The Museum of Modern Art’s First Annual Graduate Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Art
Saturday, April 9, 10:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

The Museum of Modern Art's first annual Graduate Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Art, entitled When Was Modern Art? A Contemporary Question, investigates past and current interpretations of modern art's beginnings in written histories, museum displays, and artworks. The speakers are six graduate students selected from an international pool of entries.

Hans Belting, Director of the International Research Center for Sciences of Culture (IFK) in Vienna, presents the keynote address, "Multiple Modernities: The MoMA and the Invention of Modernism" on Friday, April 8, 6:30 p.m.  

For the symposium, students were encouraged to submit proposals that examined, for example, why modern art's historical origin has been variously located in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Belle Époque; what visual and cultural forms modern art took, where, and why; and how the emergence of the category of "contemporary," as distinct from "modern," has altered our understanding of modern art's chronology. Papers could focus on, among other subjects, institutional histories of modern museums and academies, artworks that dominate narratives of modern art, international differences in defining the modern, and alternative and unfinished histories that yield new meanings of modernity and its art.

Friday, April 8, 6:30 p.m.

Keynote address, "Multiple Modernities: The MoMA and the Invention of Modernism," by Hans Belting, Director of the International Research Center for Sciences of Culture (IFK) in Vienna

Saturday, April 9, 10:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

Symposium, Titus 2

10:00 a.m.  Introduction by David Little, Director, Adult and Academic Programs, The Museum of Modern Art

10:15–10:45  Morna Elizabeth O'Neill, Yale University
"The Aesthete as Socialist: Walter Crane and the Modernity of British Art"

10:45–11:15  Hester Ruth Westley, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
"Saint Martin's, London, 1966: Expectorating Greenberg's Art and Culture"

11:15–11:45  Alexandra Moschovi, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
"Who's Afraid of Contemporary Art? The Metamorphosis of Tate Gallery in the Postmodern Period"

11:45 a.m.–12:15 p.m.  Discussion with moderator Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art

12:15–1:45  Lunch break

1:45–2:15  Itay Sapir, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
"The Quarrel of Art and Knowledge: Tenebristic Painting as the Genesis of Modern Art"

2:15–2:45  Thomas Frederick Folland, University of California, Los Angeles, CA
"Another Modernism: Rethinking the 1930s and Its Postmodern Critique"

2:45–3:15  Victoria H.F. Scott, Binghamton University, New York
"Exit Modernism, Paris 1968"

3:15–4:30  Discussion: Charles W. Haxthausen, Director, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art

Presenters were selected from a pool of international applicants by an advisory committee consisting of:

Charles W. Haxthausen, Director, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art

Yacouba Konate, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Abidjan-Cocody and Art Critic, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

From The Museum of Modern Art:

Amy Horschak, Educator, Department of Education

David Little, Director, Adult and Academic Programs, Department of Education

Peter Reed, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design

Anne Umland, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture

For more information about this program please call (212) 708-9727 or e-mail Amy_Horschak@moma.org.

The symposium topic and schedule of speakers from 2006's Graduate Symposium is also available online.

Pictured above:

"Torpedo" Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection, drawn in 1933 by Alfred H. Barr, Founding Director of The Museum of Modern Art.