Tarsila do Amaral, Landscape with Bridge (detail)

Short course

Modernism around the world

Evening talks series

4 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm11 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm18 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm25 February 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm4 March 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm11 March 2025 6.30 - 7.45pm

Wolfson British Academy Room | Burlington Gardens

courses and classes

£340

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Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism

Go to the exhibition

Join us for this 6-week talks series as we explore how modernism has taken shape around the world.

In the early 20th century, a new global art movement emerged: modernism. This movement centred on experimentation, abstraction, and the experience of the individual in the face of both industrialisation and globalisation.

This series of evening talks will take a fresh look at the modernist movement. Modernism has long been considered a movement of the Western avant-garde, with centres in Paris and New York disseminating its ideas across the globe. However, art historians have shown that there were multiple modernisms, developing and converging in centres around the world.

As we present an exhibition of Brazilian modernism in our main galleries, join us for an expanded view of the modernism movement. You’ll learn about artists working in Latin America, South and East Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. You’ll uncover modernism as a response to Communism in China; the influence of Soviet power; the ways in which African art has shaped Western European modernism; and the impact of Indigenous identity in the work of modernist artists in Brazil.

Talks are given by academics, curators and art-world professionals, with the opportunity for questions and discussion.

Minimum age 18. If you have any access requirements that you’d like to discuss, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.

If the event is sold out, please contact public.programmes@royalacademy.org.uk.

Terms and conditions

£340

Sold out

Friends of the RA book first

Join now

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism

Go to the exhibition

About the speakers

Ben Street, Art historian

Modernism and modernisms

What is understood by the term "modernism"? This talk will explore this question in relation to traditional conceptions of the term, which will include fine art, design, architecture and other media made in Western locations, before expanding the idea to include under-explored modernisms in other geographical and social contexts.

Ben Street is an art historian and lecturer based in London. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone (Yale University Press, 2021) and the children’s book How to be an Art Rebel (Thames and Hudson, 2021). He has been a lecturer and educator for the National Gallery, Tate, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is currently an Associate Tutor and Researcher at the University of East Anglia, specialising in postwar American painting.

Dr. Adjoa Osei, University of Cambridge

Modernism in Brazilian art

Starting in the 1910s and continuing into the 1970s, Brazilian artists were adapting contemporary trends, international influences and artistic traditions to create a new type of modern art; art informed by the vibrant cultures, identities and landscapes of Brazil. This talk will explore the lives and works of some of the artists featured in our exhibition Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism.

Dr. Adjoa Osei is a cultural historian. Her research explores themes that are at the intersection of Performing Arts, Brazilian Studies, and Francophone Studies. Adjoa is a BBC New Generation Thinker, with a growing portfolio of media work. Prior to her career as a public intellectual, Adjoa worked internationally as a showgirl. Adjoa's new book Elsie Houston: Revolutionary Soprano uncovers the story of the extraordinary Elsie Houston - a Brazilian, mixed-race, classically trained soprano who performed from Europe to the Americas.

Professor Craig Clunas, University of Oxford

Modernism in Chinese Art

The art world of China in the early twentieth century was the beneficiary of centuries of art practice, but also of centuries of theory, of writing about art. And it had been engaged to varying degrees with the art of western Europe for at least two hundred years. But a self-conscious 'modernism' after 1900 posed a new problem - was it possible to be both 'modern' and 'Chinese'? What would such an art look like? This lecture will explore the varied responses to the question, showing the wide range of artworks produced, and the reactions they provoked in audiences and critics.

Craig Clunas has written extensively on the art of China in the imperial and modern periods. He is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford.

Dr. Katia Denysova, University of Basel

Art, Modernism and Ukraine

Ukrainian modernism developed against a complicated socio-political backdrop: the First World War, collapsing empires, the revolutions of 1917 with the ensuing Ukrainian War of Independence (1917–21), and the eventual creation of the Soviet Union. Despite such turbulent circumstances, Ukrainian art of the period lived through a true flourishing of creative experimentation. The talk will explore Ukraine's art production in various media, examining how artists used local pictorial traditions to construct Ukraine’s modern cultural identity and the intercultural and transnational exchanges that informed their practice.

Katia Denysova is an art historian and curator, specialising in Ukraine's modern art. She was the co-curator of the travelling exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s and the co-editor of the accompanying catalogue (Thames & Hudson, 2022).

Dr. Bea Gassmann de Sousa, University College London

Tradition and Modernity in Nigeria

Africanicity will be at the heart of this introduction to pre-Independence artistic modernity in Nigeria. Bouncing off Tarsilo do Amaral’s Brazilianity we will explore African self-determination in the work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-1994). We take a look at Paris, Lagos and Dakar through the lens of African-centred intellectual thought and expose the cultural differences and mutual allure of a diverse African diaspora and their left leaning anti-racist Surrealist allies. Debunking myths of Négritude as a movement we will introduce some of the multitude of neo-African artistic innovations.

Dr. Bea Gassmann de Sousa is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCL School of European Languages, Society and Culture in London. Her specialism is historical African-centred culture and intellectual thought in pre-Independence Nigeria. She co-programmed the conference Re-configuring Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern in 2017 and is currently the collaborative researcher for Tate Modern’s forthcoming exhibition Nigerian Modernism in Autumn 2025. Central to her research and her book manuscript is the pivotal role of continental African archives and scholarship for global modernity.

Dr Emilia Terracciano, University of Manchester

Made in India: Art and Modernism

From the outset, modernism in India drew its impulses and ideas from transcultural exchanges and encounters. But the question that kept haunting artists was: how to be modern and yet rooted in the more local ‘living traditions’ of India? In this lecture, we begin by looking at a painting, created by artist Benode Behari Mukherjee in 1940 at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan University. The scroll, conserved at the V&A, depicts a jungle scene on a banana pith scroll and offers a convenient entry point into questions of materials, processes, and methods used by artists after 1947, the year India became independent from British rule. We focus on specific creations that evolved from a self-consciously modernist ethos, one rooted in the open-air school model of Santiniketan.

Dr Emilia Terracciano is a lecturer in Modern Art History in the Art History and Cultural Practices department at the University of Manchester. She specialises in the histories of global modernism focusing on the art ecosystems of modern and contemporary South Asia and its diaspora. She is the author of Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India (IB Tauris, 2018).