Steven Mansbach

Advancing a Different Modernism analyzes a long-ignored but formative aspect of modern architecture and art. By examining selective buildings by the Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner (1850-1923) and by the Slovenian designer Jože Plecnik (1872-1957), the book reveals the fundamental political and ideological conservatism that helped shape modernism’s history and purpose. This study thus revises the dominant view of modernism as a union of progressive forms and progressive politics. Instead, this innovative volume promotes a nuanced and critical consideration of how architecture was creatively employed to advance radically new forms and methods, while simultaneously consolidating an essentially conservative nationalist self-image.

Steven Mansbach stresses in the tradition of his own discipline the overwhelming importance of urban centers in his predominantly rural "Eastern Europe". It is cities which shape artistic regions, and this the more so in a part of Europe where there are fewer cities than in other parts. This is one of the reasons why Mansbach in his 2013 Oskar Halecki Lecture analyzes (and visualizes) the "capital modernism" of the only "Baltic metropolis" - Latvia's capital Riga.In looking at Riga's central role not only for Latvia but for all three Baltic countries and the wider Baltic Sea Region, Mansbach aptly applies Klaus Zernack's post-Haleckian meso-regional concept of "Nordosteuropa" which constructs a 'Mediterranean of the North' reaching from the Neva to the Kattegat - a region of enhanced economic, military, cultural, political, and ethnic cooperation and conflict from the Nordic Wars of the early modern period to the interwar years of the 20th century. As Mansbach demonstrates with the example of the city on the Daugava's modernism, after Hanseatic commercialism, Russian imperialism and Latvian nationalism also Soviet communism left its visible impact resulting in "a novel eclecticism" by "a quixotic intermingling of Riga's inventive modernism and constraining Soviet politics." Northeastern Europe lives on, and the Soviet legacy, unwelcome as it may be today, is a constituent part of it - as can be seen in Riga.

In this visually stunning companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition, art historian S. A. Mansbach offers an overview of the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers who, in the first four decades of the 20th century, redefined and reshaped culture and its social meanings as they sought to comprehend and interpret the dynamics of a modern, postwar age. Illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications, it includes works on paper by such artists as El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others, all drawn from the Library's extensive holdings of eastern and southeastern European materials. The volume also includes an essay on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, as well as a checklist of the exhibition.

Catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition by Tamás Konok. Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

Analyzing an enormous range of works, from art centers such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, (many published here for the first time), Modern Art in Eastern Europe shows that any understanding of Modernism is essentially incomplete without the full consideration of vital Eastern European creative output. He argues that Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism, along with other great modernist styles, were merged with deeply rooted, Eastern European visual traditions. The art that emerged was vital modernist art that expressed the most pressing concerns of the day, political as well as aesthetic. Mansbach examines the critical reaction of the contemporary artistic culture and political state. A major groundbreaking interpretation of Modernism, Modern Art in Eastern Europe completes any full assessment of twentieth-century art, as well as its history.