Éva Forgács

This project aims to examine different incarnations of trends and movements in 20th century art history and cultural history that migrated from one country to another; from one culture to another, and underwent serious modifications in the process. Since scholarship uses, in most cases, the same terminology for the various incarnations of these tendencies, researching their differences and specific local significances promises interesting results. For example, Constructivism, Futurism, Cubism, occupied very different cultural space in the Central European cultures than in their respective countries of origin, because these concepts landed in very different historical, political and cultural contexts that cannot be neglected when interpreting them even if our terminology is not nuanced to indicate such alterations.
The project is aimed particularly at the examination of various chapters of modernism and the avant-gardes in 1920s Germany, Russia, and Central Europe. These three locations were interconnected in many ways - Germany occupied a special place in early Soviet political thinking, and many important Central European thinkers, artists, writers, and intellectuals became «Wahlberliner», that is residents of Berlin who chose to live there, during this period.
The inquiry of the project is anchored in the concrete examination of the impact of the Russian painter Kazimir S. Malevich on Western- and Central European artists. While his painterly work was embraced in the well-meant belief that they spell ideas that are similar to the Westerners’ views, the misinterpretations, mistranslations, and rejection of some of his written work indicates a deeper rift between Western and Eastern thinking; Central Europeans had their own interpretations of Malevich, and, interestingly, a Malevich revival in the last decades of the 20th century.
At the same time Malevich has experienced an unparalleled post-mortem career in the international art world, too. The reasons and circumstances of this revival is also part of my research.
Malevich’s work is particularly interesting for historical analysis because Malevich’s painted and written oeuvre put him at the crossroads of the conception of art as prophetic versus secular activity; the concept of the artist as a quasi-high-priest versus participant of the pragmatic political struggles of his time. Such contradicting philosophies often translated as strategies; they will be examined in this light.