SESSION: Rethinking History in Modernism (fULL-DAY PArt 1)

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 1 / Panel 1 Speakers:

Susan Laxton, University of California, Riverside

Photomontage and/as History Painting

This paper proposes to examine a series of understudied surrealist photomontages as an anti-modern reconception of history painting that is based on the sense that photojournalism–a genre characterised by authoritative presentation of events and spectacular, public-facing legibility–had been accepted as the presumptive heir of the role of history painting. Between 1931 and 1933, André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Suzanne Muzard created thirty-four photomontages from fragments clipped from VU magazine. Their reconfigurations of the historical record offered by the bourgeois picture press affirm mass media as the new public sphere but suggest an inadequacy in the representation of contemporary events profound enough to warrant a wholesale reconstruction of the priorities of historical representation.

Through cutting, juxtaposition, and reassembly, this series of photomontages simultaneously addresses contemporary political events and disrupts photojournalism’s illusion of immediacy, exposing the editorial and commercial practices that shape public perception. This doubled critique distinguished their work from both traditional history painting’s affirmative stance and socialist realism’s heroizing conventions.

Photomontage’s fragmentary form proves significant for rethinking the modern era’s engagement with history. These works held past and present in suspension, as fragments from recently obsolete magazine features produced uncanny familiarity alongside temporal distance, resonating with psychoanalytic theories of memory and foregrounding photography’s relationship to pastness.

By interrogating photojournalism from within, this series of surrealist photomontages reveals the 20th century’s complex, technologically inflected engagement with historical thinking, expanding understanding of how anti-capitalist and anti-modern frameworks shaped attitudes toward history and its representation.

Dorota Jagoda Michalska, Central European University

Art Deco and Feudalism. Zofia Stryjeńska (1891-1976) and Asynchronous Modernism in Interwar Poland

This presentation will re-examine the work of Zofia Stryjeńska (1891-1976), a celebrated national artist in interwar Poland (1918-1939). Hailed as the “princess of Polish painting”, her synthesis of Art Deco and Slavic myth was seen as synonymous with a modern Polish identity rooted in a reimagined folk history. Departing from traditional scholarship that frames her work as a state-building project, I propose a Marxist reframing, arguing that rather than reflecting a unified national spirit, Stryjeńska’s art registers the profound socio-economic contradictions of the Second Republic—a peripheral agrarian nation defined by the volatile coexistence of nascent capitalism and persistent, pre-modern feudal structures.

To grasp this dynamic, I introduce the concept of ‘asynchronous modernism’. Focusing on key works like the portfolios Polish Dances (1927) and Magie Slave (1934), I explore the temporal complexity of Stryjeńska’s practice: how her visually modern style coexists with, appropriates, and reframes pre-modern, archaic, and feudal representations of class, the peasantry, and perceived racial difference. This “asynchronous modernism,” rooted in a historically materialist understanding of modernity as a “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous,” challenges the trope of modernism as anti-historical. Instead, I reveal Stryjeńska’s engagement with a reconstituted past as a precise, critical registration of the uneven development inherent to capitalism on the periphery.

Louisa Avgita, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The Politics of Histories of Socialist Realism

In recent years, an emerging strand of art history has challenged the presumed autonomy of the Eastern and Southeastern European art scene. Publications such as Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945–1989 (2016), Making Art History in Europe After 1945 (2020), and the exhibition The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (2013) emphasise the fluidity of borders between Eastern/Southeastern and Western Europe, underscoring the artistic exchanges across these regions.

Consequently, the object of study has shifted. A central argument advanced in this context is that many socialist realist artists from the Soviet satellite states were influenced not by the “bad”—that is, imposed, uninspired, and propagandistic—socialist realism of the USSR, but rather by the “good”, militant, and ultimately avant-garde socialist realism of the West, particularly that emerging from Spain, Italy, Mexico, and parts of Africa within anti-colonial artistic frameworks.

The primary aim of these new historiographies is to propose a more “democratic” model of art history—one that positions at least a core part of the region’s artistic production as increasingly “compatible” with the avant-garde and with the Western value of artistic agency. In this light, the paper critically examines how Eastern European and Balkan socialist realism has been interpreted in relation to, or in opposition to, modern and contemporary art. This discussion is situated within the context of major recent art initiatives and institutions, such as The Uses of Art — The Legacy of 1848 and 1989 by the museum consortium L’Internationale.