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The natural history of art: Adam von Bartsch and the taxonomic classification of prints
Get PDFThe taxonomic arrangement Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) devised for the print cabinet at the Imperial Court Library in Vienna fostered the historical analysis of prints by compelling visitors to associate the location of each print impression with the circumstance of its creation. His organizational system facilitated research by placing prints in a rational order. Similar to Linnaean classification, the rigid structure of Bartsch’s system described the relationships between prints, specifically their attributions and their creators’ places in a national tradition. By engaging with Bartsch’s taxonomy, the scholars and collectors who visited the Imperial Library absorbed his ideas about authorship, historical development, and national identity
‘Wien oder Salzburg?’: late Sedlmayr as a symptom and cure
Get PDFThe collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 accelerated the ‘atomization’ of the Vienna School of Art History, which had started with the discussion ‘Orient oder Rom’. This process eventually resulted in the interdisciplinary of ‘The New Vienna School of Art History’, where Sedlmayr was one of the central figures. His scheme of four-level interpretation of works of art, in which the eschatological level is also considered, can be applied to his own work. This allows for the better understanding of both his method and the logic of his writings as whole entities. Considering the importance of ‘ruins’ for Sedlmayr, the author pays special attention to his text on preservation of monuments, ‘Die demolierte Schönheit…’ (1965), created in Salzburg, a cultural-historical parallel to Vienna, where Sedlmayr spent the last twenty years of his life
Max Dvořák: Catechism of Conservation for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?
Get PDFMax Dvořák’s Catechism of conservation [Katechismus der Denkmalpflege], first published during the 1914–18 war, is considered a milestone in the history of heritage conservation. The book emerged out of specific political circumstances, as part of the political agenda of Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’Este, heir to the Austrian imperial throne. Although the archduke’s involvement may complicate the book’s legacy, the mission of the Catechism is humanistic and open to general audiences regardless of nationality, citizenship or class affiliation. The paper examines Catechism of conservation from the standpoint of its relevance for contemporary heritage conservation. Do Dvořák’s main concerns differ from the concerns of the current generation of conservationists? Which of Dvořák’s points seem outdated, and which are still relevant? How does Dvořák’s approach to heritage value meet current challenges
Dvořák on the revolutionary temporalities of art
Get PDFThis text discusses the relations between temporality and art in some elucidative texts written by Max Dvořák (1874–1921) in the last years of his short life. Dvořák did not hesitate to see medieval (or older) art as art but he explicitly talked about a change in the understanding of art, or a new concept of art. He described the radical multi-level changes of this concept as ‘an imaginative revolution’, which started a departure from ‘a period of decadence’. However, a closer look at the meanings of ‘revolution’ in several early twentieth century thinkers’ texts and actions (for example these by Lenin, Trotsky and Freud) reveals substantial temporal differences in the way it was understood
Netherlandish carved altarpieces: a historiographic overview with a focus on Sweden
Get PDFNetherlandish carved altarpieces have attracted much new scholarly attention over the last decades. The objective of this article is first to provide a comprehensive historiography of the existing body of research, and second to outline the main research trends from the late nineteenth century until now. Even though Sweden still houses no less than thirty-eight late medieval Netherlandish carved altarpieces, about ten retable fragments, and two wooden Malines statuettes,and much has already been written on the pieces preserved there, an extensive description of this research field is currently lacking. The third aim of this paper is to fill the remaining gap by providing an extensive status quaestionis of the research on Netherlandish carved altarpieces in Sweden
The invention of curatorship in Australia, Review of: Recent Past. Writing Australian Art by Daniel Thomas, edited by Hannah Fink and Steven Miller, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales/Thames and Hudson, 1 December 2020, pp. 348, 119 col. plates, 14 b. & w. illus., Aus. $. 64.99. ISBN. 9781741741506.
Get PDFDaniel Thomas’s first volume of collected writings is a small sample from about a thousand articles written over seventy years. From the time Thomas returned to Australia from Oxford to become the first curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958, he emerged as a leading figure in the Australian art world. Then as the inaugural head of Australian art at the newly established National Gallery, Canberra (1978-1984), and as Director of the Art Gallery of Australia (1984-1990), he developed curatorship as a profession, created national collections with remarkable acquisitions, developed provenance research and much more. This book is essential reading for anyone who writes on Australian art
Doing connoisseurship. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Introductory remarks
Get PDFThe introduction seeks to concretize and expand on crucial connoisseurial practices such as comparing or verbalising. Starting from the three domains of connoisseurship, namely the judgment of an artwork’s quality, the attribution to an artist, and the question whether the art work is an original or a copy, it becomes apparent that connoisseurial practices still play a remarkable role in art historical endeavors. This can be demonstrated with a look at the contributions, which are bringing together and reflecting both historical and current connoisseurial practices
‘Square plans for a circular journey: remarks on the “decolonial” critique of art history’. Review of: Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, Decolonial Introduction to the Theory, History and Criticism of the Arts, Lulu.com, 2019, ISBN 9780244195182 paperback, ISBN 9780244795177 e-book, 356 pages, 93 b/w ill.
Get PDFThe volume explores the Eurocentrism that has characterised practices and discourses related to Western art phenomena from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, examining the critical, aesthetic and ideological implications of such a pervasively Eurocentric horizon of references. Through the adoption of alternative parameters of interpretation, like the concepts of ‘third space’ and ‘a-historicity’, the book aims to promote a ‘decolonial perspective’ in the study of art, reassessing well-consolidated narratives that reflect, first and foremost, a hegemonic cultural system directly derived from Europe-centered experiences both in the production as well as in the analysis of artworks
‘The fringes in and of art historiography in post-1945 Europe’. Review of: Noemi de Haro García, Patricia Mayayo and Jesús Carrillo (eds.), Making Art History in Europe after 1945, New York/London: Routledge, 2020. ISBN 978-0-8153-9379-6. (Hardback) £ 120; ISBN 9781351187596 (eBook) £ 33.29
Get PDFThe volume under review here investigates how politics in post-1945 Europe affected the academic, critical and political discourses on art. It focuses specifically (but not exclusively) on the fringes of the continent: the eastern and southern regions, thus highlighting the role played by the discipline of art history in former Communist countries and erstwhile military (fascist) regimes. The volume also sets out to expand upon the sources of art historiography by tying into the current strand of research on the exhibitionary complex, and by discussing cultural policies and art criticism. The result is an intellectual journey through time and geopolitical space, and across disciplines. Although the volume sets a new agenda in decentralising the approach of art historiography by shifting the focus from a regional to a geopolitical perspective, it has failed to convincingly fill this gap, largely because of the inclusion of criticism and cultural policy, inevitably leading to a fragmented and, at times, superficial view of how politics influences the discourse on the arts
Apostles of Good Taste? The use and perception of plaster casts in the Enlightenment
Get PDFIn his ‘Treatise on the Capacity for Sensitivity to the Beautiful in Art …’ Winckelmann compares the feeling of the beautiful in art with liquid plaster poured over the head of the Apollo. While this reference to plaster as a material is unusual, his view of casts as propagators of good taste was widely shared. By looking at reactions to casts and cast collections by authors such as Goethe, Christian Gottlob Heyne, John Flaxman and others, this article analyses the complex relationship of notions of good taste on the one side and the perception of plaster casts on the other
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