CONTEMPORARY SEMINAR SERIES

“POSTWAR: ART BETWEEN THE ATLANTIC AND PACIFIC, 1945-65”

KATY SIEGEL Stony Brook University

MONDAYNOVEMBER 16

5-7pmDML 241

Image: Antonio Berni, The World Promised to Juanito Laguna, 1962.

Postwar is the title of an exhibition Siegel is co-curating with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes for the Haus der Kunst in Munich. She will speak about the problems raised by the research for this first draft of a global accounting of postwar art. Despite its ambitious breadth, the exhibition is not a survey, but rather argues for a three-tiered understanding of the postwar landscape: as a single world, unified by both technological threat and communication systems; as a territorial split along the lines of the Cold War; and as a more multiple, geo-political reorganization around liberation struggles and nation formation. A series of eight sections (such as “Form Matters,” “New Images of Man,” and “Cosmopolitan Modernisms”) describe the various ways in which artists describe and resist these new orders.

Co-sponsored by the USC Art History Department