RIHA Journal

'Gesamtkunstwerk' World’s Fair. Revisioning International Exhibitions

2024-05-13T09:47:18+02:00

This special issue focuses on four thematic areas, 'Gesamtkunstwerk and the Assemblage of Things', 'Technology and Art', 'Gender and Fashion', and 'Colonial Entanglements and Postcoloniality'. At the intersection of art, crafts, architecture and technology, these have so far received little attention in the discourse on world exhibitions.

0313 La cerchia di Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle e un problema di metodo

2023-12-18T09:15:46+01:00

The sharp division between "Italian" and "Early Netherlandish" culture fostered by a nationally minded art history has led to serious misunderstandings in the classification of unattributed works created within supranational networks in the sixteenth century. The artistic circle of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (1517–1586), minister to Charles V of Habsburg, can be considered a prime example of such a network, because it was characterised by an intense and widespread mobility of artefacts and artists from and to Brussels between the 1540s and the 1560s. This article focuses on two medals that portray personalities close to Monsignor of Granvelle, namely the painter Anthonis Mor and Cardinal Francisco Pacheco y Toledo. It aims to revise their traditional attributions and to demonstrate the extent to which the cultural encounters that took place in the shadow of the Habsburg court impacted artistic developments. Above all, the article will illustrate how much the interpretive schemes of a nationally minded art historiography have biased our account and complicated our understanding of these encounters.

0304 Engineers as Artists − Artists as Engineers

2023-12-12T13:23:54+01:00

"The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations", held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, hosted an array of objects that testified to both artistic and technical virtuosity, while their display served as a spectacle for the public. This paper takes up the rich history of mechanical technologies in the service of art using the example of the machine for reproducing sculptures, which was presented as a cutting-edge innovation at the Great Exhibition. Drawing on the history of early photography and in particular the historical context of various techniques of three-dimensional reproduction (such as the 'photo-sculpture' introduced later in 1862), the process of reproducing and displaying works of art on a small scale will be explored. The study of mechanically minded sculptors, who celebrated the almost magical qualities of their machines and the demonstration of the production processes, reveals their ambition to join the ranks of the great inventors, alongside the situation of the pioneers of early photography. The presentation of sculptures, reliefs and objets d’art in the milieu of technical knowledge, industry and manufacture at the universal exhibition of 1851 is thus put up for discussion, also with a view to subsequent international exhibitions.

0306 Gender and World’s Fairs at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2023-12-12T12:23:37+01:00

This paper explores the intersections between gender, display, and empire at turn-of-the-century world’s fairs in the United States. The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition serves as a case study. Designed to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, the 1915 fair was hinged on contemporary notions of manliness and used gender ideology to articulate prevailing ideas and assumptions about the American nation, its new empire, and its influence on the entire world. Indeed, gendered rhetoric found its way into numerous contemporary published tracts, articles, paintings, and popular culture that take on the enormity of the Panama Canal and its implications. Manliness and its mechanical prosthetic, technology, became the arenas through which the United States refashioned its national body and confidently assumed its new role as imperialist on the world stage.

0310 The Art Exhibition at the Palais du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi at the Expo 1958 in Brussels

2023-12-12T11:28:07+01:00

It was mainly thanks to the efforts of the Belgian artist Laurent Moonens, who had founded an art academy in the then Belgian Congo, that a group of young art students from Lubumbashi were able to travel to the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels. Today, their works are regarded as the first generation of modern art in the DR Congo. At the time, the issue of modern art in the Congo was incorporated into the national tasks of the Belgian colonial power; voices criticising power relations or definitions are difficult to find in the sources. Nevertheless, the way in which these works were presented at the World Expo was not a matter of course at the time. This essay analyses the conditions of this very first exhibition, in which European and Congolese works were shown together. All those involved embraced an idea of "humanism", albeit their respective conceptions of it varied.

0308 The Designed Object and Its Imperial Histories: On T.N. Mukharji and the "Art-Manufactures of India"

2023-12-04T13:21:13+01:00

This essay locates a late 19th-century category of objects variously named as 'industrial' or 'decorative arts' within the specifically imperial institutional circuit of the World Exhibitions. Taking up a segment of the World Exhibitions of the 1880s, it traces a history which connects the three cities of Calcutta, London and Glasgow and creates a trail of travelling exhibits and museum collections of this most proliferating category of objects. It follows in particular the career of the Bengali exhibition commissioner and museum curator Trailokya Nath (T.N.) Mukharji and the anthology he compiled on the Art-Manufactures of India for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888 to map a specific network of commissioning, collecting, cataloguing and documenting India’s 'art-manufactures'.

0302 'Buried Empires': Showmanship and the Staging of Aesthetic Knowledge at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, 1854–1855

2023-10-17T12:36:12+02:00

In June 1854, the second Crystal Palace opened at Sydenham in South London. The media reported keenly on Sydenham’s large-scale archaeological reconstructions known as the Fine Arts Courts. These exhibits were designed by prominent design reformers as a means to improve public knowledge and public taste. However, the Courts attracted frequently hostile reviews from notable art critics who derided the displays as entertainment spectacles. This essay reevaluates the Courts by examining their deliberate showmanship. I trace the origins of the Sydenham display techniques in the archaeological representations made by the Sydenham Court designers for the London print, performance, and exhibition markets. Following the lead of historians of popular science, this essay emphasises the significance of popular formats and popularisation in Victorian visual culture and knowledge formation. It examines the reconstructions as visualising technologies designed to popularise, stage and communicate Victorian visual knowledge. I argue that both designers and showmen presented a virtual past through shared strategies of showmanship, the staging of expertise, and dramatic, poetic narrative. The Sydenham Fine Arts Courts were complex visual commodities, offering both instruction and diversion. Some Victorian critics found these aims mutually incompatible.

0314 Another Realism: Ion Grigorescu, Photography and Document in 1970s Romania

2023-10-16T08:44:54+02:00

In the Romanian context of the 1970s, how was it possible to produce a work of art that the authorities deemed too realistic? How can one understand the critique of an excess of realism when in 1971 the doctrine of Socialist Realism was re-established? This essay examines the notion of realism as forged by Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu. Drawing on recent writings in the theory of photography, it helps us understand how Grigorescu used the photographic medium to produce works, which, whilst adhering to realism’s principles, contravened the regime’s prescriptions. The use the artist made of the term "document" to circumvent official injunctions along with the national and international artistic sources of his work are among the questions addressed in this article to show how, even in a Communist country, dissent could walk on the paths of realism.

0301 World's Fairs and Colonialism

2023-07-12T10:15:18+02:00

This survey on the history of world’s fairs since 1851 starts with the losers of this contest in national profiling and industrial competition: Germany and Austria, both former territories of the Holy Roman Empire and belated nation states. Both had been rather unlucky colonizers. Some of the leading colonial states, instead, organized more than three world’s fairs in the time span from 1851 until today: France, Belgium, and Spain, all of them Catholic. Holland, the Calvinist colonial power, renounced on this kind of spectacles at all, Great Britain contented itself with two performances. World’s fairs don’t pay off. While the USA participated regularly since 1876, two spectacular world’s fair events, Osaka 1970, and Shanghai 2010, mark the rise of the Asian powers. The history of world’s fairs mirrors global politics, diplomacy and wars against the backdrop of late colonial history.

0300 'Gesamtkunstwerk' World’s Fair. Revisioning International Exhibitions

2023-07-02T11:06:42+02:00

From their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s fairs sought to generate a synthesized body of knowledge about the world by gathering an encyclopedic and didactic collection of objects from a wide array of fields: technology, machinery, handicrafts, the visual arts, performance, and ethnography – knowledge made visible and experienced through artifacts sourced from all over the world. This expanded visual experience can also be understood as one that interprets the gaze as a catalyst for a multi-sensory perception and categorization of material culture, of both two- and three-dimensional objects of vision. Thus, these exhibitions not only synthesized 'the world', but they also synthesized arts, handicrafts, architecture, and technology into an imagined Gesamtkunstwerk. The objects and works of art – handcrafted or machine-made – displayed at the world’s fairs were conceived as a mass spectacle as they were turned into the signifiers of a narrative – imagined and presented as coherent – of technological progress, colonial expansion, and artistic innovation. The colonized regions were to stand in contrast to this, with ethnographica and handicrafts presented as traditional, 'authentic'. Nevertheless, a complex network of "shared histories" and transnational interconnections became manifest at the world’s fairs.

0299 Verlockende Struktur und gefährliche Ganzheit

2023-06-01T11:35:24+02:00

After 1945, the term 'structure' became a guiding category not only in the sciences but also in the arts. In 1965, while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, György Kepes published in the MIT series vision + value the anthology Structure in Art and Science, which contains individual contributions by various authors from different disciplines. Through a close reading, I show how these build on elementarist concepts of the pre-World War II period, while at the same time offering connecting possibilities to so-called poststructuralist models of thought. In addition, I examine how macro photographs were used suggestively in this context to create a holistic unity of art and nature.

0312 The Making of (Post)Colonial World's Fairs

2023-05-04T10:06:12+02:00

This article explores the agency of (post)colonial professional self-positioning through globalised forms of representational work. It deepens our understanding of the constraints and duress from the colonial past involved in the making of (post)colonial world’s fairs by analysing representational work related to the Moroccan contribution to Expo 2000. It shifts the perspective from the aesthetics of Expo contributions to the process of making aesthetic objects for such a world’s fair. Stressing the specific limited and intensified temporality of representational work in the historical context of world’s fairs allows for insights into the aspirations of those who are engaged in this mode of project work. Taking an ethnographic perspective onto the working context in the Moroccan Expo office, I will show how the daily practice allowed for a certain 'neverthelessness' when facing the duress of the colonial past, as described by Laura Ann Stoler (2016). Finally, the Moroccan contribution to Expo 2000 will be briefly discussed with respect to later and as yet unrealised pavilions.

0309 Staging and Displaying Colonialism

2023-03-28T10:42:22+02:00

The article examines the aesthetic staging and displaying of non-European art, particularly African art and culture, common at international world’s fairs at the turn of the century. As examples serve the Brussels International Exposition of 1897 and the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931. The use of ornament, once of Art Nouveau and once of Art Deco, as a design feature, unite both exhibitions. This article examines two interrelated areas. One is the relationship between the aesthetic staging and displaying of African art and the perception and appreciation of non-European art within the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement. The second is between this aesthetic staging and consumerism from 1900 onwards, which was increasingly marked by exoticism.

0298 War Painting and the Soldier as the New Man

2023-03-14T08:04:24+01:00

With his series of pilot portraits during the First World War, the Viennese painter Karl Sterrer made a significant contribution to the depiction of a modern heroic figure. It has not yet been analysed in the context of the modern soldier and his masculinity, which came under strain in the brutal trench warfare. At the mercy of an abstract war machine, the common soldiers could hardly find heroic moments to impress. Only a few new types of troops, such as the aviators, succeeded in doing so, which gave them a great deal of public recognition and made them part of modern visual culture. Ultimately, they were seen as New Man, above the horrors of modern warfare. At the same time, they were also role models for a noble habitus that met the phenomena of modernity calmly. This aspiration was evident in their elegant countenance, their extraordinary physiognomy. Unlike previous attempts in art history, however, this article provides a look at the conservative take on the subject – by a traditional, academic artist. This focus underlines the extent to which old and new soldierly values overlapped in modernity and became actualised by different artists regardless of their political orientation. The same applies to the stylistic realisation, which intertwines traditional elements with those of new movements such as New Objectivity.

0297 Aristide Maillol aux États-Unis

2023-02-10T08:44:53+01:00

Aristide Maillol is the 20th-century French sculptor best represented in American collections. In 1925–1926, his works were shown in museums in eleven cities as part of an exhibition organized by A. Conger Goodyear: Albright Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art… This article traces the artist’s reception on the other side of the Atlantic and, based on a study of correspondence, highlights the role of major museum figures such as Alfred Barr, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, and John Rewald, particularly through exhibitions, but also of dealers, especially Joseph Brummer, who helped to develop the sculptor’s American presence. These sources reveal the sometimes difficult negotiations. They also attest to the active role played by Dina Vierny, his last model and then his successor, after Maillol’s death. With the support of dealers, including Paul Rosenberg, Klaus Perls, and Otto Gerson, she significantly expanded his presence in American collections.

0295 Notes on the Early Provenance of Paolo Veronese’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Prison

2023-01-26T10:11:54+01:00

This article provides information about the early provenance of the Paolo Veronese painting entitled Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Prison in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting can most likely be traced back to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Augsburg. Descriptions that match the Veronese painting are found in the inventories of two very wealthy Augsburg merchants: one is in the post mortem inventory of Octavian Secundus Fugger (ca. 1600/1601), the other in a list of works of art from the collection of Hans Steininger (ca. 1641/42). Octavian Secundus Fugger only occasionally bought paintings from Venice, never seeking to amass a systematic collection of art. The deeply religious Catholic merchant, who was a strong supporter of the Jesuits, hung his picture of Saint Catherine, along with other religious paintings, in the antechapel of his house, and it remained at this location until the early 17th century. The painting’s later owner, however, the Lutheran textile merchant Hans Steininger, was a highly educated art collector who created one of the most illustrious collections in Augsburg. In his Kunstkammer, Veronese’s painting was displayed in the company of mythological female figures, nymphs, and Venus, accompanied by a whole series of paintings by renowned artists such as Hans von Aachen, Christoph Amberger, Paris Bordone, Hans Burgkmair, Joseph Heintz and Titian. Steininger’s collection was dispersed after his death, but many of the paintings he owned can still be identified. Veronese’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria may be one of them.

0288 The Annihilation of the German Numismatic Market during the Nazi Era, with Some Observations on the Countermeasures Adopted by Jewish Ancient Coin Dealers

2022-12-13T12:30:53+01:00

This paper shows that the Nazi persecution of Jewish coin dealers and collectors prominent in Germany’s economic and cultural life resulted in a weakening of the domestic numismatic market. The failure of Nazi cultural-economic policy is illustrated by a study of the trade in ancient coins. While the Nazi authorities (e.g., Foreign Exchange Offices, Customs) failed to prevent the export of numismatic assets, the most prominent Jewish dealers were able to reestablish their businesses abroad, especially in Switzerland as the new international trading center for ancient coins. Their non-Jewish German colleagues, in turn, had great difficulty filling the gaps in the supply of ancient coins in the German Reich left by the Jews who had emigrated or fled.

0291 "Unclaimed" Artworks Entrusted to French Museums after World War II

2022-12-13T10:54:43+01:00

Between 1949 and 1953, about 2,100 “unclaimed” artworks returned to France from Germany after World War II were selected by museum professionals and labeled MNR (Musées nationaux récupération). About half of the works are paintings, while thirty percent are decorative arts, and the remaining pieces are drawings, sculptures, folk art, Asian art, and antiquities. This paper presents the so-called AOR (Antiquités orientales récupération), 31 objects entrusted to the care of the Département des Antiquités orientales, Musée du Louvre, which at the time included both pre-Islamic and Islamic objects. Research carried out by the Mission Mattéoli (1997–2000) determined that only two, maybe three, artworks are proven to have been looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during the Nazi occupation of France. The rest of the AOR items were purchases made by German individuals and museums, confirming that the MNR corpus does not equate in its entirety to art plundered from Jewish collections. The study of this portion of the works is an opportunity to shed light on the Near Eastern art and antiquities market in Paris during the war.

0290 The Antiquities Trade during the German Occupation of France, 1940–1944

2022-12-13T10:26:07+01:00

Despite the confiscation of many art collections, mainly from Jewish families, the Parisian art market was prosperous during the German occupation of France, from 1940 to 1944. This boom was also driven by the vast number of purchases made by German museums. After the war, most of these acquisitions were returned to France, with postwar investigations focusing on the recovery of paintings. The lack of interest in other types of art may explain, at least in part, why the acquisitions made by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin during the Occupation have been ignored for so long. Mainly antiquities, they are still part of the collections today. As this case study of the holdings of the Ägyptisches Museum in Berlin shows, these acquisitions can serve as a starting point for learning more about the antiquities dealers active during the Occupation.

0289 The Patronage of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum by German-Jewish Press Tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) and the Sequestration of His Art Collection during the "Third Reich"

2022-12-13T09:41:56+01:00

The publishing tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843–1920) donated over 700 objects to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin between 1892 and 1894, among them the Green Head from a royal statue of Amasis (ÄM 11864). Most had been acquired on the antiquities market by Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827–1894) during his journey to Egypt in 1891–1892, which was financed by Mosse. Leaving aside postcolonial discourse regarding the appropriation of ancient Egyptian artifacts by European travelers and scholars, this case study highlights another important and long-neglected aspect of the early history of German Egyptology: patronage or private support provided by Jewish entrepreneurs. Only recently a wider public was reminded of the engagement of James Simon (1851–1932), the most significant sponsor of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), whose gifts to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin included the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. This article—which is based on the findings of a multi-author volume published jointly by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the Egyptian Museum in Berlin—discusses the prehistory of the seizure and sale of Mosse’s private art collection in 1934, including Egyptian antiquities, and the attempted damnatio memoriae of him. The goal is to open a discussion with a broader, more complex approach, employing strategies of provenance research, to document the efforts and achievements of Jewish patrons of the arts and thus avoid their reduction to victims.