Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacob Wamberg (eds.): Totalitarian Art and Modernity (2010)

“In spite of the steadily expanding concept of art in the Western world, art made in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes – notably Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the communist East Bloc countries – is still to a surprising degree excluded from mainstream art history and the exhibits of art museums. In contrast to earlier art made to promote princely or ecclesiastical power, this kind of visual culture seems to somehow not fulfill the category of ‘true’ art, instead being marginalised as propaganda for politically suspect regimes.

Totalitarian Art and Modernity wants to modify this displacement, comparing totalitarian art with modernist and avant-garde movements; confronting their cultural and political embeddings; and writing forth their common generalogies. Its eleven articles include topics as varied as: the concept of totalitarianism and totalitarian art, totalitarian exhibitions, monuments and architecture, forerunners of totalitarian art in romanticism and heroic realism, and diverse receptions of totalitarian art in democratic cultures.”

With contributions by Mikkel Bolt, Sandra Esslinger, Jørn Guldberg, Paul Jaskot, Jacob Wamberg, Christina Kiaer, Anders V. Munch, Kristine Nielsen, Olaf Peters, K. Andrea Rusnock, and Marla Stone.

Publisher Aarhus University Press, Århus, 2010
Acta Jutlandica series, 9
ISBN 8779345603, 9788779345607
359 pages
via Mikkel Bolt

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (10 MB)

XSCREEN. Materialien über den Underground-Film (1971) [German]

Publication documenting four years of the alternative projections space XSCREEN founded by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein and others in Cologne in 1968.

Reprinted on the occasion of Wilhelm Hein’s You Killed the Underground Film and Bettina Koester’s The Sisters, Amsterdam, March 2012.

Edited by W & B Hein, Christian Michelis, and Rolf Wiest
Publisher Phaidon, Cologne, 1971
Reprinted in Amsterdam, 2012
ISBN 3876350387, 9783876350387
128 pages
HT FCR, via Sly Pro Potter

WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)

See also a short documentary of Wilhelm Hein’s underground film screening at Sly Prop Otter X, Amsterdam

Erste russische Kunstausstellung, Berlin (1922) [German]

The First Russian Art Exhibition [Erste russische Kunstausstellung] opened at the Van Diemen Gallery on Unter den Linden 21, near the Russian embassy in Berlin, on 15 October 1922. More than 700 works by 167 artists where shown, including paintings, graphic works, sculptures, as well as designs for theater, architectural models, and porcelain. The exhibition’s official host was the Russian Ministry for Information, and it was put together by the artists Naum Gabo, David Shterenberg, and Nathan Altman. El Lissitzky designed the catalogue’s cover. Gabo was in charge of the three rooms where Russian avant-garde art was presented, including several of his own sculptures. Due to the positive response in the press and the large number of visitors (ca. 15,000), the exhibition was prolonged until the end of the year. On the initiative of the International Workers’ Assistance, the show was conceived as a commercial exhibition; the proceeds were to go to “Russia’s starving”. In the Spring of 1923, a version of the exhibition traveled to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Publisher Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, Berlin, 1922
31+[46] pages
via Bibliotheque Kandinsky

Commentary: Branko Ve Poljanski (Zenit 1923, trans. 2002), Eckhard Neumann (Art Journal 1967).

PDF (27 MB)

More about the exhibition