11th Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES).

Caricature and the Historical Avant-Garde East of Berlin.

The panel Caricature and the Historical Avant-Garde East of Berlin, to be submitted by 30 November to XI Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies, held at University College London 21-25 July 2025, aims to examine the multiple affinities between caricature and the avant-garde in Europe’s east in early twentieth century. Caricature crossed paths with the avant-garde many times. As the most explicitly critical, anti-mimetic, that is essentially disruptive mode of expression, caricature accompanied the arts of the first decades of the twentieth century, such as cubism (Gopnik 1983), abstract art (Kroiz 2010) and dada (Kriebel 2014). The principles of deformation and the laughter-based rebellion had also been essential for Russian neo-primitivism and cubo-futurism (Bowlt 1975; Brooks 2019), or for the invention of the transrational language zaum by the Kherson-born Aleksei Kruchenykh who, in parallel to Duchamp, began his career as a caricaturist around 1910 (Kruchenykh 2006). In the newly established independent state of Czechoslovakia, Karel Teige the theorist and Adolf Hoffmeister the caricaturist, adopted the principle of radical negation and the constructivist belief in art applied to life, to open an investigation into caricature on its own, debating its powers as the weapon of political resistance, the messenger of anti-aestheticism, as well as the record of critical inquiry into theories and activities of the international avant-garde.

Please, send the proposals of 200 words relating to those and other manifestations of the relationship between caricature and the historical avant-garde east of Berlin to my address below by 22 November.

Please consult the congress website for registration fees and discounts, as well as financial support, including travel grants.

Dr Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius
Honorary Research Fellow
Birkbeck, University of London
School of Historical Studies
k.murawska-muthesiusbbk.ac.uk