Session 1 of our workshop Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture will take place at
18.00 CET on 18 February 2021
on Zoom, featuring papers by
Matthew Rampley (Masaryk University, Brno)
and
Manuela Klauser (Independent Scholar, Munich).
The first event of our workshop Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture will take place at
18.00 CET on 4 February 2021
on Zoom.
Cynthia Paces (The College of New Jersey, NJ)
will present her keynote lecture:
A marked aspect of modernist art and architecture was the search for the spiritual. This has long been recognised, but the involvement of organised religion remains much less examined. Focusing on interwar central Europe, the online lecture series Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture examines critically the stakes involved in the engagement with religious faith by artists and architects, as well as the role of religiously-motivated state and church patronage in shaping cultural politics.
The workshop is organised in cooperation with the Belvedere, Vienna.
The events will take place on Zoom, every fortnight starting on 4 Feb 2021 and concluding with a roundtable on 13 May 2021. The lectures will begin at 18.00 CET.
Not long ago, this blog featured a review of Their Safe Haven, a book that explores the life and work of fourteen Hungarian artists who settled in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. One of them, George (György) Mayer-Marton (1897–1960), became a senior lecturer at Liverpool College of Art, and received several commissions to decorate churches in England with murals. The Crucifixion in the Church of the Holy Rosary in Oldham is now under severe threat. The church has been closed since 2017, and the artwork is at risk of being damaged by vandalism, water leaks, as well as by the eventual demolition or redevelopment of the building. The artist’s great-nephew, Nick Braithwaite, is leading a campaign to save the mural with the support of SAVE Britain’s Heritage, which has issued an appeal to restore the work and have it listed as a protected monument.
Since May 2018 a touring exhibition has been taking place of work from the photographic studio of Rudolf Sandalo (1899–1980). With an impressive and informative bi-lingual catalogue that includes high quality reproductions of nearly 280 photographs, it is worth trying to visit it at the City of Prague Museum, where it is still due to be on display.[1] Sandalo is little known outside of the Czech Republic, but he is noteworthy as the author of an extensive portfolio of photographs of the modern architecture that was built in Brno in the 1920s and 1930s. Almost single-handedly, he shaped the present-day image of the city as a major centre of central European modernism. This exhibition is important, not only for its attention to an oeuvre of great significance for Brno and Czechoslovak interwar culture, but also for the wider questions it raises about modern architecture and the role of photography in shaping how we see it.
