Max Boersma

Research ︎

Teaching ︎

About ︎

Technical Implications: The Making of Interwar Abstraction

My current book manuscript presents a newly complex and global story of European abstract art by following the worldly entanglements of artistic making. Reapproaching familiar artists in unfamiliar ways, the project charts how interwar practitioners in Russia and Germany reimagined abstraction via intricate negotiations with other forms of making, implicating their works—at times consciously, at others unwittingly—within technical logics of Western modernity unfolding across transnational scales.

Its chapters trace the one-hundred-year loop connecting Aleksandr Rodchenko’s quasi-scientific painting practice to Brazil; uncover the negotiations of Hannah Höch’s little-known abstract collages with gender hierarchies, financial crisis, colonialism, and globalizing craft; and investigate Kurt Schwitters’s contradictory embrace of misprinted matter at the same time as he put abstraction to work for bureaucracy and world standardization. Crossing into the domains of science, craft, and industry, the book surfaces a very different picture of abstraction’s ambitions and consequences in the world, as well as an urgent and timely rethinking of the European interwar avant-garde.

Publications

Journal Articles:

“Global Patterns: Hannah Höch, Interwar Abstraction, and the Weimar Inflation Crisis,” Grey Room 91 (Spring 2023): 6–35. Link.

“Le patron dégenré: Hannah Höch, le cubisme et les collages-dessins,” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, no. 159 (Spring 2022): 40–52. Link.

“From Material to Infrastructure: Germaine Krull’s Métal,” October 173 (Summer 2020): 118–42. Link.

Recent and Upcoming Presentations

“Abstraction and Transculturation: Anwar Jalal Shemza, Paul Klee, Tunisia,” Rethinking Modernism in North Africa and the Arab World, Symposium at Tate Modern, November 20, 2024

“‘Ruthless Restriction’: The New Typography and the Transnational Politics of Script,” Research Forum for German Visual Culture Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh, June 19, 2024

“Tangibilities and Intangibilities of the Paper Pattern,” CAA 112th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 15, 2024

“Global Patterns: Hannah Höch, Interwar Abstraction, and the Weimar Hyperinflation Crisis,” European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, 8th Biannual Conference: Globalising the Avant-Garde, Lisbon, Sept. 1–3, 2022

“Total Eclipse: Aleksandr Rodchenko, Brazil, and the Imperialist Imagination of Nonobjective Painting,” Association for Art History Conference, April 3–8, 2022

“Hannah Höch’s Degendered Geometries,” Elles font l’abstraction. Une autre histoire de l’abstraction au XXe siècle, Symposium at Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, May 19–20, 2021

“‘To inhabit, uneasily, the intersection:’ Germaine Krull and the Photographic Book,” Association for Art History 2021 Conference, April 14–17, 2021

Fellowships and Grants

Arp Research Fellowship, Stiftung Arp, Berlin, 2024
Presidential Scholar Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 2022–23
GSAS Dean’s Fund for Graduate Program Initiatives, Harvard University, 2023
Krupp Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 2021–22
Graduate Research and Travel Grant, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2021
Fulbright Research Grant, Deutsch-Amerikanische Fulbright-Kommission, 2020–21
Graduate Research and Travel Grant, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2020–21
Porter Travel Award (10-month grant), Harvard University, 2019–20
Presidential Scholar, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 2016–18
Richard and Susan Smith Foundation Fellowship, Harvard University, 2017–18
Graduate Fellowship, Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, 2014–16

Awards and Honors

Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essay in the English Language, Harvard University, 2022–23
Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essay in the English Language, Harvard University, 2020–21
Fulkerson Leadership in the Arts Award, Williams College Museum of Art, 2016