Navigation

In 1942, the Museum of Modern Art acquired the just completed painting Hide-and-Seek (Cache-Cache) by Pavel Tchelitchew. The work became one of that institution’s most popular—and the measure of an aesthetic and philosophical commitment to figuration, even as abstraction took hold in the New York scene. As the United States entered World War II, art makers grappled with cultural and political landscapes in flux through a broad range of responses to intensifying global conflict. Turning to enigmatic narrative, symbolic and mythic landscapes, and local variants of surrealism, artists explored new forms of world-making in the face of war, across a range of media from painting to prints, photography, film, and performance. Drawing from modern physics and premodern epistemologies, artists across a geographical span turned away from the formal fragmentation associated with much modernist practice and toward an integration of human and natural worlds. Using 1942 as a pivot, along with the years leading up to and after World War II, this session seeks to expand our understanding of a time when figure, myth, and symbol acquired new force beyond the older languages of social realism and in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism. We welcome papers exploring transnational artistic networks connecting the U.S. to Mexico, South America, North Africa, and beyond.