METROMOD explored innovative approaches and methods through a conceptual triangle of modernism, migration and the metropolis, which are understood as interrelated and mutually constitutive. Explorations in the six metropolises have shed light on exiled actors, objects, exhibitions and flight routes. Through this recuperative work, the project contributes to a new understanding of modern art and architecture as “on the move” and “dispersed”, revealed by the comparative approach. The results of our research went far beyond the state of the art.
Until today, infrastructures and institutions have played a subordinate role in art history. METROMOD contributed to a new infrastructural research perspective: The team examined galleries, publishing houses, photo agencies – all of them founded by emigrants, which shed new light on the interactions between local and émigré actors. One example is given by the New School for Social Research in New York, where numerous emigrants gave courses in photo theory, art history and art practice. For Bombay, hotels where exiled artists met were analysed. For Shanghai, street exhibitions of the 1930s were in view. Networks between artists were also in focus; the Union of Russian Painters in Istanbul is one of these networks of Russian-speaking émigrés. In Buenos Aires we were able to investigate the important network around the artists Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern. We researched the medias of migration, especially journals such as “MARG” in Bombay, “Sur” in Buenos Aires and books such as “A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939” by the London exile Lucia Moholy, which shaped the writing of photographic history. We were able to explore articles written by exiles such as architects Wilhelm Schütte and Gustav Oelsner, contributing to local debates in the Istanbul architecture magazine “Arkitekt”.
The METROMOD digital archive led to new research conclusion. Distances and proximities between exiled artists and artistic and émigré communities could be evaluated as well as cumulation of studios, agencies and galleries in specific neighbourhoods. Ambitious digital visualisations contributed to a better understanding of artistic placemaking in and beyond the metropolises. The project was able to prove that exile and global dispersion of numerous European artists in the first half of the 20th century led to the decentralisation of modern art and stimulated exchange processes.
