Rethinking Europe: Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the Late 1940s and 1950s

How to talk about art and architecture in Europe after World War II within the frame of a global and horizontal art history?

Recent debates have shown that a mapping of post-war art should be based neither on political nor on stylistic criteria alone, as doing so involves the danger of repeating ideological patterns of the Cold War. The entangled diversity of post-1945 art production would therefore not be recognized and fully acknowledged. Hence, the conference “Rethinking Europe. Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the Late 1940s and the 1950s” aims at the development of a critical approach that takes into account the complex political framework as well as Europe’s unique position within a global context. Case studies will span a horizon for our discussions on the specific power of art during the time when civilization in Europe had to be rebuilt.

Concept: Arnold Bartetzky, Marina Dmitrieva, Barbara Lange and Tanja Zimmermann

Programme:

Day 1

Thursday, 15 February

14:30 – 15:00 Registration

15:00 Welcome and Introduction: Barbara Lange (Tübingen)

Young Scholars’ Forum

Moderation: Marcel Finke (Tübingen)

15:10 Marcela Hanácková (Zurich): How Socialist Realism Rocked Modernism. On Purists, Reformers and Radicals at the CIAM Bergamo Congress in 1949

15:50 Agata Pietrasik (Berlin): Art in Crisis: Rebuilding Modernism in the Aftermath of War

Refreshment Break

17:00 Patricia García-Monton Gonzales (Madrid): Europe and the Baroque through the Old Paths of Unity

17:40 Elisabeth Ansel (Dresden): “Emancipated from Provincial Myth” (Herbert Read, A Letter to a Young Painter): Irish Modernism and Its European Reception between the Poles of Art and Politics

19:00 Buffet Reception at Kunsthistorisches Institut Tübingen

Day 2

Friday, 16 February

9:30 Welcome: Tanja Zimmermann (Leipzig)

9:45 Panel I. Traditions and Innovations

Chair: Christian Fuhrmeister (Munich)

10:00 Agata Jakubowska (Poznan): All-Women Art Initiatives in the Aftermath of World War II

10:30 Hildegard Frübis (Berlin): Europe as Transit – Jewish Remembrance and the Photographs of Roman Vishniac from the 1940s and 1950s

Refreshment Break

11:30 Evá Forgács (Pasadena): Shaping a Narrative of a New Internationalism in Art: Willem Sandberg and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1945–1957

Discussion

Lunch

14:00 Panel II. Matters of Form

Chair: Arnold Bartetzky (Leipzig)

14:10 Dirk Hildebrandt (Cologne): The Politics of Modification. Asger Jorn and a Network of European Post-War Art

14:40 Barbara Lange (Tübingen): Back to the Roots and Open for Experiments at the Same Time: Asger Jorn’s Concept of Ceramics as a Way to Reform European Civilization

Refreshment Break

15:40 Tanja Zimmermann (Leipzig): Post-Colonial Art History for Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned States? Oto Bihalji-Merin and the Concept of “Naïve” Art

Discussion

Refreshment Break

17:00 Panel III. Entanglements

Chair: Marina Dmitrieva (Leipzig)

17:10 Ljiljana Kolesnik (Zagreb): Negotiating Cold War Divisions – International Artist Networks of the 1950s and Yugoslav Practices of Cultural Exchange

17:40 Pedro Lapa (Lisbon): A Particularity in the Portuguese Case

Discussion

Day 3

Saturday, 17 February

9:30 Panel IV: Prospects for Further Researches

Chair: Barbara Lange (Tübingen)

9:40 Christian Fuhrmeister and Barbara Murovec (Munich/Ljubljana): Inversions in Slovenia 1941–1954

10:00 Regina Wenninger (Munich): Polish Abstract Art in Western German Art Discourses of the late 1950s. A Historiographical Test Case

Refreshment Break

11:00 Thomas Thiemeyer (Tübingen): Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Berlin. The Humboldt Forum and the Current Shift in Germany’s Culture of Remembrance

Discussion

Registration for the open conference at postwar.europekhi.uni-tuebingen.de
Abstracts and conference programme on www.postwar-europe.de