Special Issue: Next To Each Other: Exercises in Horizontal Art History
This special issue derives from the traveling seminar Linking Art Worlds: American Art and Eastern Europe from the Cold War to the Present, a series of five week-long seminars that took place across Prague, Budapest, Berlin, New York, and Giverny from 2022 to 2024.(The seminar series was funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Getty Foundation.) Organized by Beáta Hock, Tomáš Pospiszyl, and John J. Curley, the seminars united graduate students, junior scholars, and senior researchers, this seminar raised a series of questions about the connections—both tangible moments of influence and more speculative instances of affinity—between artistic practices in the United States and those on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain. The three essays of this special issue grew out of the spirited debates, collective deliberations, and productive disagreements that characterized these seminars.
Together, we asked: What would a more speculative art history of Eastern European art of the 20th century look like? What are the uses (and abuses) of comparison in modern and contemporary art history today?(With “uses and abuses of comparison” we are referring to Yve-Alain Bois’s essay “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-Alikes,” October 154 (2015): 127–49, which engages with the lure of pseudomorphism for art history. For recent discussions of comparison, as well as the trap of the pseudomorph, in art history beyond Eastern Europe, see, for instance, Caroline Walker Bynum’s “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; or, Why Compare?” in Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe, (Zone Books, 2020), 183–220; or Mostafa Heddaya, “Left, Right, Inside, Out: Art and Comparison.” Artforum 60, no. 5 (2022).) How do we shift from asking questions about mechanical influence, original invention, and belated copying, towards art histories attuned to asynchronicity, discontinuity, disjuncture, strange parallelisms, and hard-to-account-for similarities? Conceived as “exercises” that experiment with thematic and iconographic comparison across geopolitical contexts, the essays gathered here engage these questions by exploring a speculative approach to comparison, interrogating its relevance for alternative ways of writing art history.
The format of the exhibition, with its capacity to create symbolic constellations between artworks and narratives, served as one inspiration for the articles of this special issue. As Romanian art historian Cristian Nae argues, exhibitions have long functioned as instruments for shaping critical art history in East-Central Europe.(Cristian Nae, “What Is at Stake in Writing Art History Through Exhibition Histories in East-Central Europe?,” Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny (2023): 160, https://vvp.avu.cz/app/uploads/2025/02/sesit-35-2023-nae.pdf.) Research-based group exhibitions, often developed by multinational curatorial teams, have frequently employed comparison to recover unexplored histories and propose new transnational narratives. A case in point is the exhibition The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s.(The Other Trans-Atlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s–1970s, curated by Marta Dziewańska, Dieter Roelstraete, and Abigail Winograd at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in collaboration with the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and SESC São Paulo, November 17, 2017 – February 11, 2018.) The show questioned the dominance of North Atlantic art production in the postwar period by tracing a set of concurrent aesthetic practices and artistic exchanges that emerged in cities such as Warsaw, Budapest, Caracas, and Rio de Janeiro. On a more monographic level, a recent show at Fondazione Prada pairing Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince similarly foregrounded unexpected artistic convergences, framing the dialogue between the two artists, however, through the notion of an “elective affinity.”(Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, curated by Nancy Spector, Fondazione Prada, Venice, May 9 – November 23, 2026. For “elective affinities,” see their exhibition text at https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/helter-skelter-arthur-jafa-richard-prince/?lang=en.)
In art history, the methodological question of how to account for affinity beyond influence is hardly new. It belongs to a longer disciplinary conversation, one shaped by interventions such as Piotr Piotrowski’s call for a “horizontal art history,” first articulated at the International Congress of the History of Art in Melbourne in 2008.(Agata Jakubowska and Magdalena Radomska, eds. Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revising Peripheral Critical Practices (New York: Routledge, 2023), 4. See the book’s introduction for an excellent and thorough intellectual history of “horizontal art history.”) Piotrowski criticized a hierarchical model of Western art history that privileges art from major urban centers such as Berlin, Paris, London, and New York while relegating works from the peripheries to a perpetual state of belated- or derivativeness—including Eastern Europe, but also many regions in the Global South. While such a critique is valid and timely in the late 2000s (it was formulated partly in reaction to the textbook Art Since 1900), it provided little practical guidance for how to instantiate a horizontal art history in practice, beyond providing evocative metaphors of the horizontal as emancipatory and the vertical as oppressive.(Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005). For Piotrowski’s critique of the book’s organizational logic, see Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” Umění/Art 56, no. 5 (2008), 378.) As noted by Tomáš Pospiszyl in his review of a new volume dedicated to this concept for ARTMargins Online, in order to effect systemic change in the world of art history, a more constructive strategy is needed, one that moves beyond the critical analysis of the status quo. He writes: “The originality and appeal of Piotrowski’s proposal lie exactly in this broad scope and openness. It is not a practical tool; yet it is a metaphorical device that proved highly effective.”(Tomáš Pospiszyl, “Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revisiting Peripheral Critical Practices,” ARTMargins Online, published November 13, 2024, https://artmargins.com/horizontal-art-history-and-beyond-revisiting-peripheral-critical-practices/.) The task at hand, then, is to move beyond what Terry Smith aptly calls “allegories of orientation,” and instead consider what such allegories have to offer to an art history in practice.(Terry Smith, “Allegories of Orientation,” in Horizontal Art History and Beyond: Revising Peripheral Critical Practices, ed. Agata Jakubowska and Magdalena Radomska (New York: Routledge, 2023), 171–81.)
Piotrowski’s intervention has since been extended in different directions. One particularly constructive example is Pospiszyl’s book An Associative Art History: Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World (2018).(Tomáš Pospiszyl, An Associative Art History: Comparative Studies of Neo-Avant-Gardes in a Bipolar World (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2018).) The volume is a collection of what Pospiszyl refers to as “comparative critical studies,” composed in a historical moment when Eastern European art was being critically reread in the early 2000s.(Pospiszyl, An Associative Art History, 13.) As Sven Spieker notes in his introduction to the book, productive comparisons are ones that highlight “conditional similarities” and that tease out the “below-the-surface differences”—shedding light on precisely the distinct material and intellectual conditions in which each artist worked.(Sven Spieker, “Conditional Similarities: Parallax in Postwar Art from Eastern Europe,” in Pospiszyl, An Associative Art History, 5, 8.) Pospiszyl’s conditional comparative studies inform the “exercises” compiled in this special issue. Yet they also teach us that there is no single formula that can be repeated ad infinitum. Rather, as with the texts in this issue, each comparison—each condition—demands its own mode of juxtaposition.
The three essays assembled in this special issue turn to undiscovered territories, bring to light lesser-known artworks, and experiment with the associative method of art history. Magdalena Anna Nowak’s “Suspension in Time: Transatlantic Explorations of ‘Waiting,’” compares two paintings from postwar Poland and the United States. Through careful close reading, she considers two works titled Waiting Room, by the Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski and by the American artist George Tooker, which were created only three years apart on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. In her curatorially-informed analysis, Nowak investigates the themes of stagnant time and post-war existential dread, turning “waiting” into a metaphor to describe the temporal suspension shared by artists consigned to the margins of both socialist and capitalist modernities.
In “Lunar Landing,” Andi Soós blurs the lines between art history and curating, considering a series of artworks from the 1960s—from the United States, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Belgium—that explore Space Race imagery. Surveying the works of Ester Krumbachová, Olja Ivanjicki, Kiki Kogelnik, and Evelyne Axell, Soós’s text can be understood as an exhibition in written form, following the same forms (spaceships, rockets, and astronaut suits) moving through different political and aesthetic regimes: all point to an imaginary realm of female empowerment in the 1960s. These four artists developed feminist interpretations of Space Race aesthetic, drawing on a comparable symbolism of Outer Space—without, however, being cognizant of each other’s practices.
Finally, Karolina Majewska-Güde brings together two actions with living animals, and offers a speculative interpretation of Polish artist Zbigniew Warpechowski and Serbian artist Raša Todosijević’s performances that involved cradling, withholding from water, and re-immersing a fish. Majewska-Güde critically engages with notions of ethics, documentation, and care in Eastern European performance art, asking what it would look like to read these artworks diachronically (across time), considering them from the future. In her essay, horizontality is no longer a matter of a “spatial turn,” but a question of temporal orientation.
Taken together, these essays compare seemingly disparate artworks alongside one another to trace unexpected correspondences across time, geography, and political systems. They combine close visual analysis with comparative thinking to investigate the continued relevance of horizontal art history as a practical approach for understanding art produced in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Finally, this special issue also introduces new allegories of orientation, such as affective alliances, cross-temporal correspondences, and relational thinking, which seek to foster new art historical and critical analyses.
Articles published as part of the Special Issue:
Flora Brandl
Flora L. Brandl is a PhD candidate in the department of Art History at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation research focuses on contemporary art and economic reform in Ghana in the 1980s and 1990s.
