Modernism's Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in "East-Central Europe," 1910-1930s

09/01/2025 to 31/01/2027

The project aims to re-contextualize modernist art and its historiography by critically reassessing the entrenched polarity between the perceived nationalism of folk practices and the universalism of the historical avant-garde in East-Central Europe. The engagement with the history of ethnography in this region holds enormous potential for how the discipline of art history contends with tensions between anticipation and anachronism in the study of culture more broadly. By focusing on the emergence of abstract art and design, the project seeks to explore the link between non-representational visual practices and folk and decorative art traditions in the region of study. It will surface a network of 12−15 early and mid-career researchers and curators of early twentieth-century art and visual culture in the European countries of the former Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union. This group will build on extant research in a series of traveling seminars to take place in Prague/Brno, Łódź/Poznań, and Kyiv/Lviv (hybrid format, potentially to be hosted in Estonia). In each seminar, participants will work together to take art historical methodologies beyond the national historiographies that continue to restrict the broader reception of scholarship generated in the region, reinvesting in the study of transnational exchanges and relationships among historical agents active in East-Central Europe between the 1910s, when the first abstract artworks started to appear across the European continent, and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, with the subsequent ideological and aesthetic conformism of Soviet communism that overshadowed this region.