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Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”-all designations adopted by the artists themselves-turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years-Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl- Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism.
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“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world Text by Jenny Anger, Barbora Bartunkova, Barry Bergdoll, Benjamin Buchloh, Jane Cavalier, Masha Chlenova, Jean-Louis Cohen, Olivia Crough, Lee Ann Daffner, Noam Elcott, Katie Farris, Devin Fore, Maria Gough, Ilya Kaminsky, William Kentridge, Christina Kiaer, Juliet Kinchin, Iva Knobloch, Juliet Koss, Megan Luke, Ellen Lupton, Erika Mosier, Chris McGlinchey, Laura Neufeld, Libby Otto, Kristin Romberg, Jeffrey Schnapp, Martino Stierli, Jenny Tobias, Robert Wiesenberger, Andrés Zervigón. THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented 1918–1938 Edited by Jodi Hauptman, Adrian Sudhalter. Preview our SPRING 2022 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.