Art against totality: Czechoslovakian art between 1945 – 1989 and its struggle against the oppression

Syllabus

1) General Introduction

2) „Entartete Kunst“: The Avant–garde in the interwar period and why it (always) bothered the leaders

3) The Group 42: Intimacy against the public hollowness

4) Field trip I.: National Gallery in Prague

5) Post–War Expressionisms: Expression of what?

6) Informel or Art Brut? The gentle aggressions and why nobody knows Boudník or Diviš

7) Central and Eastern Europe Constructivism: Last call for Utopia

8) Field trip II.: Museum Kampa

10) The Action Art: Art on the brink of death

11) The Happenings: Art and Political Carnival on the communist street

12) Art & Women in Central Europe

13) Field Trip III.: Prague City Gallery

14) Summary and Final discussion

Annotation

The course will present 15 diverse yet interconnected lectures on Czechoslovakian, both dissident and official art (focusing nevertheless on the unofficial art scene and prohibited or even persecuted artists), showing how art & artists tried to deal with the communist totalitarian oppression and to what extent were these attempts successful. In other words: if public space was virtually non-existent, at least in terms of freedom, what „other“ space did art help to produce, what kind of „public intimacy“ did it establish and what kind of „existential compromise“ was it forced to choose? The Czechoslovakian art scene naturally did not live in a vacuum, despite the fact that it suffered and flourished being the Iron Curtain.

The course will thus present the artworks in an international context and confront them with a period philosophy and literature.