Art beyond Borders
This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism?
The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.
List of Illustrations
1. Introduction: Geography of Internationalism
Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski
Part I: Moving People
2. The Moscow Underground Art Scene in an International Perspective
Lola Kantor-Kazovsky
3. The British Art Critic and the Russian Sculptor: The Making of John Berger’s Art and Revolution
Kai Artinger
4. Pop Art in the GDR: Willy Wolff’s Dialogue with the West
Sigrid Hofer
5. Twinkling Networks, Invisible Ties: On the Unofficial Contacts of Byelorussian Artists in the 1980s
Aliona Gloukhova
6. Chocolate, Pop and Socialism: Peter Ludwig and the GDR
Boris Pofalla
7. Gabriele Mucchi’s Career Paths in Italy, Czechoslovakia and the GDR
Fabio Guidali
8. The Murals by Spanish Exile Josep Renau in Halle-Neustadt, a Socialist Town Built for Chemical Workers in the GDR
Anja Jackes
9. Women Artists’ Trajectories and Networks within the Hungarian Underground Art Scene and Beyond
Beata Hock
10. Heightened Alert: The Underground Art Scene in the Sights of the Secret Police—Surveillance Files as a Resource for Research into Artists’ Activities in the Underground of the 1960s and 1970s
Kata Krasznahorkai
Part II: Moving Objects
11. Remapping Socialist Realism: Renato Guttuso in Poland
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
12. Picasso behind the Iron Curtain: From the History of the Postwar Reception of Pablo Picasso in East-Central Europe
Piotr Bernatowicz
13. On Propagarde: The Late Period of the Romanian Artist M. H. Maxy
Erwin Kessler
14. Realism and Internationalism: On Neuererdiskussion by Willi Neubert (1969)
Jérôme Bazin
15. Socialist Realism in Greece (1944–67)
Costas Baroutas
16. Constructive-Concrete Art in the GDR, Poland, and Hungary
Doris Hartmann
17. Nationalizing Modernism: Exhibitions of Hungarian and Czechoslovakian Avant-garde in Warsaw
Piotr Piotrowski
18. Avant-garde Construction: Leonhard Lapin and His Concept of Objective Art
Mari Laanemets
19. Fluxus in Prague: The Koncert Fluxu of 1966
Petra Stegmann
20. International Contact with Mail Art in the Spirit of Peaceful Coexistence: Birger Jesch’s Mail Art Project (1980–81)
Stefanie Schwabe
Part III: Gathering People
21. (Socialist) Realism Unbound: The Effects of International Encounters on Soviet Art Practice and Discourse in the Khrushchev Thaw
Susan E. Reid
22. “Friendly Atmospheres”? The Union Internationale des Architectes between East and West in the 1950s
Alexandra Köhring
23. Zagreb as the Location of the “New Tendencies” International Art Movement (1961–73)
Ljilana Kolesnik
24. The Graphic Arts Biennials in the 1950s and 1960s: The Slim “Cut” in the Iron Curtain—The Bulgarian Case
Irina Genova
25. The Biennale der Ostseeländer: The GDR’s Main International Arts Exhibition
Elke Neumann
26. Czechoslovakia at the Venice Biennale in the 1950s
Veronika Wolf
27. “Biennale of Dissent” (1977): Nonconformist Art from the USSR in Venice
Jan May
28. Correcting the Czech(oslovakian) Error: The Cooperation of Hungarian and Czechoslovak Artists in the Face of the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia
Magdalena Radomska
29. Crossing the Border: The Foksal Gallery from Warsaw in Lausanne/Paris (1970) and Edinburgh (1972 and 1979)
Thomas Skowronek
30. To Each Their Own Reality: The Art of the FRG and the GDR at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1981
Mathilde Arnoux
Part IV: Defining Europe
31. Moscow–Paris–Havana–Mexico, 1945–60
Serge Fauchereau
32. A Dying Colonialism, a Dying Orientalism: Algeria, 1952
Sarah Wilson
33. Global Socialist Realism: The Representation of Non-European Cultures in Polish Art of the 1950s
Andrzej Szczerski
34. The Influence of Käthe Kollwitz on Chinese Creation: Between Expressionism and Revolutionary Realism
Estelle Bories
35. The Eastern Connection: Depictions of Soviet Central Asia
Aliya Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen
36. The Visualization of the Third Way in Tito’s Yugoslavia
Tanja Zimmermann
List of Contributors
Index