Modern Art in the Global Cold War

Catalog description

Allthough the field of global art history has been largely concerned with contemporary art and with developments in the international art world under globalization (i.e., roughly since 1989), its temporal frame has expanded over the last decade or so. The field now includes exhibition projects, edited volumes, and specialized monographs that chart some of the international and transnational circuits of modern art since the end of World War II. Some of this work responds to an extensive literature on modern art and the Cold War whose main hubs have conventionally been Paris and New York. This course will engage with and build upon some of this recent curatorial and scholarly to explore other hubs and axes of modern art during the age of decolonization and the early Cold War period. We will look especially at trajectories of American, French, and African and diaspora modernist production between Africa, Europe, and North America.