LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents "Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930," on view through June 2, 2002. The exhibition examines the cross-fertilization among the artistic avant-garde movements in the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the former Yugoslavia during the evolution of modernism between 1910 and 1930. In Central Europe the social milieu of artists and intelligentsia—what we call the avant-garde—constantly reinvented and restructured itself, becoming an international cosmopolitan community whose unprecedented cohesion and influence is still felt today.
Extending along the Danube and Oder rivers and from the Balkans to the Baltic, Central Europe is a rich ethnic melding of Slavic, Germanic, Hungarian, and Gaelic cultures. These regional cultures prospered even during centuries of rule by the powerful empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary, and they continued to bloom when Central Europe was transformed after World War I into the cluster of nation states we know today. This exhibition examines cities as sites of vibrant exchange—Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Cracow, Dessau, Ljubljana, Lódz, Poznan, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Weimar, and Zagreb— as they evolved from regional centers into cosmopolitan communities. The cross-fertilization among artistic avant-garde movements in these cities produced a remarkable variety of contributions to the evolution of modern art.
Through approximately 300 examples of painting, sculpture, works on paper, photographs and applied art objects, Central European Avant-Gardes looks at how the international relationships among vanguard intellectual circles helped transform the avant-garde. Conflicting attitudes of nationalism and utopianism were abundant in the culturally diverse and politically volatile social setting of Central Europe during the inter-war era. Artists sought to overcome the forces of traditionalism and nationalism by cultivating both an internationalist social milieu and an elemental visual vocabulary they hoped could transcend national boundaries.
The exhibition identifies events (exhibitions and performances) and situations (artists’ groups, publishing ventures, galleries, cafes, and schools) where such intercultural exchange took place. Here artists sought to impart political ideologies, disrupt the status quo, and build new alliances and communities. They were well aware of the art world beyond, including Italian Futurism, French Cubism, German Expressionism, and Russian Constructivism. Artists of the Prague group “Skupina” traveled to Paris between 1909 and 1914. Called “Czech Cubism,” their paintings, sculptures, furniture and ceramics were imbued with a vocabulary of faceted crystalline forms, based on Prague’s well-preserved Bohemian baroque facades as well as the German Expressionist works they so much admired. As a premiere example Central European Avant-Gardes presents a suite of Czech Cubist furniture by Josef Gocar for the first time in a touring exhibition.
Each instance of such influence between avant-garde centers entailed a transformation in style and content suited to the immediate locale. This often led to contrasts and contradictions – between past and present, regional and cosmopolitan, and, especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution when Moscow gained both political and artistic ascendancy over Paris, politics and aesthetics. When in 1919 members of the Activists of Budapest went into exile in the former Habsburg capital of Vienna, they found themselves in one of the most culturally diverse cities in Europe. Kineticism, inspired by the abstract forms of Expressionism and the celebration of movement of Futurism, was developing in the paintings of Otto Erich Wagner. Friedrich Kiesler was producing innovative theater and exhibition designs, which will be documented in the exhibition. Then calling themselves “Ma” (meaning ‘today’) after their radical periodical, the Hungarian émigrés in Vienna established contacts with Berlin and Weimar, where the newly founded Bauhaus soon drew members László Moholy-Nagy and Sándor Bortnyik to take up residence along with leading artists from all over Europe. At the Bauhaus, Lucia Moholy, Irena Bluhová, and other students began making photographs stressing formal abstract qualities while conveying straight-forward images of reality. Other artists contributed to a revolution in typography and page design that was especially pronounced in Central Europe. Throughout the exhibition are publications where typography and page design were transformed by, among others, Moholy-Nagy, Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, and Czech artist and theorist Karel Teige (a rare set of his innovative periodical ReD is on view).
