HAA 277y

From Posada to Isotype: International Progressive Political Print Culture, 1900-1945
Benjamin Buchloh
Wednesday 3-5:45pm
This seminar, open to Graduates and qualified undergraduates will trace the developments and exchanges between presumably regressive and anti-technological media such as the woodcut and the linocuts in the first half of the twentieth century, in its various geo-political contexts from Mexico and Germany to the Soviet Union and China. Key figures to be studied will be Käthe Kollwitz and some of the German Expressionists, José Posada, Leopoldo Mendez, Elizabeth Catlett and the Taller de Grafica Popular,  Frans Masereel, Gerd Arntz and Otto Neurath. The debates around and against photography and technological media will be one of the theoretical challenges of the seminar, and the internationalization and interactions through major critics and historians travelling to the Soviet Union and subsequently in exile in Mexico, such as Hannes Meyer , Paul Westheim and Anna Seghers will form its historical horizons.