12 Jun 2024
A Hungarian in Paris: Charles Sirato, Dimensionisme and Beyond
Paris, France
The École des modernités
Recipient in 2022 of the prestigious Moholy-Nagy Award, Oliver A. I. Botar is Professor of Art History and Associate Director at the School of Art, University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. His Ph.D. (Toronto) was on Biomorphic Modernism and Biocentrism. The nexus of Biocentrism-Modernism, the Hungarian avant-garde, László Moholy-Nagy and the origins of new media art have been research focuses. He has lectured, published, and curated exhibitions in Canada, the US, Europe and Japan. He is author of Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered (2006), Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts (2014) as well as numerous articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogues. He is co-editor of Biocentrism and Modernism (with Isabel Wünsche, 2011), and telehor (with Klemens Gruber, 2013). Botar also works on Canadian art, publishing on Winnipeg Modernism, Lyonel LeMoine FitzGerald and Arthur Lismer, as well as the 2009 volume A Bauhausler in Canada: Andor Weininger in the ‘50s, and is currently working on a book on settler art in Winnipeg from 1913 to 1950. He has taught courses at the School of Art on “Canadian Art Since World War II,” “Prairie Modernism,” “Manitoba Modernism,” “Bauhaus-Canada” and “Art in Treaty One Territory.” He has curated a number of exhibitions on Canadian art, including, most recently, “Bauhaus (Canada) 101” at the School of Art Gallery (2020).
The Hungarian avant-garde poet Károly Tamkó Sirató, aka Charles Sirató, arrived in Paris in 1930, and by 1936 he had gathered the signatures of many of the most important artists living in Paris, both native French and expatriate, to sign his “Manifeste Dimensioniste.” The manifesto was remarkable for its ambition: nothing less that reconfiguring contemporary art to accord with the new conceptions of space, time and dimensions of Einstein and Minkowski. With signatories such as Duchamp, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Arp, Bryen, and the Delaunays, this should have marked the beginning of a new movement, a synthesis and further development of both Surrealism and Abstraction-Création. Instead, the effort fizzled, faded out as Sirató was taken ill, had to return to Hungary for medical treatment. Despite this apparent “stillborn” nature of the “mouvement”, “Dimensionism”, as it was known, did in fact manifest in the art of the Post-War avant-garde. In this talk, Oliver Botar addresses the origins of the Manifesto and point towards its afterlife, its apparent effect on Post-War artistic development.
12 June, at 6.30PM
At the Giacometti Lab and live on Youtube
Lecture in English by Oliver Botar
Image : Camille Bryen, Charles Sirato et Julien Moreau (hiver 1936)
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