SESSION: Transcultural Abstraction, Colonial Histories
Bringing together scholars across geographic subfields, this panel seeks to develop more expansive histories and methodologies for abstract art, centred on the intersections between abstraction, nationalism, colonialism, and coloniality. We aim to probe anew the power relations, aesthetic motivations, and transcultural connections undergirding abstract art’s early development and global dissemination. We ask: How did abstraction index the political, technological, racialized, and socio-economic divisions that shaped artmaking in different localities across the globe? What opportunities did the practice offer for resistance and solidarity? And how might attending to overlooked or marginalized epistemologies and positionalities—including visual traditions and cultural practices outside of modernist painting—be central to a renewed history and historiography of the topic? The session’s contributors critically interrogate abstract art within an interdisciplinary frame; examine distinct conceptual and philosophical bases for non-mimetic form; foreground local invocations and alternative genealogies of abstraction from Indigenous and non-Western contexts; and challenge the coloniality of Euro-American narratives.
Session Convenors:
Max Boersma, Freie Universität Berlin
Yiqing Li, University of Macau
Stephanie Su, University of Colorado, Boulder
Session Speakers:
Adrienn Kácsor, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
“Re-inventing” Kyrgyz Abstractions in the 1930s
The Stalinist cultural dictum “national in form, socialist in content” defined Soviet aesthetics for over half a century. This paper asks how artists in Soviet Central Asia responded to this aesthetic principle in the 1930s, at the height of Soviet imperial modernization and nation-building campaigns that established new national republics in the Central Asian territories of the Soviet empire. In the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic, artists “re-invented” indigenous traditions of decorative abstraction to create a Kyrgyz Soviet national culture. They transformed the abstract decorative patterns of handmade textile objects, such as the Kyrgyz felt carpets shyrdaki, into the primary “national form” of Kyrgyz Soviet modernism. Such a “re-invention” of indigenous abstract artistic practices forms an instructive episode within colonial histories of abstraction, but with a quintessentially Soviet twist. The main actors of this transformation included not only local artists who in the 1930s were trained in the imperial centres of Moscow and Leningrad (e.g., Semen Chuikov and Sabyrbek Akylbekov), but also Russian and other Soviet artists relocated to Central Asia (such as Oksana Pavlenko), as well as foreigners such as the Hungarian Béla Uitz and László Mészáros, who arrived in the Kyrgyz Republic to build Soviet culture in the name of Soviet internationalism. Studying how the latter appropriated indigenous Central Asian abstractions for Socialist Realism thus also offers a new model for understanding European artists’ urge to turn to foreign cultures and traditions beyond the familiar tropes of avant-garde exoticism.
Beatriz Cordero Martín, Saint Louis University, Madrid
Dissenting Abstractions in Latin America: Tenth Interamerican Conference in Caracas, 1954
The Tenth Inter-American Conference sought to promote democratic values across the hemisphere, despite being held in 1954 in Venezuela, ruled by the military regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. On this occasion, the host nation organized Painting in Venezuela, a panoramic exhibition tracing local artistic traditions from the pre-Hispanic period to contemporary geometric abstraction. The US, however, delegated its representation to the MoMA, whose curators chose to present exclusively a selection of abstract expressionism—provocatively titled “Six American Painters.” This decision contrasts with the museum presentation at the Venice Biennale on the same year, where paintings by Willem de Kooning were seen alongside works by leftist artist Ben Shahn.
Caracas thus became the perfect stage for two divergent interpretations of abstraction: Venezuelan artists such as Alejandro Otero presented geometric abstraction as a universal and optimistic language, whereas the US exhibition championed an emotionally charged, individualistic style, often interpreted as a nihilistic reading of the Cold War period. These parallel discourses prove that the artistic epistemologies of the period must be expanded beyond the reductive rhetoric of figurative versus abstraction.
Through an examination of the critical reception of the Caracas exhibitions, the archives of MoMA’s International Program at the scholarship of Monica Boulton, Shifra Goldman, Claire Fox, Nancy Jachec, Ana Franco and Mariola Álvarez, I seek to elucidate why the US refrained from framing abstract expressionism as the culmination of American artistic traditions—despite the evident connections to Navajo painting and Mexican muralism in the work of Jackson Pollock, for instance.
Max Boersma, Freie Universität Berlin
Anwar Jalal Shemza’s Transcultural Abstraction
In 1956, Anwar Jalal Shemza moved from Lahore to London, where he encountered an artistic environment wholly dismissive of his prior career in Pakistan. Studying at the Slade School of Fine Art, the artist felt profoundly alienated by the experience, commencing a deep rethinking of his practice. In this process, Shemza turned obsessive attention to the work of Swiss-born, German painter Paul Klee. Planning to write a book on the Bauhaus master, Shemza visited his son in Switzerland and assembled a significant personal library on his work. “I have been deeply struck by Paul Klee,” he wrote to a friend in 1957, “I realize that being afflicted by Klee may have a positive or a negative outcome.”
This talk reexamines Shemza’s engagement with Klee and its implications for his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. While the artist’s paintings are frequently framed as a “synthesis” of Western modernism and Islamic art, I propose instead that Shemza’s specific intervention in this period was to locate and work through relations already existing between these supposed oppositions. Shemza’s research into Klee foregrounded the constitutive role of Klee’s 1914 trip to Tunisia and his encounters with North African cultural production in shaping his approach to abstraction. Thus, tracing from colonial Tunisia to the Bauhaus to mid-century London, I argue that Shemza critically probed Klee’s work as a fraught yet generative resource in shaping a critical, transcultural model of postwar abstract painting.
Asia Adomanis, Ohio State University
Monumental Immateriality: Abstractions and Borders in Tseng Yuho’s Western Frontier (1964)
Tseng Yuho’s Western Frontier mural (1964) consists of nine gilded panels featuring vertical forms composed of thin layers of coloured paper, creating an abstract panoramic landscape reminiscent of the Western coast of the United States. The impenetrability of the abstract vista, which the Chinese American artist likened to “the monumental sight of the redwood forest,” contrasts with the highly legible and often candidly ideological works that comprise the canon of American landscape painting. A section of the mural served as the cover for the Asian/American/Modern Art (2008) exhibition catalogue—the first major retrospective on twentieth-century Asian American artists—confirming the central position of abstraction in the canon of specifically “Asian” American art. Building from the theoretical work of David Palumbo-Liu, I argue that Western Frontier can be read as an index of the multi-dimensional project of U.S. colonialism. Through its ideological distance from representation, the mural’s immaterial picturing of the nation’s borders opens space to consider the United States’ imperial activities in Asia and the Pacific during the twentieth century and the legacy of settler-colonial Western expansion during the nineteenth century as part of the same visual regime of power. In analyzing the work as both a depiction of the U.S. landscape and an abstract painting, I interrogate how national narratives surrounding colonialism, immigration, race, and the politics of abstraction have impacted art historical scholarship around representations of the Western border of the United States as a racialized—and therefore politically contrived—frontier.