Modernism, Colonialism, Internationalism

Catalog description

This course situates modernist painting within a global context. We will begin by considering how the major artistic tendencies of the first half of the twentieth century, among them cubism, abstraction, concretism, realism, and surrealism, developed amid the circulation of peoples, objects, and concepts under colonialism. Then, we will trace how these tendencies developed differently in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States, connecting the work of individual painters to the larger themes of the postwar era: the aftermaths of Auschwitz and Hiroshima; the decolonization of the global south; the formation of international institutions; the spread of commercial culture; and the ideological divisions of the Cold War.