Foreign Modernism

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris was the cosmopolitan hub of Europe and home to a vast number of foreigners – including the writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians who were creating works now synonymous with modernism itself, such as Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, The Rite of Spring, and Ulysses. The situation at the end of the period, however, could not have been more different: even before the violence of the Second World War, the cosmopolitan avant-garde had largely abandoned Paris, driven out by nationalism, xenophobia, and intolerance.

Foreign Modernism investigates this tense and transitional moment for both modernism and European multiculturalism by looking at the role of foreigners in Paris’s artistic scene. Examining works of literature, sculpture, ballet and performing arts, music, and architecture, Ihor Junyk combines cultural history with contemporary work in transnationalism and diaspora studies. Junyk emphasizes how émigré artists used radical new forms of art to resist the culture of virulent nationalism taking root in France, and to articulate new forms of cosmopolitan identity.