Art History and the Dialogics of Diaspora

"„Sok szíves üdvözlettel régi barátos...” (“With kind regards, your old friend...”). Coriolan Petranu’s Friendly Connections to the Hungarian Historians. Coriolan Petranu is the founder of modern art history education and scientific research in Transylvania. He had received special education in this field of study that is relatively new in the region. He started his studies in 1911 at the University of Budapest, attending courses in law and art history. During the 1912-1913 academic year he joined the class of Professor Adolph Goldschmiedt (1863-1944) at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. The professor was an illustrious personality from the same generation as art historians Emil Mâle, Wilhelm Vögte, Bernard Berenson, Roger Fry, Aby Warburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin, specialists who had provided a decisive impetus to art historical research during the twentieth century. In the end of 1913, Coriolan Petranu favored Vienna, with its prestigious art historical school attached to the university from the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he completed and perfected his education under the supervision of Professor Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941). The latter scholar was highly appreciated for his contributions to the field of universal art history by including the cultures of Asia Minor (Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia), revealing the influence that this area had on proto-Christian art, as well as by researching ancient art in Northern Europe. In March 1920 the young art historian successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Inhaltsproblem und Kunstgeschichte (”Content and art history”). He thus earned his doctor in philosophy title that opened him access to higher education teaching and art history research. His debut was positively marked by his activity as museographer at the Fine Art Museum in Budapest (Szepműveszeti Muzeum) in 1917-1918. Coriolan Petranu has researched Romanian vernacular architecture (creating a topography of wooden churches in Transylvania) and his publications were appreciated, published in the era’s specialized periodicals and volumes or presented during international congresses (such as those held in Stockholm in 1933, Warsaw in 1933, Sofia in 1934, Basel in 1936 and Paris in 1937). The Transylvanian art historian under analysis has exchanged numerous letters with specialists in the field. The valuable lot of correspondence, comprising several thousands of letters that he has received from the United States of America, Great Britain, Spain, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the USSR, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Egypt represents a true history of the stage and development of art history as a field of study during the Interwar Period. The archive of the Art History Seminary of the University in Cluj preserves one section dedicated to Hungarian letters that he has send to Hungarian specialists, art historians, ethnographers, ethnologists or colleagues passionate about fine art (Prof. Gerevich Tibor, Prof. Takács Zoltán, Dr. Viski Károly, Count Dr. Teleki Domokos). His correspondence with Fritz Valjavec, editor of the “Südostdeutsche Forschungen” periodical printed in München, is also significant and revealing. The letters in question reveal C. Petranu’s significant contribution through his reviews of books published by Hungarian art historians and ethnographers. Beyond the theoretical debates during which Prof. Petranu has criticized the theories formulated by Prof. Gerevich’s school that envisaged the globalization of Hungarian art between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period and that also included in this general category the works of German masters and artists with other ethnic backgrounds, he has also displayed a friendly attitude and appreciation for the activity/works of his Hungarian colleagues (Viski Károly and Takács Zoltán). The previously unpublished Romanian-Hungarian and Hungarian-Romanian set of letters discussed here attest to this. Keywords: Transylvania, correspondence, vernacular architecture, reviews, photographs, Gerevich Tibor, Dr. Viski Károly "

The aim of the project Meta-Image , funded by German Research Foundation (DFG), is to provide a network-based research environment for art history and other sciences concerning visual culture. It consists of the two components prometheus and HyperImage . Meta-Image combines the distributed digital image archive prometheus , which consists of a very large pool of images, with HyperImage ( http://www.hyperimage.eu ), a tool for image annotation. prometheus provides over 700,000 images in nearly 60 connected image databases; Hyperimage facilitates collaborative work directly on the image. The numerous users, the secure legal context for use and the existing technologies for collaborative research make prometheus a perfect subject for HyperImage . This image annotation tool serves as an instrument to support research in art history. It allows the identification of motifs, the creation of linked image networks as well as the addition of metadata. This synthesis creates the ability to reorganise, juxtapose and annotate images in a way that can lead to new conclusions concerning image-based research. Art history and other cultural studies can finally realise the potential of the network based and collaborative analysis of images.

The article discusses transcultural art history with Danish examples about Japanese art. This includes an introduction to the concept of transculturation, and how the concept is used in art history research. The core of the argument concerns two interrelated aspects of Danish art historiography: the role of ethnography and the myth of modernism as a Western phenomenon. For the first of these aspects, I analyse the only existing Japanese art history in Danish language, published in 1885. For the other aspect, I analyse recent interpretations of the Danish painter Anna Ancher and her alleged use of formal elements from Japanese woodblock prints. I thereby wish to connect the theoretical issues of transculturation with analyses of transformative and constituent exchange of objects, phenomena and ideas, and point out the potential of the concept of transculturation as both theory and method. An investigation of transcultural connections between Japan and Denmark will contribute to writing a new art history on global interactions.

When we first applied for the role of organizers of the VI th International Congress of Art History Students, in what now seems like a very distant late 2016, we knew there

The creative component of the design process is fundamental, as it is associated with the search for innovative solutions. In the creative process, the designer’s imagination plays a leading role – it serves as the foundation for shaping and transforming the vision of the functional and aesthetic image of the future object. This study was aimed to identify and systematise the main strategic directions and techniques that stimulate the creative process in generating innovative solutions within modern design practice. The research methodology included the analysis of information sources on design methods; tools for form development in architectural, industrial, and environmental design; structural and systematic analysis; and synthesis of research results. It has been demonstrated that human imagination operates on the basis of previously formed visual images through perception. The strategic approach to reativity development is shaped by visual-operational experience. It has been established that the main method of generating new ideas is creative experimentation. To stimulate the creative process during the ideation stage, it is advisable to apply techniques such as decomposition, alteration of visual modelling tools, combinatorics, the use of simple and flexible tools, references and analogies, brainstorming, and design heuristics. The practical significance of these findings lies in their application to design practice, the education and training of specialists in artistic and creative fields, and further research in art history, cultural studies, architecture, and design.

As we contemplate the future of forest landscapes under changing climate conditions and land‐use demands, there is increasing value in studying historic forest conditions and how these landscapes have changed following past disturbances. Historic landscape paintings are a potential source of data on preindustrial forests with highly detailed, full‐color depictions of overstory and understory environments. They display key details about forest community composition, microhabitat features, and structural complexity from a time well before the advent of color photography. Despite these paintings' potential, their scientific applications have been impeded by questions of validity.How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist's manipulation of a scene to best illustrate an allegory or romanticized view of nature?Following an established assessment model from historical ecology for evaluating resource validity, we demonstrate how scholarship on art history can be integrated with ecological understanding of forest landscapes to follow this model and address these questions of image veracity in 19th century American art. Further, to illustrate the potential use of these historic images in ecological studies, we present in a case study assessing microhabitat features of 10 different paintings. While this paper explores 19th century landscape art broadly, we focus our art historical review in particular on Asher Durand, a prolific and influential artist associated with the so‐called “Hudson River School” in the mid‐1800s. Durand left clear records about his perspectives on accurately depicting nature, and from a review of images and writings of Durand, we find support for the potential use of many of his paintings and sketches in historic forest ecology research. However, we also identify important caveats regarding potential ecological interpretations from these images. More broadly, because 19th century landscape paintings are not always directly transcriptive, and because regional art cultures differed in the 1800s, we cannot within this paper speak about landscape image veracity across all 19th century landscape art. However, in following established methods in historical ecology and integrating tools from art history research, we show that one can identify accurate historic landscape paintings for application in scientific studies.

Araştırmanın ilgilendiği sanat işleri, sanat tarihi çalışmalarında “duvar resmi” terim anlamının içine dâhil olmaktadır. İncelenen resimler, “geçiş döneminin” artık fotoğraf teknolojisinin de bu uygulamada rolü olduğu 19. yy. ‘ın son çeyreğine aittir. Edirne’de konak maliki merhum Şücaattin Dumlu ismi dolayısıyla Dumlu Konağı olarak geçen günümüzde metruk halde bulunan tarihi konaktaki toplamda 4 adet duvar resmi, estetik değerleri, mekânla kurduğu ilişkileri ve sanat tarihsel özellikleriyle incelenmektedir.

This article examines the art practice of a group of professors and students—who later came to be known as Group 57—at the Fine Arts College of the University of Tehran during the revolutionary period of 1978 to 1980. Through interviews with artists and art historical research, the authors describe the artists’ workshop where they produced posters against the Shah, the United States, and imperialism. Their posters drew on the bold colors, clear text, symbolic imagery, and easy reproducibility of international radical poster art and the early Russian revolutionary avant‐garde. The authors recover these aesthetic and intellectual connections in the academic and professional training of the artists and in the art historical context of the posters themselves, examining the posters’ recent and more distant influences, and reinscribing the artists in the history of Iranian art and international art history. The authors also point toward connections between Group 57 and protest art in Iran today.

The image plates that Aby Warburg produced during the closing years of his life and his complex use of photographic reproductions were a completely new, experimental medium in art-history research. The essay deals with the visual rhetoric of this medium, with its both polyphonic and multifocal argumentation structure. Warburg’s plates are arranged into compositions whose distinct syntax does not follow any linguistic models and in many of the plates Warburg’s notion of polarity in art history is expressed through utterly conflicting, inversive perspectives on the pictorial material. They document how deeply devoted the art historian was to pictures in which humanity had sought to exorcise inexplicable and hence threatening phenomena, the emotions of the inner and the demons (‘monstra’) of the outer world. The specific impact of his series of pictures and exhibitions shows that Warburg developed a demonstration procedure that was highly performative.

This project studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today, correlating portrayals in ancient Greek myth, nineteenth- century Symbolist painting, and new, controversial, visions of women in contemporary art. The myth of the Medusa has long been the ultimate symbol of woman as monster. With her roots in classical mythology, Medusa has appeared time and again throughout history and culture and this book studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today. Hedgecock presents an interdisciplinary and broad historical “cultural reflections” of the modern Medusa, including the work of Maria Callas, Nan Goldin, the Symbolist painters and twentieth-century poets. This timely and necessary work will be key reading for students and researchers specializing in mythology or gender studies across a variety of fields, touching on interdisciplinary research in feminist theory, art history and theory, cultural studies, and psychology.

Rune-stones have been a major field of research in philology, archaeology, art history and history during the 20th century. Most of these studies have been based on the thorough editions of rune-stones published in Scandinavia during the century. The aim of this article is to question some of the fundamental principles of these editions, and to initiate a new type of interpretation based on the complex interplay between images and texts on the rune-stones. Elements of a more visual understanding of the monuments are presented, as well as some examples of a new contextual reading, which sometimes alter the philological interpretations in the rune-stone publications.

Reviewed by: A Global History of Child Death: Mortality, Burial, and Parental Attitudes by Amy J. Catalano Lydia Murdoch A Global History of Child Death: Mortality, Burial, and Parental Attitudes. By Amy J. Catalano. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. xi + 175 pp. Cloth $81.95. In the past decade, historians have published important—often lengthy—new books on death, several of which extend beyond individual national contexts: Peter Stearns’s Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective (2007); Erik Seeman’s Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492–1800 (2010); and Thomas Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015). These and other national histories by Drew Gilpin Faust, Pat Jalland, and Julie-Marie Strange, among others, mark a renewed interest in death studies, but, like Philippe Ariès’s classic The Hour of Our Death (1981), tend not to concentrate primarily on the particular issues related to child mortality. Catalano’s Global History of Child Death addresses this gap in the literature, taking the broadest possible coverage from prehistoric to modern times, extending from the cremated body of a three-year-old child buried some 11,500 years ago in the North American Arctic to the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings. Catalano’s survey draws upon research in archeology, history, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, and art history. The book is divided into two main sections, the first on “Mortality and Burial Practices through History,” and the second on “Indicators of Parental Attitudes toward Child Death.” Specific topics cover the causes of child mortality, funeral and burial practices, gravestones and other monuments, social directives for grieving parents, parental expressions of grief, and mourning practices. Both sections also include significant, arguably disproportionate, material on child sacrifice and infanticide. Given the far-reaching scope of A Global History of Child Death, there are understandable limitations on what it can accomplish. Yet, for a number of topics the literature review is dated and, at least from a historian’s view, often idiosyncratic. There is an entire chapter on “America and England in the 17th to 20th Centuries,” for instance, but Catalano, an expert in children’s literature, does not include books by Faust, Jalland, or Strange in the bibliography. A conclusion and more overall historical contextualization of case studies would help readers [End Page 123] navigate the quick transitions between different times and places. The lack of contextualization leads to some surprising statements, including the idea that ancient Romans “thought that the regular practice of killing abnormal children removed a defective gene from the evolutionary process” (40). The scholar with whom Catalano engages most directly is Ariès, but even in this case readers would benefit from more direction in terms of the author’s position on key debates. While A Global History of Child Death includes case studies from across the world, the greater emphasis is on Europe and America. At times, the portrayal of non-Western histories lapses into a kind of Orientalist narrative. For example, Catalano blithely recounts, “One of the first efforts in the Eastern hemisphere to put an end to female infanticide was in 1789 by the British government” (47). Along with this wholesale treatment of “the Eastern hemisphere,” there is no mention of the extensive work by scholars, such as Padma Anagol, Satadru Sen, Daniel Grey, Lata Mani, and Antoinette Burton, explaining how British campaigns against infanticide, like the debates over sati, age of consent legislation, and widow remarriage, cannot simply be described as humanitarian efforts without understanding the colonial projects that such reforms sought to advance. In other examples, readers learn that “the Papuans practice cannibalism” (note the present tense) and that the Japanese routinely ate child victims of the 1783 famine, only to discover, through the footnotes, that the sources for these statements were published in 1912 and 1916 respectively (98, 135). The strength of A Global History of Child Death is the way in which it models, in an accessible format, the myriad of sources and methodologies scholars use to understand social and individual responses to the death of a child. Catalano prompts readers to ponder the limitations as well...

The father of Op Art, Victor Vasarely, is the author of a paper collage called Barson, owned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Zagreb, which is the only such example in Croatian public cultural institutions. The collage was created in 1967 using the screen printing technique on paper glued to a paper support and then onto large-sized hardboard, and its creation was influenced by the leading objectivist artistic and philosophical trends and knowledge of the time, under the influence of which Vasarely created his art. The collage was found very dusty and with many damages on the entire surface of the paper support, such as cracks, dried and detached parts and traces of activities of insects. Works of Op Art imply an undisturbed perception of the artwork, which in the case of the Barson collage, due to caused damage, was impossible. Therefore, conservation and restoration work was carried out that included extensive research and numerous tests, followed by dry cleaning, gluing both layers of the paper carrier, removing traces of insects and the necessary, minimal retouching. The corresponding wooden frame was cleaned of a layer of dust, and the smaller, missing part was reconstructed with the same type of wood and finally retouched.

The seminal research of Francesca Bray (1997) and Susan Mann (1992, 1997) on women and domestic work, especially textiles, have inspired a generation of new research in cultural history and art history, and the articles presented in this special issue attest to the productivity of this emergent field of inquiry. But curiously, historians of science and technology—Bray’s intended audience—have been slow in embracing gender in their research agendas (with the notable exception of historians of medicine.) The reasons for this lacuna are complex, but the three articles gathered here suggest at least one answer: that one cannot take gender and women seriously without questioning existing paradigms about innovation, knowledge-making, and skills, and thus the very meanings of “science” and “technology.”

The essay introduces MapTap, a research project that zooms in on the ever-changing social networks underpinning Flemish tapestry (1620 – 1720). MapTap develops the young and still slightly amorphous field of Formal Art Historical Social Network Research (FAHSNR) and is fueled by Cornelia, a custom-made database. Cornelia’s unique data model allows researchers to organize attribution and relational data from a wide array of sources in such a way that the complex multiplex and multimode networks emerging from the data can be transformed into partial unimode networks that enable proper FAHSNR. A case study revealing the key roles played by women in the tapestry landscape shows how this kind of slow digital art history can further our understanding of early modern creative communities and industries.