Eastern Europe

Art from Central and Eastern Europe, from Gothic altarpieces and icons to Art Nouveau, the interwar avant-garde and conceptual art.

No works indexed yet · 10 related artists

No open-access works for Eastern Europe are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.

About

The region stands where Latin and Orthodox Christianity meet. Painted icons and wooden churches spread through the East, while Gothic workshops flourished in Prague and Kraków, where Veit Stoss carved the huge limewood altarpiece of St. Mary's Church between 1477 and 1489.

Around 1900, national movements found expression in Art Nouveau: Alphonse Mucha's posters made him famous in Paris before he returned to paint the Slav Epic. Many modern pioneers were born here and worked abroad, including Constantin Brâncuși, whose polished Bird in Space sculptures began in 1923, Marc Chagall from Vitebsk, Alexander Archipenko from Kyiv and László Moholy-Nagy from Hungary. Others built the avant-garde at home, like the Polish Constructivists Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro. Under Communist rule, artists found coded or unofficial outlets: Július Koller in Slovakia made question marks his signature, and Magdalena Abakanowicz in Poland turned weaving into monumental hanging forms.