Modernism around the world
Evening talks series
4 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm11 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm18 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm25 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm4 March 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm11 March 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm
Wolfson British Academy Room | Burlington Gardens
£340
Friends of the RA book first
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism
Join us for this 6-week talks series as we explore how modernism has taken shape around the world.
In the early 20th century, a new global art movement emerged: modernism. This movement centred on experimentation, abstraction, and the experience of the individual in the face of both industrialisation and globalisation.
This series of evening talks will take a fresh look at the modernist movement. Modernism has long been considered a movement of the Western avant-garde, with centres in Paris and New York disseminating its ideas across the globe. However, art historians have shown that there were multiple modernisms, developing and converging in centres around the world.
As we present an exhibition of Brazilian modernism in our main galleries, join us for an expanded view of the modernism movement. You’ll learn about artists working in Latin America, South and East Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. You’ll uncover modernism as a response to Communism in China; the influence of Soviet power; the ways in which African art has shaped Western European modernism; and the impact of Indigenous identity in the work of modernist artists in Brazil.
Talks are given by academics, curators and art-world professionals, with the opportunity for questions and discussion.
Minimum age 18. If you have any access requirements that you’d like to discuss, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.
If the event is sold out, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.
£340
Friends of the RA book first
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism
About the speakers
Ben Street, Art historian
Modernism and modernisms
What is understood by the term "modernism"? This talk will explore this question in relation to traditional conceptions of the term, which will include fine art, design, architecture and other media made in Western locations, before expanding the idea to include under-explored modernisms in other geographical and social contexts.
Ben Street is an art historian and lecturer based in London. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone (Yale University Press, 2021) and the children’s book How to be an Art Rebel (Thames and Hudson, 2021). He has been a lecturer and educator for the National Gallery, Tate, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is currently an Associate Tutor and Researcher at the University of East Anglia, specialising in postwar American painting.
Adrian Locke, Royal Academy of Arts
Modernism in Brazilian art
Starting in the 1910s and continuing into the 1970s, Brazilian artists were adapting contemporary trends, international influences and artistic traditions to create a new type of modern art; art informed by the vibrant cultures, identities and landscapes of Brazil. This talk will explore the lives and works of some of the artists featured in our exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism.
After completing a PhD in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex in 2001 Adrian Locke joined the Exhibitions Department at the Royal Academy of Arts. Since then he has worked on a diverse portfolio of over twenty ground-breaking and award winning exhibitions that range from major surveys of contemporary artists, including Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei, and William Kentridge to cultural explorations such as Aztecs, Turks: A journey of a Thousand Years, 600-1600, Byzantium 330-1453, and Oceania, and smaller, focussed exhibitions such as Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940, Leon Spilliaert, and Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist. He has lectured and published widely.
Adrian has also worked collaboratively on exhibitions for other institutions including Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Philadelphia Museum of Art, V&A , London and the Brazilian Embassy in London.
Professor Craig Clunas, University of Oxford
Modernism in Chinese Art
The art world of China in the early twentieth century was the beneficiary of centuries of art practice, but also of centuries of theory, of writing about art. And it had been engaged to varying degrees with the art of western Europe for at least two hundred years. But a self-conscious 'modernism' after 1900 posed a new problem - was it possible to be both 'modern' and 'Chinese'? What would such an art look like? This lecture will explore the varied responses to the question, showing the wide range of artworks produced, and the reactions they provoked in audiences and critics.
Craig Clunas has written extensively on the art of China in the imperial and modern periods. He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford.
Dr. Katia Denysova, University of Basel
Art, Modernism and Ukraine
Ukrainian modernism developed against a complicated socio-political backdrop: the First World War, collapsing empires, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–21), and the eventual creation of the Soviet Union. Despite such turbulent circumstances, Ukrainian art of the period lived through a true flourishing of creative experimentation. The talk will explore Ukraine's art production in various media, examining how artists used local pictorial traditions to construct Ukraine’s modern cultural identity and the intercultural and transnational exchanges that informed their practice.
Katia Denysova is an art historian and curator, specialising in Ukraine's modern art. She was the co-curator of the travelling exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s and the co-editor of the accompanying catalogue (Thames & Hudson, 2022).
Further speakers TBA.
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