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 adjuncts and junior scholars.
The annual HGSCEA Emerging Scholars Publication Prize is an award of $500 given to the author of a distinguished essay published the preceding year on any topic in the history of Scandinavian, German or Central European art, architecture, design, or visual culture.
Due at the end of the calendar year.
Submission Requirements:
English language from electronic or print publications
Publication date of that year
Applicants must be either current Ph.D. students or have earned a Ph.D. in the last 5 years
Applicants must be members of HGSCEAat the time of application (Join Here)
The recipient of the Prize (along with honorable mentions as appropriate) will be chosen by the members of the HGSCEA Board, notified in late January, and publicly announced in February.
Submissions should include a copy of the publication and a CV. They should be sent as electronic attachments to HGSCEA’s Secretary.
Emerging Scholars Essay Prize, 2024
Call for Submissions
Submissions are now being accepted for the 13th annual HGSCEA Emerging Scholars Essay Prize, an award of $500 given to the author of a distinguished article or essay published this year on any topic in the history of German, Scandinavian, or Central European art, architecture, design, or visual culture. Submissions, which must be in English and may be from electronic or print publications, must have a publication date of 2024. Applicants must be either current Ph.D. students or have earned a Ph.D. in or after 2020, and must be members of HGSCEA at the time of submission (http://hgscea.org/hgscea-membership-form/). The recipient of the Prize (along with honorable mentions as appropriate) will be chosen by the members of the HGSCEA Board, notified in January 2025, and publicly announced at the HGSCEA member’s dinner at CAA in February. Submissions should include a copy of the publication and a CV. They should be sent as electronic attachments to HGSCEA’s Secretary, Professor Jenny Anger ([email protected]), by December 23, 2024.
2023 Co-Winners
Golan, Tamara. “Mit Dem Kreidestift und Farben: Revolutionizing Grünewald in the German Democratic Republic.” Art History 46, no. 2 (April 2023): 310–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12714.
Norman, David. “A Monochrome at Ukkusissaq: Pia Arke’s Home-Rule Earthworks.” October 184 (May 2023): 115–46. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00487
Honorable Mention:
Oing, Michelle K. “Carnival’s Unstable Objects: Masks as Human–Sculpture Hybrids in Nuremberg’s Schembartlauf.” Sculpture Journal 32, no. 2 (2023): 213–32. https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2023.32.2.05.
In the casual spirit of the blog, I would like to initiate a discussion and exchange of information and experiences regarding the teaching of nineteenth-century German and Central European art in English-speaking countries. While twentieth-century art (at least German) enjoys greater centrality in art history curriculums, nineteenth-century courses are more of a rare breed. Until the last decade, material available in English was fairly limited but that is increasingly no longer the case for German topics. At most schools, however, students who read any of these Central-European languages are very scarce.
Ten years ago I began teaching a graduate course that surveys the century in Germany (Winckelmann to Liebermann, essentially). I initially feared that it would seem extremely obscure and even irrelevant to students at the art school where I teach (Pratt Institute). This was initially the case but over time I have noticed a distinct change in attitude in my students who now regard the material – and issues raised concerning spiritualism, nationalism, gender, etc. – as mainstream. (Philosophers and musicians, nonetheless, remain more familiar figures.) I attribute this change to the ever-growing popularity of German modernism, to the (slowly) expanding number of museum exhibitions, and to the increasing availability of publications – especially essays and articles – in English. Additionally, survey textbooks of nineteenth-century art by Petra Chu and Michelle Facos have expanded coverage of German and Central European contributions.
I have little knowledge of offerings at other institutions apart from courses taught by Cordula Grewe and Christiane Hertel. Do some faculty members teach more specialized classes? Interdisciplinary courses? Would HGCEA members be interested in compiling a database of courses, syllabi, and bibliographies? I would particularly like to gather a list of Ph.D.-granting universities with faculty in this area. The recent retirements of Reinhold Heller and Françoise Forster-Hahn have only contributed to a decline in undergraduate and graduate course offerings. A perusal of CAA’s list of completed dissertations yielded only four in the past seven years:
McColgan, Denise Sarah, “The Sacred Spring of Nature: Gustav Klimt’s Landscape Paintings and Nietzschean Tragic Vision” (Yale, C. Wood), 2005
Becker, Colleen, “Competing Representations: The “Volk” in German Visual Culture, 1890– 1900” (Columbia, A. Higonnet), 2008
Barenscott, Dorothy, “Founding and Finding Modern Hungary in Fin de Siècle Budapest” (University of British Columbia, M. Ryan), 2008
Drozdek, Justyna, “A Taste for Paris: The Modernist Dialogue between France and ‘Young Poland,’ 1890–1914” (Case Western Reserve, A. Helmreich), 2008
More theses are hopefully in progress, but until this situation is rectified German and Central European art history will remain a field of largely Medieval, Renaissance and Twentieth-Century scholarship and publishers will consider manuscripts on nineteenth-century topics to be a speculative venture.
Marsha Morton Professor, Department of Art and Design History Pratt Institute
We are soliciting applications for our fellowship competition 2025/26. Deadline: December 1 – Competition opening: November 1
The Berlin Program offers up to one year of dissertation or postdoctoral research support at the Freie Universität Berlin, one of Germany’s leading research universities. It is open to scholars in all social science and humanities disciplines, including historians working on German and European history since the mid-18th century.
We offer five different fellowships: Berlin Program Dissertation Fellowship, Berlin Program Postdoc Fellowship, Max Kade Berlin Postdoc Fellowship, Kerstin Leitner Berlin Dissertation Fellowship and Kerstin Leitner Berlin Postdoc Fellowship. For key features, eligibility, forms and more, check Fellowships Overview, Guidelines, and Application.
Located in one of the densest and most innovative academic regions in Europe, a Berlin Program Fellowship offers extraordinary research opportunities. Each semester, our research colloquium led by distinguished scholars, serves as the central meeting point to share, discuss and support each other’s work. Fellows are supported by program staff to assist them before and during the research stay.
The Berlin Program is administered in close cooperation with our North American partner and co-sponsor, the German Studies Association (GSA), the largest organization of scholars, professionals, and students who focus on the study of German-speaking Europe from all periods of history and all relevant disciplines.
Please spread the word about this great opportunity,
EPCAF Works in Progress Call for Papers
The European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum seeks proposals for works in progress on any subject pertaining to the association’s geographic and temporal focus. In addition to research related to art and/or visual culture produced in Europe and the European Union in the 20th and 21st century, we also welcome original scholarship that addresses themes that intersect with the region and its wider transcultural context. To this end, papers might consider the presence, reception of, and interaction with European art across the globe. Subjects might engage issues of the impacts of global capital, migration flows and crises, climate change, and more.
Our hope with this session is to encourage an open, energetic, and lively feedback with our colleagues to generate new knowledge and ideas with one another and our EPCAF community.
We aim to host one work in progress seminar in the first week of December 2024, specifically around 10-11:30AM CDT US time. The session will include two to three papers, lasting fifteen minutes each, with feedback time at the end for Q&A from the audience and colleagues moderated by Dr. Sara Blaylock (University of Minnesota Duluth) and Dr. Kerry Greaves (University of Copenhagen). The seminar will be held over Zoom. We happily welcome submissions from MA students, PhD candidates, and early career researchers who wish to share their latest research in a supportive and informal environment.
In order to generate as robust a conversation as possible, we request that any accepted participants invite two people to attend the workshop. We are happy to facilitate connections between participants and other scholars.
We are now accepting 250-word proposal submissions. Please email your submission and a short biography (max. 100 words) to [email protected] and kerr[email protected] by October 11, 2024.
Job Posting
Call for Manuscripts – German Visual Culture
Edited by Dr Christian Weikop, Senior Lecturer, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh ISSN: 2296-0805
www.peterlang.com/view/serial/GVC
I am writing to inform you of the launch of the first edition of our new journal: Art East Central (https://arteastcentral.eu). The journal is an open-access peer-reviewed English-language journal dedicated to the art, architecture and visual culture of east central Europe, from 1800 to the present. The editorial lays out some of the basic ideas behind the journal as well as the scope and meanings of the term ‘east central Europe.’
We look forward to receiving submissions to the journal, either scholarly articles or reviews. We hope that future issues the journal may also serve as a platform for the publication of translations of source texts, and will welcome proposals.
Please pass on the word to colleagues and researchers who may be interested!
Prof. Matthew RampleyRC
Principal Investigator | Continuity / Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918-1939
Ongoing
Research Forum for German Visual Culture (RFGVC)
The Research Forum for German Visual Culture (RFGVC) is a network organisation that exists under the auspices of the Visual Arts Research Institute, Edinburgh (VARIE) based at the University of Edinburgh, and involving VARIE consortium partners – Edinburgh College of Art, the National Galleries of Scotland, National Museums Scotland, National Library of Scotland, University of Glasgow, and the University of St Andrews, as well as other partner institutions in the UK and abroad.
The RFGVC is inter- and multi- disciplinary, inter-school, inter-institutional, and international in orientation. The scope of research interest encompasses Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and while the central focus is likely to be on modern and contemporary visual culture, the forum does not exclude coverage of earlier periods.
In the first instance, the forum is designed to cohere and draw upon the considerable expertise and research networks of Germanists based in Scottish academic and art institutions, and to create various opportunities for knowledge transfer. Beyond this goal, it is intended as a key research exchange point encouraging Anglo-American-German relations within a matrix of international research institutions, centres, associations, and societies.
The RFGVC will encourage contact between British, American, and German art historians and curators, fostering and contributing to the development of national and international collaborative, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research by means of seminars, conferences, colloquia, and lectures. In due course, the RFGVC will also develop an active programme of film screenings and other events.
For information about the forum, and for details about forum events, visit the RFGVC website at http://rfgvc.tumblr.com/
The Research Center “Humanities, Modernity, Globalization” at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany invites applications for Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities
The position allows for independent research, but the successful applicant will be expected to contribute to the center’s research agenda; be involved in ongoing research initiatives; assist in project management, fund raising, and third-party funding applications. In addition, s/he will teach one course per semester, either a seminar related to topics of his/her expertise and/or an introductory course.
The research center is particularly interested in applicants whose scholarship focuses on contemporary issues, intercultural concepts, and global perspectives in fields such as art history, literature, cultural history, religious studies, media studies, anthropology, and philosophy. For further information regarding the research center, visit our website: http://www.jacobs-university.de/hmg
Successful applicants will hold a Ph.D. degree or equivalent in a humanities discipline. S/he will be responsible, self-motivated, and enjoy working in an international academic environment. In addition to excellent writing and presentation skills, organization and management skills are essential. Proven experience with project management and/or the acquisition of third party funds will be considered a definite plus. Fluency in English is a must, knowledge of other languages in as much as it is required by the candidate´s research interests. Candidates who do not speak German are encouraged to take part in the German courses offered by Jacobs University. Experience with ehumanities is especially welcome.
Jacobs University is a private, international, English-language University in Northern Germany. It is an equal opportunity employer and is certified “Family Friendly” by the Hertie Foundation. For further information see www.jacobs-university.de
Please sent your application as one PDF document to [email protected] and include the following items:
Letter of application
Curriculum Vitae with list of publications
Names and contact information of three references
A short description of three courses the candidate could teach, with indication of whether the course would be taught at an introductory or advanced level)
In addition to the PDF application, we ask you to provide us with electronic copies of two published articles or book chapters.
All correspondence should be addressed to:
Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche
Research Center “Humanities, Modernity, Globalization”
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Jacobs University gGmbH
Campus Ring 1, Research IV
28759 Bremen
Germany
Call for Manuscript Proposals: German History in Context
Camden House is pleased to launch a new series in German history entitled GERMAN HISTORY IN CONTEXT. We especially encourage submissions of monographs and edited collections on any aspect of post-1945 cultural, political, and social history. Investigations of the Third Reich, the Weimar Republic, and Imperial Germany are also welcomed. Of particular interest to the series editors are studies that explore their given historical topic in a wider perspective: for instance, by comparing cultural developments in East and West Germany; by seeking to understand developments in Germany in a transnational or global context; or by analyzing the degree to which events in postwar Germany were shaped by the legacy of earlier eras. All manuscripts will be peer reviewed and, if accepted for publication, copyedited and produced in line with the highest standards in academic publishing.
Series editor is BILL NIVEN, Professor of History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.
Members of the editorial advisory board are Professor Stefan Berger of the University of Bochum, Professor Atina Grossmann of The Cooper Union, New York, and Professor Andrew Port of Wayne State University.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, “promote[s] academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany.”
The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is the largest funding organisation in the world supporting the international exchange of students and scholars. Since it was founded in 1925, more than 1.5 million scholars in Germany and abroad have received DAAD funding. It is a registered association and its members are German institutions of higher education and student bodies.
The Gerda Henkel Foundation was established in 1976 by Lisa Maskell (1914 – 1998) in memory of her mother Gerda Henkel. Headquartered in Düsseldorf, the Gerda Henkel Foundation is a charitable organisation under private law that is independent of today’s Henkel Group. The Foundation supports national and international academic projects in the following subjects: Archaeology, History, Historical Islamic Studies, Art History, History of Law, and Pre- and Protohistory. The Foundation is active both inside and outside Germany.
106th College Art Association Annual Conference Los Angeles, February 21–24, 2018
HGSCEA Session
Saturday, February 24, 2018, 2–3:30 Los Angeles Convention Center, room 501A
Critical Race Art Histories in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe
Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University, “Cultural Appropriation and Modern Design: The Art Colony at Gödölló in Critical Perspective”
Patricia G. Berman, Wellesley College, “Whitewashing Whiteness in Nordic ‘Vitalism'”
Bart Pushaw, University of Maryland, “Visual Reparations: Scandinavian Privilege and the Discontents of Nordic Art’s Colonialist Turn”
Kristin Schroeder, University of Virginia, “From Sideshow to Portrait: Looking at Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man and Rasha, the Black Dove (1929)”
Critical race theory, which entered art history through postcolonial analyses of representations of black bodies, has remained relatively peripheral to art historical studies of Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, whose colonial histories differ from those of countries such as Britain, France, and the United States. At the same time, art historical examinations of white supremacy in the Nazi period are frequently sectioned off from larger histories of claims to white superiority and privilege. Centering critical race theory in the art histories of Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, this panel will consider representations of race in the broadest of terms — including “white makings of whiteness,” in the words of Richard Dyer. We invite papers that together will explore the imagination and construction of a spectrum of racial and ethnic identities, as well as marginalization and privilege, in and through German, Scandinavian, and Central European art, architecture, and visual culture in any period. How have bodies been racialized through representation, and how might representations of spaces, places, and land — the rural or wilderness vs. the urban, for instance — also be critically analyzed in terms of race? Priority will be given to papers that consider the intersections of race with other forms of subjectivity and identity.
HGSCEA Members at CAA 2018
Peter Chametzky, “Space, Time, and Motion in Maziar Moradi’s Ich Werde Deutsch” Session: Time, Space, Movement: Art between Perception, Imagination, and Fiction Saturday, 2-3:30 p.m., Room 406A
Sabine Eckmann Co-Chair Session: International Abstraction after World War II: The US, France, Germany, and Beyond” Wednesday, 8:30-10:00 a.m., Room 410
Eva Forgacs “The 1968 Prague Spring in Central Europe. Art and Politics” Session: ’68 and After: Art and Political Engagement in Europe Thursday, 2-3:30 p.m., Room 409A
Peter Fox “Germanizing Intarsia c. 1900” Session: Material Techniques in the Cultural Sphere Wednesday, February 21, 8:30 – 11 AM. Room 409B
Susan Funkenstein “Visualizing Dance in the Third Reich: Gender, Body, … Modernity?” Session: Modernity, Identity, and Propaganda Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Room 501B
Tomasz Grusiecki “Of Mixed Origins: Tracing Michał Boym’s ‘Sum Xu’” Session: Archives, Documents, Evidence Wednesday, 2-3:30 p.m., Room 409B
Charlotte Healy “Knotted, Woven, Unraveling: Fabric as Structure in the Work fo Paul Klee” Session: Structure, Texture, Facture in Avant-Garde Art Saturday, 4-5:30 p.m., Room 501A
Juliet Koss Discussant Session: Avant-Gardes and Varieties of Fascism, Part II Friday, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m., Room 407
Max Koss “The Intimacy of Paper: Fin-de-siècle Print Culture and the Politics of the Senses” Session: Intimate Geographies Thursday, 4-5:30 p.m., Room 410
Megan Luke, “Books of Stone” Session: Avant-Gardes and Varieties of Fascism, Part I Wednesday, 2-3:30 p.m., Room 501A
Bibiana Obler “A Strip of Red Velvet” Session: Warp, Weft, World: Postwar Textiles and Transcultural Form Friday, 8:30-10:00 a.m., Room 408B
Dorothy Price Association for Art History/Art History/Wiley Publishing reception Thursday, 5:30 pm, Santa Anita-A Room, Lobby Level, Westin Bonaventura Hotel
Jeannette Redensek “Cool, brittle, luminous, clear: Josef Albers and the materiality of glass at the Bauhaus” Session: Structure, Texture, Facture in Avant-Garde Art Saturday, 4-5:30 p.m., Room 501A
Nathan Timpano “Blue Horse, Yellow Cow: Franz Marc, Romanticism, and the Color of Theosophy” Session: Interaction with Color Redux Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-12 p.m., Room 402B
James van Dyke “The Vulgarity of Otto Dix’s Facture” Session: Structure, Texture, Facture in Avant-Garde Art Saturday, 4-5:30 p.m., Room 501A
Greg Williams “Practice Situations: Franz Erhard Walther and the Pedagogical Impulse” Session: No Experiments: Art, Culture, and Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1949-1989 Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m., Room 410
Andres Zervigon Discussant Session: Avant-Gardes and Varieties of Fascism, Part I Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m., Room 501A
Historians of German Scandinavian and Central European Art and Architecture (HGSCEA) Sponsored Sessions:
The HGSCEA panel at the CAA conference, New York 2017, where the theme was Revivalism in Twentieth century Design in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe.From left to right: Paul Stirton (chair), Anni Vartola (Aalto University, Helsinki), Charlotte Ashby (Birkbeck, London), Hedvig Mårdh (Uppsala University, Sweden), Erin Sassin (Middlebury College), Marija Dremaite (Vilnius University, Lithuania), Dragan Damjanović (Zagreb University, Croatia).
Revivalism in Twentieth-Century Design in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, Part I Date and Time: Friday, 02/17/17: 3:30–5:00 PM, Nassau Suite-East/West, 2nd Floor Chair: Paul Stirton, Bard Graduate Center
Christopher Long (University of Texas at Austin) Adolf Loos, Oskar Strnad, and the Biedermeier Revival in Vienna
Charlotte Ashby (Birkbeck, University of London) National – Regional – International: The City Halls of Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo
Juliet Kinchin (Museum of Modern Art) The Neo-Baroque, the ‘Folk Baroque’ and Art Deco in Central Europe
Erin Sassin (Middlebury College) The Biedermeier Revival: Artisans, and Ledgenheime
Revivalism in Twentieth-Century Design in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe, Part II Date and Time: Friday, 02/17/17: 5:30–7:00 PM, Nassau Suite-East/West, 2nd Floor Chair: Paul Stirton, Bard Graduate Center
Room: Nassau Suite East/West, 2nd Floor, New York Hilton Midtown
Dragan Damjanović (University of Zagreb) Neo-Historicism in Croatian Architecture of the first Half of the 20th Century
Marija Dremaite (Vilnius University) The Folklorist Revival within Soviet Modernism in the Baltic Republics in the 1970s
Hedvig Mårdh (Uppsala University) Translating the Gustavian: Heritage Consumption and National Aesthetics in Sweden
Anni Vartola (Aalto University, Finland) Eclectic regression? Revivalist phenomena in postmodern Finnish architecture
There’s No Such Thing as Visual Culture
Wednesday, February 3
Chair: Corine Schleif (Arizona State University) Visual display, the gaze, and scopic economies have played important roles in the consideration of German art. Yet visual perception never existed in isolation. In fact, neuroscience demonstrates interactions of many sensibles with respect to cognition, emotion, and memory. Presenters in this session might observe how the visual was augmented, diminished, or contradicted by the interplay of other senses. They might analyze how museum practices have feminized objects by subjugating them through the aestheticizing gaze, thereby foreclosing more interactive sensualities. Participants might theorize liturgical processions, public Heiltumsweisungen, theatrical Gesamtkunstwerke, popular reenactments, or documentary reproductions. Why did our discipline develop as pursuant of the visual? How did early German and Central European art historians support or resist purely visual regimes? Why did the “haptic” gain consideration in German art historiography? What might scholarly production learn either from cinematographic attempts to engage the entire sensorium or from journalistic practices voluntarily limiting visual representation of sensitive material?
Charting Cubism across Central and Eastern Europe Friday, February 13 at CAA and Saturday, February 14 at the MET Museum
This symposium consists of a CAA session sponsored by HGCEA and a related session co-organized by HGCEA and the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Chairs: Anna Jozefacka, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Hunter College, City University of New York and Associate Curator, Leonard A. Lauder Collection, New York, and Luise Mahler, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Keynote speaker: Prof. PhDr. Vojtěch Lahoda, Director, Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague
Respondent: Éva Forgács, Adjunct Professor, Liberal Art and Sciences, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA
The impact of Cubism on twentieth century art was instant, widespread, and long lasting. Participating in the Cubist circles were artists and intellectuals from various backgrounds, including a large contingent from Central and Eastern Europe. The cultural exchange between this vast geo-political region and Paris – facilitated by the networks of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, and scholars – culminated in contributions that are integral to the theoretical implications of Cubism. Building on the growing scholarship on the region’s artistic avant-gardes, this two-part symposium investigates two inter-related questions. The first concerns ways in which Cubism was integrated into the cultural scenes of the various nations, as it was here that Cubist language diversified and crossbred with approaches to visual form previously unconsidered. The second investigates strategies used by artists, critics, and scholars from these European regions that aided them in asserting their participation in the Cubist movement and the surrounding discourse, both at home and abroad, and by so doing internationalized the movement. As Cubist scholarship begins to address the movement’s global influence, Charting Cubism considers the specificities of the interaction and engagement with Cubism in Central and Eastern Europe, and evaluates how local artists, dealers, collectors, critics, and scholars partook in its growth and evolution.
The papers presented in the first part of the symposium examine the Czech journal Umělecký měsíčník (Arts Monthly), the adoption of Cubism in Latvia post-1918 independence, and the complicated case of Hungarian Cubism. In the second part of the symposium papers delve into the reception of Cubism in the region by focusing on Czech art historian and collector Vincenc Kramář, Ukrainian painter and theorist Oleksa Hryshchenko (Alexis Gritchenko), and Cold War era Soviet art criticism and theory.
First Session:
“Platform for Czech Cubism – the journal Umělecký měsíčník (Arts Monthly)” Vendula Hnidkova, Ph.D., Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences, Prague In 1911, a group of young Czech avant-garde artists founded an association named Skupina výtvarných umělců. Interested in Cubism, they rapidly ascended as the style’s most influential agents. Their published journal Umělecký měsíčník (Arts Monthly), maintained two objectives: to create a platform for Cubist art, ideas, and theories within Czech culture, and to propagate and popularize local art abroad. The magazine’s editors intended to publish a German and French edition employing regional collaborators and correspondents, among them Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Adolphe Basler, and Guillaume Apollinaire. This paper will analyze the editors’ personal contacts and networking strategies as well as their particular relationships with various artistic localities. Such analysis will allow for an investigation of the journal’s impact on the reception of Cubism in the region before World War I, and the role of Czech Cubist artists on the international art scene.
“Latvian Cubists, Table for Six…” Mark Allen Svede, Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art, The Ohio State University By late 1918, Latvian political independence was declared, and native modernists sought similar autonomy. The expressionism they explored during the war years was soon exchanged for Cubism, and in Rīga the ascendancy of this style was startlingly swift. The newly formed art museum acquired Cubist works for its collection, grants for travel abroad from a cash-strapped government were awarded to modernists more frequently than to traditionalists, and Cubist maquettes were in such serious contention for national monument design concourses that these competitions were suspiciously, repeatedly interrupted. Cubism’s penetration of public consciousness was such that a popular café named “Sukubs,” a portmanteau of “Suprematism” and “Cubism,” opened in Rīga. The conspicuous success of these progressive artists rankled traditionalists, and critical attacks upon the Cubists soon bore the epithet “sukubisms.” This mutual antagonism escalated to spectacular levels, in the press and in the courtroom, on gallery walls and on snowy cobblestone streets.
“Known and Unknown Hungarian Cubists” Gergely Barki, Art Historian, Advisor of 20th Century Art at Szépművészeti Múzeum – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest In around 1910, when the spirit of Cubism was predominant in Paris, a young generation of Hungarian artists arrived in the French capital and engaged with this new pictorial language. While a number of them exhibited alongside the style’s original creators, their art appeared only sporadically and exerted less influence at home. Although Hungarian artists produced Cubist work, its near non-existence in Hungary at the time did not allow for a unified Cubist group to develop. Only few works created by older Hungarian painters who had returned to Budapest from Paris after 1906 to 1908 (primarily importing Fauvism and Cézanne-ism) showed Cubist tendencies. Instead, members of the younger generation living in Paris formed a Hungarian Cubist diaspora in Paris. Yet, due to the outbreak of World War I the majority was forced to stay abroad and unable to continue their work and participate in the spread of Cubism in Hungary.
Second Session:
“Picasso, Braque and Kramář: The Czech Reception of Synthetic Cubism” Nicholas Sawicki, Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of Art, Architecture and Design, Lehigh University Between 1912 and 1914, Picasso and Braque experimented with a range of new materials and techniques that dramatically shifted the direction of Cubism, towards what is often described as its “synthetic” phase. Garnering mostly limited interest from buyers and audiences at the time, these works attracted unique attention from Vincenc Kramář, the Czech collector and historian of Cubism. Kramář viewed them during his travels to Paris and made several purchases for his collection. On his interpretation, this newest body of work marked an important turning point for the two artists: an innovative use of pictorial fragments, truncated lettering and manufactured materials that introduced to Cubism a new “quality of reality,” while definitively breaking with the traditions of conventional representation. Drawing on Kramář’s private and published writing, this paper examines his evolving understanding of Picasso’s and Braque’s 1912 to 1914 production, and its echoes in the Czech artistic community.
“A Crisis in Cubism: The Theoretical Writings of Alexis Gritchenko” Myroslava M. Mudrak, Professor Emerita, The Ohio State University During the critical decade of Cubism’s expansion (1908-1918), the Ukrainian painter and theorist, Oleksa Hryshchenko (Alexis Gritchenko) who first encountered Cubism in Paris in the 1910s, helped mitigate the indiscriminate adoption of Cubist aesthetics by Eastern European artists by empowering them to recognize and incorporate local traditions, such as the Byzantine, and by so doing render abstraction accessible to the public. In his major tracts of 1912 and 1913, Hryshchenko promoted modern painting’s transubstantiation of the object into an absolute, an act meaningful to viewers habituated to scrutinizing icon images. In his 1917 essay, “The ‘Crisis of Art’ and Contemporary Painting” Hryshchenko identified an existential dilemma in Cubist art brought on by what Paris-based, émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev described as “dematerialization” within Cubism, as well as an ensuing threat of alienation from viewers, a dilemma to be played out in Eastern European modernist painting of the interwar period.
“Cubism and Soviet Art Criticism during the Cold War” Kirill Chunikhin, Ph.D. Candidate at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, and Terra Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Although Cubist art was rarely exhibited in the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, dozens of Soviet authors wrote on the subject. Cubism was afforded no exemption from the hostility directed toward all of Western avant-garde art by Soviet art criticism, with the movement described as formalist, anti-humanistic, and bourgeois. However, the voices critical of Cubism were not monolithic. While one is hard-pressed to find official apologies for Cubism during the Cold War, the intellectual arguments and tone of critical discussion of Cubism vary. The paper will focus on different theories of Cubism within Marxist-Leninist aesthetics and on the ways those theories served one common purpose—reproducing the official negative stance on modernism.
Popularizing Architecture
Chair: Wallis Miller (University of Kentucky) Popularizing Architecture will focus on the dissemination and circulation of new ideas in architecture to non-professional audiences in Germany and Central Europe since the late nineteenth century, when publications that included architecture began to emerge in large numbers. Over time, architectural exhibitions, film, radio, television, and the Internet joined newspaper and magazine articles to form a complex media landscape that continues to address a wide range of audiences today. Recent research on architecture and media has been primarily concerned with professional contexts, examining case studies focusing on Western Europe and the United States. The session will shift this regional focus to Germany and Central Europe to examine more explicitly the relationship between architectural proposals—theoretical or built, traditional or innovative—and non-professional audiences while also exploring the concept of popularization. Papers on a range of places and periods since the mid-nineteenth century will attend to the following questions: How did non-professional audiences encounter new ideas about architecture? How did this experience diverge from that of professional architects? To what extent did the dissemination of architectural ideas exploit new media? How might a regional focus on Germany and Central Europe prompt particular questions and conclusions regarding architecture and its popularization?
“The Viennese Interior and its Media” Eric Anderson, Rhode Island School of Design Vienna in the 1870s was a city transformed not only by the monumental architecture of the Ringstrasse but also by popular interest in interior decoration fed by a nascent media culture of design. Artists and tastemakers employed a variety of techniques to promote home decoration to a growing middle-class audience. This paper presents four media—a book, a museum, an “ethnographic village,” and an artist’s studio—and poses questions about the mechanisms through which meanings accrued around interiors. How did various media facilitate unique forms of spectatorship? Who consumed these representations? How did meanings vary among different formats and audiences? At stake in these questions are insights into not only the cultural history of Vienna, but also our own, heavily mediated experience of design, in which publications, museums, and trade fairs continue to shape meaning in ways both powerful and too often taken for granted.
“’Building Unleashed’: Building as public discourse in the 1929-30 Bauhaus traveling exhibition” Dara Kiese, Pratt Institute The 1929-30 Bauhaus traveling exhibition was Hannes Meyer’s opportunity to showcase the school’s new approach and accomplishments during his tenure as second director. Publicity, sales and advancing ties to the manufacturing industry were main objectives, but Meyer’s ambitions were greater. This paper considers the exhibition as a springboard for public discourse and user interaction about the built environment through installations, exhibition catalogues, lectures, publications and press coverage. With a focus on theoretical architectural student studies and multidisciplinary practices and methodologies, the exhibition cultivated a new relationship between architect and visitor/consumer/user, in which the end users played an active role in the design and interpretive processes. Current Bauhaus pedagogical principles and designs equipped the public sphere with discursive and practical tools necessary to imagine and create individualized, sustainable environments—building unleashed.
“‘You are Now Entering Occupied Berlin’: Architects and Rehab-Squatters in West Berlin” Emily Pugh, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts In the 1970s and 1980s, the West Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg formed the center of a movement that brought architecture professionals together with political activists and squatters to reform urban housing policy in the city. My paper will focus on an important center of exchange between these groups: the Bauhof Handicraft Collective (Bauhof Handwerkskollektiv). Run by members of the squatter movement, the Bauhof provided a place where non-professionals could learn basic construction skills and techniques, and thus undertake “rehab-squatting.” For professional architects, such collectives, along with squats themselves, provided opportunities for experimenting with new and innovative approaches like community-based design and adaptive reuse. Examining archival materials related to the Bauhof as well as alternative architectural publications, including the journal Arch +, I will consider how politically-engaged architectural practices were “popularized,” both within the rehab squatting community and in professional circles, for example as part of the 1987 International Building Exhibition.
HGCEA’s annual dinner at CAA was held on February 14 at the Scandinavia House and attended by sixty members. The event this year honored the service and scholarly accomplishments of Françoise Forster-Hahn and Reinhold Heller upon their recent retirement from teaching. Their careers and influence were remembered in talks by Steven Mansbach and Allison Morehead, and a poem by Marion Deshmukh.
First prize: Pepper Stettler, “The Object, the Archive, and the Origins of Neue Sachlichkeit Photography” in the journal History of Photography, August 2011.
Shira Brisman, “Sternkraut: The Word that Unlocks Dürer’s Self Portrait of 1493,” in the exhibition catalog Der frühe Dürer, Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2012.
HGCEA Emerging Scholars
Chair: Keith Holz (Western Illinois University)
Over the past several years the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture have sponsored sessions offering an opportunity for young scholars to share their work in progress with a professional audience. We aim to enrich the discourse within the field of German and Central European art history by encouraging a new generation of researchers. This year’s session presents new research informed by critical thinking on Romantic landscape paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, printmaking and printed currency during the years of Germany’s hyperinflation, and on the historiography of twentieth-century architecture in Poland.
“The Eye and the Hand: Caspar David Friedrich and the Organic Instruments of Artistic Creation'” Nina Amstutz, University of Toronto
“TIn the 1820s, Caspar David Friedrich painted several anthropomorphic landscapes. Two such paintings, I argue, take the eye and the hand as their subjects. These organs are not painted in the likeness of the human body; they are metamorphosed into landscape. Eyes and hands are the conventional instruments of the imagination, and are often emphasized in self-portraiture. Their potency as symbols of creation is linked with their religious usage as emblems of God’s creative intervention. Friedrich reduces the traditional Christian iconography of the eye and hand to pure landscape, suggesting a discovery of God’s benevolent eye and divine handiwork in the wonders of nature. But these paintings also read as personal reflections on the status of eyes and hands in the creative process. Looking to analogies between the body and nature in Romantic nature philosophy, I contend that Friedrich conceptualizes the artist’s activity as an earthly equivalent to divine creation.
“Impressions of Inflation: Prints, Paper, and Prices in Germany, 1918-1923” Erin Sullivan, University of Southern California
During the years of rampant inflation in Germany, the atmosphere of economic anxiety encouraged a boom in print production. The inflation is visible as subject in prints by artists including Max Beckmann and George Grosz, and in popular press illustrations. But its traces are also present in the materials and the marketing of graphic works, as prints were increasingly promoted for their potential exchange value. This paper will explore these traces, and consider them next to characteristics of the ever-expanding supply of paper money, or Inflationsgeld. Prints and paper money shared attributes that became problematic in the context of inflation: both were “mechanically” reproduced, and their perceived value was tied to their relative rarity. Both also employed different strategies to affirm faith in the abstract, rather than actual, value of printed paper. The graphic arts, therefore, offer a unique visual and material archive of the inflation years.
“Historical Overhangs: Problematizing Cold War Era Temporal Frameworks in Polish Architectural History” Dr. Anna Jozefacka, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Historians of Eastern and Central European twentieth-century art and architecture who investigate the influence of politics and ideology on such disciplines routinely adapt their work to the well-established pre-war / post-war division of historical time. Validated by the mayhem of World War II, underscored by the establishment of communist regimes, and codified by Cold War era politics, such a politically based compartmentalization of historical time weighs heavily on the art and architectural history of this region. The paper uses the development of twentieth-century Warsaw to investigate the validity of that division and debate its consequences for art historical inquiries. Contrary to many studies of Warsaw’s post-World War II rebuilding, this investigation positions the city’s recovery efforts within a broader temporal framework that takes into account the prior thirty years of architectural and urban design effort to transform Warsaw into a capital city for the emerging modern nation state.
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Panel I
Chair: Brett Vanhoesen, University of Nevada, Reno, and Elizabeth Otto, State University of New York at Buffalo
From Charlemagne to Schengen, the physical borders of Central European nations have been the subjects of constant dispute. Equally as fraught are the complex debates that have raged around notions of national and individual identity, which have been formed through such concepts as race, ethnicity, nation, temporality, religion, gender, and sexuality. These constructs have been powerfully solidified in visual representations. The papers for the panel “Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture” exemplify new approaches to concepts of the Other and related ideas of insiders and outsiders in representations from the Middle Ages to the present. Contributors will address discursive arenas and visual cultures that reflect the influence of trade, crusades, colonialism, post-coloniality, and tourism as they helped to form images and ideas of Others. Some of our panelists explore visual culture in relation to subtle and overt challenges to established institutions, structures of inclusion and exclusion, or conventional power dynamics. A number of the papers in this session rethink tropes of particular Central European identities and investigate how supranational constructs such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality were supported or challenged in visual representations of nation or Volk. Lastly, this panel will examine how visual materials enabled those considered marginal to engender agency through subcultures or other sites of resistance. Above all, we hope that this panel will provoke a broad spectrum of rich, rigorous engagement with notions of Othering across geographical and temporal boundaries in the Central European context.
“Central Europe’s Others, Now and a Thousand Years Ago: ‘The Exhibition Europe’s Centre around A.D. 1000′” William J. Diebold, Reed College
“The exhibition Europe’s Centre around A.D. 1000,” on view from 2000 to 2002 in major museums in Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, used visual and verbal expressions of otherness to define a central European identity. The exhibition emphasized the similarities between the present and the Middle Ages and argued that central Europe was unified around the year 1000 in ways that were remarkably similar to the kind of unification that was perceived to be taking place at the time of the exhibition, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because the exhibition did not take the expected position that the medieval past was other, it needed something else against which to define its view of central Europe. It found this crucial other in the non-Christian peoples of high medieval Europe: the Jews and the various groups that had not been converted to Christianity.
“Site/Sight of Alterity: Albrecht Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse of c. 1496” Bradley J. Cavallo, Temple University
Despite its network of intersecting erotic gazes, no sustained attempts have been made to interpret Dürer’s “The Men’s Bathhouse” in the context of early-Modern gender normativity, its Other, or their regulation. Dürer’s print addresses these issues ambiguously by presenting a homo-social setting imagined as the site/sight of a homo-sexual desire that must conceal itself under the cover of inaction. His idealized naked males can look but can’t act on their desires because of their awareness of the unobtrusive act of surveillance performed by a clothed figure behind them. Overpowering them into stasis, his gaze analogizes that of a society desirous to prohibit sexual acts and hence maintain prescribed sexualities.
As depicted by Dürer, passive coercion in the form of acknowledged observation governs bodies best by encouraging them to regulate themselves, aware as they are of the gaze but not when, where, or how they might be inspected and judged.
“Savages on Display: The European Peasant and the Native North American at Central European Fairs in the Nineteenth Century” Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University
World fairs and regional exhibitions were important venues in nineteenth-century Central Europe for expressing national identity. Ostensibly organized as celebrations of industry and empire, these events showcased the contrast between primitive and civilized in temporary pavilions and in exhibits of applied arts. By the 1890s ethnographers on both sides of the Atlantic, fueled by cultural anxiety about vanishing traditions in the face of industrialization as much as by the spirit of scientific inquiry, constructed elaborate villages demonstrating lifestyle and ceremonial practice from Moravian village weddings to Kwakiutl potlatches. This paper suggests that the Central European fascination with the Native North American was a response to industrialism and to the rise of nationalist movements in the late nineteenth century, and begins to explore a transatlantic dialogue, in which the image of the European peasant likewise became a surrogate for American ideas about tradition, immigration, and civilization.
“Otto Dix’s Jankel Adler and the Materiality of the Eastern Jew in Weimar Culture” James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri-Columbia
This paper will consider a portrait painted in 1926 by the German artist Otto Dix, one of the most provocative and prominent artists of his day. In so doing, it will reflect upon what this particular picture contributes, on the one hand, to our understanding of the role of the Other in the constitution of Dix’s subjectivity and public image. On the other, the paper is intended to draw attention to the ambiguous, perhaps ironic presence of (anti-Semitic) stereotypes in, rather than simply against, Weimar Culture. The picture in question is Dix’s portrait of Jankel Adler, a Polish Jew who lived and worked as a painter in the Rhineland after the First World War and until his emigration after the formation of Hitler’s government in early 1933. Best known for his paintings of Jewish types and customs, Adler was a prominent figure in the avant-garde circles in Düsseldorf and Cologne.
“The Roma Pavilion: Contemporary Art and Transnational Activism” Brianne Cohen, Université catholique de Louvain
This paper analyzes the Roma Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Entitled “Calling the Witness,” the exhibition staged a stream of live “testimony” by artists, filmmakers, social workers, political activists, art historians, and more in order to interrogate the stateless position of Romani peoples today. Perhaps more than any minority in Central Europe, the Roma have been particularly demonized in the last decade as cultural outsiders. The pavilion assumed a contestatory symbolic role within the Biennale’s nationalistic structure.
Located at the UNESCO headquarters in Venice, “Calling the Witness” was also illustrative of a move away from nation-state-based cultural sponsorship towards other transnational humanitarian, legal, and social-activist models. How may such NGO-like models enliven visual-symbolic resistance to cultural Othering in Central Europe? What are some of the limitations of this shift in contemporary art? Such analyses are critical at a time of increasingly fluid borders and sociopolitical uncertainty in Europe.
Commentator: Maria Makela
Central Europe’s Others in Art and Visual Culture, Panel II
“A Black Jewish Astrologer in a German Renaissance Manuscript” Paul H. D. Kaplan, Purchase College, State University of New York
Among the thousands of images of black Africans in pre-1800 European art, the depiction of a person of color in the act of writing is extremely rare. This paper explores a 1520 miniature by the Nürnberg artist Hans Hauser, an author portrait of the Jewish astrologer Sahl ibn Bishr (fl. ca. 820) which precedes one of his treatises. Hauser, probably at the behest of his patron, Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg, depicts Sahl – pen in hand and spectacles perched on his nose – with emphatically dark skin and African features. This unique image must reflect the influence of Joachim’s brother, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg. Albrecht’s devotion to and promotion of two black African saints (Maurice and Fidis) resulted in many Christian images of Africans, but Hauser’s painting, of a Jew who wrote in Arabic for Muslim patrons, represents an unusual extension of this interest in Africans into the secular realm.
“Czech, Slovak, and Rusyn: Nation-building in First Republic Czechoslovakia” Karla Huebner, Wright State University
With the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918, this “multinational nation-state”—inhabited by Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Jews, Rusyns, and many other less numerous ethnicities–needed to create an identity both internally and abroad. However, a major reason for bringing Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia into the new state was in fact the existing tension between Czechs and Germans, which prompted Czech nation-builders to seek a Slavic majority. Who, then, was considered Czechoslovak? How would the new citizens be portrayed in visual culture? This paper examines how Czech and Slovak periodicals represented Czech, Slovak, and Rusyn women during the First Republic and how Czech periodicals gradually but increasingly began to show Slovak and Rusyn women as Other, contrasting with an urban Czech ideal of a fashionable, active, efficient young woman. While remaining respectful, these representations show a growing recognition of difference and the Czechs’ move away from a sense of idealized pan-Slavic unity.
“The Outsider’s Vision: Bohumil Kubišta as Social Critic” Eleanor Moseman, Colorado State University
The Czech artist Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918) represents a self-imposed outsider fixed on exposing the tensions of class and ethnicity in Habsburg Prague, where Czech- and German-speakers compete for cultural, industrial, religious and political power. Kubišta’s paintings and writings reveal his engagement with the impact of modernity on social structure and the utopian view of art’s role in social progress, a stance not fully attainable without adopting the position of outsider. Steeped in Marxist philosophy, Kubišta targets capitalist mechanisms of access and labor, set against the religious underpinnings of bourgeois society, which reinforce the imperial power of social elites. While economic need dictated his enlistment in the Habsburg navy, the seemingly contradictory status of a modern artist as imperial sailor actually provided Kubišta with the necessary distance to recognize and critique class and ethnic stratification in Prague as symptomatic of broader power structures reinforced by capitalist and imperialist domination.
“From Fiction to Fact: The Need to Document in Post-Yugoslav Art” Nadia Perucic, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
In Denmark, ideas of nationalism were perhaps never more highly charged than during the German occupation of World War II. To the leading modern artists of the period, at stake were not only notions of national identity and political belief, but also the very survival of culture itself. In response, the social-activist collective and eponymous journal Helhesten spearheaded cultural resistance in Nazi-occupied Denmark through a radical art that promoted ideas of community, experimentation, and Danish folk in opposition to the Nazi conception of Volk. This paper explores how Helhesten mobilized the chaos and fear brought about by the occupation to establish a new kind of countercultural movement that set the stage for post-war groups such as CoBrA. It also serves as a reassessment of the emergence of later twentieth-century avant-gardes as well as the way in which art history understands the exchange between national and international, and local and foreign.
“To Hell and Back: ‘Helhesten’ and Cultural Resistance in World War II Denmark” Kerry Greaves, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York
Following the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-1995 and the breakup of the country into several states, the new political and cultural leadership established regimes that caused a general closing of society, different from the restrictions that characterized socialist Yugoslavia. Memories of the socialist past were suppressed, unsavory aspects of the present were ignored, and outsiders and other undesirables were marginalized. My paper focuses on Post-Yugoslav artists who, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, aimed to reverse this trend by recovering forgotten histories or highlighting contemporary issues that were censored by their new governments and the mainstream media. These artists often used extensive preliminary research as part of their method, leading to works with a documentary or journalistic format. I will show how, by adopting elements of reportage, artists aimed to position their artworks in opposition to the dominant public discourse in an effort to shape a more comprehensive and inclusive social reality.
Commentator: Steven A. Mansbach, University of Maryland
Picturing Urban Space in Central Europe since 1839
Chair: Miriam Paeslack, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
When the daguerreotype took Europe and the world by storm within weeks of its publication in Paris in 1839, a tremendously powerful tool for the urban imagination was born. While veduta- and street-painters had been meticulously documenting and spontaneously sketching the city in the earlier decades of the century, photography soon was able to capture motion and urban life. This opened up a whole new range of topics and issues in city imagery.
This panel investigates the cross-fertilization between 19th century city photography and urbanization in central Europe, for example in Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Prague and or other Central European cities. It addresses the “pictorial turn” in urban representation that was triggered by the arrival of photography, and its repercussions for other visual media. More specifically, it asks about the different visual languages, expectations, and functions of urban representations found in diverse media – photography and film, but also drawings and paintings – since the 1840s. How have these different media impacted our perception of the city, and what were their respective means of “constructing” the city? How did urban growth, the urbanite’s sense of identity, and the image of the city interact? How did the urban image’s evolution relate to urban development?
Visual and architectural historians, human geographers, and artists are encouraged to submit proposals for presentations studying the spatial, structural, social and/or cultural encoding generated by urban imagery. Such studies could focus, for example, on the way that urban imagery addresses relationships of space and time/history or how national identity figures into such imagery. Proposals comparing two or more cities, and urban imagery from the 19th through the early 20th centuries respectively are welcome, as are proposals by artists working with historic imagery or relying on historic urban imagery as a point of reference.
“The Invisible City: Architectural Imagination and Cultural Identity Represented in Competition Drawings from Sibiu 1880-1930” Timo Hagen, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
Sibiu, the European Capital of Culture in 2007, was the center of Transylvania for centuries, and around 1900 characterized by its population’s cultural diversity. At this time the townscape was changed substantially by a wave of new building projects. In addition to the buildings actually built, drawings submitted to architectural competitions provide a deeper insight into contemporary architectural discourses: often revised or dismissed, these sketches form the image of a city existing only on paper. In my presentation I explore principles, which led to the selection of the drawings for those buildings that were eventually executed. I analyze how architects tried to affect decisions through elaborate drawing designs, highlighting the buildings’ aesthetic value and the associated concepts of cultural identity. The broad spectrum of building types shed light on the diversity of competing cultural identities in Sibiu during the period, while drawings reveal how visual representations helped communicate such identities.
“Picturing the Nation: The Multifaceted Image of Hungary at the 1896 Millennium Exhibition in Budapest” Miklós Székely, Ludwig Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
This presentation discusses and critically reflects on the meaning and importance of ephemeral exhibition architecture at the 1896 millennial festivities in Budapest, Hungary through its photographic representation. The lecture aims to show how politics influenced not only the architecture of the exhibition venue – a city within the city – but also its photographic representation, which was used to convert it into a national lieu de memoire. Pavilions were dedicated to express the nationalist politics of the re-emerging Hungarian political class, which aimed at reinstalling the country’s image as independent, economically and politically strong European nation. For that purpose, surviving monuments were re-erected in ephemeral versions for the millennial festivities. This exhibition and its pavilions was also one of the last examples of historicism-based cultural policy at the turn-of the century. After 1900, the Hungarian pavilions in universal exhibitions emphasized the vernacularism based modernist side of Hungarian culture.
“Architecture, Monuments, and the Politics of Space in Kolozsvár/Cluj” Paul Stirton, Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
In 1902 János Fadrusz’s equestrian statue of the Hungarian Renaissance king Matthias Corvinus was unveiled on the main square in Kolozsvár, Transylvania, marking out this central locale as a distinctively Hungarian space in a region with an increasing majority of Romanians. It also inaugurated a competition for cultural dominance of the urban landscape by rival ethnic groups that lasted throughout the inter-war period (when Transylvania was ceded to Romania), the Communist period, and even after 1989. This paper addresses both the transformation of the city squares and their interpretation through ritual celebrations and photographs that served to focus attention on certain features and to heighten their symbolic importance.
“Urban Space as a Visual-Haptic Experience: Stereoscopic Views of German Cities, 1880-1910” Douglas Klahr, University of Texas at Arlington
In the second half of the nineteenth century, stereoscopic views of European cities became immensely popular, and those of German cities dominated the market in Central Europe. Stereographs often delivered sensations of depth that were haptic in intensity, a result due not merely to binocular optics, but also to the kinesthetic relationship between viewer and device. The stereoscopic experience therefore was phenomenological, establishing a realm of psycho-corporeal space unlike any other visual medium, in which the sensation of depth was corporeal rather than intellectual. Stereoscopy therefore seemed ideally suited to provide an illusion of depth, which is the sine qua non in pictorial depictions of urban space, yet consistently delivering this illusion was problematic. This talk addresses the challenges that stereographers encountered when photographing urban spaces, which lead them often to depart from iconic images of German Cities that were marketed in widely-distributed viewbooks during the same period.
“Picturing Contested Space and Subjectivity in the Urban Milieus of Budapest and Vienna” Dorothy Barenscott, Simon Fraser University
Examining the powerful role that urban spaces have played in the social imaginary of nation and Empire, this paper explores the new media forms of photography and film as they appeared at key historical moments in the interconnected development of Budapest and Vienna’s urban character in the fin de siècle period. Arguably, these new media forms operated as a powerful visual patois that celebrated and exposed the most pedestrian and de-institutionalized visions of a modern world—ephemeral and fleeting moments that competed with and broke the illusion of grand monuments dedicated to abstract concepts of nationhood and citizenship. What were the new spaces produced by photography and film in the dual capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? And how did they affect the difficult histories and distinct perceptions of time-space, but also the competing theories of modern subjectivity and picture-making, that would emerge out of both places by WWI?
HGCEA Emerging Scholars
Chair: Timothy O. Benson, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
“Viva Durero! Albrecht Dürer and German Art in Nueva España” Jennifer A. Morris, Princeton University
In the early modern period, settlers and missionaries from the farthest reaches of Europe traveled to the Americas with the goal of converting the New World into a Christian paradise. With them came a number of artworks that circulated widely and served as prototypes for the “hybrid” art forms of colonial America described by George Kubler and others. This paper examines the presence and impact of German art in the New World in particular, using the transmission and imitation of Albrecht Dürer’s prints in Nueva España as a model for the interaction between Indo-American and German art in New Spain and hence for the reception of Central European styles in colonial art at large. By considering the afterlife of Dürer in the New World, this study demonstrates that Central European art was pervasive and continuously influential in the Americas, serving important artistic, religious, and political functions in a spiritual battlefield.
“‘Opium Rush’: Hans Makart, Richard Wagner, and the Aesthetic Environment in Ringstrasse Vienna” Eric Anderson, Kendall College of Art and Design
In 1871, critic Wilhelm Lübke characterized the paintings of Viennese artist Hans Makart as “gemalte Zukunftsmusik.” Lübke intended no compliment. Drawing a comparison to composer Richard Wagner, Lübke denounced Makart’s art as mere surface, lacking intellectual or moral value. Both Wagner’s “colossal masses of sound” and Makart’s “nerve-tingling colors,” he wrote, offered only a stupefying narcosis for the sensation-addled parvenu of the Ringstrasse: “an opium rush, received through the ear or the eye.”
Around 1900, the Viennese critic Ludwig Hevesi offered a striking reassessment, celebrating the decorative, psychologically immersive character of Makart’s paintings, and especially his decorated interiors, as a sophisticated and elegant means of escaping the crises of modernity. Taking Hevesi’s remarks as a starting point, this paper will reconsider the relationship between Makart’s interiors and Wagner’s concept of immersive experience, taking into account links to Aestheticism, the Secession, and fin-de-siècle theories of mental life that informed Hevesi’s analysis.
“Architecture on Moscow Standard Time” Richard Anderson, Columbia University
Focusing on the 1930s, this paper explores architecture’s relationship to the Communist Party’s politics of time. After the competition for the Palace of the Soviets of 1932, Party officials prescribed the use of “both new techniques and the best techniques of classical architecture” in future projects. Although this event has long been interpreted as a negation of the agency of the avant-garde, this paper presents the architectural debates that followed as symptoms of the chronotope—the time-space—in which they unfolded. Concretely, it traces the ways that leading architects—Moisei Ginzburg, Aleksandr Vesnin, Ivan Leonidov, among others—responded to the proposition that a progressive, socialist architecture could arise only from the “critical appropriation of architectural heritage.” By attending to rarely-discussed projects and texts, this paper shows how Soviet architects articulated a theoretical program that would position socialist architecture ahead of the West, paradoxically, by turning to the past.
HGCEA at CAA 2011 New York
The Display of Art and Art History, From the Premodern to the Present Chair: Karen Lang, University of Southern California Alois Riegl’s engagement with Late Roman antiquity in Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts stimulated a new art-historical method of relative values. Aby Warburg’s experience as a student in Florence of Italian quattrocento art resulted in a novel approach to the “afterlife” of antiquity. The young Wilhelm Worringer, contemplating medieval cast reproductions in the Trocadéro, chanced upon the sociology professor Georg Simmel; their meeting sparked the conception of Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Despite attention to foundational moments such as these, we have yet to learn in depth and across time about interrelations between the exhibition of art and the history of art history as a disciplinary practice. This panel draws on exhibition histories and historiography to address the multidirectional and reciprocal ways the display of art and art-historical methodologies have shaped each other in Germany and Central and Eastern Europe, from the premodern to the present. Previous scholarship has focused on the museum and the university as art history’s “two cultures.” This panel explores relations between exhibition history and art history to open a new stream of research.
“Virtual Display: The Role of Drawing in the Early Modern Art Collection” Susan Maxwell, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Works on paper did not became part of the culture of collecting until the late sixteenth century, but even then, patrons valued them differently than in contemporary practice. For example, Duke Philipp of Pommern-Stettin had his art agent commission drawings that documented works of art in the ducal collection in Munich rather than commissioning new works himself. When the drawings were assembled into albums, Philipp possessed a virtual re-creation of his rival’s art collection. In 1565 Samuel Quiccheberg wrote the first theoretical text on the organizational structure of the ideal museum for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, who created the first Kunstkammer, or ducal art collection, north of the Alps. Quiccheberg’s theory provides insight into how these patrons may have valued drawings and prints. This paper analyzes primary sources to determine whether drawing was viewed as a creative endeavor or a tool in organizing and possessing knowledge within a collection.
“Pattern Book, Museum, and Ethnographic Village: Intersections of Art History and Ethnography in Austria-Hungary” Rebecca Houze, Northern Illinois University The development of art history coincided with that of ethnography in the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, at the end of the nineteenth century. The relationship of the two fields at that time was especially evident in the diverse modes of display employed in their publications and exhibitions. Illustrated albums from the 1860s and 1870s, with luxurious color-lithograph printed plates, catalogued embroidery and woven textile designs from various sources. These pattern sheets, produced for industrial designers, foreshadowed Alois Riegl’s theoretical treatises on ornament and folk art based on his own observations of textiles. At the same time, installation practices from the realm of fine and industrial art lent themselves well to ethnographic comparisons by scholars such as Michael Haberlandt and János Jankó in the 1890s. This paper considers three examples—the pattern book, the comparative installation, and the ethnographic village—in an effort to better understand the intersections between them.
“An Art History of the ‘Most Neglected’: Art History and Ethnology in German-Speaking Scholarship” Priyanka Basu, University of Southern California One important consequence of assembling the data of the earliest surveys of art history was that lacunae became visible. Art historians in the following generations elevated these unknown areas and periods to objects of study, many claiming to renounce previous norms and personal taste and give attention to the previously marginal. One of these gaps was occupied by “primitive” art, encountered in ethnological studies and museums and which gained visibility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries along with other nonclassical artifacts and prehistoric art. This paper deals with a number of theorists and historians who attempted to determine the relationship of these to art history, as part of a broader enterprise of negotiating disciplinary boundaries and methodologies. It attends also to the representation of these objects in publications, sometimes as reproductions of fragments of patterns and ornament, from which art-historical beginnings and ur-motifs were extracted.
“Expansion of the Discursive Field: Harald Szeemann’s documenta 5 (1972)” Ursula Frohne, University of Cologne, Germany Arnold Bode’s documenta sought to reconnect Germany to international avant-garde positions in the aftermath of World War II. In the climate of the Cold War, he reestablished the autonomous, abstract, and form-genealogical idea of art within the art-historical canon of medium specificity and originality. By contrast, Harald Szeemann’s concept for documenta 5, with its programmatic “inquiry of reality—image worlds today,” presented a heterogeneous ensemble of visual artifacts from diverse cultural contexts. Emphasizing the notion of “parallel visual cultures,” Szeemann broke with the modernist principle of the artwork’s autonomy and the traditional order of images. This paper examines Szeemann’s transformation of exhibition display and its historiographic, cultural, and epistemological orders. It argues that documenta 5’s scenography anticipated the new horizon for art history’s methodological expansion toward Bildwissenschaften (science of the image).
“Raphael and Stalin in Dresden: Art, Display, and Ideology” Tristan Weddigen, University of Zurich On Stalin’s instructions, a list was made of two thousand artworks to be seized in Germany as trophies for a World Museum of Art. The most sought after was Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. In 1945 the Trophy Brigades found Dresden destroyed, but they discovered the hidden art depots. Two hundred thousand objects were sent to the Soviet Union, especially to the Pushkin Museum. These formed a secret museum within the museum, and the spoliations were denied. After signing the Hague Convention in 1954, and following Khrushchev’s De-Stalinisation, the Soviet Union began to return this booty (estimated at $2.5 million) to the West. The repatriation of the Dresden Picture Gallery in 1956 was accompanied by massive propaganda in which the work of the Trophy Brigades and the Soviet art restorers was touted as a rescue operation from the barbarism of the Nazis and the Allies. The paper investigates how the Stalinist aesthetic legacy still defines Dresden’s cultural identity.
HGCEA Emerging Scholars Session Chair: Mitchell B. Merbeck, Johns Hopkins University
“The ‘Ghostly Semblance’ of the Modern: Deformation and Transformation of Images in Der Blaue Reiter” Charles Butcosk, Princeton University The 1912 publication of Der Blaue Reiter presented an almanac of essays and works of art as eclectic as the book’s eponymous exhibition society. The range of works reproduced in the book is vast, including not only paintings by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne but also Iberian masks, Gothic prints, Egyptian shadow puppets, and children’s drawings. These latter images, often cropped to the point of being unreadable fragments and seeming to float enigmatically in and around the text, defer and mediate the works they reproduce, often reducing them to art-historical emblems. This paper examines the transformation and deformation of images in Der Blaue Reiter and their relationship to figurations of the past in essays by Franz Marc and August Macke. In so doing, it reconsiders the relationships between painting and the present in a project that was at the core of Der Blaue Reiter.
“Painting in Arcadia: Kirchner and Male Friendship, 1914–17” Sharon Jordan, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London Throughout the vast literature on the German Expressionist artist Ernst Kirchner, the psychologically devastating experience of service during World War I is regarded as one of the defining aspects of his biography. This paper sheds new light on this crucial period by examining images depicting the artist’s fleeting friendship with Botho Graef, a classical archaeologist and art historian, which coincided with the duration of the war. An iconographic analysis of these artworks reveals the foundation of the men’s friendship in their mutual engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and shows how Graef’s devotion to the ancient Greek tradition of pedagogical male friendship proved inspirational. By considering the interrelationship between Kirchner’s extreme mental difficulties and the war’s ultimate ruination of this vital friendship, this discussion further expands our understanding of the artist by offering additional interpretations for self-portraits relating directly to his profound period of crisis in 1915.
“Some Uses of Photomontage in Soviet and German Periodicals in the 1930s” Katerina Romanenko, The Graduate Center, City University of New York This paper questions the persisting perceptio that Stalinist and Nazi regimes rejected photomontage because of its association with modernist experimentation and with the political Left by tracing some of the ways the medium was appropriated for the totalitarian modes of expression associated with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The discussion reveals that for magazine designers, photomontage was mostly a technical tool enabling the organization of visual material in a dynamic yet also concise and economic manner. This suggests that while both regimes rejected the radical language of photomontage characteristic of the 1920s, the technical and visual flexibility of the medium, coupled with photography’s documentary quality, were regarded as useful despite the controversial associations of the medium. Various uses of photomontage throughout the decade, using examples from periodical press of the 1930s—USSR in Construction, Krestianka, Rabotnitsa, Illustrierter Beobachter, Frauen Warte, and others—are compared and analyzed.
Transformation Reconsidered: ‘Utopias’, Realities and National Traditions in post-1989 Central Europe Chair: Andrzej Szczerski, Jagiellonian University, Cracow
Twenty years of post-Cold War transformation in the Central European region had been marked by recourse to lost identities and renewed interest in national histories and traditions. Concurrently, new questions have been posed regarding regional experience, including whether remnants of the communist system and the incoming capitalist globalization can provide a new socio-political and cultural model for contemporary Europe. In both instances, retro- and prospective ones, art, artists, and critical/historical discourse play a crucial role in forging new and questioning old identities. The session will analyze attempts to regain or reinvent national and individual histories, lost or destroyed during the Iron Curtain era. It will also look at the idea of remembrance about the communist ‘utopias’ and realities, their relevance, persistence and rejection within contemporary societies, as reflected in current art production as well as historiography. Since attitudes towards the recent past are highly politicized and often mutually exclusive, the question will be asked to what extent art, art history, and criticism can provide a platform for negotiations within the emerging civil society. The session will also consider the problem of how the post-communist transformation has been perceived as a lived reality, with its own cultural models and hierarchies.
“Work with Drawers, Slide Trays, Files, and Boxes!” Georg Schoellhammer, Springerin, Hefte fur Gegenwartskunst Twenty years after 1989 neo-avant garde and post conceptual art from the so called Former East is still confronted with a stereotypic reception elaborated in the early 1990s. Already by then the Western efforts of presenting a comprehensive reading of the avant gardes that had worked behind the Iron Curtain was palimpsested by its reception as a mere mirror of Western art practices. The paper will look at the histories of exhibitions of Eastern European art in Western institutions vis-à-vis materials that still hide away in private archives in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Its aim is to show how these archives have enabled communication, and how their forms and formats have themselves influenced the macro-structure of some of the exhibitions. Question will be asked about the strategies available to counter hegemonic subordination to the rules of the Western canons.
“Continuity of Art Informel and Artistic Self-Assertion in the GDR after the Cold War” Sigrid Hofer, Philipps-Universitat Marburg Since the nineteen-fifties numerous artists gathered in Dresden to cultivate forms of abstraction and to developed Art Informel. While Informel Art in the West was considered to have degenerated into a fad only after a few years it maintained its actuality in the East for several decades and was not even abandoned after the Wall came down. In the years of state-ordered Socialist Realism the decision for Informel was at the same time an expression of latent resistance. Therefore it seems that this distinctive approach influenced the artist’s self-image in a more crucial way than this appears to be the case in non-obstructive contexts. The presentation will investigate whether and to what extend new impulses brought change to Art Informel after 1989, and especially how adhering to tradition and continuation was a necessary condition for artists to affirm their own identity.
“‘The Future Is Behind Us'” Edit Andras, Hungarian Academy of Sciences In the turbulent period of transition, in the ex-East Block, contemporary art faces utopias in two ways, artists revisit the past searching for the moment when utopias went wrong, or, they eagerly look for new utopias in the condition of global capitalism, analyzing and adapting the enormous heritage of utopian thinking of the region for a disillusioned time, obsessed with dystopias. The paper is to peel off the layers covering the origins of some basic utopias, the ruins and remnants of which are still in our midst. The paper focuses on works which redirect the attention to the need of a retrospective analytical work, a kind of therapy of wounds and failures of the past. Some artists are eager to take responsibility of conscience of the societies that tend to forget their dreams of a better future. The presentation concentrates on video and conceptual art.
“The Possibility of the Postnational in Contemporary East European Art” Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Translocal.org and University College London The art history of the countries of Eastern Europe before 1989 was written, according to Piotr Piotrowski, more on the basis of ‘state apparatuses’ than ‘ethnicity’. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the afterglow of the internationalist ideals of socialism could still be felt, while the desire for free and open communication across state, ideological and national borders was predominant. Subsequently, the first post-communist decade saw the rise of identity politics, during which a national prefix became an obligatory addition to survey exhibitions of contemporary art in the countries of the former Eastern Blok. This paper discusses the changing understanding of the national in contemporary art since the End of Communism and the shift of interest during the second post-communist decade away from issues of identity in both its national and regional formulations towards an exploration of the possibilities of a post-national sense of belonging.
“The Situation: Contemporary Art Practice in the Post-Cold War Era” Elizabeth M. Grady, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York The contemporary moment is rife with “posts”: Post-Cold War, post-Communist, post 9-11, post-colonial, and even post-national. Blogs embody decentralized communities of identity-shifting “post-ers” who together determine the parameters of everything from what’s hip to the next revolution, often offering a faux-reality of democratic access and collectivist practice. But what is left when we’re offline? How do we come to terms with the reality of our decidedly non-ideal or falsely idealized cultural, social, political, and even material positions? And what role does art play in exposing or perpetuating this disjuncture between ideology and reality, virtual and real existence, mediated and actual experience? This paper will demonstrate the current efforts of artists to expose the disjuncture between the ideologically loaded virtual and media-driven models of reality that govern our collective cultural consciousness and the possibilities for individual agency and personal freedom of movement outside these powerful but ultimately hollow models for living.
Forging California modernism: Central European émigrés on the West Coast between 1920 and 1945 Chair: Isabel Wünsche, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany
At the beginning of the twentieth century, California was a cultural melting pot in which the local traditions of Native American, Hispanic, and Asian cultures mixed with the diverse influences of European modernism. The multitude of cultural influences as well as the relative immaturity of the California art scene attracted numerous European émigré artists and intellectuals and enabled them to become a driving force in introducing and establishing modernist art and design. This session will discuss the contributions artists, architects, photographers, and filmmakers from Germany and the former Habsburg Empire made to the emergence of modernism in California. Particular emphasis will be on the role European émigré architects played in shaping modernist architecture and design, the incorporation of modernist idioms into photography, the development of hybrid photographic styles that merged European modernist aesthetics with the American social documentary approach, and the influence that Central European avant-garde filmmakers gained upon Hollywood.
“A Position ‘Neither Here nor There’: Hansel Mieth’s and Otto Hagel’s California Photographs, 1928-1936” Dalia Habib Linssen, Boston University Arriving in San Francisco at the outset of the Depression, German-born photographers Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel began chronicling a California they experienced as both active participants and perceptive observers. Forced to pick crops and work in factories, this émigré pair produced a distinctly modernist and politically-minded body of photographic work between 1928 and 1936. In directing their cameras toward those with whom they shared their struggles, including migrant laborers, Chinatown residents, and maritime workers, Mieth and Hagel skillfully negotiated the boundaries between worker and photographer, immigrant and resident, and European and American stylistic approaches. They developed a hybrid photographic style that merged the aesthetics of European modernism with the humanism of American documentary practices. Though known mostly for their photojournalistic work, I introduce Mieth and Hagel’s early contributions to show how their work complicates and expands our understanding of 1930s California photography.
“Camera Infirma: John Gutmann in California” Miriam Paeslack, California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco Berlin émigré John Gutmann arrived in San Francisco in 1933. Although he had been trained as a painter by German Expressionist Otto Müller and intended to use the camera only commercially, he became best known for his intriguing, subjective photographs of mid-century American culture. In California, he used photography not just as a means of income but as a documentary tool, revealing as much about the place documented as about the documentarian. This paper examines Gutmann’s use of photographic qualities as a language of signification; it asks about the visual indicators for displacement and how Gutmann’s photographs, shaped by the outsider’s perspective, contribute to the development of California modernism. I will discuss how Gutmann’s photographs fit into the aesthetic and cultural discourse of Northern California photography between Dorothea Lange’s social documentary approach and the f64 group’s meticulous sense of aesthetic and technique.
“The Photographs of Arthur Luckhaus and the New Architecture of Richard J. Neutra” Ruben A. Alcolea, School of Architecture, University of Navarra, Spain The series of pictures taken by Arthur Luckhaus in California in the first half of the twentieth century illustrates both the changing of American society as well as the turn to New Objectivity in photography. Arthur Luckhaus, a photographer unknown until today, was the official photographer of the early works of the well-known Californian and Austrian-born modernist architect Richard J. Neutra, who introduced the idea of integrating industry and the machine into the modern languages of architecture and spatiality. In my paper, I will show some of the recently discovered photographs by Luckhaus in the context of the transition from Pictorialism to New Objectivity in California and also discuss them in relation to the development of early modernist architecture in Los Angeles, especially the work of Neutra. I thus will establish that both Luckhaus and Neutra are key figures for understanding modern photography and architecture.
“Artistic Survival in Paradise: German-Speaking Architects in California after 1933” Burcu Dogramaci, University of Hamburg, Germany Two factors were significant for the success of German and Austrian émigré architects attempting to establish a new existence in California in the 1930s: a high level of flexibility and the ability to network. Fritz Block and Ernst Hochfeld quickly adapted to the new situation by temporarily taking up photography and stage design; Oskar Gerson and Liane Zimbler found their most important clients among the German-speaking émigrés on the West Coast. This paper will focus on the émigré networks in California and their importance for the exiled architects. I will discuss why émigrés commissioned other émigrés and examine the clients’ wishes with respect to the design of their private homes, including the desire to aesthetically relate their new surroundings to the European Heimat versus attempts to adapt local architectural styles.
“The Unlikely Director: Paul Fejös and the Hollywood Connection, 1927-28” Dorothy Barenscott, Trent University, Canada In histories of early Hollywood, the community of Hungarian filmmakers, directors, and moguls, who played a decisive role in American filmmaking from its earliest inception, remain among the most misunderstood of all Central and Eastern European émigré groups. This paper focuses on one such related figure, director Paul Fejös, and his brief yet meteoric rise to fame in 1927-28. After leaving positions in Hungary, Austria and Germany, Fejös arrived in America and produced a low budget avant-garde film that garnered broad critical acclaim and led to a lucrative contract with Hollywood’s Paramount Studios to begin producing what would be understood as “cross-over” films linking European and Hollywood filmic approaches, techniques, and philosophies. Through a discussion of Fejös’s professional background and projects, I will explore a range of modernist and avant-garde techniques often overlooked in the visual, narrative, and contextual elements that make up his category of Hollywood films.
Feminism and Modernity in Central Europe Chair: Adrienne Kochman, Indiana University Northwest, Chair
The association between feminism and power, and modernity with patriarchal systems represents a set of long established binaries addressed years ago in Broude and Garrard’s Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (1982). Women’s forays into modernity and the ‘art world’ were conditioned and/or filtered by male-dominated expectations concerning quality, productivity, the media with which they worked, and their relationship to women’s traditional roles as mothers, wives and partners. Recent research on women artists of Central Europe, including Germany, indicates that some of the values, morals and societal expectations around these issues were particular to the region as was perhaps the very concept of woman herself. Studies of collaborations by artist couples, women as patrons and artists, and women’s participation in artist groups are some of the frameworks around which their contribution is being explored as is the role of class, privilege and economics. Differences in labor demands between urban and rural environments, as well as gender identities encoded in the cultures of Catholicism, Judaism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism and Islam also affect concepts of woman and feminist artistic behavior. This panel focuses on the 20th century, from pre-World War I Germany and Austro-Hungary to the First Czech Republic, Weimar Germany and the G.D.R.. It includes methodological reappraisals of stylistic movements, the inscription of gender in modernist discourse and the redefinition of subject matter and themes traditionally appropriate for women artists to pursue.
“Paula Modersohn-Becker: the national, regional and the Modern” Shulamith Behr, Courtauld Institute Since the publication of Alessandra Comini’s essay “Gender or Genius? The Women Artists of German Expressionism”, in Broude and Garrard (1982), the task of “recuperating” the histories of women artists has been brisk. However, the problematic manner in which gender is inscribed within modernist theory and practice still lies at the heart of evaluating women’s role in Expressionism. Besides Käthe Kollwitz the view exists that women artists functioned outside public debates on the direction that contemporary art should assume. This paper focuses on Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), a timely intervention given the hundredth anniversary of her death. It explores the maternal line in generating Becker’s reliance on conservative models of national identity. Critical reading of her writings– as societal and performative genres – reveals her encounters with the “peasants” in Worpswede are encoded in a language that shows the artist’s roles as explorer, ethnographer and colonizer. The excursus suggests her paintings in Paris were audacious in ways that escape circumscription by the more predictable discourses of her writing. This paper considers posthumous canonization of Modersohn-Becker, the visibility of her works in the public sphere (prior to 1933) and concordant engendering of Expressionism warranting an overhaul of the movement and its history.
“Rediscovering Helene Funke: The Invisible Foremother” Julie Johnson, University of Texas at San Antonio Helene Funke (1869-1957) was an Expressionist painter who exhibited with Matisse and the Fauves in 1907 before moving to Vienna. In Modernist aesthetic terms, Funke was one of the most advanced painters in Austria. Her nudes and still lifes are not allegorical, and call attention to the production of art in the space of the studio. When Herbert Boeckl acknowledged Funke as “significant for the entire community of artists” in 1945, there was then no preexisting framework in public memory or histories of art that would make comprehensible the art of a woman as a producer of new forms, and she was promptly forgotten. It is entirely unexpected to place a woman in the role of a foremother, a transmitter of and producer of the most Modernist art in Austria, or anywhere else, for that matter.
“Re-thinking ‘virility and domination’ in German Vanguard Painting: The Case of Marta Hegemann (1894-970)” Dorothy Rowe, University of Bristol This paper will consider the work of Marta Hegemann (1894-1970) within the context of the construction of the German avant-garde during the 1920s. Hegemann was a Cologne-based painter who was married to fellow artist Anton Räderscheidt (1892-1970). By 1919 they had become central to the new circle of avant-garde artists emerging in Cologne after the First World War. In proto-Dadaist manner, the new group called themselves Gruppe Stupid and membership included Hegemann, Räderscheidt, Max Ernst, Heinrich Hoerle and Angelika Fick-Hoerle, amongst others. Gruppe Stupid was fairly short-lived, producing only one catalogue entitled Stupid 1 in 1920. During its existence, the group used to meet at the Hegemann-Räderscheidt apartment at number 9 Hildeboldplatz, where they held joint exhibitions of their work. Images by both Räderscheidt and Hegemann dating from this period are frequently read autobiographically. However, in this paper I would like to suggest that elements of autobiographical self-presencing in their work have more currency if placed within a psychoanalytically informed interpretative strategy. This might also enable a consideration of the personalized symbolism embedded in Hegemann’s work to operate within a wider contextualized reading of Neue Sachlichkeit and Magic Realism in 1920s Germany.
“Prague Strategies: Toyen, Feminism, and the Czech Avant-Garde” Karla Huebner, University of Pittsburgh This paper examines the position of Toyen (Marie Cermínová), a member of the avant-garde group Devetsil and a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, in First Republic art, social history, culture, and discourse. While Czechoslovakia retained many legal and social inequalities, it prided itself on its attention to gender equality, and was recognized for its achievements by feminists elsewhere. Nonetheless, few women were visible on the Prague art scene. Toyen and the sculptor Hana Wichterlová were almost the only women artists mentioned in the press. How, then, did Toyen negotiate her place in Czech culture? Did her avant-gardist direction, image as liberated but not actively feminist, and alliance with male peers, gain her visibility? Did her erotica distance her from Czech feminism and identify her as a New Woman? What was the role of the prevalent modernist belief that Marxism would end gender inequality? Toyen found a means of making herself known that eschewed obvious self-promotion. Czech society honored verbal, intellectual, extroverted female cultural figures, but perhaps quieter female visual artists needed to ally themselves with highly visible and vocal figures—in Toyen’s case, the artist and writer Štyrský, the poets Nezval and Seifert, and the theorist Teige.
“Gender in the GDR: Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt’s Conceptualization of the Female Sublime” Catherine J. Wilkins, Tulane University The “liberation” of East German women immediately following World War II created a widespread public backlash and a problematic politicization of the private sphere in the 1970s and 1980s. During this period, the landscape drawings with figures executed by Ursula Mattheuer-Neustädt created a “female sublime” that reflected the dichotomy between the rhetoric of equality espoused by the GDR government and the discrimination and inequality that existed for artists as well as individuals. In such images, Mattheuer-Neustädt sought to recover and redeem well-known but troubled German women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, creating representations that depicted the strengths and struggles of the female subject’s experience to draw parallels with contemporary conditions. By deconstructing the Romantic gendering of the “Fatherland” through alterations in the landscape’s content, style, and composition, Mattheuer-Neustädt also reclaimed and regendered the nation, giving women their share of a rich German legacy but simultaneously problematizing the myth of gender equality propagated by the East German government. In so doing, Mattheuer-Neustädt provided a visual framework for a subversive critique of hegemonic values and rhetoric able to be used by others interested in exposing the values and expectations of Central European societies regarding women as individuals and artists.
Follow the Red Brick Road Chair: Katja Zelljadt, Getty Research Institute, and Maiken Umbach, University of Manchester
In four case studies, framed by two overview presentations, this session explores the importance of material in the visual culture and political iconography of central Europe. Since the Middle Ages, red brick had been the dominant material in the ecclesiastical and commercial architecture of North-West Europe. From the mid-ninteenth century, material and stylistic aspects of this ‘red-brick gothic’ were revived in the quest for a place-specific visual idiom. Depending on one’s point of view, this movement culminated in, or was distorted by, the blood-and-soil aspirations of Nazi architects. The session charts the rise of red brick in modern architecture and sculpture, and the controversies surrounding it. Papers explore different case studies, ranging from architecture and urban planning in Wilhelmine Berlin and Hamburg, via the importing of red brick into Hungarian nationalist architecture, to Bernhard Hoetger’s ‘Niedersachsenstein’ war memorial. Through these explorations, we hope to address two issues in particular. The first is the relationship between text and artifact. In tracing the influence of contemporary theorists of red brick, such as Fritz Höger, on the artistic and architectural production of their time, we foreground the political subtexts of the ‘material turn’ of post-historicist architecture and art. Yet we also test the limits of written sources in explaining visual and material practices, juxtaposing such texts with an art historical analysis of actual brick structures. Second, we seek to locate the role of red brick in the transition from historicist to modern visual culture. What motivated the turn away from more conventional allegorical and symbolic means of representation prevalent in historicism, towards a focus on material as the principal vehicle for establishing ‘meaning’? In addressing this issue, we question conventional periodizations. While theorists and practitioners at the time argued that red brick was a unique vernacular material that helped them ditch the universalist legacy of historicism, in fact, red brick quickly became a universal rhetorical topos in its own right. Many of its advocates were conscious of the fact that brick architecture was not unique to any world region or period: it could be traced back as far as Mesopotamia, and, notwithstanding the fact that ‘Northern’ red brick was widely defined in ideal-typical opposition to the Latin world, it was also used widely in Southern Europe, notably Italy and Spain. Like the idea of Heimat, the use of red brick in modern identity politics thus presents us with a paradox: an international vernacular.
Industrial, Ecclesiastical, Monumental? Brick Architecture in 19th-Century Hungary and Central Europe József Sisa, Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest The status of brick in Hungarian architecture changed substantially during the 19th century. Exposed brick facades traditionally had hardly existed, buildings in Hungarian towns and villages being typically covered with plaster and stucco, rarely with stone. Not surprisingly, brick found its way first of all to utilitarian structures, such as storehouses, industrial structures and railway stations. The first monumental buildings in Pest (Budapest) with exposed brick facades were designed by foreign, i.e. German architects in the mid-19th century, their Hungarian counterparts following suite only a few decades later. In due course buildings of education (schools) and health care (hospitals) tended to be constructed with brick exteriors, where the ideas of practicality, cleanliness, and economy were to be considered, and projected through the very image of the buildings. Another area where brick played a major role was church building, especially the architecture of Neo-Gothic churches. Following North German, and ultimately English, models, these buildings were to conform to the principles of honesty of structure and materials, and for this brick represented the most appropriate medium. The use of brick went hand in hand with the use of ceramic materials, whose texture and manufacture were analogous to those of bricks. The first impulses and products came from Germany. Initially terracotta features were applied, which blended well with brick facades. Later polychromatic majolica elements appeared in great numbers, their bright colors and shiny surfaces paving the way for new artistic expression. There was one enterprise in southern Hungary, the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, which excelled in manufacturing ceramic materials and even inventing new formulas. Their products influenced greatly the course Hungarian architecture was taking. Zsolnay found congenial partners in some architects, first of all in Ödön Lechner, who, with the use polychromatic majolica elements and gracefully curved brick bands over the facades of many of his buildings, managed to create a highly original national style in Hungarian architecture.
Backstein oder Putzbau? The architectural physiognomy of Kommunale Berlin, 1890-1900 Jennifer Dillon, Duke University In 1896, when Hermann Blankenstein relinquished his position as Berlin Stadtbaurat to Ludwig Hoffmann after 24 years in office, the Berliner Tageblatt announced that the era of brick architecture in the capital city was finally at an end. A celebratory choir of public officials announced Hoffmann’s appointment to the city, hailing a fresh vision coming to transform Berlin’s public sphere. For 24 years, Hermann Blankenstein’s office had produced hundreds of public structures in a standard vocabulary of brick and terracotta, a signature Schinkel School style that he developed early in his public career. Frustration with the perceived urban monotony among his critics was paired with resentment at the omnipotence invested in the person of the Berlin Stadtbaurat, a position of total control that resonated with the authoritarian politics of the German Reich. Criticism of Blankenstein culminated with his design for the Polizeipräsidium on Alexanderplatz (1886-1890) a massive, dominating, block structure of brick masonry with monumental domed corner pavilions. By the time Hoffmann arrived in Berlin, hopes for reform had been raised to a heady high, but the elation was short lived.
Opposition to Hoffmann arose after his first year in office, identified with a mythic duel between Backstein and Putzbau and informed by their mutual claims to being the true vernacular. Psychological portraits of the architects mirrored their favored material: Blankenstein-brick was seen as the product of a “pattern-book” architect, while Hoffmann was viewed as an artist, whose sculptural works of civic Gemütlichkeit were achieved by integrating Brandenburg styles into the institutions of the public sphere. Hoffmann was portrayed by others as a decadent artist from out of town, with knowledge produced not by honest work like his predecessor but from fancy scholarships to foreign countries. Newspaper accounts, architectural journals and archival records register the public theorization of building materials and their economic and metaphorical importance to the modern city in turn of the century Berlin.
Bernhard Hoetgers “Niedersachsenstein” (1915-1922): Fantasies of Rebirth and the Use of Brick Arie Hartog, Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen In 1915 the sculptor Bernhard Hoetger was commisioned to design a war-monument to the village of Worpswede, near Bremen. Between 1915 and 1919 the design was altered from a flying human figure in limestone to a brick construction without obvious iconography. It was named “Niedersachsenstein” and finished in 1922. The missing visual clues in the monument have lead to its popular interpretation as an abstract antiwar monument. Recent research demonstrated on the other hand that the signs Hoetger uses in this sculpture have an esoteric and nationalist background.
The renovation of this large expressionist sculpture between 1998 and 2001 showed that the construction has a limestone core and this combined with newly found sources indicates that the sculpture was started in limestone and later changed to brick. Most of the alterations to the design were made after the actual building process had started, which lead to the delay of its completition.
In my paper I wil relate the change of materials to the change of iconography. The “Niedersachsenstein” marks the transition between esoteric and nationalist imagery that is typical of northern german expressionism around 1920. In Hoetgers case brick is the bearer of a new iconography that by its material characteristics obscures the figurative signs involved (the sculptor opposed to any carving in the structures built). While this seems to be a disadvantage of the material it can be argued that the caused vagueness suited Hoetgers search for a monumental, religiously laden language of form for a Germany, he hoped to be born out of the ruins of the empire.
Brick as ‘Bauedelstein’ Claudia Turtenwald, University of Bielefeld Originally, there were practical reasons why brick was preferred in Norther German architecture, and the brick eventually gave the region its characteristic appearance. During the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the use of brick and clinker became increasingly ideological. Competing with favored “international building styles” and fighting the mechanization of craftsmanship through standardization and substitute materials, architects also argued that brick should be used for “national” reasons. Based on what was known as the “Heimatschutzbewegung” or “homeland protection movement,” it seemed to them that craftsmanship was the only guarantee of a flourishing future, and brick was the only legitimate building material in the north. During the early 1930s, the arguments for brick mutated, becoming even more closely aligned with politics through the emphasis on “Blut und Boden” (or “blood and ground”) for the nation.
We can trace the path of these arguments all the way to a metaphorical understanding of brick as a material, in particular, through the career of architect Fritz Höger, who celebrated many successes, especially after completion of his “Chilehaus” in Hamburg. Contemporary reports say that the “strict gesture”—closely linked to the use of brick as the primary building material—was interpreted as a symbol for Germany’s unbroken strength, despite its loss in the war and the rampant inflation. Over the ensuing years Höger devoted himself to lectures (as far away as Persia), publications, and architectural exhibitions featuring brick and clinker. He promoted brick sculpture, as well as creating initiatives for the purpose of founding a school where students could learn to master brick. Höger described brick and clinker with an increasingly ideological, almost spiritually transcendent term, calling it his “Bauedelstein.” His battle on behalf of brick became mission-like. Höger changed from an architect loyal to his homeland to an agitator caught up in National Socialism. At the end he was both, unsuccessful and incomprehensible. The Nazis refused brick nearly totally for their architecture and Höger was therefore unable to become the star architect he´d wanted to be – because of his arguments for using brick.
Concluding Remarks: Mesopotamian, Hanseatic, or Modern? Arguing about Brick in Germany around 1900 Maiken Umbach, University of Manchester
Art and Democracy in Central Europe Chair: Piotr Piotrowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland
The session address the relationship between art and democracy in Central Europe in the course of the 20th century. Of course in Central Europe democracy has always worked as a utopian and political counterbalance to authoritarian ideological discourses and social practices. This is true almost from the beginning of modern history, i.e. from 18th century, when democratic social structures emerged, however, it is particularly important in the 20th century, in terms of tensions between art and nationalism, art and constructing new republics just after World War I, art and totalitarianism, both before and after WW II, as well as after 1989.
“Imaging Universalism: Democracy and National Style in Central Europe ca. 1900” Andrzej Szczerski, Jagiellonian University, Cracow In Central Europe around 1900 the debate on nationalism, democracy and art acquired an unprecedented status. The debate concentrated around the concept of national style, understood not only as an artistic, but also a political manifesto. The “national style” could express a nationalist rhetoric yet was also perceived as an attribute of the inclusive national community bound by common cultural heritage and history, rather than ethnicity. This latter national utopia embraced principles which were democratic in spirit, envisaging the egalitarian solidarity of free individuals who would unite to create new societies and, in some cases, new nation-states.
Central European national/democratic utopias varied, though generally they had a strongly romanticized flavor and were based on historical myths, spirituality, as well as an interest in folk art. In Poland, Stanislaw Witkiewicz based his concept of the Zakopane Style on the idea of a unified nation made up of different classes and different ethnic groups. In Witkiewicz’s eyes, the Zakopane Style transgressed simple “Polishness” and reflected the cultural affinities found in the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, perceived as a democratic community of equal nations. In Hungary, artists from the Gödöllo colony turned to Transylvanian peasant culture in order to find not only visual sources for the national style, but also the role-model communities living according to the principles of equality and freedom. The Czechs and the Slovaks looked to peasant art, in order to emphasize their sense of belonging together. The artists associated with Tomaš Masaryk promoted pre-modernist architecture as a symbol of the democratic principles of the future republic.
The Central European national utopias tried to counterbalance social and political tensions within society with the idea of a democratic community. The national revival was perceived as the condition for the establishment of an egalitarian democracy, which in turn could secure the existence of a civil society in the lands of complex ethnic and religious structure. Elaborated under unfavorable political circumstances, those utopias often turned into romantic escapism or paternalistic teaching. However, it appears that Central European artists created a hybrid narrative, where “nation” and ‘democracy” were perceived as coherent, mutually conditioned and dependent forms of social life. In their aspirations, this narrative expressed universal principles not only of morally superior societies but also of the public role art should play in the modern age.
“Designs for a Modern Republic. Art and Architecture in the Baltic” Steven Mansbach, University of Maryland, College Park Democratic government in the eastern Baltic was coincident with the independence that was won as a consequence of the First World War and the immediately ensuing civil strife. To consolidate these costly freedoms and to secure the respective republics, Baltic artists were enlisted to articulate and reflect the political aspirations of the emergent new states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Significantly, associations of intellectuals, commercial enterprises, and government authorities turned to modern art, architecture, and design to articulate domestically a national self-image and to signal internationally republican values.
“Expressionism as Democratic Art: Adolf Behne’s Criticism of Art for and by the People” Kai K. Gutschow, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh In the years before World War I, the German art critic Adolf Behne synthesized arguments promoting the new art of Expressionism with some of the ideals of social democracy. In harsh critiques of the Kaiser’s conservative art policies, in essays on the value of “populist art,” and in his ardent defenses of radically new art in galleries such as Der Sturm, the young Behne repeatedly tied artistic aims to social and political ones. He heralded the recent art as being more “democratic,” for example, than Impressionism, which he felt was “bourgeois,” “imperialist,” and “undemocratic.” He argued that Expressionism had reached new heights of creativity and a more profound ability to reveal and express a common humanity, in large part because of the greater artistic freedoms enjoyed by individual artists and because it was accessible–both physically and emotionally–to a far greater spectrum of society.
Behne believed that a truly modern art would only arise once an even broader populace had access to and fully embraced the creative and spiritual force of all art. A deeper understanding of art, he felt, would lead the working masses to feel more empowered, spiritually alive, and unified in their common humanity. As a result, Behne worked tirelessly to promote and “popularize” the new art to the widest possible audience, not only in the art and culture magazines of the elite, but more poignantly in mass-circulation newspapers and family magazines, socialist culture and youth journals, and even through extensive teaching in populist adult education schools throughout Berlin. When the decadent and materialist culture of Wilhelmine Germany turned increasing nationalist and reactionary during World War I, Behne turned ever more socialist, eventually becoming one of the leaders of the “working councils” that arose in Berlin in 1919. Although Behne is better known for this later work, this paper seeks to show how Behne’s unique critical perspective before the war aligned modern art with a more humanistic and “democratic” social vision than was often the case in the revolutionary fervor of the post-war period. In the process he set the intellectual framework for him to become one of the most influential critics of modern art and architecture, an instrumental force in setting up the close alignment modern art with left-leaning politics in Weimar Germany.
“Does Democracy Grow under Pressure? A Case Study of the Strategies of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde” Eva Forgacs, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena The classic avant-garde of the 1920s as artistic language and political statement was vigorous in post-1956 Hungarian art, but the generation of the 1960s had their own say in their own language. They broke up rigorous geometry and breathed fresh air into Hungarian art and culture inspired by their own rebellious ideas, idiosyncrasies, and contemporary Western art. What they were also looking for but did not find was a tradition of introducing new concepts and new artistic languages.
Their strategies throughout the late 1960s and 1970s included an array of new formats and locations. They organized happenings, home theater, art exhibitions in private apartments and a rented lakeside chapel, and harnessed the loopholes of censorship to bring out ephemeral publications. The Hungarian neo-avant-garde, as their other East European counterparts, was thoroughly politicized. It emphatically expressed political opposition until the emergence of the samizdat culture.
A remarkable feature of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde was its curious mirroring of the oppressive state bureaucracy it was tackling. The revolting artists also needed one central authoritative personality – a tradition originating from the classic avant-garde – but that person had to come from the ranks of the neo-avant-garde itself. The rise of the charismatic artist, architect, and poet Miklós Erdély was an interesting process, since it was the making of the Budapest art world almost more than his own endeavor.
Erdély’s becoming the central figure of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde throws light to the fact that the counter-cultural art world had a tendency to stay unified and focused on the common ideas of various groups rather than the differences. The general understanding was that debates, emphasis on differences, and fallout’s would have weakened the positions which were rather weak in the first place; which led to the practical elimination of inner criticism. Groups and individuals with very different concepts and art had a basic, tacit agreement to keep disagreement under wraps. Art critics became part of the art world. This strategy blurred the differences between the leading agents of the new art and did not help to create the culture of debates or the articulation of different outlooks. It was not an exercise in democracy, although every participant believed so. It was a heroic, failed attempt at creating a democratic model in an undemocratic context.
“A Socio-Cultural Impulse of Neue Slowenische Kunst: Between Transgression and Candidness” Gediminas Gasparavicius, State University of New York, Stony Brook There is a significant disparity in how the art production of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) collective has been received in the West and the East. When the music band Laibach and the visual arts group Irwin, two key members of NSK, were beginning to get international exposure in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were most often presented in the western media as deeply ironic and critical commentators of the corrupt socialist system. In former Yugoslavia, however, the artistic actions of NSK stroke a rather different, and definitely more complex note. Within NSK itself, beyond the layer of apparent irony, there was a conviction that art can replicate and engage the state structure itself, instead of simply following it as an accessory. This was not done in a merely ironic guise but with a great deal of belief in the possibility of superseding the contradictions between socialism, romantic nationalism and the aesthetic demands of artistic production. The NSK enterprise appears symptomatic of the peculiar type of socio-cultural imagination that took socialist heritage seriously instead of simply dismissing it or assuming a dissident stance. Mostly associated with the artistic production of the Irwin group, the notion of ‘retro-avant-garde’ denotes a renewed interest in making a historic experience relevant for the late socialism in Slovenia. Of the two critical aspects of classical avant-garde – confrontation with the tradition and the commitment to expand the artistic impulse toward broader social transformation – the Irwin’s retro-avant-garde espoused only the latter. NSK advocated transformation without a revolution. A definitive characteristic of classical avant-gardes, the cult of the new and inexperienced (and of the outside in general) was given up for the unprecedented recycling of national and socialist motifs from the past.
My presentation will discuss the critical aspects of the socio-cultural imagination that underlie the NSK’s aspiration to create an aesthetic state of arts within an existing socialist state. It will also analyze why the NSK enterprise outside of the former Yugoslavia has mostly been viewed as an active undoing of the socialist system, and its participants as messengers of approaching pluralist democracy.
DISCUSSANT: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton University
Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Arts in Central Europe during the Cold War Chair: Barbara McCloskey, University of Pittsburgh
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of the European Economic Union has ushered in a new wave of thinking about Central Europe that vacillates between a remystification of the East/West divide (often under the rubric of Ostalgie), on the one hand, and a critical dismantling of Cold War assumptions, on the other. In the cold warrior imagination, East and West became identified by the reified styles—Socialist Realism and Modernism—with which opposing sides of the Iron Curtain laid political claim to freedom, progress, and the goal of human emancipation. Since the opening of borders and archives in the 1990s, however, such monolithic notions of the artistic cultures and political projects of the Cold War antagonists have come under scrutiny. Emerging instead are more nuanced understandings not only of their changing historical character, but also of their dialogical relationship to one another.
The papers included in this session contribute to this critical project in a number of ways. By looking across and through the Iron Curtain they reveal the manner in which memory, specifically of World War II, played a vital role in shaping the visual regimes and cultural politics of the Cold War era. Such investigations also reveal, contrary to prevailing assumptions, that exchange, however mediated by the antagonisms of the era, continued to take place via state sanctioned international exhibitions, forced expulsions, travel, and migrations in which the cultural certainties of the East-West divide were simultaneously projected and undermined.
Taken together, these papers suggest that our object(s) of study must also be broadened in order to pursue the task of critical historical engagement with the Cold War and its lasting effects in our current moment. Family photographs and public monuments, the work of well- to lesser-known or non-artists each become important vehicles for an exploration of the period. Panelist contributions point to the manner in which the ongoing obsession with memory—whether of the Nazi or Communist past—might be liberated from nostalgia and seen instead in its historical instrumentality for the Central Europe of today.
“Toward an Iconography of the Iron Curtain” Yuliya Komska, Cornell University Drawing attention to a vast number of sources that traditional scholarship of the Cold War has left out, some recent publications have suggested that a cultural history of post-war decades, one informed by anthropological, literary, and visual studies approaches, is long overdue. Similar disciplinary shortcomings have plagued a recent reexamination, in Germany and beyond, of the significance, causes, and outcomes of the post-WWII expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. These new analyses have consistently dismissed works of art and literature produced by those publicly identifying as expellees as merely revisionist, blocking cooperation between Germany and its East European neighbors, or inconsequentially sentimental and nostalgic.
I argue, however, that the cultural production of the fiercely anti-communist and traditionally Christian expellees may provide clues to some of the Cold War studies desiderata. Indeed, their settlement in post-war Germany may be said to have ushered the Cold War, situating the group as a self-proclaimed bulwark of Germany against the communist East. Winston Churchill’s memorable speech in Fulton, Missouri, juxtaposing the treatment of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe with his statement about the descent of the Iron Curtain, was notably the first to gesture toward a link between these two. Initially metaphoric, the expellee self-understanding as a bulwark turned acutely material and performative for the former Czechoslovak (Sudeten) Germans who have, in the wake of 1945, continued to visit and shape the Iron Curtain on the West German side of the Czechoslovak-Bavarian border. A chain of new pilgrimage shrines along the border, many accompanied by lookout towers to provide a good view of both the former “homeland” and the Iron Curtain, spurred a new visual environment largely unexplored to date.
My examination of the imagery of the East-West divide integrated into Sudeten expellees’ histories of westward flight and their ideology of the “return to the homeland” challenges the single-minded focus of German Studies on the Berlin Wall (1961-1989). By addressing the Sudeten representations of the Iron Curtain in drawings and family photographs at the border, I hope to underscore the understanding of the separation line as a non-metaphoric, intensely material environment geared toward visuality. Formulating an approach to an iconography of the Iron Curtain, I argue, could provide for a productive angle at a consideration of multiple intersections of anti-nationalism (regionalism) and nostalgia, nationalism, internationalism and, nowadays, transnationalism alike.
“Architects Abroad: Czechoslovakia and the Redefinition of Cultural Exchange in the 1950s” Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Columbia University For many people, the phrase “the iron curtain” suggests an impenetrable barrier, the edge of a space that no one could travel into or out of. This black and white image of complete freedom on one side and absolute oppression on the other is increasingly being questioned from a variety of viewpoints. Although one certainly cannot deny the restrictive travel policies of the Eastern Bloc regimes, it must be acknowledged that a few privileged members of the society – most often, but not exclusively, party members – were granted some access to foreign travel. In addition to their personal experiences, they brought back photographs, magazines, books, and professional knowledge that was shared with the public. Within the architectural sphere, travel was supported as a vehicle for sharing technical information and gathering useful research data from colleagues inside and outside of the Bloc. As one might expect, visits to other Communist countries were the most common, but dozens of architects attended trade fairs, professional conferences, and participated in study trips on both sides of the Cold War divide.
This paper will consider two such trips made by architects from Czechoslovakia: the 1953 journey of three architects to Lisbon to represent the country at the 3rd Congress of the International Union of Architects and a 1955 exchange between East Germany and Czechoslovakia when thirty-three architects from each country visit the other for a three-week long study trip.
The purpose of the inquiry is to fundamentally challenge some of our assumptions about the 1950s, which remains the least understood decade of Communism in eastern Europe. Some larger questions about cultural exchange will be addressed through these examples. How aware were Czechoslovak architects, or cultural figures of any sort, of developments in the west? How did they gain access to this information and what affect did it have on their own national practices? Was there interest expressed by western architects in the work being done in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union and if so, what were the most intriguing developments in the eyes of an outsider? What roles were ascribed to travelers once they arrived on the international scene – for example, disseminator of state propaganda, information gatherer, expert advisor – and what differences were there between traveling in the east and the west?
“Longing for Permanence: The Construction of a Post-War German National Art” Sabine Eckmann, Washington University in St. Louis Narratives of 20th century postwar art frequently emphasize the internationalist orientation of the art of the West German democracy while underscoring the nationalist underpinning of social realism produced in the communist East Germany. By engaging with the art and culture of the immediate post war period (1945 -1949), a time of confusion, loss and re-orientation, my paper seeks to complicate the alleged dichotomies of nationalism and internationalism and their interdependence with the prevailing political systems of socialism and capitalism.
Immediately after Nazi Germany’s forced surrender, cultural efforts in the East and Western zones of Germany concentrated on hastily constructing a new national modern German art in order to substitute for the aggressive National Socialist one. Attention was focused to establish a linkage between Wilhelminian and Weimar modernist art traditions and contemporary practices. Exhibitions such as Erste Kunstausstellung nach dem Krieg (1945) and Allgemeine deutsche Kunstausstellung (1946), conceived in the Western and East zones of Germany respectively, forced a straight continuation between pre-war German modernism and postwar art as they showcased German Expressionism side-by-side with contemporary practices. Works by Expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Ruttluff and Erich Heckel entered into a dialogue with those by Hans Uhlmann, Oskar Nerlinger and Heinz Tröckes among others. The newly formed bond between German Expressionism and contemporary practices not only demonstrated a reconnection to an abandoned past but more importantly underscored recent artworks as inherently German, thus solidifying a new national art months after Nazi Germany’s surrender.
However, representative examples of aesthetically moderate postwar modernism by such artists like Werner Heldt and Ernst Wilhelm Nay (as well as those just mentioned), stand in contrast to Expressionism. In these images the ritualized and collectivized life of Nazi society still resonate through pre-individualized, often archaic aesthetics. While exhibition narratives attempted to underscore a national German art that reaches back to the international climate of its pre-war productions, the actual works demonstrate their indebtedness to nationalistic forms of Nazi collectivism.
Considering the art institutions of exhibitions on the one hand, and of aesthetics on the other, two realms repeatedly at odds with each other, my paper will examine how ideologically charged concepts such as nationalism and collectivism versus internationalism and individualism exposed de-stabilizing qualities rather than operating as unifying and powerful cold war forces.
“In Opposition to Ideology: Gerhard Richter’s Style of Resistance” Elizabeth M. Grady, Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY Scholars have examined artists’ reactions to the propagation of socialist and capitalist ideologies through cultural policy after World War II, but resistance to the overarching issue—ideology itself—has not been investigated. Gerhard Richter’s work explores the possibilities for such resistance.
Richter’s opposition assumes its full significance in the context of art’s historic use in the service of German nationalism. From its inception the German nation viewed art as the expression of identity, making it a violently contested political battleground. It logically remained a focus of the ideological battles between communism and capitalism as the Cold War increased in intensity. In the FRG abstraction was hailed as a sign of freedom, and in the GDR Socialist Realism claimed to create art for the people. Richter toyed with both before turning to photo-based painting that was neither abstract nor idealist, neatly avoiding the political claims for art found on both sides of Germany’s political and geographic divide, and illustrating his resistance to producing ideologically useful artworks.
Educated in the GDR, Richter had begun a promising career as a muralist in the fifties. However, after visiting Documenta 2, where he first encountered Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel, he resolved to leave the GDR. He moved to Düsseldorf in 1961, quickly absorbing the lessons of abstraction, but apparently was unsatisfied. In a public display that rejected the dominant style in the FRG as decisively as he had that of the GDR, Richter burned all of his work and began again. He now painted from photographs in an effort to avoid ideologically loaded styles. However, he maintained an interest in subject matter, frequently turning to images that recalled nationalist art and National Socialism. In this way, he raised the specter of the past as a way of suggesting that Germany had not yet escaped the burden of its legacy.
Just when it seemed that Richter had settled into a style, he changed radically, skittering wildly between disparate styles. For a German artist working during the Cold War, the role of style was especially fraught with ideological weight. Therefore it was only through an entirely new artistic paradigm—the avoidance of a signature style—that Richter deemed it possible to circumvent art’s political role while exposing the very idea of artistic style as an ideological construct.
“Anselm Kiefer and Helmut Kohl at the End of the Cold War” Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University Anselm Kiefer is one of the most prominent post-war German artists associated with the working through of the National Socialist past in visual culture. From his earliest pieces to his one-person shows in the mid-1980s, the steady rise of his fame also paralleled the expanding public discussion of the National Socialist past in general and the Jewish genocide in specific. And yet, in the literature dealing with Kiefer and his relation to the Nazi past, former atrocities and oppressive policies appear if at all as a relatively uninflected and vague presence. Looking at how the political reception of the Nazi past changed from the sixties to the eighties helps us in modeling a different kind of historical project, one that sees a reciprocal relationship between cultural and political spheres during the Cold War.
In terms of Kiefer, crucial in this regard is analyzing a phenomenon barely mentioned in the literature: the rise of the conservative right up to and after the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl was named Chancellor in October 1982 and its concomitant Cold War policies. Kohl attempted to negotiate the debate concerning the National Socialist past both to shore up key right-wing elements within his constituency as well as promote the first steps towards what would be called “normalization.” Kohl’s interest in asserting contemporary West Germany’s right to be a “normal” nation again, meant that different elements of the Nazi past became of concern to him than to previous leaders within the CDU.
While Kiefer and Helmut Kohl influenced the public sphere from two very different institutional positions, their shared concern with using the Nazi past can be compared and discussed in terms of this crucial moment in Cold War politics. This presentation questions how the discussion of the Nazi past functioned for Kohl and Kiefer as a means of emphasizing contemporary East/West interests. At stake here is understanding the ways in which history can be manipulated, specifically the very loaded and volatile history of Nazi Germany. By investigating the political reception of the Nazi past and its use by particular interests, we can come to more synthetic conclusions about the function of culture in this process. As a result, we can reevaluate Kiefer, Kohl and Cold War German responses to the Nazi past in more sober and critical terms.
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.
Anne Umland Welcomes us to Sophie Taeuber Arp Living Abstraction
Sept. 9, 2021 Rosemarie Haag Bletter Interview with BBC Radio 4 on the history of glass in architecture and Paul Scheerbart’s and Bruno Taut’s proposals for utopian glass architecture for a Program, “The Dreams We Live In”, to be broadcast in late September.
THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH EVENT
Can Artists Still Break the Rules? Revisiting Strategy: Get Arts
Mon 30 Aug 11:30 – 12:30, The New York Times Theatre (in Sculpture Court)
From Mon 30 Aug – In August 1970, Richard Demarco collaborated with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf to stage Strategy: Get Arts, an exhibition at the Edinburgh College of Art. It featured works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard…
The Great Women Artists Podcast announces a new episode: Paula Modersohn Becker, with author Diane Radycki and podcaster Katy Hessel.
(Hessel, creator of The Great Women Artists Podcast (London, 2015), has been selected one of Forbes 30 Under 30 successful young Europeans in Art and Culture to watch in 2021.
Michelle Facos will give the 2021 Raoul Wallenberg lecture at the Nordic Museum in Seattle on 13 June at 12:30 pm Pacific Time. The topic is “Jews and the Formations of a Swedish National Identity,” and will be accessible on Zoom via the Nordic Museum website.
On 14 August at 10 am Pacific Time, she will give a lecture “Sisters of the Brush: Scandinavian Women Painters in the Impressionist Era” in connection with the Nordic Museum’s exhibition Among Forests and Lakes: Masterpieces from the Finnish National Gallery, which runs 6 May-26 October 2021. This will also be via Zoom and accessible the Nordic Museum website.
Book Launch: Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, eds. Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson
You are cordially invited to a book launch party on Saturday April 17 celebrating the release of our book Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe. This anthology features essays by many HGSCEA members and was initially developed from the HGSCEA session, “Representing Race” chaired by Allison Morehead at CAA in 2018. The book launch will feature brief presentations by the authors followed by a Q&A. Further information is provided in the registration link below. We hope that you can attend!
Apr 17, 20213:00 PM Eastern Standard Time See email for details on how to register.
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented On view through April 10, 2021
Friday, March 5, 7:00 – 8:30 pm EST
You are invited to a special walkthrough of MoMA’s Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented with exhibition organizers, Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter, followed by a discussion moderated by HGSCEA President James Van Dyke. The exhibition traverses much of HGSCEA’s geographic terrain and numerous HGSCEA members contributed to the catalogue. This special event — organized exclusively for HGSCEA — is open to current members and is free of charge (renew your membership here). It will take place on Friday, March 5, from 7:00–8:30 p.m. (EST). This is a by-registration-only event. To register check your email.
Robert Gore Rifkind dies at age 91; His legacy continues through the Rifkind Scholars-in-Residence Program.
The renowned collector of German Expressionist art and donor of the eponymous study center at LACMA, Robert Gore Rifkind, died on October 20 at the age of 91. A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, he was a pioneer of the boutique law firm model and established the first single-focused case securities law practice in Los Angeles in 1978. He was awarded the Order of Merit, First Class by the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his extraordinary efforts in spearheading the understanding of German Expressionist art in the U.S. His philanthropy included HGCEA at a crucial juncture in 2004 as well as grants to many of its members through the Rifkind Scholars-in-Residence program.
Rifkind was assisted in building his collection by dealer Orrel P. Reed Jr. and scholar Peter Gunther, among others, and the library was enriched by the expertise of Jake Zeitlin in Los Angeles, Elmar W. Seibel in Boston, and Hans Bolliger in Zurich. His 1983 donation of German Expressionist prints, drawings, and library led to the creation of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, an extensive and growing collection of more than 6,000 prints and drawings and a research library of over 10,000 volumes, documented in the 1989 volume Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies by Bruce Davis, which includes Mr. Rifkind’s interview of Oskar Kokoschka.
Oskar Kokoschka and Robert Gore Rifkind, 1978.
LACMA’s exhibition program includes nearly continuous rotations and thematic installations from the Rifkind collection—often complemented by works from other LACMA departments—most recently the exhibition, Fantasies and Fairy Tales. The Rifkind Center has also contributed to major international loan shows ranging from German Expressionist Sculpture (1983), The Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner (1989), “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (1991), Expressionist Utopias (1993), and Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (1997), to Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (2014).
The Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation under the able leadership of Mr. Rifkind’s son, Max Rifkind-Barron, supports art and library acquisitions, LACMA exhibitions such as Hans Richter: Encounters (2013) and New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (2016), public programming, and a Scholar-in-Residence program that allows specialists from the U.S. and abroad to conduct research in the Center. These activities will continue throughout the construction of LACMA’s new Peter Zumthor building to be completed in 2023.
The Scholars-in-Residence program has supported generations of scholars beginning with Herschel B. Chipp, Wolf-Dieter Dube, Alexander Dückers, Naomi Jackson- Groves, Paul Raabe, Günther Thiem, and extending through Rose-Carol Washton Long, Sherwin Simmons, Olaf Peters and many others up to young scholars and students just beginning their careers today. The Scholar-in-Residence program is currently accepting applications for Summer 2020 and beyond. A link to this program is found at: https://www.lacma.org/learn/research-library/rifkind-center
With Child: Otto Dix/Carmen Winant
September 21-December 15, 2019
Worcester Art Museum
Centered on WAM’s recent purchase of Otto Dix’s provocative painting, The Pregnant Woman (1931), the exhibition, With Child, will explore the subject of pregnancy and birth in Dix’s works. “The Pregnant Woman” (1931) has touched visitors in powerful ways, eliciting varied responses to a universal theme. This exhibition will be the first internationally to showcase the German artist’s works on this theme, along with a painting from the same model by one of his master students, Gussy Hippold-Ahnert, as well as Dix’s Pregnant Woman (1966), a portrait of his Dresden daughter, Katharina König, and his last nude painting. With Child will explore Dix’s stylistic and personal changes in his treatment of this subject over his lifetime, and associated programming will reflect on women’s social, political, and medical conditions during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), highlighting issues that are still relevant. This exhibition also will feature a commissioned work by contemporary artist Carmen Winant. Inspired by The Pregnant Woman, Winant’s immersive, multi-media piece, Ha Hoo…Ha Ha Hoo, brings a contemporary woman artist’s voice to this universal topic.
It has been a long time since I’ve written. It’s time for an update.
We had a great conference in Chicago last February. Our sponsored session, chaired by Marsha Morton and Pat Berman, was well-attended and offered listeners a set of four excellent and provocative papers on health, illness, and the art of medicine in the early twentieth century by Amanda Brian, Katerina Korola, Kathryn Carney, and Jonathan Odden. Jay Clarke, curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, hosted a special event that gave members the opportunity to examine and to discuss some of the German, Scandinavian, and Central European works on paper there. Finally, we hosted another delightful members’ dinner at Bistronomic, where I announced the winners of the annual Emerging Scholars Publication Prize. After long and lively deliberations necessitated by the quality of the large pool of submissions, the Board decided to name co-winners. The first was Tamara Golan, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, for her article, “Mit dem Kreidestift und Farben: Revolutionizing Grünewald in the German Democratic Republic,” which appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. The second was David W. Norman, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Wisconson-Madison, for his article “A Monochrome at Ukkusissaq: Pia Arke’s Home-Rule Earthworks,” which was published by October. Finally, an honorable mention was awarded to Michelle Oing, for her article “Carnival’s unstable objects: masks as human-sculpture hybrids in Nuremberg’s Schembartlauf,” in Sculpture Journal. Even if very belatedly, I want once again publicly to congratulate all the winners of that competition, and thank everyone who submitted their work to the Board. It is always exciting to read the outstanding scholarship of our members. I am looking forward, as always, to this year’s competition!
CAA has traditionally been the main focal point of the organization’s activity, but there is no reason now for the annual conference to be the exclusive site of our activity. While we all have been happy, I think, to lessen the amount of time we need to spend on Zoom or Teams since the most dangerous months of the pandemic, we want to continue to utilize those platforms in order periodically to offer accessible events for all of our members, wherever they may live and work. This past May, for instance, Freyda Spira and Joseph Henry, curator and curator fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery, offered HGSCEA members a special online presentation of the exhibition “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression,” which was on display there until late June. Freyda and Joseph spent well over an hour with the members who were logged in. They talked about the scholarly insights the exhibition had yielded with slides that focused on particular works in the exhibition. They gave a sense of the spatial and conceptual organization of the show with installation views. They engaged in a vigorous Q&A at the end. I want to thank them both very much for their willingness to share their work with HGSCEAns who were unable to visit the exhibition in person, and to Alison Morehead, a contributor to the exhibition’s catalogue and member of the HGSCEA Board, who initially proposed the idea for this very enjoyable event. Another exciting online curatorial talk, scheduled for late next month, is in the final stages of planning. Be on the lookout for the announcement this coming week!
So much for the year in review. Looking forward, I want to remind viewers of a few upcoming dates. The first is 15 November, which is the deadline for eligible members who are presenting papers in any session at the CAA annual conference to apply for travel stipends (https://hgscea.org/trave-stipend/). Second is the deadline for submissions to the Emerging Scholar Publication Prize. We haven’t yet determined that exact date, but it typically is in mid-December. I’ll send out more information later this fall.
I am looking forward to seeing many of you from afar at the upcoming online special event, and also at CAA’s annual conference in New York in February 2025! Our sponsored session, “The Visual Culture of Festivals in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe,” is being chaired by Michelle Oing. You can see the call for papers on the CAA website (https://caa.confex.com/caa/2025/webprogrampreliminary/Session14130.html), and I encourage interested members to submit proposals by the deadline of 29 August! In addition to the session, we are at the initial stages of planning for the next members’ dinner as well as a few exciting special in-person events during the conference. Stay tuned!
That’s it for now. Please let us know about ideas for special remote and in-person events or ways that you think HGSCEA can better serve you. The Board would love to hear from you!
The service AHICE was created to provide easier access to information about events in the domain of art history in four Central European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The areas covered include exhibitions, conferences and publications. AHICE publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter and operates a website at: http://www.ahice.net
Art Margins is an e-journal dedicated to contemporary visual culture, including contemporary art, of Central and Eastern Europe. It covers all media, including architecture,new media, and film. http://www.artmargins.com/
The German Studies Association is the national and international association of scholars in all fields of German Studies. Its interests span the period from early times to the present Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. http://www.thegsa.org/
The Virtueller Katalog Kunstgeschichte (Virtual Catalogue for Art History,VKK) is a European specialized meta catalogue based on the KVK technolgy.]The VKK gives now access to more than 4,1 million bibliographical records. It is also accessible through http://www.artlibraries.net
Austrian Studies Association (Formerly: Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association) is an affiliated society of the MLA. ASA/MALCA publishes the print journal Journal of Austrian Studies .
The combined online public access catalog of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence/Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris/Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome: http://aleph.mpg.de/F?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=kub01
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation
By Elizabeth J. Petcu
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, February 2025)
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation explores how architectural media came to propel scientific discourse between the eras of Dürer and of Rubens. It is also the first English-language book to feature the polymathic, eccentric, and long-misunderstood artist Wendel Dietterlin (c. 1550–1599). Here, Elizabeth J. Petcu reveals how architectural paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints became hotbeds of early modern empiricism, the idea that knowledge derives from sensory experience. She demonstrates how Dietterlin’s empirical imagery of architecture came into dialogue with the image-making practices of early modern scientists, a rapport that foreshadowed the intimate relationships between architecture and science today. Petcu’s astute insights offer historians of art, science, and architecture a new framework for understanding the role of architectural images in the foundations of modern science. She also provides a coherent narrative regarding the interplay between early modern art, architecture, and science as a catalyst for modern empirical philosophy.
The book has been published with support from the Graham Foundation.
Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language
Edited by Marie Rakušanová and Nicholas Sawicki Contributions by Miroslav Haľák, Alexander Klee, Marek Nekula, Marie Rakušanová, and Nicholas Sawicki
Kant (Prague) and the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen, 2024
Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language traces the writer Franz Kafka’s interest in modern art and visual culture. Examining Kafka’s relationship to visuality, the book explores the diversity of images that surrounded Kafka in his home city of Prague—a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences. It maps how Kafka engaged with local painting and sculpture, architecture, and monuments, and also with an array of popular visual media and phenomena from illustrated magazines and advertising to film, photography, dance, and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student.
The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language at the Gallery of West Bohemia in Pilsen (5 June–28 October 2024). It is distributed in North America by Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.).
This study offers a radically new perspective on Dutch Neorealism, one that emphasizes the role of film as an apparatus, the effects of which, when emulated in painting, can reproduce the affective experience of film-watching.
More of a tendency than a tightly defined style or “ism,” Neorealism is the Dutch variant of Magic Realism, an uncanny mode of figurative painting identified with Neue Sachlichkeit in Germany and Novecento in Italy. Best represented by the Dutch artists Pyke Koch, Carel Willink, Charley Toorop, Raoul Hynckes, Dick Ket, and Wim Schuhmacher, Neorealism—as demonstrated in this book—depicted societal disintegration and allegories of looming disaster in reaction to the rise of totalitarian regimes and, eventually, the Nazi Occupation of The Netherlands. The degree to which these artists exhibited either revolutionary or reactionary sentiments—usually corresponding with their political affiliation—is one of the central problematics explored in this text.
The Dada Archivist: Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Berlin Dada
by Stina Barchan
Peter Lang (2023)
The archive of the German artist Hannah Höch (1889–1978) has long been an important source of material for historians researching the interwar avant-garde and artists associated with Berlin Dada. This book explores Höch’s practices of organisation when assembling the documents in her house outside Berlin from 1939 until her death. Through extensive research, the author argues that Höch’s archive should be considered not just a collection of documents but a work in its own right, intimately connected with the artist’s daily life. Noting the importance of understanding the mechanisms of this work, the book suggests that Höch took charge of both preserving and exploring the possibilities of Dada long after the group had been officially dissolved. The file that Höch assembled on her friend, the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), plays an important part in the book, its content revealing how domestic habits infused both artists’ practices. Juxtaposing Höch’s archive and Schwitters’s Merzbau, the author argues for an interactive movement between the two that has fundamental implications for how we understand both artists’ oeuvres.
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1299817
Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth
Edited by Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen
Contributions by Ali Smith, Jay A. Clarke, Jill Lloyd-Peppiatt, Trine Otte Bak Nielsen and Arne Johan Vetlesen
A thought-provoking volume on Edvard Munch’s often neglected pictures of nature, exploring the Norwegian artist’s landscapes, seascapes, and existential environments in light of his own time and ours
This richly illustrated catalogue provides a multifaceted perspective on the pictures of nature and landscape by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944). This important topic has been neglected in scholarship on Munch, despite the fact that it is a major motif in his oeuvre. This volume is the first to explore the theme in its full breadth throughout Munch’s corpus, including his paintings, lithographs, watercolors, and woodcuts. His depictions of forests, farmland, and the seashore, as well as paintings of sea storms, snow, and other extreme weather, present us with undulating forms that animate nature. They likewise provide an example of Munch’s preference for liminal spaces where transformations take place, often celebrating human interaction with nature in its many manifestations. The book also considers Munch’s less conventional landscapes, and particularly those where his famous Scream motif occurs. These environments depict nature in an existential way, suggesting that the artist held a deep concern for nature’s destruction by humans—a concern no less relevant today. A complementary look at his writings as primary sources alongside his images shows how Munch mixed a scientific perspective on nature with metaphysical and spiritual notions of rebirth that permeate other parts of his corpus. The book also includes a engaging short story by award-winning author Ali Smith that was inspired by Munch’s work.
Foreword by Michael Govan. Text by Bruno Cabanes, Santanu Das, Anton Kaes, Jeffrey T. Sammons, Catherine Speck, David A. Welch
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and DelMonico Books, 2023
How the first global media war impacted art, graphic design, and cinema, from Otto Dix to Kathe Kollwitz.
The media spectacle in which we live today has origins in the Great War (1914–18) and the burgeoning mediascape of newspapers, ephemera, photography and the new medium of cinema that made it the first global media war. The war’s battlefields and contingent spaces became perhaps the most international human endeavor hitherto undertaken, with most Eastern and Western European countries and the Ottoman Empire involved, as well as forces from Australia, Canada, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and Indigenous peoples including Maori, First Peoples and Choctaw “code talkers.” This book examines the war through paintings, sculpture, posters, photographs, film stills and the graphic arts, showing how it affected the arts between 1914 and 1930, and the role of media in constructing a global “imagined community” that could be accepted as part of the war effort.
Artists include: Johannes Baader, Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, George Bellows, Edith Collier, Raymond Desvarreux, Otto Dix, Raoul Dufy, Lyonel Feininger, Natalia Goncharova, George Grosz, Mary Riter Hamilton, Hannah Höch, Willy Jaeckel, Kathe Kollwitz, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Moriz Melzer, and many others.
Exhibition: This volume accompanies the exhibition Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), December 3, 2023-July 7, 2024.
Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania
By Tomasz Grusiecki
Manchester University Press, 2023 (Dec. 9)
Transcultural things examines four sets of artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: maps pointing to Poland-Lithuania’s roots in the supposedly ‘Oriental’ land of Sarmatia, portrayals of fashions that purport to trace Polish culture back to a distant and revered past, Ottomanesque costumes worn by Polish ambassadors and carpets labelled as Polish despite their foreign provenance.
These examples of invented tradition borrowed from abroad played a significant role in narrating and visualising the cultural landscape of Polish-Lithuanian elites. But while modern scholarship defines these objects as exemplars of national heritage, early modern beholders treated them with more flexibility, seeing no contradiction in framing material things as local cultural forms while simultaneously acknowledging their foreign derivation.
The book reveals how artefacts began to signify as vernacular idioms in the first place, often through obscuring their non-local origin and tainting subsequent discussions of the imagined purity of national culture as a result.
Between 1947 and 1953, the Austrian-born, Bauhaus-trained artist Herbert Bayer (1900–1985) oversaw the design and production of the World Geo-Graphic Atlas, a landmark work of graphic design and data visualization. Commissioned by Container Corporation of America to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chicago-based company’s founding, the Atlas would ultimately become much more than the promotional publication its patrons had initially envisioned. The Atlas’s imaginative presentation methods have had a lasting impact within the fields of information design and visual education, transforming the look and character of subsequent geographic atlases and popular scientific illustration. Characterized by Bayer as “the concept of a ‘visualist,’” the Atlas’s graphic presentations made complex and specialized information comprehensible and engaging for readers—a point he underscored in giving the Atlas’s title its distinctive, hyphenated formulation “geo-graphic.” The Atlas’s narrative proved to be prescient as well, highlighting challenges related to economic globalization and human-caused environmental destruction—crises that have only grown more acute in the seventy years since its publication.
In Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury, Benjamin Benus tells the story behind this work’s creation. Richly illustrated and drawing on extensive archival documentation, Benus’s account reconstructs the working methods and intellectual exchanges through which Bayer and his circle of scientific collaborators realized this remarkable work. Reflecting on Bayer’s attempt to balance and resolve the commissioned work’s educational and advertising functions, Benus’s study offers broader insights into the roles twentieth-century artists and designers played in popularizing scientific knowledge and shaping audiences’ geographical worldviews.
The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany
by Gregory C. Bryda
Yale University Press, 2023
A revelatory study exploring wood’s many material, ecological, and symbolic meanings in the religious art of medieval Germany
In late medieval Germany, wood was a material laden with significance. It was an important part of the local environment and economy, as well as an object of religious devotion in and of itself. Gregory C. Bryda examines the multiple meanings of wood and greenery within religious art—as a material, as a feature of agrarian life, and as a symbol of the cross, whose wood has resonances with other iconographies in the liturgy. Bryda discusses how influential artists such as Matthias Grünewald, known for the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the renowned sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider exploited wood’s multivalent nature to connect spiritual themes to the lived environment outside church walls. Exploring the complex visual and material culture of the period, this lavishly illustrated volume features works ranging from monumental altarpieces to portable pictures and offers a fresh understanding of how wood in art functioned to unlock the mysteries of faith and the natural world in both liturgy and everyday life.
This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating theories on memory studies, collective and public memory, and notions of “memoricide,” this is the first book in English to focus on visual culture in the period when Austria was erased as a nation and incorporated into the Third Reich as “Ostmark.” The organization, content and publications surrounding these three exhibits are explored in depth and set against the larger political changes and dangerous ideologies they reflect.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, cultural history, memory studies, art and politics and Holocaust studies
Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding Western industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media.
Images discussed range from the depiction of people and places to the invisible realms of pathogens and emotions, while topics include the messaging of disease prevention and containment in public health initiatives, the motivations of governments to ensure control, the criticism of authority in graphic satire, and the private experience of illness in the domestic realm. Essays explore biomedical conditions as well as the recurrent constructed social narratives of bias, blame, and othering regarding race, gender, and class that are frequently highlighted in visual representations.
This volume offers a pictured genealogy of pandemic experience that has continuing resonance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, history of medicine, and medical humanities.
This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin.
During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel.
This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.
Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles 1937. Eine Ausstellung zwischen antiquarischen Büchern und der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League
By Françoise Forster-Hahn
Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, 2022
Im Juni 1937 eröffnete Jacob Zeitlin in seiner Buchladen-Galerie in Los Angeles eine Ausstellung mit Grafiken von Käthe Kollwitz. Es war die erste Ausstellung von Kollwitz’ Werk in Südkalifornien. Co-Sponsor der Ausstellung und der glamourösen Vernissage war die Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy. Die Redner des Abends waren der deutsche Schriftsteller und Aktivist Ernst Toller und der amerikanische Komponist George Antheil. Zu den illustren Gästen gehörten Fritz Lang, Richard Neutra, Arnold Schönberg, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill und andere Berühmtheiten der Filmindustrie und der deutschösterreichischen Exilgemeinde. Die Kollwitz-Ausstellung wurde zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt der zentralen Konfliktfelder der Stadt: Sie war nicht bloß ein kulturelles Ereignis in Zeitlins Buchladen-Galerie, sondern vor allem eine gezielte politische Aktion der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Kollwitz’ Schaffen geriet damit ins Kreuzfeuer der Auseinandersetzungen zwischen dem antifaschistischen Kampf der Anti-Nazi League und den gewalttätigen Aktionen nationalsozialistischer Gruppen in Los Angeles. In diesem politischen Spannungsfeld wurde Käthe Kollwitz als »anti-Nazi artist« wahrgenommen und ihrer Ausstellung eine aktive Rolle im Kampf gegen Hitler zugeschrieben. Die Kapitel des Buches zeichnen nach, wie die Ausstellung zum Kreuzungspunkt von vier Biografien wurde: Käthe Kollwitz, Jacob Zeitlin, Ernst Toller und George Antheil.
An incisive analysis of the pedagogy of influential artist and teacher Josef Albers.
An extraordinary teacher whose influence continues today, Josef Albers helped shape the Bauhaus school in Germany and established the art and design programs at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University. His books about color theory have informed generations, and his artworks are included in the canon of high-modernist non-representational art. The pedagogy Albers developed was a dynamic approach to teaching that transcended the modernist agendas and cultivated a material way of thinking among his students.
With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.
The Chicago Lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy and His Eclectic Art Collection
By Vivian Endicott Barnett
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 111, Part 2 (2022)
Arthur Jerome Eddy, the Chicago lawyer, author, and art collector, was a legend in his lifetime (1859–1920). Among other accomplishments, he was the first person to buy radically modern paintings by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia at the 1913 Armory Show (also known as the International Exhibition of Modern Art), the first American collector to purchase works by Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and arguably the first person to write a book about modern art in the United States. Eddy was a corporation lawyer by profession and a partner in prominent Chicago law firms. He was instrumental in organizing American Steel Foundries, American Linseed Oil, National Carbon, and National Turbine, among other large corporations. He published his opinions on tariffs, bonds, trusts, and monopolies. Students of law and business are familiar with his books The Law of Combinations (1901) and The New Competition (1912). Nevertheless, a century later, Eddy is best known as a collector of modern art. Twenty years before the Armory Show took place, Eddy had begun to collect art. At the time of his death in 1920, he owned more than 250 works—and not all were modern. In fact, his collecting was extremely eclectic or, as he expressed it, “catholic in taste.” How he began to collect, when and from whom he bought art, which artists he favored, and why he acquired certain works and not others are questions that must be explored in order to solve the mysteries of Eddy’s collection.
Free Berlin:Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life
By Briana J. Smith
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.
In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.
These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects.
With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.
Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation
By Shulamith Behr
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022
Women Artists in Expressionism explores how women negotiated the competitive world of modern art during the late Wilhelmine and early Weimar periods in Germany. Their stories challenge predominantly male-oriented narratives of Expressionism and shed light on the divergent artistic responses of women to the dramatic events of the early twentieth century.
Shulamith Behr shows how the posthumous critical reception of Paula Modersohn-Becker cast her as a prime agent of the feminization of the movement, and how Käthe Kollwitz used printmaking as a vehicle for technical innovation and sociopolitical commentary. She looks at the dynamic relationship between Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Münter, whose different paths in life led them to the Blaue Reiter, a group of Expressionist artists that included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Behr examines Nell Walden’s role as an influential art dealer, collector, and artist, who promoted women Expressionists during the First World War, and discusses how Dutch artist Jacoba van Heemskerck’s spiritual abstraction earned her the status of an honorary German Expressionist. She demonstrates how figures such as Rosa Schapire and Johanna Ey contributed to the development of the movement as spectators, critics, and collectors of male avant-gardism.
Richly illustrated, Women Artists in Expressionism is a women-centered history that reveals the importance of emancipative ideals to the shaping of modernity and the avant-garde.
Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context After 1912
Editedby Cole Collins
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022
This volume, which takes its title from a Hannah Höch quote of 1971, contains essays by current and former HGSCEA members including Brett M. Van Hoesen, Lisa Lee, Adrian Sudhalter, and Michael White.
From the dust jacket:
“Compressed Utterances brings focused attention to collage in a Germanic context, whose contours and impact are still so little appreciated. As this stunning volume shows, collage serves as a key medium not only for understanding art historical developments but social and political transformations as well, often embodying the dynamic forces of avant-garde criticality.”
— Thomas O. Haakenson, Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, California College of the Arts
“A deep dive into the paradigmatic medium of the twentieth century, Compressed Utterances is the foundational text of the growing field of collage studies. The book’s established and emerging authors investigate an astonishing range of previously unknown collage work to explore German artists’ and writers’ deployment of this medium as appropriative, intertextual, alienating, and temporally slippery.”
— Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York
The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition, and German Modernism
By Isabel Rousset
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture’s obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset’s revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany’s rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture’s ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.
How East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life.
Experimental artists in the final years of the German Democratic Republic did not practice their art in the shadows, on the margins, hiding away from the Stasi’s prying eyes. In fact, as Sara Blaylock shows, many cultivated a critical influence over the very bureaucracies meant to keep them in line, undermining state authority through forthright rather than covert projects. In Parallel Public, Blaylock describes how some East German artists made their country’s experimental art scene a form of (counter) public life, creating an alternative to the crumbling collective underpinnings of the state.
Blaylock examines the work of artists who used body-based practices—including performance, film, and photography—to create new vocabularies of representation, sharing their projects through independent networks of dissemination and display. From the collective films and fashion shows of Erfurt’s Women Artists Group, which fused art with feminist political action, to Gino Hahnemann, the queer filmmaker and poet who set nudes alight in city parks, these creators were as bold in their ventures as they were indifferent to state power.
Parallel Public is the first work of its kind on experimental art in East Germany to be written in English. Blaylock draws on extensive interviews with artists, art historians, and organizers; artist-made publications; official reports from the Union of Fine Artists; and Stasi surveillance records. As she recounts the role culture played in the GDR’s rapid decline, she reveals East German artists as dissenters and witnesses, citizens and agents, their work both antidote to and diagnosis of a weakening state.
Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture
Lynnette Widder
A close look at the work and influence of German architects Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf.
West German architecture underwent a phase of intense productivity from 1949 to 1964. In the immediate postwar years, architects confronted Nazi legacies in building culture amidst drastic privation that hampered construction. As industrial production recovered and a middle-class nation emerged, so too did a new architecture influenced by the American International Style model, especially as Bauhaus masters returned to Germany from the United States as advisers. But there was much more at stake than style. Construction details and other technical documents reveal that this was a moment when architectural practice aspired to calibrate social, material, and political norms through design.
As Lynnette Widder shows in Year Zero to Economic Miracle, at the center of all these transformations were Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf, two architects who shared political, religious, and professional allegiances. Schwippert, the architect of the new Bonn parliament, worked to align economic redevelopment and a burgeoning consumer goods industry with design. Ruf, to whom Schwippert directed the commission for West Germany’s first World’s Fair pavilion, found ways to master architectural construction amidst both scarcity and largess. With photographs, drawings, and a broad range of unpublished documents, this book introduces these architects to an English-language audience.
A definitive survey on the Dada participant and pioneer of abstraction between art and craft, spanning her textiles, marionettes, stained glass, paintings and more
A New York Times critics’ pick | Best Art Books 2021
Accompanying the first retrospective of Taeuber-Arp’s work in the United States in 40 years, Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is a comprehensive survey of this multifaceted abstract artist’s innovative and wide-ranging body of work. Her background in the applied arts and dance, her involvement in the Zurich Dada movement and her projects for architectural spaces were essential to her development of a uniquely versatile and vibrant abstract vocabulary. Through her artistic output and various professional alliances, Taeuber-Arp consistently challenged the historically constructed boundaries separating fine art from craft and design.
This richly illustrated catalog explores the artist’s interdisciplinary and cross-pollinating approach to abstraction through some 400 works, including textiles, beadwork, polychrome marionettes, architectural and interior designs, stained glass windows, works on paper, paintings and relief sculptures. It also features 15 essays that examine the full sweep of Taeuber-Arp’s career. Arranged into six chapters that follow the exhibition’s sections, these essays trace the progression of Taeuber-Arp’s creative production both chronologically and thematically. A comprehensive illustrated chronology, the first essay on Taeuber-Arp’s materials and techniques, and an exhibition checklist based on new research and analysis detail the expansive nature of Taeuber-Arp’s production.
The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin
Carolyn S. Loeb
Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022
In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city’s infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be.
Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city’s division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall’s existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.
Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2020-2021: The Société Anonyme at 100
Frauke V. Josenhans (ed.) with contributions by Jenny Anger, Carlotta Castellani, Lucia Colombari, Francesca Ferrari, Joanna Fiduccia, Megan Fontanella, Choghakate Kazarian, Talia Kwartler, Helke Smet, Cynthia Schwarz, Marcin Szelag, Isabel Wünsche
New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 2022
The Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin publishes original scholarship on works in the museum’s collection, contributed by curators, conservators, and fellows, as well as art historians and specialists. This special double issue of the Bulletin celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Société Anonyme, Inc., with new research and a special focus on female artists and others who, in the past, have received less attention than some of their amply studied colleagues. Founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier (1877–1952), Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), and Man Ray (1890–1976), the Société Anonyme set out to introduce modern art to the United States by amassing an important collection of objects that was shown across the country through a variety of innovative programs, exhibitions, and publications. Gifted to Yale University and entrusted to the care of the Gallery in two settlements, in 1941 and in 1953, much of the collection—which features works by some of the 20th century’s most renowned artists—now belongs to the museum. Spanning styles as varied as abstraction, Constructivism, Cubism, Dada, De Stijl, Expressionism, Futurism, Neoplasticism, and Surrealism, the Société Anonyme Collection is a distinctive testimony to artistic production in the first half of the 20th century due to both its depth and the variety of artists represented. The 12 articles in this issue showcase the exciting research that the collection continues to inspire, uniting both emerging and established scholars, from the United States and Europe, who vividly illustrate through their articles on movements, artists, and artworks the need to critically question and rewrite the discourse around modern art.
Malevich and Interwar Modernism. Russian Art and the International of the Square
by Éva Forgács (Bloomsbury, 2022)
This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe.
It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book’s chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.
Design and Heritage: The Construction of Identity and Belonging
Edited by Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze (Routledge, 2021).
Design and Heritage provides the first extended study of heritage from the point of view of design history. Exploring the material objects and spaces that contribute to our experience of heritage, the volume also examines the processes and practices that shape them.
Bringing together 18 case studies, written by authors from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Norway, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, the book questions how design functions to produce heritage. Including provocative case studies of objects that reinterpret visual symbols of cultural identity and buildings and monuments that evoke feelings of national pride and historical memory, as well as landscapes embedded with trauma, contributors consider how we can work to develop adequate shared conceptual models of heritage and apply them to design and its histories. Exploring the distinction between tangible and intangible heritages, the chapters consider what these categories mean for design history and heritage. Finally, the book questions whether it might be possible to promote a truly equitable understanding of heritage that illuminates the social, cultural and economic roles of design.
Design and Heritage demonstrates that design historical methods of inquiry contribute significantly to critical heritage studies. Academics, researchers and students engaged in the study of heritage, design history, material culture, folklore, art history, architectural history and social and cultural history will find much to interest them within the pages of the book.
Strategy: Get Arts: 35 Artists Who Broke the Rules
By Christian Weikop (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
Based on close archival research, Christian Weikop uncovers unknown and exciting narratives, as well as artist networks, concerning this provocative 1970 exhibition, held at ECA. The author has previously considered the British press reception of SGA in an article for Tate Papers, but this Studies in Photography-EUP book publication goes far beyond that article and any other scholarship on the exhibition by taking into account the contributions of all 35 artists based in Düsseldorf, and incorporating testimony of individuals who were involved in this landmark exhibition, or who were later engaged in archive exhibitions or recreation projects. Weikop explores the formation of the exhibition in the context of a late 1960s culture of protests and occupations, and demonstrates that SGA was a pivotal ‘Shock of the New’ moment that would leave its mark on art education.
Private Passion, Civic Spirit: Robert Gore Rifkind and German Expressionism.
Edited by Stephanie Barron and Timothy O Benson
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021)
This volume includes numerous remembrances of the late Robert Gore Rifkind and his collection of German Expressionist prints and library from the scholars, colleagues, and dealers who were involved with the collection during its formation in the 1970s and 80s. Unlike many of the émigrés who founded German Expressionist collections in America, Rifkind – a Los Angeles native and successful lawyer—had little familiarity with German culture when he was drawn to the visually intense graphic art of this socially engaged modernist movement. To build the world class collection and library which is now his legacy, Rifkind sought out leading dealers, curators, and scholars in the field for advice, developing along the way an admiration for scholarship that led him to invite many experts to Los Angeles. Thus was begun the Scholars-in-Residence Program funded by the Rifkind Foundation that now thrives at the Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art founded through his philanthropy in 1983. Fittingly this volume includes three longer essays by Alessandra Comini, Megan R. Luke, and Christian Weikop which explore Expressionism and its echoes into the Post-Cold-War era.
Preface / Stephanie Barron, Timothy O. Benson — From private collection to public resource: creating the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies / Timothy O. Benson — Remembrances. Ida Katherine Rigby: when German Expressionism was a cause — Ralph Jentsch — Karin Breuer — Joan Weinstein — Alessandra Comini — Rose-Carol Washton Long: a reminiscence as a tribute — Shulamith Behr — Stephanie Barron — Wolf-Dieter Dube: a salute — An album of personal photographs, 1975-1983 — Compelling Käthe Kollwitz / Alessandra Comini — A withdrawal from appearance: George Grosz and Kurt Schwitters / Megan R. Luke — The art of Georg Baselitz: Expressionism remixed? / Christian Weikop — Exhibition history and Rifkind scholars-in-residence — Contributors — Photograph credits.
Softbound, 95 pages: illustrations (chiefly color), portraits; 24 cm.
Edited by Nina Amstutz, Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Mareike Hennig, Gregor Wedekind (Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021)
Der Band geht der wechselseitigen Durchdringung von visuellen Künsten und Naturwissenschaften bzw. Naturphilosophie im Kontext der europäischen Romantik nach.
Die Romantik als eine geistige Bewegung entfaltete sich in Europa auf Grundlage der allgemeinen Überzeugung, dass Kunst eine Form von Wissenschaft sei und umgekehrt. Viele Dichter und Künstler sowie Naturwissenschaftler waren bestrebt, empirische und kreative Formen der Welterkundung miteinander zu verbinden. Die Aufsätze in diesem Sammelband untersuchen die Entstehung einer „romantischen Wissenschaft“ und ihre Beziehung zur bildenden Kunst, worin objektive und subjektive Formen der Forschung gleichgestellt wurden.
Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.
Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930
Edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity.
The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization.
The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness.
With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects—those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel—and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany’s multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.
Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960
Edited By Kerry Greaves (Routledge 2021)
This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s.
The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of “rediscovered” women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen.
The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.
Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy
Vanessa Rocco (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)
Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture.
The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results.
Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture
Jacqueline E. Jung (Yale University Press, July 14, 2020)
A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture
Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.
German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies
Dorothy Price (ed.) (Manchester University Press, 2020)
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
CONTENTS
Introduction: why does der Blaue Reiter still matter? – Dorothy Price and Christopher Short
1 Is der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? A discussion of anarchism, art and politics – Rose-Carol Washton Long
2 The dynamics of gendered artistic identity and creativity in der Blaue Reiter – Shulamith Behr
3 The ‘primitive’ and the modern in Der Blaue Reiter almanac and the Folkwang Museum – Katherine Kuenzli
4 The ‘savages’ of Germany: a reassessment of the relationship between der Blaue Reiter and Brücke – Christian Weikop
5 Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada – Debbie Lewer
6 Type/face: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on language and perception – Annie Bourneuf
7 Feeling blue: Der Blaue Reiter, Francophilia and the Tate Gallery 1960 – Nathan J. Timpano
8 Die Tunisreise: the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter in the art of Paul Klee and Nacer Khemir – Sarah McGavran
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented: 1918–1938
Edited by Jodi Hauptman andAdrian Sudhalter The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020)
How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world
“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years―Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl―Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.
These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”―all designations adopted by the artists themselves―turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, architects, theater designers and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks the transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, this richly illustrated book presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.
The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy
Megan Brandow-Faller
Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.
Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.
Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.
A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy
Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.
In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.
Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei (Chicago: IIT Institute of Design, 2019)
Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy offers a unique insight into one of the less familiar sides of the Bauhaus at large and Moholy-Nagy in particular. In May 1926, thirteen Bauhaus professors and students created handprints that were preserved by László Moholy-Nagy. This publication brings together for the first time all of the so-called Bauhaus handprints in their historical and contemporary contexts with scholars and artists touching upon and responding to the Bauhaus legacy.
BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture,
Edited by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Isabel Wünsche, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019
A history of Bauhaus in Australia and New Zealand.
Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture presents an extraordinary new Australasian cultural history. It is a migrant and refugee story: from 1930, the arrival of so many emigre, internee and refugee educators helped to transform art, architecture and design in Australia and New Zealand. Fifteen thematic essays and twenty individual case studies bring to light a tremendous amount of new archival material in order to show how these innovative educators, exiled from Nazism, introduced Bauhaus ideas and models to a new world. As their Bauhaus model spanned art, architecture and design, the book provides a unique cross-disciplinary, emigre history of art education in Australia and New Zealand. It offers a remarkable and little-known chapter in the wider Bauhaus venture, which has multiple legacies and continues to inform our conceptions of progressive education, creativity and the role of art and design in the wider community.
Carl Einstein A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, University of Chicago Press (2019)
The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was at the forefront of the modernist movement that defined the twentieth century. One of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators on cubism, he was also among the first authors to assess African sculpture as art. Yet his writings remain relatively little known in the Anglophone world. With A Mythology of Forms, the first representative collection of Einstein’s art theory and criticism to appear in English translation, Charles W. Haxthausen fills this gap. Spanning three decades, it assembles the most important of Einstein’s writings on the art that was central to his critical project—on cubism, surrealism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee, and includes the full texts of his two pathbreaking books on African art, Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921). With fourteen texts by Einstein, each presented with extensive commentary, A Mythology of Forms will bring a pivotal voice in the history of modern art into English.
A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades.
Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. (Das östliche Europa. Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9.) Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, 280 pp.
How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was „invented“ and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably „Sovietized“ in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Although the new „official“ discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.
Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art.
Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds.,New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century.
Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.
Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school’s engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members’ spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school’s Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
By: Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler (Bloomsbury/Herbert Press, 2019)
Forty five key women of the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today.
The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localized to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. Moving chronologically from the first women to enter the school to those who helped lead it through its last days in 1933, this book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists, and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience.
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted her last self-portrait in autumn 1907, while she was pregnant with her first child. In the painting she gazes straight at the viewer, holding up two flowers—symbols of the creativity and procreativity of women artists—and resting a protective hand atop her swelling belly. Modersohn-Becker would die three weeks after giving birth, at age thirty-one, still to be recognized as the first woman artist to challenge centuries of representations of the female body. Today this compelling work claims an important place at The Museum of Modern Art as the earliest painting by a woman on view in the collection galleries. Art historian Diane Radycki’s essay examines Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait in depth, surveys the artist’s late career, and discusses her posthumous recognition.
Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. A richly illustrated and lively essay illuminates the subject in detail and situates the work within the artist’s life and career as well as within broader historical contexts. This series is an invaluable guide for exploring and interpreting some of the most beloved artworks in the Museum’s collection. 48pp; 35 illus.
Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School,
Editor(s): Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, 2019
A century after the Bauhaus’s founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular.
In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus’s founding and beyond.
Transformation: Art In East-Central Europe After 1989
Andrzej Szczerski, 2019
The year 1989 marked the end of one era and the beginning of another—the period of postcommunist transformation. Similar processes were taking place in other former Eastern Bloc countries that were declaring free elections, reclaiming full sovereignty, building democracy, and completely changing their economies in favor of free market capitalism. The several historic months in the latter half of 1989 came to be known as the “Autumn of Nations” and ushered in the total liberation of East-Central Europe from Soviet domination. Less than two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, signaling the end of the Cold War in Europe. The new era brought not only political and economic changes, but also cultural ones which would lead to reclaiming individual liberties and other civil rights, as well as to the rebuilding of national identities within the European community which could now, finally, encompass the entire continent. Culture became a moving force for change, as censorship was abolished, monuments to communist heroes were removed, and streets renamed.
The radical cultural changes reverberated in the art of the period, its ideology, and the system of institutional sponsorship that promoted the three approaches most popular with artists. Many of them engaged in the changes directly, creating works that either commented on current events or proposed what they believed to be the right direction for the transformation to take. Others, although preferring to observe from a distance, highlighted the diverse contexts and historical antecedents generated by the cultural identities of countries, regions, or even artistic centers, in which the changes were rooted. The third contribution of contemporary art was its role in shaping how we remember the communist period, by on the one hand questioning the past, and on the other accenting the persistence of the traces it left behind, thereby inviting reflection on its negative as well as its positive ramifications. The art created in these circumstances and that related directly to the post-1989 transition, democracy, and a free market economy can be united under the name “art of the transformation” and it is the subject of this publication.
Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933
Robin Schuldenfrei, 2018
Luxury and Modernism examines the status of the object within the context of Wilhelmine and Weimar architectural culture and theory. It argues that modernism responded to and reflected the norms and desires of a bourgeois elite—and that new and old forms of luxury are embedded accordingly in its materials, its showcasing of technology, and its discourses. This monograph looks specifically at such aspects as: the design and marketing of AEG electrical appliances by Peter Behrens and the notion of electricity as luxury in this period; the relationship between the design and materials of Bauhaus architecture and objects and failed efforts at affordable mass production of them; and notions of materiality and interiority in the domestic commissions of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Methodologically, this study reinterrogates key components of the canonical history of modernism using economic history, cultural studies, social history, sociology, and German history, to reveal new meanings in familiar objects of modernism.
Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History.
Michael Yonan, London: Routledge, 2018.
This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his “Character Heads.” These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.
Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis
Miriam Paeslack, 2018, University of Minnesota Press
How photography and a modernizing Berlin informed an urban image—and one another—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
This is the first book to critically assess, contextualize, and frame urban and architectural photographs of Berlin’s crucial Imperial years between 1871 and 1918. Imperial Berlin emerges as a modern metropolis, only half-heartedly inhibited by urban preservationist concerns and rather more akin to North American cities in their bold industrialization and competing urban expansions than to European counterparts.
This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally.
Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest émigré projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German émigré collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the ‘degenerate’ artists themselves. The book explores the show’s potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.
As a programmatic action of the Nazi cultural policy was opened in July 1937, the propaganda show “degenerate art” Munich and then wandered through several major German cities. In response to this campaign against modernity was the exhibition “20th Century German Art”, which was shown in 1938 in London and collected nearly 300 masterpieces of modern German art. The project was originally conceived by two women who run galleries in London and Zurich: Noel Norton and Irmgard Buchard. Then came Paul Westheim, the former ex-publisher of the “Kunstblatt” living in exile in Paris, before the British art critic Herbert Read won the prestigious New Burlington Galleries as an exhibition venue. About half of the exhibits came from German emigrants and artists, which were branded as “degenerate” by the National Socialists or persecuted as Jews. The spectrum of works ranged from Liebermann’s impressionism to the expressionism of the “Blaue Reiter” to the Bauhaus artists Paul Klee, Kandin sky and Schlemmer. Also represented were Max Beckmann and Nolde or the sculptors Barlach and Lehmbruck. The exhibition thus surpassed in scope and quality density even the legendary show of the New York Museum of Modern Art of 1931, but was forgotten by the soon after breaking out of World War II. As the most important cultural manifesto against the policies of the National Socialists, this event, which dates back to 2018 eighty years ago, is to be rediscovered. The Liebermann Villa in Berlin takes this anniversary as an opportunity to reconstruct the exhibition. In the run-up to the Berlin show, the Wiener Library, London, is showing a documentary exhibition with documents, plans and photographic interior views, thus closing a gap in German-British art history. The bilingual catalog is introduced by prefaces by Minister of State Monika GruVonters and Sebastian Wood, the British Ambassador to Germany.
Against the background of acute political tensions in London in the summer of 1938: Twentieth Century German Art. It is not only the first major retrospective of German modernist art in the English-speaking world. It was the first international response to the Nazi campaign against socially degenerate art. Published to mark the eightieth anniversary of this important cultural event, this catalog tells the story of the exhibition: the context in which it was staged, the circumstances of its organization, and its impact on Britain and further afield. The catalog accompanies two exhibitions taking place during 2018, at the Vienna Library in London and at the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee in Berlin.
Bilingual German-English Bilingual edition in English and German
Art and Resistance in Germany, Editor(s): Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, 2018
In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.
While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.
Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context, Edited by Isabel Wünsche, 2018
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century.
Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production.
Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.
Joyce Tsai Laszlo Moholy-NagyPainting after Photography, University of California Press, 2018
This provocative book examines crucial philosophical questions László Moholy-Nagy explored in theory and practice throughout his career. Why paint in a photographic age? Why work by hand when technology holds so much promise? The stakes of painting, or not painting, were tied to much larger considerations of the ways art, life, and modernity were linked for Moholy and his avant-garde peers. Joyce Tsai’s close analysis reveals how Moholy’s experience in exile led to his attempt to recuperate painting, not merely as an artistic medium but as the space where the trace of human touch might survive the catastrophes of war. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography will significantly reshape our view of the artist’s oeuvre, providing a new understanding of cultural modernism and the avant-garde.
Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology
Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, editors, 2018
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades. This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is an indispensable volume on modern and contemporary art and theory from the region.
Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski
Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme By Jenny Anger, 2018
“Where do the roots of art lie?” asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. “In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.” Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910–1932)—has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.
Jenny Anger traces Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche—forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York’s Société Anonyme (1920–1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism.
Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction’s connection with the real.
Megan Brandow-Faller (Ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present, Bloomsbury, 2017
Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern ‘invention’ of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design–Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.
Øystein Sjastad, Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, University of Washington Press, 2017
The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries’ most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. Krohg’s work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertineand its related paintings were banned upon publication. The story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway, but Krohg was punished for its sexual content.
In Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, Oystein Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg’s art made a striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, he provides the definitive account of Krohg’s art in the English language.
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Rainer Schützeichel (Eds.) Die Stadt als Raumentwurf Theorien und Projekte im Städtebau seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017
The preoccupation with space – a central subject in philosophy, psychology and art theory since the late 19th century – has fundamentally influenced city planning. In the course of the discipline’s institutional anchoring, the urban environment has been (re-)discovered and processed through urban development theory as a design object. The design of urban spaces oriented to humans, a human scale, and our sensory perceptions was recognized as a remedy against the technocratically and economically determined urban development, backed by investors, that tended to prevail in the drawing table quarters of European city expansion. This book is dedicated to an early “spatial turn” in urban design theory in Germany during the decades around 1900.
Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope By Frauke V. Josenhans With essays by Marijeta Bozovic, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Megan R. Luke
This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile—forced or voluntary—as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity.
The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the last 200 years, and the book’s four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones—like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters—but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.
SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE: A Century of Social Photography Edited by Donna Gustafson, Andrés Mario Zervigón
Generously illustrated with photographs from early twentieth century reformers to contemporary artists, this collection of essays re-examines the genre of social documentary photography through the shifting lens of photographic objectivity, modes of dissemination, and the passions animating documentary projects.
While the public’s acceptance of photographs as visual evidence made documentary photography possible, canny interventions employed by image makers and their editors alternately exploit and dismantle assumptions of the medium’s transparency, testing our wish to see pictures inspire social change. Among the photographers included in the exhibition and book are Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, William Castellana, Walker Evans, Larry Fink, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Boris Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Igor Moukhin, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Rothstein, Sebastião Salgado, Arkady Shaikhet, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee et al.
With contributions by D. Gustafson, S. M. Miller, J. Tulovsky, A. M. Zervigón
Photography and Doubt Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Mario Zervigón
Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.
Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?
Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and whenphotography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.
Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.
The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. Photography and Germany broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.
The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focusing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.
Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this is the first single-authored history of German photography.
Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle Edited by Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche
Marianne Werefkin and the Women traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin’s circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists’ sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art. Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fäthke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Röder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wünsche
Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965 Edited by Nicholas Sawicki, with contributions by Rachel Dickson, Zuzana Duchková, Arno Pařík, Sarah MacDougall, and Nicholas Sawicki
Friedrich Feigl was a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in the Czech lands and central Europe. A painter, printmaker, and illustrator of extraordinarily broad scope and vision, Feigl was among the most prolific and internationally connected modern artists to emerge from Prague in the first half of the twentieth century. Active in Prague and Berlin, Feigl exhibited widely and gained particular attention for his innovative graphic art and book illustrations, and his work on biblical motifs. As the political situation in Germany worsened in 1933, Feigl traveled briefly to Palestine before returning to Prague. He remained there until the German occupation in 1939, when he left Czechoslovakia for London. There he gradually rebuilt his artistic career, joining the large community of émigrés displaced to England by Nazi oppression, many of them Jewish like himself. The present monograph traces the complex, often turbulent story of Feigl’s life and work, from his beginnings in Prague and Berlin through his later years in London. It is published in association with the exhibition Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World (Friedrich Feigl: Oko vidí svět), held at the Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (30 June-25 September 2016) and Alšova jihočeská galerie in České Budějovice (27 January-16 April 2017).
Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation Editors: Isabel Wünsche, Wiebke Gronemeyer. With contributions by Isabel Wünsche, Naomi Hume, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Viktoria Schindler, Aarnoud Rommens, Nieves Acedo del Barrio, Gordon Monro, Birgit Mersmann, Dorothea Schöne, Elena Korowin, Marilyn Martin, Wendy Kelly, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Pamela C. Scorzin
Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in the phenomenon of abstract art, particularly regarding its ability to speak to the political, social, and cultural conditions of our times. This collection of essays, which looks at historical examples of artistic practice from the early pioneers of abstraction to late modernism, investigates the ambivalent role that abstraction has played in the visual arts and cultures of the last hundred years. In addition, it explores various theoretical and critical narratives that seek to articulate new perspectives on its legacy in the visual arts. From metaphysical considerations and philosophical reflections to debates on interculturality and global perspectives, the contributors examine and reconsider abstraction in the visual arts from a contemporary point of view that acknowledges the many social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of artistic practice. As such, the volume progressively expands the boundaries of thinking about abstract art by engaging it in its increasingly diverse cultural environment.
Dadaglobe Reconstructed With Contributions by Adrian Sudhalter, Michel Sanouillet, Cathérine Hug, Samantha Friedman, Lee Ann Daffner, and Karl D. Buchberg
Dadaglobe was to be the definitive anthology of the Dada movement. Had it been published in 1921 as planned, it would have constituted more than one hundred artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries, showing Dada to be an artistic and literary movement with truly global reach. Yet, mainly due to a lack of funding, it remained unpublished, a remarkable void in the literature on this early-twentieth-century movement. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Dada in Zurich, Dadaglobe Reconstructed restores this fascinating literary artifact with reproductions of the works of art received by the Romanian poet and cofounder of the Dada movement Tristan Tzara. Tzara’s call for submissions in four categories—drawings, photographs of artworks, photographic self-portraits, and book layouts—was met not merely with existing works. In fact, the parameters for production also served as a catalyst for the creation of many new ones, including some of the Dada movement’s most iconic works. For the first time, the collection is presented here in full color and alongside essays examining Tzara’s concept and the history of Dada and Dadaglobe. Based on years of extensive research by American scholar Adrian Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed provides a remarkable view of Dada, with a wealth of previously unpublished material. It will be essential—and fascinating—reading for anyone interested in the first truly international avant-garde movement.
Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) Umberto Boccioni, Introduction by Maria Elena Versari, Translation by Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari
Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), a truly radical book by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), claimed a central position in artistic debates of the 1910s and 1920s, exerting a powerful influence on the Italian Futurist movement as well as on the entire European historical avant-garde, including Dada and Constructivism. Today, Boccioni is best known as an artist whose paintings and sculptures are prized for their revolutionary aesthetic by American and European museums. But Futurist Painting Sculpture demonstrates that he was also the foremost avant-garde theorist of his time. In his distinctive, exhilarating prose style, Boccioni not only articulates his own ideas about the Italian movement’s underpinnings and goals but also systematizes the principles expressed in the vast array of manifestos that the Futurists had already produced. Featuring photographs of fifty-one key works and a large selection of manifestos devoted to the visual arts, Boccioni’s book established the canon of Italian Futurist art for many years to come. First published in Italian in 1914, Futurist Painting Sculpture has never been available in English—until now. This edition includes a critical introduction by Maria Elena Versari. Drawing on the extensive Futurist archives at the Getty Research Institute, Versari systematically retraces, for the first time, the evolution of Boccioni’s ideas and arguments; his attitude toward contemporary political, racial, philosophical, and scientific debates; and his polemical view of Futurism’s role in the development of modern art.
Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany Marion F. Deshmukh
Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann’s importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany’s cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany – and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives.
The search for cultural identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014 Edited by Irena Kossowska
The topic of this volume was inspired by Milan Kundera’s famous article published in 1983 under the title Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale: a text which revived the dispute over the geopolitical and geo-cultural concepts of Central Europe. “The search for cultural identity” is a polyphonic voice in this debate, though the articles included here do not offer any final conclusion to the boundaries and the character – historical, political, and cultural – of the macro-region in question. The chronological frame of this volume opens up with the year 1919, when France, Italy and Germany adopted the “return to order” ideology, which rapidly spread in the newly established states of Central and Eastern Europe in a form of idiosyncratic nationalisms. The year 2014 was, in turn, a time of retrospection in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which (re)gained democracy being at the same time subject to the pressure of outside factors (economic, legal and cultural in the first place) that were different from the pre-1989 ones. The years of political and economic transformation in Europe after the Fall of Berlin Wall were marked by a renewal of interest in the paradigm of national/regional/local identity and the return of traditions which were abandoned/lost during the Cold War as well as the time of worldwide globalization and cultural integration of the Continent. On the opposite side of the national/ethnic/religious self-identification, feminism, Gender and Queer Studies have strengthened their positions, and the tension emerging among the aforementioned stances generates a wide field for discourse on the contemporary condition of a human being, and the idioms of activity/contestation within the democratic society. “The search for cultural identity” diagnoses diverse attempts to revive or create national/local narratives, as well as various formulae of emphasizing sexual identity with regard to the interwar period, the time of the Iron Curtain and the twenty-five years which have gone by since the abolition of the Cold War demarcation of Europe. What is of equal importance for the discourse of this book is the individual artistic experience, perceived here in the context of increasingly conspicuous resistance to global homogenization and neocolonialism in the cultural sphere. The phenomena of glocalization, to use the terminology of the social sciences, cushioning the effects of the dominance of western cultural models, constitute an important point of reference in the articles incorporated into this volume: a point which enables enhancing the value of local specificity and cultural distinctiveness.
Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac’s best-known work—the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust—this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac’s work. These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpathian Ruthenia, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons’ camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and ’50s. Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these newfound images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac’s pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and ’60s. This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.
The Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890–1918 by Andrzej Szczerski
Views of Albion is the first comprehensive study of the reception of British art and design in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes a new map of European Art Nouveau, where direct contacts between peripheral cultures were more significant than the influence of Paris. These new patterns of artistic exchange, often without historic precedence, gave art during this period its unique character and dynamism. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of Central Europe, the book examines knowledge about British art and design in the region. In subsequent chapters the author looks at the reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting and graphic arts as well as analysing diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries. The epilogue reveals the British interest in Central Europe, echoed in the designs Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee and publications of The Studio. The book questions the insularity of British culture and offers new insights into art and design of Central Europe at the fin de siècle. It presents the region as a vital part of the international Art Nouveau, but also shows its specific features, visible in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.
The Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come by Joyce Tsai
László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible by Annie Bourneuf
The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s.
Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.
Heimat Photography in Austria: A Politicized Vision of Peasants and Skiers / Heimatfotografie in Österreich: eine politisierte Sicht von Bauern und Skifahren by Elizabeth Cronin
Photographs of peasants, churchgoers, skiers, and alpine landscapes in magazines, books, and exhibitions informed the visual culture of Austria in the 1930s. Used by the authoritarian Ständestaat to glorify traditional values and establish a backward-looking Austrian identity, the same pictures of pristine mountain idylls, picturesque work in the fields, and local costume groups also served to massively propagate Austria as a tourist destination. Aesthetically demanding and partly influenced by the New Vision movement, the Heimat photographs of the main protagonists—Rudolf Koppitz, Peter Paul Atzwanger, Simon Moser, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Adalbert Defner, and Wilhelm Angerer—were, irrespective of political discontinuities, widely disseminated well into postwar Austria.
German-language edition translated by Wolfgang Astelbauer
The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order by Barbara McCloskey
The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates Grosz’s American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how Grosz’s art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents Grosz’s work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what Germany’s postwar future should be. Important too at this time were Grosz’s interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art world’s consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of Grosz’s work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts by Oliver Botar
Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key fi gure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today’s disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal fi gure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to refl ect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.
Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin by Emily Pugh
On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment.
In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War.
Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.
Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism by Marsha Morton
The Wilhelmine Empire’s opening decades (1870s – 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger’s early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification.
This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.
Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a její okruh v letech 1900-1910 (On a Path to Modernity: The Eight and Its Circle in the Years 1900-1910) by Nicholas Sawicki
Formed in the first decade of the 20th century, the modernist group known as the ‘Eight’, which referred to itself by the Czech name ‘Osma’ and the German ‘Die Acht’, was one of the most influential artistic movements in Prague before the First World War. Comprising artists of Czech, German and Jewish backgrounds, it included such prominent painters as Vincenc Beneš, Friedrich Feigl, Emil Filla, Max Horb, Otakar Kubín, Bohumil Kubišta, Willi Nowak, Emil Pittermann, Antonín Procházka and Linka Scheithauerová. The Eight played a fundamental role in the development of modern art and modernism in Prague and its environs, and its members and affiliates have long been recognized as foundational figures in the history of 20th-century Czech art.
Relying on new archival, textual and visual sources, “On a Path to Modernity,” presents a close examination of the artists and their work, and of the social and cultural context in which they operated. The book traces the shared practices, beliefs and concerns that brought the Eight together, and considers aspects of the group’s history that have not yet been documented in scholarship. In particular, it examines the relationship that the Eight had with the public, critics and institutions of Prague, and the reception that the group garnered from audiences and the press. It also investigates the group’s mixed ethnic composition, which voluntarily brought together artists of both Czech and German identity, Christian as well as Jewish, at a time when Prague and late imperial Austria-Hungary were strongly divided along national lines.
Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile by Megan Luke
German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.
Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.
Władcy snów. Symbolizm na ziemiach czeskich 1880-1914 / Masters of Dreams: Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914 by Otto M. Urban, Irena Kossowska, and Adam Hnojil
“Masters of Dreams” has been published on the occasion of a comprehensive presentation of Bohemian art of the turn of the 19th century at the gallery of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, being an effect of a long-lasting cooperation between the Centre and the Olomouc Museum of Art. The narrative of the book emphasizes the contribution of numerous artists active in the Bohemian lands to the complex mapping of the art scene in Europe of the late 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors’ discourse contextualizes Bohemian Symbolism in relation to the West European art trends as well as confronts Czech developments with the exponents of Young Poland. Thus both the special cultural position of Prague seen in the context of the Austria-Hungary Empire and the interconnections with the artistic milieu in Krakow have been open to question.
“Masters of Dreams” expounds the idiosyncratic features, the richness and the universal dimension of Bohemian Symbolism, an important chapter of the European avant-garde, at the threshold of the First World War. Symbolism paved the way for Czech artists to the salons of Europe – a path followed by Alfons Mucha and Karel Hlaváček, Jan Preisler and František Kupka. Around 1900 the Bohemian lands exemplified economic success on a European scale, and the wealthy Bohemian bourgeois eagerly supported the buoyant burgeoning of artistic life. Prague – the scene of rivalry between Bohemian and German cultures; Prague – one of the key artistic metropolises of contemporary Europe – also became the center of the Czech national awakening.
Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber by Bibiana K. Obler
This compelling examination of the work and lives of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter and Dadaists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber illuminates the roles of gender and the applied arts in abstraction’s early days. Both couples, like Expressionism and Dada more generally, strived to transcend the fragmented individualism promoted by capitalism. Through abstraction and by unsettling the boundaries between the decorative and fine arts, they negotiated tensions between the philosophical and commercial aspects of their production. Both pairs were feminist—the women ambitious and the men supportive of their work—but theirs was a feminism that embraced differences between the sexes. This innovative look at the personal relationships of two influential artist couples shows how everyday life—mundane concerns along with spiritual and intellectual endeavors—informed the development of abstraction.
Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield by Sabine T. Kriebel
Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield’s groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist by Diane Radycki
Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists. Tragically, her life and career were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth.
Diane Radycki examines the artist’s fascinating biography, highlighting her friendships with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff as well as her personal anguish, including years in an unconsummated marriage, a disappointing affair, and irresolution about motherhood. Radycki also details the genres of Modersohn-Becker’s work: figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape; and the reception of her work following her death. This new book is an authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker, who Radycki convincingly portrays as the first significant woman artist in the history of modernism.
“Livre d’une rare intelligence,” Stephane Guegan, Le Monde, 2016
Telehor: the International New Vision, Facsimile reprint and Commentary edited by Klemens Gruber and Oliver Botar
In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. The facsimile reprint of the magazine is accompanied by a commentary volume. The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.
It also contains new translations of the original texts: in Mandarin, Russian, Hungarian and Spanish.
After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde by Dorothy Rowe
What happened in 1920s Cologne ‘after Dada’? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst’s departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894–1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier.
The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field.
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume III: Europe 1880 – 1940 edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop
The third of three volumes devoted to the cultural history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection contains fifty-six original essays on the role of ‘little magazines’ and independent periodicals in Europe in the period 1880-1940. It demonstrates how these publications were instrumental in founding and advancing developments in European modernism and the avant-garde.
Expert discussion of approaching 300 magazines, accompanied by an illuminating variety of cover images, from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe will significantly extend and strengthen the understanding of modernism and modernity. The chapters are organised into six main sections with contextual introductions specific to national, regional histories, and magazine cultures. Introductions and chapters combine to elucidate the part played by magazines in the broader formations associated with Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism in a period of fundamental social and geo-political change. Individual essays, situated in relation to metropolitan centres bring focussed attention to a range of celebrated and less well-known magazines, including Le Chat Noir, La Revue blanche, Le Festin d’Esope, La Nouvelle Revue Française, La Révolution Surréaliste, Documents,De Stijl, Ultra, Lacerba, Energie Nouve, Klingen, Exlex, flamman, Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Der Dada, Ver Sacrum, Cabaret Voltaire, 391, ReD, Zenit, Ma, Contemporanul, Formisci, Zdroj, Lef, and Novy Lef.
The magazines disclose a world where the material constraints of costs, internal rivalries, and anxieties over censorship ran alongside the excitement of new work, collaboration on a new manifesto and the birth of a new movement. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the expanding field of modernist studies, providing a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which helps bring to life the dynamics out of which the modernist avant-garde evolved.
Bruno Schulz: rzeczywistość przesunięta / Bruno Schulz: Shifted Reality by Jan Gondowicz, Jerzy Jarzębski, Irena Kossowska, and Łukasz Kossowski
The Museum of Literature in Warsaw houses the largest collection of Bruno Schulz’s works worldwide. A selection of the artits’s prints and drawings has already been shown in many important centers, such as the museums of Paris, Nancy, Madrid, London, Dusseldorf, Trieste, Genoa, Istanbul, Brussels and Jerusalem. The year 2012 marked the 120th anniversary of Schulz’s birth and the 70th of his death. On this occasion the Museum of Literature organized a special exhibition meant to show for the first time the work of the great visionary in the context of Polish interwar art. The exhibition embraced over 200 paintings, prints and drawings as well as assemblages, visualizations and films by a significant body of artists.
When writing about the Polish version of surrealism – or rather about the not quite definable trend of the Polish interwar art which occupied a borderland between magical realism, grotesque and expressionism – Joanna Pollakówna called it “the painting of a shifted reality”. This strange realism was a peculiar equivalent of the Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit. It seems that only a “shifted reality” makes it possible to place Schulz in the framework of his epoch. By stepping out of the usual interpretational patterns and reaching beyond the time when he lived and worked, the book looks for antecedents and followers and immerses him in the poetics of photomontage and film.
The essays in this exhibition catalogue define the “shifted reality” created by Schulz in various ways. Jerzy Jarzębski locates it in a discontinuity, in the tension between a center and a periphery. Irena Kossowska discusses its European background, pointing out the metaphysical paintings and drawings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as the missing link in the interpretational contexts of Schulz’s work. Jan Gondowicz shows how Schulz tried to tame the cosmic perspective of the predicted apocalypse by viewing it through the anachronistic raster of 19th-century engravings. Thus the reality questioned by the artist is analyzed from three different points of view.
Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche
Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation “of.” Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs), covering three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.
War Culture and the Contest of Images by Dora Apel
Series: New Directions in International Studies
War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images. As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship. While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage by Andrés Mario Zervigón
Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.
Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.
Art & Life: Mikhail Matiushin and the Russian Avant-Garde in St. Petersburg by Isabel Wünsche
Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934), best known as composer of the music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), was not only a successful musician but also an influential painter and theoretician. Together with Elena Guro he founded the artists’ group Union of Youth in 1910, and the couple’s house became a central meeting place of the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg avant-garde. Matiushin developed his organic approach to art together with Nikolai Kulbin, Pavel Filonov, and Kazimir Malevich. After the 1917 October Revolution, he established the Studio of Spatial Realism at the Art Academy and organized the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. In the 1930s, he worked in the field of color theory and its practical application in art, architecture, and design. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of Matiushin’s multifaceted artistic and theoretical œuvre.
Nina Amstutz, Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, Mareike Hennig, Gregor Wedekind, eds, .Paderborn: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021.
Der Band geht der wechselseitigen Durchdringung von visuellen Künsten und Naturwissenschaften bzw. Naturphilosophie im Kontext der europäischen Romantik nach.
Die Romantik als eine geistige Bewegung entfaltete sich in Europa auf Grundlage der allgemeinen Überzeugung, dass Kunst eine Form von Wissenschaft sei und umgekehrt. Viele Dichter und Künstler sowie Naturwissenschaftler waren bestrebt, empirische und kreative Formen der Welterkundung miteinander zu verbinden. Die Aufsätze in diesem Sammelband untersuchen die Entstehung einer „romantischen Wissenschaft“ und ihre Beziehung zur bildenden Kunst, worin objektive und subjektive Formen der Forschung gleichgestellt wurden.
Part art book and part biography, Magnetic Woman examines the life and work of the artist Toyen (Marie Čermínová, 1902–80), a founding member of the Prague surrealist group, and focuses on her construction of gender and eroticism. Toyen’s early life in Prague enabled her to become a force in three avant-garde groups—Devětsil, Prague surrealism, and Paris surrealism—yet, unusually for a female artist of her generation, Toyen presented both her gender and sexuality as ambiguous and often emphasized erotic themes in her work. Despite her importance and ground-breaking work, Toyen has been notoriously difficult to study. Using primary sources gathered from disparate disciplines and studies of the artist’s own work, Magnetic Woman is organized both chronologically and thematically, moving through Toyen’s career with attention to specific historical circumstances and intellectual developments approximately as they entered her life. Karla Huebner offers a re-evaluation of surrealism, the Central European contribution to modernism, and the role of female artists in the avant-garde, along with a complex and nuanced view of women’s roles in and treatment by the surrealist movement.
Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930
Edited by Marsha Morton and Barbara Larson (Bloomsbury, 2021)
Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery of race construction in Scandinavia, Austro Hungary, Germany, and Russia. It covers a period when historic disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and theorists of race were debating competing conceptions of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. Beginning in 1850 and extending into the early 21st century, this book explores how paintings, photographs, prints, and other artistic media engaged with these discourses and shaped visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures in countries associated with theorizations of white identity.
The chapters contribute to postcolonial research by documenting the colonial-style treatment of minority groups, by exploring the anomalies and complexities that emerge when binary systems are seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts, and by representing the voices of those who produced images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued ethnographic and anthropological information. In doing so, Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe uncovers instances of unexpected connections, establishes the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and challenges the certainties of racial categorization.
The first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness.
With Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the usual suspects—those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie Trockel—and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this first book-length examination of Germany’s multicultural art scene, Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are (among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.
Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960
Edited By Kerry Greaves (Routledge 2021)
This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sápmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s.
The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists’ contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors’ subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of “rediscovered” women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women’s art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Júlíana Sveinsdóttir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen.
The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.
Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy
Vanessa Rocco (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)
Photography and fascism in interwar Europe developed into a highly toxic and combustible formula. Particularly in concert with aggressive display techniques, the European fascists were utterly convinced of their ability to use the medium of photography to manufacture consent among their publics. Unfortunately, as we know in hindsight, they succeeded. Other dictatorial regimes in the 1930s harnessed this powerful combination of photography and exhibitions for their own odious purposes. But this book, for the first time, focuses on the particularly consequential dialectic between Germany and Italy in the early-to-mid 1930s, and within each of those countries vis-à-vis display culture.
The 1930s provides a potent case study for every generation, and it is as urgent as ever in our global political environment to deeply understand the central role of visual imagery in what transpired. Photofascism demonstrates precisely how dictatorial regimes use photographic mass media, methodically and in combination with display, to persuade the public with often times highly destructive-even catastrophic-results.
Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture
Jacqueline E. Jung (Yale University Press, July 14, 2020)
A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture
Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.
German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies
Dorothy Price (ed.) (Manchester University Press, 2020)
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
CONTENTS
Introduction: why does der Blaue Reiter still matter? – Dorothy Price and Christopher Short
1 Is der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? A discussion of anarchism, art and politics – Rose-Carol Washton Long
2 The dynamics of gendered artistic identity and creativity in der Blaue Reiter – Shulamith Behr
3 The ‘primitive’ and the modern in Der Blaue Reiter almanac and the Folkwang Museum – Katherine Kuenzli
4 The ‘savages’ of Germany: a reassessment of the relationship between der Blaue Reiter and Brücke – Christian Weikop
5 Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada – Debbie Lewer
6 Type/face: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on language and perception – Annie Bourneuf
7 Feeling blue: Der Blaue Reiter, Francophilia and the Tate Gallery 1960 – Nathan J. Timpano
8 Die Tunisreise: the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter in the art of Paul Klee and Nacer Khemir – Sarah McGavran
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented: 1918–1938
Edited by Jodi Hauptman andAdrian Sudhalter The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020)
How the modernist avant-gardes from Dada to constructivism reconceived their roles, working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, graphic designers, curators and more, to create new visual languages for a radically changed world
“We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things … we put our works together like fitters.” So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, John Heartfield and Fré Cohen, and European avant-gardes of the interwar years―Dada, the Bauhaus, futurism, constructivism and de Stijl―Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world.
These “engineers,” “agitators,” “constructors,” “photomonteurs,” “workers”―all designations adopted by the artists themselves―turned away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture and invented new visual languages. Central among them was photomontage, in which photographs and images from newspapers and magazines were cut, remixed, and pasted together. Working as propagandists, advertisers, publishers, editors, architects, theater designers and curators, these artists engaged with expanded audiences in novel ways, establishing distinctive infrastructures for presenting and distributing their work.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor marks the transformative addition to MoMA from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, one of the great private collections of political art. Illuminating the essential role of women in avant-garde activities while mapping vital networks across Europe, this richly illustrated book presents the social engagement, fearless experimentation and utopian aspirations that defined the early 20th century, and how these strategies still reverberate today.
The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy
Megan Brandow-Faller
Decorative handcrafts are commonly associated with traditional femininity and unthreatening docility. However, the artists connected with interwar Vienna’s “female Secession” created craft-based artworks that may be understood as sites of feminist resistance. In this book, historian Megan Brandow-Faller tells the story of how these artists disrupted long-established boundaries by working to dislodge fixed oppositions between “art” and “craft,” “decorative” and “profound,” and “masculine” and “feminine” in art.
Tracing the history of the women’s art movement in Secessionist Vienna—from its origins in 1897, at the Women’s Academy, to the Association of Austrian Women Artists and its radical offshoot, the Wiener Frauenkunst—Brandow-Faller tells the compelling story of a movement that reclaimed the stereotypes attached to the idea of Frauenkunst, or women’s art. She shows how generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies of art, craft, and design drove the conservative and radical wings of Austria’s women’s art movement apart and explores the ways female artists and craftswomen reinterpreted and extended the Klimt Group’s ideas in the interwar years. Brandow-Faller draws a direct connection to the themes that impelled the better-known explosion of feminist art in 1970s America. In this provocative story of a Viennese modernism that never disavowed its ornamental, decorative roots, she gives careful attention to key primary sources, including photographs and reviews of early twentieth-century exhibitions and archival records of school curricula and personnel.
Engagingly written and featuring more than eighty representative illustrations, The Female Secession recaptures the radical potential of what Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka referred to as “works from women’s hands.” It will appeal to art historians working in the decorative arts and modernism as well as historians of Secession-era Vienna and gender history.
A revelatory look at how the mature work of Caspar David Friedrich engaged with concurrent developments in natural science and philosophy
Best known for his atmospheric landscapes featuring contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) came of age alongside a German Romantic philosophical movement that saw nature as an organic and interconnected whole. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations about the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms could lead to conclusions about human life. Many of Friedrich’s often-overlooked later paintings reflect his engagement with these philosophical ideas through a focus on isolated shrubs, trees, and rocks. Others revisit earlier compositions or iconographic motifs but subtly metamorphose the previously distinct human figures into the natural landscape.
In this revelatory book, Nina Amstutz combines fresh visual analysis with broad interdisciplinary research to investigate the intersection of landscape painting, self-exploration, and the life sciences in Friedrich’s mature work. Drawing connections between the artist’s anthropomorphic landscape forms and contemporary discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, death, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s work into the larger discourse surrounding art, nature, and life in the 19th century.
Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei (Chicago: IIT Institute of Design, 2019)
Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy offers a unique insight into one of the less familiar sides of the Bauhaus at large and Moholy-Nagy in particular. In May 1926, thirteen Bauhaus professors and students created handprints that were preserved by László Moholy-Nagy. This publication brings together for the first time all of the so-called Bauhaus handprints in their historical and contemporary contexts with scholars and artists touching upon and responding to the Bauhaus legacy.
BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture,
Edited by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Isabel Wünsche, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019
A history of Bauhaus in Australia and New Zealand.
Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture presents an extraordinary new Australasian cultural history. It is a migrant and refugee story: from 1930, the arrival of so many emigre, internee and refugee educators helped to transform art, architecture and design in Australia and New Zealand. Fifteen thematic essays and twenty individual case studies bring to light a tremendous amount of new archival material in order to show how these innovative educators, exiled from Nazism, introduced Bauhaus ideas and models to a new world. As their Bauhaus model spanned art, architecture and design, the book provides a unique cross-disciplinary, emigre history of art education in Australia and New Zealand. It offers a remarkable and little-known chapter in the wider Bauhaus venture, which has multiple legacies and continues to inform our conceptions of progressive education, creativity and the role of art and design in the wider community.
Carl Einstein A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, University of Chicago Press (2019)
The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was at the forefront of the modernist movement that defined the twentieth century. One of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators on cubism, he was also among the first authors to assess African sculpture as art. Yet his writings remain relatively little known in the Anglophone world. With A Mythology of Forms, the first representative collection of Einstein’s art theory and criticism to appear in English translation, Charles W. Haxthausen fills this gap. Spanning three decades, it assembles the most important of Einstein’s writings on the art that was central to his critical project—on cubism, surrealism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee, and includes the full texts of his two pathbreaking books on African art, Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921). With fourteen texts by Einstein, each presented with extensive commentary, A Mythology of Forms will bring a pivotal voice in the history of modern art into English.
A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades.
Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. (Das östliche Europa. Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9.) Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, 280 pp.
How did the Eastern European and Soviet states write their respective histories of art and architecture during 1940s–1960s? The articles address both the Stalinist period and the Khrushchev Thaw, when the Marxist-Leninist discourse on art history was „invented“ and refined. Although this discourse was inevitably „Sovietized“ in a process dictated from Moscow, a variety of distinct interpretations emerged from across the Soviet bloc in the light of local traditions, cultural politics and decisions of individual authors. Although the new „official“ discourse often left space open for national concerns, it also gave rise to a countermovement in response to the aggressive ideologization of art and the preeminence assigned to (Socialist) Realist aesthetics.
Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art.
Stacey Sloboda and Michael Yonan, eds.,New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
While the connected, international character of today’s art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century.
Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.
Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school’s engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers—notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members’ spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed “spirit photographs” and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the “queer hauntology” of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right—during the school’s Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
By: Elizabeth Otto & Patrick Rössler (Bloomsbury/Herbert Press, 2019)
Forty five key women of the Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today.
The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localized to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. Moving chronologically from the first women to enter the school to those who helped lead it through its last days in 1933, this book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists, and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience.
Paula Modersohn-Becker painted her last self-portrait in autumn 1907, while she was pregnant with her first child. In the painting she gazes straight at the viewer, holding up two flowers—symbols of the creativity and procreativity of women artists—and resting a protective hand atop her swelling belly. Modersohn-Becker would die three weeks after giving birth, at age thirty-one, still to be recognized as the first woman artist to challenge centuries of representations of the female body. Today this compelling work claims an important place at The Museum of Modern Art as the earliest painting by a woman on view in the collection galleries. Art historian Diane Radycki’s essay examines Modersohn-Becker’s self-portrait in depth, surveys the artist’s late career, and discusses her posthumous recognition.
Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. A richly illustrated and lively essay illuminates the subject in detail and situates the work within the artist’s life and career as well as within broader historical contexts. This series is an invaluable guide for exploring and interpreting some of the most beloved artworks in the Museum’s collection. 48pp; 35 illus.
Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School,
Editor(s): Elizabeth Otto, Patrick Rössler, 2019
A century after the Bauhaus’s founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular.
In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus’s founding and beyond.
Transformation: Art In East-Central Europe After 1989
Andrzej Szczerski, 2019
The year 1989 marked the end of one era and the beginning of another—the period of postcommunist transformation. Similar processes were taking place in other former Eastern Bloc countries that were declaring free elections, reclaiming full sovereignty, building democracy, and completely changing their economies in favor of free market capitalism. The several historic months in the latter half of 1989 came to be known as the “Autumn of Nations” and ushered in the total liberation of East-Central Europe from Soviet domination. Less than two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, signaling the end of the Cold War in Europe. The new era brought not only political and economic changes, but also cultural ones which would lead to reclaiming individual liberties and other civil rights, as well as to the rebuilding of national identities within the European community which could now, finally, encompass the entire continent. Culture became a moving force for change, as censorship was abolished, monuments to communist heroes were removed, and streets renamed.
The radical cultural changes reverberated in the art of the period, its ideology, and the system of institutional sponsorship that promoted the three approaches most popular with artists. Many of them engaged in the changes directly, creating works that either commented on current events or proposed what they believed to be the right direction for the transformation to take. Others, although preferring to observe from a distance, highlighted the diverse contexts and historical antecedents generated by the cultural identities of countries, regions, or even artistic centers, in which the changes were rooted. The third contribution of contemporary art was its role in shaping how we remember the communist period, by on the one hand questioning the past, and on the other accenting the persistence of the traces it left behind, thereby inviting reflection on its negative as well as its positive ramifications. The art created in these circumstances and that related directly to the post-1989 transition, democracy, and a free market economy can be united under the name “art of the transformation” and it is the subject of this publication.
Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933
Robin Schuldenfrei, 2018
Luxury and Modernism examines the status of the object within the context of Wilhelmine and Weimar architectural culture and theory. It argues that modernism responded to and reflected the norms and desires of a bourgeois elite—and that new and old forms of luxury are embedded accordingly in its materials, its showcasing of technology, and its discourses. This monograph looks specifically at such aspects as: the design and marketing of AEG electrical appliances by Peter Behrens and the notion of electricity as luxury in this period; the relationship between the design and materials of Bauhaus architecture and objects and failed efforts at affordable mass production of them; and notions of materiality and interiority in the domestic commissions of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Methodologically, this study reinterrogates key components of the canonical history of modernism using economic history, cultural studies, social history, sociology, and German history, to reveal new meanings in familiar objects of modernism.
Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History.
Michael Yonan, London: Routledge, 2018.
This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his “Character Heads.” These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.
Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis
Miriam Paeslack, 2018, University of Minnesota Press
How photography and a modernizing Berlin informed an urban image—and one another—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
This is the first book to critically assess, contextualize, and frame urban and architectural photographs of Berlin’s crucial Imperial years between 1871 and 1918. Imperial Berlin emerges as a modern metropolis, only half-heartedly inhibited by urban preservationist concerns and rather more akin to North American cities in their bold industrialization and competing urban expansions than to European counterparts.
This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally.
Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest émigré projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German émigré collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the ‘degenerate’ artists themselves. The book explores the show’s potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.
As a programmatic action of the Nazi cultural policy was opened in July 1937, the propaganda show “degenerate art” Munich and then wandered through several major German cities. In response to this campaign against modernity was the exhibition “20th Century German Art”, which was shown in 1938 in London and collected nearly 300 masterpieces of modern German art. The project was originally conceived by two women who run galleries in London and Zurich: Noel Norton and Irmgard Buchard. Then came Paul Westheim, the former ex-publisher of the “Kunstblatt” living in exile in Paris, before the British art critic Herbert Read won the prestigious New Burlington Galleries as an exhibition venue. About half of the exhibits came from German emigrants and artists, which were branded as “degenerate” by the National Socialists or persecuted as Jews. The spectrum of works ranged from Liebermann’s impressionism to the expressionism of the “Blaue Reiter” to the Bauhaus artists Paul Klee, Kandin sky and Schlemmer. Also represented were Max Beckmann and Nolde or the sculptors Barlach and Lehmbruck. The exhibition thus surpassed in scope and quality density even the legendary show of the New York Museum of Modern Art of 1931, but was forgotten by the soon after breaking out of World War II. As the most important cultural manifesto against the policies of the National Socialists, this event, which dates back to 2018 eighty years ago, is to be rediscovered. The Liebermann Villa in Berlin takes this anniversary as an opportunity to reconstruct the exhibition. In the run-up to the Berlin show, the Wiener Library, London, is showing a documentary exhibition with documents, plans and photographic interior views, thus closing a gap in German-British art history. The bilingual catalog is introduced by prefaces by Minister of State Monika GruVonters and Sebastian Wood, the British Ambassador to Germany.
Against the background of acute political tensions in London in the summer of 1938: Twentieth Century German Art. It is not only the first major retrospective of German modernist art in the English-speaking world. It was the first international response to the Nazi campaign against socially degenerate art. Published to mark the eightieth anniversary of this important cultural event, this catalog tells the story of the exhibition: the context in which it was staged, the circumstances of its organization, and its impact on Britain and further afield. The catalog accompanies two exhibitions taking place during 2018, at the Vienna Library in London and at the Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee in Berlin.
Bilingual German-English Bilingual edition in English and German
Art and Resistance in Germany, Editor(s): Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, 2018
In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.
While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.
Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context, Edited by Isabel Wünsche, 2018
The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century.
Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production.
Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.
Joyce Tsai Laszlo Moholy-NagyPainting after Photography, University of California Press, 2018
This provocative book examines crucial philosophical questions László Moholy-Nagy explored in theory and practice throughout his career. Why paint in a photographic age? Why work by hand when technology holds so much promise? The stakes of painting, or not painting, were tied to much larger considerations of the ways art, life, and modernity were linked for Moholy and his avant-garde peers. Joyce Tsai’s close analysis reveals how Moholy’s experience in exile led to his attempt to recuperate painting, not merely as an artistic medium but as the space where the trace of human touch might survive the catastrophes of war. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography will significantly reshape our view of the artist’s oeuvre, providing a new understanding of cultural modernism and the avant-garde.
Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology
Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, and Ksenia Nouril, editors, 2018
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the ripple effects felt over the following years from Bucharest to Prague to Moscow demarcate a significant moment when artists were able to publicly reassess their histories and question the opposition between the former East and the former West. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe takes the pivotal political changes between 1989 and 1991 as its departure point to reflect on the effects that communism’s disintegration across Central and Eastern Europe—including the Soviet Union’s fifteen republics—had on the art practices, criticism, and cultural production of the following decades. This book presents a selection of the period’s key voices that have introduced recent critical perspectives. Particular attention is given to the research and viewpoints of a new generation of artists, scholars, and curators who have advanced fresh critical perspectives and who are rewriting their own histories. Their examination of artistic practices and systems of cultural production proposes distinct outlooks for acting in the contemporary world while simultaneously rethinking the significance of the socialist legacy on art today. Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe is an indispensable volume on modern and contemporary art and theory from the region.
Contributors: Branislava Andjelkovic, Edit András, Inke Arns, Marius Babias, Zdenka Badovinac, Ivana Bago, Zbynek Baladrán, Claire Bishop, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andreas Broeckmann, Boris Buden, Ilya Budraitskis, Ondrej Chrobák, Keti Chukhrov, Kim Conaty, Cosmin Costinas, Eda Cufer, Bojana Cvejic, Ekaterina Degot, Branislav Dimitrijevic, Michelle Elligott, Octavian Esanu, Yevgeniy Fiks, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Boris Groys, Daniel Grún, Marina Gržinic, Vít Havránek, Jon Hendricks, IRWIN (Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, and Borut Vogelnik), Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Janevski, David Joselit, Tímea Junghaus, Klara Kemp-Welch, Juliet Kinchin, Zofia Kulik, Andres Kurg, Katalin Ladik, Václav Magid, Eva Majewska, David Maljkovic, Roxana Marcoci, Lina Michelkevice, Aldo Milohnic, Viktor Misiano, Rastko Mocnik, Magdalena Moskalewicz, Deimantas Narkevicius, Ksenia Nouril, Ewa Opalka, Martina Pachmanová, Bojana Pejic, Dan Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Piotr Piotrowski, Bojana Piškur, David Platzker, Paulina Pobocha, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Lýdia Pribišová, Oleksiy Radynski, Karol Radziszewski, Christian Rattemeyer, Cristina Ricupero, Georg Schöllhammer, David Senior, Alina ?erban, Slavs and Tatars, Sven Spieker, Tamas St.Auby, Zuzana Štefková, Jakub Stejskal, Mladen Stilinovic, subREAL, Tomás Svoboda, Ovidiu Ṯichindeleanu, Margarita Tupitsyn, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda Urbonas, Jonas Valatkevicius, Jelena Vesic, Dmitry Vilensky, Raluca Voinea, What, How & for Whom (Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Nataša Ilic, and Sabina Sabolovic), Igor Zabel, Artur Zmijewski
Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme By Jenny Anger, 2018
“Where do the roots of art lie?” asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. “In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels.” Walden’s Der Sturm—the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910–1932)—has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.
Jenny Anger traces Walden’s aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche—forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York’s Société Anonyme (1920–1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism.
Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction’s connection with the real.
Megan Brandow-Faller (Ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present, Bloomsbury, 2017
Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern ‘invention’ of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design–Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented – critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children’s use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.
Øystein Sjastad, Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, University of Washington Press, 2017
The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries’ most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. Krohg’s work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertineand its related paintings were banned upon publication. The story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway, but Krohg was punished for its sexual content.
In Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, Oystein Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg’s art made a striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, he provides the definitive account of Krohg’s art in the English language.
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Rainer Schützeichel (Eds.) Die Stadt als Raumentwurf Theorien und Projekte im Städtebau seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017
The preoccupation with space – a central subject in philosophy, psychology and art theory since the late 19th century – has fundamentally influenced city planning. In the course of the discipline’s institutional anchoring, the urban environment has been (re-)discovered and processed through urban development theory as a design object. The design of urban spaces oriented to humans, a human scale, and our sensory perceptions was recognized as a remedy against the technocratically and economically determined urban development, backed by investors, that tended to prevail in the drawing table quarters of European city expansion. This book is dedicated to an early “spatial turn” in urban design theory in Germany during the decades around 1900.
Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope By Frauke V. Josenhans With essays by Marijeta Bozovic, Joseph Leo Koerner, and Megan R. Luke
This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile—forced or voluntary—as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity.
The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the last 200 years, and the book’s four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones—like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters—but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.
SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVE: A Century of Social Photography Edited by Donna Gustafson, Andrés Mario Zervigón
Generously illustrated with photographs from early twentieth century reformers to contemporary artists, this collection of essays re-examines the genre of social documentary photography through the shifting lens of photographic objectivity, modes of dissemination, and the passions animating documentary projects.
While the public’s acceptance of photographs as visual evidence made documentary photography possible, canny interventions employed by image makers and their editors alternately exploit and dismantle assumptions of the medium’s transparency, testing our wish to see pictures inspire social change. Among the photographers included in the exhibition and book are Berenice Abbott, Max Alpert, William Castellana, Walker Evans, Larry Fink, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lewis Hine, Boris Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Igor Moukhin, Gordon Parks, Alexander Rodchenko, Arthur Rothstein, Sebastião Salgado, Arkady Shaikhet, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee et al.
With contributions by D. Gustafson, S. M. Miller, J. Tulovsky, A. M. Zervigón
Photography and Doubt Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel, Andrés Mario Zervigón
Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.
Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of photographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipulated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?
Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multi-authored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and whenphotography was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.
Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.
The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. Photography and Germany broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.
The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focusing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.
Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, this is the first single-authored history of German photography.
Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle Edited by Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche
Marianne Werefkin and the Women traces the relationships between the modernist artists in Werefkin’s circle, including Erma Bossi, Elisabeth Epstein, Natalia Goncharova, Elizaveta Kruglikova, Else Lasker-Schüler, Marta Liepiņa-Skulme, Elena Luksch-Makowsky, and Maria Marc. The book demonstrates that their interactions were dominated not primarily by national ties, but rather by their artistic ideas, intellectual convictions, and gender roles; it offers an analysis of the various artistic scenes, the places of exchange, and the artists’ sources of inspiration. Specifically focusing on issues of cosmopolitan culture, transcultural dialogue, gender roles, and the building of new artistic networks, the collection of essays re-evaluates the contributions of these artists to the development of modern art. Contributors: Shulamith Behr, Marina Dmitrieva, Simone Ewald, Bernd Fäthke, Olga Furman, Petra Lanfermann, Tanja Malycheva, Galina Mardilovich, Antonia Napp, Carla Pellegrini Rocca, Dorothy Price, Hildegard Reinhardt, Kornelia Röder, Kimberly A. Smith, Laima Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, Baiba Vanaga, and Isabel Wünsche
Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965 Edited by Nicholas Sawicki, with contributions by Rachel Dickson, Zuzana Duchková, Arno Pařík, Sarah MacDougall, and Nicholas Sawicki
Friedrich Feigl was a pivotal figure in the history of modern art in the Czech lands and central Europe. A painter, printmaker, and illustrator of extraordinarily broad scope and vision, Feigl was among the most prolific and internationally connected modern artists to emerge from Prague in the first half of the twentieth century. Active in Prague and Berlin, Feigl exhibited widely and gained particular attention for his innovative graphic art and book illustrations, and his work on biblical motifs. As the political situation in Germany worsened in 1933, Feigl traveled briefly to Palestine before returning to Prague. He remained there until the German occupation in 1939, when he left Czechoslovakia for London. There he gradually rebuilt his artistic career, joining the large community of émigrés displaced to England by Nazi oppression, many of them Jewish like himself. The present monograph traces the complex, often turbulent story of Feigl’s life and work, from his beginnings in Prague and Berlin through his later years in London. It is published in association with the exhibition Friedrich Feigl: The Eye Sees the World (Friedrich Feigl: Oko vidí svět), held at the Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (30 June-25 September 2016) and Alšova jihočeská galerie in České Budějovice (27 January-16 April 2017).
Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation Editors: Isabel Wünsche, Wiebke Gronemeyer. With contributions by Isabel Wünsche, Naomi Hume, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Viktoria Schindler, Aarnoud Rommens, Nieves Acedo del Barrio, Gordon Monro, Birgit Mersmann, Dorothea Schöne, Elena Korowin, Marilyn Martin, Wendy Kelly, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Pamela C. Scorzin
Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in the phenomenon of abstract art, particularly regarding its ability to speak to the political, social, and cultural conditions of our times. This collection of essays, which looks at historical examples of artistic practice from the early pioneers of abstraction to late modernism, investigates the ambivalent role that abstraction has played in the visual arts and cultures of the last hundred years. In addition, it explores various theoretical and critical narratives that seek to articulate new perspectives on its legacy in the visual arts. From metaphysical considerations and philosophical reflections to debates on interculturality and global perspectives, the contributors examine and reconsider abstraction in the visual arts from a contemporary point of view that acknowledges the many social, economic, cultural, and political aspects of artistic practice. As such, the volume progressively expands the boundaries of thinking about abstract art by engaging it in its increasingly diverse cultural environment.
Dadaglobe Reconstructed With Contributions by Adrian Sudhalter, Michel Sanouillet, Cathérine Hug, Samantha Friedman, Lee Ann Daffner, and Karl D. Buchberg
Dadaglobe was to be the definitive anthology of the Dada movement. Had it been published in 1921 as planned, it would have constituted more than one hundred artworks by some thirty artists from seven countries, showing Dada to be an artistic and literary movement with truly global reach. Yet, mainly due to a lack of funding, it remained unpublished, a remarkable void in the literature on this early-twentieth-century movement. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Dada in Zurich, Dadaglobe Reconstructed restores this fascinating literary artifact with reproductions of the works of art received by the Romanian poet and cofounder of the Dada movement Tristan Tzara. Tzara’s call for submissions in four categories—drawings, photographs of artworks, photographic self-portraits, and book layouts—was met not merely with existing works. In fact, the parameters for production also served as a catalyst for the creation of many new ones, including some of the Dada movement’s most iconic works. For the first time, the collection is presented here in full color and alongside essays examining Tzara’s concept and the history of Dada and Dadaglobe. Based on years of extensive research by American scholar Adrian Sudhalter, Dadaglobe Reconstructed provides a remarkable view of Dada, with a wealth of previously unpublished material. It will be essential—and fascinating—reading for anyone interested in the first truly international avant-garde movement.
Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) Umberto Boccioni, Introduction by Maria Elena Versari, Translation by Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari
Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), a truly radical book by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), claimed a central position in artistic debates of the 1910s and 1920s, exerting a powerful influence on the Italian Futurist movement as well as on the entire European historical avant-garde, including Dada and Constructivism. Today, Boccioni is best known as an artist whose paintings and sculptures are prized for their revolutionary aesthetic by American and European museums. But Futurist Painting Sculpture demonstrates that he was also the foremost avant-garde theorist of his time. In his distinctive, exhilarating prose style, Boccioni not only articulates his own ideas about the Italian movement’s underpinnings and goals but also systematizes the principles expressed in the vast array of manifestos that the Futurists had already produced. Featuring photographs of fifty-one key works and a large selection of manifestos devoted to the visual arts, Boccioni’s book established the canon of Italian Futurist art for many years to come. First published in Italian in 1914, Futurist Painting Sculpture has never been available in English—until now. This edition includes a critical introduction by Maria Elena Versari. Drawing on the extensive Futurist archives at the Getty Research Institute, Versari systematically retraces, for the first time, the evolution of Boccioni’s ideas and arguments; his attitude toward contemporary political, racial, philosophical, and scientific debates; and his polemical view of Futurism’s role in the development of modern art.
Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany Marion F. Deshmukh
Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany is the first English-language examination of this German impressionist painter whose long life and career spanned nine decades. Through a close reading of key paintings and by a discussion of his many cultural networks across Germany and throughout Europe, this study by Marion Deshmukh illuminates Liebermann’s importance as a pioneer of German modernism. Critics and admirers alike saw his art as representing aesthetic European modernism at its best. His subjects included dispassionate depictions of the rural Dutch countryside, his colorful garden at the Wannsee, and his many portraits of Germany’s cultural, political, and military elites. Liebermann was the largest collector of French Impressionism in Germany – and his cosmopolitan outlook and his art created strong antipathies towards both by political and cultural conservatives.
The search for cultural identity in Eastern and Central Europe 1919-2014 Edited by Irena Kossowska
The topic of this volume was inspired by Milan Kundera’s famous article published in 1983 under the title Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe Centrale: a text which revived the dispute over the geopolitical and geo-cultural concepts of Central Europe. “The search for cultural identity” is a polyphonic voice in this debate, though the articles included here do not offer any final conclusion to the boundaries and the character – historical, political, and cultural – of the macro-region in question. The chronological frame of this volume opens up with the year 1919, when France, Italy and Germany adopted the “return to order” ideology, which rapidly spread in the newly established states of Central and Eastern Europe in a form of idiosyncratic nationalisms. The year 2014 was, in turn, a time of retrospection in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, which (re)gained democracy being at the same time subject to the pressure of outside factors (economic, legal and cultural in the first place) that were different from the pre-1989 ones. The years of political and economic transformation in Europe after the Fall of Berlin Wall were marked by a renewal of interest in the paradigm of national/regional/local identity and the return of traditions which were abandoned/lost during the Cold War as well as the time of worldwide globalization and cultural integration of the Continent. On the opposite side of the national/ethnic/religious self-identification, feminism, Gender and Queer Studies have strengthened their positions, and the tension emerging among the aforementioned stances generates a wide field for discourse on the contemporary condition of a human being, and the idioms of activity/contestation within the democratic society. “The search for cultural identity” diagnoses diverse attempts to revive or create national/local narratives, as well as various formulae of emphasizing sexual identity with regard to the interwar period, the time of the Iron Curtain and the twenty-five years which have gone by since the abolition of the Cold War demarcation of Europe. What is of equal importance for the discourse of this book is the individual artistic experience, perceived here in the context of increasingly conspicuous resistance to global homogenization and neocolonialism in the cultural sphere. The phenomena of glocalization, to use the terminology of the social sciences, cushioning the effects of the dominance of western cultural models, constitute an important point of reference in the articles incorporated into this volume: a point which enables enhancing the value of local specificity and cultural distinctiveness.
Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s vast holdings of work by Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), this generously illustrated and expansive volume offers a new and profound consideration of this key modernist photographer. In addition to featuring Vishniac’s best-known work—the iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust—this publication also introduces many previously unpublished photographs spanning more than six decades of Vishniac’s work. These include newly discovered images of prewar Berlin, rare film footage from rural Jewish communities in Carpathian Ruthenia, documentation of postwar ruins and Displaced Persons’ camps, and vivid coverage of Jewish life in America in the 1940s and ’50s. Essays by world-renowned scholars of photography, Jewish history and culture address these newfound images and consider them in the context of modernist tendencies in Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s; the rise of Nazi power in Germany and Eastern Europe; the uses of social documentary photography for relief organizations; the experiences of exile, displacement, and assimilation; and the impact of Vishniac’s pioneering scientific research in color photomicroscopy in the 1950s and ’60s. This first retrospective monograph on Roman Vishniac offers many new perspectives on the work and career of this important photographer, positioning him as one of the great modernists and social documentary photographers of the last century.
The Views of Albion: The Reception of British Art and Design in Central Europe, 1890–1918 by Andrzej Szczerski
Views of Albion is the first comprehensive study of the reception of British art and design in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes a new map of European Art Nouveau, where direct contacts between peripheral cultures were more significant than the influence of Paris. These new patterns of artistic exchange, often without historic precedence, gave art during this period its unique character and dynamism. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of Central Europe, the book examines knowledge about British art and design in the region. In subsequent chapters the author looks at the reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting and graphic arts as well as analysing diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries. The epilogue reveals the British interest in Central Europe, echoed in the designs Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee and publications of The Studio. The book questions the insularity of British culture and offers new insights into art and design of Central Europe at the fin de siècle. It presents the region as a vital part of the international Art Nouveau, but also shows its specific features, visible in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.
The Paintings of Moholy-Nagy: The Shape of Things to Come by Joyce Tsai
László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) became notorious for the declarations he made about the end of painting, encouraging artists to exchange brush, pigment, and canvas for camera, film, and searchlight. Even as he made these radical claims, he painted throughout his career. The practice of painting enabled Moholy-Nagy to imagine generative relationships between art and technology, and to describe the shape that future possibilities might take. Joyce Tsai illuminates the evolution of painting’s role for Moholy-Nagy through key periods in his career: at the German Bauhaus in the 1920s, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom in the early 1930s, and as director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in the last decade of his life. The book also includes an introduction to the history, qualities, and significance of plastic materials that Moholy-Nagy used over the course of his career, and an essay on how his project of shaping habitable space in his art and writing resonated with artists and industrial designers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible by Annie Bourneuf
The fact that Paul Klee (1879–1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered—until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee’s works from the 1910s and 1920s.
Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen to threaten slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in the early twentieth century, Bourneuf shows how Klee reconceptualized abstraction at a key moment in its development.
Heimat Photography in Austria: A Politicized Vision of Peasants and Skiers / Heimatfotografie in Österreich: eine politisierte Sicht von Bauern und Skifahren by Elizabeth Cronin
Photographs of peasants, churchgoers, skiers, and alpine landscapes in magazines, books, and exhibitions informed the visual culture of Austria in the 1930s. Used by the authoritarian Ständestaat to glorify traditional values and establish a backward-looking Austrian identity, the same pictures of pristine mountain idylls, picturesque work in the fields, and local costume groups also served to massively propagate Austria as a tourist destination. Aesthetically demanding and partly influenced by the New Vision movement, the Heimat photographs of the main protagonists—Rudolf Koppitz, Peter Paul Atzwanger, Simon Moser, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Adalbert Defner, and Wilhelm Angerer—were, irrespective of political discontinuities, widely disseminated well into postwar Austria.
German-language edition translated by Wolfgang Astelbauer
The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order by Barbara McCloskey
The Exile of George Grosz examines the life and work of George Grosz after he fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought to re-establish his artistic career under changed circumstances in New York. It situates Grosz’s American production specifically within the cultural politics of German exile in the United States during World War II and the Cold War. Basing her study on extensive archival research and using theories of exile, migrancy, and cosmopolitanism, McCloskey explores how Grosz’s art illuminates the changing cultural politics of exile. She also foregrounds the terms on which German exile helped to define both the limits and possibilities of American visions of a one world order under U.S. leadership that emerged during this period. This book presents Grosz’s work in relation to that of other prominent figures of the German emigration, including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as the exile community agonized over its measure of responsibility for the Nazi atrocity German culture had become and debated what Germany’s postwar future should be. Important too at this time were Grosz’s interactions with the American art world. His historical allegories, self-portraits, and other works are analyzed as confrontational responses to the New York art world’s consolidating consensus around Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism during and after World War II. This nuanced study recounts the controversial repatriation of Grosz’s work, and the exile culture of which it was a part, to a German nation perilously divided between East and West in the Cold War.
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts by Oliver Botar
Life in the digital economy of information and images enriches us but often induces a sense of being overwhelmed. Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts considers the impact of technology by exploring ways it was addressed in the practice of the Hungarian polymath artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a prominent professor at the Bauhaus and a key fi gure in the history of Modernism. Moholy-Nagy felt that people needed guidance to cope with the onslaught of sensory input in an increasingly technologized, mediatized, hyper-stimulating environment. His ideas informed media theorists such as Walter Benjamin, John Cage, Sigfried Giedion, and Marshall McLuhan, who anticipated digital culture as it emerged. Should we then regard Moholy-Nagy as a pioneer of the digital? His aesthetic engagement with the technology/body problematic broached the notions of immersion, interactivity and bodily participation, innately offering a critique of today’s disembodiment. Was he then both a pioneer and a proto-critic of the digital? This book is intended to introduce this seminal fi gure of post-medial practices to younger generations and, by including responses to his work by contemporary artists, to refl ect on the ways in which his work is relevant to artistic practice now.
Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin by Emily Pugh
On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment.
In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War.
Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.
Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism by Marsha Morton
The Wilhelmine Empire’s opening decades (1870s – 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger’s early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification.
This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.
Na cestě k modernosti: Umělecké sdružení Osma a její okruh v letech 1900-1910 (On a Path to Modernity: The Eight and Its Circle in the Years 1900-1910) by Nicholas Sawicki
Formed in the first decade of the 20th century, the modernist group known as the ‘Eight’, which referred to itself by the Czech name ‘Osma’ and the German ‘Die Acht’, was one of the most influential artistic movements in Prague before the First World War. Comprising artists of Czech, German and Jewish backgrounds, it included such prominent painters as Vincenc Beneš, Friedrich Feigl, Emil Filla, Max Horb, Otakar Kubín, Bohumil Kubišta, Willi Nowak, Emil Pittermann, Antonín Procházka and Linka Scheithauerová. The Eight played a fundamental role in the development of modern art and modernism in Prague and its environs, and its members and affiliates have long been recognized as foundational figures in the history of 20th-century Czech art.
Relying on new archival, textual and visual sources, “On a Path to Modernity,” presents a close examination of the artists and their work, and of the social and cultural context in which they operated. The book traces the shared practices, beliefs and concerns that brought the Eight together, and considers aspects of the group’s history that have not yet been documented in scholarship. In particular, it examines the relationship that the Eight had with the public, critics and institutions of Prague, and the reception that the group garnered from audiences and the press. It also investigates the group’s mixed ethnic composition, which voluntarily brought together artists of both Czech and German identity, Christian as well as Jewish, at a time when Prague and late imperial Austria-Hungary were strongly divided along national lines.
Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile by Megan Luke
German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile.
Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.
Władcy snów. Symbolizm na ziemiach czeskich 1880-1914 / Masters of Dreams: Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914 by Otto M. Urban, Irena Kossowska, and Adam Hnojil
“Masters of Dreams” has been published on the occasion of a comprehensive presentation of Bohemian art of the turn of the 19th century at the gallery of the International Cultural Centre in Krakow, being an effect of a long-lasting cooperation between the Centre and the Olomouc Museum of Art. The narrative of the book emphasizes the contribution of numerous artists active in the Bohemian lands to the complex mapping of the art scene in Europe of the late 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century. The authors’ discourse contextualizes Bohemian Symbolism in relation to the West European art trends as well as confronts Czech developments with the exponents of Young Poland. Thus both the special cultural position of Prague seen in the context of the Austria-Hungary Empire and the interconnections with the artistic milieu in Krakow have been open to question.
“Masters of Dreams” expounds the idiosyncratic features, the richness and the universal dimension of Bohemian Symbolism, an important chapter of the European avant-garde, at the threshold of the First World War. Symbolism paved the way for Czech artists to the salons of Europe – a path followed by Alfons Mucha and Karel Hlaváček, Jan Preisler and František Kupka. Around 1900 the Bohemian lands exemplified economic success on a European scale, and the wealthy Bohemian bourgeois eagerly supported the buoyant burgeoning of artistic life. Prague – the scene of rivalry between Bohemian and German cultures; Prague – one of the key artistic metropolises of contemporary Europe – also became the center of the Czech national awakening.
Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber by Bibiana K. Obler
This compelling examination of the work and lives of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter and Dadaists Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber illuminates the roles of gender and the applied arts in abstraction’s early days. Both couples, like Expressionism and Dada more generally, strived to transcend the fragmented individualism promoted by capitalism. Through abstraction and by unsettling the boundaries between the decorative and fine arts, they negotiated tensions between the philosophical and commercial aspects of their production. Both pairs were feminist—the women ambitious and the men supportive of their work—but theirs was a feminism that embraced differences between the sexes. This innovative look at the personal relationships of two influential artist couples shows how everyday life—mundane concerns along with spiritual and intellectual endeavors—informed the development of abstraction.
Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield by Sabine T. Kriebel
Revolutionary Beauty offers the first sustained study of the German artist John Heartfield’s groundbreaking political photomontages, published in the left-wing weekly Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) during the 1930s. Sabine T. Kriebel foregrounds the critical artistic practices with which Heartfield directly confronted the turbulent, ideologically charged currents of interwar Europe, exposing the cultural politics of the crucial historical moment that witnessed the consolidation of National Socialism. In this period of radicalization and mass mobilization, the medium of photomontage—the cut-and-paste assemblage of photograph and text—offered a way to deconstruct the visual world and galvanize beholders on a mass scale.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist by Diane Radycki
Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well as mothers and children nude. She also created the first self-portrait while pregnant in the history of art. Modersohn-Becker painted the life she was living as a woman and artist and led the way for generations of women artists. Tragically, her life and career were cut short at age thirty-one, following complications from childbirth.
Diane Radycki examines the artist’s fascinating biography, highlighting her friendships with poet Rainer Maria Rilke and sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff as well as her personal anguish, including years in an unconsummated marriage, a disappointing affair, and irresolution about motherhood. Radycki also details the genres of Modersohn-Becker’s work: figure (especially nudes), still life, and landscape; and the reception of her work following her death. This new book is an authoritative source on Modersohn-Becker, who Radycki convincingly portrays as the first significant woman artist in the history of modernism.
“Livre d’une rare intelligence,” Stephane Guegan, Le Monde, 2016
Telehor: the International New Vision, Facsimile reprint and Commentary edited by Klemens Gruber and Oliver Botar
In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. The facsimile reprint of the magazine is accompanied by a commentary volume. The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.
It also contains new translations of the original texts: in Mandarin, Russian, Hungarian and Spanish.
After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde by Dorothy Rowe
What happened in 1920s Cologne ‘after Dada’? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst’s departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894–1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier.
The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field.
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume III: Europe 1880 – 1940 edited by Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop
The third of three volumes devoted to the cultural history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection contains fifty-six original essays on the role of ‘little magazines’ and independent periodicals in Europe in the period 1880-1940. It demonstrates how these publications were instrumental in founding and advancing developments in European modernism and the avant-garde.
Expert discussion of approaching 300 magazines, accompanied by an illuminating variety of cover images, from France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Portugal, Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe will significantly extend and strengthen the understanding of modernism and modernity. The chapters are organised into six main sections with contextual introductions specific to national, regional histories, and magazine cultures. Introductions and chapters combine to elucidate the part played by magazines in the broader formations associated with Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism in a period of fundamental social and geo-political change. Individual essays, situated in relation to metropolitan centres bring focussed attention to a range of celebrated and less well-known magazines, including Le Chat Noir, La Revue blanche, Le Festin d’Esope, La Nouvelle Revue Française, La Révolution Surréaliste, Documents,De Stijl, Ultra, Lacerba, Energie Nouve, Klingen, Exlex, flamman, Der Blaue Reiter, Der Sturm, Der Dada, Ver Sacrum, Cabaret Voltaire, 391, ReD, Zenit, Ma, Contemporanul, Formisci, Zdroj, Lef, and Novy Lef.
The magazines disclose a world where the material constraints of costs, internal rivalries, and anxieties over censorship ran alongside the excitement of new work, collaboration on a new manifesto and the birth of a new movement. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the expanding field of modernist studies, providing a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which helps bring to life the dynamics out of which the modernist avant-garde evolved.
Bruno Schulz: rzeczywistość przesunięta / Bruno Schulz: Shifted Reality by Jan Gondowicz, Jerzy Jarzębski, Irena Kossowska, and Łukasz Kossowski
The Museum of Literature in Warsaw houses the largest collection of Bruno Schulz’s works worldwide. A selection of the artits’s prints and drawings has already been shown in many important centers, such as the museums of Paris, Nancy, Madrid, London, Dusseldorf, Trieste, Genoa, Istanbul, Brussels and Jerusalem. The year 2012 marked the 120th anniversary of Schulz’s birth and the 70th of his death. On this occasion the Museum of Literature organized a special exhibition meant to show for the first time the work of the great visionary in the context of Polish interwar art. The exhibition embraced over 200 paintings, prints and drawings as well as assemblages, visualizations and films by a significant body of artists.
When writing about the Polish version of surrealism – or rather about the not quite definable trend of the Polish interwar art which occupied a borderland between magical realism, grotesque and expressionism – Joanna Pollakówna called it “the painting of a shifted reality”. This strange realism was a peculiar equivalent of the Italian pittura metafisica and German Neue Sachlichkeit. It seems that only a “shifted reality” makes it possible to place Schulz in the framework of his epoch. By stepping out of the usual interpretational patterns and reaching beyond the time when he lived and worked, the book looks for antecedents and followers and immerses him in the poetics of photomontage and film.
The essays in this exhibition catalogue define the “shifted reality” created by Schulz in various ways. Jerzy Jarzębski locates it in a discontinuity, in the tension between a center and a periphery. Irena Kossowska discusses its European background, pointing out the metaphysical paintings and drawings by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as the missing link in the interpretational contexts of Schulz’s work. Jan Gondowicz shows how Schulz tried to tame the cosmic perspective of the predicted apocalypse by viewing it through the anachronistic raster of 19th-century engravings. Thus the reality questioned by the artist is analyzed from three different points of view.
Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory edited by Paul Crowther and Isabel Wünsche
Traditional art is based on conventions of resemblance between the work and that which it is a representation “of.” Abstract art, in contrast, either adopts alternative modes of visual representation or reconfigures mimetic convention. This book explores the relation of abstract art to nature (taking nature in the broadest sense—the world of recognisable objects, creatures, organisms, processes, and states of affairs), covering three categories: classical modernism (Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Arp, early American abstraction); post-war abstraction (Pollock, Still, Newman, Smithson, Noguchi, Arte Povera, Michaux, postmodern developments); and the broader historical and philosophical scope.
War Culture and the Contest of Images by Dora Apel
Series: New Directions in International Studies
War Culture and the Contest of Images analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals. Dora Apel examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. Simultaneously, she explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images. As a result of the global visual culture in which anyone may produce as well as consume public imagery, the wide variety of visual and documentary practices present realities that would otherwise be invisible or officially off-limits. In our digital era, the prohibition and control of images has become nearly impossible to maintain. Using carefully chosen case studies—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s video projections and public works in response to 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the performance works of Coco Fusco and Regina Galindo, and the practices of Israeli and Palestinian artists—Apel posits that contemporary war images serve as mediating agents in social relations and as a source of protection or refuge for those robbed of formal or state-sanctioned citizenship. While never suggesting that documentary practices are objective translations of reality, Apel shows that they are powerful polemical tools both for legitimizing war and for making its devastating effects visible. In modern warfare and in the accompanying culture of war that capitalism produces as a permanent feature of modern society, she asserts that the contest of images is as critical as the war on the ground.
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage by Andrés Mario Zervigón
Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.
Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history.
Art & Life: Mikhail Matiushin and the Russian Avant-Garde in St. Petersburg by Isabel Wünsche
Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934), best known as composer of the music for the Cubo-Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913), was not only a successful musician but also an influential painter and theoretician. Together with Elena Guro he founded the artists’ group Union of Youth in 1910, and the couple’s house became a central meeting place of the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg avant-garde. Matiushin developed his organic approach to art together with Nikolai Kulbin, Pavel Filonov, and Kazimir Malevich. After the 1917 October Revolution, he established the Studio of Spatial Realism at the Art Academy and organized the Department of Organic Culture at the State Institute of Artistic Culture in Leningrad. In the 1930s, he worked in the field of color theory and its practical application in art, architecture, and design. This monograph is the first comprehensive study of Matiushin’s multifaceted artistic and theoretical œuvre.
Publications for the past five years are listed below.
2025
Erin Dusza, “Warrior or Damsel? Representations of the Nation as a Woman” in Gender and Nation in East Central Europe. ed. Marta Cieslak and Anna Müller. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2025.
2024
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Margarete Schuette-Lihotzky: Architecture, Politics, Gender; New Perspectives on Her Life and Work,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (vol. 30, no 2) Fall-Winter 2023, 312-316. [published in December 2024]
Marta Faust, “Art, illusion, and recycled images in Johannes Pauli’s anecdotes on painters,” Word & Image 40, no. 3 (October 2024), 136-168, https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2024.2362446.
Eva Forgacs “Towards a European Integration of the Arts and the Art Discourse”, in Antje Kempe, Beáta Hock and Marina Dmitrieva, eds., Universal – International – Global. Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe, Wien, Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 2023.
Mark Haxthausen,“Fatal Attraction: Carl Einstein’s ‘Ethnological’ Turn,” in: Art and Anthropology” Modern Encounters, 1870– 1980, ed. Joseph Imorde and Peter Probst, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023, pp. 123–45.
Andrés Zervigón “Visible Yet Transparent: The Lens in Nineteen-Century Photographic Cultures,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 49, Issue 4 (Summer 2023): 626-662.
____. Review of Juliet Hacking and Joanne Lukitch, eds., Photography and the Arts: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Practices and Debates, London, Bloomsbury, 2020. In 19th-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2023). Available at this link.
2022
Eva Forgacs, “Responses to the First Russian Art Exhibition”, in Isabel Wünsche, Miriam Leimer, eds., 100 Years On. Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition, Wien, Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 2022.
_____,”History Too Fast”, in Agnieszka Chmielewska, Irena Kossowska, Marcin Lachowski, eds.,State Construction and Art in East Central Europe 1918-2018, New York, London, Routledge, 2022.
_____, “War as a Psychological,Social and Intellectual Experience”, in Lidia Gluchowska, Vojtech Lahoda, eds., Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Avant-Garde and Modernism, Prague, Institue of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, 2022.
_____,”Alfred Kemeny and the Hungarian Political Left in Berlin Art during the Early 1920s”, in Ralf Burmeister, Thomas Köhler, László Baán, András Zwickl, eds., Magyar Modern. Hungarian Art in Berlin 1910-1933, Berlin, Hirmer Verlag,Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts, 2022.
Françoise Forster-Hahn, “Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles 1937: Eine neue Lesart im Kreis der Hollywood-Anti-Nazi League,” in: Seismographen und Orientierungsspiegel. Bilder der Welt in kurzen Kunstgeschichten, ed. by Lena Crasemann, Benjamin Fellmann und Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2022, pp. 148-153
_____, “Unterwegs-Sein zwischen Zeiten und Orten: Max Beckmanns ‘Heimatgefühl im Kosmos’ und die Dialektik des Exils,” in:
Max Beckmann Departure, ed. by Oliver Kase, Christiane Zeiller, Cornelia Zetzsche, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne, pp. 89-91.
Juliet Koss, “During the Bauhaus,” in After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy, ed. Geoff Kaplan. Cambridge Mass.: no place/MIT Press, 2022, 74–85
_____., review of Anna Bokov, Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930 (Zurich: Park Books, 2020), Slavic Review 81, no. 3 (Fall 2022): 841-43
Marsha Morton, “Max Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie: The Physiological Sublime, Embodiment, and Male Identity,” in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Vol. 21, Issue 1, Spring 2022.
Morgan Ridler, “Color and Architecture: Walter Gropius and Bauhaus Wall Painting Workshop in Collaboration, 1922-1926,” Architectural Histories, 10 no. 1 (2022): 1-27.
Isabel Rousset, ‘The Kleinhaus and the politics of localism in German architecture and planning, c. 1910’, Urban Planning 7:1 (2022), 254–66
James A. van Dyke, “Modernism and the State: German Art Academies in Crisis during the Weimar Republic,” Kunstchronik (Munich) 75, no. 5 (May 2022): 218-26.
Andres Zervigon, “Visual Explosion in the Weimar Era’s Print Media.” In Material Modernity: Innovations in Art, Design and Architecture in the Weimar Republic, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela, 115-139. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
2021
Jenny Anger “Sonja Sekula and ‘Art of the Mentally Ill.’” American Art 35, no. 1 (2021): 94-113.
____.“Midcentury Multiplicity.” In A Future We Begin to Feel: Women Artists 1921-1971, edited by Emma Wippermann, 20-25. New York: Rosenberg and Co., 2021.
____.“Henryk Berlewi, Mechano-Facture, 1924.” In Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939: The Merrill C. Berman Collection, edited by Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter, 146-51. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2020.
Eva Forgacs “Cezanne and the Bauhaus”, in Judit Gesko, ed., Cezanne to Malevich. Arcadia to Abstraction, Museum of Fine Art, Budapest, 2021.
Keith Holz,“Witness to Global Realignments and Human Suffering: Oskar Kokoschka in Post-War London.” In: Sites of Interchange: Modernism, Politics, and Culture in Britain and Germany, 1919-1951.” Edited by Lucy Wasensteiner. Series: German Visual Culture, Vol. 8. Series editor: Christian Weikop. New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishing, 2021, 283-302.
____.“Oskar Kokoschkas Amerika Kampagne,” & “Oskar Kokoschka’s American Campaign.” In: Oskar Kokoschka: New Perspectives. Edited by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold. Berlin: deGruyter Verlag, 2021, 168-186, 187-203. (print & e-book editions)
____.“Handicrafts under duress: interwar representations in word and image of German Bohemian glass workers.” In: Modern Realist Approaches across the Czechoslovak Scene, 1918-1945. Ivo Haban & Anna Habanová, eds., Stephan von Pohl, translator. Liberec: Regional Art Gallery & Liberec: National Heritage Institute, English edition, 2021, 130-147.
Juliet Koss, review of Katherine Zubovich, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Moscow’s Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), Slavonic and East European Review vol. 99, no. 4(October 2021): 784–86
Barbara McCloskey, “White Supremacy and the Art of Anti-Fascism in the United States and Germany between the World Wars, Kunst und Politik (vol. 23, 2021): 101-109.
Elizabeth Otto “Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi Neoclassicism: Olympia.” A Modernist Cinema: Film Art from 1914 to 1941. Ed. Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2021, 259–78.
____.“Sofie Korner: Die Pionieren” and “Lotte Rothschild: Ein Leben auf der Suche nach der Zukunft,” Vergessene Bauhaus-Frauen: Lebensschicksale in den 1930er und 1940er Jahren, ed. Anke Blümm and Patrick Rössler. Weimar: Klassik Stiftung Weimar & Universität Erfurt, 2021, 30–33, 70–75.
Isabel Rousset, ‘Those Who Live in Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Stones’ in Activism at Home: Architects Dwelling between Politics, Aesthetics and Resistance, eds. Janina Gosseye and Isabelle Doucet (Berlin: Jovis, 2021), pp. 27–37
Sherwin Simmons ““Malerische Dichtungen”: Two Landscape Paintings of 1916 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner”Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, vol. 84, no. 3, 2021, pp. 379-407. https://doi.org/10.1515/ZKG-2021-3004
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Mx. Gropius: Nonbinary Doings at the Bauhaus,” review of Jana Revedin’s Jeder Hier Nennt Mich Frau Bauaus: Das Leben der Ise Frank (Cologne: Dumont, 2018) in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (vol. 26, no 2) Fall-Winter 2019, pp. 309-13. [expanded version of essay published in A Book for Mary, 2020].
____. “Strangers in a Strange Land: Bruno Taut and Charlotte Perriand as Design Consultants in Japan,” Book for Mary: Sixty on Seven [ Festschrift for Mary McLeod], Irena Lehkozivova and Joan Ockman, eds. (Brno, Czech.: Quatro Print, 2020) 68-80.
____.”Strangers in a Strange Land: Bruno Taut and Charlotte Perriand as Design Consultants in Japan,” West 86th:A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture (27:2) Fall-Winter 2020 [published in 2021].
Elizabeth Cronin “Modern Children by Modern Women” in The New Women Behind the Camera, ed. Andrea Nelson (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2020), 115-125.
Elizabeth Cronin and Jessica Keister, “Polar Expeditions: A Photographic Landscape of Sameness?” in Proximity and Distance in Northern Landscape Photography: Contemporary Criticism, Curation and Practice, eds. Darcy White and Chris Goldie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020), 35-55.
Eva Forgacs “The New Aesthetic of the Late Nineteen Twenties. Reconsidering the Periodization of the Interwar Avant-Gardes,” Acta Historiae Artium, Vol. LXI, Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 2020.
_____.”The Inconceivable Reality. Amateur Photography and Professional Painting”, Moritz Baßler, Ursula Frohne, David Ayers, Sascha Bru and Benedikt Hjartarson eds., Realisms of the Avant-Garde,Berlin, Boston, DeGruyter, 2020.
_____.“The Bauhaus Paradox. Creativity, freedom, and the lasting legacy of the Bauhaus in Hungary”, in Dora Hegyi, Zsuzsa Laszlo, eds.: Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020.
Juliet Koss. “Liubov Popova, Production Clothing for Actor No. 7, 1922,” in Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939, ed. Jodi Hauptman and Adrian Sudhalter. New York: Museum of Modern Art exh. cat., 2020, 64-67.
_______.“Red Flags,” invited response to “The Future of Avant-Garde Studies: A European Round Table, 2010” (with Wolfgang Asholt, Peter Bürger, Éva Forgács, Benedikt Hjartarson and Piotr Piotrowski, moderated by Hubert van den Berg), Journal of Avant-Garde Studies 1 (inaugural issue, July 2020).
Irena Kossowska “Reframing National Identity: Official Art Exhibitions on Tour in Central and Eastern Europe” in Terms. Proceedings of the 34th World Congress of Art History (eds. Shao Dazhen, Fan Di’an, LaoZhu (Zhu Qingsheng), Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), Central Academy of Fine Arts, Peking University, 15-19.09.2016, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 2020).
_______.“A Quest for a ‘New Man’: Bruno Schulz and Giorgio de Chirico” in the sixth volume of the series European Avant-Garde and Modernisms Studies titled Realisms of the Avant-Garde (eds. Moritz Baßler, Benedikt Hjartarson, Ursula Frohne, David Ayers and Sacha Bru, Berlin: De Gruyter 2020; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110637533)
Rose-Carol Washton Long “Is the Blaue Reiter Relevant for the Twenty-First Centruy? A Discussion of Anarchism, Art, and Politics.” In The Blaue Reiter. Edited by Dorothy Price. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020: 15-33.
Megan R. Luke, “The Factotum of Industry: Max Klinger’s Beethoven,” kritische berichte 48, no. 3 (2020): 81–94.
Elizabeth Otto “ringl + pit and the Queer Art of Failure,” October 173 (Sept. 2020): 37–64. https://bit.ly/3m5sKq8 .
James A. van Dyke, “German Art and War in the Year 1932,” Oxford German Studies, 49, no. 4 (December 2020): 336-62. Special issue: Aftermath – German Culture in the Wake of World War I, edited by Catherine Smale and Tara Talwar Windsor.
____. “On Masculinity and Male Sexuality in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Soldiers’ Bath,” Art History 43, no. 5 (November 2020): 892-926.
Andres Zervigon “Photography, Truth, and the Radicalized Public Sphere in Weimar Germany.” In Photography and Its Publics, edited by Melissa Miles and Edward Welch. London: Bloomsbury, January 2020.
____. “Is Photomontage Over?” Special issue of History of Photography coedited with Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork, Ireland). Zervigón’s article “The Photomontage Activity of Postmodernism” is published along with the coauthored introduction. January 2020.
____. “L’image prolétarienne entre agitation politique et sobriété réaliste. L’Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung et le mouvement photographique ouvrier allemand,” in special issue devoted to worker photography, Transbordeur Nr. 4 (2020): 38-49.
____. “Fünf Finger hat die Hand.” Essay on the John Heartfield poster of the same name for catalog accompanying the exhibition “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor – The Merrill C. Berman Collection at MoMA,” Museum of Modern Art, Spring 2020.
____. “Produktive Beziehungen. John Heartfield und Willi Münzenberg.”Essay for the catalog accompanying the exhibition Fotografie plus Dynamit. Zeitschnitt, curated & edited by Angela Lammert, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, March 2020, 38-45.
2019
“Talking About the Bauhaus: Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Barry Bergdoll, and Mary McLeod,” Architectural Record, June 2019.
Kathryn Brush, “Carl Georg Heise and the USA: New Perspectives on the History of Harvard’s Germanic Museum and Lübeck’s Museum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 45 (2018/19), pp. 7-60.
Jay A. Clarke, “Kollwitz, Gender, Biography, and Social Activism,” Käthe Kollwitz: Prints, Process, Politics, ed. Louis Marchesano (Getty Research Institute, 2019), 40-56.
Elizabeth Cronin, “Heimatfotografie in Tirol 1938-1945: Eine flexible Sicht der Dinge” in Zwischen Ideologie, Anpassung und Verfolgung: Kunst und Nationalsozialismus in Tirol (Innsbruck: Tiroler Landesmuseen, 2019), 252-261.
Eva Forgacs, “The International of the Square. Reception of the Russian Avant-Garde Abroad 1920s-1970s”, in Silvia Burini, ed.: Translations and Dialogues: The Reception of Russian Art Abroad, Europa Orientalis, No. 31, Salerno, 2019, pp. 207-216.
Susan Funkenstein, “Paul Klee and the New Woman Dancer: Gret Palucca, Karla Grosch, and the Gendering of Constructivism,” in Bauhaus Bodies, eds. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 145-67)
Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Equist, Isabel Wünsche (ed.), BAUHAUS DIASPORA: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture, Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing; Sydney: Power Publications, 2019.
Charlotte Healy, “Knotted, Woven, Unraveling: Textile as Structure in the Work of Paul Klee,” in Textile Moderne / Textile Modernism, ed. Burcu Dogramaci (Cologne: Böhlau, 2019), 119–30.
Keith Holz, “Why defend Degenerate Art?” in Arte Degenerada – 80 Anos: Repercussões No Brasil. Edited by Helouise Lima Costa and Daniel Rincon Caires. Museu De Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, 2019, 47-65.
Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Dangerous Portraits? Lotte Jacobi’s Photos of Uzbek and Tajik Women,” Women’s Art Journal , fall/winter 2019, pp. 14-23.
Kristina Jõekalda A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Eds. Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, Michaela Marek. (Das östliche Europa. Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9.) Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, 280 pp
Kristina Jõekalda, “Monuments as a Responsibility: Baltic German Learned Societies and the Construction of Cultural Heritage around 1900.” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung / Journal of East Central European Studies 2019, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 189–222.
Sharon Jordan “He is a Bridge: The Importance of Friedrich Nietzsche for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner” essay in Jill Lloyd and Janis Staggs, editors, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (New York: Neue Galerie and Prestel Verlag, 2019). Exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with the retrospective Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, on view at the Neue Galerie New York until mid-January 2020.
Marsha Morton, “Rudolf von Eitelberger and Leopold Carl Müller: Constructing a Genre of Viennese Orientalism” in Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg: Netzwerker der Kunstwelt, Eva Kernbauer, Kathrin Porkorny-Nagel,Raphael Rosenberg, Julia Rüdoger, Patrick Werkner, and Tanja Jenni, eds.., Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, pp. 291-312.
Eleanor Moseman “Navigating Partnership: German Surrealist Ellida Schargo von Alten, Richard Oelze, and Cross-Fertilization in the Visual Arts,” was published in Feminist German Studies 34 (2019): 75-100.
Dorothy Price and Camilla Smith (eds.) ‘Weimar’s Others: Art history, alterity and regionalism in inter war Germany’ Special Issue Art History 42.4 September 2019 (Wiley Blackwell)
Morgan Ridler, “Dörte Helm, Margaret Leiteritz, and Lou Scheper–Berkenkamp: Rare Women of the Bauhaus Wall-Painting Workshop,” In Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) 195-216.
________. “Paint it Red: The Squares, Cubes and Doors of the Bauhaus” Source: Notes in the History of Art (Spring 2019).
Sherwin Simmons, “Under the Flicker of Arc Light: Color in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Paintings of Berlin, 1912-14.” Essay in exhibition catalogue Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, ed. by Jill Lloyd and Janis Staggs, Neue Galerie, New
York City, October 3, 2019 – January 13, 2020, pp. 62-84.
James A. van Dyke, “Style,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (special issue: “Keywords for Marxist Art History Today,” ed. Andrew Hemingway and Larne Abse Gogarty) 21 (2019): 149-56.
____. “On the Possibility of Resistance in Two Silverpoints by Otto Dix,” in: Art and Resistance in Germany, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Deborah Ascher Barnstone (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 151-72.
____. “Dix und die Illustrierte Moderne,” in: Egger-Lienz und Otto Dix: Bilderwelten zwischen den Kriegen, ed. Helena Pereña and Astrid Flögel, exh. cat. Tiroler Landesmuseen, Innsbrück and Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen (Munich: Hirmer, 2019). 137-49.
Isabel Wünsche, “Terra incognita? Die erste australische Bauhaus-Ausstellung 1961 in Melbourne,” in Bauhaus ausstellen, ed. Franziska Bomski, Hellmut Th. Seemann and Thorsten Valk, Göttingen: Wallensteinverlag 2019 (Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar), 219-238.
_____. “die abstrakten hannover – utopian designs for a new world,” in Groups, Coteries, Circles and Guilds. Modernist Aesthetics and the Utopian Lure of Community, ed. Laura Scuriatti, Frankfurt Main: Peter Lang, 2019, 225-247.
Andres Zervigon “Photography Studies and Germany” in the feature “Forum: Visual Studies—The Art Historian’s View,” The German Quarterly 92.2 (Spring 2019), 266-268
Andres Zervigon “Ontology or Metaphor?” in Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, eds. Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty (London: Routledge Books, 1919), 10-23.
2018
Eric Anderson, “Dreams in Color: Sigmund Freud’s Decorative Encounters,” in Elana Shapira, ed., Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism(Vienna: Böhlau, 2018), 161-178.
Jenny Anger. Four Metaphors of Modernism: From Der Sturm to the Société Anonyme (University of Minnesota Press 2018)
Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, Art and Resistance in Germany (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018)
Jean Marie Carey, “The Tempest and the Savages: Franz Marc, Hugo Ball, and a Decisive Moment in Expressionist-Dada Theater with a Special Appearance by August Macke” in The Empty Mirror (February 2018).
Elizabeth Cronin, “Paris 1937: Promoting Austria Abroad” Austriaca. Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche no. 83 (Dec 2016), 103-116. (belatedly published in 2018)
Eva Forgacs, “Vajda az Európai avantgárdban és azon kívül” (Vajda in the European avant-garde and outside it) in György Petőcz, ed.: Vajda Lajos. Exhibition in the Ferenczy Cultural Center, Szentendre, 2018. Bilingual catalog.
________.”Suprematism: a Shortcut into the Future: the Reception of Malevich by Polish and Hungarian Artists during the Inter-War Period”, in Christina Lodder, ed., Celebrating Suprematism. New Approaches to the Art of Kazimir Malevich, London: Brill, 2018.
Charles Haxthausen, “Handbook,” along with translation of Carl Einstein’s prospectus for his “Handbook of Art,” in: Neolithic Chidlhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke and Tom Holert, exh. cat. Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt/ Diaphanes Verlag, 2018, 22–33, 129–131.
Keith Holz, “Questions of German-Bohemian Art and New Objectivity.”Opuscula historiaeatrium 67,no. 2. Masaryk University, Brno, December 2018, 16-25.
Keith Holz, “The United States tour of 20th Century (Banned) German Art / Ausstellungstournee 20th Century (Banned) German Art durch die USA.” London 1938. Martin Faass and Lucy Wasensteiner, eds. Berlin: Villa Max Liebermann and London: Wiener Library. Zurich: Nimbus Verlag, 2018, 214-233.
Keith Holz, “Not only biographies: a brief institutional history of German and Austrian exiled artist groups,” in INSIDERS/OUTSIDERS: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Culture. Edited by Monica Bohm-Duchen. London: Lund Humphries, 2018, 214-225.
Rebecca Houze, “Emilie Bach (1840-1890): Education Reformer, Critic, and Art Embroiderer in the Era of Franz Joseph I.” In Design Dialog: Der jüdische Beitrag zur Wiener Moderne/ Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism. Edited by Elana Shapira. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2018.
Kristina Jõekalda, Cherished and Perished Monuments: Some 19th-Century Cases of Renovation in the Baltic Heimat. – Stephanie Herold, Anneli Randla, Ingrid Scheurmann (Eds.). Re-Nationalisierung oder Sharing Heritage? Wo steht die Denkmalpflege im europäischen Kulturerbejahr 2018. (Veröffentlichungen des Arbeitskreises Theorie und Lehre der Denkmalpflege e.V. 28.) Holzminden: Verlag Jörg Mitzkat / Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2018, pp. 32-41.
Barbara McCloskey, “Teach Your Children Well: Hermynia Zur Mühlen, George Grosz, and the Art of Radical Pedagogy in Germany between the World Wars,” 77-95. In Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto, eds., Art and Resistance in Germany (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Andrew McNamara, Ann Stephen, and Isabel Wünsche, “Refugees and émigrés to Australia, 1930-1950: Three cases of light, colour and material studies in the Antipodes under the shadow of fascism and war,” in Migration Processes and Artistic Practices in Wartime, Lisbon: Artistic Studies Research Centre (CIEBA), Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, 2018, 271-289.
Morgan Ridler “Hinnerk Scheper and Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp’s Architecture and Color: Bauhaus Wall Painting in the Soviet Union,” Translation and Introduction, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 25 no 1 (Spring–Summer 2018)
Isabel Rousset, ‘Satirical Representations of the Bauhaus Architect in Simplicissimus Magazine’ in Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries, eds. Leah Armstrong and Felice McDowell (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 103–20
_______. “The Dancer’s Revenge: Dance/Pantomime and the Emergence of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Fantasy Pictures, 1912-15,” Dance Chronicle. Studies in Dance and the Related Arts, Vol. 41, no. 2, (2018), pp. 121-57.
Joyce Tsai Laszlo Moholy-NagyPainting after Photography, (University of California Press 2018)
Isabel Wünsche, The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context, (Routledge 2018)
_____. “The Novembergruppe Writes Absolute Film History,” in Freedom: The Art of the Novembergruppe 1918-1935, exh. cat., Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 2018, 168-175.
_____. “’Der Absolute Film.’ Matinee der Novembergruppe und Ludwig Hirschfeld-Macks Reflektorische Farbenspiele,” in Novembergruppe 1918: Studien zu einer interdisziplinären Kunst für die Weimarer Republik, Münster: Waxmann, 2018 (Veröffentlichungen der Kurt-Weill-Gesellschaft Dessau Bd. 10), 169-180.
_____. “Lebendigkeit und Unsterblichkeit in der Kunst der Organischen Schule der russischen Avantgarde,” INTERJEKTE 12, 2018, 25-32.
_____. “Von der Metaphysik zur Psychophysik: Reflexionen zum Wesen des künstlerischen Schaffensprozesses in den kunsttheoretischen Schriften von Nikolaj Kulbin und Wassily Kandinsky,” in Literatur und menschliches Wissen, ed. Helena Ulbrechtova, Frank Thomas Grub, Edgar Platen, and Siegfried Ulbrecht, Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2018, 194-215.
2017
Megan Brandow-Faller (Ed.) Childhood by Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood, 1700-Present, (Bloomsbury 2017)
Carey, Jean Marie. “Affen in Eden” in Avenue, Vol. 4 (September 2017).
_____. “To Never Know You: Archival Photographs of Franz Marc and Russi Marc in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Vol. 41 (September 2017).
_____. “Between Something and Nothing: Franz Marc’s Authorial Ether” in The Empty Mirror (July 2017).
_____. “Alfred Flechtheim: Kunsthandler der Moderne” in Journal of Visual Art Practice, Volume 17, Issue 3 (August 2017)
Rebecca Houze, ” ‘A Revelation of Grace and Pride’: Cultural Memory and International Aspiration in Early Twentieth-Century Hungarian Design.” In Expanding Nationalisms At World Fairs: Identity, Diversity And Exchange, 1851-1915. Edited by David Raizman and Ethan Robey.London: Routledge, 2017.
Frauke V. Josenhans, Marijeta Bozovic, Joseph Leo Koerner, Megan R. Luke, and Suzanne Boorsch. Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope. (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017).
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Rainer Schützeichel (Eds.) Die Stadt als Raumentwurf Theorien und Projekte im Städtebau seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017
Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón. Photography and Doubt. (London: Routledge, 2017).
Marsha Morton, “Picturing the Perils of Greed: Kladderadatsch and the 1873 Financial Crash,” Journal of Illustration, vol. 4, issue 2, Fall 2017.
Eleanor Moseman, “Die Zukunft der Vergangenheit: Richard Oelze and Post-War Reflection,” appeared in the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 80 (February 2017): 126-155.
Øystein Sjastad, Christian Krohg’s Naturalism, (University of Washington Press 2017)
James A. van Dyke, “Paul Mathias Paduas Leda mit dem Schwan, zeitgeschichtlich betrachtet,” in: vermacht. verfallen. verdrängt. Kunst und Nationalsozialismus, ed. Christian Fuhrmeister, Monika Hauser-Mair, Felix Steffan, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie Rosenheim (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2017), 55-64.
____. “Dix Petrified,” in: Art and War (German Visual Culture series), ed. Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Barbara McCloskey (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017), 103-27.
____. “On the Challenge of Nazi Art,” German Quarterly 90, no. 3 (2017): 366-8.
Andres Mario Zervigon. Photography and Germany. (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
Isabel Wünsche, “Natural Phenomena and Universal Laws: The Organic School of the Russian Avant-garde,” in Natural-Unnatural: Organicity and the Avant-garde, ed. Paulina Kurc-Maj und Aleksandra Jach, exh. cat., Lodz: Museum Sztuki, 2017, 185-206.
_____. “Transgressing National Borders and Artistic Styles: The November Group and the International Avant-Garde in Berlin during the Interwar Period,” in Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics, Late 19th to Early 21st Centuries, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2017, 291-307.
2016
Shulamith Behr, “Ludwig Meidner, Exile, Creativity and Holocaust Awareness”, in exh. cat. Eavesdropper on an Age – Ludwig Meidner in Exile (Horcher in die Zeit – Ludwig Meidner im Exil), English–German edition, ed. Museum Giersch der Goethe-Universität and Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt (Munich: Hirmer, 2016), pp. 148-165.
Shulamith Behr, “Performing the wo/man: the ‘interplay’ between Marianne Werefkin and Else Lasker-Schüler”, in Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle, ed. Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche, (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), pp. 92-105.
Carey, Jean Marie. “The Indexicality of Animalisierung: Remediating Franz and Russi Marc,” in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Volume 37. (December 2016) (forthcoming).
Cronin, Elizabeth. “Traditional Modern becomes a Modern Tradition: Heimat Photography in Austria” in Anti:Modern; Salzburg inmitten von Europa zwischen Tradition und Erneuerung, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Munich: Hirmer, 2016), 288-292.
Eisman, April. “From Double Burden to Double Vision: The “Doppelgaenger” in Doris Ziegler’s Paintings of Women in East Germany,” in The Doppelgaenger (German Visual Culture 3), ed. Deborah Ascher Barnstone (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016) 45-66.
Haxthausen, Charles W. “Renaissance Reconsidered: Carl Einstein on De Cimabue à Tiepolo, 1935,” in: Historiographie der Moderne: Carl Einstein, Paul Klee, Robert Walser und die gegenseitige Erhellung der Künste, edited by Michael Baumgartner, Andreas Michel, and Reto Sorg, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016 (September 2016).
_____. “Les genres parodiques de Klee,” in: Paul Klee: l’ironie à l’œuvre ed. Angela Lampe (catalogue of an exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, April 2016), 159-165. [ English Version: “Klee’s Parodic Genres,” in: Paul Klee: Irony at Work, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2016 159-164.]
Huebner, Karla. “Inter-War Czech Women’s Magazines: Constructing Gender, Consumer Culture and Identity in Central Europe,” Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production, and Consumption, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, Rachel Ritchie, S. Jay Kleinberg, eds. Routledge, 2016, 66-80.
Sawicki, Nicholas Ed. Friedrich Feigl, 1884-1965. Contributions by Rachel Dickson, Zuzana Duchková, Arno Pařík, Sarah MacDougall, and Nicholas Sawicki. Arbor Vitae and Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu, 2016.http://cupress.cuni.cz/ink2_ext/index.jsp?include=podrobnosti&id=312253
James A. van Dyke, “Otto Dix’s Triptych TheWar,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft (special issue: “Hauptwerke politischer Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert/Icons of 20th-Century Political Art,” ed. Andrew Hemingway and Norbert Schneider), 18 (2016): 25-35.
____. “Franz Seraph von Lenbach, Portrait of Prince Otto von Bismarck (1884-90),” in: Spotlights: Collected by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, ed. Sabine Eckmann (St. Louis: Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2016), 91-94.
Versari, Maria Elena, “Introducation” to Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism) by Umberto Boccioni. Translated by Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari. Getty, 2016
Wünsche, Isabel and Wiebke Gronemeyer Ed. Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation. With contributions by Isabel Wünsche, Naomi Hume, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Viktoria Schindler, Aarnoud Rommens, Nieves Acedo del Barrio, Gordon Monro, Birgit Mersmann, Dorothea Schöne, Elena Korowin, Marilyn Martin, Wendy Kelly, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Pamela C. Scorzin. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. http://www.cambridgescholars.com/practices-of-abstract-art
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The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation
Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language
Dutch Neorealism, Cinema, and the Politics of Painting, 1927–1945
The Dada Archivist: Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Berlin Dada
Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media
Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania
Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury
The Trees of the Cross: Wood as Subject and Medium in the Art of Late Medieval Germany
Art, Exhibition and Erasure in Nazi Vienna
Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease since 1750 
Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads: Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR, 1920-1932
Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles 1937. Eine Ausstellung zwischen antiquarischen Büchern und der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League
Josef Albers, Late Modernism, and Pedagogic Form
The Chicago Lawyer Arthur Jerome Eddy and His Eclectic Art Collection
Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life
Women Artists in Expressionism: From Empire to Emancipation 
Compressed Utterances: Collage in a Germanic Context After 1912
The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition, and German Modernism
Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany
Year Zero to Economic Miracle: Hans Schwippert and Sep Ruf in Postwar West German Building Culture
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction 
The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin
Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2020-2021: The Société Anonyme at 100 
Malevich and Interwar Modernism. Russian Art and the International of the Square
Das Bild der Natur in der Romantik
Magnetic Woman: Toyen and the Surrealist Erotic
Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe: Ethnography, Anthropology, and Visual Culture, 1850-1930
Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960
Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy
Eloquent Bodies: Movement, Expression, and the Human Figure in Gothic Sculpture
German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its Legacies 
Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented: 1918–1938 
The Female Secession: Art and the Decorative at the Viennese Women’s Academy
Caspar David Friedrich: Nature and the Self 
Ascendants: Bauhaus Handprints Collected by László Moholy-Nagy. Edited by Jan Tichy and Robin Schuldenfrei (Chicago: IIT Institute of Design, 2019)
Carl Einstein A Mythology of Forms: Selected Writings on Art, Translated by Charles W. Haxthausen, University of Chicago Press (2019)
A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades.
Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art. 
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics
Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Self-Portrait
Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, 
Transformation: Art In East-Central Europe After 1989
Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History.
Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis 
The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition: Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London, 1st Edition
London 1938: Defending ‘degenerate’ art. With Kandinsky, Liebermann and Nolde against Hitler
Art and Resistance in Germany, Editor(s): Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Elizabeth Otto, 2018
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts
Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin
Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism
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Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile
Władcy snów. Symbolizm na ziemiach czeskich 1880-1914 / Masters of Dreams: Symbolism in the Bohemian Lands 1880-1914
Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber
Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield
Paula Modersohn-Becker: The First Modern Woman Artist
Telehor: the International New Vision, Facsimile reprint and Commentary
After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne avant-garde
The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines Volume III: Europe 1880 – 1940
War Culture and the Contest of Images
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage
Art & Life: Mikhail Matiushin and the Russian Avant-Garde in St. Petersburg