On Thursday, 15 February, from 10 am – 12 noon CST, members are invited to come to a special event at the Prints and Drawings Study Room at the Art Institutewhere curator Jay Clarke, longtime members and old friend, will have things out for us to see and discuss. We did this in 2020, when the conference was last in Chicago, and it was a wonderful special event! If you’d like to attend please let Jenny Anger know ([email protected]). I’ll share more details in a week or two.
On Thursday night, from 6:30-8:30 pm CST, we will gather for our annual members’ dinner at Bistronomic, which some of you might remember from 2020. Aside from enjoying good food and company, I’ll announce the results of this year’s Emerging Scholars Competition Prize. An invitation just went out this morning. If you didn’t receive it, please let someone on the Board know. If you have seen it, we need to know by 1 February if you’ll be attending so that we have a firm headcount.
HGSCEA’s sponsored session, “Health, Illness, and the Art of Medicine,” is scheduled to take place in the Lake Michigan Room on the 8th floor of the Hilton Chicago on Saturday, 17 February, from 11 am – 12:30 pm CST. The session, which has been organized and is chaired by Pat Berman and Marsha Morton, comprises four papers by Amanda Brian (“Illustrating Children’s Health in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe”), Katerina Korola (“Purification by Light: Photography and Phototherapy in Early Twentieth-Century Germany”), Kathryn Carney (“Vital Signs: Weimar Hygiene on Film [Selections from Gesolei]”), and Jonathan Odden (“Figment Phalloplasty: Christian Schad’s Medical Imaginary). Allison Morehead will be the discussant.
Immediately after the session, from 1-2 pm CST, is HGSCEA’s annual business meeting. For those who wish to attend in person, the room listed on the conference program is the Astoria Room on the 3rd floor of the Hilton Chicago. However, because several members of the Board are unable to attend the conference this year, the meeting will be hybrid. The meeting is open to all members. Anyone wishing to attend remotely should contact me ([email protected]) or Jenny Anger ([email protected]) a day or two in advance of the meeting in order to get the zoom link, which is too unwieldy to include here.
Friday, February 17, 2023 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM New York Hilton Midtown – 3rd Floor – Mercury Ballroom
During the last three decades Viennese 1900 has exploded in popular culture and academia: in countless exhibitions dedicated to painting, architecture, and the applied arts, in myriad books on every well-known Viennese designer, and in the “Klimtomania” that covers umbrellas, scarves and shopping bags. Yet the popularity of Viennese Modernism and the commercial “Vienna 1900” industry simultaneously obscures a problematic series of historical erasures and gaps. All too often, the glittering culture of “Vienna 1900” is studied in isolation from the political exigencies of 1938 and thereafter. Our panel will interrogate the intentional neglect and repression of specific figures, organizations and movements who have faded in the shadow of larger Viennese superstars and a now familiar narrative, or who have been intentionally white-washed. The papers will call attention to some of the “absences” linked directly to the years of 1938-1945, to the “de-Jewification” of the Viennese street scape, to the careful art historical narrative surrounding certain careers, to the reshaping of a “Vienna-in-Exile” within the artistic establishment of post-war New York. In addition, we will show how the very celebration of Vienna 1900 cannot be understood apart from the uses to which it was put following the war, for it cannot be denied, and indeed is richly ironic, that the same period suppressed in Nazi discourse has been used to suppress Austria’s turbulent Nazi past.
“Sculpture, Site, and Space: Objects and Environments in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe.”
Chaired by Jackie Jung.
The session, with papers by Luke Fidler, Oeystein Sjaastad, Megan Luke, and Ewa Matyczyk on, respectively, the Braunschweiger Lion, Leif Erikson’s ‘Cult’, Site Specific Sculpture around 1930, and the Brodno Sculpture Park, will take place on Thursday, February 17, from 4:30 to 6 pm CST. (See https://caa.confex.com/caa/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Session/9776)
HGSCEA’s sponsored session “Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain: International Cooperation in Art, 1945-1948,” Chaired by Eva Forgacs (Art Center College of Design) Discussion lead by Barbara Jaffee (Northern Illinois University) Papers by Anna Jozefacka (Hunter College), Lauren Elizabeth Hanson (Harvard Art Museums), Lynette Roth (Harvard Art Museums), and Petra Skarupsky (University of Warsaw)
HGSCEA President Jim van Dyke
A lively panel and discussion via Zoom.
Discussion Leader Barbara Jaffee
Lynette Roth, Harvard Art Museums
Lauren Hanson, Harvard Art Museums
Anna Jozefacka, Hunter College, CUNY
Petra Skarupsky, University of Warsaw
Timothy Benson with a comment for the panel.
February 5, 2021
Dear fellow HGSCEANs,
I hope this finds you all as well as one can be in these days.
At a recent meeting on Zoom, the Board considered hosting some sort of virtual happy hour in lieu of our annual dinner and reception in conjunction with remote CAA, but decided that another large remote meeting was the last thing that people would want to attend, and that even if they did there would be no way to approach the buzz of numerous small conversations and the energizing conviviality that we all have when we’re in the same room together. Hence, instead of the usual presidential oration, I’m writing this note to let you know about a few things.
To begin, that recent meeting of the Board was primarily devoted to a discussion of the Emerging Scholars Publication Prize for 2020, the ninth iteration of the competition. As always, the pool of submissions was outstanding, ranging from early medieval to contemporary, from runestones and reliquaries to intarsia and photography, from Scandinavia to Austria and from Poland to Paris. The strength of the publications that were submitted bodes well for the future of the discipline in general, the study of German, Scandinavian, and Central European art, and our affiliated society in particular. At the same time, this wealth of scholarly quality and critical acuity posed yet again a challenge for the Board in its capacity as jury. But, after long deliberation and debate, the Board took a vote to determine the result. I am delighted to report that the winner of this year’s prize is Aleksander Musiał’s (Princeton) article “Mentem mortalia tangent – Fragments and Fetishes in Puławy Landscape Garden (1794-1831),” which appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. An honorable mention was awarded to Jordan Troeller (Universität Graz) for “Lucia Moholy’s Idle Hands,” in October. On behalf of the Board, I wish to congratulate both of these colleagues!
As always, a substantial number of HGSCEA’s members are presenting papers or have organized sessions at this year’s annual conference. HGSCEA’s sponsored session, which was proposed and organized by Eva Forgacs (Art Center College of Design) and is entitled “Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain: International Cooperation in Art, 1945-1948,” brings together papers by Anna Jozefacka (Hunter College), Lauren Elizabeth Hanson, Lynette Roth (both Harvard Art Museums), and Petra Skarupsky (University of Warsaw), with a commentary by Barbara Jaffee (Northern Illinois University). Thanks go to the organizers and all of the participants for persevering in the face of uncertainty and concerns about the new process, and for realizing yet another great session. The pre-recorded papers are, or will be, accessible to those who have registered for the conference. The live Q&A with the authors and organizers will take place on the conference site on Friday, February 12, from 12-12:30 p.m. (US, EST).
In addition, the Board will hold its annual business meeting remotely on Zoom on Wednesday, February 10, from 7-8:30 p.m. (US, EST). If you would like to attend the first, public part of the meeting, please send me an email to let me know and I will send you the invitation to the meeting.
Finally, the Board thought it was important to offer HGSCEA’s membership a special event akin to those that have taken place at recent annual conferences. HGSCEA member Adrian Sudhalter and MoMA curator Jodi Hauptman have generously offered to host a remote curator’s tour through their exhibition “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918–1939,” currently on view at MoMA. The exhibition traverses much of HGSCEA’s geographic terrain and numerous HGSCEA members contributed to the catalogue. The succinct virtual tour through the galleries, will leave plenty of time for questions and discussion. The event is scheduled to take place on Friday, March 5, starting at 7 p.m. (US, EST). Mark your calendars! More details on how to participate will be announced soon.
That’s all there is to report for now. I already miss the annual dinner, and the pleasure of seeing so many friends! I look forward to 2022 in the hope that we can once again enjoy together a delicious meal, good wine, and great company.
Until then, stay well and be safe!
Wishing you all the best,
Jim van Dyke
HGSCEA Session at CAA 2021
Between Point Zero and the Iron Curtain: International Cooperation in Art, 1945-1948
Chair Eva Forgacs Art Center College of Design
The period between 1945-1948 was one of great hopes and initiatives to culturally reunite the war-torn European continent and the world. The 1945 Yalta Conference issued the Declaration of Liberated Europe promising the European nations “to create democratic institutions of their own choice,” while Stalin would increase Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and by 1949, an ‘iron curtain’ would descend, cutting the region off from the Western half of the continent and the world, placing it under Soviet rule. After the war, many artists in Europe pursued a new, united, internationally open European art and culture. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, the “European School” in Budapest, worked on reestablishing continuity with interwar modernism as well as supporting nascent postwar art. The international CoBrA group was one of the first to reach out to such Eastern European artists as the Czech “Ra” group, hoping to develop further contacts. Papers discussing the apparently wide open possibilities of the post-World War II period internationally, or within the boundaries of any one country, are invited to discuss this chapter of art history, when the recovery of pre-World War II modernism and the fostering a new internationalism was a worldwide effort, anticipating the global, international culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
HGSCEA’s sponsored session, “A Foreign Eye: Photography, Women, and Global Encounters in the Twentieth Century,” organized by Jordan Troeller and Hyewon Yoon
Wednesday, February 12, from 10:30 to 12:00, Williford B (Hilton, 3rd Floor)
Kara Charles Felt (National Gallery of Art), “Alice Schalek: Finding the Neue Frau in 1920s Japan”
Alyssa Bralower (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), “The Making of a Zionist City: Ellen Auerbach’s Short Film Tel Aviv, 1933-36”
Kim D. Sichel (Boston University), “German Typologies Confront French Immersion in Africa: The Ethnographic Photographs of Lotte Errell, Ilse Steinhoff, Thérèse Rivière, and Germaine Tillion”
Elisaveta Dvorakk (Humboldt University), “Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Photographic Reports in Afghanistan, 1939-40: The Strategy of Metonymy in the Context of Contemporary ‘Orient Photography’
Alyssa Bralower (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Kim D. Sichel (Boston University)
Elisaveta Dvorakk (Humboldt University),
CAA Panel 202
The Annual Business Meeting this year will take place at CAA’s annual conference in Chicago on Wednesday, February 12, from 12:30 to 1:30 pm in Williford A at the Hilton.
Special viewing in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the AICon Friday morning at 10:30 a.m. organized by Jay Clarke, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago and a former HGSCEA officer. She will pull out some “greatest hits” prints and drawings from the AIC’s holdings of Scandinavian, German, and Central European art for viewing and discussion. The room can accommodate around 20 people so RSVP to Jay ([email protected]) if you would like to take part. The sign up will be first come, first served.
HGSCEA’sannual dinner-reception, complimentary to members. This year the dinner will take place on Thursday, February 13, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at Bistronomic (840 N. Wabash Ave). If you plan to attend, RSVP to me ([email protected]) by 5 February.
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.
