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Reframing the history of proletarian art: SinoJapanese relations in modern woodcut print culture
Full text linkThe emergence of modern Chinese woodcut aesthetics, motifs and techniques during the early twentieth century has long been understood in relation to cultural exchanges between East and West. Art historical narratives have highlighted the influence of European art on East Asian woodcut printing, while conceptual, pictorial and technical connections between Chinese and Japanese practices have been neglected. This article reveals previously overlooked Sino-Japanese correlations in the emergence of modern print culture and argues that their absence in the Chinese history of proletarian art served political goals
The reception of Max Dvořák’s thought in Italy: resistances and unlucky attempts between the 1920s and the 1940s
Full text linkThe essay proposes a synthesis of the reception by Italian scholars of Max Dvořák’s art history theories between the 1920s and the 1940s. The resistance to his thought for both linguistic and ideological reasons will be underlined mostly based on the reviews and essays influenced by Adolfo Venturi and Benedetto Croce. Reference will also be made to some unlucky attempts to translate and communicate Dvořák’s writings, and to the evidence of a possible dialogue between Vienna and Rome
'Baroquemania: a counter-rationalist history of Italian art'. Review of: Laura Moure Cecchini, Baroquemania: Italian Visual Culture and The Construction of National Identity, 1898-1954, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, 288 pp., 93 col. Plates, £ 80, ISBN 9781526153173.
Full text linkThis review discussed the emergence of the Baroque in Italian visual arts as analysed in the book Baroquemania by Laura Moure Cecchini. In this book, the author shows how the baroque is a key element of the history of post-unification Italy which has been often neglected by the relevant scholarship on the matter. By reinscribing the Baroque within the Italian national paradigm, the book contributes to rewrite an important chapter of the history of Italian art in order to question its own foundational premises of an entirely rational strive to become a modern nation-state. In this way, Baroquemania represent an important addition to the existing scholarship on the relationship between the arts and the construction of national identity
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, and the Śukranīti
Full text linkThe English-raised Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the twentieth century’s leading historian of Indian art, is well known for prizing tradition and anonymity and for upholding the position that visualization exercises were an essential part of the creative process. The first part of this article addresses the role of the English Arts and Crafts Movement and of such lesser-known figures as Sister Nivedita and Lionel de Fonseka in shaping Coomaraswamy’s views. The middle part consists of a discussion of the passages in the nineteenth-century Sanskrit treatise the Śukranīti that Coomaraswamy depended upon to support his opinions. The final part of the article is devoted to the writings of the sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, author of the standard translation of the Śukranīti. As an opponent of the over-spiritualisation of Indian civilisation, he constructed a universal grammar of art. In this enterprise, he was heavily influenced by the American painter Max Weber
"Karagöz is ours": İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu’s cultural revivalism and the Long Turkish Modernity
Full text linkIn 1939, the Turkish scholar and art critic İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978) spearheaded a campaign of recovery of shadow theatre plays. Known informally as Karagöz plays, these candlelit performances of flat figurines mounted on sticks had been a widespread cultural phenomenon during the Ottoman Empire, but their relevance in the newly built, progress-facing Turkish Republic was questioned by the Turkish intelligentsia. This paper examines Baltacıoğlu’s recuperation of Karagöz as part of a wider phenomenon of cultural revivalism, closely connected to local art historiographical practices that had been developed since the 1920s. These accounts, privileging notions of anachronism, historical duration and the survival of form, paired a deliberate self-orientalising vocabulary to avant-garde terminology adapted from European artistic quarters. Baltacıoğlu’s cultural intervention, whose conservative modernist attitude was politically motivated by his nationalistic beliefs, articulated the shadow theatre plays as mobile carriers of the region’s artistic memory, positioning Turkish art history on an alternative trajectory of influence, memory and progress
What does ‘knowing’ mean? Otto Pächt hears Moritz Schlick
Full text linkThis article outlines an approach to a manuscript by the art historian Otto Pächt, which engages with the theories of the physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick. The focus is primarily on Pächt’s exploration of the question, ‘What means Knowing?’. It is argued that Pächt drew significant implications for his art-historical work from Schlick’s ideas. Schlick’s lectures not only encouraged Pächt to consolidate art history as an exactly distinct discipline within the concept of ‘Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung’, but he also influenced his understanding of determining artistic ‘quality’ in a historical context, his scientific approach to artworks, and his notion of modern ‘representation theory’ in the scope of the image theory. Moreover, Otto Pächt’s fundamental conflict with none other than Ernst Gombrich is not least due to his commitment to Moritz Schlick.
In times when the possibility of perceiving reality has become increasingly dubious and ‘storytelling’ has become a buzzword in this sense, Pächt’s manuscript is, on the contrary, a resource of thought-provoking impulses. Following him requires limiting art history as an explanatory discipline or renouncing the claim to create ‘reality’
The reception of the Vienna school of art history in Poland in the years 1945-1955
Full text linkIt is with a fair amount of certainty the one can state today the importance of the Vienna School of art history for the Polish art historians at the beginning of the XX century, in the interwar period or the 1960s and 1970s, yet very little is known about the years in-between. It is commonly accepted that strong anti-German sentiment during the second half of the 1940s and the domination of the soviet doctrine in the first half of the 1950s both complicated further dissemination of works and methods of the Viennese scholars. A closer look at the matter would suggest that their works and ideas remained present in the polish art history of the period, allowing it to serve as a chain link between the interwar years and the development of the discipline in the following decades
Through the lens of Henry Viollet: an undisclosed photographic and paper archive on Islamic monuments (1904-1913)
Full text linkA pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. These archives document Viollet’s excavations at Samarra and his surveys of Islamic monuments, particularly in Iraq and Iran. In 2021-2022 a scientific project funded by the GIS CollEx-Persée and co-partnered with BULAC and CeRMI has been set up to study part of the iconographic materials stored in these archives (EpiPOM project). In the frame of this project, an international conference was organized in Paris on 23 June 2022 to bring together a network of researchers in the arts of Islam into a collaborative study of this partly undisclosed archival material
Transcriptions of 27 Greek Manuscripts of the Gospel according to Mark
No full textThese transcriptions were prepared in conjunction with the doctoral thesis "Family Π in the Gospel of Mark".
They comprise the following Greek New Testament manuscripts:
017 041 114 178 229 389 420 489 581 652 702 796 989 992 1079 1159 1219 1313 1346 1354 1500 1602 1690 1816 2278 2404 241
Kurt Erdmann (1901-1964)
Full text linkKurt Erdmann was a German art historian of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with European architecture and paintings he developed a special interest for ancient Persian art as well as medieval and early modern Middle Eastern art. He became one of the leading art historians on Oriental carpets and published numerous major studies which were widely read. As a curator of the Islamic Department of the State Museums in Berlin and as a university teacher he became an influential scholar for generations of students in Germany and in Turkey
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