DAVID CROWLEY - Late Style: The Modernist Avant-garde in Old Age

Late Style: The Modernist Avant-garde in Old Age
Reflecting on the themes of his current exhibition in the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in Poland on the life and art of Henryk Stażewski, David will consider the challenges of the biographical format on which so many exhibitions depend.
The talk will consider the way that long-lived avant-garde artists and architects, active in the 1920s, experienced the future that they had once imagined. Stefan Sebök and Marianne Brandt (both Bauhausler), Lajos Kassák (Hungary), Henryk Stażewski (Poland) and Konstantin Rozhdestvensky (USSR) feature. They were figures who remained in Eastern Europe and – with the exception of Sebök - survived Stalinism and Fascism to experience socialist modernity in the 1960s and 1970s. What was their place in the new worlds which formed after 1945? How did they use art and design to narrate their own histories, particularly concerning the trauma of authoritarian rule? And how might curators engage with these acts of what might be called autofiction?

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David Crowley teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. He is a historian and curator with an interest in Eastern Europe under communist rule. He has curated various exhibitions including Cold War Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008–9 (cocurated with Jane Pavitt); Sounding the Body Electric. Experimental Art and Music in Eastern Europe at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012 and Calvert 22, London, 2013 and Notes from the Underground. Music and Alternative Art in Eastern Europe, 1968-1994 at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017 and Akademie Der Künste in Berlin in 2018 (both co curated with Daniel Muzyczuk). His exhibition Henryk Stażewski: Late Style was mounted at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź in 2023.