The New Aesthetic of the Late Nineteen Twenties Reconsidering the Periodization of the Interwar Avant-Gardes

The avant-gardes of the nineteen twenties are discussed in the art historical literature as the art products of a rarely upbeat decade, which featured great utopian aspirations and progressive art between the wake of World War I and the Nazi takeover in Germany, as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. This essay depicts the decade as being far from a homogenous period, demonstrating that the early internationalism and sense of unlimited possibilities gave way, in or around 1923, to less idealistic, more pragmatic views and practices in even the avant-garde. If examined in this framework, the reception of avant-garde artists and works in the late 1920s that had been enthusiastically embraced in the first years of the decade, was understandably cooler. Professional eminence was overwriting great ideas. The lack of the earlier fervor had disappeared, not because the art was worse, but on account of the new Zeitgeist that brought about the new moral idea of utilitarianism, requiring that the artists be, first of all, of use to the community. Several artists and art writers suddenly turned against those ideas and art that they had only a short time earlier held in the highest esteem.

The Religious Experience of the Landscape Ruskin and Nature

This paper reconstructs Ruskin’s work from the perspective of the landscape, building upon the assumption that Modern Painters played a cardinal role in the emancipation of the genre. This reconstruction is complicated by the internal contradictions within the work: it cannot be regarded as a systematic work of philosophy, but belongs rather to the genre of sage writing. In volume I, Ruskin approached the landscape not from an aesthetic point of view, but from the direction of scientific truth. The aesthetic consequence of this was his anti-mimetic attitude, which differentiated between the imitation of nature and the uncovering of the truths of nature, and in this respect, he considered Turner the greatest master who had ever lived. Truth takes precedence over all aesthetic considerations, and for this reason Ruskin was resolutely against artistic tradition. Seen from his perspective, the history of landscape painting appeared as a series of scientific illustrations, which, with the forward march of science, came ever closer to truth-to-nature. The other two essential conditions of art, the other side of truth, were its moral and religious messages. Beauty is the work of God, and God must be praised in His work, in Nature. Only later did Ruskin introduce a historical dimension to the experience of the landscape. The modern era is characterised by the rise of the pre-eminent interest in the landscape, accompanied by a parallel decreasing interest in gods, saints, ancestors and humans. This later became the main motif of Ruskin’s activities as a social critic and reformer. In relation to the loss of faith and the prospect of regaining it, Ruskin saw landscape painting as the representative art of the modern era. In the later volumes of Modern Painters, Ruskin carefully distinguished between the task of science, which is to investigate the essence and uncover the truths of material nature, and the task of art, which is to explore the possible viewpoints or aspects of material nature. In volume V of Modern Painters he firmly asserted – in diametric contradiction to his earlier views – that the greatness and truth of Turner did not rest on scientific truth, for in this respect the artist was completely ignorant. This paper interprets and evaluates Ruskin’s extraordinarily harsh criticism of Claude Lorrain, which contrasts with the fact that Turner spent almost his entire life idolising and attempting to rival Claude.

Thomas De Coloswar. On The Esztergom Altarpiece and An Addition to His Oeuvre

The large triptych in the Esztergom Christian Museum, painted in 1427 by Thomas de Coloswar, is a work of art typical of the International Gothic style, and includes formal elements that can be related to the schools of Bohemia, or better to the school of Nuremberg. The painting is analysed from an iconographic point of view, pointing out the most peculiar features, that may lead to an interpretation of the altarpiece also as an affirmation of the Catholic Eucharist doctrine. A new panel painting is added here to Thomas’ catalogue: a Vir Dolorum with Saint Francis receiving the stigmata in Cologne (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), formerly attributed to the Master of the Lindau Lamentation (Meister der Lindauer Beweinung).

“Imaige A La Vierge Marie” The Hours of Mary Of Burgundy, Her Marriage, and Her Painter, Hugo Van Der Goes

The Vienna Hours, illuminated by the artist known as the “Master of Mary of Burgundy”, was originally commissioned by Margaret of York. The later parts of the manuscript commemorate the love and marriage between Mary of Burgundy and Maximilian of Habsburg, and their (newborn or expected) child.The miniatures and texts in question convey the same idea expressed on several occasions by the official historian, Jean Molinet: in the Burgundian court, the duchess was venerated as the Virgin Mary (and in consequence of this, Maximilian – and Philip – came to be revered as the Saviour, and Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, as the Father). Underlying the tendency to identify Mary of Burgundy with the Virgin Mary was the situation of Burgundy and its heiress, which was understood by means of salvation-historical analogies. In the book of hours, the figures of the two Marys are conflated several times in a variety of ways (fols. 14v, 19v, 43v, 94v, 99v). The hymn in praise of the heavenly joys of the Virgin Mary, which is organically related to the frontispiece image, is thus (also) a chanted sequence for the eternal beatitude of the young bride. The painter conjured up the imaginary figure of Maximilian in the foreground of the two miniatures with window scenes, while the jewels in the border around the image of the Crucifixion scene allude to Margaret of York. These miniatures have a playful tone (as evidenced by the role-swapping between the Marys, the book-within-a-book, picture-within-a-picture, vision-within-a-vision, trompe l’oeil solutions, and the complex dialogue between objects, materials and locations).There are a number of factors supporting the argument that the miniatures, hitherto attributed to the Master of Mary of Burgundy, were illuminated by Hugo van der Goes, who was a resident of the Red Cloister at the time, and that he was commissioned by the Austrian Archduke. The date of 1478 is rendered likely by stylistic and biographical factors (the paintings Hugo made in the cloister, both before and after, his later illness, the visit of Maximilian, the birth of Philip the Handsome). It was also at this time that Jean Molinet wrote Le Chappellet des dames, which makes multiple comparisons between the duchess and the Virgin Mary, and whose imagery is often echoed in the folios of the Vienna Hours. It is possible that the first (co-)owner of the manuscript was Maximilian of Habsburg.

A History of the Jewish Community of Tállya and of Their Synagogue

In the study I tried to reconstruct the history of the Jewish community of Tállya and their synagogue, for up to now neither the community, nor the art historically important Torah ark has received due attention. After the Holocaust very few survivors came back to Tállya – a settlement in Tokaj-Hegyalja, a region of north-eastern Hungary – and not a single member of the former Orthodox congregation lives there today. The community built their third place of worship in the mid-nineteenth century, pulled down in 1964. The reasons why I found it important to map the socio-cultural and religious environment in more detail are commemorative and research methodological. The Israelite community enjoyed autonomy in choosing their rabbi and arranging all other domestic matters, and consequently, their taste, religious orientation, acculturation influenced the shaping of their synagogue building, the style of its furnishing and ritual objects. For lack of congregational documents, many kinds of sources (e.g. newspaper articles, recollections, biographies of rabbis, municipal documents) had to be interpreted within the context offered by the historical elaborations of the age. It was indispensable to shed light on the system of relations between Hasidism of growing influence from the early nineteenth century and traditional Orthodoxy, particularly because the tendencies of secession also appeared in the Tállya community, and the iconography of the Torah ark of their synagogue is most closely related to the carved Torah arks of East European Hasidic communities (in Poland, Galicia, Moldavia, etc.). According to archival sources the community leaders of Tállya could assert their wish to have the woodcarver create symbolic motifs on the ark despite the rabbi’s disapproval. As the direct antecedent to the composition I identified the masonry Torah ark of Mád, but the inventive, singular style of the carvings bears no kinship with the mentioned prototypes or the altars in churches in the vicinity. At the end of the paper I sum up the events that led to the demolition of the synagogue and the perishing of its interior furniture, relying on documents in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and the Monument Documentation Centre.

“This Single Slab of Marble Does Not Show you One Single Face”. •

The paper presents stone funerary monuments known from the Saint Michael Cathedral in Alba Iulia (in Hungarian, Gyulafehérvár, in German Karlsburg or Weissenburg, today in Romania) from the second half of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the period of the Transylvanian Principality. These memorials represented a broad variety in terms of their quality and complexity, including simple heraldic ledgers produced locally as well as large wall monuments made of colorful marbles imported from the most fashionable Dutch and Italian workshops in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to commemorate the princes of Transylvania and their family members. All stone funerary monuments, regardless their size and form, are linked by their function: they were created to preserve and evoke the memory of the dead among the present and future generations of the living by communicating specific messages about them. The forms, materials, images, and texts, as well as the location of the memorial in the space of the medieval cathedral and in the context of the other funerary monuments there were all carefully chosen to serve this purpose of communication. The paper analyzes all principality-period funerary monuments from the Saint Michael Cathedral in Alba Iulia as media of memory, including both the simple and the more complex ones ordered from abroad to commemorate the Transylvanian rulers. I will examine the monuments in the context of their production and reception, within the scene of sculpture in Central and Eastern Europe, in order to understand what kind of memory they were intended to preserve and how they were designed to retain and shape the memory of the deceased.