A new article by research fellow Christian Drobe, ‘Alma Karlin and Alice Schalek Look East: Travel Writing by Central European Women in the Interwar Period,’ has been published in Austrian Studies.
New article by Nóra Veszprémi in the Oxford Art Journal
An article by CRAACE research fellow Nóra Veszprémi, ‘Sites of Memory and Forgetting: Gyula Derkovits’s Woodcuts of the 1514 Peasant War‘ has just been published in the Oxford Art Journal.
The 2023 issue of Art East Central is now out
The new issue of the open access journal Art East Central is now out! Introduced by Marta Filipová, the issue focuses on exhibitions of central and eastern European art and design. It features four articles based on papers presented at the CRAACE workshop ‘Exhibitions, New Nations and the Human Factor, 1873–1939’ held at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris on 4 and 5 April 2022. Julia Secklehner’s essay discusses the Austrian contribution to the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts and the role of the modern woman designer in light of the exhibition’s focus on the modern female consumer. Mira Kozhanova explores how, at the same exhibition, the Soviet Union constructed an official narrative of national renewal through a sophisticated exhibition concept that complemented contemporary art (particularly constructivism) with arts and crafts. In turn, Elizaveta Berezina examines the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair and the endeavours of the Scientific Research Institute of Art Industry to arrange a collection of Soviet crafts for international display. Joanna Wolańska’s article focuses on Poland at the World Exhibition of the Catholic Press held in Vatican City in 1936. The fifth article in the issue, by Pavla Machalíková, investigates a different time period, discussing the first art exhibitions in Prague in the nineteenth century and the shaping of modern exhibition spaces.
In addition to the five essays, the issue also features reviews of books on Jewish cultural identity in central European modernism, the Warsaw group Rytm and modernist classicism, Toyen and the surrealist erotic, the Czech architect Jan Kotěra, national art and culture in Poland before the First World War, and the history of Czech architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Read the new issue here: arteastcentral.eu
Artwork of the Month, December 2023: The Bílá Labuť Department Store, Prague by Josef Kittrich and Josef Hrubý (1939)
On the 19th March 1939 the formal opening took place of the Bílá labuť (White Swan) department store on Na Pořící Street in Prague. With its striking facade consisting solely of Thermolux plate-glass windows measuring some 33 by 18 metres, drawing on the most up to date window technology, it is understandably celebrated as a significant example of interwar modernist architecture in Czechoslovakia.
Artwork of the Month, November 2023: Dynamic of the Metropolis by László Moholy-Nagy (1921–22/1924/1925)
Born in Hungary, achieving international fame in Germany, and concluding his tragically short life in the USA, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was an artist from interwar central Europe who is still recognised as one of the most significant innovators of modernism worldwide. Working across different media – painting, graphic design, photography, film, sculpture – he produced a multifaceted oeuvre that was, nevertheless, centred firmly on his key concerns: light and movement in modern art, the new artistic avenues opened up by modern technology, and the complex tensions of modern life. The artwork examined in this article, Dynamic of the Metropolis, was a seminal work that summed up the early years of his career. It combined his avant-garde inspirations, his interest in Constructivism and typography, with his attraction to modern technologies such as photography and film. It also elucidated issues that preoccupied him from the early 1920s: the tensions between modern humanity and the natural environment, between technology and the biological limitations of humans.