The Making of post-War Modernism between Eurocentrism and Decolonization

Amid Cold War tensions, artists in Europe and the United States turned to abstraction, material experimentation, and mass culture to navigate a divided world, revealing unexpected convergences beneath ideological contrasts.

Institutions, Associations and Disconnections: South Asian Artworlds after 1947

In the decades after independence, South Asian artists forged new visual languages, balancing modernist experimentation with a reworking of inherited traditions. From the Bombay Progressives to the Madras Art Movement, this lesson explores how artists transformed independence into an aesthetic and political horizon, redefining what it meant to be modern in a newly decolonized world.

Spirituality, Secularism, and Modernist Visions in West Asian Art in the Early Independence Period

n the decades when nations were being remade, so too were the meanings of art. Between spiritual inheritance and secular modernity, West Asian artists forged new vocabularies of form and thought. From the Baghdad Group to the phenomenon of horoufiya, this lesson traces how calligraphy, abstraction, and political vision converged in a decolonial search for belonging and self-definition.

Latin American Avant-Gardes: Interwar Hemispheric Networks and Transatlantic Dialogues

In the wake of independence and revolution, Latin American art became a crucible for rethinking modernity itself. From the monumental voices of muralism to the symbolic power of Indigenism and the utopian geometries of kinetic art, this lesson follows how artists across the continent transformed modernism into a project of identity, solidarity, and liberation – at once regional and transnational, rooted and visionary.

Post-1945 Transformations in East Asian Art

From the ideological charge of Socialist Realism to the meditative abstraction of Dansaekhwa, postwar East Asian art unfolds as a constellation of reinvention. Through movements such as Gutai, Mono-ha, and the Xingxing Group, artists challenged both political orthodoxies and aesthetic boundaries, forging practices that turned the postwar condition itself into a site of philosophical and material exploration.