Cosmopolitan Modernisms

This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits theperiod in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a sharedhistory of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Originalessays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay ofcultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of

This first book in the Annotating Art's Histories series revisits theperiod in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a sharedhistory of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Originalessays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay ofcultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovationin modernism's cross-cultural past. An account of colonialism and nationalism inIndian art from the 1890s to the 1920s, for example, suggests that culturalidentities are constantly modifying one another in the very moment of theirencounter and points to primitivism as a counter-discourse to modernism. A collisionbetween modernism and colonialism in the design of a Bauhaus model housing projectreveals the volatile conditions of European modernism in the 1930s. Discussions ofthe abstract painting of Norman Lewis and the collages of Romare Bearden illustratethe conflicted experiences and multiple affiliations of African American artists inthe New York art world of the 1940s and 1950s. The first English translation of aninfluential essay in the Brazilian neoconcrete movement of the 1950s takes upconcerns similar to those of North American minimalism in the 1960s. These and theother journeys into modernism's past described in Cosmopolitan Modernisms return toour contemporary moment with questions about modern art and modernity that we areonly beginning to ask.Copublished with inIVA/Institute of International Visual Arts, London.