241, 347, 689 Berni, Antonio 52, 334, 422, 423, 423n11
Abdul-Hai, Muhammed 223 Art Society at the Khartoum Technical Beuys, Josef 26, 26, 16264, 193, 228,
Abela, Eduardo 423n1 Institute 642 690, 728 C
Aboul-Ela, Hosam 56 Art Society at the Nigerian College of Art, Bezalel Art School 628, 630, 631n3 Cage, John 701
Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Expres- Science and Technology, Zaria 641 Bezalel Museum 628 Cai, Yuanpei 437
sionist 29, 45, 46, 64, 144, 213, 216, 239, Arte Nucleare 141, 144 Bezem, Naftali 627, 628, 630, 631 Caliban 77
422, 445, 635, 697, 698 Arte Nuevo 485 Bhabha, Homi 30 Camargo, Sergio 573, 583
Achebe, Chinua 77, 643n4 Arte Programmata 685 Bianchi (Whites) series 215, 217 Camberwell School of Art 225n1
AD&A Museum 695 Arte Spaziale 141 Biasi, Alberto 687n1 Cardazzo, Carlo 141
Adorno, Theodor 26, 27, 29, 40n44, 50, Artist Placement Group 227 Biblioteca Nacional 422 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) 572
54, 57n66, 346 Arturo 485, 487 Bichos (Critters) series 53, 494 Caro, Anthony 502
Adrian, Marc 687n1 Asahi Camera 139n11 Bienal de So Paulo 487, 488, 492, 583, 584 Carvo, Alusio 494, 495n13, 515
Affandi 411 Asahi Graph 136 Biennale de la Mditerrane 583 Cassirer, Ernst 342
African socialism 222 Asahi Graph and Life 41n53 Biennale der Ostseelnder 587n30 Castellani, Enrico 532, 533, 585, 687n1
Agamben, Giorgio 25 Ashton, Dore 244 Biennale Grafike 583, 584 Castro, Fidel 422
Akademie der Knste 444 Asociacin Arte Concreto-Invencin Big Three 71 Catrami (Tars) series 215, 217
Akimov, Nikolai 585 (AACI) 485, 487 Biggers, John 423n1, 446, 454 Celan, Paul 29, 41n51
Al Hurufiyya 222 Atlantic Charter 13, 69 Bill, Max 485, 487, 492, 493, 493, 499, Cline, Louis-Ferdinand 216
Al Rahal, Khalid 563 Atlas 26, 27, 29 584 Center for the Cultivation of Jewish
Al Said, Shakir Hassan 50, 222 Atom Age 144 Birkenau 41n48 Consciousness 630
Al-Adab 50 Auerbach, Frank 233, 259, 382, 572 Bishoff, First Lieutenant Robert E. 39n6 Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 432
Al-Anbiyya (Prophets) series 221 Auschwitz 26, 27, 29, 30, 40n30, 339, 627 Bisire, Roger 642 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 64, 578
Al-Awam, Ibrahim 224 Ausstellung Bayerischer Gemlde des Bit International 686 Centre for Advanced Creative Study 572
Al-Khaldi, Ghazi 431, 432, 434 15. Und 16. Jahrhunderts 23, 39 Bit International[Nove] tendencije. Centre Pompidou 567, 569n5
Al-Moudarres, Fateh 52, 383, 599 Avant-garde 59, 215, 216, 218, 224, 227, Computer und visuelle Forschung. Zagreb Centro de Arte Realista 421
Al-Musawwar 431 229, 230, 241, 421, 425, 438, 440, 477, 479, 19611973 686 Csaire, Aim 25, 32, 33, 41n67, 49, 52,
Al-Nasiri, Rafa 432 481, 482, 485, 487, 488, 489, 492, 493, Black Arts Movement 576 54, 75
Al-Sudanawiyya 223 494, 561, 569, 572, 573, 581, 585, 630, Black Orpheus 348, 559, 585 Czanne, Paul 341
Albers, Josef 481, 701 636, 639, 641, 642, 687, 694, 698, 701 Black Phoenix 230 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 38

INDEX
Aleksic, Dragan 686 Azimuth 685 Blackman, Charles 239 Chamberlain, John 331
Alfonsin, Ral 423n15 Azzawi, Dia 223, 600 Blaszko, Martn 485 Chandler, John 479
Algeria Unveiled 354 Bloch, Ernst 427 Chandra, Avinash 571, 572, 582, 583, 620
Allied Control Council 60 Bodet, Jaime Torre 346, 348 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simon 427
Allied New World Order 147 Boghossian, Skunder 244, 576, 585, 593 Charoux, Lothar 487, 495n13
Allied; Allies 59, 60, 67n4, 69, 71, 136, 147, B Boletn Arte Concreto Invencin 485 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 348
151, 152, 229, 231n7, 341 Bacon, Francis 26, 49, 159, 345, 362, 571, Bombay Progressive Artists Group 231n7 Chelsea Polytechnic 573
Alloway, Lawrence 46, 241, 690, 69395, 572, 691 Bomberg, David 642 Chelsea School of Art 573n6
701 Baj, Enrico 30, 30, 141, 143, 144, 199, Bonaparte, Napoleon 71 Chen, Duxiu 437
Alonso, Carlos 422 Bakic, Vojin 687n1 Bonsiepe, Gui 686 Chen, Peng 441n10
Alonso, Paloma 423n15 Balaghi, Shiva 49 Bontecou, Lee 312 Chen, Shizeng 437
Altdorfer, Albrecht 23, 23 Baldessari, John 687n12 Borduas, Paul-Emile 216 Chen, Yongjiang 441n10
Alte Pinakothek 40n19, 65 Baldwin, James 33, 458, 576, 577 Borgese, Leonardo 143 Chen, Zunsan 441n10
Alte Universitt 65 Bandung Conference 33, 54, 75, 76, 222, Boriani, Davide 687n1 Cherkaoui, Ahmed 287, 432, 642
Althusser, Louis 348 431, 576, 633, 698 Boshier, Derek 718 Chiang, Kai-Shek 437
Alviani, Getulio 687n1 Banham, Reyner 693, 694, 701 Boto, Martha 687n1 Chiggio, Ennio 687n1
Ambedkar, B.R. 231n7 Barilli, Renato 141, 686 Boudnk, Vladimr 49, 290, 291, 347 Chimei, Hamada 56n18
American Seventh Army 21 Barker, Heather 241 Bourdelle, mile-Antoine 347 China Academy of Art, Hangzhou 441n10
American Society of African Culture Barr, Alfred 567 Bourriaud, Nicolas 41n81 Chizu 136,
(AMSAC) 575, 578 Barr, Alfred H. (Jr.) 242 Bowling, Frank 571, 572, 573n5, 582, Choucair, Saloua Raouda 56n11, 493,
Ana, the Igbo earth goddess 641 Barr, Alfred (model) 567 587n16, 614, 615 494, 544
Anatol 155 Barson, Tanya Boyd, Arthur 239 Christen, Andreas 687n1
Anceschi, Giovanni 687n1 Barth, Richard 575 Boyd, David 239 Chua, Mia Tee 472
Anders, Gnther 41n55 Barthes, Roland 444 Brack, John 239 Chuikov, Semyon 427, 445, 446
Anderson, Benedict 633 Baselitz, Georg 46, 50, 52, 64, 387, 586 Brady, Mary B. Chukhrov, Keti 429
Andre, Carl 517 Bashir, Al Tijani Yusuf 225n2 Braithwaite, Edward Kamau 572 Ciudad Universitaria, Caracas 492
Anselmo, Giovanni 687n12 Bataille, Georges 218, 219n8, 227 Braque, Georges 23 Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City 492
Anthropometries 144 Baudissin, Klaus Graf von 62 Breker, Arno 22, 60 Civil Rights Movement 32, 36, 446, 625,
Anti-Nazi 40n46, 69 Bauhaus 343n7, 485, 488, 491, 630 Brenna, Enrico 144 633, 636, 701
Anti-Semite; Anti-Semitic 216, 352, 584, 628 Baumeister, Willi 50, 52, 343n5 Brest, Jorge Romero 242, 487, 488 Clark, Lygia 53, 229, 242, 309, 477, 487,
Antipodean Manifesto 239 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich 39n6 Breton, Andr 444, 487 494, 495n13, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511,
Apollinaire, Guillaume 481, 481 Bayerischen Staatsministerium fr Unter- Brett, Guy 572, 698 573, 583
Apollonian 342 richt und Kultus (Bavarian State Ministry of Bretton Woods Conference 24, 35 Clifford, James 581
Apollonio, Umbro 584 Education and Culture) 66 Breuer, Marcel 571 Cloud Canyons series 53, 230
Appel, Karel 30, 30, 18283, 345, 694 Bayley, Edgar 485, 487 Bridges, Ruby 446 Coalition Provisional Authority 565n11
Appiah, Kwame Anthony 581 Bayrle, Thomas 376, 754 Bristol Aeroplane Company 693 CoBrA 586n13, 694
Arab-Israeli War of 1948 628 Bearden, Romare 582, 722, 723 British Army Film and Photographic Unit Coffineau, Nicole 245
Araeen, Rasheed 230, 74, 53536, 569, Becker, Carl 69 26, 40n42 Cold War 30, 33, 35, 43, 45, 46, 54, 55,
571, 572, 573n4, 573n9 Beckmann, Max 24, 1958 Brussels World Fair 447n15 71, 72, 75, 76, 133, 138, 242, 341, 342,
Arcay, Wifredo 542 Beier, Ulli 243, 244, 585 Bryen, Camille 347 343, 345, 419, 421, 423n11, 437, 444,
Arce, Georgie 444, 459 Bek, Boo 687 Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 27 446, 575, 579, 581, 690, 698, 702
Archives de la critique dart 241 Belkahia, Farid 432, 642 Buddhist 52, 346 Coldstream, William 642

827
Collages and Objects 694
College of Fine and Applied Art 221, 225n1
Colombo, Gianni 687n1
Colombo, Joe Cesare 141, 144
Commission on Human Rights 35
Commonwealth Art Today 583
Commonwealth Institute 583
Communist; Communism 35, 43, 46, 49,
71, 229, 230, 235, 242, 343, 345, 347, 348,
421, 422, 423n10, 425, 427, 428, 429, 431,
432, 437, 438, 441n1, 443, 446, 584, 627
Conceptual art 242, 479, 572
Congress for Cultural Freedom 40n27, 64
Congress of Black Writers and Artists 222,
585, 639
Connelly, Matthew 56n4
Conner, Bruce 748
Constructive Universalism 492
Constructivism 227, 485, 491, 687, 689, 690
Continuit et avant-garde au Japon 585
Contro lo stile 144
Cordeiro, Waldemar 487, 493, 494, 495n2,
495n13, 523, 687n11
Cordell, Magda 30, 52, 347, 378, 693
Corriere della Sera 143
Costa, Toni 687n1
Council of Foreign Relations 55
Crawford, Ralston 141
Cremonini, Leonardo 348
Crippa, Roberto 141
Cruz-Diez, Carlos 687n1
Cubism; Cubist 22, 49, 216, 224, 341
Cuevas, Jos Luis 242
D Drer, Albrecht 23, 23
DHarnoncourt, Ren 40n27, 575
Da Silva, Maria Helena Vieira 485
Dachau 21, 39n12
Dada; Dadaism 22, 139n11, 227, 485, 492,
687, 689, 690
Dada Jazz 686
Dada Tank 686
Dadi, Iftikhar 221, 223
Dahlmann, Alfred 63
Dal, Salvador 30, 143
Damas, Lon 41n67
Damisch, Hubert 217
Damnjanovic-Damnjan, Radomir 687n12
Dangelo, Sergio 141, 143, 144
Dari, Sand 493, 494, 495n2, 522, 524
David, Jacques-Louis 443
Davis, John A. 578
De Barros, Geraldo 495n13
De Beauvoir, Simone 345, 347
De Camargo, Sergio 583
De Campos, Augusto 479, 481, 482, 487
De Campos, Haroldo 482, 487
De Castro, Amlcar 242, 495n13
De Castro, Willys 495n13
De Kooning, Elaine 46, 67n15
De Kooning, Willem 45, 49, 67n15, 141,
233, 251, 345, 372, 373, 445
De Ora, Pedro 540
De Saint Phalle, Niki 228
De Stijl 485
De Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 689
De Vecchi, Gabriele 687n1
Denazification 23, 39n15, 40n46, 59, 60,
65, 67n5
Debord, Guy 694, 751
DeFeo, Jay 52
Degas, Edgar 347, 347
Del Prete, Juan 485
Del Renzio, Toni 693, 695
Delaney, Beauford 233, 273, 458
Delaunay, Robert 23
Deleuze, Gilles 235, 236
Deng, Shu 441n10
Denis, Maurice 215
828
Der Blaue Reiter. Mnchen und die Kunst Expo 70 136 Gattin, Ivo 49, 328 Hautes ptes (thick pastes) 215 International Pop 56n23 Klek, Jo 686 Lissitsky, El 686
des 20. Jahrhunderts 23, 66 Exposio de arte condenada pelo III Reich Gauguin, Paul 235 Hawkins, Weaver 30, 190 International Style 491, 559 Kline, Franz 46 Little Boy 21
Derain, Andr 23 (Exhibition of art condemned by the Third Geoffrey, Iqbal 571 Heckel, Erich 64 Internationale Jugendebuchausstellung 65 Knifer, Julije 685, 686, 687n1 Liu, Lydia 56n5
Descartes, Ren 345 Reich) 487 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 23, 63 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 235, 345, Iommi, Godofredo 485 Kobo, Jikken 749 Liu, Shaoqi 439
Design Unit Group 693 Gerstner, Karl 686, 687n1 354, 428 Iron Curtain 43, 348, 443, 444, 446, 690 Kofi, Vincent Akweti 576, 578 Llins, Julio 242
Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS) 227 Gestapo 29 Heidegger, Martin 345 Isozaki, Arata 135, 138 Khn, Heinz 62 Locke, Donald 571
Deutscher Ausblick 26 Getty Research Institute 241 Heise, Carl Georg 66 Itike ite yokata 144 Kolr, Jir 322 Louis, Morris 29, 174, 175
Di Tella, Guido 242, 492, 702 F Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon 698 Hekate series 341 Ivanissevich, Oscar 489n5 Konkrete Kunst 485 Lozza, Ral 485, 487
Daz, Porfirio 446 Fahlstrm, yvind 690, 756 Giacometti, Alberto 30, 345, 346, 347, Henderson, Nigel 693, 695 Korachi, Rachid 223 Lu, Dingyi 439
Dickerson, Robert 239 Fangor, Wojciech 444, 457 363, 364, 366, 367 Hepworth, Barbara 571 Korean War 52, 76, 347 Lu, Zheng 437
Die Neuen Tendenzen. Eine europische Fanon, Frantz 32, 33, 49, 52, 53, 54, 75, Gilroy, Paul 636 Heron, Patrick 573n3 Korzhev, Geliy 428, 429, 452 Luda and Yangquan 440
Knstlerbewegung 19611973 686 339, 348, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 639, Girola, Claudio 487 Herrera, Carmen 500 J Kosice, Gyula 485, 487, 492, 501, 706 Luftwaffe 26
Die Zeit 66 641, 642 Giunta, Andrea 241, 702 Hesse, Eva 233, 288, 616, 617 Jabareen, Hassan 56n2 Kossoff, Leon 258, 572 Lukacs, Gyrgy 428
Dillgardt, Just 62 Farfield Foundation 67n15 Godfrey, Mark 29 Higgins, Dick 701 Yakovlev, Vasiliy 450 Kotelawala, Sir John 76 Lumumba, Patrice 221
Dimitrijevic, Braco 687n12 Fat Man 21, 30 Goebbels, Joseph 60, 62 Hiroshima (event) 21, 25, 30, 41n53, 43, Jamaat Baghdad lil Fan al-Hadith Kounellis, Jannis 687n12 Luo, Gongliu 441n10
Dionysian 342 Fatah, Ismail 347 Goertiz, Mathias 52, 487, 488, 493, 538 71, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 149, 345 (The Baghdad Group for Modern Art) 563 Koaric, Ivan 414
Diop, Alioune 578 Fautrier, Jean 26, 46, 158, 215, 216, 217, Goldenes Buch 21, 39n6 Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome 136 James, C. L. R. 75 Kramer, Hilton 56n24
Discourse on Colonialism 32, 75 218, 227, 233, 281, 347 Goldschmidt, Gertrude (Gego) 488, 498 Hiroshima Peace Center 139n6 Jamiyat asdiqa al fan (Friends of Art) 563 Krampen, Martin 686
Divi, Aln 402 Fauvism 641 Golub, Leon 396 Hirschenberg, Shmuel 628 Jardim, Reynaldo 242 Krasner, Lee (Lena, Lenore) 45, 254 M
Diwani style 225n2 Fax, Elton 575 Gomringer, Eugen 481 Histadrut 628 Jaspers, Karl 40n46, 346 Krauss, Rosalind E. 219n8, 690 Ma, Yuanhong 441n10
Dmitrieva, Nina 428 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 347 Gordon, Allison 435n3 Hitler, Adolf 21, 22, 39n6, 39n13, 60, 62, Jenkins, Ronald 695 Krauss, Werner 342 MacArthur, General Douglas 136
Documenta I 46 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) 15, 23, Gorgona group 686, 687 71, 341, 342, 343n7, 425, 697 Jess (Collins, Burgess Franklin) 191 Kristl, Vlado 686, 687n1 Mack, Heinz 585, 687n1, 689
Documenta II (1959) 46, 56n21, 64 63, 67n4 Gosebruch, Ernst 62 Hlito, Alfredo 485 Jeyifo, Biodun 643n9 Ku-lim, Kim 207 Macke, August 23
Domon, Ken 136 Fjer, Kazmer 587n36 Gtz, Karl Otto 689, 690, 735, 751 Hochschule der Bildenden Knste (Univer- Ji, Xiaoqiu 441n10 Kubin, Alfred 489n7 Mad group 53, 477, 485, 492, 495n11, 584
Dong, Xiwen 52, 439, 440 Feldman, Hannah 160 Gozo, Yoshimasu 482 sitt der Knste) 63 Jia, Youfu 446, 468, 469 Kubota, Shigeko 228 Madrasat al-Ghaba wa al-Sahra
Dong, Zuyi 441n10 Feng, Zhen 441n10 Grabowski Gallery 583 Hochschule fr Bildende Knste 64 Jiang, Feng 439 Kubrick, Stanley 41n56 (Jungle and the Desert School) 223
Dorazio, Piero 687n1 Fenollosa, Ernst 482 GRAV (groupe de recherche dart visual) Hochschule fr Gestaltung Ulm 491, 584 Takamatsu Jiro 711 Kudo, Tetsumi 228, 233, 276, 324 Madrasat Al-Wahid (The School of One) 224
Dorfles, Gillo 686 Ferrari, Ariel 703n20 685, 689 Hoehme, Gerhard 690 Johns, Jasper 635, 647 Kunstakademie Dsseldorf 690 Maghribi tradition 225n20
Dova, Gianni 141 Ferrari, Len 49, 701, 702, 703n20, 729 Greek Alecco 67n2 Hofer, Karl 64, 343n10 Johnson, Daniel LaRue 494, 654 Kunsthalle-Altbau 40n22 Maharaj, Sarat 35
Dreyfus Affair 631n3 Fire Paintings series 144 Green, Charles 241 Hofgarten 22 Johnson, Sergeant Eugene 39n6 Kunstmagistrat 343n10 Mahdaoui, Nja 222
Dubois, William Edward Burghardt 40n26, First All-Union Congress of Soviet Artists Greenberg, Clement 216, 219n8, 241, Hofgartenarkadengebude 62 Jorn, Asger 380, 381, 694 Kunstverein 40n22 Mainichi Shinbun 30, 41n53
41n67, 576, 578 427 245n5, 341, 698 Holocaust 25, 26, 27, 29, 40n32, 141, 227, Jornal do Brasil 242 Kupferman, Moshe 630, 631 Makchmobk.M 438
Dubuffet, Jean e215, 216, 217, 218, 227, First Congress of Negro Writers and Grez, Ramn Vergara 487 347, 421, 488, 628, 630, 631 Joyce, James 347, 481, 482 Kusama, Yayoi 228, 233, 320, 321, 690 Maksimov, Konstantin 427, 444
345, 347, 374, 375 Artists 575, 576 Gribaudo, Ezio 585 Holroyd, Geoffrey 695, 695n8 Judaism (Jew, Jewish) 22, 341, 347, 425, Kwon, Heonik 56n5 Malangatana 670
Duchamp, Marcel 227 First International Congress of Black Grigorian, Marcos 229, 316 Hlzel, Adolf 66 628, 630, 631, 693 Maldonado, Toms 242, 485, 487, 492,
Dunayevskaya, Raya 348 Writers and Artists 585 Gris, Juan 341 Honda, Ishiro 41n56 Judeo-Bolshevism 341 493, 504, 686
First World 36, 136 Grohmann, Will 65, 341 House of Un-American Activities Judt, Tony 35, 72 Maler am Bauhaus
Dvizheniye group, 685 First World Festival of Negro Arts 578 Gropius, Walter 343n7 Committee 636 L (Painters at the Bauhaus) 23, 66
Fleischmann, Julius 67n15 Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 21, 22, Howard University 575, 576 Ltudiant noir 41n67 Malevich, Kazimir 227, 485, 493, 686
Fluxus 228, 683, 691, 703n13 39n18, 59 Howard University Museum 575 La Phalange 215 Mallarm, Stphane 347, 481
Fontana, Lucio 141, 227, 233, 235, 294, Grote, Ludwig 66 Hua, Li 432 K La Rose, John 572 Malraux, Andr 347, 348
E 485, 689 Group 1890 230, 231n9 Hudson Institute 698 Kamei, Fumio 144 Laa, Diyi 485 Mancoba, Ernest 50, 52, 252, 253, 348,
Eames, Charles 744 Formalist 53, 215, 222, 227, 482, 689 Group of Modern Art 445, 636 Huebler, Douglas 687n12 Kammer der Kunstschaffenden 64 Lacan, Jacques 353, 355 586n13
Eames, Ray 744 Frster, Otto H. 62, 63, 65 Grundig, Hans 64 Huelsenbeck, Richard 686 Kmmer, Rudolf 687n1 Lagos galleries 578 Man-Katz, Emmanuel 630
East German Willi Sitte 446 Fotivec, Dorotea 687 Grnewald, Matthias 347, 23, 23 Hughes, Langston 578 Kandinsky, Vasily 23, 24, 46, 66, 235, Laguna, Juanito 422 Manet, douard 347
Eco, Umberto 347, 685 Fougeron, Andr 49, 444, 584 Grupo Ruptura 495n13, 584 Huidobro, Vicente 485 485, 686 Lam, Wifredo Manhattan Project 71
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Casablanca 642 Franke, Herbert W. 686 Gruppo N 685, 687n1 Humanism and Terror 345 Kang, Youwei 437 52, 56n11, 376, 377, 542, 583, 694 Manichaean 75, 354
cole des Beaux-Arts, Paris 348 Frankenthaler, Helen 52, 233, 260 Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) 573 Husain, Maqbool Fida 32, 231n7, 400, 582, Kant, Immanuel 582 Landi, Edoardo 687n1 Manifeste de la peinture nuclaire 144
Edward, Duke of Windsor 21, 39n6 Frankfurter Rundschau 63 Guggenheim, Peggy 444 635, 635, 636, 637 Kantor, Tadeusz 49, 755 LaRue Johnson, Daniel 494, 654 Manifesto neoconcreto 242
Edwards, Melvin 655, 656, 657 Free Democratic Party (FDP) 62 Guha, Ranajit 56n5 Hussein, Saddam 565n11 Kaprow, Allan 228, 585, 701, 702 Lassnig, Maria 272, 404 Manzoni, Piero 227, 233, 270, 685, 687n1
Efflatoun, Inji 49, 421, 431, 467, 669 French Revolution 627 Guilbaut, Serge 41n78, 586n11, 635 Karkutli, Burhan 432, 434, 435n16 Latham, John 227, 267, 313, 314 Mao, Zedong 49, 419, 437, 438, 439, 440,
Egonu, Uzo 582, 597, 719 Freud, Lucian 572 Gujral, Satish 231n7 Kassab-Bachi, Marwan 407 Laverdant, Gabriel Dsir 215, 218 441n1, 446
Egyptian Surrealists 229, 231n8 Freud, Sigmund 351 Gullar, Ferreira 242, 482, 483, 484 I Kassk, Lajos 686 Lawrence, Jacob Marc, August 24
Eichmann, Adolf 630 Frohne, Ursula 165 Guo, Shaogang 441n10 Ibrahim, Muhammed al-Makki 223 Katzenstein, Ins 241 423n1, 575, 578, 582, 585, 621 Marc, Franz 23
Ein Harod Museum 630 Frohner, Adolf 215 Guston, Philip 263, 385 Ibrahim, Salah Ahmad 224 Kawada, Kikuji 136 Le Parc, Julio 687n1 Marcks, Ney Gerhard 64
Einstein, Albert 41n54 Fromm, Erich 348 Gutai 53, 213, 216, 228, 236, 241, 347, Ichiro, Haryu 56n18, 241 Kawara, On 32, 45, 49, 50, 52, 403, 707 League of Nations 69, 633 Mari, Enzo 685, 687n1
Eiriz, Antonia 422 Fu, Baoshi 439 493, 585 Ideal Home Exhibition 695n7 Kazuo, Shiraga 216, 228, 274, 493 Lebrun, Rico 347, 423n1 Marika, Mawalan 674
Eisenhower, General Dwight D. 39n4 Fuller, Hoyt 578 Guttuso, Renato 49, 53, 422, 444, 445 Ifriqi style 225n20 Keeler, Paul 230, 572, 583, 698 Lee, Christopher 79n12 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 218, 241
El Salahi, Ibrahim 30, 32, 221, 222, 223, Futurism 22, 133, 425 Iljenkov, Evald 429 Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm 40n29 Lee, Seung-taek 52, 228, 319 Marker, Chris 41n56
224, 360, 361, 571, 585, 586n15, 596, Futurist Manifesto 241 Ilse 155 Kelly, Ellsworth 233, 493, 518, 520, 521 Leeson, Lynn Hershman 730, 731 Marshall Plan 152, 345, 491, 492, 698
604, 642 Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Kemble, Kenneth 242 Lger, Fernand 446 Martin, Agnes 488
Elangovan, Arvind 79 H Sculpture and Architecture 425 Khadda, Mohamed 43, 50 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 24 Maruki, Iri 30, 184, 186
Electric & Musical Industries (EMI) 693 Haacke, Hans 53, 493, 516 Imperial Institute 583 Khalwa style 224, 225n20 Lenin, Vladimir 422, 423n2, 427, 443 Maruki, Toshi 30, 184, 186
Emokpae, Erhabor 493, 554 G Haar, Leopold 587n36 Impressionism 22, 642, 690 Khan, Aga 21, 39n6 Leninist 422, 427, 443 Marxism and Questions of Linguistics 427
Emperor Hirohito 139n6 Gabo, Naum 571 Hacker, Dieter 687n1 Independent Group 683, 690, 693, 694, Khanna, Krishen 582, 672 Lepman, Jella 65 Marxism; Marxist 78, 216, 229, 346, 422,
Enayat, Heba 432 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 569 Hadashim, Ofakim 628 695, 695n7, 698, 701 Khartoum School 221, 222, 223, 224, 642 Les Temps Modernes 345 427, 428, 429, 437, 487, 494
Ensor, James 24 Gaitonde, V.S. 228 Haga, Toru 585 Indiana, Robert 648 Khrushchev, Nikita 445 Levi, Primo 40n30 Massironi, Manfredo 584, 685, 687n1
Entartete Kunst 22, 23, 39n11, 39n13, 62 Galerie Franke 341 Hains, Raymond 302, 678, 689 Indica Gallery 573 Ki, Zao-Wou 348 Lewis, Norman 49, 195, 582, 651 Masson, Andr 56n19
Entartete Kunst. Bildersturm vor 25 Jahren 23 Galerie Iris Clert 144 Hall, Stuart 572, 582 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 583, 693 Kibbutz Lohamei HaGhettaot 631 LeWitt, Sol 687n12 Mathieu, Georges 216
Enwonwu, Ben 32, 33, 52, 243, 370, 571, Galerija suvremene umjetnotsi 685, 686, Hamilton, Richard Instituto di Tella 702 Kibbutz Yechiam 628 Li, Jun 441n10 Mathur, Saloni 56n16
575, 576, 641, 642, 666 687 690, 691, 693, 695, 701, 734 Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires 492 Kiefer, Anselm 216 Li, Keran 439 Matiriste (matter painting) 215
Epoca blu 144 Galleria Apollinaire 144 Hampton Institute 446 International Center for the Arts of the Kierkegaard, Sren 345 Li, Tianxiang 441n10 Matisse, Henri 23, 235, 571, 573n2
Equipo 57 687n1 Galleria del Cavallino 141 Hanta, Simon 233 Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Kinetic art 348, 573, 583, 683, 687, 689, Li, Yuan-Chia 573 Mavignier, Almir
Ernst, Max 489n7 Galleria del Naviglio 141 Harmon Foundation 575, 576 Houston 241 690, 698 Liang, Qichao 437 584, 685, 687, 687n1, 689, 737
Erol (Erol Akyavas) 607 Galleria San Fedele 143, 144 Hartung, Hans 46, 216 International Committee for Museums and Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 24, 66 Library of Congress 40n27 Mbari Artists and Writers Club
Erste Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstaus Gallery 67 56n19 Haruo, Yamanaka 56n18 Collections of Modern Art 567 Kiroku shashin: genbaku no Nagasaki 136 Lichtenstein, Roy 30, 200, 690 585, 587n50
stellung 64 Gallery One 572, 583 Haubrich, Josef 65 International Conference on the Detection Kitaj, R.B. 572 Lifshitz, Mikhail 428 Mbembe, Achille 506
Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseo 485, Gandhi, Mahatma 75, 231n7 Haus der Deutschen Kunst of Atomic Explosions 144 Kitasono, Katue 479, 481, 482 Lijn, Liliane 573 Mc Hale, John
487, 488 Garcia-Miranda, Hctor 687n1 21, 22, 23, 39n17, 59, 65 International Klein Blue (IKB) 144 Klee, Paul 23, 49, 66, 141, 642 Lin, Fengmian 437 690, 693, 694, 695, 701, 743
Espinosa, Manuel 485 Gardner, Anthony 584 Haus der Kunst International Monetary Fund 24, 35 Klein, Yves 30, 144, 493 Lin, Gang 441n10 Mc Luhan, Marshall 701
EXAT-51 686, 687 Garnier, Pierre 482 21, 23, 24, 40n19, 59, 65, 66, 67n2 International Olympic Committee 60 Kleine, Rasmus 687 Lippard, Lucy R. 479, 569 Mc Mahon, Colonel Bernard B. 63
829
McNish, Althea 571, 572
Medalla, David
53, 230, 330, 571, 572, 583, 698
Mel, Juan 485
Melehi, Mohammed 738
Mencken, H.L. 77
Mendes, Murilo 485
Menschenbild (image of man)
50, 341, 342, 343
Mercader, Ramn 423n4
Mercer, Kobena 583
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 235, 345, 487
Merton Simpson Gallery 575, 576
Messiaen, Olivier 29
Metrovic, Matko 587n37, 685, 686
Metzger, Gustav 227, 322, 572, 618
Mexican Communist Party 421
Mexican muralism 242, 421, 445
Meyer, E. W. 694
Mezei, Leslie 686
Miyakawa, Atsushi 241
Micic, Ljubomir 686
Midas 54
Mignolo, Walter 56n5
Mikhnov-Voitenko, Evgeny 585, 602
Milan design triennial 138
Miller, Dorothy C. 244
Minimalism; minimalist 53, 427, 491, 493
Minujn, Marta 242, 304
Mir, Joan 215
Misaki, Kiuchi 56n18
Mitchell, Joan 269, 347
Mitter, Partha 585
Mochalskii, Dmitrii 493
Modern Art in the United States:
A Selection from the Collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, New York 571
Moderne Franzsische Malerei 23
Moderne Kunst als Hoffnung 63
Modernist; modernism 22, 23, 32, 33, 36,
38, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 52, 53, 63, 64, 66,
73, 213, 215, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227,
228, 229, 230, 242, 341, 342, 345, 425,
437, 439, 440, 477, 491, 561, 563, 564,
567, 568, 569, 571, 575, 576, 578, 581,
582, 584, 585, 628, 630, 635, 636, 639,
641, 642, 686, 687, 689, 691, 698
Modernits plurielles collection 567
Mohamedi, Nasreen 488, 493
Moholy-Nagy, Lzl 30, 686
Moles, Abraham 686, 689
Mondrian, Piet
235, 445, 481, 485, 487, 488, 571
Monet, Claude 347
Monterrey and Monclova 492
Montiel, Ramona 422
Moody, Ronald 571, 572
Moore, Henry 30, 201, 571
Morellet, Franois 687n1, 739
Morris, Robert 515
Motonaga, Sadamasa 53, 493, 548
Movimento Arte Nucleare 198
Mller, Gotthart 687n1
Mumford, Lewis 41n55
Munari, Bruno 685
Munch, Edvard 66
Murakami, Saburo 216, 228
Murray, Gilbert 69
Murray, Kenneth 242
Museo Experimental el Eco,
Mexico City 488
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia 569n5
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes,
Buenos Aires 489n5
Museu de Arte Moderna de So Paulo
242, 487
Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro
487
Museum Folkwang 62
Museum fr Konkrete Kunst 686
830
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 241
Museum of Modern Art, New York 23, 24,
50, 56n11, 63, 135, 241, 345, 347, 445,
482, 567, 569n5, 571, 575, 585, 685,
690, 698
Museum of the Child in the Ghetto Fighters
Museum 631
Museumsverein 62
Musgrave, Victor 583
Muslim Brotherhood 225n17
Mussolini, Benito 13, 21, 39n6
Myrdal, Gunnar 75
N Picture Post 144
NDiaye, Iba 49, 52, 348, 664
Nabaa, Nazir 431
Naef, Sylvia 50
Nagasaki (event) 21, 25, 30, 40n32, 41n53,
43, 71, 135, 136, 138, 141, 143, 339, 345
Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum 136
Nagasaki International Culture Hall 136
Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 35
Nake, Frieder 686
Naskh tradition 225n20
Nasser 56 79n12
Nasser, Gamal-Abdel 77, 231n8, 431, 432,
434, 445, 583, 633, 636
National Gallery, Washington D.C. 575
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
482
National Socialism (Nazi; Nazi Party;
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-
partei [NSDAP]) 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27,
29, 35, 40n46, 46n40, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64,
66, 67n3, 67n4, 69, 71, 147, 216, 217, 227,
341, 342, 345, 347, 425, 431, 443, 487,
693, 697
Nationalgalerie Berlin 62
Natori, Yonosuke 139n11
Natural Synthesis 33, 244, 641
Nay, Ernst Wilhelm 49, 264, 265, 341
Nedoshivin, German 445
Neel, Alice 444, 459
Nees, Georg 686
Ngritude 32, 41n67, 222, 339, 348, 351,
585, 639, 641, 642
Negro Digest 578
Nehru, Jawaharlal
76, 77, 230, 231n7, 421, 633
Neo-Concretist 229
Neo-Dada 348
Neoconcrete
53, 477, 479, 482, 483, 495n11, 573
Nerlinger, Oskar 64
Neruda, Pablo 423n4, 423n9
Neue Galerie 686
Neue Sachlichkeit 65
New Horizons 628, 630
New Images of Man 50, 345, 347, 348
New Vision Centre 583
New Vision Group 583
New Year Painting Movement 438
New York Times 576, 578
Newall, Albert 541, 543
Newman, Barnett 50, 52, 194, 233, 235, 236
Newsbulletin 583
Ngwenya, Valentin 670
Nicholson, Ben 571
Nicks, Walter 488
Nietzsche, Friedrich 351
Niikuni, Seiichi 482
Nikonov, Pavel 427
Nippon 136
Nitsch, Hermann 233, 297
Nixon, Richard 348
Nkrumah, Kwame 14, 55, 633
No, Luis Felipe 408, 422
Noguchi, Isamu
30, 139n6, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181
Noigandres 481, 482 Prez, Matilde 487 Rauschenberg, Robert 53, 196, 216, 690, 712 of Applied Arts 225n1 428, 438, 443, 445 Torres-Garca, Joaqun 485, 492
Nolde, Emil 24 Pern, Juan Domingo 422, 487, 489n5 Raza, S. H. 231n7 School of Design in Gordon Memorial Stalinist 419, 421, 425, 428, 444, 584 Traba, Marta 244, 422
Noll, Michael A. 686 Peter the Great 425 Red Army 151, 443 College, Khartoum 221 Stamos, Theodore 53 Trbuljak, Goran 687n12
Non-Aligned Movement 231n7, 572, 633, Petka 155 Regent Street Polytechnic 572, 573n6 School of London 572 Stanford University 79 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security
636, 685 Pettoruti, Emilio 485 Reich, Annie 354 School of Paris 230, 568, 630 State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow 434 136
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Phelps-Stokes Fund 479n5 Reichskulturkammer 39n13, 62 Schwitters, Kurt 686 Staudt, Klaus 687n1 Triumph des Willens
14, 35 Photography 100 Years: A History of Pho- Reinhardt, Ad 46, 141, 514 Second World 36 Steichen, Edward 41n53 (Triumph of the Will) 60
Nouveau Ralisme 241 tographic Expression by the Japanese 138 Reinhartz, Karl 687n1 Sedlmayr, Hans 50 Stein, Jol 687n1 Tropiclia movement 229
Nova tendencija 3 685 Physical Damage Division of the United Renaissance 141, 215 Segall, Lasar 489n7 Steinbeck, John 446 Trotsky, Leon 423n4
Nove Tendencije 685 States Strategic Bombing Survey 136 Ren Drouin Gallery 215 Segi, Shinichi 144 Stella, Frank 29, 172 Truman Doctrine 345
Nove tendencije 2 685 Picard, Max 342 Repin Institute of Art, Leningrad 438, 446 Seissel, Josip 686 Still, Clyfford 423n1 Truman, Harry S. 63, 71
Novedades 242 Picassian 141 Repin, Ilya 439, 444 Seitz, William 685 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 347 Tuckson, Tony 406
Nwoko, Demas 52, 641, 642 Picasso, Pablo23, 36, 66, 341, 347, 358, Resnais, Alain 41n56 Sekoto, Gerard 32, 348, 412, 413, 575, 576 Stonard, John-Paul 691 Tumarkin, Igael 203, 630
Nyerere, Julius 76, 77 444, 571, 576, 582 Restany, Pierre 241, 584 Selim, Jawad 413, 600 Storm Society 437 Turki, Tomader 432
Picelj, Ivan 530, 685, 686, 687n1 Reuben Gallery 701 Selz, Peter 347 Street Art (Zouxiang shizi jietou de yishu) Turnbull, William 693
Revueltas, Jos 421 Senghor, Lopold Sdar 33, 41n67, 53, 54, 437 Tutankhamun 348
Piene, Otto 687n1 Rheinisches Muesum Kln-Deutz 40n22 77, 78, 79, 348, 351, 577, 587n50, 641 Studio Osman 225n1 Tzara, Tristan 487, 686
O Pignatari, Dcio 481 Richier, Germaine 347 Serpa, Ivan 487 Subramanyan, Kalpathi Ganpathi 230
Oba, Hideo 41n56 Pinakothek der Moderne 65 Richter, Gerhard Seung-taek, Lee 52, 228, 319 Sddeutsche Zeitung 60, 63
Oehm, Herbert 687n1 Pinakothek, Alte 65 26, 27, 50, 64, 170, 171, 388, 690 Sevcenko, Nicolau 492 Sudjojono, Sindoedarsono 673
Office of the Coordinator of Pinot-Gallizio, Giuseppe 300 Richter, Vjenceslav 686, 687n1 Shahn, Ben 45, 423n1, 445 Sukarno 33, 54, 77, 633 U
Inter-American Affairs 40n27 Pintaric, Vera Horvat 686 Riefenstahl, Leni 60 Shamma, Abdul Manan 432 Summers, David 43 U.S. Seventh Army 59
Office of War Information 40n27 19 Pintores (19 Painters) 487 Riley, Bridget 237 Shammout, Ismail 446, 628, 663 Sun, Zixi 440 Uecker, Gnther 687n1
Oiticica, Hlio 53, 229, 326, 487, 494, Pirie, Norman 694 Riopelle, Jean-Paul 216 Shannon, Claude 697 Suprematists; suprematism 227, 493 Ufan, Lee 228, 295
495n13, 513, 534, 573 Piskur, Bojana 56n16 Rivera, Diego 421, 423n2, 444 Shao, Da Zhen 441n10 Supreme Command of Allied Powers Uhlmann, Hans 64
Okamoto, Taro 50, 52 Pittura Nucleare 143 Rivers, Larry 649 Shapiro, J. S. 694 (SCAP) 41n53 Uli aesthetic 641
Okara, Gabriel 77 Piyadasa, Redza 35 Robinow, Lieutenant Wolfgang F. 39n1 Shapiro, Jerome F. 41n53 utej, Miroslav 687n1 Uemae, Chiyu 216
Okeke-Agulu, Chika 578, 636 Platonic 375 Rockefeller, Nelson D. 242 Shemza, Anwar Jalal 50, 284, 285, 493, Suzuki, Masafumi 135 United Nations 24, 35, 69, 75, 76, 339,
Okeke, Uche 32, 52, 244, 590, 641, 668 Poblete, Gustavo 487 Rockwell, Norman 49, 446 494, 512, 571, 572, 582, 583, 609 Swaminathan, Jagdish 230 345, 698
Olea, Hctor 493, 495n13 Pohl, Uli 687n1 Rodchenko, Aleksandr 686 Shi, Lu 439 Swiss Allianz group 485 United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Oluwabamise, Colette 415 Polke, Sigmar 690, 714 Rodin, Auguste 347 Shibrain, Ahmed Mohammed Szapocznikow, Alina 29, 167, 347, 405 Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 35, 345,
Olympia-Film GmbH 60 Pollock, Jackson 45, 46, 64, 141, 144, Rodrigo, Joaquim 708 221, 222, 223, 224, 585, 606, 642 Szilard, Leo 71 346, 348, 698
Olympia: Fest der Vlker/ 216, 219n8, 228, 233, 248, 250, 345, 347, Roosevelt, Franklin D. 69 Shimamoto, Shozo 216, 305 Szombathy, Blint 687n12 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Fest der Schnheit 60 423n1, 585, 635, 698 Rosenberg, Harold 241 Shindo, Kaneto 41n56 35, 339
Omar, Madiha 564 Pomar, Jlio 422, 446, 464 Rotella, Mimmo 689 Shiraga, Kazuo 216, 218, 228, 274, 493 Universidad de Guadalajara Escuela de
Omogbai, Colette 30, 415 Ponge, Francis 217, 218 Roth, Dieter 550, 551, 689, 726, 727 Shoah (also see: Holocaust) 41n51 Arquitectura 488
On The Beach 239 Pop; pop art 46, 241, 422, 572, 635, 690, Rothfuss, Rhod 485, 505 Shurpin, Fyodor 427, 443, 451 T University College, Ibadan 643n4
Onabolu, Aina 242 691, 693, 695, 701 Rothko, Mark 49 Shute, Nevil 239 Tagore, Rabindranath 75, 230 University of Auckland 77
Ono, Yoko 228 Popkov, Viktor 428, 446, 453 Royal College of Art and the Slade School Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts 440 Tahrir Monument 563 University of Heidelberg 40n46
Orientalist 642 Portinari, Candido 423n1 572 Sicre, Jos Gmez 242 Taizo, Yoshinaka 56n18 University of Ibadan 243
Orozco, Jos Clemente 421, 423n2, 444, 641 Post-cubism; post-cubist 141, 223, 241, 641 Rubens, Peter Paul 425 Siegel, Katy 635 Talman, Paul 687n1 Utaibi, Ahmad Abdallah 224
Ossorio, Alfonso 52, 333, 347, 379, 585 Pound, Ezra 482 Rhm, Gerhard 698, 743 Signals Gallery 230, 572, 583 Tamayo, Rufino 384, 421, 422
Otero, Alejandro 573 Poussin, Nicolas 347 Ruscha, Ed 742 Signals Group 698 Tambal, Hamza al-Malik 225n13
Otra Figuracin 50 Prakash, Gyan 635 Rushdie, Salman 77 Simias of Rhodes 481 Tan, Yongtai 441n10
Ov, Horace 572 Prashad, Vijay 56n5 Russell-Einstein Manifesto 41n54 Simon, Yohanan 662 Tanaka, Atsuko V
Owais, Hamed 432, 434, 445, 473 Prati, Lidy 485, 487 Russell, Bertrand 41n54, 71 Simone, Nina 578 493, 494, 546, 689, 744, 745 V-E Day 39n4
Pre-Socratic 345 Russian Constructivism 491 Sintenis, Rene 64 Tanavoli, Pervez 222 Valry, Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules
Preda, Enzo 144 Russian Revolution 427, 628 Siporin, Mitchell 661 Tange, Kenzo 139n6 (Toussaint) 351
Prsence Africaine 50, 578, 585 Ruwad (Pioneers) 563, 564 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 30, 49, 409, 421, 422, Tapi, Michel 241, 347, 585 Valoch, Jir 686
P Prestes Maia gallery 487 423n2, 423n10, 444, 445, 446, 466, 584 Tpies, Antoni 215, 227, 230, 296 Van Doesburg, Theo 485, 492, 493,
P1 Club 59, 67n2 Progressive Artists Group, Bombay 582 Sirry, Gazbia 53, 598, 636, 637 Taslitzky, Boris 444, 462 495n13
Padmore, George 40n26 Prospero 77 Sithole, Lucas 368 Tate Gallery 67n15, 347, 571 Van Dongen, Kees 23
Paik, Nam June 691, 747 Pure Paints a Picture 46 S Sitte, Willy (Willi) 446, 456 Tate Modern 56n11, 569n5 Van Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon 427
Pan American Union 242 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts 425 Sabogal, Jos 423n1 Slade School of Fine Art 221, 586n15, 641 Tatlin, Vladimir 227, 686 VanDerBeek, Stan 750
Pan-African Festival 222 Putar, Radoslav 685, 686 Sacilotto, Lus 487, 495n13 Smith, Bernard 239 Tatsuo, Ikeda 56n18 Vanya 155
Pan-Africanism 43, 45, 222, 572, 585, 639 Putzel, Howard 56n19 Sadamasa, Motonaga 53, 493, 548 Smith, David 160, 161 Teige, Karel 686 Varisco, Grazia 687n1
Pan-Arabism 43, 45, 222, 559, 564 Sadequain 50, 222, 612, 613 Smith, Terry 38 Tel Aviv Museum 628 Vassilakis, Panagiotis (Takis) 573
Pan, Tianshou 437 Said, Edward 79, 581 Smithson, Alison 693, 695, 701 Tlmaque, Herv 690, 716 Vedova, Emilio 306, 646
Paolini, Giulio 687n12 Salahi, El 30, 32, 221, 222, 223, 224, 360, Smithson, Peter 693, 695, 701 Tendencije 4 685 Velzquez, Diego 427
Paolozzi, Eduardo 143, 192, 480, 481, 486, Q 361, 571, 585, 596, 604, 642 Sobrino, Francisco 687n1 Tendencije 5 685 Velepic, Ciril 584
487, 488, 491, 492, 493, 494, 690, 693, Qi, Baishi 437 Salahov, Tahir 446 Socialist Modernism 686 The Effect of the Atomic Bomb on Veneuse, Jean 353
695, 701, 720, 721, 732, 733 Qi, Muer 441n10 Salazar, Antnio 446 Socialist Realism 35, 73, 239, 242, 419, Hiroshima, Japan 136 Venice Biennale 46, 444, 583
Papastergiadis, Nikos 582 Qian, Shaowu 441n10 Salim, Jawad 563 421, 422, 423n10, 425, 427, 437, 438, The Family of Man 41n53, 135 Ver y Estimar 487
Pape, Lygia 242, 487, 494, 553 Quan, Shanshi 441n10 Salim, Naziha 564 439, 440, 443, 444, 445, 686 The Great Depression 235, 241 Victoria and Albert Museum 571, 573n2
Parallel of Life and Art 695 Quartet for the End of Time 29 Salkey, Andrew 572 Socit Africaine de Culture (SAC) 578 The New School for Social Research Villegl, Jacques (Mah de la)
Paris Salon dAutomne 444 Quin, Carmelo Arden 485 Salvadori, Marcello 572 Society for Islamic Thought 225n17 423n2 303, 679, 689, 724
Pasmore, Victor 571 Quit India Movement 231n7 Samant, Mohan 229, 329, 582, 635 Soldevilla, Lol 495n4, 526, 527 Theatre Institute, Leningrad 585 Vinholes, L.C. 482
Pasvolsky, Leo 71 Quran 221, 222 Sartre, Jean-Paul 33, 50, 345, 346, 347, Sommerrock, Helge 687n1 Third Reich 59, 60, 487 Viswanathan, Gauri 77
Patel, Jeram 230, 280 348, 351, 352, 481 Sontag, Susan 241, 249 Third World 36, 43, 72, 221, 229, 230, Vittorini, Elio 487
Paulhan, Jean 217 Sattler, Dieter 66 okic, Ilija 687 231n7, 351, 421, 431, 432, 573n3 Vlaminck, Maurice 23
Paz, Octavio 230, 231n9 Sauvy, Alfred 56n6 Soto, Jsus-Rafael 572, 736 Thorak, Josef 60 Voelcker, John 693, 695
Pechstein, Max 64 R Schaeffer, Pierre 686 Soulages, Pierre 216 Tibol, Raquel 423 Volta Redonda and Voturantim 492
Pedrosa, Mrio 241, 487, 492 Raad, Walid 56n11 Schanze, Helmut 691 Soutine, Chaim 630 Tillich, Paul 345, 347 Volwahsen, Herbert 65
Peeters, Henk 687n1 Rabin, Yitzhak 631 Schendel, Mira 209 Souza, Francis Newton 32, 52, 231n7, 398, Time magazine 141, 575 Von Gentz, Friedrich 71
Peirce, Charles Sanders 235, 237 Rabindralaya, Lucknow 230 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 216, 218 399, 571, 572, 582, 583, 585, 591 Tito, Josip Broz 633, 689 Von Graevenitz, Gerard 687n1
Petliura, Symon 628 Radelet, Sergeant Richard S. 39n6 Schlemmer, Oskar 66 Soviet Socialist Realism 242, 421, 423n10, Tobey, Mark 45, 49, 585, 605 Von Jawlensky, Alexej 23
Penck, A.R. (Winkler, Ralf) 394, 410 Ragon, Michel 481 Schloss, Ruth 628, 630, 660 437, 438, 439, 443 Togliatti, Palmiro 487 Von Metternich, Klemens 71
Penone, Giuseppe 687n12 Raindance Corporation 703n13 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 64, 489n7 Soyinka, Wole 643n9 Tolstoy, Leo 427 Vostell, Wolf
Peoples Daily 438 Rama, Carol 308, 506 Schneemann, Carolee 228, 310, 311, 701 Spanudis, Theo 242 Tomasello, Luis 687n1 26, 26, 166, 689, 691, 748, 752
Perceptismo 485 Rancire, Jacques 563 Schoenberg, Arnold 29 Srnec, Aleksandar 531, 686, 687n1 Tomatsu, Shomei 136 Vu, Tuong 56n5
Perceval, John 239 rand Corporation 698, 703n10 School of Arabic Calligraphy and College Stalin, Joseph 49, 69, 419, 421, 425, 427, Tomii, Reiko 241
831
W Yusuke, Nakahara 241
Wa Thiongo, Ngugi 77 Yvaral, Jean-Pierre 687n1
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 56n23
Wallerstein, Immanuel 56n15
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum 63, 65
Wang, Baokang 441n10 Z
Waqialla, Osman 221, 223, 224, 225n2 Zadkine, Ossip 348
Warhol, Andy 30, 635, 690, 691, 715 Zamriq, Hisham 432, 434
Warnke, Martin 587n32 Zaria Art Society 52
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 631 Zaritsky, Yosef 628, 631, 658
Warsaw Pact 35, 423n9, 689 Zayyat, Elias 432
Watteau, Jean-Antoine 347 Zehringer, Walter 687n1
Weaver, Warren 697 Zeid, Princess Fahrelnissa 254, 583
Weissmann, Franz 242 Zein El Abdein, Ahmed El Tayib 223
Welles, Sumner 71 Zen 49 341
Wells, Herbert George 69 Zenderoudi, Charles Hossein 50, 348, 610
Wenger, Susanne 594 Zeno 582
West Indian Students Centre 572 Zentrum fr Kunst und Medientechnologie
Westad, Odd Arne 56n5 686
Westermann, Horace Clifford 348 Zero (group) 493
White, Charles 49, 423n1 Zhan, Jianjun 439
Whitechapel Art Gallery Zhang, Huaqing 441n10
582, 695, 695n7 Zhdanov, Andrei 443, 444
Whitney Museum of American Art Zhou, Benyi 441n10
49, 569n5 Zhou, Zheng 441n10
Whitten, Jack Zhukov, Marshal Georgy 425
30, 52, 390, 391, 392, 393, 636, 650 Ziegler, Adolf 22, 39n13, 62
Wiener, Norbert 697, 701, 702 iek, Slavoj 427
Wilding, Ludwig 687n1 Zlotnikov, Yuri 205, 740
Williams, Aubrey 571 Zurbarn, Francisco de 427
Wilson, Colin St John 693 Zyklus das schwarze Zimmer 26
Wilson, Ellis 575
Wilson, Sarah 26
Wilson, Woodrow 71
Winter, Fritz 341
Wladyslaw, Anatol 587n36
Woeller, Wilhelm 489n7
Wols (Alfred Otto Woldgang Schulze)
141, 262, 347, 585, 694
Woodcut Movement 437, 438
Woodruff, Hale 578
World Bank 24, 35
World Trade Organization 35
World War II 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 35, 43,
49, 52, 56n7, 59, 63, 66, 69, 71, 73, 135,
136, 138, 147, 148, 215, 222, 227, 231,
241, 345, 421, 423, 425, 437, 491, 559,
567, 571, 572, 573, 575, 582, 583, 585,
627, 633, 635, 636, 687, 693, 697, 701
Wright, Edward 693
Wright, Frank Lloyd 66
Wright, Richard 75, 577, 633
Wrblewski, Andrzej
29, 168, 169, 204, 443
Wu, Biduan 441n10
Wu, Zuoren 439
Wyeth, Andrew 45, 443, 465
Wyss, Marcel 687n1

X
Xi, Jingzhi 441n10
Xiao, Feng 441n10
Li Xiushi 470
Xiwen, Dong 52, 439, 440
Xu, Beihong 439
Xu, Minghua 441n10

Y
Yakovlev, Vasiliy 425, 443
Yamahata, Yosuke 30, 135, 136, 138, 188
Yanan Talk 438, 440
Yoshiaki, Tono 241
Yoshihara, Jiro 585
Yoshihara, Michio 216
Younan, Ramss 233, 278
Young Commonwealth Group 583
Yozo, Hamaguchi 584

832
 The Africa Center, formerly the
Museum for African Art, New York
Aicon Gallery, New York
Aishti Foundation, Beirut
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Aomori Museum of Art
Archivio Carol Rama, Turin
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
The Art Institute of Chicago
Asele Institute, Nimo
Associao Cultural O Mundo de Lygia
Clark, Rio de Janeiro
Barford Sculptures Ltd., London
Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah
Bar Galera, Sao Paulo
Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Berlinische Galerie Landesmuseum
fr Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und
Architektur, Berlin
Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
Frank Bowling
Udo und Anette Brandhorst Collection,
Munich
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Cologne
Butcher Family Collection
CAFA Art Museum, Beijing
Luis de Carvalho e Oliveira, Lisbon
Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Chiba City Museum of Art
Rathika Chopra & Rajan Anandan, New Delhi
Saloua Raouda Choucair
Collection Fundaci Antoni Tpies,
Barcelona
The Conner Family Trust, Los Angeles
CRG Gallery, New York
LIST OF LENDERS
Des Moines Art Center
Deutsche Bank Collection,
Frankfurt am Main
Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki
Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York
Ginette Dufrne
Eames Office, Los Angeles
Melvin Edwards
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Estate of Uzo Egonu, London
Estate of Ellsworth Kelly
Estate of Alice Neel
Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, London
Estate of David Smith, New York
Estate of Alina Szapocznikow
Estate of Jiro Takamatsu
Estate of Stan VanDerBeek
Estate of Wolf Vostell, Bad Nauheim
Hecilda & Sergio Fadel Collection,
Rio de Janeiro
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen bei Basel
Fondation Gandur pour lArt, Geneva
Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca
Vedova, Venice
Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan
Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia,
Galleria Internazionale dArte Moderna
di CaPesaro, Venice
Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione
Burri, Citt di Castello
The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros
Collection, Miami
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
Fundacin Augusto y Len Ferrari Arte
y Acervo, Buenos Aires
Larry Gagosian
Gagosian Gallery, New York
Galera La Caja Negra, Madrid
Galerie Georges-Phillipe &
Nathalie Vallois, Paris
Galerie Lelong, New York
Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Salzburg
Galerie van de Loo, Munich
Gallery Hyundai, Seoul
GAM - Galleria Civica dArte Moderna e
Contemporanea, Turin
Generali Foundation Collection, Vienna
Glenstone, Potomac
Daniel Goeritz
Gordon Family Collection, Los Angeles
gordonschachatcollection, Johannesburg
Alexander Gray Associates, New York
Grey Art Gallery. New York University
Art Collection
Barbara Gross Galerie, Mnchen
Grosvenor Gallery, London
Hales Gallery, London
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Hartlepool Borough Council
Taimur Hassan
Hauser & Wirth, Zrich, London, Somerset,
Los Angeles
HEART Herning Museum of
Contemporary Art
Herbert F.Johnson Museumof Art, Cornell
University. Ithaca, NY
Carmen Herrera
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y
Literatura, Mexico City
International Institute of Social History
(Amsterdam)
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Iwalewahaus, Universitt Bayreuth
Amrita Jhaveri, New Delhi
The Jewish Museum, New York
Jasper Johns
Kim Kulim
Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi
Klewan Collection, Munich
Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles
Kunstmuseum Bonn
Kunstmuseum Winterthur
Maria Lassnig Foundation, Vienna
John Latham
Leicestershire County Council
Lisson Gallery, London
Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek
MAC USP Collection Museu de Arte
Contempornea da Universidade
de So Paulo
MACBA. Museu dArt Contemporani
de Barcelona
Mart, Museo di arte contemporanea di
Trento e Rovereto
Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima Panels,
Higashimatsuyama
Marwan Kassab-Bachi
MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha
Almir Mavignier
The Mayor Gallery, London
Fergus McCaffrey, New York
The Menil Collection, Houston
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Gustav Metzger
Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, OH
Marta Minujin
Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York
MMK Museum fr Moderne Kunst
Frankfurt am Main
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Muse dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris
Muse national dart moderne/Centre de
cration industrielle, Paris
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Takamatsu Art Museum
Sofia, Madrid TATE, London
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Museu Coleo Berardo, Lisbon Tresart, Coral Gables, FL
Museu de Lisboa, Lisbon University of Iowa Museum of Art
Museu Nacional de Arte Contempornea University of Lagos
Museu do Chiado, Lisbon Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Museum der bildenden Knste Leipzig Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson
Museum der Moderne Salzburg College, Davidson, NC
Museum Folkwang, Essen Axel & May Vervoordt Foundation, Antwerp
Museum Lippo, Jakarta Joel Wachs
Museum Ludwig Cologne Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Susanne Wenger Foundation, Krems
Wien, Vienna Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Museum of Art, Ein-Harod Jack Whitten
Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb May and Adel Youssry
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Khedr Collection, Cairo
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo
The Museum of Modern Art, New York Zamalek Art Gallery, Cairo
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp
in Nusantara (Museum MACAN), Jakarta Yuri Zlotnikov
Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau
Museum Wiesbaden And the lenders who wish
Muzeum Narodowe we Wrocawiu to remain anonymous
(National Museum in Wroclaw)
Muzeum Sztuki in dz
Nrodn galerie v Praze
(National Gallery in Prague)
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
National Film Center, Tokyo
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C
National Gallery Singapore
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C
National Museum of Australia, Canberra
National Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art, Gwacheon
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Ernst Wilhelm Nay Stiftung, Cologne
Neue Galerie Graz
Neues Museum - Staatliches Museum fr
Kunst und Design in Nrnberg, Nuremberg
Luis Felipe No
The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and
Garden Museum, New York
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
Uche Okeke
Yoko Ono
P.P.O.W., New York
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester,
Projeto Lygia Pape, Rio de Janeiro
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Prt du Muse national Picasso-Paris
Prada Collection, Milan
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York
Rpublique du Sngal
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York
Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg
Safarkhan Art Gallery, Cairo
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Aurel Scheibler, Berlin
Carolee Schneemann
Antoun Nabil Sehnaoui
Sharjah Art Foundation Collection
Sharjah Art Museum
Gazbia Sirry
Laurie Slatter
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub
Foundation for the Arts
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,Nationalgalerie
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Stdtische Galerie Wolfsburg
John-Paul Stonard
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Marinko Sudac Collection, Zagreb
835
 Priscilla Abecasis Francesco Bonami Josef Deisbck Wolfram Friedrich
Jane Acheson Manolo Borja-Villel John Delk Ronja Friedrichs
Sarah Adamson Isabella Bortolozzi Laura Deluca Lena Fritsch
Marianne Ahrensberg Jan Bttger Liliana Dematteis Jess Fuenmayor
Yasmine Aidel Leila Bou Nasr Wolfgang Denk Takashi Fukumoto
Olufunke Akinsode Marisa Bourgoin Natasha M. Derrickson Daniel Gabrielli
Gozen Muftuoglu Aksan Capucine Boutte Annick Des Roches Carla Galfano
Amna Al Hemeiri Carol Braide Lucy Dew Meem Gallery
Furat al Jamil Michael Brand Ske Dinkla Vicki Gambill
Yuri Albert Jos Mrio Brando Andrew Dintenfass Juliana Ganuza
Sarah Allen Udo Brandhorst Ruti Direktor Gao Gao
Alya Mohamed Al Mulla Maria Brassel Amy Distler Felix Gaudlitz
Aldo Jimenez Altamirano Sabine Breitwieser Leanne Dmyterko Nelly Gawellek
Isabel Soares Alves Ilse Ordaz Briz Camille Doizelet Mara C. Gaztambide
Sivan Amar Elizabeth Broun Elna Dolino Fabrizio Gazzarri
Kyung An Courtney Brown D. Angie Lee Dollard Chlo Geary
Anasthasia Andika Rene Brown Bridget Donahue Susanne Geiger
Ekaterina Andreeva Kristyna Brozova Arielle Dorlester Isa von Gerlach
Melisa Angela Friedrich von Brhl Maurice Dorren Narimane Gharib
Michelle Antonisse Hilde de Bruijn Douglas Dreishpoon Larry Giacoletti
Maria Cristina de Almeida Araujo Susanne Brning Douglas Druick Marion Gillet Guigon
Kelsey Arrington-Ashford Adam Budak Thadeu Duarte Ren Gimpel
Sharon Matt Atkins Marion Buffaut Issa M. Benitez Dueas Adelaide Ginga
Swapnil Avdhesh Michael Buhrs Diane Dufour Ellen Ginton
Heidrun Bachmaier Charlotte Bullions Ginette Dufrne Massimiliano Gioni
Zdenka Badovinac Rico Burgmann Andrs G. Duprat Hadwig Goez
Roberta Cerini Baj Pablo Butcher Anita Duquette Thelma Golden
Catherine Scrivo Baker Cordelia Butler Melisa Durkee Barbara Gunz Goldschmidt
Dabashree Banerjee Kristy Caldwell Anne-Sophie Dusselier Sasha Gomeniuk
Matt Bangser Levent alkoglu Prajit K. Dutta Eliza Gonzalez
Joe Baptista Alice Calloway Ciarn Dyke Timothy Goodhue
Olatunde Barber Marusca Caltran Marta Dziewanska Frau Gtz
Geanna Barlaam Andrianna Campbell Yilmaz Dziewior Claudia Gould
Friedrich-Michael Barnick Andrew Cannon Barbara Economon James Gould
Stephanie Barron Kelly Carpenter Michael Edler Vivien Greene
Georg Baselitz Andrea Cashman Arne Ehmann Maggie Gregory
Joellen El Bashir Barbara Bertozzi Castelli Cornelia Eilers Margaret C. Gregory
Carlos Basualdo Edwin Castro Juliane Eisele Detlev Gretenkort
Tobias Bumer Francesca Cattoi Dietmar Elger Alexander Grnert
Dennis Cecchin Carol Eliel Barbara Gross

LIST OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Olivia Bax
Susana Maldonado Bayley Alban Chaine Naheda El-Khoury Nicole Gro
Rodrigo Bazaldua Dipesh Chakrabarty Jane England Gabriela de la Guardia
Anneliis Beadnell Sucheta Chakraborty Oliver Enwonwu Mr. de la Guardia
Rie van Beek Carla Chammas David Ertl Tatyana Gubanova
Attilio Begher Eleanor Chapman Charles Esche Gina Guddemi
Bavand Behpour Johnny Chen Nicole Espaillat Christophe Guglielmo
Sarah Bejerano Melissa Chiu Ursula Esposito Ferreira Gullar
Margherita Belaief Rowena Chiu Werner Esser Nkosinathi Gumede
Luca Belenghi Yol Cho Bruno Cezar Mesquita Esteves Jaqueline Gutirrez
Gabriella Belli Anna Chodorska Reem Fadda Fabio Carapezza Guttuso
Ramon Tio Bellido Emilie Choffel Olukemi Fadehan Charlotte Gutzwiller
Angela Bell-Morris Maciej Cholewinski Marta Fadel Gina Guy
Yasmine Benamara Angela Choon Elisabeth Fairman Sophie Haaser
Amanda Bender Radhika Chopra Will Faller Kathrin Haaengier
Eva Bendova Michael Bank Christoffersen Max Prez Fallik Fernand F. Haenggi
Antonia Bergamin Sara Chun Sonke Faltien Heinke Hagemann
Thomas Berghuis Tiffany Chung Victoria Fernndez-Layos Moro Kayla Hagen
Evelyn Bergner Vanessa Clark Annie Farrar Noura Haggag
Anders Bergstrom Sennen Codjo Guide Fabender Ken Hakuta
Ins Rodrguez Berni Jean Colombain Hannah Feldman Lubna Hammad
Jos Antonio Berni Heidi Colsman-Freyberger Anna Ferrari Toshio Hara
Mohamed Berrada Moira Connelly Marc Feustel Lesley Harding
Yasmine Berrada Matt Conway Bernd Ficker Hans-Jrgen Harras
Rita Cecilia Bertoni Harry Cooper Ariane Figueiredo Halley K. Harrisburg
Tobia Bezzola Analivia Cordeiro Csar Oiticica Filho Helen Harrison
Jyoti Bhatt Cathy Cordova Carly Fischer Dakin Hart
Avijna Bhattacharya Jerome Coup Dora Fisher Sergey Harutoonian
Marlene Bielefeld Eleanor Crabtree Mnica Montes Flores Yuko Hasegawa
Klaus Biesenbach Reggy Havekes-van Creij Claire Floyd Rainer Hauswirth
Stefanie Bihlmayer Elena Crippa Tiffany Floyd Lauren Haynes
Xu Bing Andrew Crompton Francine Flynn Allie Heath
Daniel Birnbaum Hope Cullinan Megan Fontanella Matt Heffernan
Janine Biunno Nicholas Cullinan Sandra Fort Fonthier Marien van der Heijden
Christa Blatchford Patrick Cunningham Clarissa Fostel Margareta Helleberg
Daniel Blau Elzbieta Cyganik Dorotea Fotivec Sandy Heller
Bernard Blistene Fereshteh Daftari Jonathan Fox Ann Henderson
Tamara Bloomberg Laetitia Dalet Mark Francis Amy Henry
Tim Blum Jrg Daur Alessio Fransoni Carra Henry
Diana Blumenroth Federico Deambrosis Eliza Frecon Ines Henzler
Marianne Boesky Kirsten Degel Francesca Frediani Fabrice Hergott
Laurent Le Bon Jrgen Dehm Denis French Michael Hering

837
Eva Hernndez Hideki Kikkawa Conor Macklin Selima Niggl Emmanuelle Rossignol Jeremy Strick Brent Willison
David Hertsgaard Hyunjin Kim Julie Maguire Harumi Nishizawa Claudia Rozzoni Sile Stuttard Andrew Wilson
Michaela Hetzel Seolhee Kim Charley Maher Corinna Nisse Nicole Ruppert Marinko Sudac Katherine Wilson
Wolfgang Heubisch Matt Kirsch Zain Mahjoub Lutz Nitsche Mickey Ryan Kathrin Sndermann Amelia Winata
Thomas Heyden Naveen Kishore Martin W. Mahoney Luis Felipe Noe Hanseug Ryu Chris Sutherns Mr. and Mrs. Winokur
Christina Hierl Udo Kittleman Olga Makhroff Sarah Norris Anna Saciuk-Gasowska Astrid Suzano Beate Witt
Christopher Higgins Michiko Kiyosawa Toms Maldonado Eveline Notter Mona Sad Katsuo Suzuki Agns Wolff
Joanna Hill Norman L. Kleeblatt Wael Mansour Ady Nugeraha Ibrahim El Salahi Yoshiko Suzuki Michle M. Wong
Jennie Hirsh Helmut Klewan Martin Mntele Cynthia Octavianty Katherine El Salahi Sandra Sykorova Karli Wurzelbacher
Erica E. Hirshler Eva Klimtova Emilie Le Mappian Sean O'Harrow Ludmilla Sala Christian Tagger Kelso Wyeth
Achim Hochdrfer Sanne Klinge Christine Marcel Vassilis Oikonomopoulos Tony G. Salame Marjan Tajeddini Deborah Wythe
Emily Hodes Claudia Klugmann Adele Marini Chukuma I. Okadigwe Armando Salas Suheyla Takesh Li Yaochen
Aliza Hoffman Simone Kobler Andreas Marks Marie Okamura Emily Salmon Philip Tan Thomas Yarker
Maja Hoffmann Eunnarae Koh Aimee L. Marshall Yukinori Okamura Jillian Samant Takako Tanabe Atsuo Yasuda
Pernille Hjmark Thomas Khler Karin Marti Nadezhda Okurenkova Julio Sarmento Stef Tanki Cho Jeong Yeol
Constanze Holler Nadine Koller Leila Martinusso Luisa Oliveira Chiara Sarteanesi Brbara Tavares Satoshi Yokota
Abigail Hoover Walther Knig Anne Massey Sarah Oliver Hidenori Sasaki Alex Taylor Sylvie Younan
Sigrid Horsch-Albert Markus Kormann Taro Masushio Duro Olowu Adriana Scalise Benjamin Teague Okamuru Yukinori
Meagan Kelly Horsman Karin Koschkar Almir Mavignier Duro Oni Carmen Schaefer Ann Temkin Luca Zaffarano
Cssia Hosni Alain Kouyoumdjian Shoair Mavlian Ayala Oppenheimer Tatjana Schfer Serkan Terzioglu Abdulaziz Mohammad Zaghmout
Johannes Hossfeld Danielle Kovacs Marie Mbow Patricia O'Regan Aurel Scheibler Helga Theodhori Adamova Zaneta
Christine Hourde Ute Krebs Fergus McCaffrey Sicar Vsquez Orozco Katharina Schendl Lukas Thiele Bruno Zanon
Laura Hovenac Johanne Kristensen Cale McCammon Johanna Ortner Amy Schichtel Amanda Thompson Lisa Zemann
Laura M. Hovenac Maren Krger Tara McDowell Andrea Pacheco Claudia Schicktanz David Thompson Isabella J. Zieritz
Jeannine Howse Christine Kron Maria McGreger Filipe Pacheco Lothar Schirmer Florence Thurmes Magdalena Ziolkowska
Claire Hsu Jolanta Krzywka Susan McGuire Filipe Pacheco Nikolaus Schneider Jennifer Tobias Magdalena Zikowska
Marge Huang Elke Kchle Franciska Meijers Hazelle Anne Page Henning Schroeder Valerio Trabandt Carolina Ziotti
Milan Hughston Alexandra Khnert J. Meissner Marina Panteleymon Shannon Schuler Flora Triebel Yuri Zlotnikov
Matthieu Humery Aya Kunii Mohammed Melehi Paula Pape Anna Schler ukasz Trzcinski Bonnie van Zoest
Michelle Humphrey Allison Kupietzky Sonia Menezes Taiyana Pimentel Paradoa Dirk Schulz Yassmeen Tukan
Laura Hunt Kerstin Kster Karla Merrifield Mihwa Park Patricia Schulze Alexandr Tulenev
Marie Christine Huyn Sung-oh Kwon Marianne Le Mtayer Shruti Parthasarathy Rachel Schumann Ijeoma Uche-Okeke
Donald Christopher Hyde Young Kwon Andrea Mihalovic-Lee Anne Pasternak Sabine Schumann Yoko Ono
Toru Ikeda Sarah Lagrevol Ann Milad Bettina Paust Hans-Jrgen Schwalm Frau Uecker
Patrycja de Bieberstein Ilgner Natasha Laing Adele Minardi Mirta Pavic Dieter Schwarz Gnther Uecker
Andrea Inselmann Eskil Lam Gao Minglu Marc Payot Heather Schweikhardt Joseph Underwood
Tomoko Ishida Luciano Lanfranchi Fabio Miniotti Gabriel Prez-Barreiro Otto Selen Xavier Guzmn Urbiola
Nataa Ivancevic Laura Lang Marta Minujn Luis Prez-Oramas David Senior Burkhard von Urff
Cecilia Ivanchevich Katie Langjahr Camille Misson Friedrich Petzel Luise Seppeler Michael D. Uva
Alison Jacques Elizabeth Largi Brent Mitchell Wilfried Petzi Pilar Garca Serrano Eugenio Valdes
Sebastian Jaehn Emily Larsen Gaby Mizes Chelsea Pierce Annemarie Seyda Georges-Philippe Vallois
Vineet Jain Emanuel Layr Hirokazu Mizunuma Joachim Pissarro Yazid Shammout Nathalie Vallois
Jasna Jakic Galerie Emanuel Layr Kate Monsted Jan Plack Gulam Mohammed Sheikh Leni Velasquez
Robert Jarosz Carol A. Leadenham Joana Sousa Monteiro Charles Pocock Samantha Sheiness Noelia Ordoez Velez
Alejandro Jassan Doreen Leberecht Charles Moore Jeff Poe Aphra Shemza Sander Vermeulen
Ivna Jelcic Jiyoon Lee Janet Moore Alexandre Pomar Mary Shemza Ulf Vierke
Marko Jenko Mary Anne Lee Stacy Moore Sabina Povic Oksana Shestaka Franck Vigneux
Amrita Jhaveri Seung K. Lee Pavlna Morganov Ida Rodriguez Prampolini Richard Shiff Maria Villa
ric Jimnez Katja Leeuw Gabriella Mori Franck Prazan Amir Sidharta Olga Viso
Maika Jirous Katja Lehmann Laura Morris Natalia Pribytok Warren Siebrits Marcia Vissers
Abraham Joel Erin Leland Lynda Morris Vivienne Prince Manjari Sihare-Sutin Wendy Vogel
Jasper Johns Erin Leland Robert Morris Leslie Prouty Michelle Silva David Vogt
Jennifer Johns Johanna Lemke Stuart Morrison Maureen Pskowski Mark Simmons Igor Volkov
Caren Jones Marc Leve Tanya Morrison Bernhard Purin Lorna Simpson Kristina von Knorring
Rose Jones Andreas Leventis Anne Mosseri-Marlio Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi Janne Sirn Angelika von Schwedes
Henna Joo Dominique Levy Markus Mueller Derek Quezada Anat Danon Sivan Rafael Vostell
Julie Joseph Andrea Lewis Ramez Mufdi Wojciech Radlinski Laurie Slatter Joel Wachs
Jennifer Josten Jeremy Lewison Mathias Mhling, Lenbachhaus Amy Rahn Kim Sluijter Sheena Wagstaff
Miguel Juarez Marie Liard-Dexet Alya Mohamed Al Mulla Meheen Rangoonwala Daniela Smetanca Caroline V. Wallace
Amrica Jurez Jennifer Lim Jennifer Mundy Karola Rattner Elizabeth Smith Anthony Wallis
Franois Jupin Jung Eun Lim Estelle Mury Nada Raza Adam Sobota Cathleen Walter
Emilia Kabakov Amy Lin May Muzaffar Sangeeta Razu Jana Suhani Soin Eva Walters
Sonia Kadzioka Elaine Lin Noda Naotoshi Kasia Redzisz Dawn Somerville Katy Wan
Katerina Kalvarov Barbara Lindop Tommy Napier Sophie Reinhardt Patricia Sorroche Lisa Webb
Toby Kamps Nicolas Linnert Tanja Narr Jonathan Rendell Francisca Sousa Barbara Weber
R. Siva Kamur Joachim Lissmann Hammad Nasar Natalia Revale Heather South Stefan Wedepohl
Sojung Kang Charlie Littlewood Ginny Neel Liz Reynolds Allison Spangler Low Sze Wee
Geeta Kapur Philippe Litzka Hartley Neel Annika Riethmller Nancy Spector Anne Wehr
Evgenia Karlova Herve Loevenbruck Jos Alvarenga Neto Sofia Rinaldi Chelsea Spengemann Adam Weinberg
Roobina Karode Arshiya Lokhandwala Olga Neufeld Ryan Roa Julie Spielman Bernd Wei
Abdellah Karroum Marie-Jos van de Loo Elke Neumann Lauren Robbins Stefan Sthle Astrid Welter
Mizuho Kato Marlia Bovo Lopes Constantin Neumeister Soledad de Pablo Roberto Amy Staples Dr. Clemens Wendtner
Koichi Kawasaki Antonia Lotz Andrew Newall Andrea Robertson Galeria Starmach Julia Westner
Clive Kellner Cardiff Loy Lia Newman Sylvain Rochat Pari Stave Rachel Wetzler
Sara Kelly Kristen Lubben Rebekah Newman Anne Rodler Kevin Stayton David White
Julieta Kemble Kathleen Ludwig Clara Nguyen Daniel Goeritz Rodriguez Jane Steinhaeuser Jack Whitten
Chris Kendall Eva Lund Tuan Andrew Nguyen Shawn Roggenkamp Andrea Stengel Mary Whitten
Amalyah Keshet Amber R. Lynn Lara Nicholls James Rondeau Nadezhda Stepanova Mirsini Whitten
Vera Kessenich Lisa MacDougall Nick Nicholson Andrea Rosen Peter Stevens Ann Noel Williams
Sandra Khazam Diego Machado Georges Nicol Adriana Rosenberg Laura Stewart Maggie Williams
Ahmed Khedr Amy MacKinnon Alexandra Nicolaides Cora Rosevear John-Paul Stonard Margaret Williams

838 839
 Table of Contents (left to right) Chronology of Social and Political Events
Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1880 1 Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images;
2000, bulk 19571999. Archives of Ameri- 2 National Archives and Records Admi-
can Art, Smithsonian Institution; Photo: nistration; 4 U. S. Army Photo; 7 Henri
Kiyoji Otsuji, Seiko Otsuji; Courtesy Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Agentur
of Musashino Art University Museum Focus; 8 Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos/
& Library and Tokyo Publishing House. Agentur Focus; 9 UN Photo/MBH; 10
From theportfolioGUTAI PHOTOGRAPH Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos/Agentur
195657; Photo: Latif Al Ani, Courtesy Focus; 11 Photo: Horst Faas, picture alliance/
Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Cul- AP Images.
ture in Iraq; Photo: Hans Niederbacher
Atelier Hermann Nitsch; Photograph: Clay Visual Essay: Arts and Culture
Perry, Courtesy England & Co. 1 Courtesy of the Western Regional Archi-
ves, State Archives of North Carolina; 2
Visual Essay: Social and Political Events Pierre Jahan/Roger-Viollet; 3 Sidney
1 Imperial War Museums (BU 1292); 2: Nolan Trust. Port Phillip City Collection;
Imperial War Museums (NYP 27322); 3, 4 The Willem de Kooning Foundation,
4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 18, 30 National Archives New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
and Records Administration; 7 Imperial Harry Bowden papers, 1922-1972. Archives
War Museums (BU 8573); 8 Imperial of American Art, Smithsonian Institution;
War Museums (D 25636); 10 AFP/Getty 5 Archive Cobra Museum of Modern Art,
Images; 11 Imperial War Museums (MH Amstelveen; 6 Photo: Charles Breijer
29427); 15 Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990- Charles Breijer/Nederlands Fotomuseum;
032-29A; 16 U. S. Army Photo; 19 Central 7 2016 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust; 8
Press/Getty Images; 21, 44, 49, 67, 70 Unknown photographer, Establishment of
picture alliance/AP Images; 22 Photo by the Monument at Mishmar HaEmek, 1945,
Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection/ Photograph, 11.517.2 cm, Information
Getty Images; 23 Photo by Keystone-France/ Center for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jeru-
Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; 24 salem; 9 Courtesy of The State Tretyakov
Photo by Frank Shershel/GPO via Getty Gallery, Moscow; 10, 21 Archivi Farabola;
Images; 25 Henry Ries/NYT/laif; 26, 39 11 La Biennale di Venezia Archivio
U.S. Defense Department; 27, 32 Henri Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, photo
Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Agentur by Ferruzzi Venezia; 12 Courtesy Museu
Focus; 28 Robert Capa International do Neo-Realismo, Vila Franca de Xira;
Center of Photography/Magnum Photos/ 13 DAG Modern archives; 14, 25, 69
Agentur Focus; 29 New China Pictures/ Courtesy of Lubna Hammad; 15 VG
Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 33 UN- Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Archivi
RWA photo by Hrant Nakashian, 1949; 34 Guttuso; 16 The Isamu Noguchi Founda-
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S88796/Fotograf: tion and Garden Museum/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; 17 Famlia Cordeiro; 19
Singapore; 44 Photographer: Kiyoji Otsuji,
Seiko Otsuji, Courtesy of Musashino
Art University Museum & Library and
Tokyo Publishing House. From theportfo-
lioGUTAI PHOTOGRAPH 1956-57; 46
Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty
Images; 47 Photo by Fritz Goro/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images; 48 Archi-
ve of Pancho Guedes, Lisbon; 49 Samsung
Museum ofArt, LeeumLibrary:donated by
Yi Ku-yol; 50 Niki Charitable Art Foun-
dation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Shunk-Kender J. Paul Getty Trust. The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
(2014.R.20); 51 Courtesy of Projeto Hlio
Oiticica; 52 Photo by Martha Holmes/
The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images;
54 Photo: Shunk-Kender J. Paul Getty
Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles (2014.R.20); 55 Photo: Kishor
Parekh, Courtesy Jyoti Bhatt Archive at
Asia Art Archive; 56 AMSAC Papers at
the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard
University; 57 Courtesy Allan Kaprow
Estate and Hauser & Wirth; 58, 74 Marta
Minujin Archives; 59 Courtesy Estate of
K.G.Subramanyan, Jyoti Bhatt, and Asia
Art Archive; 60 Jyoti Bhatt Archive at Asia
Art Archive; 61 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Photo: Hiroko Kudo; 62 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn. bpk/Staatsgalerie Stuttgart,
Archiv Sohm/Hartmut Rekort; 63
ullstein bild - Rudolf Dietrich; 64 Nam
June Paik Estate, Photo: Manfred Leve
estate of Manfred Leve, Courtesy Museum
Kunstpalast, AFORK, Dsseldorf; 65
Courtesy Antony Penrose; 66 Courtesy
Atelier Cruz-Diez Paris; 67 DEVA/Iwale-
wahaus, Universitt Bayreuth; 68 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Enrique
Alexander Calder, Calder Foundation, New
York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Photographer, Paolo Gasparini. Courtesy
Calder Foundation, New York/Art Resource,
NY; 12 Gnther Becker/ documenta
Archiv; 13 Horace Mann Bond Papers (MS
411). Special Collections and University
Archives, University of Massachusetts
Amherst Libraries; 14 Photographer: Kiyoji
Otsuji, Seiko Otsujii; Courtesy of Musas-
hino Art University Museum & Library and
Tokyo Publishing House. From theportfolio
GUTAI PHOTOGRAPH 1956-57; 15
Yves Klein, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2016
Photo Paul Sarisson; 16 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Hollis Frampton, untitled
from The Secret World of Frank Stella,
19581962, black-and-white photograph,
810, Collection Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, Estate of Hollis Frampton;
17 Artistic action by Yves Klein, Yves
Klein, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2016, Photo
Harry Shunk and Janos Kender J.Paul
Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles. (2014.R.20); 18 Succes-
sion Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Inge Morath/Magnum Photos/Agentur
Focus; 19 Courtesy Archivio Baj, Vergiate;
20 Photo Harry Shunk and Janos
Kender - J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Re-
search Institute, Los Angeles. (2014.R.20);
23 Courtesy Julieta Kemble; 25 Photo:
Sameer Makarius, Courtesy Luis Felipe
No papers, Buenos Aires; 26 Photograph:
Reiner Ruthenbeck/GERHARD RICHTER.
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 27 Photo-
graph: Clay Perry, Courtesy England & Co.;
28 Courtesy Galerie Krinzinger Vienna.
Essays

IMAGE CREDITS
Erich Zhlsdorf; 35 Allsport/Getty Images;
36 Photo by J. R. Eyerman/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images; 37 Presse-
und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung,
Perlia-Archiv; 38 Photo by Earl Leaf/
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; 40
IVAA; 42 Bibliotheca Alexandrina; 43 Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives; 45
Bentley Archive/Popperfoto/Getty Images;
46 akg-images/Erich Lessing; 47 Photo:
Eli Weinberg; 48 Presse- und Informations-
amt der Bundesregierung; 50, 54, 62, 78
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; 51
Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos/
Agentur Focus; 52 Burt Glinn/Magnum
Photos/Agentur Focus; 53 Prints &
Photographs Division, Library of Congress,
LC-DIG-ppmsca-19729; 55 OFF/AFP/
Getty Images; 57 Courtesy FCA Group; 58
NASA; 59, 63 Rene Burri/Magnum Pho-
tos/Agentur Focus; 60 Everett Collection/
action press; 61 STF/AFP/Getty Images;
64 Nicolas Tikhomiroff/Magnum Pho-
tos/Agentur Focus; 65 Vasiliy Malyshev/
Sputnik; 66 picture alliance/dpa; 68, 76
Marc Riboud/Magnum Photos/Agentur
Focus; 69 Micha Bar Am/Magnum
Photos/Agentur Focus; 71 Prints & Photo-
graphs Division, Library of Congress, LC-
USZ62-128465; 72 AFP/Getty Images; 73
Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos/Agentur
Focus; 74 Photo: Latif Al Ani, Courtesy
Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture
in Iraq; 75 L HUMANITE/KEYSTO-
NE-FRANCE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty
Images; 77 Cecil Stoughton, White House
Press Office (WHPO); 79 Carl T. Gossett/
NYT/Redux/laif; 80 Bruce Davidson/
Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 81 Photo:
Horst Faas, picture alliance/AP Images.
Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016. 1991 Hans Namuth
Estate, Courtesy Center for Creative
Photography, Arizona; 20, 36 IVAA; 22
Alexander Calder, Calder Foundation,
New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Arquivo Histrico Wanda Svevo/
Fundao Bienal de So Paulo; 23 The
Estate of Reg Butler; 24, 39 Courtesy Li
Yaochen; 26 Man Ray Trust, Paris/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 28, 45 Estate
of Anwar Jalal Shemza; 29 Succession
Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Alberto
et Annette Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris.
Photograph by Ernst Scheidegger 2016
Stiftung Ernst Scheidegger-Archiv, Zrich;
30 Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; 31 From the archive of the
photographer Israel Zafrir, The Information
Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum,
Jerusalem; 32 Courtesy of The Ben Enwonwu
Foundation; 33 Photographer: Kiyoji Otsuji,
Seiko Otsuji, Musashino Art University
Museum & Library, Courtesy of Tokyo
Publishing House. From theportfolioeye-
witness; 34 Photo: Karel Koukal, Courtesy
Ztichl klika; 35 Courtesy of the Gallizio
Archive, Turin; 37 Architectural Press
Archive/RIBA Collections; 38 Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Photograph Collection. Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New
York. Photo: Kay Harris; 40 Osaka City
Museum of Modern Art GA12; 41
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Inc./
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Burt Glinn/
Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; 42 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Siegfried
Khl, Courtesy K.O. Gtz und Rissa-Stif-
tung; 43 YAYOI KUSAMA, Courtesy of
Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/
Bordes Mangel, reprouccin autorizada por
El Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Li-
teratura, 2016; 70 Elisabeth Nay-Schei-
bler, Kln/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Gnther Becker/ documenta Archiv; 71
Minoru Hirata, Hi Red Centers Cleaning
Event (officially known as Be Clean! and
Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and
Order in the Metropolitan Area), 1964,
Gelatin silver print, Image size: 33.522.2
cm, Paper size: 35.727.8 cm, Minoru
Hirata, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery
Photography/Film; 72 Photo Desdemone
Bardin, Courtesy of Projeto Hlio Oiticica;
73 Courtesy George Maciunas Founda-
tion Inc., New York; 75 Photo: Eustachy
Kossakowski, Anka Ptaszkowska.
Negative owned by Museum of Modern Art
in Warsaw, Poland; 76 Photo by Fred W.
McDarrah/Getty Images.
Chronology of Arts and Culture
1 Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. 2 Haus der Bayerischen
Geschichte, Augsburg (Bayer. Pressebild);
4 Kosice Museum, Buenos Aires, Argen-
tina; 5 Courtesy of the Andrzej Wroblewski
Foundation; 6 Archive Cobra Museum of
Modern Art, Amstelveen; 7 1998 Center
for Creative Photography, The University
of Arizona Foundation, Photo Courtesy
Ad Reinhardt Foundation, New York; 8
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Collection
of the Library and Documentation Center
of MASP; 9 Folhas, Image Courtesy
Arquivo Histrico Wanda Svevo/Fundao,
Bienal de So Paulo; 10 D.R. MATHIAS
GOERITZ (1953), BAJO LICENCIA DE
L.M.DANIEL GOERITZ AND GALERA
LA CAJA NEGRA, MADRID and FONDO
MATHIAS GOERITZ. CENIDIAP/INBA.; 11
Enwezor fig. 1 Photo by Margaret Bourke-
White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
Images; Enwezor fig. 2 Imperial War
Museums (A 30427); Enwezor fig. 3 Baye-
rische Staatsbibliothek Mnchen; Enwezor
fig. 4 Stadtarchiv Mnchen; Enwezor fig. 5
Haus der Kunst, Historisches Archiv;
Enwezor fig. 6 Haus der Kunst, Histori-
sches Archiv; Enwezor fig. 7 Photo by
John Deakin/Picture Post/Getty Images;
Enwezor fig. 8 Yosuke Yamahata; Enwezor
fig. 9 Gerhard Richter 2016 (1175);
Enwezor fig. 10 Succession Picasso/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. 2016. Digital
image, The Museum of Modern Art, New
York/Scala, Florence; Enwezor fig. 11
The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights re-
served/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Tate,
London 2016; Enwezor fig. 12 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016; Enwezor fig. 13 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo Centre
Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/Adam Rzepka; Enwezor fig. 14 Co-
urtesy Maruki Gallery for the Hiroshima
Panels; Enwezor fig. 15 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Photography The Art
Institute of Chicago; Enwezor fig. 16 DEVA,
Universitt Bayreuth; Enwezor fig. 17
Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Cour-
tesy of Aicon Gallery; Siegel fig. 2 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Siegel fig. 3 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo Centre
Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais/Philippe Migeat; Siegel fig. 4
Taro Okamoto; Siegel fig. 6 Lee Seung-
taek; Siegel fig. 7 Gazbia Sirry; Siegel
fig. 8 2016. Digital image, The Museum
of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence;
Siegel fig. 9 Image: Projeto Lygia Pape.
Photograph by Paula Pape, 1983; Wilmes

841
fig. 1 Scherl/Sddeutsche Zeitung
Photo; Wilmes fig. 2 Stadtarchiv Mnchen;
Wilmes fig. 3 bpk Bildagentur fr
Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte; Wilmes fig.
5 Picture alliance/AP Images; Wilmes fig.
7 Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1992-0410-
546/Fotograf: Dietrich, Hans; Wilmes
fig. 8 Photo: Maximilian Geuter Haus
der Kunst; Wilmes fig. 9 Sddeutsche
Zeitung Photo; Wilmes fig. 10 Succes-
sion Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Stadtarchiv Mnchen; Mazower fig. 1
The Estate of John Vachon; Mazower fig. 2
Picture alliance/AP Images; Mazower fig.
3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Dirk Pauwels; Chakrabarty fig. 2 Photo
by Keystone/Getty Images; Chakrabarty
fig. 3 Photo by Keystone-France/Gam-
ma-Keystone via Getty Images; Nakamori
fig. 1 Yosuke Yamahata; Nakamori fig.
3 Shomei Tomatsu. Photo: Minneapolis
Insitute of Art; Nakamori fig. 4 2016
Arata Isozaki; Petersen fig. 1 Lucio Fon-
tana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Courtesy Galleria del Naviglio Milano;
Braun fig. 1 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva,
Switzerland. Photo: Sandra Pointet; Braun
fig. 2 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Denis
Farley; Braun fig. 3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016; Hassan fig. 3 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; Kapur fig. 1 The John Latham
Foundation; Courtesy Lisson Gallery;
Kapur fig. 2 Murakami Makiko and the
former members of Gutai Art Association.
Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey; Kapur fig.
3 Photo: Ashish Dhir, KNMA Photogra-
phy; Kapur fig. 4 Courtesy Projeto Hlio
Oiticica; Kapur fig. 5 Courtesy Estate of
K.G. Subramanyan, Jyoti Bhatt, and Asia
Art Archive; Shiff fig. 1 Lucio Fontana by
SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
J & M Zweerts; Shiff fig. 2 Barnett
Newman Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016; Shiff fig. 3 Shiraga Fujiko and the
former members of Gutai Art Association.
Courtesy of Fergus McCaffrey; Smith fig. 2
Sidney Nolan Trust National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra; Heibel fig. 1
Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, Kln/VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016; Heibel fig. 2 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016. bpk Bildagentur fr
Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte; Wilson fig. 2
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Wilson fig. 3
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Piotr
Stanisawski; Bhabha fig. 1 Marc Riboud/
Magnum Photos/Agentur Focus; Anreus
fig. 1 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Agustin Estrada; Anreus fig. 2 Archivio
Antonio Berni; Degot fig.1 The State
Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Degot fig. 2
The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo:
Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Degot fig. 3
The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo:
Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Degot fig. 4
The State Russian Museum 2016. Photo:
Mark Vasilevich Skoromorokh; Lenssen fig.
2 Courtesy Rafa Nasiri Studio; Lenssen
fig. 3 The State Museum of Oriental Art
(Moscow); Drosos & Golan Fig. 1 The
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Drosos &
Golan Fig. 2 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photo: Zdenek Sodoma; Drosos & Golan
Fig. 3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. The
State Russian Museum 2016; Erber fig.
1 Image: Projeto Lygia Pape; Erber fig.
2 Reproduced with the permission of Ms.
Sumiko Hashimoto; Erber fig. 3 Ferreira
Gullar; Giunta fig. 1 2016 Galera Jorge
Mara-La Ruche; Giunta fig. 2 The Asso-
842
ciao Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark;
Giunta fig. 3 Projeto Hlio Oiticica;
Ramirez fig. 1 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Collection: Museu de Arte Contempor-
nea da Universidade de So Paulo, Brazil;
Ramirez fig. 2 Toms Maldonado. Photo:
Jos Cristelli; Ramirez fig. 3 The Estate
of Anwar Jalal Shemza; Ramirez fig. 4
Image: Projeto Lygia Pape. Photograph by
Paula Pape, 1983; Grenier fig. 2 Licensed
under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-
Commercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internatio-
nal license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc-nd/4.0/; Martin fig. 1 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Frank
Bowling Archive; Martin fig. 2 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016 Clay Perry, England &
Co, London; Wofford fig. 2 Gerard Seko-
to Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016;
Wofford fig. 3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
LLC, New York; Wofford fig. 4 VG Bild-
Kunst, Bonn 2016. AMSAC Papers at the
Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard Uni-
versity; Wofford fig. 5 AMSAC Papers at
the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, Howard
University; Lentini fig. 1 Clay Perry, Eng-
land & Co, London; Lentini fig. 2 Courtesy
of Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Museum
of Modern Art and Museum of Contempo-
rary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana; Lentini fig.
3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Bar Or
fig. 1 Shlomo Bezem ; Bar Or fig. 2
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Bar Or fig. 3
Roni Ben Dor; Gupta fig. 1 Estate of M.F.
Husain; Gupta fig. 2 Gazbia Sirry; Gupta
fig. 3 Jack Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; Okeke-Agulu fig. 2 Estate
of Uche Okeke ; Okeke-Agulu fig. 3 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; Okeke-Agulu fig.
4 Demas Nwoko; Denegri fig. 1 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Agostino
Osio, Milano Fondazione Piero Manzoni,
Milano; Grasskamp fig. 1 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; Grasskamp fig. 2 John-Paul
Stonard; Lee Turner fig. 1 Photo by Alfred
Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty Images; Lee Turner fig. 2
Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/Pix Inc./The
LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; Lee
Turner fig. 3 Fundacin Augusto y Len
Ferrari. Arte y Acervo, Buenos Aires.
Plates
1, 73 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
Muse d'Art Moderne/Roger-Viollet; 2
The Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights
Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The
Netherlands; 3 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Photo: David Heald; 4 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Gary Gold;
5, 6, 7, 13, 70, 77, 85, 98, 99, 133, 134,
151, 165, 208, 225, 260, 270, 272, 274,
328, 331, 339, 341, 346, 351 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 8, 160 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Fabrice
Gousset; 9, 10, 43 By Courtesy of Andrzej
Wrblewski Foundation; 11 Gerhard
Richter 2016 (1175). Stdtische Galerie
Wolfsburg; 12 Gerhard Richter 2016
(1175) bpk/Bayerische Staatsgemldes-
ammlungen, Galerie-Verein Mnchen e.V;
14, 15 All Rights Reserved. Maryland
Collage Institute of Art/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; 16 The Isamu Noguchi
Foundation and Garden Museum/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Digital Image
Whitney Museum, N.Y.; 17 The Isamu
Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Patty
Wallace; 18, 19, 20, 21 The Isamu
Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 22 The
Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden
Museum/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photo: PD Rearick; 23 The Isamu
Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum/
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Soichi
Sunami; 24 K. Appel Foundation/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of the
Foundation and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/
New York/Tokyo; 25 K. Appel
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016;
26, 27 Courtesy Maruki Gallery for the
Hiroshima Panels; 28 Yosuke Yamahata;
29 Estate of HF Weaver Hawkins.
Photo: AGNSW; 30 The Jess Collins
Trust; 31, 325 Trustees of the Paolozzi
Foundation, Licensed by VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; 32 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland/
Joseph Beuys Archiv. Photo: Walter Klein;
33 Barnett Newman Foundation/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography
The Art Institute of Chicago; 34 Estate
of Norman W. Lewis. Courtesy of Michael
Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY.
Photograph 2016 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; 35 Robert Rauschenberg
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 38
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Kevin
Todora; 39 The Henry Moore
Foundation. All Rights Reserved/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 42, 282, 285 Tel
Aviv Museum of Art. Photo: Elad Sarig; 44
Yuri Zlotnikov. The State Tretyakov
Gallery, Moscow; 45, 46 Kim Kulim; 47
Mira Schendel Estate; 48 Pol-
lock-Krasner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016 2016. Digital image, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala,
Florence; 49 Pollock-Krasner
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
Tate, London 2016; 50 The Willem de
Kooning Foundation, New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 bpk/The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; 51, 52
Courtesy of the Estate of Ernest Mancoba
and Galerie Mikael Andersen; 53
Pollock-Krasner Foundation/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Digital Image VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 bpk/RMN
Whitney Museum, N.Y.; 55 2016 Leon
Kossoff; 56 2016 Frank Auerbach.
Image reproduced with the permission of
the Museum of Hartlepool, copyright
Hartlepool Borough Council; 57 Helen 244, 254 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Frankenthaler Foundation Inc./VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 58 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 bpk/Nationalga-
lerie, SMB/Jrg P. Anders; 59 Estate of
Philip Guston, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
Photo: Genevieve Hanson; 60, 61
Elisabeth Nay-Sheibler, Kln/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Lothar
Schnepf, Kln; 62, 102 The John
Latham Foundation, Courtesy Lisson
Gallery. Photography: Ken Adlard; 63
Estate of Joan Mitchell. Photo: Jos
Manuel Costa Alves; 64 Estate of Joan
Mitchell; 65, 114 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Photo: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am
Main; 66 Siah Armajani/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016; 67, 159 Maria Lassnig
Foundation; 68 Estate of Beauford
Delaney, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld
Gallery LLC, New York, NY; 69 Mr. Hisao
Shiraga; 71 Archives Ramss Younan,
Paris, France. Photo Museum moderner
Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; 72 Estate
of Jeram Patel; 74 Rasheed Araeen.
Image Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation;
75, 76, 259 The Estate of Anwar Jalal
Shemza; 78 Droits rservs/Cnap/ Auerbach; 142 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photographe: Yves Chenot; 79 2016
The Estate of Eva Hesse. Galerie Hauser &
Wirth, Zurich; 80, 81, 82, 156 Photo
2016 National Gallery in Prague; 83 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Fondazione
Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citt di
Castello by SIAE 2016; 84 Lucio
Fontana by SIAE/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016 Fondazione Lucio Fontana; 86
Fondation Antoni Tpies Barcelona/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 87 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo Museum
moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; 88,
89 Niki Charitable Art Foundation/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo : Andr
Morin; 90 Estate of Pinot Gallizio; 91,
307 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 bpk/
CNAC-MNAM/Philippe Migeat; 92, 299,
317 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Andr Morin; 93 Marta Minujn; 95
Paolo Mussat Sartor Fondazione Emilio
e Annabianca Vedova, Venezia; 96, 199
Courtesy Archivio Carol Rama, Torino
and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; 97,
203, 204, 205 The Associao Cultural
O Mundo de Lygia Clark; 100 2016 Lee
Bontecou. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
Texas, USA/Museum purchase funded by
D. and J. de Menil/Bridgeman Images; 101
The John Latham Foundation, Courtesy
Lisson Gallery Tate, London 2016; 103
The Estate of Marcos Grigorian; 104
Estate of Jir Kolr. Photo: Neues Museum
in Nrnberg/New Museum in Nuremberg;
105 Lee Seung-taek; 106 Yayoi
Kusama. Photo: Rich Sanders, Des Moines,
Iowa; 107 Yayoi Kusama; 108 Gustav
Metzger; 109 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Photo: Genevieve Hanson; 110
Projeto Hlio Oiticica Tate, London
2016; 112, 257, 278 2016. Digital image,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York/
Scala, Florence; 113 David Medalla.
Archivo Fotogrfico Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofa; 115 The
Ossorio Foundation. Courtesy of the
Philadelphia Museum of Art; 116 Archivio
Antonio Berni; 117 Succession Picasso/
- Grand Palais/Jean-Gilles Berizzi; 118
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photography
Courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson
Museum of Art, Cornell University; 119,
DEVA, Universitt Bayreuth; 120 The
Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights
Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 121,
122, 123, 124 Succession Alberto
Giacometti (Fondation Alberto et Annette
Giacometti + ADAGP) Paris; 125 The
Haenggi Foundation Inc; 126, 127, 141,
191 Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of
Modern Art, Doha; 128, 187, 250 Image
Courtesy of Barjeel Art Foundation,
Sharjah; 129 Oliver Enwonwu/The Ben
Enwonwu Foundation; 130 The Willem
de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 131 The Willem
de Kooning Foundation, New York/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Tim
Nighswander/Imaging4Art.com; 132 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Fondation Beyeler,
Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection. Photo:
Peter Schibli, Basel; 135 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Photography by Fenessa
Adikoesoemo; 136 Estate of Magda
Cordell McHale; 137 Courtesy of Michael
Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY; 138,
139 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 140 2016 Frank
Costa Grissolli; 201 The Associao
2016 D.R. Museo Nacional de Arte/
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y
Literatura, 2016; 143 The Estate of Philip
Guston. Photo: Ben Blackwell; 144
Georg Baselitz, 2016. Photo: Frank Oleski,
Kln; 145 Georg Baselitz, 2016. Photo:
David Ertl; 146 Gerhard Richter 2016
(1175); 147, 148, 149, 150 Jack
Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photographer: John Berens. Courtesy of
the Artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York
and Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp; 152
Estate of Leon Golub/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016 The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub
Foundation for the Arts. Courtesy The
Estate of Leon Golub and Hauser & Wirth.
Photo: Alex Delfanne; 153, 154 Estate
of F. N. Souza, All Rights Reserved/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 155 Estate of
M.F. Husain. Image 2011 Peabody Essex
Museum, Salem, MA. Photography by
Walter Silver; 157 On Kawara; 158
Maria Lassnig Foundation. Photo: Wilfried
Petzi; 161 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photo: AGNSW; 162 Marwan
Kassab-Bachi. Photo: Jrg von Bruchhau-
sen; 163 Luis Felipe No; 164 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Javier
Hinojosa; 167, 169 Gerard Sekoto
Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016;
168 Jewad Selim Estate. Image Courtesy
of Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; 170
Courtesy City of Zagreb, Studio Koaric.
Courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art
Zagreb; 171, 256, 293 DEVA, Universitt
Bayreuth; 172 The State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow; 173, 175 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. The State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow; 174, 253 The State Russian
Museum 2016; 176 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016 Estate of John T. Biggers.
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery
LLC, New York, NY; 177 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016 bpk/Museum der bildenden
Knste, Leipzig/Ursula Gerstenberger;
178 Courtesy Galeria Stefan Szydlowski;
179 Estate of Beauford Delaney.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of
Art; 180 Estate of Alice Neel. Photo:
Ethan Palmer; 181 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016 Archivio Fotografico e Mediateca
Mart; 182 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
Tate, London 2016; 183 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016 Fundao Jlio Pomar; 184 Estate of Uche Okeke, Courtesy Asele
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Antnio
Jorge Silva/Atelier-Museu Jlio Pomar
2016; 185 Andrew Wyeth/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Philadelphia. Joseph E. Temple Fund; 186
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Gerardo Cordero; 190 Collection of
National Gallery Singapore; 192
Fundacin Gego. Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, Texas, USA. Fundacion Gego
Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston/Bridgeman Images; 193 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Schweizerisches
Institut fr Kunstwissenschaft Zrich, Lutz
Hartmann; 194 Carmen Herrera,
Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography:
Adam Reich; 195 Gyula Kosice; 196
Courtesy of Barford Sculptures Limited/
Gagogian Gallery. Photo: Mike Bruce; 197
Toms Maldonado; 198 Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Museum
purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess
Law Accessions Endowment Fund/
Bridgeman Images; 200 The Associao
Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Mario
Bernd Fickert; 268 Gustav Metzger/
Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Photo:
Marcelo Ribeiro Alvares Correa; 202
The Associao Cultural O Mundo de Lygia
Clark. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
Texas, USA/The Adolpho Leirner
Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art,
museum purchase funded by the Caroline
Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund/
Bridgeman Images; 206 The Estate of
Anwar Jalal Shemza. Image Courtesy of
Jhaveri Contemporary and the Estate of
Anwar Jalal Shemza. Vipul Sangoi; 207
Projeto Hlio Oiticica; 209 Aluso
Carvo. Photo Courtesy of Edies Pinako-
theke and Almeida Braga Collection; 210
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Elizabeth Mann; 211 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn. Photo: Hans Haacke; 212 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo:
Rheinisches Bildarchiv Kln: rba_c024180; Art, Ein Harod, Israel . Photo: Ran Erda;
213 Ellsworth Kelly. Photo: Graydon
Wood, Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of
Art; 214, 215 Ellsworth Kelly. Photo:
Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio; 216, 218,
219, 220, 230, 232 Courtesy David
Zwirner, New York/London; 217 Famlia
Cordeiro. Collection: Museu de Arte
Contempornea da Universidade de So
Paulo, Brazil; 221, 332 VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Courtesy of Museum of
Contemporary Art Zagreb; 222 Courtesy
of Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb;
224 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess
Roberto Marossi; 226 Projeto Hlio
Oiticica. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
Texas, USA. The Adolpho Leirner
Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art,
museum purchase funded by the Caroline
Wiess Law Endowment Fund/Bridgeman
Images; 227, 228 Rasheed Araeen.
Image Courtesy of Aicon Gallery; 229
Courtesy of Ida Rodrguez Prampolini and
Daniel Goeritz Rodrguez Armando
Salas Portugal Foundation; 235 Courtesy
of the Artist and CRG gallery; 236, 338
Kanayama Akira and Tanaka Atsuko
Association; 237 Motonaga Archive
Research Institution Ltd.; 238, 239
Dieter Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser &
Wirth. Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 240 Courtesy
and copyright Projeto Lygia Pape. Photo
Paula Pape; 241 Photo: Anthony Nsofor.
Courtesy Chika Okeke-Agulu; 242
2016; 315 Romare Bearden Foundation/
Institute, Nimo. Photo: Franko Khoury; 243
Estate of F. N. Souza, All Rights
Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Image Courtesy of Aicon Gallery; 246
Susanne Wenger Foundation, Krems an
der Donau; 247 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. The Africa Center, formerly the
Museum for African Art; 248, 309
Egonu Estate c/o Grosvenor Gallery,
London; 249 Gazbia Sirry; 251 Jewad
Selim Estate. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab
Museum of Modern Art, Doha; 255 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. By Courtesy of the
Fondazine Torino Musei. All Rights
Reserved; 258 Siah Armajani/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 bpk/The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; 261
Archives Ramss Younan, Paris, France
Nabil Boutros; 262 bpk/The Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art; 264, 265 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Charlie
Littlewood; 266 2016 The Estate of Eva
Hesse. Galerie Hauser & Wirth, Zurich.
Photo: Wilfried Petzi; 267 2016 The
Estate of Eva Hesse. Galerie Hauser &
Wirth, Zurich. Photo: Museum Wiesbaden/
Museum der Moderne Salzburg; 337
Sonke Faltien. Photo: Sonke Faltien; 269
Leicestershire County Council Artworks
Collection The Estate of Avinash
Chandra; 271 Fondazione Emilio e
Annabianca Vedova, Venezia. 2016
Photo Archive - Fondazione Musei Civici di
Venezia; 273 Morgan Art Foundation/
ARS, New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Image Courtesy of Miami University
Art Museum, photograph by Scott Kissell;
275 Jack Whitten/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Hauser &
Wirth, New York and Zeno X Gallery,
Antwerp; 276 Estate of Norman W.
Lewis; 277 2016 The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts bpk/
Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen;
279, 280, 281 Melvin Edwards/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 283 Museum of
286, 287 Shammout Family; 288 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Anne Fours -
Agence Luce; 289 University of Lagos;
290 Estate of Uche Okeke, Courtesy
Asele Institute, Nimo; 296 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Estate of the
Artist licensed by Aboriginal Artists
Agency Ltd; 297 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Deutsche Bank Collection; 298
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Wilfried
Petzi; 300 Gyula Kosice. Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Museum
Law Accessions Endowment Fund/
Bridgeman Images; 301 On Kawara .
Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The
Netherlands; 302 Direo Geral do
Patrimnio Cultural; 303 The Estate of
Jiro Takamatsu, Tokyo, Yumiko Chiba
Associates, Tokyo, Stephen. Photography:
Maseru Yanagiba; 304 Robert
Rauschenberg Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2016. Photo: Rheinisches
Bildarchiv Kln: rba_c000182; 305 The
Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Wolfgang
Morell; 306 2016 The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts. Photo: Axel
Schneider, Frankfurt am Main; 308 VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: David Rato;
310, 311, 312, 313, 314 Trustees of the
Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016 Tate, London
Gulammohammed Sheikh and Asia Art
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016; 316 Romare
Bearden Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016. Collection of Van Every/Smith
Galleries at Davidson College; 318, 319,
320 Dieter Roth Foundation and Dieter
Roth Estate, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth; 321
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Mario
Gastinger, Photographics, Munich; 322
Fundacin Augusto y Len Ferrari. Arte y
Acervo, Buenos Aires; 323 Lynn
Hershman Leeson. Photo: Dejan Saric;
324 Lynn Hershman Leeson. Photo:
Wilfried Petzi; 326 Trustees of the
Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Photo: Jos
Manuel Costa Alves; 327 R. Hamilton.
All Rights Reserved/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016; 329 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas,
USA. Funds provided by the Caroline
Wiess Law Endowment Fund/Bridgeman
Images; 330 Almir Mavignier; 333
Yuri Zlotnikov; 334 Edward Ruscha.
Photo: Paul Hester; 335 Yale Center for
British Art; 336 Generali Foundation
CollectionPermanent Loan to the
Eames Office LLC; 340 Estate of Nam
June Paik 2016 bpk/Nationalgalerie im
Hamburger Bahnhof, SMB/Jens Ziehe;
343 Tokuma Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd;
344 Estate of Stan VanDerBeek; 345
Yoko Ono; 348 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2016 Museum Folkwang Essen - ARTO-
THEK; 349 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Photo: Museum Wiesbaden/Bernd Fickert.
Selected Documents
1, 7, 13, 46 Archivo Lafuente; 2 Courtesy
of Heide Museum of Modern Art; 3 Fondo
Leopoldo Mendez. CENIDIAP/INBA; 5,
29 Courtesy of Museu do Neo-Realismo
(Neo-Realism Museum) Vila Franca de
Xira; 8 Lucio Fontana by SIAE/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy Archivo
Lafuente; 10 Photo: Reinhard Truckenmller,
Courtesy Archiv Baumeister im Kunst-
museum Stuttgart; 16 Graphic design: S.
Marzari. Printer: Omassini & Pascon. La
Biennale di Venezia Archivio Storico delle
Arti Contemporanee; 18 DAG Modern
archives; 19 Image Courtesy Nada
Shabout; 20 Archive Cobra Museum of
Modern Art, Amstelveen; 24 Courtesy
of Marjan Tajeddini; 26 Tomas Santa
Rosa, image Courtesy of Arquivo Histrico
Wanda Svevo/Fundao, Bienal de So
Paulo; 27 Image Courtesy of Harumi
Nishizawa; 30 Courtesy of Marion Gillet
Guigon; 31 Courtesy of Studio Bibliogra-
fico Marini; 33 Courtesy Famlia Cordeiro;
35 Courtesy of The Marg Foundation; 36
Courtesy of Sylvie Younan; 37, 38, 42
Courtesy of Osaka City Museum of Modern
Art GA12; 40 Courtesy ofMeem Gallery
41 documenta Archiv; 44 Modern Art
Iraq Archive, Item #9; 47 Image Courtesy
Fereshteh Daftari and Leila Heller Gallery;
48 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Image Courtesy
Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library,
Columbia University; 51 Courtesy Allan
Kaprow Estate and Hauser & Wirth; 53, 54
Samsung Museum of Art, Leeum Library:
donated by Yi Ku-yol; 57 Courtesy MSU
Zagreb; 61 Courtesy Luis Felipe No pa-
pers, Buenos Aires; 62 Courtesy Alexandre
Pomar; 63 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.
Courtesy of Georg Baselitz; 64 The
Estate of Emmett Williams; 65 Courtesy
Archive; 67 Gerhard Richter Archive; 69
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy
George Maciunas Foundation Inc., New
York; 70 Care of Yirrkala elders; 72
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy the
Artist and PPOW; 73 Courtesy Lubna
Hammad; 74 Courtesy Elke Neumann; 75
VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy
of Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna; 76 Cour-
tesy England & Co.
Despite thorough research, it was not
always possible to determine the identity of
the copyright holders for all images. We
ask copyright holders with justified claims
to contact Haus der Kunst.
843
 This catalogue is published in conjunction Haus der Kunst Team External Affairs
with the exhibition Postwar: Art Between
the Pacific and the Atlantic, 19451965, Finance Director Press & Communications
held at Haus der Kunst, Munich, from Marco Graf von Matuschka Elena Heitsch
October 14, 2016, to March 26, 2017
Mediation & Visitor Relations
Stiftung Haus der Kunst Mnchen, Directors Office Martina Fischer
gemeinntzige Betriebsgesellschaft mbH
Executive Assistant to the Director Marketing
Director and CEO: Melissa Klein Tina Anjou
Okwui Enwezor
Assistant to the Director Digital Communications & Social Media
Prinzregentenstrasse 1 Teresa Lengl Anna Schller
D-80538 Munich Iris Ludwig
Tel. +49 89 21127 113 Assistant
www.hausderkunst.de Jacqueline Falk
Finance Directors Office
Graphic Design
Assistant to the Finance Director Jakob Jakob
Moritz Petersen
Under the patronage of Digital Communications Consultant
Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Head of Accounts Christian Gries
Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Daniela Burkart

Accounts Assistant Children & Youth Program

Karin Mahr Sylvia Clasen
Major funding support by Anne Leopold
Personnel Administration
Arnulf von DallArmi

Mail Order
Miro Palavra

Technical Office
Anton Kttl
Glenn Rossiter

Curatorial Office

COLOPHON Generous support by Chief Curator

Ulrich Wilmes

Curator
Julienne Lorz
We would like to thank our shareholders:
Freistaat Bayern Archive Curator
Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst e.V. Sabine Brantl
and our major supporter:
Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung Assistant Curators
for their annual support of the program Daniel Milnes
Anna Schneider

Exhibition Secretary
Isabella Kredler

Public Program
Andrea Saul

Exhibition Coordination
Tina Khler

Registrar
Cassandre Schmid

845
Exhibition Team Publication 2016 Stiftung Haus der Kunst Mnchen,
gemeinntzige Betriebsgesellschaft mbH
Curators of the Exhibition and Editors Exhibition Coordination Managing Editor Chronologies und Prestel Verlag, Munich London New York
of the Catalogue Tina Khler Tim Roerig Damian Lentini A member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
Okwui Enwezor Neumarkter Strasse 28 81673 Munich
Katy Siegel Registrar Essay Editor Selected Documents
Ulrich Wilmes Cassandre Schmid David Frankel Megan Hines With respect to links in the book, the Publisher expressly notes that no
Daniel Milnes illegal content was discernible on the linked sites at the time the links were
Assistant Curators Assistant Exhibition Coordination Essay Authors created. The Publisher has no influence at all over the current and future
Damian Lentini Sofia Sprick Nilsson Alejandro Anreus Visual Essays design, content or authorship of the linked sites. For this reason the Publisher
Daniel Milnes Ariella Azoulay Daniel Milnes expressly disassociates itself from all content on linked sites that has been
Assistants Zainab Bahrani altered since the link was created and assumes no liability for such content.
Research and Curatorial Assistants Lucas Hagin Galia Bar Or Artists Biographies
Megan Hines Mareike Hetschold Homi K. Bhabha Carina Kaminsky for the texts by the authors
Tim Roerig Emily Braun Damian Lentini for the works of art by the artists
Sonja Teine Conservators Dipesh Chakrabarty Nicolas Linnert
Johannes Baur Ekaterina Degot Daniel Milnes Prestel Publishing Ltd.
Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellows Marjen Schmidt Jea Denegri Alexandra Nicolaides 14-17 Wells Street
at Haus der Kunst Susanne von der Groeben Nikolas Drosos Tatjana Schfer London W1T 3PD
Atreyee Gupta (201314) Okwui Enwezor Wendy Vogel
Yan Geng (201415) Interns Pedro Erber Prestel Publishing
Damian Lentini (201516) Chlo Coquilhat Gao Minglu Index 900 Broadway, Suite 603
Jelena Vesic (201617) Maxim Weirich Romy Golan Jordan Pace New York, NY 10003
Andrea Giunta
Exhibition Liaison Technical Office Walter Grasskamp Copy-Editors Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954276
Luz Gyalui Anton Kttl Catherine Grenier Jonathan Fox (Chronology of Social and
Glenn Rossiter Atreyee Gupta Political Events; Chronology of Cultural A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Film Program Salah Hassan Events)
Mark Nash Installation Team Yule Heibel Ann Henderson (Artists Biographies) Editorial direction: Constanze Holler
Anton Bosnjak Geeta Kapur Stacy Moore (Artists Biographies) Design and layout: Double Standards
Music Program Markus Brandenburg Pamela M. Lee Monica Rumsey (Artists Biographies) Production management: Cilly Klotz
Markus Mueller Elena Carvajal Daz Anneka Lenssen Emily Salmon (Artists Biographies) Separations: Helio Repro GmbH, Munich
Tanja Eiler Damian Lentini Wendy Vogel (Artists Biographies) Printing and binding: Longo SPA | AG, Bozen
Curatorial Interns Andrea Faciu Courtney Martin Typeface: Lyon Display; Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk
Carina Kaminsky Vincent Faciu Anne Massey Proofreading Paper: 150 g/qm Garda matt 0,9f.; 80 g/qm Druckfix 2000
Laura Lang Hans-Peter Frank Mark Mazower Stacy Moore
Adam Gandy Yasufumi Nakamori Monica Rumsey
Exhibition Architects Ben Goossens Chika Okeke-Agulu Emily Salmon
KUEHN MALVEZZI, BERLIN Martin Hast Stephen Petersen
Tommy Jackson Mari Carmen Ramirez Translators
Marzieh Kermani Richard Shiff Richard Flantz (Galia Bar Or)
Christian Leitna Katy Siegel Dorotea Fotivec (Jea Denegri)
Ruth Munzner Terry Smith Judith Rosenthal (Ulrich Wilmes; Verlagsgruppe Random House FSC N001967
Kaori Nakajima Fred Turner Patrons Statement; State Ministers
Roland Roppelt Ulrich Wilmes Statement; Prefaces) Printed in Italy
Tina Schultz Sarah Wilson Rebecca van Dyck (Walter Grasskamp)
Andrea Snigula Tobias Wofford David Wharry (Catherine Grenier) ISBN 978-3-7913-5584-9
Nikolaus Steglich (English edition)
Magnus Thoren Graphic Designers
Laura Ziegler Double Standards ISBN 978-3-7913-5583-2
Chris Rehberger (German edition)
Media Team Julia Egger
Florian Falterer Annika Riethmller www.prestel.com
Moritz Friedrich
Tim Wolff

846