scholarly journals Fake or Fortune? Alexander Dorner and the Weimar Reproductions Debate

Author(s):  
Camilla Balbi

Between 1929 and 1930 the Der Kreis journal hosted a debate among art historians and museum directors on how art copies were changing the museum landscape. The so-called Hamburger Faksimile-Streit constitutes a crucial moment in the Weimarian theoretical debate on the categories of copy and original, culminating a few years later in Benjamin’s well-known essay on the work of art. After examining the theses of the main participants in the debate, this article focus on the position of curator and museum director Alexander Dorner – the only one advocating for the non-superiority of originals over copies in art museums – and on his relationship with Walter Benjamin’s later theories.

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 109-115
Author(s):  
K.I. Shimanskaya ◽  

Artistic communication is the interaction between the viewer and the work of art. Its success is the highest goal of an art mediator, whose role is to establish and maintain a dialogue between the subjects of artistic communication. n this regard, art mediation is understood by the authors of the article as a participatory practice that teaches visitors of art museums and galleries the language of art and its interpretation. This view is confirmed by a review of the concept of artistic communication in scientific literature, as well as an analysis of the practice of art mediation, its basic principles (such as openness, polyphony and the use of an individual approach by an art mediator) are revealed on the example of the Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale «Negotiators» in the Krasnoyarsk Museum Center.


2021 ◽  
pp. 286-289
Author(s):  
N. I. Kovalyov

The reviewer claims that Florian Illies’ essays demonstrate a perfect balance between pure scholarship and journalism. Despite representing a miscellany of genres (book and exhibition reviews, articles summarising the author’s view of various painters and art historians), the collection proves harmonious due to a common motif of the essays. The book does not draw a strict line between history of literature and art history. Similarly, Illies does not separate art history from the context of the life around art, i. e. the authors’ correspondence, their relationships with their family and friends, fellow artists and patrons. His unconventional view of art history enables Illies to identify interesting overarching subjects which include the problem of the patron’s influence on a work of art and the category of taste. The essayist is particularly interested in ‘second-rank’ authors, who, he suggests, emerge as first-rank in various historical periods.


Ikonotheka ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Matul

What happened when the poster, originally an advertising medium, became an object of appreciation in the museums of Communist Poland? What criteria did it have to comply with in order to be accepted into a temple of art, a museum? The article analyses poster exhibitions organised at the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in the 1950s. During this period, the interest of museum curators, critics and art historians in this medium must be envisioned as always being underpinned by political and propagandist interests; the transition of the poster to the status of a work of art is analysed here in this double, i.e. cultural and political, perspective.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-132
Author(s):  
M.V. Yermolayeva ◽  
D.V. Lubovsky

The article analyzes the functions and structure of psychological catharsis as a cultural means of meaning-making. Basing on eudemonistic understanding of catharsis, the authors show its meaning-making action. In the structure of catharsis, there are phases of excitement (pathos), concentration (‘merging’ with the main character), and transcendence (‘reaching beyond one’s limitations’) which, through personal reflection, concludes with the individual’s ‘return to oneself’, transformed through the encounter with the work of art. The authors consider catharsis as an event that encourages action and creates the space of opportunities for it; basing on the research of art historians, the authors describe two kinds of catharsis (in the perception of Caravaggio’s and Rembrandt’s works). The authors identify psychotechnical means of interrupting catharsis at the moment of emotional extremum (in the works of Caravaggio) and the conditions for completing the reflective catharsis with the ‘return to one’s transformed self’ (using the paintings of Rembrandt as an example). The paper concludes with an outline of further prospects of exploring catharsis as a cultural means of meaning-making.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ling Zhu

Artists and art historians frequently use the word ‘tension’ when describing a work of art. However, no full-fledged explanation has yet been given on what tension, a term borrowed from physics, exactly means in visual and artistic contexts. This paper seeks to fill this explanatory gap and to outline a theory according to which visual tension, in a way totally analogous to elastic tension, emerges as the result of the distortion of basic shapes underlying visual perception. This theory, which draws from Edwin Rausch and Michael Leyton, will be applied to the analysis of biomorphic art, Edvard Munch’s painting Eye in Eye and Giotto’s fresco Joachim’s Dream.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Margarita Juárez Nájera ◽  
Mariana Castellanos

The visual language of the paintings has undergone a theoretical and pragmatic process, which is different than that of textual linguistics. In this paper we propose a method of analysis based on semiotics to elucidate and compare the visual response of six paintings of the pre-Columbian Maya Dresden Codex. The Venus table was chosen because it presents a calendrical-astronomical message through a visual language that makes its interpretation complex. We consider that the visual semiotics of the Quebec School represented by Saint-Martin and Shannon´s entropic comparison of the Venus table paintings may be applied to both classical and contemporary pictorial works to support the work of art historians.


1970 ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
Camilla Gjendem

Exhibition practices in art museums The text is taken from a thesis for a Master of Arts degree which the author presented in 1990 at Bergen University, Norway. The first part (chapter 3 of the thesis) deals with the German art historian Alexander Dorner (1893-1957), who was director of the Landesmuseum in Hannover from 1923 to 1936. He devoted himself to a methodical renewal of the art exhibitions in his museum in close cooperation with Walter Gropius and the artists of the Bauhaus group at Weimar. Both his theoretical background (Hegel, Riegel, Goldschmidt) is described and his conviction that a work of art is basically a historical document and that it must be understood as part of the mentality of its age, not only be seen as an object for aesthetic consumption. His important book Oberwindung der «Kunst», published in 1947 (during his exile in New York) is presented as well as his exhibitions in the Hannover museum, of which Das abstrakte Kabinett produced with El Lissitzky and Raum der Gegenwart have become famous. 


2018 ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Adam Labuda

Polish and German Art History in a Polemic. The Rogalin Symposium of 1973 Summary The paper recapitulates a discussion over the book, Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung, ed. Martin Warnke, Köln 1970, which was an aftermath of a pungent statement made by critical German art historians at the Congress of German Art Historians held in Köln in 1970. The main idea of the book was showing the “work of art as an object of ideological interests, a victim of ideological interventions” (Warnke) – in this case, those of a nationalist, Nazi, and fascist origin. A critical impulse triggered by the congress and the book was the main reason for organizing a symposium in Rogalin in 1973, during which art historians from Poznań delivered papers-comments on four articles included in the German publication. Taking into consideration the key message of the book, in the first place they focused on the methodological and theoretical assumptions adopted by German scholars. Stressing the discrepancy between the goals and assumptions of the German publication and its Polish reception, the author treats the papers delivered in Rogalin as evidence of a methodological shift in Polish art history of the early 1970s. His main observations are the following: the end of the dominant approach focusing on the artwork itself; a shift toward approaching it in terms of the communicative triad “sender-work-recipient”; acknowledging the inevitable involvement of the art historian (scholar-recipient) in that historically determined framework. It is notable that the Polish scholars virtually ignored the ideological and critical approach to the evolution of art history that was developed in the German book. Moreover, the paper presents the historical background of both the Köln conference and its proceedings as well as the specific determinants of art history in the communist Poland, particularly as regards its contacts with the two German states.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (57-58) ◽  
pp. 10-47
Author(s):  
Thierry De Duve

Thierry de Duve’s essay is anchored to the one and perhaps only hard fact that we possess regarding the story of Fountain: its photo in The Blind Man No. 2, triply captioned “Fountain by R. Mutt,” “Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz,” and “THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS,” and the editorial on the facing page, titled “The Richard Mutt Case.” He examines what kind of agency is involved in that triple “by,” and revisits Duchamp’s intentions and motivations when he created the fictitious R. Mutt, manipulated Stieglitz, and set a trap to the Independents. De Duve concludes with an invitation to art historians to abandon the “by” questions (attribution, etc.) and to focus on the “from” questions that arise when Fountain is not seen as a work of art so much as the bearer of the news that the art world has radically changed.


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