scholarly journals L’Imagination au pouvoir: Art History in the Times of Crisis, 1960s – 1970s

2019 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Andrzej Turowski
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Times ◽  
The University

The present paper is reminiscence and an attempt to reconstruct the intellectual heritage of art history as it was practiced at the University of Poznań in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in the context of new developments in cultural theory and changing research interests. Besides, it includes the author’s account of his own academic work in that period, began in the 1960s and inspired in particular by the year 1968 that brought a social crisis and a cultural revolution, as well as introduced the element of imagination into academic knowledge and critical thought. The author draws a wide panorama of intellectual stimuli which contributed to an epistemic and methodological turn, first in his own scholarly work and then in the work of some other art historians in Poznań. Those turns opened art history at the University of Poznań to critical reading of artistic practices approached in relation to other social practices and subjects of power. As a result, four key problems were addressed: (1) the position of contemporary art in research and teaching, (2) the necessity to combine detailed historical studies with critical theoretical reflection, (3) the questioning of genre boundaries and ontological statuses of the objects of study and the semantic frames of the work of art, and finally, in connection to the rise of an interdisciplinary perspective, (4) the subversion of the boundaries and identity of art history as an academic discipline. Then the author reconstructs the theoretical background of the “new art history” that emerged some time later, drawing from the writings of Walter Benjamin, the French structuralism, Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and Louis Althusser’s interpretation of the concept of ideology. Another important problematic was the avant-garde art of Poland and other East-Central European countries, studied in terms of artistic geography and the relations between the center and periphery. The conclusion of the paper presents a framework marked with the names of Aby Warburg and Max Dvořák, which connected the tradition of art history with new developments, took under consideration the seminal element of crisis, and allowed art historians to address a complex network of relations among the artist’s studio, the curator’s practice, the scholar’s study, and the university seminar, as well as the West, the Center, and the East. At last, the author remembers the revolutionary, rebellious spirit and the lesson of imagination that the Poznań art history took from March and May, 1968.

scholarly journals L’Imagination au pouvoir: historia sztuki w czasach kryzysu lat 60./70

2019 ◽  
pp. 399-413
Author(s):  
Andrzej Turowski
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The University

The present paper is reminiscence and an attempt to reconstruct the intellectual heritage of art history as it was practiced at the University of Poznań in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in the context of new developments in cultural theory and changing research interests. Besides, it includes the author’s account of his own academic work in that period, began in the 1960s and inspired in particular by the year 1968 that brought a social crisis and a cultural revolution, as well as introduced the element of imagination into academic knowledge and critical thought. The author draws a wide panorama of intellectual stimuli which contributed to an epistemic and methodological turn, first in his own scholarly work and then in the work of some other art historians in Poznań. Those turns opened art history at the University of Poznań to critical reading of artistic practices approached in relation to other social practices and subjects of power. As a result, four key problems were addressed: (1) the position of contemporary art in research and teaching, (2) the necessity to combine detailed historical studies with critical theoretical reflection, (3) the questioning of genre boundaries and ontological statuses of the objects of study and the semantic frames of the work of art, and finally, in connection to the rise of an interdisciplinary perspective, (4) the subversion of the boundaries and identity of art history as an academic discipline. Then the author reconstructs the theoretical background of the “new art history” that emerged some time later, drawing from the writings of Walter Benjamin, the French structuralism, Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and Louis Althusser’s interpretation of the concept of ideology. Another important problematic was the avant-garde art of Poland and other East-Central European countries, studiedin terms of artistic geography and the relations between the center and periphery. The conclusion of the paper presents a framework marked with the names of Aby Warburg and Max Dvořák, which connected the tradition of art history with new developments, took under consideration the seminal element of crisis, and allowed art historians to address a complex network of relations among the artist’s studio, the curator’s practice, the scholar’s study, and the university seminar, as well as the West, the Center, and the East. At last, the author remembers the revolutionary, rebellious spirit and the lesson of imagination that the Poznań art history took from March and May, 1968.

„Sok szíves üdvözlettel régi barátos…”. Colegamenti di amicizia di Coriolan Petranu con storici magiari

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-126
Author(s):  
Nicolae Sabău
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Vernacular Architecture ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
General Category ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The University

"„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 "

scholarly journals Facing the Work of Art. Memories of My Student Years

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Skubiszewski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
French Experience ◽  
The Times ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
The University

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957-1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar.

Erwin Panofsky

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wagner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Art History ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Full Professor ◽  
New York University ◽  
Erwin Panofsky ◽  
The University

Erwin Panofsky (b. 1892–d. 1968) was a German art historian who, after immigrating to the United States in 1933, became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century art history. His method of reading works of art as historical documents and understanding their interpretation as intimately connected to the literary and philosophical currents of their times is called iconology. While his early writings reflect the theoretical problems of art historical analysis, his later writings aim more at applying than at justifying this procedure. Panofsky was born in Hanover. He went to high school in Berlin and subsequently studied art history at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where he completed his doctorate in 1913 with a prize thesis on Albrecht Dürer’s art theory. He worked as a Privatdozent from 1920 at the University of Hamburg, where he was appointed to the chair of art history in 1926 after defending his thesis on formal principles in the works of Michelangelo and Raffael. In his Hamburg years two important influences on Panofsky’s thought stand out: On the one hand, the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer and on the other, Aby Warburg’s iconological project of the afterlife (Nachleben) of Antiquity in Western art. Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism contributed to Panofsky’s project to define principles by which one may evaluate the artwork’s transhistorical aesthetic values. Aby Warburg’s concern for the shifts of meaning caused by the artwork’s relation to historical discontinuities contributed to Panofsky’s insight that a purely stylistic interpretive system, as proposed, for example, by art historian Heinrich Wölfflin would not do. Panofsky’s focus on the complex historical embeddedness of an artwork’s content in relation to its formal aspects, a focus influenced by his 1920 reworking of art historian Alois Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen, facilitated the success of his iconological method. Panofsky taught in Hamburg as full professor until 1933, when he and his Jewish colleagues were dismissed. The new Nazi law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excluded non-Aryans from teaching at universities. In 1934 Panofsky immigrated to the United States, where he had already taught at New York University as a visiting professor for alternate terms since 1931. In 1935 he became professor of art history at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. All of his later publications were written in English. Panofsky’s importance for art history rests as much on his groundbreaking work for this academic discipline as on his ability to popularize his research via public lectures and eloquent studies.

scholarly journals Przed dziełem sztuki. Wspomnienia ze studiów

2019 ◽  
pp. 307-321
Author(s):  
Piotr Skubiszewski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
French Experience ◽  
The Times ◽  
French Tradition ◽  
The University

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957–1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at the University of Poitiers (CÉSCM), it turned out that the local methodological tradition was similar to what he had learned in Poznań before. The CÉSCM was founded as a multidisciplinary institute for the study of the Middle Ages, combining history, art history, literary history, and the history of ideas. It was important that one of them could shed light on an object studied by another, but each of them, including art history, kept its material and methodological identity. In the French tradition, art history had an “autonomous” status, focusing on artistic creation as a special sphere of human activity. That idea influenced also quite strongly the study of medieval architecture, originated in the early 19th century by Arcisse de Caumont, and continued until today by many generations of French scholars. What is characteristic of their research is meticulous analysis of form, articulated with a precise, detailed, and comprehensive specialist vocabulary. The lectures of French scholars on medieval architecture, which the author attended in Paris and Poitiers, taught him precision in the analysis of the artwork’s structure and its components, as well as responsibility for every single statement made on art. For a young art historian who did not specialize in architecture but in representational arts, that French experience was a lesson of methodological rigor necessary in the intellectual pursuits of the humanities scholar. 

scholarly journals Structure of the Modern Culturology: Semiotic Triad

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Yevheniia Bilchenko ◽  
Tetyana Kalyta
Keyword(s):  
Professional Identity ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Value

The article offers the semiotic analysis of culturology as an episystem. Culturology is regarded not as a “pure” academic discipline, but as an integrative project that combines elements of academic knowledge with ideologies. The paper aims to substantiate the internal structure of the culturology based on the combination of social and philosophical traditions. Representatives of cultural elites who embody a social science or worldview approaches are, in one way or another, influenced by the ideologies of the modernity (traditionalism, Marxism) and the postmodernity (neoliberalism). The scientific value of the study is that it proposes a semiotic model of culturology based on structuralism — a triadic structure consisting of theoretical, applied and practical cultural studies according to the three elements of the symbolic order (archetypes, meanings, forms). An attempt was made to conceptualize the cultural method, in which the structural analysis of cultural forms occurs as a movement from diachrony to synchrony, from the dynamic to the static principle of designation. This method is intended to bridge the gaps in the professional identity of cultural theory experts facing difficulties in critical ways of responding to the challenges of the world and cultural practitioners who are at risk of being transformed into carriers of the political economy’s service function.

Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evonne Levy
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Art History ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nazi Party ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The World ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Central Argument

<P>This study in intellectual history places the art historical concept of the Baroque amidst world events, political thought, and the political views of art historians themselves. Exploring the political biographies and writings on the Baroque (primarily its architecture) of five prominent Germanophone figures, Levy gives a face to art history, showing its concepts arising in the world. From Jacob Burckhardt’s still debated "Jesuit style" to Hans Sedlmayr’s <I>Reichsstil</I>, the Baroque concepts of these German, Swiss and Austrian art historians, all politically conservative, and two of whom joined the Nazi party, were all took shape in reaction to immediate social and political circumstances. </P> <P>A central argument of the book is that basic terms of architectural history drew from a long established language of political thought. This vocabulary, applied in the formalisms of Wölfflin and Gurlitt, has endured as art history’s unacknowledged political substrate for generations. Classic works, like Wölfflin’s <I>Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe</I> are interpreted anew here, supported by new documents from the papers of each figure.</P>

Untranslatable: Gottfried Kinkel, Kulturgeschichte, and British Art Historiography

2021 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-268
Author(s):  
Hans Christian Hönes
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Close Friend ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
British Art ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
German Art ◽  
The Subject ◽  
1848 Revolution

Abstract In 1934, Edgar Wind claimed there was no English equivalent for the word “kulturwissenschaftlich” and the method it denoted: it was untranslatable. Although German art history had been widely read in England since Victorian times, certain methods, as well as the discipline itself, were only hesitantly received. This article focuses on a decisive moment in this entangled history—an attempt to establish in Britain both art history as an academic discipline and a cultural-historical approach to the subject. The key figure is the dashing art historian Gottfried Kinkel, a close friend of Jacob Burckhardt (and archenemy of Karl Marx), who fled Germany after the 1848 revolution. In 1853, he gave the firstever university lecture in art history in England, the manuscripts of which were recently discovered. Kinkel’s case is a prime example of both a socio-historical approach to art history in Victorian times and an exile’s only partially successful attempt to transmit his methodology to a new audience.

Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984): Structural Approach and Pre-Modern Values

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Angelov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of

The prevailing part of art historians, critics and theoreticians from the mid-1950s even until today feels related to the means of expression of the modernist art trends from the last decade of 19th c. until the end of 1960-s. Modernism has become a sacred text, whose complexity should be interpreted, but not criticized. Sedlmayr’s conception of art is built on moral, religious, aesthetic and political grounds, which are the very reason for the actuality of his works – both in the specialized sphere of art history and in the wider public debate on values. That is why I will analyse his structural approach mainly in relation to his anti-modern conception of art. This is the task of this study. Sedlmayr’s effort to turn art history into a “strict science” is an independent part of his scientific pursuit; it is in relation, but is not subordinate to his conception of modern art. Those publications of his are discussed but only in the specialized literature on history of the methods in humanities, while his conception against modern art acquires an exceptional popularity. Because of that reason his theoretic contribution to the study of art remains in a penumbra. I argue that Sedlmayr’s conception has the following coinciding points with the official understanding of art in the time of socialism: – A denial to estimate art with aesthetic criteria, which the ideologists of socialist realism define as formalism, and Sedlmayr as aesthetism; – In socialism art should represent a positive ideal; Sedlmayr calls this ideal “human measure”; – Art should habituate to morals; – A conviction that the modern art from the end of 19th c. on is decadent; – A criticism against the “dehumanization” of art.

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