Editorial
A New Journal and the Meanings of ‘East Central’ Europe
Matthew Rampley
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
We are proud to launch Art East Central as a journal that will act as a forum for scholarly articles and discussion on the art, architecture and design of East Central Europe since 1800. It will be the only such journal in English, and its aim is to disseminate knowledge and stimulate debate about the art and culture of a large geographical region that, for many, remains terra incognita.
Article
Faces of Modernism after Trianon: Károly Kós, Lajos Kozma and Neo-Baroque Design in Interwar Hungary
Paul Stirton
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
In comparing the careers of Károly Kós and Lajos Kozma between c. 1907 and 1930, this article explores the impact of the First World War and its aftermath on the work of two leading Hungarian architect-designers. These circumstances not only affected their working practices and professional opportunities, but also reflected changes in taste, theory and the source materials of Hungarian domestic design.
Article
Karel Čapek’s Graphic Britain: A study of the Visual Intermodernism of Čapek’s Letters from England
Jeremy Howard
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
Best known as a science-fiction writer, Karel Čapek’s drawings from his 1924 tour of Great Britain are here analysed in terms of what is categorised as ‘intermodernism.’ As an integral part of the travelogue he published in English as Letters from England, they are seen as coordinates for navigating identity, detailing, through their construction and composition of lines, a subtle and perceptive understanding of difference and unity.
Article
Lost in Translation? The Idea of the Garden City and its Migration to the Czech Lands 1900-1938
Vendula Hnídková
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
The article is the first introduction to the garden city movement in the Czech lands. The dynamic transformations of its trajectory are highlighted by selected upheavals. It spans from its cautious beginnings in the first decade of the twentieth century to its climax in the 1920s, and a singular appropriation of the urban vision by the Czechoslovak government in the 1930s.
Article
Lajos Vajda (1908-1941) and the Russian Idea of Universalism
Lili Boros
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
This study focuses on the problem of interpreting Lajos Vajda’s Icon Self-Portrait Pointing Upward (1936) while attempting to rethink the artist’s relationship to the ideas of Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948). In one of his letters dedicated to Júlia Richter, his future wife, Vajda wrote that Berdyaev’s book entitled The New Middle Ages had greatly influenced his thinking.
Book review
Understanding Greek Art History
A Review of: Evgenios Matthiopoulos, ed. Art History in Greece: Selected Essays, Athens: Melissa, 2018.
Matthew Rampley
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
For many art history students of a certain generation, courses on art historical method were likely to have included a book titled Art History and Class Struggle. An extensive discussion of Marxist art history, it was part of the transformation of art history in the 1970s and early 1980s that saw the appearance of a number of pioneering works of social art history by scholars such as T. J. Clark, Horst Bredekamp and Albert Boime.
Book review
A World of its Own? Art History in Prague
A Review of: Jakub Bachtik, Richard Biegel and Roman Prahl, eds, Století Ústavu pro dějiny umění na Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Karlovy, Prague: Charles University, 2020.
Marta Filipová
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
When the Czech film Pupendo (2003), set in the 1980s, depicted an art historian as a dishevelled, middle-aged man, it captured a common stereotypical view of the profession held by the majority of society in Communist Czechoslovakia. Although homeless, the fictional art historian Alois Fábera in the film always wears a suit, a tie and obligatory glasses, showing his middle-class (possibly bourgeois) background.
Book review
Women and the Wiener Werkstätte
A Review of: Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Anne-Katrin Rossberg, and Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, eds, Women Artists of the Viennese Workshops, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2020.
Julia Secklehner
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
In Autumn 2020, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna (MAK) was due to open an exhibition that shed new light on women’s contributions to the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) design brand. Due to the current pandemic, the exhibition has had to be postponed to next year (21 April – 3 October 2021), but the accompanying bi-lingual catalogue was published to coincide with the original planned dates.
Book review
A Review of: Mária Árvai, Zsóka Leposa, Enikö Róka, Ulrich Winkler, eds, Lajos Barta, Überlebensstrategien, Budapest: Kiscelli Museum, 2019, and Márta Branczik and Zsóka Leposa, eds, Sonderwege, Karl-Heinz Adler und die ungarische Abstraktion, Budapest: Kiscelli Museum and Kassak Museum 2017
Christian Drobe
Art East Central N° 01 / 2021
Two exhibitions in 2017 and 2019 are exemplary of a larger series of projects at the Kiscelli Museum, which have, in recent years, been devoted to Hungarian art after 1945, its protagonists and issues of abstraction behind the Iron Curtain.1 Both of these catalogues document this and demonstrate the gaps that the restrictive Communist system had, so that it was still possible to create truly ‘progressive,’ i.e., non-figurative art.
ISSN 2695-1428 (online)
