Modernist language for the countryside : abstract photography and the interwar hungarian village movement'

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14210%2F25%3A00144638" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14210/25:00144638 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2025-annual-conference/" target="_blank" >https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2025-annual-conference/</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Modernist language for the countryside : abstract photography and the interwar hungarian village movement'

Original language description

1962 saw the publication of The Art of Lace-Making in Hungary, a book examining one of Hungary's most celebrated crafts, drawing on the extensive collections from Budapest's Museum of the Decorative Arts. Its illustrations adopted a remarkably experimental approach: by presenting white lace against a dark background in sharp and close focus, they highlighted texture and intricate details, detaching the craft from its rural origins and integrating it into a modernist aesthetic. Taken by Judit Kárász (1912-1977), the museum's in-house photographer, these illustrations built on a visual language that Kárász had begun to develop in the 1930s, after studying at the Dessau Bauhaus. Even though Kárász lived abroad until the late 1940s, she frequently returned to eastern Hungary to participate in the Hungarian village movement: Travelling to remote homesteads and villages alongside ethnographers, educators, and sociologists, Kárász documented the lives of individuals experiencing rural poverty. Yet, drawing inspiration from rural life and folk cultures, she also ventured into abstraction, culminating in a series of photographs that reframed rural environments in a new visual idiom. My contribution builds on this body of work to investigate how narratives of avant-garde photography transform when considering intersections of ethnographic practices and folk cultures with a modernist visual language. Concentrating on the work of women photographers working in rural East Central Europe, such as Kárász, I show that the intersections of folk cultures and modern technologies engendered a modernist photography profoundly engaged in avant-garde transnational exchanges while remaining rooted in specific local contexts.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

O - Miscellaneous

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60401 - Arts, Art history

Project

<a href="/en/project/GA24-10997S" target="_blank" >GA24-10997S: Beyond the Village. Folk Cultures as Agents of Modernity, 1918-1945</a><br>

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů