13: Dec15

Articles:

Meghan Bissonnette (Valdosta State University), ‘From “The New Sculpture” to Garden Statuary: the suppression of Abstract Expressionist sculpture’ 13/MB1

Rebecca Darley (Birkbeck, University of London) and Daniel Reynolds (Birmingham), ‘Exhibiting coins as economic artefacts: Curating historical interpretation in Faith and Fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)’ 13/DR1

Catherine De Lorenzo (University of New South Wales and Monash University, Australia), ‘The hang and art history’ 13/CL1

Melissa Eppihimer (Pittsburgh), ‘Caylus, Winckelmann, and the art of “Persian” gems’ 13/ME1

Michael Falser (Heidelberg), ‘The Graeco-Buddhist style of Gandhara – a “Storia ideologica”, or: how a discourse makes a global history of art’ 13/MF1

Roberto C. Ferrari (Columbia), ‘John Gibson, designer: sculpture and reproductive media in the nineteenth century’ 13/RCF1

Luba Freedman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), ‘Bartolomeo Maranta’s “Discourse” on Titian’s Annunciation in Naples: introduction’ 13/LF1

Giovanni Gasbarri (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘Antonio Muñoz (1884-1960) and the history of Byzantine illumination: a new field of research in Italy under the aegis of Adolfo Venturi’ 13/GG1

Valentina Locatelli (Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland), ‘Italian Painters, Critical Studies of their Works: the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. An overview of Giovanni Morelli’s attributions’ 13/VL1

Julia Orell (Academia Sinica, Taipei), ‘Early East Asian art history in Vienna and its trajectories: Josef Strzygowski, Karl With, Alfred Salmony’ 13/JO1

Jakub Stejskal (Free University Berlin), ‘Art-matrix theory and cognitive distance: Farago, Preziosi, and Gell on art and enchantment’ 13/JS1

Eleonora Vratskidou (Technische Universität Berlin), ‘Art history at the art school: Revisiting the institutional origins of the discipline based on the case of nineteenth-century Greece’ 13/EV1

Jindřich Vybíral (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague), ‘Birnbaum‘s “Baroque Principle” and the Czech reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’ 13/JV1

Translations:

‘Maria Hirsch in the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen’. Introduced, edited and translated by Karl Johns (Independent) 13/KJ1

Dimitrios Latsis (Internet Archive, San Francisco), ‘The afterlife of antiquity and modern art: Aby Warburg on Manet’ 13/DL1

Viviana Tonon (Independent), ‘Bartolomeo Maranta’s “Discourse” on Titian’s Annunciation in Naples: translation’ 13/VT1

Xiongbo Shi (University of Canterbury, New Zealand), ‘Zhang Yinlin: A Preface to Chinese Calligraphy Criticism (1931)’. A translation with an introduction by the translator. 13/XS1

Document:

Jan Bakos (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava), ‘Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal: Methodological Parallels’, an article first published in Umeni 2014, No.5. Republished by courtesy of the author and editor of the journal. 13/JB1

Reviews:

Jenny Anger (Grinnell College Iowa), ‘Grappling with the grotesque’: Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 190 pp., 62 b & w illus., £64.99 hdbk, ISBN 9781107011250 13/JA1

Basile Baudez (Université Paris-Sorbonne), ‘Architectural theory in Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment’: Ignacy Potocki, Remarks on Architecture. The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland, Carolyn C. Guile ed. and transl., University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 155 p. 13/BB1

Sibel Bozdogan (Harvard), ‘Orientalist Orientals: re-conceptualizing Ottoman architecture in the late Empire’: Ahmet Ersoy, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire, Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2015, 313 pp. includes bibliographical references and index; 72 b & w illus., $112.46 hdbk,ISBN: 978-1-4724-3139-4 13/SB1

Elizabeth den Hartog (Leiden), ‘Making medieval art modern’: Janet T. Marquardt, Zodiaque. Making Medieval Art Modern 1951-2001, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press 2015, 202 pp. and 86 illustrations (70 b&w and 16 colour), Hardcover edition $74.95, ISBN 978-0-271-06506-9 13/EdH1

Jae Emerling (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), ‘To render time sensible: transmissibility’: Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, 207 pp., 8 col. plates, 21 b. & w. illus., $89.85 hdbk, $24.95 pbk, Hardback ISBN 978-0-8223-5354-6, Paperback ISBN 978-0-8223-5369-0 13/JE1

Émilie Oléron Evans (Strasbourg), ‘The voice of art history: Nikolaus Pevsner’s work for the BBC’: Pevsner: The Complete Broadcast Talks. Architecture and Art on Radio and Television, 1945– 1977, by Nikolaus Pevsner, edited by Stephen Games, London: Ashgate Press, 2014, 578 pp., 1 b & w ill., £90 hdbk, ISBN: 9781409461975.
Pevsner: The BBC Years. Listening to the Visual Arts, by Stephen Games, London: Ashgate Press, 2015, 412pp., 6 b & w ill., £85, ISBN: 9781472407672. 13/EOE1

Claire Farago (University of Colorado Boulder), ‘The absolute Leonardo’: The Lives of Leonardo, ed. Thomas Frangenberg and Rodney Palmer, Warburg Institute Colloquia, ed. Charles Burnett and Jill Kraye, London: The Warburg Institute and Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2013. 266 pp. + b&w illustrations. £50.00. ISBN 978-1-908590-044-2 13/CF1

Katherine Hauser (Skidmore College), ‘The poster as modernist progenitor’: Ruth E. Iskin, The Poster: Art, Advertising. Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s, Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2014, 408 pp., 48 col. plates, 140 b & w illus., $50.00 pbk, ISBN 9781611686166 13/KH1

Robert Gaston (Melbourne), ‘“What I wanted was concepts”: Michael Baxandall’s intellectual Odyssey’: Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, edited by Peter Mack and Robert Williams, Farnham UK and Burlington VT, Ashgate, 2015, xii +175 pp, 16 col. Plates, £ 60 hdbk, ISBN 9781472442789 13/RG1

Noah Heringman (Missouri), ‘Origins, survivals, and other metahistorical fictions in Enlightenment conjectural histories of art’: Hans Christian Hönes, Kunst am Ursprung: Das Nachleben der Bilder und die Souveränität des Antiquars, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014, 327 pp., 89 b/w illus., €37.99 pbk or ebook, ISBN 978-3-8376-2750-3 13/NH1

Katherine Manthorne (CUNY), ‘Art at the crossroads: Francisco Oller and Caribbean art’: Edward J. Sullivan, From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of Impressionism, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 208 pp., 81 colour + 18 b/w ills, $60.00 hdbk, ISBN: 978-0-300-20320-2 13/KM1

Martin Myrone (Tate Gallery), ‘Henry Fuseli’s Alternative Classicism’: Andrei Pop, Antiquity, Theatre & The Painting of Henry Fuseli, Oxford University Press 2015, 288 Pages, 64 black and white and 11 colour illustrations, ISBN: 9780198709275 13/MM1

Andrei Pop (Chicago), ‘The pinch of Expressionism in art history’: Kimberly A. Smith, ed., The Expressionist Turn in Art History, Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2014, 374 pp., 35 ill. b/w, £75.00, ISBN: 978-1-4094-4999-7 13/AP1

Matthew Rampley (Birmingham), ‘Art Historians in Romania’: Vlad Țoca, Art Historical Discourse in Romania, 1919-1947. Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2011, 206 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-963-236-486-5 13/MR1

Anne Nike van Dam (Independent), ‘The many possibilities of debating German heritage’: Kristina Jõekalda, Krista Kodres, eds, Debating German Heritage: Art History and Nationalism during the Long Nineteenth Century. Special issue of Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 2014, vol. 23, no. 3/4. 184 pp., paperback, colour illustrations, ISSN: 1406-2860 13/AvD1

Ian Verstegen (Pennsylvania), ‘Persistence of vision – Blind Spots after ten years’: Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany. Yale University Press, 2005. 300 pp. 13/IV1

Nóra Veszprémi (Birmingham), ‘National ornament and the imperial masquerade’: Rebecca Houze, Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria–Hungary before the First World War: Principles of Dress, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 384 pp., 79 col. plates, 109 b. & w. illus., £85.00 hdbk ISBN 978-1-4094-3668-3 13/NV1

Jeremy White (University of California, Santa Barbara), ‘Studying frozen movement’: Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 400pp. + b/w illustrations, £35.00, ISBN-10: 0226645681; ISBN-13: 978-0226645681 13/JW1

Arnold Witte (Royal Netherlandish Institute in Rome and University of Amsterdam), ‘Wölfflin’s Grundbegriffe as a psychological palimpsest?’: Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. One Hundredth Anniversary Edition, translated by Jonathan Blower and edited by Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen, ix + 357 pp. Los Angeles: Getty Publications 2015. US$ 34.94, £ 20.00 ISBN 978-1-60606-452-8 13/AW1

Report:

Annie Malama (National Gallery of Greece), ‘Art history: formation of the academic discipline in Europe, and related developments in Greece (18th-19th c.) Rethymnon (3-4 October, 2014)’ 13/AM1 This report has also been published, in Greek, in Art History [Istoria tis Technis] journal, #3, Winter 2014-15, 209-211 https://istoriatechnisinfo.wordpress.com/about-2/

Responses:

Niccolo Caldararo (San Francisco State University and Conservation Art Service), ‘On the history of conservation in the western USA’ 13/NC1

Seth Adam Hindin (Oxford), ‘A Reply to Dr Caldararo’13/SAH1

Abstracts

Articles:

Meghan Bissonnette (Valdosta State University), ‘From “The New Sculpture” to Garden Statuary: the suppression of Abstract Expressionist sculpture’ 13/MB1

Abstract: In the 1940s, David Smith, David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton and Theodore Roszak were part of a new generation of sculptors working in New York who used welding and other direct-metal techniques to make abstract sculpture. In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionist sculpture was praised for its vitality and inventiveness, yet beginning in the 1960s these works gradually fell out of favour. The sole exception is David Smith, who has been upheld as the only sculptor of merit from this period. This study will contend that the suppression of Abstract Expressionist sculpture is largely due to Clement Greenberg and the lasting impact of his writings. Furthermore, his critique of the new sculpture has shaped subsequent assessments by Michael Leja, Kirk Varnedoe, and Edward Lucie-Smith. It has also contributed to the belief, still current today, that Abstract Expressionism is a movement of painters with no comparable counterparts in sculpture.

Key words: art criticism, Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), Abstract Expressionism, art historiography, Abstract Expressionist sculpture, American sculpture, David Smith (1906-1965), David Hare (1917-1992), Herbert Ferber (1906-1991), Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003), Seymour Lipton (1903-1986), Theodore Roszak (1907-1981)

Abstract: Faith and Fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coins was an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (October 2013-January 2015). It reflected on ways in which the rise of Islam in the seventh century shaped global political and economic systems, and how the early Islamic government and the Christian Byzantine Empire expressed the religious loyalties of their states visually. The exhibition, however, attempted to move away from traditional approaches to presenting coins, focusing almost exclusively on them as images and political documents. Instead, this exhibition sought to convey a sense of coins as economic artefacts, tightly woven into the day-to-day fabric of ordinary lives, in a period of extraordinary change. This article examines how the spatial, textual and temporal intersected in historical theory and exhibition design and suggests that exhibition represents an alternative method both of presenting (and teaching) but also of undertaking research.

Keywords: numismatics, museology, Byzantine studies, exhibition design, Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Catherine De Lorenzo (University of New South Wales and Monash University, Australia), ‘The hang and art history’ 13/CL1

Abstract: The 2013 Australia exhibition in 2013 at the Royal Academy, London, served at one level to demonstrate the ‘Aboriginal turn’ in Australian art history and curatorship. This paper traces some key exhibitions and texts that examine Aboriginal art as art, and traces the use by anthropologists and art historians of seminal texts such as Meyer Schapiro’s essay ‘Style’ published, significantly, in Kroeber’s Anthropology Today (1953). However, what promised to serve as a lingua franca of sorts across the disciplines has provoked contested, and at times heated, interpretations. Disciplinary differences were evident in the years immediately following Tony Tuckson’s 1960-61 Australian Aboriginal Art touring exhibition, and they persist today as evidenced by Howard Morphy’s claim (2011) for anthropological ways of ‘knowing about’ as distinct from art historical attempts at ‘appreciating’ Aboriginal art. So, apart from acknowledging and questioning the persistence of these differences, my question is: Based on the extant art historiographic literature, is there anything methodologically distinctive about the practice of art history when it grapples with exhibitions of Aboriginal art?

Key Words: Aboriginal art exhibitions, anthropology and art, Australian art historiography, Meyer Schapiro, Tony Tuckson

Melissa Eppihimer (Pittsburgh), ‘Caylus, Winckelmann, and the art of “Persian” gems’ 13/ME1

Abstract: Although early modern European travellers and antiquarians frequently engaged with the ruins of Persepolis when contemplating Persian antiquity, the pioneering art historians of the eighteenth century turned to engraved gems for their studies of ancient Persian art. In the major published works of Anne-Claude-Phillipe, comte de Caylus and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called ‘Persian’ gems provided empirical evidence of the art of this lesser known corner of the ancient world. Unlike the Persepolis reliefs, which were known only through engravings, the gems were accessible in European collections, and hence they appealed to the working methods of these two men. The results of Caylus’ and Winckelmann’s studies of ‘Persian’ gems established Persia’s place in art history’s fundamental cultural hierarchy.

Keywords: Caylus, Winckelmann, ancient Persia, engraved gems, Persepolis, rediscovery of antiquity

Michael Falser (Heidelberg), ‘The Graeco-Buddhist style of Gandhara – a “Storia ideologica”, or: how a discourse makes a global history of art’ 13/MF1

Abstract: This paper is embedded in the new methodological – transcultural – approach of Global Art History: it questions the taxonomies and values built into the discipline since its inception, with their claim to universal validity, and tries to constitute new units of investigation by contextualizing the multiple processes of the appropriation and reconfiguration of artworks through the participating agents in changing institutional regimes. As a case-study, this paper investigates what art historians and archaeologists between 1850 and 2015 had negotiated under the umbrella-term Graeco-Buddhist Style of Gandhara as it historically emerged in an area of today’s North Pakistan between the first and fifth centuries CE. Bypassing the Area Studies approach to describe this Eurasian hybrid of architectural and sculptural style along its formal characteristics, this paper investigates how it was ideologically exploited for different (post)colonial purposes by operating with the classic art historical terminologies of influence and transfer, purity and decadence.

Key words: global art history, world art history, transculturality, Gandhara, Graeco-Buddhism, archaeology, colonialism

Roberto C. Ferrari (Columbia), ‘John Gibson, designer: sculpture and reproductive media in the nineteenth century’ 13/RCF1

Abstract: John Gibson (1790-1866) was one of the most significant British sculptors of the nineteenth century. Although he is best known today for the Tinted Venus, this article shifts attention away from his interest in polychrome sculpture to explore instead his studio practice, his interest in disegno, and his active participation in reproduction so as to disseminate his designs in various media. This article discusses one of his most popular sculptures, Cupid Disguised as a Shepherd Boy, commissioned in marble nine times, and then considers at length the dissemination of his designs as Parian statuettes, cameos, and prints. By shifting his self-identity from a ‘sculptor’ to a ‘designer’, around the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Gibson reengaged with his lifelong interest in disegno—the academic principles of ‘idea’ and draftsmanship—and disseminated his work using some of the latest reproductive technologies of his day.

Key words: John Gibson, sculpture, reproduction, parian statuettes, cameos, prints, disegno, Great Exhibition

Luba Freedman (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), ‘Bartolomeo Maranta’s “Discourse” on Titian’s Annunciation in Naples: introduction’ 13/LF1

Abstract: More than a contemporary commentary on Titian’s Annunciation, Maranta’s ‘Discorso’ offers an analysis of the painting. Maranta applies a five-fold concept of beauty to the portrayal of the Angel Gabriel, and dismisses as baseless certain opinions regarding the unsuitability of the figure, while questioning about what constitutes a critic’s expertise. He considers a similarly controversial figure, Michelangelo’s youthful Christ in the Last Judgment, arguing that the surprising elements in both pictures reveal the intentions of the painter to express the mystery. As a literary critic, Maranta interprets both figures as ‘pictorial metaphors’; as a physician, he analyses the figure of the Angel in terms of its sanguine temperament and the positioning of the ‘speaking hand’ in terms of its anatomical structure. The essay and accompanying English translation set the ‘Discorso’ in the cultural and artistic milieu of Naples, making more accessible a neglected work of Renaissance aesthetics.

Key words: Bartolomeo Maranta, Titian, Angel Gabriel, Michelangelo, Christ in the Last Judgment, concept of beauty, appropriate vividness of colour

Giovanni Gasbarri (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘Antonio Muñoz (1884-1960) and the history of Byzantine illumination: a new field of research in Italy under the aegis of Adolfo Venturi’ 13/GG1

Abstract: Antonio Muñoz (1884-1960) is usually remembered for his successful career in the administration and conservation of the monumental heritage in Rome during the Fascist era. His brief yet relevant activity as a Byzantinist is often underestimated in the secondary literature, despite the fact that, before the 1914-18 war, he was unanimously considered as the most promising Italian specialist in Byzantine art. From 1903 onwards, after completing his studies with Adolfo Venturi, Muñoz developed an interest in Byzantine illumination, which became his primary area of expertise. At this early stage, his most important work was without doubt the new edition of the Rossano Gospels (1907), which was internationally praised as a significant step forward in the history of Byzantine illumination. With the support of previously unpublished or little-known documents, this article aims to provide a new critical analysis of Muñoz’s research on Byzantine illumination, as well as a more balanced evaluation of its impact on the scholarly community at the turn of the twentieth century.

Keywords: Byzantine art, history of Byzantine Illumination, Italy, 1900-1910 Art Press, Antonio Muñoz, Adolfo Venturi, Rossano Gospels

Abstract: This article analyses the role played by the art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) and his publication Italian Painters, Critical Studies of their Works (ed. 1880; 1891, en. transl. 1893) in the history of attributions of the Italian old master paintings held within the Gemäldergalerie Alte Meister’s collection in Dresden. After a brief description of the most salient aspects of Morelli’s so-called ‘experimental method’, the article concentrates on Morelli’s relationship with the prestigious art collection and its director, Karl Woermann (1844–1933). The article does not aim to explore the applicability and accuracy of Morelli’s method in general, but it rather examines the results Morelli concretely achieved in Dresden. In the annex, a chart provides a comprehensive overview of Morelli’s attributions proposed for the Gemäldergalerie Alte Meister. The chart enables the reader to systematically compare Morelli’s attributions with the traditional ones which had been accepted by director Julius Hübner (1806–1882), together with those approved by Woermann as well as with those maintained in the last comprehensive catalogue of the collection (Harald Marx 2005).

Key Words: Giovanni Morelli, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, art connoisseurship, Karl Woermann Italian old masters, attribution of paintings

Julia Orell (Academia Sinica, Taipei), ‘Early East Asian art history in Vienna and its trajectories: Josef Strzygowski, Karl With, Alfred Salmony’ 13/JO1

Abstract: In 1912 Josef Strzygowski founded the ‘Section for East Asian Art History’ at the University of Vienna, which attracted many students who would continue their careers in museums and at universities and thus established East Asian art history as an academic field. This paper examines these early art historical engagements with East Asian art: First, I discuss the role of East Asian art in Strzygowski’s agenda of broadening art history’s geographical scope beyond Europe and in his argument about the dominance of ‘Nordic’ artistic traditions in Europe and in Asia. Secondly, I introduce the work of two early students at the ‘Section for East Asian Art History’ in Vienna, Karl With and Alfred Salmony. Their respective approaches to East Asian art exemplify a range of methodological concerns of their time, from stylistic narratives, the concept of ars una, comparative frameworks, to ideas about cultural or national ‘purity’ in the arts, and an interest in cross-cultural adaption and transformation of motifs and symbolism.

Key words: Josef Strzygowski, Karl With, Alfred Salmony, Vienna, East Asian art history, global art history

Jakub Stejskal (Free University Berlin), ‘Art-matrix theory and cognitive distance: Farago, Preziosi, and Gell on art and enchantment’ 13/JS1

Abstract: Theories that treat art objects primarily as agents embedded in a causal nexus of agent–patient relationships, as opposed to studying them as expressions or symbols encoding meanings, tend to identify art’s agency with its power to enchant recipients. I focus on two such approaches, the art-matrix theory of Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi and the art-nexus theory of Alfred Gell. Their authors stress the potential of art to make its enchanting power the topic of our experience with it, that is, to disenchant its own enchantment. This raises the following question: If artworks are to be understood as agents enchanting their recipients, how can they become forces of disenchantment? I argue that the shift in perspective from perceiving art objects as indices of agency within a matrix/nexus to approaching them as possible means of gaining cognitive distance is inadequately addressed by both theories; this is due to features inherent to their respective theoretical outlooks.

Key words: art agency, art matrix, art nexus, Alfred Gell, Claire Farago, Donald Preziosi, cognitive distance, anthropology of art, world art studies

Eleonora Vratskidou (Technische Universität Berlin), ‘Art history at the art school: Revisiting the institutional origins of the discipline based on the case of nineteenth-century Greece’ 13/EV1

Abstract: As part of a broader research on the teaching of art history in nineteenth-century art academies, this paper focuses on the courses offered at the Athenian School of Arts from 1844 to 1863 by the historian and philologist Grigorios Pappadopoulos. In his teaching, Papadopoulos turned away from the tradition of a universal history for artists established in Italian and French art schools, and proposed instead an in-depth study of ancient Greek art, drawing on the German university model, and more particularly on Karl Otfried Müller’s Handbuch der Arhchaölogie der Kunst (1830). The paper examines the various operations that permitted the re-invention of an archaeological manual for the purposes of art education, and analyses the different approaches to the study of ancient art developed within the School of Arts and the Athenian University during the period. I argue that adapting the scholarly study of art to the needs of artistic training gave way to approaches primarily centred on objects, techniques and forms, rather than on the construction of historical narratives. The Greek case is used in order to reflect more broadly on the scholarly courses of art academies, which remain largely overlooked both within the history of art education and the history of art history. Lying at the intersection of these two fields, scholarly training at the art school, and art history courses in particular, may permit both a re-evaluation of art education in the nineteenth century and a better understanding of the varied institutional frameworks that shaped art history as a discipline.

Key words: art education, art history for artists, university, cultural transfers, Karl Otfried Müller

Jindřich Vybíral (Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague), ‘Birnbaum‘s “Baroque Principle” and the Czech reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’ 13/JV1

Abstract: This paper deals with the essay ´The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture’, published by Czech art historian Vojtěch Birnbaum in 1924. The placement of this work in the context of the reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’s methodological initiatives questions the originality of Birnbaum’s ideas and shows the negative role of anti-German resentments in the Czech art historiography of the 20th century.

Key words: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Heinrich Wölfflin, Czech art historiography

Translations:

‘Maria Hirsch in the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen’. Introduced, edited and translated by Karl Johns (Independent) 13/KJ1

Abstract: Maria Hirsch has remained a completely unknown figure and the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen where her only published article appeared during her lifetime has also been ignored and misunderstood. Nonetheless, her contribution is short, to the point and more easily understood than most of the other contributions to the two volumes of that periodical to have appeared before its political curtailment. It illuminates the interest in objectivity, the conception of structure and structural analysis, the empirical approach to perceptual analysis and that European art is best approached within the context of its genres.

Key Words: Master ES, art historical method, structural analysis

Dimitrios Latsis (Internet Archive, San Francisco), ‘The afterlife of antiquity and modern art: Aby Warburg on Manet’ 13/DL1

Abstract: Aby Warburg’s manuscript on Édouard Manet – unpublished during his lifetime and presented here for the first time in English – constitutes one of his rare, substantial commentaries on nineteenth century art. Using “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” as a departure point, Warburg proceeds from his customary meticulous investigation of the central motif’s “visual archeology,” to a larger reflection on the evolution of the representation of nature in art and the image of antiquity that modernity has created for itself.

Key words: Aby Warburg, Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, iconology, Atlas Mnemosyne, translation

Viviana Tonon (Independent), ‘Bartolomeo Maranta’s “Discourse” on Titian’s Annunciation in Naples: translation’ 13/VT1

Key words: Bartolomeo Maranta, Titian, Angel Gabriel, Michelangelo, Christ in the Last Judgment, concept of beauty, appropriate vividness of colour

Xiongbo Shi (University of Canterbury, New Zealand), ‘Zhang Yinlin: A Preface to Chinese Calligraphy Criticism (1931)’. A translation with an introduction by the translator. 13/XS1

Abstract: Written in 1931, Zhang Yinlin’s treatise “A Preface to Chinese Calligraphy Criticism” has long been neglected by researchers of twentieth-century Chinese calligraphy theory. The main part of this article is a translation of this treatise. In an introduction, the translator briefly reviews the development of the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy in the early twentieth century. The influence of Western aesthetics on Chinese calligraphy theory in the early twentieth century is manifest, and Zhang’s treatise, quoting directly from some contemporary English books on aesthetics, is of this nature.

Key words: Zhang Yinlin 張蔭麟, Chinese calligraphy, aesthetics, form, tishi 體勢

Document:

Abstract: In 1971 on the 50th anniversary of the death of Max Dvořák, outstanding Czech medievalist Albert Kutal expressed the opinion that Dvořák’s work was not only highly relevant for its conception of art history as the history of ideas but also for its early formal evolutionary approach. Three years later on the centenary of Max Dvořák’s birth, Vienna professor Otto Pächt emphasized the relevancy of Dvořák’s article ‘Über die dringendsten Methodischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung’ (1913–1914), which spanned the formal evolutionary and history of ideas approaches. For Pächt the ‘relevance and strategic significance’ of Dvořák’s article to the 1970s lay in the fact that it represented a counter weight to ´the danger that iconology might monopolise interpretations of works of art’. Kutal’s and Pächt’s critique of iconology was motivated not only by their attempt to relativise iconology’s claim to hegemony but also by their efforts to defend the indispensability of the evolutionary genealogical method. Pächt openly pronounced his views on the iconology method in 1956 in his review of Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting. In 1964, at the 21st World congress of art history in Bonn his argument against iconology sought to overturn the premise that every work of art was also iconographically innovative. Pächt summarised his thinking on this topic in his 1970/71 university lectures, ‘Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis’. His criticism of iconology focused on its neglect of the non-discursive nature of visual art and its total intellectualisation. Albert Kutal shared Pächt’s conviction that it is vision and not the word that is of primary importance for the history of art. The reservations the two well-known art historians had towards iconology found support in a conviction they shared with Jacob Burckhardt: that works of art were non-discursive and conceptually indefinable. Hence, they both considered the evolutionary genealogical method to be most appropriate in approaching the history of art. By projecting a modernist conception of works of art onto medieval art, they significantly contributed to our knowledge of art in the Middle Ages.

Key words: Vienna school of art history, Otto Pächt, Albert Kutal, evolutionary approach, iconology, medieval art and modernism

Reviews:

Abstract: Frances S. Connelly’s The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play is an exciting new book that ruptures art-historical conventions as much as does her subject, the grotesque. The generally chronological approach examines four interwoven strands: improvisation, subversion, trauma, and revelation in successive chapters. Although Horace’s classical injunction against the grotesque is a touchstone, the book surveys relevant art principally from the fifteenth-century, when the grottesche at Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome were discovered, to the twentieth. This review provides an overall assessment of the book and enumerates each chapter’s contents.

Keywords: grotesque, improvisation, ornament, arabesque, subversion, trauma, l’informe, play, revelation

Abstract: Scholars working on architectural theory have recently benefitted from several important editions of treatises published during the Enlightenment, but few manuscripts have received the attention they deserve and we still have until now a relatively limited knowledge of the architectural culture outside Western Europe. Carolyn C. Guile’s translation and edition of Ignacy Potocki (1750-1809)’s Remarks on Architecture with Pennsylvania State University Press offers an exceptional case-study of what rigorous and inventive scholarship can bring to our knowledge not only of the strategies at work in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth but also of the Enlightenment European architectural theory in general.

Key words: architecture, architectural theory, Eastern Europe, Poland, Enlightenment, amateur

Abstract: Late Ottoman Empire’s concerted effort to forge a modern imperial identity to better position itself within the emerging world system was accompanied by a proto-nationalist desire for an authentic cultural past. In the field of art and architecture, the result was a new interest and patriotic pride in the Islamic artistic and architectural heritage of the Empire, along with an intense period of creative engagement with European artistic and scholarly discourses. The book offers a meticulously historicized account of what emerged as a major intellectual effort to construct a genealogy for Ottoman architecture, to make it intelligible in terms of Western architectural theory and above all, to recast it as a historically evolving style capable of revival in the modern world. In doing so, it critically engages with recent scholarly debates on modernity, historicism, romanticism, orientalism, nationalism, revivalism, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, eclecticism and hybridity among other topics. Taking issue with both the received “westernization paradigm” and its companion, the notorious “decline thesis” in terms of which the architecture of Ottoman Tanzimat has long been written, it gives us a more complex, more nuanced, more cosmopolitan and more ambivalent picture. As such, it makes a major contribution to Ottoman/ Turkish studies, to the historiography of Islamic architecture and to cross-cultural studies in general.

Keywords: Historicism, romanticism, orientalism, revivalism, cosmopolitanism, authenticity, hybridity, eclecticism, Usul-i Mimariyi Osmani, Ottoman Renaissance, Tanzimat, Balyan family, Istanbul Gothic, Vienna World Exhibition 1873, Sultan Abdulaziz

Abstract: Janet T. Marquardt’s book ‘Zodiaque. Making medieval art modern’ discusses the historical context, history and impact of the Zodiaque publications issued by the monks from the abbey of Ste-Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire in Burgundy between 1951 and 2001 and links the striking photogravures, the core business of these books, to the modern movement. Although Marquardt’s view that the Zodiaque series made a great impact on the study of Romanesque sculpture is somewhat overrated, her claim that the photogravures should be seen as avant-garde works of art and the books as a “museum without walls” is entirely convincing.

Key words: Romanesque, photography, avant-garde modernism, twentieth-century catholicism, Zodiaque

Abstract: This review-essay of Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History (2013) addresses recent theoretical work on images, historiography, and temporality. It does so by critiquing preexisting methodological issues such as linear chronology, ekphrasis, and contemporaneity. In addition to reviewing how Moxey deals with the problematic of temporality in art historical practice, this review-essay develops its own methodological approach through the concept of transmissibility. Transmissibility is a theoretical methodology for how to approach the relation between temporality and artworks that draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Transmissibility stems from a desire to arrive at an art history capable of articulating the complex epistemic and aesthetic power of an artwork. In other words, an artwork as a material, expressive reality, a conjunction of content and expression, statement and visibility, sensible and intelligible. It remains to us as art historians to think a philosophy of history wherein artworks embody transmissibility (survival, anachronism, memory, becoming): the full complexity of temporality.

Keywords: art theory, temporality, images, methodology, Gilles Deleuze, transmissibility, ontology of art

Abstract: Pevsner: The Complete Broadcast Talks (2014), edited by Stephen Games for Ashgate, presents the complete range of Nikolaus Pevsner’s work for radio in the period 1945-1977 for the first time. The collection of talks is an important new source for the study of the close relationship between the development of the discipline of history of art and architecture in Britain and the history of radio as mass media. The eclectic range of subjects tackled by Pevsner, whether commissioned by a succession of producers or – as was increasingly the case as he gained confidence working in radio – based on his own suggestions, enhances his image as a pedagogue and populariser who shunned dogmatism, always holding to the belief that scholars had a major role to play in society as cultural mediators. Games’ essay Pevsner: The BBC Years (2015), while intended to serve as an accompanying piece, struggles to present a coherent analysis of the evolution of Pevsner, the art historian, as a broadcaster.

Key words: Nikolaus Pevsner, art history in Britain, BBC, radio talks, popularisation

Abstract: The central theme of the book, as argued in Thomas Frangenberg’s Introduction, is that the legacy of Vasari’s Lives is complex and ambivalent because, on the one hand, it is composed of fictional anecdotes; but on the other hand, it is based on a highly reliable source almost contemporary with Leonardo’s lifetime. This review considers that the main interpretive challenge of the genre of biography has always been where and how to define the terrain in which fact and fiction co-exist. One of the strengths of The Lives of Leonardo is that it includes study of the factually verifiable, the philologically trackable, the mythical, and the psychological biography within the covers of the same book. This review locates the twelve case studies spanning 400 years of Leonardo biographies within the history of scholarship on artist’s biographies. It considers questions of authorship, intertextuality, cultural capital, and poetics and provides summaries of the individual chapters.

Keywords: authorship, intertextuality, biography, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari

Abstract: Ruth E. Iskin’s The Poster: Art, Advertising. Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s positions the late-nineteenth-century advertising poster as the progenitor of valued modernist practices typically attached solely to photography and film. Modernist biases separating high art from mass culture account for scholars ignoring posters, however the poster ushered in an innovative reductive graphic style as well as pioneered the notion of multiple originals.

Keywords: Ruth E. Iskin, poster, advertising, Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, chromolithography, aura

Abstract: The review offers a thorough critical account of the Introduction and nine substantial studies contributed to the book. Given its author’s personal experience of the Warburg Institute during several of Baxandall’s formative years there, it offers something of an insider’s perspective on the development of his early work that both coincides with that offered by several of the collection’s authors, who were students of Baxandall in the following decades, and elaborates it with slightly different emphases. A consistent focus, as the review’s title implies, is Baxandall’s search for ‘concepts,’ to enable his transition from an empiricist training at Cambridge, and initially at the Warburg, toward an obsessively distinctive series of theoretical positions that stood apart from the wave of French and German theory of his time.

Keywords: pictorial meaning, language, experience, period eye, method, decorum

Abstract: This learned and capacious study of three antiquaries writing at the turn of the nineteenth century—Pierre-François Hugues (better known as “Baron” d’Hancarville), Richard Payne Knight, and James Christie Jr—argues for a counter-tradition of art historical writing concerned with origins and survivals, exemplified in the experimental and conjectural work of these three men. Five chronological chapters focusing on each writer’s body of work (two each on d’Hancarville and Knight and one on Christie) are followed by three chapters devoted to concepts: “De-Temporalization” [Entzeitlichung]; “Surveyability” [Übersichtlichkeit]; and “Entanglements” [Verwicklungen]. Though at times overly ambitious, this will be an engrossing book for any scholar interested in eighteenth-century antiquarianism or conjectural history.

Keywords: origins of art, historiography, antiquarianism, Neoclassicism

Abstract: Francisco Oller (1833-1917) was a Puerto Rican born artist who helped shape the visual production of the Caribbean in the second half of the nineteenth century. He enjoyed a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, both at home and in Europe, where he spent twenty years. This book fills provides a much-needed analysis of the achievement of Oller, who has received little scholarly attention in the past thirty years. In six chapters that analyze major artworks and themes in Oller’s oeuvre, this book recasts the artist as a key figure in nineteenth century art and sheds new light on his contribution to a uniquely Caribbean aesthetic.

Key words: Puerto Rico, Caribbean, Francisco Oller, Latin American art, landscape painting, still life Ppainting, history painting, portraiture, plantations, trans-national art, nineteenth century art, Spanish colonialism, José Campeche

Abstract: The review considers Andrei Pop’s Antiquity, Theatre & The Painting of Henry Fuseli. This argues for the history painter and writer Fuseli as an exemplary ‘Neopagan’, a term coined by Pop to refer to the new sense of cultural pluralism and historical relativism which emerged in Europe after the discovery of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 1748. While this perspective offers a fresh view of the artist, relating him to the emergence of modernity, and illuminates some important aspects of his work, the reviewer also suggests that the monographic focus risks re-asserting a sense of Fuseli’s exceptionalism.

Key words: Henry Fuseli, neoclassicism, classicism, modernity

Abstract: A useful if strangely hybrid collection of writings in translation by allegedly expressionist art historians, together with introductory historical essays by young as well as established (Hans Aurenhammer, Charles Haxthausen) art historiographers. The translated texts vary in quality, familiarity, and interest, and while on the whole they are judiciously chosen, the same cannot be said of the list of protagonists, which leans unfortunately toward a German-nationalist, tendentiously political expressionism unfair both to artists like Beckmann or Klee and to the more interesting art historians who engaged with expressionism. Interestingly, the contingency of these choices, and the imperfect match between even the chosen historians and expressionism as an artistic movement, are clearly seen and duly noted by editor Kimberly Smith and several of the contemporary authors. Some suggestions are thus made about how such an attention to expressionist historiography could be extended.

Keywords: nationalism, expressionism, Germany, formalism, Wölfflin, Worringer, Vienna School

Abstract: This review discusses Vlad Țoca’s outline of Romanian art history from 1919 to 1947. It considers the value and significance of scholarship on Romanian culture and the historiography of art, but also identifies a number of critical deficits in Țoca’s study, including a lack of concrete detail, a reluctance to engage with the cultural politics shaping the development of interwar Romanian art history, and an overly descriptive approach. Despite such flaws, the book remains, it argues, valuable for its role in opening up a new field of research and providing a useful introduction to its topic.

Key words: Romania, Transylvania, Cluj, Vienna School, George Oprescu, Coriolan Petranu, Nicolae Iorga, Josef Strzygowski

Abstract: This review discusses the volume Debating German Heritage, a special issue of the journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi. This issue focuses heritage and art historical knowledge production in relation to nationalism, containing an introduction and six essays on a variety of subjects related to this main theme. The essays each approach heritage practices in the nineteenth century from different a perspective, ranging from canon formation to heritage preservation efforts at theatres of war. This review takes a closer look at each of the essays and studies the main contribution of the volume to the field of art history and heritage scholarship. Overall, this special issue offers interesting insights in the relationship between the dynamics of heritage preservation, art historical scholarship and nationalism from the point of view of Eastern and Central European scholarship with a ‘German connection’. In all, the essays are invariably well researched, often innovative in their approach and pleasant to read.

Keywords: Germany, art history, heritage, nationalism, Baltic States, nineteenth century

Abstract: Frederic Schwartz’s important book, Blind Spots, is revisited after ten years and an inadequate reception within art history. Its pioneering discussion is summarized and then, taking into account the passage of a decade and the emergence of new priorities in the intellectual landscape (and particularly the overall ‘return to Marx’), its major points are assessed. Arguing that its deconstruction of Frankfurt school figures risks conflating its project with a common sense view of history, the review urges a reconsideration of the category of “physiognomy” and the consequent oppositions that a caricature of it produces.

Keywords: Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin; Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Hans Sedlmayr

Abstract: Rebecca Houze’s book is a thoroughly researched and original study of the impact of design reform on textile production and fashion in Austria-Hungary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which centres its argument around the Bekleidungsprinzip (“principle of dress”) put forward by Gottfried Semper. It discusses the role of newly founded applied arts museums, industrial exhibitions, the concept of “house industry,” and the upsurge of interest in folk crafts in this process, while also placing a strong emphasis on the role of women as producers of textiles. One of the main virtues of the book is its wide scope which manages to investigate endeavours informed by different and sometimes opposed national and imperial interests in their complicated interconnectedness. It is a pity that this broad perspective is narrowed down in the second part of the book which focuses on with turn-of-the-century Vienna and does not deal with modernist tendencies in Hungarian design. Nevertheless, this part of the book also provides a fascinating discussion of its own subject, and the monograph as a whole is a valuable contribution to its field of study.

Keywords: Austria-Hungary, design reform, applied arts, design museums, fashion, Gottfried Semper, folk culture

Abstract: Spyros Papapetros examines ideas about simulated movement and inorganic life during and after the turn of the twentieth century. Exploring works of a selection of important art historians as well as artists and architects of the period, the author maintains that the ability to identify with material objects was repressed by modernist culture, and yet found expression stylistically through depictions of inorganic forms. That expression is shown to have continuity with older medieval and renaissance depictions. The book is organized by a narrative that evokes the modes of inquiry documented and critiqued by the content of the book, employing movement as a narrative device, a metaphor, while serving as a subject of inquiry.

Keywords: animation, extension, inorganic, movement, organic, modern

Abstract: The centenary of the publication of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich, 1915) has been celebrated by the Getty with a new translation of this seminal text of art history in English. The introductions by Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen illuminate the academic background of this work, but also shed an interesting and important light on how the circumstances under which Wölfflin composed his book – the onset of the First World War – had a profound impact on its content and approach. This shows that a contextual approach to the historiography of art can help to reveal its presumed ‘neutral’ methods as profoundly time-bound.

Key words: Heinrich Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe/principles, art history around 1900, World War I, translations

Report:

Abstract: The Academic Forum with the title Art history: formation of the academic discipline in Europe and related developments in Greece (18th-19th centuries), co-organised by the Association of Greek Art Historians and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies – FORTH, took place at the Institute’s premises in Rethymnon, Crete on Friday, 3rd and Saturday, 4th October 2014. Its central aim was to explore the ways in which the academic and research fields of art history had been formed from the late 18th century and continued to develop up to the beginning of the 20th century; the meeting actually functioned as a workshop charting the current status of art historiography research in Greece and the rest of Europe.

Key words: academic forum, workshop, art historiography, Greece, Europe, terminology, methodology, periodization, geography, art criticism, theory, art history, cultural history, art collections, art publications, art historians, scholars, critics, institutions

Responses:

Niccolo Caldararo (San Francisco State University and Conservation Art Service), ‘On the history of conservation in the western USA’ 13/NC1

Abstract: Precedents and origins are difficult to establish, and scholars often are in disagreement based on fragments, translations and interpretations. The origins and influences in the conservation and restoration of art has had little attention, such neglect leads to obscurity as generations of practitioners die off and their records are lost. In this response, I attempt to collect threads of the origins of conservation in the western regions of the United States to clarify contributions made and correct some impressions produced by Dr. Hindin.

Key words: conservation, restoration, history of art conservation, training in conservation

Seth Adam Hindin (Oxford), ‘A Reply to Dr Caldararo’13/SAH1

Abstract: In his reply to Niccolo Caldararo, the author highlights methodological and other differences between his two recent articles on the history of conservation in the western United States and Dr Caldararo’s response essay, while also suggesting possibilities for future research.

Key words: history of conservation, theory of art conservation, art conservation, California, Charles Muskavitch, twentieth century

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