Globalizing East European Art Histories ― Past and Present

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of post-socialism understood as a global condition.

Beata Hock is a Research Associate at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe.

Anu Allas is an art historian and curator in the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.