Cubists and Neo-Cubists in Holland

The Stedelijk Museum joins forces with the Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History (OSK) for a lecture by professor Françoise Lucbert (Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada) on the little-known but historically significant exhibition La Section d’Or – Paris: International Exhibition of Cubists and Neo-Cubists.

In June 1920, still reeling from the trauma of the First World War, a modern art exhibition opened at the Rotterdam Art Society titled La Section d’Or – Paris: International Exhibition of Cubists and Neo-Cubists. Organized through an association founded in Paris by sculptor Alexander Archipenko and painters Albert Gleizes and Leopold Survage, it was the first of a series of group exhibitions that traveled, after Paris and Rotterdam, to The Hague, Arnhem, Amsterdam, Brussels, Geneva, and Rome. These exhibitions, though somewhat unknown today, included works from major practitioners of contemporary avant-garde trends in art, such as Parisian Cubism, Dutch De Stijl, Russian Neo-Primitivism, and Italian Futurism. Lucbert’s lecture will give an overview about the organization, content, and main issues of the Section d’or exhibitions throughout Holland and Europe during the early 1920s. According to the initial findings of Lucbert’s research, these exhibitions were important opportunities for artists to gather and share ideas within an exciting and cosmopolitan network.

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Françoise Lucbert is an associate professor in the Department of Historical Sciences at the Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada. She teaches and conducts research in the broad field of European Art from the period 1750-1960.  Thanks to her degrees in history of art and comparative literature, she has developed research interests focused on the intersection of art history, history of literature, cultural studies, history and sociology of art. Her two main areas of research are fin-de-siècle art and literature, as well as the history of Cubism. Her books and articles address issues such as art criticism, interconnections between literature and the other arts, history of exhibitions, as well as artistic relations between France and other European countries. She is the editor of a series of volumes dedicated to art criticism for the Presses universitaires de Rennes. Over the years, she has worked closely with museums, curating art exhibitions in France, Spain, and China. The topic of her current research is the traveling exhibitions of the Section d’or throughout Europe in the early 1920s.