Journal for Art, Theory and Related Zones No. 39
| Author: | kolektiv autorek a autorů |
| Year of publication: | 2026 |
| Publisher: | Academy of Fine Arts in Prague |
| Language: | Czech |
| Journal for Art, Theory and Related Zones No. 39 | 100 Kč |
The articles in issue 39 of the journal emerged from a series of seminars titled Linking (Art) Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the Present, held at various locations in East-Central Europe and the United States between 2022 and 2024. The authors seek to move beyond the still-prevailing approach to studying Cold War cultural diplomacy, which is characterized by binary thinking and an emphasis on differences rather than a search for shared features and convergences.
Stefana Djokić examines the first exhibition of modern Yugoslav art in the USA, held between 1959 and 1962. Through this exhibition, Tito’s regime sought to present Yugoslavia as a country that, unlike other socialist states, followed its own path, reflected in its abandonment of socialist realism and openness to modernism.
Magdalena Anna Nowak explores the reception of four exhibitions of American art held in Warsaw in the 1970s; she shows that Polish critics maintained a degree of independence from both US cultural policy and the domestic regime in their assessments.
Fedora Parkmann takes readers to Czechoslovakia between 1958 and 1968, using the book series Umělecká fotografie to demonstrate that approaches to photography under state socialism shared with the West an emphasis on the medium’s cultural recognition, documentary qualities, and humanism.
Ilka Rambausek’s article moves symbolically between both sides of the Berlin Wall, examining the role played by the reception of pop art in cultural exchange between East and West Germany.
In the final peer-reviewed study, Jan Elantkowski focuses on Boris Lurie, an American artist of Latvian-Jewish origin, and his provocative collages, in which he confronted American consumerism with the suppressed memory of the Holocaust.
The issue also includes two reviews. In the first, Beáta Hock reflects on the exhibition Modern Times. The American Dream and the Avant-Gardes of the 1920, held in Dresden in 2025; in the second, Zsuzsa László discusses the book Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe (Routledge 2024), edited by Caterina Preda and Magdalena Radomska.