IN AND AROUND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

This course focuses on the history of modern art in the mid-twentieth century. To place mid-twentieth century modernism within its proper historical context, we will explore artistic practices elaborated between the 1920s and the 1960s in a wide range of different locations. We will also survey the major critical and historical accounts of modernism in the arts during these years. 

The course will first introduce the development of modernism, anti-modernism and avant-gardism in the period between the two World Wars, exploring the changing relationship between these cultural formations in Europe, the U.S.S.R., Mexico, and North America. The second part of the course will study the vicissitudes of modernism and avant-gardism in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s that led to the formation of Concrete art in Europe and Abstract Expressionism and the New York School in the United States. The third part of the course will examine the challenges to modernism and the reformulation of avant-gardism posed by the neo-avant-garde in North America, South America, Europe and Japan in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The course will address a wide range of historical and methodological questions and problems.  These include: the challenges to the idea of artistic autonomy, the evolving concept of avant-gardism, the ongoing problematic of abstraction, the formal principles of serialism and the grid, the logic of non-composition, the persistence of figuration, the changing role of cultural institutions, the impact of new technologies on cultural production, and the emergence of new audiences and patrons for art.