HGSCEA at CAA Chicago 2024

HGSCEA Events


On Thursday, 15 February, from 10 am – 12 noon CST, members are invited to come to a special event at the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the Art Institutewhere curator Jay Clarke, longtime members and old friend, will have things out for us to see and discuss. We did this in 2020, when the conference was last in Chicago, and it was a wonderful special event! If you’d like to attend please let Jenny Anger know (anger@grinnell.edu). I’ll share more details in a week or two.


On Thursday night, from 6:30-8:30 pm CST, we will gather for our annual members’ dinner at Bistronomic, which some of you might remember from 2020. Aside from enjoying good food and company, I’ll announce the results of this year’s Emerging Scholars Competition Prize. An invitation just went out this morning. If you didn’t receive it, please let someone on the Board know. If you have seen it, we need to know by 1 February if you’ll be attending so that we have a firm headcount.

HGSCEA’s sponsored session, “Health, Illness, and the Art of Medicine,” is scheduled to take place in the Lake Michigan Room on the 8th floor of the Hilton Chicago on Saturday, 17 February, from 11 am – 12:30 pm CST. The session, which has been organized and is chaired by Pat Berman and Marsha Morton, comprises four papers by Amanda Brian (“Illustrating Children’s Health in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe”), Katerina Korola (“Purification by Light: Photography and Phototherapy in Early Twentieth-Century Germany”), Kathryn Carney (“Vital Signs: Weimar Hygiene on Film [Selections from Gesolei]”), and Jonathan Odden (“Figment Phalloplasty: Christian Schad’s Medical Imaginary). Allison Morehead will be the discussant.

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/12339

Immediately after the session, from 1-2 pm CST, is HGSCEA’s annual business meeting. For those who wish to attend in person, the room listed on the conference program is the Astoria Room on the 3rd floor of the Hilton Chicago. However, because several members of the Board are unable to attend the conference this year, the meeting will be hybrid. The meeting is open to all members. Anyone wishing to attend remotely should contact me (vandykej@missouri.edu) or Jenny Anger (anger@grinnell.edu) a day or two in advance of the meeting in order to get the zoom link, which is too unwieldy to include here.

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/13367

HGSCEA at CAA 2023 New York

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/10960

Vienna 1900/Vienna 1938

Chairs: Megan Brandow-Faller and Laura Morowitz

Friday, February 17, 2023
11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
New York Hilton Midtown – 3rd Floor – Mercury Ballroom

During the last three decades Viennese 1900 has exploded in popular culture and academia: in countless exhibitions dedicated to painting, architecture, and the applied arts, in myriad books on every well-known Viennese designer, and in the “Klimtomania” that covers umbrellas, scarves and shopping bags. Yet the popularity of Viennese Modernism and the commercial “Vienna 1900” industry simultaneously obscures a problematic series of historical erasures and gaps. All too often, the glittering culture of “Vienna 1900” is studied in isolation from the political exigencies of 1938 and thereafter. Our panel will interrogate the intentional neglect and repression of specific figures, organizations and movements who have faded in the shadow of larger Viennese superstars and a now familiar narrative, or who have been intentionally white-washed. The papers will call attention to some of the “absences” linked directly to the years of 1938-1945, to the “de-Jewification” of the Viennese street scape, to the careful art historical narrative surrounding certain careers, to the reshaping of a “Vienna-in-Exile” within the artistic establishment of post-war New York. In addition, we will show how the very celebration of Vienna 1900 cannot be understood apart from the uses to which it was put following the war,  for it cannot be denied, and indeed is richly ironic, that the same period suppressed in Nazi discourse has been used to suppress Austria’s turbulent Nazi past.

Papers:

Nathan J. Timpano, University of Miami, Suppressing Max Oppenheimer’s Gay and “Jewish Traces”

Steven Beller, Independent Scholar, Washington D.C., As if they were never there: the Viennese cityscape and the ethnic cleansing of memory

Frances Tanzer, Clark University, The Emigration of Egon Schiele: Jewish Refugees and Austrian Modernism in New York

HGSCEA Events

HGSCEA organizes special events for members such as exhibition tours, scholarly panels, book talks and more. We welcome suggestions and collaborative partners for these events. Please contact members of the board with ideas.

Posted on Categories Events

support for programming

HGSCEA welcomes proposals for the support of scholarly programming related to our academic purview.  Applications should be directed to the board officers and are accepted on a rolling basis.


HGSCEA is proud to support the series From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage.

https://research.kent.ac.uk/emcentraleu/virtual-conversations/
Poster advertising the series of talks From Kyivan Rus’ to Modern Ukraine: Virtual Conversations on History, Art, and Cultural Heritage.
Ukraine’s history, art, and culture are endangered by the ongoing war. This lecture and conversation series by experts in the fields of history, art history, archaeology, heritage, sociology, as well as museums and conservation, among others, presents the region’s rich historical and cultural complexity through its objects, sites, and monuments. A focus on the medieval and early modern periods featuring Greek, Latin, and Slavic contacts, brings to the fore critical evidence to counter modern misrepresentations of Ukraine’s history and cultural heritage.

HGSCEA panel at CAA

HGSCEA sponsors a panel at the annual College Art Association Conference. Call for Session proposals are solicited in January of the year before the conference.


CALL FOR PAPERS: “Health, Illness, and the Art of Medicine”

College Art Association, Chicago, February 2024

This session is sponsored by HGSCEA (Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture)

Carl Ernst Bock’s 1855 best-seller Das Buch von gesunden und kranken Menschen (Leipzig)presaged a decades-long cultural preoccupation with disease and hygiene in Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Nordic countries.  The first illustrated histories of medicine appeared in Germany (by Eugen Holländer and Hermann Peter), while Berlin and Vienna were the sites of pioneering medical discoveries in pathology (Rudolf Virchow), germ theory (Robert Koch), surgical techniques (Theodore Billroth) and antiseptic procedures (Hungarian Ignaz Semmelwies).  Germans were also at the forefront of naturopathy, founding the Deutscher Verein für Naturheilkunde und volksverständliche Gesundheitspflege in 1883 and initiating the Lebensreform movement.  Copenhagen became a center for heliotherapy for which Niels Ryberg Finsen received the Nobel Prize in 1903. Hygiene exhibitions were curated in Vienna in 1906 and in Dresden in 1911.  Despite recurrent pandemic outbreaks, an “epidemic of health” (Paul Niemeyer) prevailed. This session invites papers that consider how this cultural saturation with medical matters was reflected in popular visual culture and art from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1920s in Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Nordic countries. Papers could examine representations related to new medical practices, technology, or homeopathy and, for example, explore visualizations of pandemic disease, surgery, trauma in sick rooms, medical providers, and public health initiatives. Did such images celebrate achievements, express anxiety over medical innovations, or both?  How did the art of medicine in this period intersect with ideologies of and debates about gender, race, empire, and class? 

The respondent is Allison Morehead, Queens University, Canada

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words as well as a 1-page CV to both:

Marsha Morton, Pratt Institute (US) mortonmarsha10@gmail.com

Patricia Berman, Wellesley College (US), pberman@wellesley.edu


HGSCEA at CAA 2023 New York

HGSCEA at CAA 2022 Chicago

HGSCEA’s sponsored session

“Sculpture, Site, and Space: Objects and Environments in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe.”

Chaired by Jackie Jung.

The session, with papers by Luke Fidler, Oeystein Sjaastad, Megan Luke, and Ewa Matyczyk on, respectively, the Braunschweiger Lion, Leif Erikson’s ‘Cult’, Site Specific Sculpture around 1930, and the Brodno Sculpture Park, will take place on Thursday, February 17, from 4:30 to 6 pm CST. (See https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Session/9776)


HGSCEA annual business meeting will take place on Friday, February 18, at noon CST. All members are welcome to attend.

HGSCEA membership form

HISTORIANS OF GERMAN, SCANDINAVIAN & CENTRAL EUROPEAN ART & ARCHITECTURE

An Affiliated Society of the College Art Association

Membership is open to anyone interested in German, Central European, and Scandinavian culture.

Check all that apply
Contributing memberships at $50 and Sustaining Memberships at $100 help cover HGSCEA’s annual costs, which include a dinner reception at the College Art Association Annual Conference, the annual Emerging Scholars Essay Prize, and travel grants to CAA for junior scholars.
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