In times of travel bans and with a tourism industry at standstill, one is forced to look for alternative ways of discovery. April’s Artwork of the Month relates to this issue: Columbus in der Slovakei is a cultural travel guide to Slovakia, written for a German-speaking audience yearning to ‘discover and to unearth, to carry back home unlosable treasures of joy’ (9). Almost six hundred pages strong and including over four hundred illustrations and photographs, the publication was instigated, arranged and designed by the Viennese writer, artist and publisher Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski (1888-1961), and published in 1936 by the German-language publisher Eos in Bratislava. Though widely advertised in the Austrian and Prague German radio and press, including praise by Thomas Mann, it should be noted in advance that the commercial success of the publication was disastrous and almost led its publisher into financial ruin, not least due to the high price caused by the design specifications.[1]
Tag: vernacular modernisms
Conference report: Multiplying Modernity: Vernacular Modernisms, Nostalgia and the Avant-Garde
The second CRAACE conference, ‘Multiplying Modernity: Vernacular Modernisms, Nostalgia and the Avant-Garde’, took place in the East Slovak Gallery, Košice, from 6 to 7 December 2019 and examined the roles of folk art, the vernacular and regionalism in interwar East/Central European modernism. The conference programme can be accessed here.
The Art of Subcarpathian Rus 1919-1938 – Czechoslovak Footprint: Exhibition Review
In response to current broader reconsiderations about how art, design and architecture in the First Czechoslovak Republic should be represented, the East Slovak Gallery in Košice is currently exhibiting The Art of Subcarpathian Rus 1919-1938 – Czechoslovak Footprint, which showcases paintings, prints and sculptures from the First Republic’s easternmost region. Built on the premise that artistic life in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, as the region is dominantly referred to in English, proliferated under Czechoslovak administration after 1918, the exhibition, curated by Miroslav Kleban, ties the region’s cultural development to the modernization efforts of the First Republic’s eastern regions.
Multiplying Modernity: Workshop Schedule and Information
Our workshop Multiplying Modernity: Vernacular Modernisms, Nostalgia and the Avant-Garde will take place in Košice on 6 and 7 December 2019.
The schedule which includes the names of the speakers and titles of their papers can be downloaded here: Multiplying Modernity Workshop Schedule
The workshop is free to attend, but you need to register. Click here for the registration form.
CFP: Multiplying Modernity: Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde
Multiplying Modernity
Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde
CRAACE workshop, 6–7 December 2019
East Slovak Gallery, Košice (Slovakia)
In the decades before 1918 there was a vibrant debate over the nature of ‘national art’ in Central Europe. For many this was embodied in folk art and culture. By 1914, this idea was increasingly challenged by avant-garde interests in the metropolis. After the War, however, a return to folk art and regionalism was revisited and gained increasing importance in the decades leading up the Second World War. Within a broad artistic landscape, folk art and culture was used to search for a fundamental essence of human culture, as in the case of the Hungarian painters Lajos Vajda and Dezső Korniss; to create a ‘national style’ with reinterpretations of folk art, as in 1920s Czechoslovakia; and to seek renewal outside a lost imperial capital, like in Austria.