RIHA Journal

0320 "Rappresentarsi tutto come enigma"

Giuseppe Peterlini — 2024-12-20

Between 1910 and 1920, Giorgio de Chirico broke with the traditional conventions of painting in order to visualize Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of the meaninglessness of existence, appearance and the subjectivity of reality, without, however, abandoning figuration. According to de Chirico, the new art had to free itself from the anthropocentrism that had determined its course, to "see everything, even man, as a thing". The aim of this paper is to investigate whether and how the concept of the meaningless and the enigma of life are also thematised and expressed in de Chirico’s portraiture of the 1910s. The hypothesis is that the artist deliberately undermines the generally agreed principle of pictorial illusion. By thematizing the material support, he reveals its seemingly real appearance as fictitious and thus creates an irresolvable visible paradox, as in the Piazze d’Italia and the Metaphysical Interiors of the same period.

0316 Almada Negreiros and Le Corbusier. Parallel Methodologies and Critical Reception

Simão Palmeirim — 2024-09-25

The French-Swiss artist and architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) created a system for architects and engineers to humanize the metric system, paving the way for a new form of architecture. The Portuguese artist José de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970) developed a multifaceted literary and artistic practice, progressively constructing a theory on the relation between art and geometry. There are parallels between these two artists in the way they devoted themselves to geometry and developed a theory with a universalistic approach that extended beyond their artistic production. Le Corbusier's international recognition has led to extensive research and dissemination of his works, whereas Almada's theoretical studies on geometry and art have only recently been the object of systematic research. Recently found documents in Almada's estate shed new light on the author's knowledge of Le Corbusier's Le Modulor, and his critical reception of such work. This paper reveals these documents and examines them in depth to identify both parallels and a structural, theoretical divergence between these authors.

0315 On the Presence and Absence of Images

Lavinia Amenduni — 2024-08-02

Starting from the presence of a painting by Aimé Morot among the slide collection of Charles Lang Freer, a collection otherwise devoted to modern American painters and Asian art, the essay traces back the origin of this slide to the collection of Ernest Fenollosa and untangles the documentation on how his slides found their home in the Freer Archives in Washington, D.C. Fenollosa’s use of this slide to juxtapose ancient Japanese art and modern French painting is a starting point for reflecting on the role that the presence – or absence – of images played in printed texts as opposed to lectures, and how that in turn fueled the tendency towards stylistic comparisons. Lastly, the position of lantern slides as a tool that was once indispensable to art history, and now, in the digital era, becomes a historical and material object to be studied as such, allows us to reflect on one of the many epistemological shifts that we face as art historians.

'Gesamtkunstwerk' World’s Fair. Revisioning International Exhibitions

RIHA Journal — 2024-06-05

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.

0317 Saxon Influences in the Architecture of Southern Lesser Poland in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries

Piotr Knapik — 2024-08-02

Saxon influences stand out as one of the most notable phenomena in the Late Gothic architecture of Lesser Poland; however, they have been insufficiently discussed to date. Four prominent buildings, likely inspired by Saxon and Lusatian architecture, are analysed in this paper. The first structure under consideration is the cloister around the courtyard of the Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. Characterised by its diamond vaults, which are the earliest example of this type in Lesser Poland, the cloister was most probably inspired by the Albrechtsburg in Meissen; it could even have been completed by one of the Meissen masters. The second building examined is the Chapel of Saint James next to the southern tower of Saint Margaret's Church in Nowy Sącz. Its vault was likely a further development of the model from the southwestern bay of the Collegium Maius cloister. The third case study focuses on the Collegium Maius library, erected slightly later than the courtyard. It features two types of net vaults: one is the Saxon modification of the Parlerian design for the Old Town Bridge Tower in Prague, and the other is inspired by the works of Konrad Pflüger in Podelwitz and Görlitz. The last example to be analysed is the gable of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Bochnia. I suggest seeing the closest analogies in the gables of churches and secular buildings in Saxony and Lusatia as well as in the gable of the Church of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine in Żagań, Silesia.

0318 "Oh, what sights to behold in this church turned upside down"

Eva L.E. Janssens — 2024-10-22

This article focusses on a unique anti-Catholic illustrated broadsheet, De Rhoemse Kercke, from the Netherlands. Inscriptions with the initials of the makers corroborate that it was engraved by Robert Baudous (ca. 1574/75–1659) and published by Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) in 1605. The engraving is accompanied by a poem long presumed lost. Commenting on the numerous pictured Catholic clergymen engaged in various abominable practices, this poem provides a unique glimpse into the thinking of its spin doctor – it is attributed to the theologian and emblematist Paulus de Kempenaer (Brussels, ca. 1554 – The Hague, 1618?). By analysing the iconography in relation to de Kempenaer's poem, this comprehensive study aims to unravel the purpose and intended audience of De Rhoemse Kercke.

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

Walter Cupperi — 2024-05-07

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

Buket Altinoba — 2024-06-05

"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

Sarah J. Moore — 2024-06-05

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

Bärbel Küster — 2024-06-05

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"

Tapati Guha-Thakurta — 2024-06-05

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

Karen Burns — 2024-06-05

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

Ileana Parvu — 2024-04-22

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

Beat Wyss — 2024-06-05

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

Buket Altinoba — 2024-06-05

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

Daniela Stöppel — 2023-12-12

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

Alexa Färber — 2024-06-05

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

Melanie Ulz — 2024-06-05

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

Christian Drobe — 2023-06-09

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

Antoinette Le Normand-Romain — 2023-05-09

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.