Keynote

The use of collage to represent the modern city became commonplace in the early twentieth century but has been rarely analysed beyond stating the most obvious. Using examples produced mainly in China and Germany in the 1920s and 30s, and drawing on concepts from architectural theory, this lecture seeks to interrogate three phenomena. The first is the connection drawn between the creation of composite, collaged images and the experience of modernity. The second is the circulation of architectural imagery, and the third is the development of urbanism as a field of professional activity. Thought about together, these strands reveal the problems of interpreting the rise of modernism as a unidirectional phenomenon and generate alternative perspectives on critiques of capitalist development.

Michael White is Professor of History of Art at the University of York, where he serves as Head of the Department. His research has focused primarily on the interwar avant-gardes, particularly Dada and De Stijl. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Theo van Doesburg and has a special interest in De Stijl and modernism in the Netherlands. He was consultant curator of the 2010 Tate Modern exhibition ‘Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World’, advised the Kunstmuseum Den Haag on the display of its permanent Mondrian and De Stijl collections, and was the external curator of the exhibition ‘Mondrian and his Studios’ at Tate Liverpool in 2014 as featured on the BBC. Michael continues to have an active interest in the history of abstract art, developed through many years of research into the careers of the likes of Van Doesburg, Mondrian and Schwitters, and is currently a senior advisor on the Getty Connecting Art Histories project, Modernisms Future Pasts: Abstraction and Identity in 'East-Central' Europe, 1910-1930s. 

Michael is also the author of ‘Generation Dada: The Berlin Avant-Garde and the First World War’ (Yale University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of ‘Virgin Microbe: Essays on Dada’ (Northwestern University Press, 2013). The theme of artistic networks has played a major role in his study of the Berlin Dada group and his book on the subject is one of the first to consider its group dynamics, using a large amount of unpublished, archival material to cast new light on the careers of figures such as George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoech. His most recent research on the subject has examined the activation of the archival afterlife of Dada for the creation of new works.