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Art of Emerging Europe ( Greek and Roman Periods & Middle Ages) (N. Saad)VERSION 1.5.pptx

2019, Avanti Corp.

This is about the art in Europe.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Historiography of European Art

Introduction.

• Early Surveys
• Critical Interpretations
• Essay Collections
• The Middle Ages
• The Early Renaissance
• Giorgio Vasari’s Lives
• Responses to Giorgio Vasari in Italy
• The European Expansion, 16th and 17th Centuries
• Antiquarianism
• Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Predecessors and Contemporaries
• Johann Joachim Winckelmann
• Italy, France, Britain
• Cultural Art History
• Formal Art History
• The Vienna Schools of Art History
• The Third Reich and Its Impact
• The Warburg Library and Institute
• Central and Northern European Art History
• French and Italian Art Historians
• Contemporary Historiography

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Historiography of European Art by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann LAST REVIEWED: 18 August 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 30 January 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199920105-0001

The visual arts and architecture have been discussed in Europe since classical Antiquity. While several earlier Greek authors are known to have written on these subjects, the first surviving literature on art dates from the late 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE . Some Romans, notably Pliny the Elder, mention the history of arts and crafts, and thus begin the tradition of writing on the history of art. In mentioning previous texts, Pliny also initiates what is here called the historiography of art—the discussion of art’s history. Consideration of the visual arts remained sporadic and scattered until the 15th century, and only a sparse historiography can be reconstructed for periods prior to the Renaissance. In the 15th century the first treatises on painting appeared. They contain some rudimentary historical comments. Writing on art took a fundamental step in the 16th century, when it assumed the form of the compilation of biographies, first by Giorgio Vasari. This paradigm was employed throughout Europe in the following centuries. By the 18th century a self-proclaimed history of art that treated stylistic change in relation to history had come into existence, distinguishing itself from antiquarianism, although Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s claim to have founded a completely new history of art is contested. In the 19th century art history was institutionalized and flourished as an academic discipline, especially in the German-speaking world. Notable scholars developed new ideas there and in Italy, France, and Britain as well. Important traditions of scholarship, such as the cultural and formal history of art, originated and grew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the earlier 20th century self-consciousness grew about the history of the discipline; the first explicit studies on art historiography appeared. Scholars associated with the Warburg Library in Hamburg and the Warburg Institute in London and with the Vienna School of Art History have in particular garnered a large literature. More recently researchers have tackled the general question of the fate of German art history in the mid-20th century as it was affected by Nazism. But art history in central and northern Europe and in France and Italy has also captured some attention. As the historiography of art gained broad interest in the later 20th century, a “new historiography” also arose that presents a revisionist critique of art history, including previous historiography. British and American scholars have increasingly participated in discussions of historiography and have been especially involved in these newer tendencies. Trends that have raised further questions about the validity of previous methods and approaches have also begun to accumulate their own historiography.

General Overviews

This section considers studies of historiography. Primary sources are treated in a separate article on the literature of art. Thus it is only with the development of art history as an independent discipline that the first general surveys of the historiography of art appeared. The earliest general overviews emerged with the growth of scholarship on art history in the early 20th century.

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Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

• ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present

by Yelena Kalinsky · Published 07/26/2020

Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present . Edited by Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 220 pp.

It is an interesting time to be reviewing a book that calls for “globalizing” art history, when everywhere there are calls for art history to decolonize. Is there a thread between the desire to globalize the study of East European art and the demands for a broader decolonization of the discipline of art history and its institutions?( For a variety of approaches to decolonizing art history, see the questionnaire, edited by Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43:1 (February 2020): 8–66, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12490. ) Or do the ambitions for a global art history within which Eastern Europe would serve as a case study for thinking from the margins risk leveling cultural differences under a more expansive Eurocentrism? Before answering these questions, we must first consider the book on its own terms, and only then reflect on its potential place in this new reality.

The volume is organized into four sections: a methodologically-oriented section that offers alternatives to the national framework frequently employed in art histories of the region and three loosely thematic sections dealing with hybridity, the circulation of ideas, and contemporary artistic and curatorial praxis. As often happens with conference publications, the four sections are not strict and offer many cross-currents in approach, framework, and subject matter, including case studies of visual art and architectural practice, international exhibitions, curatorial projects, and institutional histories. In the introduction and her chapter on transnational approaches, Beáta Hock lays out the critical stakes of globalizing East European art histories. At its most fundamental level, the approach aims to replace traditional art histories rooted in geographic and temporal hierarchies that produce narratives of formal development based on “primacy, origins, influences, and diffusions” (p. 7) with studies of “circulations, transfers, global mobilities, and supranational tendencies” (p. 6), to which one could also add projections, identifications, and shared imaginaries.

Thus, one of the main challenges to traditional art history posed by this volume (and by global art history more broadly) is the rejection of the center-periphery model of ordering the world. Tomasz Grusiecki’s close reading of a 17 th -century portrait of a Polish-Lithuanian nobleman in the collection of the National Arts Museum in Minsk uses visual evidence to show that the anonymous artist “draws no line between European and Ottomanesque traits” (p. 25). Rejecting the notion of autonomous cultural origins, Grusiecki invites us to see the visual culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an “active agent of cultural entanglement” (p. 28), rather than the product of a geographically and culturally marginal zone of assimilation and imitation. Carolyn C. Guile, in her essay on portraiture in early modern Poland, likewise holds up the “fluid adaptation … of a multivalent visual culture” (p. 86) as evidence of a richer picture of cultural exchange than allowed by previous accounts of early modern Europe, which positioned Italy as the cultural center to Poland’s vernacular periphery.

By situating her examples in specific political histories of this borderland region, Guile vividly complicates any reading of Polish-Lithuanian relations with its own eastern neighbors. Thus an Ottoman-inspired style of dress could variously symbolize a Swedish-born king’s “Polishness” during a time of political uncertainty under territorial threat from Cossacks, or his eagerness to advance a Polish-Ottoman political alliance; while in another context, a similar costume could appear on a Crimean Tatar whose aid with a series of Polish military campaigns against Muscovy formed the basis of an inter-confessional alliance. By looking beyond the center-periphery model, both Grusiecki and Guile show how the Polish-Lithuanian borderlands gave rise to complex identities that incorporated aspects of political, religious, and cultural “others.”

Another thread that runs throughout the volume is the possibility of cultural transfer and the circulation of ideas across geographic distances and ideological divides. Contributions by Agata Jakubowska, Anu Allas, and Katarzyna Cytlak—in the “Global Communities and the Traffic in Ideas” section—tell stories of partial encounters, imaginary projections, and exchange. Jakubowska’s essay counters the notion that feminist art originated in the United States and “came from the West” (p. 137), or that feminist ideas were not available as an interpretive framework in Communist Poland on the cusp of the 1970s–80s. By carefully tracing the movement of feminist texts through translation, printed matter, and catalogs; contacts between Polish women artists and international curators and critics; and the exhibition of their works in feminist art shows outside of Poland, Jakubowska recovers the presence of feminist ideas in Poland. What is particularly interesting about this approach is not that it recuperates a lost golden age of feminist art in Poland. Rather, it gives back to the women artists (like Ewa Partum and Natalia LL, who labored in an environment generally hostile to feminism) a fuller picture of the ideas with which their works were meant to resonate—and the full weight of the resistance with which the Polish art scene met feminist thinking, given that scene’s Cold War-inflected preference for the ideology of individualism and artistic autonomy (pp. 145–146).

Meanwhile, Allas and Cytlak’s essays illuminate the ways that contemporary artistic subjects operating outside of mainstream Western capitalist contexts (Milan Knížák and the Aktual community in Czechoslovakia for Allas, and the Argentinean Centre for Art and Communication [CAYC] and El Periférico de Objetos theater troupe for Cytlak) positioned themselves vis-à-vis global artistic developments by participating in global neo-avant-garde imaginaries in a way that also spoke to local social and political conditions. A number of the authors take up the category of the “global” itself: Jörg Scheller’s essay on the transculturality or cosmopolitanism of certain Polish artistic tendencies around 1900 as a kind of globalism avant la lettre , and Maya and Reuben Fowkes’s use of Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the “planetary” (contra the “utilitarian and economic logic of the global”) to think about a variety of East European artists whose works engage with ecology and the environment.

Several of the essays in the volume address the influence of ideological frameworks on various forms of East European cultural production. Kristóf Nagy’s essay on the emergence of the Soros network of art centers points to the role played by the visual arts and non-state funded cultural initiatives as “indirect political intervention” (p. 54) in late Kádár-era Hungary. By institutionally supporting a cadre of cultural elites, Nagy argues, the Soros project effected a “subtle and continuous shift in power relations” (p. 56) away from local state functionaries to a liberal intelligentsia ready to capitalize on their access to international networks and participate in the global contemporary art scene after 1989. Sarah M. Schlachetzki’s deep dive into the pitched battles over two visions of modernist city planning in Breslau (Wrocław) in the first half of the 1920s reveals an analogous alignment with wider cultural politics along a local/global fault line—between the localism of socially planned housing and the corporatism of the American high-rise. These two essays illustrate some potential pitfalls of the book’s “globalizing” framework.

In the case of city planning, the problems of architectural modernity and the capitalist system have always been transnational, so it’s no surprise that a debate about building skyscrapers would appeal to ideas about managing the masses and proper urban development that were in global circulation at the time. It’s less clear how this fascinating example contributes to a new way of doing art and architectural history of the region. In the case of the Soros network, the global dimensions of the open society’s ideological project is undeniable and certainly worth considering, particularly as it signals an important explanatory connection between certain artists’ strong support for individualism and autonomy under state socialism (as was the case for most unofficial/non-state-sponsored/non-conforming artists across the Eastern bloc and the USSR) and their seemingly ready integration of Western-style art institutions and the global contemporary art world. What Nagy’s account of cultural hegemony leaves out, however, is the texture of that local art scene and a clear picture of the nature of its artistic production, particularly the “local canon” (p. 61) that fell by the wayside during the transition. In both cases, rather than producing a new way of seeing East European artistic practices, the “globalizing” framework obscures what is particular about each phenomenon under discussion.

Hock’s introduction covers an impressive amount of conceptual ground for anyone interested in the recent historiographical trends of East European art history. The volume would perhaps have benefitted from a more detailed discussion of the kinds of important institutional capacity-building projects—collections, digital resources, translations of primary and secondary resources, or academic research projects—that connect East European art to a global network of researchers and of which readers not primarily working in or on Eastern Europe may not be aware. (Several are mentioned in the footnotes.) More importantly, the geographic and chronological focuses of the volume as a whole are somewhat lopsided: nearly half of the chapters deal with material from the Polish lands, while the Balkans, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia/USSR, and the Baltics are either missing or mentioned only briefly. The editors explain that they refrained from seeking comprehensive coverage of the region so as not to “reify its supposed alterity” (p. 8), but in practice, it is a real lost opportunity, since any number of examples of art under “socialist self-management,” the cultural policies of the Non-Aligned Movement, Romanian dictatorship, or contemporary Ukraine (to name just a few arbitrary examples) would surely have provided opportunities to explore an even greater variety of methodological interventions.

Likewise, the chronological emphasis on postwar and post-socialist material with some early modern and early 20 th -century material leaves little space for the 19 th century, prewar modernism, and the interwar years—all periods of intense transnational activity for Eastern Europe. The editors chalk the decision up to Hock’s involvement with another publication on the topic of East-Central European modernism, but again, it is an important opportunity lost.( Beáta Hock, Klara Kemp-Welch, and Jonathan Owen, eds., A Reader in East-Central European Modernism, 1918-1956 (London: The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019), https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online/a-reader-in-east-central-european-modernism-1918-1956. )

The project of globalizing East European art histories is undoubtedly an important one, since mainstream art history, from Giorgio Vasari to Clement Greenberg to many of the most recent survey textbooks, has always been marred by Eurocentric distortions. As the editors of this volume point out, art historians dealing with East-Central Europe find themselves in a strange and potentially interesting in-between place with respect to the project of global art history: How to provincialize Europe from the position of its own margins? How to deconstruct power while existing, however precariously, within its wider conceptual sphere of influence? This is the problem implicitly posed by the volume, and while the authors neither converge on one model of global art history nor uniformly succeed in addressing these questions directly, the collection serves as a useful series of starting-off points for further consideration of the global dimensions of East European art. Particularly notable is the essay by Alpesh Kantilal Patel, in which he turns to the idea of “minor transnationalism” to bring into conversation a video by the Asian American artist Tina Takemoto and an installation by the Estonian Jaanus Samma, both of which address the archival gaps associated with LGBTQI subjects and identities from the past.

So, when does the task of globalizing East European art histories reach its limit? When does the “local is global” framework cease to provide explanatory power? Take the Moldovan artist Tatiana Fiodorova’s performance I Go (2010), as described in Amy Bryzgel’s essay on East European performance artists whose works thematize identity and transnational movement in the context of globalization. In response to the rejection of her UK visa application, Fiodorova carried out a performance walk through Chișinău and past the UK embassy while in blackface and carrying a blue plaid raffia bag embroidered with the gold stars of the EU flag. Bryzgel’s essay reproduces a photograph of the smiling Fiodorova with the city’s mayor, but fails to comment on the way that the circulation of similar blackface souvenir images continues to perpetuate violently racist attitudes in both Eastern and Western Europe.

The simplistic analogy between the cultural racism of West European travel restrictions on East European migrants and refugees and the violent history of enslavement and continued racism against people of African descent, fails to enlighten. Instead of honing in on Moldova’s post-Soviet economic situation to complicate our understanding of Eastern Europe’s relationship to the European Union, migration, and the global labor market, Fiodorova’s gesture deploys blackface and the Gastarbeiter’s bag as signifiers of marginalized status without examining the material differences between an African migrant’s life-threatening constraints and the artist’s own condition of relative privilege. This unfortunate work demonstrates the danger of putting on the “global” as an easy label that grants one access to a discursive economy of marginalized subjecthood without interrogating the actual nature of neoliberal globalization and different subjects’ relationships to, and conditions within, it.

And here the difference between globalizing and decolonizing art histories comes into clearer view. Removing the structuring hierarchies in our thinking about art history (as this volume defines the work of globalizing) can draw out new conceptual connections between diverse practices and phenomena (such as the aforementioned piece by Patel). However, to do so without recognizing the violence of globalization’s neoliberal flows of labor and capital as unevenly distributed between West and East, North and South (strongly thematized by many of the artists in Joanna Sokołowska’s essay) undermines the critical force of this new model. Without an accounting of the power differentials and often violent histories that have brought us to the present moment (the work of decolonizing that is being called for now), Eurocentrism will continue to exert its force on our ways of thinking and being in the world. If we are to take seriously the editors’ claim that “the margin [is] a valuable, even privileged, epistemic location” (p. 7), then we must be able to recognize that privilege and use it.

Yelena Kalinsky

Tags: book review decolonialism East European art history global art history globalization Piotr Piotrowski

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Impressionism: art and modernity.

Garden at Sainte-Adresse

Claude Monet

Porte de la Reine at Aigues-Mortes

Jean-Frédéric Bazille

La Grenouillère

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Alfred Sisley

Edouard Manet

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Émile-Charles (1875–1895)

Auguste Renoir

The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas

Mademoiselle Bécat at the Café des Ambassadeurs, Paris

Côte des Grouettes, near Pontoise

Camille Pissarro

Mary Cassatt at the Louvre: The Etruscan Gallery

Allée of Chestnut Trees

Young Woman Seated on a Sofa

Berthe Morisot

Two Young Girls at the Piano

Dancers in the Rehearsal Room with a Double Bass

Young Girl Bathing

Young Woman Knitting

The Garden of the Tuileries on a Spring Morning

Margaret Samu Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

October 2004

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. Its founding members included Claude Monet , Edgar Degas , and Camille Pissarro, among others. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon , for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees ( 1975.1.211 ). This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of academic painting. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating ( 29.100.115 ), for example, features an expanse of the new cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition , the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them.

Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Auguste Renoir . Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. In his 1869 La Grenouillère ( 29.100.112 ), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. Landscapes , which figure prominently in Impressionist art, were also brought up to date with innovative compositions, light effects, and use of color. Monet in particular emphasized the modernization of the landscape by including railways and factories, signs of encroaching industrialization that would have seemed inappropriate to the Barbizon artists of the previous generation.

Perhaps the prime site of modernity in the late nineteenth century was the city of Paris itself, renovated between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III. His prefect, Baron Haussmann, laid the plans, tearing down old buildings to create more open space for a cleaner, safer city. Also contributing to its new look was the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), which required reconstructing the parts of the city that had been destroyed. Impressionists such as Pissarro and Gustave Caillebotte enthusiastically painted the renovated city, employing their new style to depict its wide boulevards, public gardens, and grand buildings. While some focused on the cityscapes, others turned their sights to the city’s inhabitants. The Paris population explosion after the Franco-Prussian War gave them a tremendous amount of material for their scenes of urban life. Characteristic of these scenes was the mixing of social classes that took place in public settings. Degas and Caillebotte focused on working people, including singers and dancers , as well as workmen. Others, including Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt , depicted the privileged classes. The Impressionists also painted new forms of leisure, including theatrical entertainment (such as Cassatt’s 1878 In the Loge [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]), cafés, popular concerts, and dances. Taking an approach similar to Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, the painters of urban scenes depicted fleeting yet typical moments in the lives of characters they observed. Caillebotte’s 1877 Paris Street, Rainy Day (Art Institute, Chicago) exemplifies how these artists abandoned sentimental depictions and explicit narratives, adopting instead a detached, objective view that merely suggests what is going on.

The independent collective had a fluid membership over the course of the eight exhibitions it organized between 1874 and 1886, with the number of participating artists ranging from nine to thirty. Pissarro, the eldest, was the only artist who exhibited in all eight shows, while Morisot participated in seven. Ideas for an independent exhibition had been discussed as early as 1867, but the Franco-Prussian War intervened. The painter Frédéric Bazille, who had been leading the efforts, was killed in the war. Subsequent exhibitions were headed by different artists. Philosophical and political differences among the artists led to heated disputes and fractures, causing fluctuations in the contributors. The exhibitions even included the works of more conservative artists who simply refused to submit their work to the Salon jury. Also participating in the independent exhibitions were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin , whose later styles grew out of their early work with the Impressionists.

The last of the independent exhibitions in 1886 also saw the beginning of a new phase in avant-garde painting. By this time, few of the participants were working in a recognizably Impressionist manner. Most of the core members were developing new, individual styles that caused ruptures in the group’s tenuous unity. Pissarro promoted the participation of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, in addition to adopting their new technique based on points of pure color, known as Neo-Impressionism . The young Gauguin was making forays into Primitivism. The nascent Symbolist Odilon Redon also contributed, though his style was unlike that of any other participant. Because of the group’s stylistic and philosophical fragmentation, and because of the need for assured income, some of the core members such as Monet and Renoir exhibited in venues where their works were more likely to sell.

Its many facets and varied participants make the Impressionist movement difficult to define. Indeed, its life seems as fleeting as the light effects it sought to capture. Even so, Impressionism was a movement of enduring consequence, as its embrace of modernity made it the springboard for later avant-garde art in Europe.

Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Bomford, David, et al. Art in the Making: Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New Haven and London: National Gallery, 1990.

Herbert, Robert L. Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

House, John. Monet: Nature into Art . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Moffett, Charles S., et al. The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 . San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986.

Nochlin, Linda, ed. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874–1904: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism . Rev. and enl. ed. . New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.

Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette. Origins of Impressionism . Exhibition catalogue.. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. See on MetPublications

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