Douglas Cooper in Prague and Moscow: Behind the Iron Curtain for ‘The Cubist Epoch’

In 1970-1971 the collector, curator and scholar Douglas Cooper staged the exhibition ‘The Cubist Epoch’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was the first major museum exhibition in the United States to present cubism as a broadly diverse movement of international significance, and to exhibit works by Czech cubist artists. As part of his preparations Cooper travelled to Prague and Moscow in the summer of 1969, where he researched Czech and Russian cubism and attempted to arrange loans for the exhibition. Arriving at a time of heightened political tensions between east and west, his achievements were uneven. His negotiations in Russia all but collapsed, but he was received positively in Prague. He secured major loans from the National Gallery in Prague and an unusually large presence for Czech artists in the exhibition, where both Czech and Russian art was framed by a heavily politicized publicity campaign that Cooper himself initiated.

Přednáší Nicholas Sawicki (Lehigh University, Pennsylvania), přednáška se uskuteční v místnosti č. 117 v 1. patře.