Arts and Humanities Commons^™

La Méditerranée Des Artistes: Ouverture Sur Le Présent, Maria Grazia Messina

Artl@s Bulletin

Ce texte, conçu comme un épilogue au colloque La Méditerranée des artistes, entend faire le point sur les méthodes de travail des artistes qui ont abordé le thème de l’identité méditerranéenne dans leurs œuvres au cours des cinquante dernières années. A la lumière de quelques récents points de repère bibliographique, des thèmes majeurs sont envisagés, tels que le genius loci, la crise induite par une remise en cause des identités due à la mondialisation, le risque du folklore et d’un orientalisme introjecté, les différences entre les artistes des rives Nord et Sud de la Méditerranée.

Le Baiser D'André Fougeron. Italie 1947, Yves Chevrefils Desbiolles

Artl@s Bulletin

Il peut arriver qu’une anecdote tapie au creux d’un fonds d’archives suffise à rafraîchir le regard critique jeté sur une œuvre et sur son créateur. Au printemps 1947, la visite du peintre André Fougeron à la basilique San Francesco d’Arezzo, fait partie de ces petits événements dont il faut tirer le fil pour mieux comprendre la place occupée par cet artiste, chez qui la fonction sociale de l’art se décline de manière contrastée en divers styles figuratifs, dans l’histoire de la peinture européenne de la seconde moitié du siècle dernier.

« Squilli Di Gloria Nel Sole Di Napoli »: Le Pavillon L’Albania Nella Civiltà Mediterranea De La Prima Mostra Triennale Delle Terre Italiane D’Oltremare À Naples (1940), Alessandro Gallicchio

Artl@s Bulletin

En 1940, à l’aide d’un dispositif de monstration complexe, le pavillon de l’Albanie de l’expo-sition coloniale de Naples propose, pour la première fois, une lecture italienne et fasciste du passé de ce pays balkanique, en évoquant des raisons d’ordre culturel et géographique : son identité « romaine », son positionnement à 71 km des côtes italiennes et ses richesses archéologiques. À partir de ce cas inédit, l’article tâche de questionner la nature des produc-tions artistiques conçues pour ce projet idéologique, d’analyser les discours historiques pro-duits autour du mythe de l’Albanie romaine et fasciste et de décrypter les stratégies visuelles employées …

La Méditerranée De Tériade Pendant L’Entre-Deux Guerres, Poppy Sfakianaki

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article traite de l’utilisation de l’idée de la Méditerranée par le critique d’art Tériade en France de l’entre-deux-guerres. En s’alignant avec le courant intellectuel et artistique dominant à l’époque qui considérait l’art du Sud/méditerranéen supérieur à l’art du nord/allemand, il a souligné dans ses écrits l’origine méditerranéenne des artistes qu’il souhaitait promouvoir ainsi que les caractéristiques méditerranéennes de leur art. Étant lui-même d’origine grecque, ses arguments sur la méditerranéité de l’art et des artistes reflétèrent tout autant chez Tériade un outil d’intégration dans l’establishment culturel français.

The Myth Of ‘Mare Nostrum’: Themes And Exhibitions, Legacy And Experimentation In The Construction Of Mediterranean Fascist Italy, Aurora Roscini Vitali

Artl@s Bulletin

This essay aims to analyse the ways in which the myth of the Mare nostrum entered into the artistic iconography of the early twentieth century. It was highly amplified during the Fascist regime thanks to some relevant graphic works, monumental commissions and, above all, temporary exhibitions that were characterized by a propagandistic overtone. The representation of a Mediterranean (in fact Italian) common identity became a fundamental part of a pervasive political strategy. The stylistic choices were conditioned both by the need to emphasize the glorious return of “Latinness” and the incardination of the “new” fascist modernity.

Formes Et Cahiers D’Art Dans Le Débat Des Années 1930: La Méditerranée Comme Creuset De La Suprématie Culturelle, Eleni Stavroulaki

Artl@s Bulletin

La géographie de l’art prend un essor incontestable dans les années 1930, alimentant une polarisation, souvent démesurée, entre le Nord et le Sud, à laquelle s’attachent des attributs culturels, artistiques et spirituels antithétiques. Des figures tutélaires de ce tournant historiographique, tel Josef Strzygowski, font leur apparition dans les revues de la période, dynamisant davantage le discours. Rapidement, les revues d’art, entre autres Formes et Cahiers d’art, sont convoquées à prendre position pour ou contre la Méditerranée comme point de départ d’un renouveau artistique à venir.

Mediterranizing Gauguin. Giuseppe Biasi’S Africa And Sardinia, Giuliana Altea

Artl@s Bulletin

Looking at the North- African stay of the artist Giuseppe Biasi (1885–1945), the paper deals with a brand of Mediterraneism marked by issues of national and regional identity. A key figure of the regionalist movement in his native Sardinia, in Egypt Biasi sympathized with the painters Mukhtar and Said’s nationalist ideals. Back in Italy, his works showed a conflation of the African and Sardinian worlds, implicitly confirming the theories of the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi about the Italians as Mediterranean race and contributing to spread the fascist notion of a mediterraneism aimed at justifying colonialism.

L’Accent Sur Le Local : Modernisme Et Régionalisme Dans L’Art Grec De L’Entre-Deux-Guerres, Christina Dimakopoulou

Artl@s Bulletin

In 1919 a group of Greek modernist artists under the name “Groupe Tekhni” was presented to the Parisian public through a collective exhibition aiming at proving the synchronized status and the international scope of Greek contemporary art. Against all the ambitions, the exhibition did not meet the expectations of French critics who were searching vainly in the work of Greek artists for a certain accent local, typical of the region of oriental Mediterranean. This paper investigates the way in which the concept of accent local, proposed by the French critics, was interpreted in the Greek art of the …

Mediterranean Cubisms: Decoration, Classicism, Picasso And Professionalism, David Cottington

Artl@s Bulletin

‘A working countryside is hardly ever a landscape’, Raymond Williams observed fifty years ago in his book The Country and the City; for to perceive it as such is to have both the leisure and the distance from it, to aestheticize it. This essay argues that, similarly, art practices have too often been understood ‘from the outside in’: that in Cubist representations of the Mediterranean, the picturesque quality of the Riviera insinuated itself—indeed that that the influence of the decorative was so far- reaching in the inter- World War years that it co- opted avant-gardism itself, and that the …

Disclosing The Ultimate Mediterranean Cubist Village. Place, Identity And Politics In Eduardo Viana’S Olhão Landscapes, Joana Cunha Leal

Artl@s Bulletin

This article studies the early 1920s Olhão views painted by Eduardo Viana (1881–1967). It analyzes Viana’s turn to Algarvian-Mediterranean landscapes, while considering the emergence of Olhão as the Portuguese “cubist village” rendered just before its regionalization by the fascist cultural industry. I contend that Viana’s vistas stem from his cosmopolitan profile and earlier avant-garde experiences, suggesting also that Olhão’s Mediterranean “cubist”-built environment offered Viana the prospect of a denationalized geography. The relationship between identity, place and politics will therefore be discussed.

Un Modernisme Méditerranéen? Usages Du Voyage De Klee En Tunisie, Dominique Jarrassé

Artl@s Bulletin

Parler de « modernisme méditerranéen » ne serait-il pas déguiser d’oripeaux bien-pensants le maintien de l’hégémonie dogmatique occidentale, donc « nordique » ? Le Sud revendique un rôle dans l’émergence de la modernité à travers le mythe de l’artiste qui y connaît une révélation, de la couleur ou du primitif. Le voyage de Klee en Tunisie en 1914, contrairement à celui de Kandinsky et Munter dix ans plus tôt, a donné lieu à une mythification (Klee n’y est pas étranger). Son récent centenaire à Tunis le montre : on a même parlé de kleeification. Il ne s’agit pas ici …

Beyond Noucentisme: Joaquim Sunyer’S Mediterranean Pastoral, Maria Lluïsa Faxedas

Artl@s Bulletin

Taking as case study the painting Pastoral (1910–11), one of the iconic works of the Catalan artist Joaquim Sunyer (1874–1956), this paper examines the established link between Mediterraneanism and Noucentisme in Catalan culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. A look at how this work was received when it was first exhibited, and the sub-sequent re- reading of its iconography, enables us to understand Pastoral nowadays not as much as a symbol of Noucentisme, but more as a potential meeting point between the different aesthetic trends of the period.

Les Jardins « Du Climat De L’Oranger » : Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier (1861-1930), Traditions Méditerranéennes Et Jardin À La Française, Camille Lesouef

Artl@s Bulletin

Dans l’ouvrage Jardins : carnet de plans et de dessins (1920), le paysagiste J. C. N. Forestier forge la typologie des jardins « du climat de l’oranger » qui réunit des traditions hortésiennes de différents horizons historiques et géographiques (gréco-romaine, arabo-andalouse, maghrébine, italienne). Cet article se propose d’étudier la vision de la méditerranéité qui émane de cette typologie, puis de la mettre en perspective avec le modèle du jardin moderne élaboré par le paysagiste dès le début du siècle. Il s’agit de mettre en lumière la façon dont l’imaginaire de la Méditerranée inspire le renouvellement de l’art des jardins au …

The Mediterranean As The Primitive Source For Noucentisme: Joaquín Torres-García’S ‘Classical Primitivism’—From Arcadian Frescoes To Constructive Universalism, Begoña Farré Torras

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper explores the place of the Mediterranean as the main source of primitive references for modern art in the noucentista art scene of Catalonia (Spain) in the early 20th century. It does so by focusing on the case of Joaquín Torres- García, a leading figure of the movement and advocate for the modernisation of mural painting. The discussion considers the noucentista conflation of the notions of classical and primitive, examines how it finds expression in Torres- García’s controversial frescoes for the seat of the regional government, and posits its relevance to the Constructive Universalism pictorial idiom developed by the …

“Dusty” Arcadias: Pastoral Visions And Greek Landscape In The Work Of Fred Boissonnas In The Context Of Mediterranean Cultural Myth, Marianna Karali

Artl@s Bulletin

In the following paper, I examine the possible affiliation the Swiss commercial photographer Fred Boissonnas shared with certain groups of Greek-French Nationalists as early as in 1903-1907 and the way this particular nexus inspired the integrity of his work on Greek landscape, forming as well his naturalistic vision on photography. Within the visionary spectrum of a northerner excursionist and the aesthetic eye of a Pictorialist photographer, Boissonnas marked an Innovative gaze upon Mediterranean Arcadian Imagery, altering the Symbolic Classicism of von Gloeden paradigm of Italian South.

Sous L'Impulsion D'Une Culture Latine Et Méditerranéenne : La Revue "La Renaissance Latine" (1902-1905) Et Les Arts, Katia Papandreopoulou

Artl@s Bulletin

La Renaissance latine (1902-1905), revue culturelle et politique de diffusion internationale, consacre une grande partie de son contenu à l’évolution des arts visuels d’une Méditerranée fantasmée. Régie par des critères essentialistes et ethniques, et animée par des acteurs connus pour leurs aspirations coloniales, elle ne parvient cependant pas à éroder la modernité transnationale de la jeunesse artistique, qui affirme avec véhémence ses particularités locales et antiacadémiques. Le « mouvement latin », qui concerne l’Italie, la France, la Grèce, l’Espagne et la Roumanie, favorise un creuset artistique au sein du bassin méditerranéen, avant que ses voix modernistes ne soient écartées de …

Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam

Artl@s Bulletin

From antiquity to the Third Republic, this article follows visual and literary representations that measured space, time and ideological oppositions that spawned an image of the Mediterranean as an area of transmission and cultural tension. It focuses on three theorists: the head of Action Française, Charles Maurras; the novelist Louis Bertrand; and critic and cultural impresario Joachim Gasquet. Each contributed to the formation of an image of the Mediterranean basin as the birthplace of European heritage and a battlefield in a struggle against the forces of democracy and cultural hybridization.

L'Invention Artistique De La Méditerranée: Quelques Repères, Rossella Froissart

Artl@s Bulletin

Qu’en est-il de la Méditerranée pour les historiens de l’art ?

Si les relations nord-sud ont été abordées relativement souvent, on a gardé prudemment à distance toute analyse faisant cas d’un prétendu « genius loci » méditerranéen, fondé sur les concepts de « nation », de « peuple » et de « race ». Aujourd’hui les outils pour une lecture dépassionnée des imbrications du fait artistique avec les logiques spatiales ne manquent pas et le dossier peut être rouvert. Il faudra d’abord tenter d’établir à quel moment et sous quelles conditions la notion de « Méditerranée » apparaît dans le …

Provincializing New York: In And Out Of The Geopolitics Of Art After 1945, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

In this article, I argue that the putative global centrality of New York in art after 1945 is a construct, as it is for Paris prior to 1945. Monographs and national approaches are unsuccessful in challenging such powerful myths as these. A global, transnational and comparative approach demonstrates that the struggle for centrality was a global phenomenon after 1945, a battle that New York does not win (depending on one’s point of view) until after 1964. Rather than considering centres and peripheries as a fixed category, I propose to consider them as a strategic notion which artists and their promoters …

Circulation Of Images, From Recognition To Erasure: An Artist’S Response, Lei Xie

Artl@s Bulletin

This article revolves around my practice, as an artist, which has an essential link with images and their circulation. In a subtle way, painting offers me a language allowing me to explore the polysemy of the chosen image, to experience a vocabulary both figurative and abstract. My practice could choose and process "ordinary" images, which are diffused but whose diffusion does not alter the subject, and has no consequence on the latter. It can also retain images whose strength is intrinsic to their circulation, to their popularization, to their controversy, images which will however ultimately generate paintings, and simultaneously erasing …

Un Mode D’Existence Équivoque Ce Que Touching Reality De Thomas Hirschhorn Dit De La Circulation Des Images., Pascale Borrel

Artl@s Bulletin

Les images en circulation que Thomas Hirschhorn utilise dans Touching Reality ont été trouvées sur Internet ; elles représentent des corps détruits dans le contexte de ce qui semble être les conflits au Moyen-Orient. Il s’agira de montrer comment l’œuvre reflète le mode d’existence initial de ces images : la manière dont elle les exhibe, dont elle les fait défiler laisse percevoir les conditions techniques dans lesquelles elles ont été faites et surtout le type de diffusion dont elles sont l’objet. La réalité qu’il s’agit de toucher est ici tributaire des opérations digitales produites sur la surface d’un écran ; …

Notes On The Circulation Of Epistemic Images, Nina Samuel

Artl@s Bulletin

Three cases of image circulation in the sciences, two from complex dynamics and one from microscopy, are discussed. The article deals with failed circulations, suspected errors, interdisciplinary communication, notebooks of scientists, the role of media shifts, mathematics and materiality, human perception, pictorial norms and conventions. It analyses how images circulate through different thought collectives and visual cultures. All three examples show different strategies of how images that break with visual traditions have been reintegrated into epistemic circulations and become “boundary objects” that are both robust and flexible.

Circularity And Visibility In Italian Art Periodicals (1968-1978), Denis Viva

Artl@s Bulletin

During the 1970s, at the apex of “dematerialized art”, the art magazines contributed a great deal to turn visibility (the photographic circulation of artworks, news on the artists, etc.) into an economic value. In a country like Italy, where museum validation was still lacking, neo-avantgarde periodicals such as Flash Art or Data introduced new communicative strategies (community building, indirect advertising, etc.) in order to provide a trans-national audience for Italian art. This study tries to enlighten the impact of advertising on art magazines’ preferences and their criteria of newsworthiness by analyzing some of their quantitative data.

To Let See. The Shocking Picture As A Social Mobilization Weapon, Beatriz Martínez Sosa

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper analyses the role that Emmett Till’s postmortem pictures had in the emergence of the modern civil rights movement. When they circulated in magazines, newspapers, and television in 1955, African Americans mobilized all over the U.S., so the pictures worked as a mobilization weapon. I intend to develop some hypotheses to explain this effect. To this end, the paper comprises four parts: an outline of the murder case; an analysis of the pictures’ formal and semantic features as well as the discourses and context where they were released; an examination of Till’s figure as a martyr through the effects …

How To Build A World Art: The Strategic Universalism Of Colour Reproductions And The Unesco Prize (1953-1968), Chiara Vitali

Artl@s Bulletin

What role did UNESCO play in the art world of the post-war era? This article makes use of published and archival sources in order to clarify the utopia of a “World Art” that shaped UNESCO and led to the “Archives of Colour Reproductions of Works of Art”, a project of worldwide collect and diffusion of images of “masterworks” inspired by Malraux’s “Museum without walls”. This case study focuses on one particular aspect of the project, the “UNESCO Prize”, conceived by the Brazilian art critic and Marxist intellectual Mario Pedrosa for the 1953 São Paulo Biennial.

The Copy & The Real Thing: Changing Perceptions Between The Rubens Centennials In 1877 And 1977, Griet Bonne

Artl@s Bulletin

In this paper I examine the changing relationship between mechanical reproductions and the original artwork in the context of the Rubens centennials in 1877 and 1977. Drawing on theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Dean MacCannell, Hans Belting and Boris Groys, I argue that the mechanism of copying generates a double logic of image perception: a simultaneous centrifugal and centripetal circulation of images that affects how people perceive art in modern society. I explore this perception dynamic by looking at two photo-exhibitions during the Rubens centennials.

Extensive And Intensive Iconography. Goethe’S Faust Outlined, Evanghelia Stead

Artl@s Bulletin

Drawing on a corpus of printed items between countries, compared first-hand, the article examines the mark left by Moritz Retzsch’s 26 outline etchings after Goethe’s Faust (1816) using the distinction between extensive and intensive iconography. In extensive iconography, copied or imitated images build a collective imagination, devaluing the original work, albeit contributing to the play’s aura. That view challenges Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). In intensive iconography, inventive artists, inspired by Retzsch, rework images, granting a particular scene genuine reinterpretation. How then should we value multiples, copies and genuine …

Travelling Images In The Global Context: A Case Study Of The Short-Lived 18th Century Akita Ranga Painting School In Japan, Kuniko Abe

Artl@s Bulletin

By exploring early available travelling Western illustrations, image sources for the Akita Ranga painters in eighteenth century Japan, this article attempts to show how they developed, merging Japanese traditional Kano school aesthetics, new realistic Chinese trends for still-life images, and Western type illusionism, using Japanese traditional pictorial materials. The Akita Ranga school’s inventive compositional framework is the consequence of interaction with European models traced back to the famous Vesalius anatomy images with landscape, finally reaching Europe via Ukiyo-e prints, forming a full circle of the migration of images.

Sub Signo Capricorni. The Image Of Capricorn In Glyptics: Literary Sources, Gemstones, Impressions, Drawings, Alessandra Magni, Umberto Verdura, Gabriella Tassinari

Artl@s Bulletin

The relationship between glyptics and the circulation of images can be analysed from different perspectives, as seen in the case study of the image of Capricorn. The goat-fish monster entered the European collective imagination during Antiquity, when its image was spread on gems and coins. The popularity of this theme in the Augustan Age is unquestionable but, over time, the political meanings associated with Capricorn seemed to have faded, while others appeared. These meanings were fully recovered by 17^th century scholars through the analysis of famous cameos and lesser-known gems. However, the protective and magical value of gems with …

Behind The Circulations Of Images, Léa Saint-Raymond

Artl@s Bulletin

The history of images is nothing but a history of their mediums and a history of physical bodies. And hence, it is a history of circulation. As an introduction of this volume, this paper seeks to go "behind the circulations of images" by combining the fields of cultural, political and geopolitical studies, and by bringing together different methodologies from monographic and formal analysis to digital approaches (quantitative, cartographic, visual). These diversified case studies make it possible to answer three major questions: 1) How do images circulate? 2) Why do images circulate? 3) What does circulation do to an image and, …