This latest volume of MoMA's Primary Documents reflects on the effects that communism's disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe--including the Soviet Union's fifteen republics--had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades.

This book presents and analyzes artistic interactions both within the Soviet bloc and with the West between 1945 and 1989. During the Cold War the exchange of artistic ideas and products united Europe’s avant-garde in a most remarkable way. Despite the Iron Curtain and national and political borders there existed a constant flow of artists, artworks, artistic ideas and practices. The geographic borders of these exchanges have yet to be clearly defined. How were networks, centers, peripheries (local, national and international), scales, and distances constructed? How did (neo)avant-garde tendencies relate with officially sanctioned socialist realism? The literature on the art of Eastern Europe provides a great deal of factual knowledge about a vast cultural space, but mostly through the prism of stereotypes and national preoccupations. By discussing artworks, studying the writings on art, observing artistic evolution and artists’ strategies, as well as the influence of political authorities, art dealers and art critics, the essays in Art beyond Borders compose a transnational history of arts in the Soviet satellite countries in the post war period.

In the Shadow of Yalta is a comprehensive study of the artistic culture of the region between the Iron Curtain and the USSR, taking in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. Piotr Piotrowski chronicles the relationship between art production and politics in this zone between the end of World War II and the fall of Communism, focusing in particular on the avant-garde.

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

The specific role of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the later nation of Austria within the formation of regional art histories in East Central Europe has received little attention in art historical research so far. Taking into account the era of the Dual Monarchy as well as the period after 1989, the contributions analyze and critically scrutinize the imperial legacies, transnational transfer processes and cultural hierarchies in art historiographies, artistic practices and institutional histories. Consisting of 17 texts, with new commissions and one reprint, case studies, monographic essays and interviews grouped thematically into two sections, the anthology proposes a pluriversal narrative on regional, cultural and political contexts.

A groundbreaking introduction to the contemporary art of central and Eastern Europe, this wide-ranging study explores painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and conceptual work. In this pathbreaking new history, Maja and Reuben Fowkes introduce outstanding artworks and major figures from across central and Eastern Europe to reveal the movements, theories, and styles that have shaped artistic practice since 1950. They emphasize the particularly rich and varied art scenes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, extending their gaze at intervals to East Germany, Romania, the Baltic states, and the rest of the Balkans. This generously illustrated overview explores the richness of this region’s artists’ singular contribution to recent art history. Tracing art-historical changes from 1950 to now, the authors examine the repercussions of political events on artistic life—notably the uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the collapse of the communist bloc. But their primary interest is in the experimental art of the neo-avant-garde that resisted official agendas and engaged with global currents such as performance art, video, multimedia, and net art. Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 is a comprehensive, transnational survey of the major movements of art from this region.

Comradeshipcollects 16 essays by the forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director and scholar Zdenka Badovinac (born 1958). Appointed director of Ljubljana's Museum of Modern Art in 1993 in the wake of Slovenian independence, Badovinac has become an influential voice in international conversations rethinking the geopolitics of art after the fall of communism. She is a ferocious critic of unequal negotiations between East and West and a leading historian of the avant-garde art that emerged in socialist and post-socialist countries at the end of the last century. One of the longest-serving and most prominent museum directors in the region, Badovinac has pioneered radical institutional forms to create a museum responsive to the complexities of the past, and commensurate with the demands of the present. Collecting writing from disparate and hard-to-find sources, as well as new work, this book offers a transformative perspective on a major thinker. It is a crucial handbook of alternative approaches to curating and institution-building in the 21st century. A dialogue between Badovinac and art historian J. Myers-Szupinska introduces her history and ideas. Comradeshipis the third book in the series Perspectives in Curatingby Independent Curators International. "Whip smart, politically astute, curatorially inventive: Zdenka Badovinac is nothing less than the most progressive and intellectually rigorous female museum director in Europe. This anthology includes key essays accompanying her series of brilliant exhibitions in Ljubljana, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the differences between former East and former West. For anyone seeking curatorial alternatives to the neoliberal museum model of relentless expansion and dumbed-down blockbusters, Badovinac is a galvanizing inspiration." -Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells