Reimagining Modernism: Art History and Modernisms outside the Metropolis.
Prof. em. Partha Mitter
University of Sussex
Wednesday, 16 November 2022, 5.30 pm (GMT)
ONLINE Lecture, hosted by the Warburg Institute.
Free and open to all via Zoom; please book a place via the Warburg Institute website here.

Modernism is claimed to be an inclusive global concept today, as demonstrated by the endless merry-go-round of Biennales, Art Fairs and international auctions in which artists from Asia, Africa and Latin America are lionised. The heterogeneous character of contemporary global art practices has even given rise to anxiety about the end of art history as a grand Hegelian narrative. As the talk will argue, rather than being universal, these values are in fact the product of the western modernism and its special claims to universality. It will offer a critical reappraisal of art history that created the modernist canon and led to its domination of global modernism.
The Bilderfahrzeuge Lecture series 2022/23 – Border Regimes
From the reality of geopolitical boundaries to arguments over national styles and disciplinary limitations, border regimes are a pervasive part of academic work and our everyday world. But what kinds of associations can be made between divisions of scholarship, divisions of artistic production, and divisions of nation states? It is a commonplace to note that knowledge and art transcend boundaries and bring politics with them; but are some forms of knowledge and some forms of art more nationalistically constrained than others? Today, art historians are prone to celebrate Aby Warburg’s warning against the biases of disciplinary border guards (grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit), yet scholarly boundaries can also help establish academic rigor and Warburg’s ideal of breaking down boundaries could well be correlated with his distinctly German milieu and its holistic ideal of Bildung. This lecture series brings together art historians working on “border regimes” in every sense of the phrase, querying the positive, negative, and ambiguous dimensions to this ubiquitous concept. How does this issue apply to different historical and geographic periods of artistic production and how do those differences relate to art historiography both past and present?