International avant-gardes

This paper examines the cultural exchanges that took place between the directors and several leading contributors of a few literary journals that were active within three innovative European art movements in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Constructivist and “Integralist” circle founded in Bucharest around the literay reviews The Contemporary, 75 HP, Point and Integral, the Expressionists supported in Berlin by the magazine Der Sturm and the Hungarian movement, represented by Ma. Before a distinctly avant-garde group was formally constituted in Romania, the artists Max Hermann Maxy and Hans Mattis-Teutsch had managed to establish close relations with Der Sturm circle, while the latter had also joined the group Ma. The first two parts of this paper will shed light on the most important aspects of the initial phase of this triple collaboration. The birth proper of the Romanian avant-garde, in 1924, announced by the publication of the “Activist Manifesto for Youth” in Contimporanul, occasioned subsequent cultural exchanges between the editors and the representatives of the movements mentioned above. It is particularly interesting that these cultural connections were possible thanks to the fact that all the three artistic circles included in their own aesthetic program Constructivist affinities, which they adapted according to their own ideological needs, combining it with other more or less iconoclastic elements and trends. Therefore, the third part of the paper will analyse several occasions on which these artistic groups communicated successfully between 1924 and 1927, in order to cultivate the belief of a new art.

During its troubled history thrughout the 20th century, in the segment 1920-1930 circa, after the independence wars till the setting up of the Antanas Smetona’s regime following the 1926 coup d’état, Lithuania, despite its mainly rural condition, has also experienced an articulated surge of modernist avant-garde.
Here we offer an interesting set of six rare books and one journal issue, fully covering the decade of the official Lithuanian avant-garde in almost all its facets.
Originally published here: https://www.libreriapontremoli.it/filemanager/blog/the-lithuanian-avant-garde-in-6-books-amp-1-journal-1923-1931.php

Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full

Avant-garde calligraphy, often mistaken for abstract painting by its contemporaries, is a rich and understudied field in postwar Japanese art. While a few studies began to examine the place of this art form in the postwar art landscape, specific aspects of this phenomenon warrant further investigation.

This paper argues that in the postwar decades the dynamics of calligraphy as an avant-garde “traditional art” became increasingly issue-driven, rather than remaining community oriented. This feature distinguished avant-garde calligraphers from their traditionalist counterparts. New important theoretical issues―such as attention to materiality―connected previously separated art forms and brought artists from neighboring fields into conversation.

An example of this development is the postwar perception of the medium of ink rubbings. In 1952 the Japanese abstract painter and art historian Hasegawa Saburō (1906 - 1957) created a series of rubbings, reminiscent of surrealist Frottages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976). In the very same year, the avant-garde calligrapher Inoue Yūichi (1916 - 1985) integrated calligraphic inscriptions into rubbings from tatami mats, and creative printmakers such as Onchi Koshirō (1891 - 1955) experimented with rubbings from stone, wood, or even leaves and shells. Calligraphers noticed that the success of ink rubbings was indebted to their quality of rendering traces of the direct physical contact with the imprinted objects. This paper investigates how the postwar interest in materiality incited the calligraphers to adopt the medium of takuhon rubbings—previously used primarily as a means of copying earlier calligraphic styles—to conduct groundbreaking calligraphic experiments.

This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American performer Paul Robeson as protagonists and highlights the internationalist and cosmopolitan forces in the making of modern Chinese culture. I continue the comparative approach introduced in my first book, in which Joris Ivens and Paul Robeson embody the tangled relationship among international avant-garde, international socialism, and Chinese revolutionary popular culture. Together with their counterparts in China, they created and disseminated Chinese revolutionary popular culture from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War. Chinese revolutionary popular culture, in turn, shaped the interwar international avant-garde and its postwar transformation.

Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full

This paper addresses ground-breaking experiments with materials and techniques by a new generation of postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, who, sharing a more reflective and innovative views on calligraphy's materials, set out to challenge calligraphy's conventional “four treasures”― ink, paper, ink stone and brush. This study argues that attention to materiality, as a large feature of postwar art worldwide, was used by calligraphers as a means to enter the art processes of the larger national and international scale. It served as a common ground for starting a conversation between several groups of artists, such as printmakers, abstract painters and calligraphers.

In particular, this study focuses on works of two Bokujinkai artist, Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and Shinoda Shōji (1927-2000). Inoue's experiments revived takuhon ink rubbings as a modern art medium. His cooperation with abstract painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō emphasized its relatedness to the surrealist technique of frottages by Max Ernst. At the same time, Shinoda integrated carved calligraphy into the avant-garde calligraphic practice, actively establishing a connection with the contemporaneous sōsaku hanga print makers, such as Onchi Koshirō and Munakata Shikō. While the phenomenon of avant-garde calligraphy in postwar art landscape of Japan recently inspired several studies, the specific role that the interest in materiality played in it remains understudied. By closing this gap, this paper specifically demonstrates that addressing a common issue of materiality helped the postwar calligraphers overcome boundaries between different art forms and contest the established art hierarchies.

As a transnational agent of avant-garde documentary and international socialism, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens connected interwar European avant-garde with socialist cultural production in East Berlin, Paris, and Beijing. Before his departure for Paris in 1957, Ivens was orchestrating documentary films on international women’s and workers' movements in East Berlin, collaborating with Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Pablo Picasso across the “Iron Curtain.” His documentary Zao chun (Before Spring, or Lettres de Chine), shot in China and narrated in Chinese, produced by the CNDFS in Beijing in 1958, brings to mind Chris Marker’s landmark work Lettre de Sibérie (and Dimanche à Pékin) made around the same time, as well as Ivens’s own poetic love letter to Paris, La Seine a rencontré Paris, an award-winning documentary made right before his departure from Paris for Beijing.

Joris Ivens and his generation of interwar international avant-gardists such as Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Sergei Eisenstein, Yokomitsu Riichi, Federico García Lorca, and Tian Han were active in Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Madrid, and Shanghai at the post-WWI moment. For those who survived WWII, they became key players in the field of cultural production in East Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York, and Beijing. This paper presents Joris Ivens and his contemporary international avant-gardists as protagonists in a shared political and cultural struggle from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War, and probes their legacies for today’s interconnected world.