Session 2 of our workshop Modernity and Religion in Central European Art and Architecture will take place at
18.00 CET on 4 March 2021
on Zoom, featuring papers by
Bruce Berglund (Gustavus Adolphus College, Sankt Peter)
and
Janek Wasserman (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa).
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.
In May 2017 a new art exhibition and concert venue opened in the Slovak town of Žilina. The result of a six-year restoration project that had been partly crowd-funded and also partly funded by the EU, the Slovak government and the town council, the building won a number of awards on the basis not only of the quality of the restoration but also for its mobilisation of grass-roots support and funding. Just around the corner from the Puppet Theatre and the substantial municipal theatre, the new centre provided a valuable addition to the cultural life of the provincial town, located some 200 kilometres northeast of Bratislava. The organisation that manages the centre, Truc Sphérique, also organises cultural events in the Stanica Žilina-Záriečie, in the town’s still operational railway station, and provides an instructive example of the productive regeneration of sites as cultural venues.[1]
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.
