20 novembre 2009. Séminaire « L’abstraction avec ou sans raisons », Jody Patterson

L’abstraction dans l’espace public
‘Tomorrow, Inc.’: Modernism, Murals, and the Construction of a ‘Usable Future’ at the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair
Jody Patterson,  Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art, Ecole normale supérieure de Paris / Université de Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense / Université François Rabelais, Tours, 2009-2011

Ecole du Louvre, 10h-13h

The purpose of this presentation is to explore the ways in which modernism was positioned at the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair. It will focus on the modernist murals executed on this occasion, and also on how modernism was being positioned more generally — not only on the part of the planners for the New York World’s Fair, but by New Deal administrators, artists and critics on the left, and, finally, by influential institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, whose Art in Our Time exhibition was mounted to accompany the Fair. As I hope to demonstrate, if during the 1930s the possibility existed for a federally-funded art that was technically sophisticated, accessible to a broad public, and compatible with a leftist political perspective, by the end of the decade both the New York World’s Fair and the Museum of Modern Art suggested that the role of both art and the artist had been radically reconfigured.