Daniel 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.
This essay serves as an introduction to the special section “Modern Lives – Modern Legends”. It discusses the development of anecdotes as a literary genre in the eighteenth century, and evaluates recent historiography on artist anecdotes. Focusing on the idiosyncrasies of the genre since the eighteenth century, this essay argues that artist anecdotes should be understood less as a ‘timeless’ carrier of art theoretical topoi, but as a literary genre that needs to be analysed in its situatedness in the publishing market and social historical background of its times.
This essay addresses historiographical and methodological issues about the very beginnings of the scholarship on early medieval manuscript illumination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The enduring importance of Greek art and the development of national or ethnic approaches have profoundly shaped our appreciation and interpretation of early medieval illumination, and the latter is still relevant today. By putting into perspective the deep history of early medieval manuscript illumination studies, I seek to show how this area of research connects with other fields such as history or archaeology and why it occupied a long marginalized position within art historical scholarship.
Ruskin’s relationship with the National Gallery spanned almost half a century. This article will attempt to explain why he got involved with the institution at various points from the middle of the nineteenth century, what form his interventions took, and how such action fitted in with his evolving ideas about art galleries in general. The focus will be on Ruskin’s evolving thinking about what functions and what type of visitors a public art gallery should serve and what he regarded as best practice in relation to preserving great art and arranging, exhibiting and cataloguing it for public benefit. We will also consider, in passing, how his ideas about the National Gallery fitted within his later thinking in relation to other art institutions, including his own museum in Sheffield, and how his thinking related to a wider national discourse on the topic during the second half of the nineteenth century.
On a cold Spring morning in 1969, a small group of scholars gathered at Brantwood. They were commemorating Ruskin s 150th birthday, and sharing their interests and knowledge. Taking this conference as its starting point, the study follows various threads of interest through the next fifty years, including the transformation of Bembridge, Sheffield and Lancaster as centres for Ruskin scholarship, as well as the continuing traditions of the productive landscape at Brantwood and Ruskin Land. It also considers some of the gaps we would now recognise in the line-up of 1969, especially the contested place of Ruskin in gender studies, and the role of women in developing Ruskin s legacies. This paper will draw on new interviews with Ruskin specialists from many different disciplines carried out in anticipation of Ruskin s 200th birthday.
The arrival in England in the 1930s of scholars, trained in the German tradition of Kulturwissenschaft, had an immense effect on the study of the history of art in their new country. Yet the intellectual exchange went both ways and the present article, beyond describing the often difficult personal and professional situations these exiles encountered in their new surroundings, examines how much their work was affected by the traditions and opportunities of intellectual enquiry, familiar in England since the middle of the XIXth century. Note is also taken of the public effect of their work, most notably in the activities of Pevsner, both in his editorship of the volumes in the Pelican History of Art and his tireless travels for the series The Buildings of England.
The increasing global visibility of modern and contemporary African art makes it imperative to determine how art history frames the emergent subject/context. How do emergent theories and analyses of modern/contemporary African art position Africa within global debates about cultural production in general? How do scholars narrate a history of modern and contemporary art in Africa that unfolds from the viewpoint of the African subject / subjectivity rather than from the viewpoint of its negation by Western discourse? What approaches to historical data and interpretation are suitable for such analysis and what kind of art history does it produce? I use Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism to evaluate these issues in relation to the politics of academic writing.
Artist anecdotes are arguably among some of the more informal and entertaining bodies of artistic literature. As such, they frequently become fertile ground for experiments with different literary forms and genres of art writing. This article focuses on one historical case, a short pamphlet by the Nuremberg engraver Georg Wolfgang Knorr, with the title ‘Historic Artist-Entertainment’ (1738). Knorr’s booklet draws on an oft-repeated anecdote – told, among others, by Vasari and Sandrart -, namely the legendary meeting between Albrecht Dürer and Raffael. Knorr reconfigured this anecdote and opted for a novel way of imagining the discussions between the artists: he wrote a ‘dialogue of the dead’, staging this artistic encounter as a posthumous one, with the artists meeting each other in heaven. Knorr’s short work is intriguing for mainly one reason: it is an attempt to ‘vulgarise’ art historical knowledge by moulding it in a literary shape that was incredibly popular in mid-eighteenth-century Germany. Knorr’s text thus can serve as a case study for how authors tried to disseminate art historical knowledge amongst the new, significantly enlarged reading public of Enlightenment Europe, and which literary strategies they employed for doing so. Yet Knorr’s attempt to present art historical knowledge in a new genre – namely the dialogues of the dead – was by and large unsuccessful. Very few other dialogues of the dead with artists as protagonists were written. Moreover, Knorr himself quickly abandoned his original project of publishing a whole volume of such dialogues. The article therefore aims to discuss the reasons behind this failure, and to analyse what this might tell us about the popular appeal of artistic literature, and artist anecdotes in particular.
‘Rosalind Krauss: Between Modernism and Post-Medium’ is a response to an essay, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, by Irish aesthetic philosopher Diarmuid Costello criticising the prominent American art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss for her notion of “post-medium” art. Costello objects to the fact that in Krauss’ theorisation a particular post-medium can in principle be practised by only one artist and thus does not allow the comparative judgement and sense of artistic or historical development that the notion of medium implies. This essay by contrast contends both that Krauss’ notion of post-medium does allow comparison and that in the very notion of medium on which Costello relies there is a certain moment of non-comparison, of a particular author or artist making something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Indeed, it suggests that these two qualities of the medium cannot be separated and necessarily imply each other. The author does this with reference to the work of the American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell, on whom Krauss draws for her theorisation of the post-medium. Also included is an interview with Krauss herself that raises a number of these matters.
Beginning in the late 14th century and continuing through the 15th century, religious reform movements in England made the use of images a matter of fierce dispute. These arguments had taken place before in Church history, but they had been explained in Latin and as part of theological debates. The English reformers and those speaking in support of the Church, on the other hand, deliberately used the vernacular in an effort to reach ordinary people. Furthermore, they emphasized the practical implications of their ideas for worshipers. A variety of sources, including writings by two female mystics as well as transcripts from trials of heretics, treatises and sermons by church figures, poetry, and popular lyrics give evidence of how viewers responded to religious images during this period. I will analyse these texts as a brief episode in the history of writing about art in the west.
There are conspicuous parallelisms —and symmetries— between the scholarly fates of Walter Benjamin and Arnold Hauser. While the first failed to attain any sort of success during his lifetime, the latter s instant widespread diffusion went hand in hand with an ambiguous academic reception. However, if Benjamin posthumously grew to become a major author, Hauser remained an outsider, whose figure has faded and re-emerged with dubious fortune. In spite of opposite lucks, both authors were marked by a strong anti-positivistic attitude which sought to establish a distinct methodology for the social sciences, striving to understand the present through art criticism. Departing from broad considerations of their philosophical backgrounds, this paper will further illustrate their similarities and differences by examining shared accusations that weight on them: their controversial forms of Marxism point to a conception of art criticism that handles historical narrative as myths, rendering their methods close to psychoanalytical dream interpretation.
With his publications on architectural representations in Late Medieval painting, Felix Horb (1890–1958) positioned himself in relation to his teacher Max Dvořák, his close colleague Hans Sedlmayr and the studies of Erwin Panofsky. Founding his work on a historic-genetic methodology, Horb demonstrated its relevance for understanding important aspects of Giotto’s art and the rise of Renaissance perspective. In close contact with many renowned art historians of the earlier twentieth century, Horb’s work is important not only in itself but also for its critical stand in relation to these scholars. Refuting both the history of style and iconology, Horb took a constructivist approach to art history that was founded in the New Vienna School, and was at the same time highly original.
With their edited volume of essays dedicated to case studies of the art market during the long nineteenth century, Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna bring together research into specific cases that provide examples of the increasing internationalization of the commercial art world. This review examines each contribution and the ways in which the cases studied support the editors’ analysis of the conditions that characterized the circulation of art within Europe and America.
In her book on the historiography of German Baroque and Rococo art during the period 1830-1930, Ute Engel discusses how the rediscovery of the German Baroque led to the canonization of many monuments and artists. She argues that, although there was a growing tendency toward nationalist rhetoric in the long nineteenth century, especially after 1870, no consistent or coherent impact of it on art history can be discerned. This leaves open the issue how art historical discourse was related to nationalism; whether the academic informed the political discourse, as is sometimes argued, or vice versa. What does become clear in Engel’s book is firstly that not so much the Baroque but especially the Rococo became identified with ‘Germanness’. Secondly, it shows that there was a growing tendency not toward a pan-German concept of style, but toward a regional approach of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art – so Bavarian and Prussian became almost more important categories for art historical discourse than mere ‘Germanness’.
This publication provides a scholarly-conducted English translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Trattato della pittura”, and examines, in a cohesive collection of essays written by specialists in the field, the complex process of elaboration, transformation and circulation of textual as well as visual materials that led to the creation of this refined volume, printed in Paris in 1651. By means of rigorous micro-historical analyses, the various essays offer a detailed, all-encompassing reconstruction of the different channels through which Leonardo’s autograph notes were reinterpreted and disseminated, from the compilation of the manuscript known as “Libro di pittura”, assembled by Francesco Melzi in the second half of the sixteenth century, to the circulation of these materials in contexts such as sixteenth-century Florence or seventeenth-century Casteldurante, exploring, in particular, the crucial parts played by Cassiano dal Pozzo and Nicolas Poussin in Rome and by Raphael Trichet du Fresne, Roland Chambray and Charles Errard in Paris.
Examining a selection of 1919 works by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, this essay argues that the artist’s early forays into collage and assemblage (what he dubbed ‘Merz’) can be understood as material instantiations of essential political questions at the time of their making. Above all, Schwitters sought in his works to concretize, and thus open for creative questioning and play, the processes by which people and things are defined, given value, and merged into integrated wholes. To pursue this argument—which is positioned in relation to the structuring binary of Charles W. Haxthausen’s 1999 Clark Art Institute Conference ‘The Two Art Histories’—the essay looks closely at Schwitters’ material components and techniques, and considers his negotiation, in the immediate wake of World War I, of the competing aesthetic programs of Berlin Dada and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery.
A review of a compendious volume that traces the history of Australian exhibitions from the middle of the twentieth century to 2018. It examines how its authors place the field of exhibition history in relation to other agencies of influence on Australian culture: government policy, funding agencies, directors’ planning committees, art historians, art critics, and the inventive ways generations of curators responded to a series of artistic movements, indigenous aspirations, the cultures of minorities and successive waves of migrants. It probes possible contradictions in the volume’s presentation of exophoric or endophoric models of cohesion in national exhibitionary culture, compares it with histories of curating of other countries, and speculates upon alternative approaches to artists’ contributions to exhibition history, reasons for unequal achievements in the separate Australian states and the photography of spectating.
