The impact of the Anti-Crisis Shield package on the activity of cultural institutions in Poland

The main aim of the article is to present activities of cultural institutions during the pandemic. The theoretical part describes the impact of the anti-crisis shield package on the operation of cultural institutions during the lockdown. The description is based on information from the website of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The empirical part contains an analysis of specific support tools offered by cultural institutions and organisations, units of local government, the EU, banks, foundations and art academies.

Marie Spartali-Stillman’s feminism against Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood gender stereotypes art

In the middle of the 19th century Great Britain, Queen Victoria had been imposing her new ethical code system on social and cultural conditions, sharpening evidently the already abyssal differences of the gendered stereotypes. The Pre-Raphaelite painters reacted to the sterile way of painting dictated by the art academies, both in terms of thematology and technique, by suggesting a new, revolutionary way of painting, but were unable to escape their monolithic gender stereotypes culture. Using female models for their heroines who were often identified with the degraded position of the Victorian woman, they could not overcome their socially systemic views, despite their innovative art ideas and achievements. However, art, in several forms, executed mainly by women, played a particularly important role in projecting several types of feminism, in a desperate attempt to help the Victorian woman claim her rights both in domestic and public sphere. This article aims at exploring and commenting on the role of Marie Spartali-Stillman, one of the most charismatic Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood models and later famous painter herself, in the painting scene of the time. Through the research of her personal and professional relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites, and mainly through an in depth analysis of selected paintings, the authors try to shed light on the way in which M. Spartali-Stillman managed to introduce her subversive feminist views through her work, following in a way the feministic path of other female artists of her time. The ways and the conditions, under which the painter managed to project women as dominant, self-sufficient and empowered, opposing their predetermined social roles, have also been revised.

Deconstructing instructions in the art academy

Drawing as a manual discipline was long taught in the West according to specific ‘academic’ principles, culminating institutionally in the art academies of the nineteenth century. This educational process was mediated by visual images and three-dimensional objects, and relied on copying as a means to acquire manual skill along with a ‘vocabulary’ of idealized forms. During the twentieth century the roles, values and practices of art changed profoundly, and consequently methods of artistic education changed as well. As symbols of a tradition overcome, in many (modernizing) art academies, instruction books, plaster casts of sculptures and écorchés were either discarded or consigned to storage rooms and libraries. In one such art school, Minerva Art Academy in Groningen (the Netherlands), a didactic experiment was undertaken in the spring semester of 2019. Art historian Vanessa van ‘t Hoogt and artist Henrike Scholten designed and taught an elective course that investigated and reflected critically on the art academy’s history. Using a historically informed, experimental and practice-based pedagogic approach, the sixteen-week course challenged 23 undergraduate art students to engage with the material and didactic heritage of the art academy. Not in a nostalgic or neo-academic fashion, but on their own terms as contemporary art students. This project report describes some aspects of the authors’ didactic approach during the course. As an investigative and sometimes performative project, it toes the line between educational action research and object-based teaching. The aim of the course was to provide art students with new tools to engage with the history of their discipline and its processes of skill acquisition in a reflective and generative way.

Experiments in Eden: Mid-century artist voyages into the Mesopotamian marshlands

Following the 1958 Revolution, many Iraqi artists were sent abroad to study in foreign art academies and train in the latest methods – especially printmaking. The popularity and necessity of print in transnational decolonial movements lent printing practices a popular edge while enhancing the artwork’s seeming accessibility and reproducibility. As artists navigated the regional contours of transnational modernism while exploring graphic artmaking methods in the 1960s, several turned to the country’s southern wetland landscapes as new sites and creative worlds. This contribution examines a few of these mid-century experiments with the Mesopotamian marshlands in order to explore how these works bloomed in the liquid nature of printmaking while simultaneously proliferating images of the southern marshlands increasingly under threat in rapidly modernizing twentieth-century Iraq.

Siebenbürgisch-deutsche Künstlerinnen vom Ende des 19. und Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts

"Transylvanian German women artists from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The paper is aiming at analyzing the life and art of a group of six German women artists from Transylvania, the first ones who studied abroad, real forerunners for the next generation of female plastic artists. Emancipated ladies, determined to become artists and earn their own money, the gifted women studied in Budapest, Vienna, Munich or Paris. Only Molly Marlin did not come back home, while the others had a prodigious artistic and pedagogical activity, being present at the annual exhibitions, together with well-known male colleagues. Keywords: art academies, women artists, painters, graphic artists, art teachers, exhibitions, Sibiu, Betty Schuller, Hermine Hufnagel, Molly Marlin Horn, Anna Dörschlag, Lotte Goldschmidt, Mathilde Berner Roth "

Art Research and Food Technology: From Historical Reflections to Creative Speculations

This article is an introduction to three contributions about research related to food and technology. The text introduces the reader to different forms of research from historical reflections, applied action research based on new technologies, and artistic speculations. The author places these different research approaches in the context of the Dutch scientific and higher vocational education, focussing particularly on art academies.<br/> This edition of APRIA considers to what extent art research can contribute to our relationship with food. This immediately raises the question of the defining nature of art research. For some time now, Dutch arts education has been pondering how art or artistic research relates to academic research in universities. The desire of Dutch art academies to present themselves as fully fledged research institutes, preferably with a third level of graduate research, is closely related to their status within the higher professional education sector and to their own history. Owing to their orientation towards professional education, Dutch higher vocational education institutes have focussed on practice-based research since the introduction of research groups in 2002. In most cases, that means that these institutions utilise existing scientific and technological know-how for innovations intended to have an economic or societal impact in close collaboration with businesses and public agencies. So-called 'fundamental knowledge development' is seen as the exclusive preserve of universities.<br/> However, arts education in the form of an institute where students learn how to produce art has no counterpart within university education in the Netherlands. Moreover, the history of visual arts education reveals that its origins and rationale reside in large part in theorising about and reflecting on artistic production that occurs inside and outside the walls of the academy. Fundamental knowledge development relating to artistic production should, therefore, logically take place within arts education. Thus, in the Netherlands, the answer to the question as to the precise nature of art research is strongly influenced by institutional, political, and, as a result, financial interests. In my opinion and based on practical experiences, the academies of art have more in common with the curious and critical driven nature of academic education, and less with the strong focus on a specific field of a métier that still dominates the higher vocational education profile.

Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577–d. 1640) was an extraordinary figure who inhabited, effected, and even defined many aspects of the early modern European world. Far more than just a hugely successful painter, he was a scholar and a diplomat, a person who could produce allegorical images of the same peace treaties he was negotiating, or who carefully interpreted both material and textual sources—in original languages—when creating a mythological scene. He worked on a political level with the same powerful patrons for whom he painted, spending substantial time in courts and urban centers of the Southern and Northern Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, and England; in every place he absorbed local culture and left his mark on it. Prints after his works traveled to the New World and helped mold its visual culture. Rubens’s relationship to the art of the past was transformative, for he knew and absorbed works both famous and obscure; he redefined the canon, through the lens of his own art, for generations to come. His work spanned painting, printmaking, architecture, sculpture, book illustration, tapestry design, and décor for political pageantry. He executed important works on every kind of subject matter: mythologies, political allegories, portraits, landscapes, hunting scenes. And he was the painter of the Catholic Reformation, filling churches across the continent with devotional imagery and illustrating theological texts. If he did not work in a given genre himself, he collaborated with colleagues who did. The sheer volume of his work in so many media is astonishing, the effect of a tireless inventive mind aided by a workshop so large that it occupied most of the artistic space in Antwerp, employing painters who, in other circumstances, might have been competitors. Internationally famous in his own day, Rubens’s prestige has never faltered. He was the subject of debates in early art academies; his works found homes in Europe’s elite collections; his letters about art, diplomacy, and scholarship were preserved and published. To the primary source material, an immense amount of academic study has been added. Serious overviews of his life and work are relatively rare, however, for Rubens is hard to encompass between the covers of a single book. The attempt to produce a catalogue of all of Rubens’s work, divided into forty-four volumes and multivolume sets, each with its own author(s), has been in progress for fifty years and is not yet complete. The bibliography below is exceptionally long because that is the nature of Rubens studies: immense, diffuse, complicated, and collaborative.

Women Artists and Activism in Ellen Clayton's "English Female Artists" (1876)

In her biographical compilation English Female Artists (1876), Ellen Clayton documented the lives of many talented and hard-working women as a means of bringing to light and celebrating their role in the history of art. Moreover, she also explored these artists’ biographies in order to problematize more general issues, thus entering into one of the most significant initiatives of the period: the movement for women’s rights, with proposals including the improvement of women’s education, their access to art academies, and the amelioration of laws regarding marriage, family and employment. Of particular interest are the lives of celebrated artists who were also leading activists in the period, such as Laura Herford, Eliza Bridell-Fox and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Therefore, this study aims to explore not only Clayton’s approach to female artists within the specific domain of art, but also the incursions that they made into broad social and political issues regarding women. Finally, the presence in various biographies of the term “sisters” is particularly revealing in that Clayton, through her text, could be said to be assembling as many women as possible, not just artists, as a means of fighting for their rights together as sisters.