Category: HGSCEA at CAA

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.

The results were also announced for the first annual HGCEA competition for best recent essay by a member who has received their Ph.D. within the past five years. Winners chosen by the Board were:

First prize:
Pepper Stettler, “The Object, the Archive, and the Origins of Neue Sachlichkeit Photography” in the journal History of Photography, August 2011.

Honorable Mentions:
Amy K. Hamlin, “The Conditions of Interpretation: A Reception History of The Synagogue by Max Beckmann,” in nonsite.org, October 2012.

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

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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