Rethinking History in Modernism (FULL-DAY – PART 2)

It is a cliché in modernist studies that modernism marked the end of history painting. Theatrical gesture, heroism, and the rendering of the past as legible spectacle were, to quote one authority, ‘displaced, if not deconstructed, by modernism in the hands of painters like Manet after the 1860s’. The hardening of modernist orthodoxy in the period after the Second World War seemed to confirm this trend: history still had its purchase on art, but as form, not content.

This was a powerful view, but it was also selective and recent advances have drawn attention to its limitations. The place of history – as both content and mode of thinking –within the development of modernism across the twentieth century has yet to be fully understood. The scholarly rehabilitation of socialist realism has further shown the place of historical narrative amid innovations in public art, as the international spread of the muralist movement attests. As the twentieth century progressed, modernists across the decolonising world turned their attention to unearthing and reframing historical accounts to generate art forms that looked beyond the caesura of colonialism. Today, as reconstructed pasts and ideological rewritings once again gain political currency, revisiting modernism’s complex engagement with history becomes more than an academic exercise: it affirms the urgency of historical thinking in art.

How might political and aesthetic questions that are galvanising contemporary scholarship – questions about origins and belonging, about neo- and de-colonisation – be reframed and expanded by studying their roots in modernist attitudes to history? What becomes of distinctions between forms – painting and photography, easel and mural painting – when anti-historical conventions are removed? How might this process alter and open up the geography of modernism, still too often framed by linear temporality and singular notions of innovation?

This panel’s contributions explore the role of historical thinking, temporality, and narrative in modernism; examine how different frameworks – Marxist, decolonial, feminist – have shaped the conceptualisation of modernist history; and consider how such approaches might reconfigure the periodisation, geographies and form of modernist art.

Session Convenor:

Saul Nelson, University of Cambridge

Mary-Ann Middelkoop, University of Cambridge

Part 2 / Panel 2 Speakers:

Madeleine Harrison, University College London

Black Modernism, Black History: Aaron Douglas at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library

In 1934, the American artist Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) was commissioned by the federal government’s Public Works of Art Project to produce a mural series at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street Branch. The resulting project, Aspects of Negro Life, refined the modernist visual language Douglas had developed since arriving in Harlem in 1925, just as the Harlem Renaissance — an interwar African American intellectual, cultural, and political movement associated with modernist literary and visual artistic production — hit its stride. Sleek, abstracted, and stylised, with a stripped-back colour palette and angular forms, the works have become idiomatic of their era’s Black avant-garde.

Avant-garde as it may be, Aspects also bears all the hallmarks of history painting. Monumental, theatrical, and didactic, it captures climactic moments in African American history, from the Middle Passage and Emancipation to Reconstruction and the Great Migration. This paper argues that Aspects indexes the historical thinking that was one of African American interwar modernism’s major constituent parts but is typically overlooked in scholarly narratives that foreground rupture, innovation, and orientation towards the future. To do so, it reads Aspects alongside histories of the library for which it was painted — itself a vibrant centre for African American historical practice, archiving, and learning since the 1920s, when librarians began amassing vast holdings of rare materials relating to African American and African diasporic histories. I ultimately contend that this site-specific series prompts us to reassess long-held orthodoxies about the Harlem Renaissance’s strident future-thinking.

Elisabeth Lee, University of St Andrews

Reviving the Medieval in the GDR: Werner Tübke’s Panorama

The painted panorama medium was patented by Robert Barker in 1787 in England, and was defined as a purpose-built rotunda with a large-scale painting which encircled the viewer in 360 degrees. The formation of the Soviet Union in the 20th century extended the longevity of the medium, where it disseminated throughout Eastern Europe since the 19th century and dominated as a propaganda tool to project military power and colonial territories.

The panorama evolved in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where the Leipzig artist Werner Tübke was commissioned by the state to paint the largest oil painting in Europe, the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany (1976–1987). Intended to serve as a commemorative site for the 450th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, Tübke defied the enforced stylistic standard of socialist realism and revived the allegorical motifs of artists including Pieter Brueghel, Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, and Lucas Cranach throughout the composition. This appropriation of medieval and early modern imagery highlights the temporal versatility of the panorama medium, suggesting a Hegelian philosophy of art and history.

Through this contextual and iconographical analysis, this research analyses Tübke’s Revolution as an art-historical panorama, urging viewers to reflect on history and art despite a time of political surveillance in state-sponsored art. This offers new insights into the limited body of research on the panorama medium as a reflective temporal lens on the past, through its appropriation in the 20th century of medieval and Renaissance painting.

Luna Lobão, State University of Campinas

Reframing History: Lina Bo Bardi’s Modernist Display and the Narrative of Art at MASP

This paper explores Lina Bo Bardi’s 1968 display design for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo as a modernist experiment in rethinking the historical narrative of art. Her glass easels suspended paintings on crystal-clear panels, creating an open field where artworks from different periods and geographies could engage in direct visual conversation.

While grounded in the modernist vocabulary of architecture and design, Bardi’s display simultaneously challenged the teleological structure of art history. By juxtaposing canonical European works with Brazilian, “popular,” and everyday artefacts, MASP articulated a vision of art as a living continuum rather than a closed Western lineage. This approach redefined the “universal” not as homogeneity but as a plural, shared field of experience – a distinctly modern proposition emerging from the Global South.

The paper argues that Bardi’s spatial narrative aligns with mid-century efforts to reconcile modernism’s social ideals with the museum’s pedagogical mission. Her display transformed historical thinking into an embodied experience: fluid, comparative, and non-hierarchical. The recent revival of her design back in MASP and in exhibitions such as Tropical (National Gallery Singapore, 2023) attests to its ongoing resonance as a model for reimagining modernism’s relationship with history and display.

Nika Elder, American University

Minimalism and the Long Shadow of World War II

“Postwar” is one of the most prevalent yet undertheorized terms in the history of modern and contemporary Western art. Scholars often use it to refer to work made after 1945, but we have yet to understand how World War II—its politics and technologies—actually effected the paradigm shift that the term implies. Focusing on Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, which appeared at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, this talk locates “post-war” sculpture in the long shadow of World War II and thereby recuperates its political engagements.

Curated by Kynaston McShine, the exhibit comprised the work of approximately forty artists whose commitment to industrial materials and methods, as well as abstraction, marked a dramatic departure from historic approaches to sculpture. Ironically, however,
the institution in which the show was staged put the work back into conversation with traditional art objects. Although Primary Structures occupied no fewer than seven galleries and other spaces, the rest of the museum—both literally and ideologically—was dedicated to the display of historic ritual and ceremonial artefacts.

Analyzing the work in Primary Structures in relation to Judaica and its significance in the post-war era, I argue that the exhibit dramatized the extent to which Minimalist sculpture itself was already in conversation with the war and its travesties. Rather than an unmitigated embrace of new materials, techniques, and forms, Minimalist sculpture visualized the callousness and indeed the inhumanity of industrial warfare itself. Scholarship on the work has largely taken its artists at their word, but situating them within debates about historical memory at the Jewish Museum reveals the extent to which this concern pervaded Anglophone culture as a whole. It was not a niche interest, but a lived reality that informed the production and reception of “post-war” sculpture writ large.

Matthew Holman, The University of Hertfordshire / The Courtauld Institute of Art

The Recuperation of History Painting Today: A Look Back to the ‘End of Painting’ Debate

The renewed prominence of history painting in contemporary art – exemplified by figures such as Kerry James Marshall, Lubaina Himid, and Toyin Ojih Odutola – demands to be understood in relation to the postwar debates that pitted abstraction against realism. In the two decades following 1945, the perceived triumph of abstraction as a ‘lingua franca’ was often framed as the inevitable consequence of historical trauma: the impossibility of representation after catastrophe whereby, as the organisers of this panel have suggested, ‘history still had its purchase on art, but as form – not content.’ History painting was routinely dismissed as formally outdated or else dictated by the ideological needs of state socialism. Yet this binary masked a deeper continuity that has re-emerged today, in which the persistence of the historical imagination seeks to make claims on the canon and on the exclusionary tendencies of art history itself, rather than on history as such. If, for instance, Marshall’s paintings foreground Black figures in spaces historically denied to them – in the studio or the museum, often staged in grand-scale tableaux with narrative clarity – then it is at the expense of a broader belief in the capacity of painting to serve or meaningfully critique the politics of the present. This paper asks whether this model is the only viable future for history painting, not only in light of the ‘end of painting’ art-critical debates of the 1950s, but also in our own moment, when the capacity for a progressive conceptualisation of history in art may never have seemed more remote.