Tag: World’s Fairs

Art East Central 2023

The 2023 issue of Art East Central is now out

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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

The Bílá Labuť (White Swan) Department Store, Prague (1939) by Josef Kittrich and Josef Hrubý

Artwork of the Month, December 2023: The Bílá Labuť Department Store, Prague by Josef Kittrich and Josef Hrubý (1939)

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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.

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Emilie Paličková Milde: Bobbin Lace, 1939

Artwork of the Month, August 2023: Bobbin Lace by Emilie Paličková Milde (1939)

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Lace is not typically viewed as high art. It is more of a decorative or utility object found under vases and on windowsills or as an ornament on garments. Historically speaking, it was often seen as a luxury product due to its hand-made origin that involved acquired skill. As a decorative object, its place in modern culture is tentative, however. Lace has been commonly linked to handicrafts, home industries and to folk art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, new themes and approaches to lace began to be explored and Emilie Paličková Milde (1892–1973) is one of the key examples of a designer who experimented with lace as a form of artistic expression.

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Artwork of the Month, May 2023: Photomontage at the Paris World’s Fair by Robert Haas (1937)

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Es ‘steht ein kleiner Pavillon, und welches Wunder, er ist fertig schon’[1] – ‘There stands a little pavilion, and what a wonder, it’s already done’ – sang the cabaret artist Hermann Leopoldi on the occasion of the opening of the Austrian pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in June 1937. He had thus taken his share in the ‘image construction’[2] of the Austrofascist regime, by hailing one of its landmarks. While civil war was shaking Spain, Stalinist terror was raging in the Soviet Union, and fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had suppressed almost all resistance, Austria appeared consolidated and peaceful. The uprising of the Social Democrats in February 1934 had been crushed, all parties since been banned, the rule of law been eliminated. Nevertheless, communists and socialists continued to resist, and illegal, yet tolerated Nazis successfully undermined the state. The Austrian ‘Ständestaat,’ the Corporate State, as it called itself, was unable to completely control cultural activity; while censorship and repression were nevertheless present, best described in Robert Musil’s words as an ‘evil spiritlessness.’[3] But even if a subliminal counter-reformation, with its emphasis on the Baroque and the sacred, was the state’s cultural leitmotif, a moderate modernism remained possible. The hesitant toleration of it, combined with a recourse to the imperial past, furthered the contradiction between defining Austria on its terms and seeing it as the better Germany, characterised the ambivalence of Austrofascist cultural politics.[4]

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