Propagating Abstraction. The Establishment of an Avant-garde, 1908-1915

Christina Bartosch

PhD project (third party funded by FWF and realized within the research project “Exhibitions of Modern European Painting 1905-1915”)

Around 1912, abstraction was introduced as the new and future mode of expression in the visual arts. The medium for promoting this statement was primarily the art exhibition, as it was for many other artistic movements established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g. Impressionism, Fauvism, Suprematism etc.).
My PhD-project focuses on the exhibiting strategies of seven abstract artists working between 1908 and 1915 in order to propagate this “new” mode of artistic expression: Balla, Boccioni, Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, Mondrian and Picabia. By means of quantitative analysis, I will examine who exhibited what, when and where in order to spot potential patterns that could suggest a strategic behavior in their exhibition participations.
My main research questions are: What did each artist exhibit when and where? What behaviours become apparent? What strategies do those choices reflect? How do they compare to their colleague’s?
The PhD-project is realised within the framework of the research project “Exhibitions of Modern European Painting 1905-1915”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund – FWF. The project will result in an open-access database, containing information from and about exhibitions that took place worldwide—but mainly in Europe—between 1905 and 1915 and that included modern art.

https://kunstgeschichte.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/mitarbeiterinnen/wissenschaftliche-mitarbeiterinnen/bartosch-christina/

https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/