Westkunst, 1981: A Historiography of Modernism Exhibited

A reexamination of the Westkunst exhibition archives.

In 1981, the Cologne trade-fair center hosted a large exhibition titled Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 (Western Art: Contemporary Art since 1939). Organized by art critic Laszlo Glozer and curator Kasper König, the Western-centric survey highlighted avant-garde art and politically charged themes of freedom and individual expression. By examining Westkunst’s historiographical stakes in light of the Iron Curtain division of Europe, the show is revealed as paradigmatic of the ways in which hegemonic concepts of Western art and the accompanying processes of othering were fashioned in the art world.

In this collective volume, Westkunst’s universalizing claims are scrutinized by focusing on the artistic tendencies exhibited; on exhibitionary discourses and practices of decontextualization, comparison, and appropriation; on the alleged realization of the values of progress, freedom, and autonomy; on the enacted conceptions of temporality and the architectural devices of narrativization; and on the exhibition’s blind spots and exclusions and the critical reactions it elicited. This analytic output makes fresh use of the archival materials, which are neither centralized nor systematized, with significant excerpts republished throughout the book.

Seen through the lens of exhibition history, this revisiting of Westkunst sheds light on a broader trend of cultural conservatism that was gaining strength in the 1980s, just before the end of the Cold War and the start of new forms of globalization.

Mathilde Arnoux is an art historian specializing in transcultural processes in Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is research director and head of French publications at the German Center for Art History in Paris. Maria Bremer is an art historian specializing in contemporary art and exhibition history. Since October 2024, she has been a visiting professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.