HGSCEA at CAA archive

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.