Modernism’s Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in ‘East-Central Europe’, 1910–1930s
In an era of rising ethno-nationalism and cultural isolationism, the study of modernism in the visual arts is at a crossroads. As the universalist ideals and futurist social utopias of the early twentieth century appear increasingly suspect across the political spectrum, scholars urgently need new narratives about the origins of abstract art and design. What is the relationship between abstraction and cultural identity? And how can we tell the story of abstraction’s emergence differently?
The proposed panel invites papers (especially from early and mid-career scholars) that re-contextualise modernist art and its historiography by investigating and critically reassessing the entrenched polarity between the nationalism of folk practices and the universalism of the historical avant-garde in the region known as ‘East-Central Europe’. Focusing on the advent of abstract art and design in the first decades of the twentieth century, the panel will explore the generative intersection between the history of ethnology and the history of the avant-garde, linking the non-representational visual practices and folk and decorative art traditions in the region of study. By exploring the dialogues within the ‘East-Central Europe’ and the artistic exchanges that existed in this multicultural space (in such cities, for example, as Lviv, Kraków, Brno, and Bratislava), the panel contributes to the processes of de-centring and dismantling the overtly Westernised and/or Sovietised/Russo-centric histories of modern art in the area. The panel will begin with opening remarks from the conveners and conclude with a roundtable discussion.
Session Convenors:
Megan R. Luke, University of Tübingen
Katia Denysova, University of Tübingen & University of Basel
Speakers:
Juliusz Mazur-Machowski, University of Warsaw
El Lissitzky and Henryk Berlewi in Warsaw. Identity Struggle – Politics, Nation, Abstraction
In 1921, at the invitation of the Warsaw Kultur Lige, which Henryk Berlewi represented across Eastern Europe, El Lissitzky arrived in Warsaw. At the time, the Kultur Lige was one of the most important secular cultural organisations for Jews. Founded in 1918 in Kyiv, it had branches in Poland, Romania, and Lithuania. After 1920, it came under the control of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Education, effectively losing its independence by 1924.
Lissitzky and Berlewi shared similar biographies: both were of Jewish descent and created art in their early careers incorporating Jewish motifs. Thus, their heritage must have been a key element of their identities. For Lissitzky, a deep internal struggle must have preceded the symbolic severance from this identity to create modern Suprematist art. By convincing Berlewi of the superiority of Soviet art, Lissitzky was, in effect, advocating for a break from an ‘anachronistic’ national identity in favour of a revolutionary international one.
Also in 1921, at the Congress of the Third International, Jewish communists were urged to renounce their membership in independent Jewish communist parties, join the party designated by the Comintern, and relinquish any desire to establish a state in Palestine. As the officially recognised artist of Soviet Russia, El Lissitzky, through his artistic and cultural engagement, was promoting (whether consciously or not) the prevailing political line of the Comintern. For Berlewi, the encounter with Lissitzky was an impetus to adopt a new artistic style. This presentation discusses the social, political, and national context of this meeting in relation to national identity and political self-identification.
Alexandru Bar, University of York
Abstraction as Identity Negotiation: Tzara, Janco, and the Avant-Garde in East-Central Europe
This paper reassesses the relationship between abstraction and identity in East-Central Europe by examining the work of Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco – key figures whose art navigated the polarity between nationalist folk traditions and the universalism of the avant-garde. Drawing on research into their Jewish heritage and early collaboration, the paper explores how their work, though often considered part of the Western avant-garde canon, was deeply rooted in the sociopolitical conditions of Romania and East-Central Europe. Tzara and Janco’s engagement with abstract art was not merely a universalist gesture but a negotiation of their multilayered identities within a region marked by intense ethno-nationalism and cosmopolitan experimentation.
Their abstract and non-representational art emerges as a product of cultural hybridity,with Tzara’s poetic abstraction and Janco’s constructivist designs reflecting a dynamic tension between their Jewishness, Romanian folklore, and the broader European avant-garde. Janco’s use of folk decorative motifs within modernist frameworks and Tzara’s subversive Dadaist performances highlight how local traditions were re-imagined through avant-garde abstraction, questioning fixed cultural identities.
By critically examining these intersections, this paper contributes to dismantling dominant Western-centric narratives of modernism, offering a new regional perspective on the intersection of abstraction and identity in cities like Bucharest, Kraków, and Bratislava. In this context, Tzara and Janco’s work serves as a vital case study of how abstraction functioned not only as an aesthetic approach but also as a strategy for confronting political instability and cultural fragmentation. Ultimately, their avant-garde practices are shown to have de-centred traditional art histories, embodying a radical modernism that was both global and intimately tied to local identities.
Julia Secklehner, Constructor University, Bremen & Masaryk University, Brno
A Modernist Language for the Countryside: Abstract Photography and the Interwar Hungarian Village Movement
1962 saw the publication of The Art of Lace-Making in Hungary, a book examining one of Hungary’s most celebrated crafts, drawing on the extensive collections from Budapest’s Museum of Decorative Arts. Its illustrations adopted a remarkably experimental approach: by presenting white lace against a dark background in sharp and close focus, they highlighted texture and intricate details, detaching the craft from its rural origins and integrating it into a modernist aesthetic. Taken by Judit Kárász (1912–1977), the museum’s in-house photographer, these illustrations built on a visual language that Kárász had begun to develop in the 1930s after studying at Dessau Bauhaus. Even though Kárász lived abroad until the late 1940s, she frequently returned to eastern Hungary to participate in the Hungarian village movement. Travelling to remote homesteads and villages alongside ethnographers, educators, and sociologists, Kárász documented the lives of individuals experiencing rural poverty. Yet, drawing inspiration from rural life and folk cultures, she also ventured into abstraction, culminating in a series of photographs that reframed rural environments in a new visual idiom.
The paper builds on this body of work to investigate how narratives of avant-garde photography transform when considering intersections of ethnographic practices and folk cultures with a modernist visual language. Concentrating on women photographers working in rural East Central Europe, such as Kárász, I show that the intersections of folk cultures and modern technologies engendered modernist photography profoundly engaged in avant-garde transnational exchanges while remaining rooted in specific local contexts.
The papers will be followed by a roundtable discussion with all the speakers and convenors.