Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. Focusing on modernist artists, artist collectives, and architects central to dissonant regional traditions, as well as influential exhibitions and patronage systems, the contributors produce a new understanding of emergent postwar global art. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally.
Contributors. Iftikhar Dadi, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Atreyee Gupta, Elizabeth Harney, Jennifer Josten, Vivian Li, Tara McDowell, Alexandra Munroe, Nada Shabout, Terry Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Ming Tiampo
List of Illustrations xi
Preface / Atreyee Gupta xvii
Introduction / Atreyee Gupta 1
Part I. Europe in Transition
1. Creaturely Cobra / Hal Foster 19
1. Decolonizing Modernism/s: Transversal Histories and the Slade School of Fine Art / Ming Tiampo 35
Part II. The Soviet Bloc and Communist China
3. Soviet Art before and after the Thaw / Boris Groys 65
4. Rent Collection Courtyard, the “Atomic Bomb of the Art World” / Vivian Li 79
Part III. Pacific Passages, Atlantic Oscillations
5. Godzilla’s Schizophrenia: Americanization and Amnesia in Postwar Japan / Alexandra Munroe 99
6. The Work of Salvage: Jess, Allegory, and the Atomic Bomb / Tara McDowell 119
7. “The Eternal Modernity of the Church”: Art in the Sugar Mill and the University in the Philippines / Patrick Flores 135
8. Antipodean Vision: Postwar Arts in Australia and the South Pacific / Terry Smith 155
9. IntegraciÓn plÁstica: The Postwar Synthesis of the Arts as Seen from Mexico in 1952 / Jennifer Josten 173
10. Ancient Modernisms: Illegibility, Women, and 1950s Weaving / Jenni Sorkin 195
Part IV: Decolonizing Constellations
11. Postwar Abstraction: Similarities, Differences, and Other Ophthalmologic Conundrums / Atreyee Gupta 215
12. Enemy of the People: Jewad Selim and the Baghdad Group for Modern Art / Nada Shabout 237
13. Decolonization and Calligraphic Abstraction / Iftikhar Dadi 253
14. Postwar Imaginings: NÉgritude Legacies and Thwarted Universalisms in Dakar and Paris / Elizabeth Harney 277
Bibliography 295
Contributors 321
Index
Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) was an internationally recognized and pathbreaking art curator, the former director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and the coauthor of numerous books and exhibition catalogs.
Atreyee Gupta is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Non-Aligned: Art, Decolonization, and the Third World Project in India.
