Speculative Trading and Bubbles: Evidence from the Art Market

We argue that extrapolative expectations drive boom–bust cycles in the postwar art market. Price run-ups coincide with increases in demand fundamentals but are followed by predictable busts. Predictable changes account for about half of the variance of five-year price changes. High prices coincide with many attributes of speculative bubbles: trading volume, the share of short-term trades, the share of postwar art, and volatility are all higher during booms. In addition, short-term transactions underperform long-term transactions. Survey evidence further confirms the link between beliefs, prices, and volume dynamics as in models in which extrapolative beliefs fuel speculative bubbles. This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance.

Feeling the Nation through Exploring the City: Urban Pedagogy and Children’s Lived Experiences in Postwar Helsinki

In the post-1945 world, Finnish schools were appointed the new task of fostering democratic values and educating peace-loving citizens. By exploring postwar art and environmental education in Helsinki, understood as means to expand children’s emotional competences, Malinen and Vahtikari provide a unique analysis of the ways educators, children and urban space co-produced the nation in everyday (school) practices. Malinen and Vahtikari show the importance of fully acknowledging the spatial, material and sensory aspects of emotions when discussing children’s emotional formation and historical manifestations of everyday nationalism. To illustrate the adult-children co-creation of different ideas, practices and emotions with respect to the national community, the chapter uses two sets of contemporary sources: educators’ writings and children’s drawings.

Claiming National Heritage: State Appropriation of Nazi Art Plunder in Postwar Western Europe

In the wake of the Second World War, cultural officers from the western Allied powers recovered several million objects plundered by the Nazis – works of art, Judaica, fine furniture, collectible books and archive collections. Recent books and films have popularized the history of the heroic art recovery effort, but less well-known is the story of what happened to objects that were never returned to rightful owners. In France, Belgium and the Netherlands, postwar governments selected the best of the unclaimed objects and distributed them to public museums, ministries, embassies and other state buildings. This public use of recovered art quietly endured until the 1990s, when heightened awareness of Holocaust-era assets led to greater public and press scrutiny and an increase in restitution claims. This article examines the origins of postwar art custodianships in a comparative analysis of French, Belgian and Dutch restitution policies. The comparison reveals national differences in the scope of looting operations and postwar restitution policies, yet the broad contours of each government’s approach to ownerless art are remarkably similar. In all three cases the custodianships continued the long-term dispossession of Jewish owners wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators.

On Curating Postwar

On March 8, 2017, curator and art historian Katy Siegel delivered a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, about the exhibition Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 she curated with Okwui Enwezor and Ulrich Wilmes at Haus der Kunst, Munich from October 2016 to March 2017. Postwar, and its accompanying publications, explored how artists responded to the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, a radically transforming world in the aftermath of World War II, and—amidst Cold War divides—decolonization movements, the struggle for civil rights, and the invention of new communication technologies. Ambitious in scope, generous in outlook, and remarkable in its capacity for critical and self-reflexive dialogue, Postwar exemplified many of the qualities that made Enwezor the most significant curatorial voice of the last quarter century. As the final event in the Art, Institutions, and Inter nationalism conference on which this special issue is based, Siegel's lecture capped off two days of intensive discussions on how political internationalism and its attendant institutions impacted the development of art around the world in the mid-twentieth century. During a conversation with art historian Romy Golan following her lecture, Siegel outlined the curatorial decisions that went into Postwar and discussed how exhibitions can confront entrenched ideas of quality and belatedness inherited from Eurocentric readings of modernism. Find the complete conversation between Siegel and Golan at artmargins.com .

Re-Worlding Postwar

The exhibition, Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (2016-17), presented nearly 350 works by 218 artists from sixty-five countries, providing an ambitious and expansive account of mid-century modernism. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, Katy Siegel, and Ulrich Wilmes at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Postwar proposed a vision of artistic production in the post-World War II period that foregrounded experiences of war, decolonization, transnational movement, and changing technology. This review situates the show within a history of global exhibitions, articulating the stakes of the project for curatorial practice and pedagogy. It also evaluates its organization and display in the institution’s gallery spaces, reckoning with the limits of the exhibition format and the mode of decentering enacted through a simultaneous presentation of works created by artists in widely varying contexts.

Sculpture in Space: Flotation and Levitation in Postwar Art

The idea of sculpture with no visible contact with the earth, hovering in space without the usual vertical and horizontal orientation, arose in contemporary art practice during the postwar decades, amid the Cold War race for space. In Milan, Paris, Düsseldorf and New York, an array of floating art projects were attempted both inside—and outside—the art gallery. These artistic experiments offered a counterpoint to the first satellites and manned spacecraft, using simple technologies including magnets and balloons to address complex aesthetic issues raised by the outer-space environment and, in particular, the zero-gravity field. By the late 1960s, free-floating “aerial” and “pneumatic” art had become an international trend, reflecting a new conception of art’s meaning during a time of cultural and technological change.

Zen Influence, Inherence, and Denial

Centering on the work and reception of the composer John Cage, famous for his “indeteminant” works, Yoshihara Jirō and his “Circle works,” and the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, this chapter examines the twining postwar rhetorical patterns of Zen influence, Zen inherence, and Zen denial as they inform interpretation of works of postwar art produced by artists in the West and Japan. Contrary to certain practitioner narratives, at times beguiled by hagiography and inclined towards grand narratives, the chapter suggests a grittier sensibility that reflects the rhetorical tussles that emerged contemporaneously and have since continued. Doing so, it points again to the multifarious nature of Zen in the postwar period, including those forms espoused by the avant-garde and its advocates, as well as the parallax effect of affirmative orientalist reception in the West of Japanese artists—praised when their work looked Zen, otherwise dismissed as derivative of New York School artists.