On the occasion of Ara H. Merjian’s new volume, Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (Yale University Press, 2014), three art historians will discuss the avant-gardes in Paris in the wake of the Great War, centering in particular on that lightning rod of modernist experimentation, Guillaume Apollinaire.

Romy Golan is Professor of 20th Century art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars and Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (Yale University Press, 1995 and 2009). Among recent publications are: “Vitalità del Negativo/Negativo della Vitalità,” October, no. 150, (Winter 2014); “Campo Urbano,” Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox? (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2014); “Slow Time: The Futurist Mural” in Italian Futurism: 1909-1944 (Solomon Guggenheim Museum, 2014); “The Scene of a Disappearance” in Giosetta Fioroni: L’Argento (The Drawing Center, New York, 2013); “Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art in the 1960s,” Grey Room 49 (Fall 2012).

Gordon Hughes is a Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He is the author of Resisting Abstraction: Robert Delaunay and Vision in the Face of Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2014), co-editor, with Philipp Blom, of Nothing But the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War One(Getty Research Institute Press, 2014) and co-editor with Hal Foster of October Files: Richard Serra (MIT Press, 2000). He has written essays on Robert Delaunay’s early abstraction, Douglas Huebler’s photo-conceptualism, Jenny Holzer’s text-based artworks, Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida, Georges Braque’s still-lifes, and Fernand Léger film and painting. He co-curated the exhibition World War One: War of Images/Images of War currently on view at the Getty Research Institute until April.  In 2012-13 he was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles where he began work on a new book project titled Seeing Red: Murder, Abstraction, Machines. 

Ara H. Merjian is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris, Modernism (Yale University Press, 2014), for which he won the College Art Associations Meiss/Mellon’s Author Award, as well as two forthcoming studies: Blueprints and Ruins: De Chirico’s Untimely Futures, and The Return of the Poet: Giorgio de Chirico’s Metaphysical Painting in Word and Verse. Prof. Merjian is currently researching a new volume, Heretical Aesthetics: Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Avant-garde, for which he received a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Recent articles include a study of intermedia experimentation in early Futurism in Modernism/Modernity, and an essay on Bruno Munari and abstraction between the world wars. 

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