Universal International Global

Global Art History and World Art Studies set a worldwide focus in the study of art around the 2000s. The present volume explores related concepts and practices that originated in socialist Eastern Europe and worked towards a similar opening-up of a Eurocentric methodology.The book proposes a tentative link between socialist internationalism as a cultural diplomatic principle and certain new approaches to art historiography observed in the Soviet Bloc. Authors interrogate whether "universal art history" as practiced by socialist scholars had aspirations and achievements comparable to today's Global Art Studies. Or was this knowledge production in an internationalist paradigm a mere trope for communist rhetoric, in the shadow of which severed cultural relations to the Western world could be recommenced?