Summary
Piotr Piotrowski: Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta
Piotr Piotrowski's book Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta - The Art of Central Eastern Europe in the Period 1945-1989 is a complex study of art production in the area between the "Iron Curtain" and the borders of the former USSR, which shows the events on the art scene of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, the author places special emphasis on the relationship between artistic production and political events, focusing in the first part of the book on poetic choices that, due to their resistance to the dominant ideological code of social-realism, i.e. experimental character and engaged relationship to social reality, today we mark with the term avant-garde. Analyzing and explaining the post-war manifestations of surrealism in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, neo-constructivism in Croatia (EXAT 51) and Hungary, Piotrowski examines the evolution of modernism in the Central European cultural space, and the nature and ways and methods of its deviation from the Stalinist projection of socially (ideologically) functional art.
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