Avant-Garde Art on Paper in Europe, 1905-1950

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in collaboration with the University of Leuven and the Université Libre de Bruxelles, are organizing an international symposium on the role of paper in European avant-garde art during the first half of the 20th century.

A wide variety of historical or classic avant-garde artists turned to paper during the first half of the 20th century. Whereas this turn to paper has received quite some attention in the study of Cubism (collage), Expressionism (woodcut), and Dada (photomontage), to date we lack a proper understanding of the many ways in which avant-gardists employed paper and to what aims. This colloquium aims to tackle this issue by revisiting, and perhaps revising our view of, more canonized movements and by broadening the geographical scope that comes to include avant-garde movements, works and practices from the North, South, Centre and East of Europe.

For registration please visit www.bepaper.be


Program

23.03.2022

10:30-11:00:
Introduction : Inga Rossi-Schrimpf, Sascha Bru

11:15-12:45:
Auditorium A - The Materiality of Paper

Sabine Kriebel : Flattened: Montage Under Pressure

Emmanuelle Hincelin : Paint in white some white papers: practices and meanings in Pablo Picasso's artworks

Anneke de Vries : Taking stock: H.N. Werkman's artistic use of paper from his printing business

Room U - Cubism and Beyond

David Cottington : Cubism, the avant-garde and print culture: questions of inter-media hegemony

Claire Le Thomas : From one collage to another: the roots of cubism's pasted papers

Roberta Minnucci : Paper and Futurism: Materiality and Abstraction in Giacomo Balla's Collages

14:00-15:30:
Auditorium A - Reception of the Avant-Garde

Max Bonhomme : Advertising or Agitprop? The Uses of Photomontage in French Modernist Graphic Design (1925-1939)

Lori Cole : Paper Exhibitions: The Display of the Avant-Garde Abroad

Juliette Milbach : Discuss the avant-garde through the paper: Moscow in the 1950s

Room U - Dada Papers

David Hopkins : Tearing; cutting, smudging; staining: Dada and the metaphorics of paper

Trevor Stark : The Treason of the Clerks: Paris Dada Paperwork

Daniel Hackbarth : Berlin Dada Before Photomontage: Raoul Hausmann's Material of Painting Sculpture Architecture (1918)

16:00-17:30:
Auditorium A - From 19th Century Material and Technique to the 20th Century Avant-Garde

Michelle Foa : Terrible paper, made from wood and a thousand other things that will soon fall into powder’: Working on Paper in the Mid and Later Nineteenth Century

Laura Bruni : The Cliché Verre

Natasha Ruiz-Gòmez : Tracing, Cutting and Pasting in Rodin’s Works on Paper

Room U - Beyond the Fine Arts

Tyrus Miller : Transparency on Paper: Imagining Glass Architecture from Taut to Eisenstein

Ekaterina Kulinicheva : Paper fashions and fashions on paper in the experimental Soviet 1920s

Eric White : A Revolutionary Idea, on Paper: The Legible Technologies of Bob and Rose Brown’s Reading Machines


24.03.2022

10:30-12h00:
Auditorium A - Circulation of Paper in the Avant-Garde

Jessica Sjöholm-Skrubbe : Avant-garde by mail

Przemyslaw Strozek : Spartakiada (1928). A Close Reading of 9 postcards by Gustav Klucis

Olga Muromtseva : Art Albums by M.Chagall, I.Puni and L.Popova: laboratory of avant-garde ideas

Room U - Black and White and Reproduction on Paper

Sarah Eycken : Monochrome Harmony: Black-and-White Compositions in Belgian Constructivist Art

Anne Reimers :“I am in favour of a black-and-white print that does not correspond to the original” (Otto Dix): Weimar Germany’s Print Media Culture and Oil Painting in Reproduction

Angelina Lucento : The Paper Lives of Soviet Miners

14:00-15h30:
Auditorium A - Avant-Garde Publishing

Stephen J. Bury : General introduction on the role of printed - artists books, magazines and manifestos

Maria Anna Rogucka : Squares, thick lines and bold type: Constructivist factor of Interwar Polish Graphic Design in Printed Matter

Poppy Sfakianaki : “Qu’on oublie autant qu’il est possible l’idée de la reproduction”: Tériade’s publishing vision for Verve

16:00-17:30
Auditorium A - Periodicals, Portfolios and Platforms of Dissemination

Merse Pál Szeredi : Lajos Kassák and the Politics of Paper in Hungarian Avant-Garde

Amelia Miholca : A Romanian Type of Constructivism: Constructivist Prints, 1923-1925

Fiona Piccolo : Medium, Platform, Art form: Avant-Garde Experiments With Paper in the Original Print Portfolio

Room U - Dada Material - Collage and Photomontage

Adriaan Gonnissen : Paul Joostens’ The Kingdom of Useless Things (1937) The art of the photocollage

Caterina Caputo : Collage, Photomontage, Photography: E.L.T. Mesens' works on paper, 1926-1945

Erin Sullivan-Maynes : Refuse, Reuse, and Material Transformations in early Weimar Works on Paper


25.03.2022
10:30-11:40:
Auditorium A - Artist's Books

Viola Hildebrand-Schat : The artist's book as a paper medium

Jean Marie Carey : At First Just Ghostly: Franz Marc's and Annette von Eckardt's Stella Peregrina

Room U - Cut and Paste 1

Elza Adamowicz : Joan Miró’s collages: “A tribute to bad taste”

Kamila Kocialkowska : Cutting Content: Collage and Censorship in Varvara Stepanova’s Newspaper Books

14:00-15:30
Auditorium A - Artist's Case Studies

Jane Eckett, Andrew McNamara : “Making Strange: Hirschfeld-Mack, Klee, the monoprint and the avant-garde diaspora”

Elissa Watters : Process and Politics: Renate Geisberg's Drawings and Woodcuts of War

Room U - Cut and Paste 2

Tara Ward : Avant-Garde in Paper (Sonia Delaunay-Terk's papier collé book covers)

Frauke Josenhans: Hedda Sterne’s Papiers arrachés et interprétés: drawing as an act of freedom

15:30-16:00
Final Discussions and Conclusions