Join us for our upcoming talk, Helen Frankenthaler’s Small Paintings: A Case Study of American Abstract Expressionism in Southeast Asia, conducted by Kathleen Ditzig, curator at National Gallery Singapore.
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From 1978 to 1979, the exhibition Helen Frankenthaler: A Selection of Small-Scale Paintings 1949-1977 travelled through Asia Pacific. In Southeast Asia, it was presented first at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in October 1978 and the month after at the National Museum of Singapore’s Art Gallery. Travelling through well-established art networks of cultural exchange that had been developed in the 1950s, the exhibition was mobilized by the United States Information Service (USIS) and its institutional partners as being illustrative of American Abstract Expressionism, a national representation of the USA and an expression of the freedoms that American democracy offered.
Helen Frankenthaler: A Selection of Small-Scale Paintings 1949-1977 was one of the few US exhibitions in the region that represented American art through Abstract Expressionism. Previous exhibitions facilitated by the USIS that had travelled to Singapore and Manila included 20th Century Highlights of American Painting and the MoMA’s Recent American Prints in Color and Visionary Architecture, which were presented in Manila and Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s and advanced visions of American modernism not wholly articulated through Abstract Expressionism.
How then did American Abstract Expressionism ‘travel’ to Southeast Asia? How did it relate to the broader pluralistic development of abstract art in the region that mediated different Western and Eastern genealogies of abstract image making and intellectual histories? To address such questions, this lecture takes Helen Frankenthaler: A Selection of Small-Scale Paintings 1949-1977 as a lens to provide an exhibitionary history of the presentation in relation to a broader history of the US Cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.