Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain

Éva Forgács, Ph.D. (1992), is an Adjunct Professor at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and Professor Emerita of the László Moholy-Nagy University, Budapest. Her publications include Malevich and Interwar Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2022) and other monographs and essays on Modernism and contemporary art and culture.

"Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain situates the issue of abstraction in art on a new historiographic and theoretical basis, particularly in relation to recent decolonial scholarship. The chapters discuss abstraction not as a process of stripping contexts into select variables that can be distantly manipulated (such the metropole ruling over the colony); but rather, as pure creative potential—the white canvas onto which Malevich painted his Suprematist forms—which survives after everything else that people love and by which they live is lost to sight.""Standing on top of ruins and “scan[ning] the horizon of time … with open eye,” as the director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and CoBrA supporter Willem Sandberg wrote in a 1946 editorial of the journal Open oog: avantgardecahier voor visuele vormgeving (Open Eye: Avant-Garde Notebook for Visual Design), artists and architects were left to reassemble what was under their feet. Only with those available materials—and through the need to affirm their own existence—could they build toward a liberated future. Such visions that are presented in Forgács’s timely and important volume would soon, however, join the growing pile of wreckage, as the angel of history, summoned at the “zero hour,” proved not only to be a saving grace but a harbinger of another catastrophe to come."_Alexander Bala. in:

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresNotes on ContributorsIntroductionPART I: Local Developments1 A New Beginning: the Dresden Artists’ Group Der Ruf, 1945–1948Isabel Wünsche2 The Struggle for Dominating the Discourse: the Conflict between Traditionalists and Modernists in Hungary, 1945−1948Edit Sasvári3 Art in Poland Immediately after the War in Search of Social ContextMarcin Lachowski4 In the Realm of Contradictions: Outlines of Czech Cultural Policy, 1945−1948Tomas GlancPART II: Reaching Out5 The Bucharest Surrealist Group and the Networks of Post-war SurrealismImre József Balázs6 ‘Democratic Art par excellence’? The 1947 Polish–Czechoslovak Exchange of Modern Graphic Art ExhibitionsPetra Skarupsky7 The European School in Budapest, 1945−1948Éva Forgács8 Cobra: Vital ManifestationSascha Bru and Éva ForgácsPART III: Wide Networks9 New Realities in Paris: Abstract Art and Internationalism, 1946−1950Natalie Adamson10 Resilient Modernism: the 1946 Visit of Polish Architects to the United StatesAnna Jozefacka11 Materiality and Migration in Latin American Modernism: Caracas to Buenos Aires, 1944−1950Pia Gottschaller12 The Chicago Art That Wasn’t, 1945−1948Barbara Jaffee13 Turnabout is Fair Play: Institution Building and the Idea of International Art in São Paulo after World War IIAdele Nelson14 American Surrealism, Late Style: Horizontal Circulations in the 1940sTyrus MillerIndex