Postwar Revisited

Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition, “Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965,” redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices that re-engage the links that connect art to life itself. Focusing on modernist artists, artist collectives, and architects canonical to dissonant regional traditions as well as traveling exhibitions and patronage systems, the contributors produce a new understanding of emergent postwar global art. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is an essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally.

Contributors. Iftikhar Dadi, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick D. Flores, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Atreyee Gupta, Elizabeth Harney, Jennifer Josten, Vivian Li, Tara McDowell, Alexandra Munroe, Nada Shabout, Terry Smith, Jenni Sorkin, Ming Tiampo