Engineer, Agitator, Constructor The Artist Reinvented 1918-1938

Exhibition at the MoMA, New York, 5 October - 9 December 2020

"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. 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.

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- this exhibition catalogue demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.