A History of the Carnegie International

1896–1919 | 1920–1949 | 1950–1959 | 1960–1979 | 1980–2000

The Internationals in the 1980s reflected the phenomenal growth in the art world seen in new art magazines, new museums and exhibition spaces capable of presenting more and larger shows, the plethora of large-scale international exhibitions that developed throughout western Europe, and a voracious art market. Carnegie director John R. Lane (1980–1986) returned the International to a large survey format similar to the original one, and looked to the roots of the museum to re-evaluate its founder's hopes. Lane and John Caldwell, the museum's first dedicated curator of contemporary art organized the 1985 exhibition aided by a committee of international advisors. The exhibitions of the 1980s successfully reasserted the International's multiple role of providing a forum for European art, adding to the permanent collection, and repositioning both Pittsburgh and Carnegie Museum of Art as major sites in the international contemporary art world.

Caldwell, the only curator in recent times to produce more than one International, addressed the increased importance of sculpture on both sides of the Atlantic and the growing number of artists, especially in the United States, whose subjects included art as a commodity or as a simulacrum. He sought to represent an artist with work in a medium not seen before in the U.S. He also made new work a priority: 18 of the 39 artists included in 1988 created art specifically for the International, in many cases with installations or pieces made for particular spaces in the museum.

Mark Francis, the museum's curator of contemporary art collaborated as co-curator in organizing the 1991 exhibition with contemporary art scholar and curator, Lynne Cooke. Together they considered the particular and peculiar nature of Carnegie Museum of Art as one entity in Andrew Carnegie's original institution that also included science, music, and literature all under one roof. Taken together with the widespread interest of many contemporary artists in issues relating to collecting and display, to the acquisition and circulation of information, and to the different systems, taxonomies, and values underpinning the numerous scientific and art historical discourses, they decided to select artists they felt would be intrigued and engaged by such possibilities in the works they made for the exhibition. To this end, most artists were invited to come to Pittsburgh in advance to consider the site for themselves in creating work. While the museum's special exhibition galleries formed the heart of the show, Francis and Cooke extended the exhibition beyond the museum's walls to locations throughout the city responding to quite specific interests of the artists. The focus of contemporary artmaking toward media beyond painting—to installation and assemblage, to sculpture, and to photography—was apparent in the exhibition.

A prejudice in favor of transformative impulses, toward artists attempting to give form, rather than borrow or interpret it, compelled 1995 International curator, Richard Armstrong to look for painters, and even more insistently sculptors. Seeing imagery of what was at hand, "family, friends, the ordinary things around us," in the work of artists he considered for his exhibition, Armstrong could generalize about the mid-1990s as a moment in art of fierce self-examination. Portraits and other uses of the body, re-creations of landscapes both domestic and natural—the former symbolized by the many allusions to furniture and architecture, the latter as depicted in impressions derived from nature figured prominently. Three main motifs—the first anatomical, the second natural, and the third mathematical or conceptual—emerged in much of the work on view. Film and video artists engaged another dimension, since their material assumes meaning in time. But their essential concern with linguistic narrative could be seen as constituting a fourth motif. Armstrong saw in each of these motifs, a search for order, however baffling it might have appeared at first.

After an interval of four years, the 53rd Carnegie International opened in November 1999 and continued through March 2000 marking the millennium. The works in the exhibition by 41 artists from 22 countries were in media and format extremely diverse, yet they centered on an examination of the real. Curator Madeleine Grynsztejn saw the turn of the 20th century as a moment when the virtual and the physical, the local and the global, and the real and fictive coexisted. Works in the exhibition immersed the visitor in a more explicitly physical realm than can be offered by visual engagement alone. Art that used time, sound, smell, and movement and that welcomed interaction as primary media, were to Grynsztejn evidence of a commitment to the real. Other works manifested a deliberate slippage between reality and fiction, putting the real into question by subtly deviating from it, specifically in order to return to it with greater sharpness and clarity. The 1999–2000 Carnegie International also investigated the concept of a new internationalism in works that grafted local and global visual vocabularies in response to pervasive information technology, increased travel, and economic and media globalization.