PAN: The Avant-Garde Point of View with Dr. Max Koss

Saturday, February 6, 2021

Separate from architecture and decorative arts, the art nouveau pushed creative boundaries by elevating graphic design to a new (and collectible) art form through printed periodicals such as PAN (1895-1900). In tandem with our current exhibitions PAN: Prints of Avant-Garde Europe, 1895-1900 and William H. Bradley and The Chap-Book, this program explores this new era of printmaking and the transition from the more conservative art and ideas of the nineteenth century towards the progressive expressionism of the twentieth as revealed through the pages of PAN.

Join us as art historian Dr. Max Koss presents the aesthetic and history of Berlin’s art and literary journal PAN. You may remember seeing his surprise appearance last September during our episode of Live From the Drawing Room: The Art of Entertaining to introduce The Chap-Book and the development of poster art in the late 1800s. Having spent a decade researching PAN, Dr. Koss returns to take a deeper dive, to not only share his intimate knowledge of the behind-the-scenes production of such a luxurious periodical but also to unfold its sumptuous materiality.

Dr. Max Koss is an art historian based in Berlin, Germany. He is an expert on modernism and design and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where he successfully defended his dissertation “The Art of the Periodical: Pan, Print Culture and the Birth of Modern Design in Germany, 1890-1900” in 2019.