Narrating cold wars: CAROLINE JONES 

This keynote is part of our three-day conference, Narrating Cold Wars. For the full schedule and registration details, please click below.

Keynote: Sadequain Naqvi, a ‘Pakistani Picasso’ for the Cold War – Caroline Jones

‘Predicated internationalism’ is a linguistic pattern that proved particularly useful during the Cold War. This type of construction – e.g. ‘the Pakistani Picasso, Sadequain’ – locates the modified artist in relation to a Eurocentric periphery. During the years 1960-1970, this Indo-Islamic (and later Pakistani) artist Syed Sadequain Naqvi ‘Naqqash’ bore the dominant signifier of the Spanish-French 20th-century painter Pablo Picasso in both Parisian and Pakistani contexts. Drawing on unpublished research as well as arguments from my 2016 book The Global Work of Art, this brief talk parses the specifically Cold War configurations at play in the willingly leveraged internationalism of Sadequain.

Caroline A. Jones is Professor of art history at MIT, where she also serves as Associate Dean in the School of Architecture and Planning. She studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interfaces with science. Her solo-authored publications include Machine in the Studio (1996/98), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), and The Global Work of Art (2016); and, as editor, Picturing Science, Producing Art (coedited, 1998), Sensorium (2006), and Experience (2016). Exhibitions she curated at MIT include Sensorium (2006), Hans Haacke 1967 (2011), and the forthcoming Symbionts (2022).

[Photo by Joel Elliot, National Humanities Center]