The Limits of Liberation and the Central European Avant-Garde

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Liberation through art was especially pertinent in times of political threats to democracy. Visual artists and performers used their art to address the loss of freedom and raise awareness of injustice. But how successful were their endeavors? Focusing on a range of central European artists in the 20th century, this panel asks to what extent anti-fascist artistic practices can effectively disrupt undemocratic regimes. What role does gender play in such liberation? How global can central European liberation by art be?
Meghan Forbes considers the Liberated Theater in Prague as a space in which women’s work as avant-garde artists and activists had a visible platform in the 1920s and 30s. It follows the trajectories of the company’s dancers — Mira Holzbachová and Nina Jirsíková — into the period of the protectorate, when both faced serious consequences for their anti-fascist activities. Julia Secklehner addresses the activities of women photographers in anti-fascist resistance movements in 1930s Central Europe. Focusing on the work of figures such as Irena Blühová, Judit Kárász and Edith Tudor-Hart, she examines how Bauhaus-trained artists adapted their photographic practice in Central Europe in the service of left-wing politics, paying particular attention to the circulation of their work in illustrated magazines such as Der Kuckuck, DAV and Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. Rado Ištok traces the continuities of anti-fascism in response to world events, such as the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s to the coup d’etat in Chile in the 1970s, in the work of Czech artists like Antonín Pelc and Radomír Kolář.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Thomas W. Ort, CUNY Queens College

Papers

• Staging the Left: The Agitational Work of Women from the Liberated Theater - Meghan Leigh Forbes, Independent Scholar & Curator

• 'A School for Becoming Human?': Women Photographers in Anti-fascist Resistance Movements in 1930s Central Europe - Julia Secklehner, Constructor U (Germany)

• The Long Anti-Fascist Struggle in the Work of Czechoslovak Artists - Radoslav Istok, National Gallery Prague (Czech Republic)

Discussant

• Marta Filipova, Masaryk U (Czech Republic)