Modern Art in Bulgaria: First histories and present narratives beyond the paradigm of modernity

"Irina Genova has greatly contributed to the wider knowledge about Bulgarian art: thanks to her exhibitions, studies, texts, catalogues, books and lectures all over Europe and America, Bulgarian art - particularly from the first half of the XX century - was put in the European, first of all Balkan context, and was compared with similar phenomena in the region. To achieve this, Genova has also studied all the movements and major personalities from neighboring countries. By doing so, she has accumulated great knowledge and experience, and I am happy to say that she is surely one of the most informed, influential and best interpreters of the Balkan art scene in the 1920s and 1930s.
Genova is looking for similar ambiances, close poetics of various artists, their differences and oppositions, their encounters and communication in the last century so that her final results show high profile of an art historian's approach an method of cultural studies. Her works are at the same time full of data and impregnated with theoretical and aesthetical points of views. This method of approach ensured her very high position in the international milieus: she is often invited to present her research in various conferences, seminars and symposia.
Genova states that there is no provincial art - there are only provincial approaches to art problems. There is no peripheral art either - every art and artist are part of his / her destiny in his / her milieu and conditioned by those circumstances."
Prof. Dr Irina Subotić

Situating the study's field of research - introduction

• Discussing Modern Art - Between Historical Synthesis and Literary Interpretation
• Case Studies and Comparative Studies
• Centres and A-centres: Beyond Modernity Motivations for Narratives in the Present
• Conceptual Field: Concepts and Uses
• Historicising
• Archive
• Narrative
• Art - Modern Art
• Modernism / Modernisms and Modernity
• Modernism and Avant-garde in Central and Eastern Europe

Art institutions, their formation and significance for modern art in Bulgaria

• Introductory Notes
• Art Institutions according to Art Publications in Bulgaria in the First Decades of the Modern Epoch
• Art education, art exhibitions and art museum. The role of the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia
• The Importance of the Experience from the Fine Arts Academy in Munich for the Acquisitions of Cultural Modernity in Bulgaria at the End of the 19th and the Beginnig of the 20th century
• The Role of Photography in Art Education and Art History
• The Institutional Presentation of Bulgarian Art in the International Cultural Space
• Women and Modern Art Institutions
• The Integration of Women in the Modernisation of the Artistic Life in Bulgaria till World War I - Acquisition of the Experience of the 19th century
• Women and the Modernisation of Artistic Life World War I - Entering the 20th century
• Women Artists Society Exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s
• Women write about art
• Concluding Notes

Representation / Expression of Modernity before World War I

• Introductory Notes
• General Premises
• Representation, Pictorial Modernity, Style
• Cases and Conventions of Early / Enlightenment Pictorial Modernity Images of the Man and of the Woman
• Images of Modernity: The Experience of the City and Nature
• Images of Nature
• Images of the City
• A Digression: Representing the Village - Realism and Modernity
• The Absent City in Early Art Criticism
• Concluding Notes

Manifestations of Modernisms in Bulgaria after World War I

• Introductory Notes
• Modernisms and the National Idea
• The Marginality of Modernisms
• "The Traffic" of Images in the Avant-garde Magazines - the Participation of Bulgarian Magazines from the 1920s
• Views on Expressionism shared on the Pages of "Vezni" Magazine and Almanac
• The Difficult Names - An Obstacle for the Integration in a Historical Synthesis
• Georges Papazoff - an impossible style classification
• Nicolay Diulgheriff - the Multiple Artistic Identity
• The "High" and "Low" - Sirak Skitnik's Views on Art in the Spaces of Everyday Life
• The Return to the Picture in the 1930s - Problems of Historicising
• Concluding Notes

Histories of Modern Art in Bulgaria until World War II

• Introductory Notes
• Fifty years of Bulgarian art by Andrey Protich and The New Bulgarian Art by Nicola Mavrodinov
• Concluding Notes

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index of personal names
Index of places