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An engaging collection of essays and imagery tracing the development of modernism in Hungarian Art and reflecting on socio-political currents.
List of contents
INTRODUCTION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENLIGHTENMENT VERSUS THE 'NATIONAL GENIUS'
Attempts at Constructing Modernism and National Identity through Visual Expression in Hungary
THE SAFE HAVEN OF A NEW CLASSICISM
György Lukács, Lajos Fülep, Leo Popper and the Quest for Aesthetics, 1904-1912
CONSTRUCTIVE FAITH IN DECONSTRUCTION
Dada in Hungarian Art
BETWEEN CULTURES
Hungarian Concepts of Constructivism as a Political Act
IN THE VACUUM OF EXILE
The Hungarian Activists in Vienna
EVERYONE IS TALENTED
László Moholy-Nagy's Synthesis of Reform Pedagogy and Utopian Modernism
A FORGOTTEN GROUP: THE GALLERY TO THE FOUR DIRECTIONS
Theory, politics and the practice of abstract art in Budapest 1945-1948
DOES DEMOCRACY GROW UNDER PRESSURE?
Strategies of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-garde from the Late-1960s through the 1970s
"TODAY IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY"
The "New Sensibility" or "New Subjectivism" in the Hungarian Post-Avant-garde of the 1980s
DECONSTRUCTING CONSTRUCTIVISM IN POST-COMMUNIST HUNGARY
László Rajk and the Na-Ne Gallery
AN EXISTENTIALIST PAINTER: ISTVÁN FARKAS
Redress of an Artist's Suppressed Legacy
MIKLÓS ERDÉLY, TIME TRAVELER
LONE RADICALS
The Brittle Lines of Béla Kondor and Lajos Vajda
LÁSZLÓ FEHÉR
The Enigma of Being There
A MALEVICH REVIVAL IN HUNGARY DURING AND AFTER THE COLD WAR
István Nádler, Margit Szilvitzky, and the Quest for the Transcendental
"ART HAS BECOME A CHARACTER ISSUE"
Péter Donáth, and the Price of Independence
ARTPOOL
A Radically Open Budapest Archive of Experimental Art
WORKS CITED
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
IMAGE LIST
INDEX
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
About the author
Dr. Éva Forgács, formerly professor of art history at the Hungarian Academy of Crafts and design, has been teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California since 1994. She has a Ph. D. in Art History from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A former curator at the Hungarian Museum of Decorative Arts and professor at the László Moholy-Nagy University in Budapest, she has published a number of essays and monographs on various chapters of Modernism in edited volumes, textbooks, and journals. She has also been active as a curator and art critic, and has published several books both in her native Hungary and in English.
Forgács was co-curator (with Nancy Perloff) of “Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lisssitzky” at the Getty Research Institute, in November 1998, and was consultant at LACMA's Central European Avant-Gardes exhibition in 2002. She serves as book review editor of Centropa, is Advisory Board member of EAM (European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies), member of the International Academic Committee of the Bauhaus Institute, China Academy of Art, and vice president of the Society of Historians of Russian and East European Art and Architecture.
