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The development of art in Austria after 1918 remains little explored; the main focus of research continues to be fin‐de‐siècle Vienna. Where interwar Austrian modernism is studied at all, interest is mostly limited to the municipal housing sponsored by the Social Democratic council. The main concern of this essay is to examine the reasons for this inconsistency and comparative neglect. It explores the ways in which the historiography of Austrian post‐war modernism has been informed by wider historical assumptions, about the role of the First World War as a cultural‐political caesura, for instance, or by ambivalence about interwar Austrian history and its slide into fascism, or valorization of the avant‐garde. A comparison is also drawn with accounts of art in interwar Czechoslovakia, where modernist practices are much celebrated since they have assumed a legitimating function for Czech and Slovak culture in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, Pakistan‐born lawyer and artist Iqbal Geoffrey (1939–2021) lodged a discrimination case against the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This essay connects Geoffrey's complaint, which he filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights, to MoMA's situation at the centre of activist debates over race and equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the museum's prominent role in exporting US art around the world during the Cold War. At a time when Asian modernists received a mostly transactional, diplomatic welcome from US cultural institutions including MoMA, Geoffrey mobilized his legal, artistic, and epistolary practices to stake his claim to permanent belonging within the US art world. Today, his case raises questions over where expanding histories of 'global modernism' meet incomplete histories of 'American' modernism, against a backdrop and the legacies of the Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with an unsolicited letter to Barnett Newman written by the Indian modernist F. N. Souza, this essay seeks to reframe our understanding of the decline of modernism. Art‐historical consensus holds that, as the 1960s progressed, modernist art was swept aside by demands for political engagement to which it could not adapt. Souza's letter complicates this. On one hand, it criticizes Newman's latest paintings for expressing modernist values such as autonomy, transcendence, and universality, for amounting to the claim that 'colour is ethics'. But on the other, rather than abandoning such concepts, as did most advanced art in the 1960s, Souza demands another, political modernism, one capable of grounding itself in reflection on the movement's historical complicity with colonialism and racism. This was a difficult project, and I reject the view that it was inherently progressive; indeed, I draw out the reactionary attitudes to which it could all‐too‐easily lead. Souza's desire, by 1969, to move beyond these without abandoning the historicity of modernism positions him closer to Newman than his letter suggests. Both proceeded, in ways that refuse the schematic alternatives of traditional art history, by making work that addressed political reality through the reflexive critique of modernism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post‐imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested beholder, and universalist claims of timeless aesthetic value – the second wave (including Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes) turned to minimalism, performance, and photo‐text to de‐centre modernism's core assumptions that relied on formalist discourse. Collage and montage practices among the UK‐born third wave (including Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, and Donald Rodney), which entailed the hyphenation of cross‐cultural elements, thus call for a deeper look at transculturation processes active since modernism's beginning, but which were not previously recognized on account of formalist hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by Stuart Hall's essay 'Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three "Moments" in Post‐War History' (2006), this special issue looks closely at the multi‐faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the 'Windrush generation'. It brings together a range of essays in different formats by artists and art historians on topics and methods that have been central to the AHRC‐funded Black Artists and Modernism project from which it emerges. In particular, the introduction centralizes the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism. Re‐evaluating David Medalla's participatory artwork A Stitch in Time (1967–72), which originated in the late 1960s but has since taken on multiple lives in various locations across the globe, we consider why and how it continues to be occluded from orthodox narratives of conceptual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Danish architect, designer and cultural critic, Poul Henningsen (1894–1967), was one of the most internationally oriented figures of Danish modernism. During the 1920s, however, he insisted that Danish conditions and traditions were different from elsewhere, and that Danish art and architecture had developed its own way into modernism; that is to say, he subscribed to Danish exceptionalism. Henningsen voiced reservations about Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius; they were too propagandistic and had reduced modernist ideas to a narrow set of stylistic motifs or even fads. His change in conviction in 1930 developed through a somewhat belated re‐engagement with cubism, which he understood as an aesthetic and ideologic worldview expressed in art and architecture, design and fashion, and through which he also embraced the international style. Henningsen represents an interesting case study in the continuous negotiations and conflicts around the role of national traditions and international influences in art, design and architecture in Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional appraisal that artists in Brazil were unable or unwilling to depict black subjects during the Imperial and early Republican periods is at odds with much of what was actually produced. Following the success of abolitionist imagery in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of visual artists in Brazil actively established a critical discourse that linked race and inequality as early as the 1890s, two decades before such critiques became widespread in literature and the social sciences. Specific works by Eliseu Visconti, Antonio Ferrigno and Modesto Brocos are singled out and examined, in this respect. The final section of the essay examines the issue of self-representation, focusing on the work of Arthur Timótheo da Costa in the 1900s and 1910s. A marked contrast exists between the relatively neglected efforts of these artists and the much lauded drive of Brazilian modernism to embrace the theme of race, after 1922.

Vanessa Bell presents a problem for the history of art in Britain. As a member of the Bloomsbury group she is famous, yet her art itself is relatively little known, and there is no consensus as to whether it can be taken seriously. This essay examines the obstacles to a reassessment of her work and their implications for the wider field of British art studies. Challenging the worst stereotype of Bell as silent, apolitical and derivative, it proposes new approaches to her art through the idea of conversation, which recurs in her painting and letters. Through detailed analysis of images, primary texts and the long-term critical debate, it draws attention to the complexities of Bell’s response to modernist art and theory, and to the critical, cosmopolitan nature of her practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the alliance between painterly modernism and right-wing politics in France at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Political struggles took on an aesthetic dimension in the cultural battles waged around 1900. Maurice Denis's monumental group portrait Homage to Cézanne (1900) serves as the focus of my inquiry. This painting is often cited and reproduced in histories of French modernism, but has yet to be examined within its historical and political moment. Although Homage does not directly reference contemporary political events, Denis's formal and compositional choices in Homage were informed by Adrien Mithouard's right-wing nationalist cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes an art which, demonstrating a sense of moral duty and a will for social engagement, sought to contribute to the reconstruction of Britain following the 1939–45 war. Two models of theory and practice are distinguished in response to the potential of this moment: in the first, modern ideas about a synthesis of art and architecture (something approaching a ‘total work of art’) were consulted and revived in a British context; in the second, ideas were forged that established a new relationship between art works and their environment which maintained the link between art and architecture, yet did not imply an ultimate dissolution of one within the other. These two models are set within an historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the use of the concept of 'the gaze' in late modernist art. Argument that flatness does not offer a secure base on which to build a definition in painting; Conscious play with the gap between pre-conception and perception; Relationship between the duration of making and that of viewing.

The article presents information on the persistent attempts to create a science of art, which would comprise laws governing the right use of color, line, form, proportion and rhythm during the early nineteenth century. Chemist George Field called this "the aesthetical science". Accordingly, this transformation is part of the foundations of modernism and consists of the penetration into the nineteenth century of ideas originating in the Enlightenment and earlier. In his book "Chromatography," Field he discusses the science of classification of colors.