Tomas Pospiszyl: An Associative Art History Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World

An Associative Art History searches for the place of Czech, Slovak and Eastern European postwar art in global history. Resisting the mere repetition of Western canonization, the publication aims not to fruitlessly compare East and West, but rather to decipher the circumstances under which artworks are created, theorized and compared to each other. How do Knizak, Kolar, Koller and Kovanda relate to Situationism, Minimalism and Fluxus? What does Jindrich Chalupecky have to do with Clement Greenberg?

Czech art historian and curator Tomas Pospiszyl recounts a history of contemporary Eastern European art by highlighting emblematic stories of the art scene’s protagonists, mixing personal anecdotes with artistic agendas. This collection of nine essays, on topics spanning from 1939 to 2013, proposes a new reading of the visual arts during the Iron Curtain era and after.