Lidia Głuchowska

Cubist Idioms and Reinventions: Decentred Microhistories from Central Europe

Despite of the decades of efforts in decentring Modernism, and the fact that already in 1913 Adolf Basler, an influential Polish-Jewish critic, claimed Cubism to be a new style, as universal as Gothik, Cubism is still mostly associated only with Paris. Recently some scholars have postulated the peripheralization of Paris as it gained the status of an artistic centre only thanks to numerous artists from e.g. Central-Eastern Europe, who contributed to the dissemination of Cubism and the transcontinental discourse on it. In the context of Central Europe, it was only ‘Czech Cubism’, that was recognised by some Western scholars already in the 1980s. It happened also due to the fact, that it was locally the basis of a national style and as such devoted the most diverse studies. Czech(oslovak) research on the local idiom of Cubism before the WWI and in the inter-war period, as well as even as the doctrine of socialist realism was in force in the whole Eastern Block can be considered a model one for the whole region. However, Czech scholars, claimed the usage of the entire name ‘Czech Cubism’ to be a self-colonization. Influential October critics regarded only Picasso and Braque as pure Cubists, and Edward R. Fry depreciated geometric art outside Paris. However, already Apollinaire and Basler considered Cubism to be heterogeneous and emerging simultaneously in many countries. Research project Cubism. Its Idioms and Re-Visions ‘Outside the Centre.’ Aesthetics, Functions and Political Connotations, made it possible to discover e.g. Polish-Czech or Czech-Hungarian and Hungarian-Austrian horizontal networks, pointed out the range of `forgotten’ artists, including women, in the dissemination of this style, or of the e.g. Hungarian contribution to the transfer of Cubism to the USA. The publication of new source texts in English should intensify research on ‘minor Modernism(s)’, as well as contribute to overcoming limitations of national art historiographies, in which certain phenomena hitherto had been marginalised, and which require further critical study in the transnational context.

Author's email:

l.gluchowska@isw.uz.zgora.pl

DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.54759/ART-2024-0301

Full-text in the Digital Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:30a1913f-f498-4976-880d-c1dd1fff9dc5

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