Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From The Outside, Looking In: Reflections On The Complex Infrastructures Of African Art History, Joanna Gardner-Huggett

Artl@s Bulletin

This essay engages with the five articles featured in this issue from the perspective of a non-specialist. Each contribution considers challenges facing scholars of African arts when confronted with incomplete and not always reliable historical evidence. The author contends that given the escalating demands for the repatriation of African objects, all art historians— not only art historians focused on African arts—should better understand the important strategies proposed by contributors to this issue. These interventions encourage the development of a more critical audience for African arts and also model ethical research, a slow critical archival practice, and sustainable provenance and digital …

Art And Evidence In Totems Of Uganda (2014), Margaret Nagawa, Taga F. Nuwagaba

Artl@s Bulletin

In his painting and book project, Totems of Uganda: Buganda Edition (2014), Ugandan artist Taga Nuwagaba asks: What is the function of a totem? In Buganda, the historical kingdom in current-day Uganda, totems serve as unique identifiers for fifty-two distinct patrilineal descent groups designated as clans, or ebika in the Luganda language, forming the primary scheme of social and political organization. Yet, totems also serve as a conservation practice. In this 2022 interview, Nuwagaba discussed his art and the evidence he relies upon to create his images, demonstrating that identities and knowledges are complex.

Munna Uganda Taga Nuwagaba abuuza nti: …

You Cannot See It: Navigating Yorùbá Religious Artistic Materials, Stephen A. Fọlárànmí

Artl@s Bulletin

My research spanning two decades in Ọ̀yọ́ Palace generated series of questions about access to artistic materials in site-locational spaces, archives and private collections. I probe how scholars have navigated and negotiated these terrains, especially artworks created for religious functions. I explore alternatives to resolve field challenges and consider the effects of such hindrances in art historical research. Drawing on the concept of ọ̀gbẹ̀rì, anecdotes and personal scholarly experiences, I interrogate research access and propose approaches based on personal experience on the importance of Yoruba religion, and practice of initiation.

Iṣẹ́ ìwádì mi fún bíi ogún ọdún sẹ́yìn lórí ààfin …

Shaky Foundations: Cultural Classifications In Museum Collections Management Systems And The Endurance Of Colonial-Era Terminology, Carlee S. Forbes, Erica P. Jones

Artl@s Bulletin

This article uses two musical instruments with attached ancestral remains and labeled as “Asante” from the Fowler Museum at UCLA to consider effects of style-based cultural classifications that appear in museum databases today. We highlight the sway of past classifications over our current understanding of objects that is prolonged by the problem of confirmation-bias in museum collections management systems. We then indicate how working across disciplines stimulated a more nuanced understanding about the complexities of artistic styles for musical instruments with attached human remains in the Akan-speaking region of West Africa.

Cet article étudie deux instruments de musique incorporant des …

Shifting Approaches, Innovative Methods: Collection Histories As A Tool To Move Beyond William Fagg’S ‘Lower Niger Bronze Industry Mystery’, Imogen Coulson, Julie Hudson, Sam Nixon

Artl@s Bulletin

At the end of 2019, the British Museum launched a new research project focusing on copper alloy objects associated with the Lower Niger Bronze Industry. The aim was to increase knowledge of these objects through a combination of provenance and collection history research and scientific analysis. This paper will outline the earlier art historical-focused approach to the Lower Niger Bronzes corpus and will then describe the new research and its methodology. Initial findings will be presented through a case study of objects from the Forcados River in the Niger Delta region of present-day Nigeria. In doing so, we aim to …

Making Absences Present: The Process Of Visualizing Knowledge Production In Museum Records, Caitlin Glosser

Artl@s Bulletin

In this paper, I evaluate the development of data visualizations as an art historical approach. By visualizing data for Senufo-labeled objects in the Musée Africain de Lyon’s collection, I demonstrate how the museum’s knowledge infrastructure privileges European collectors over African makers. I use Tableau visualizations to decenter this narrative by making silences present in a more impactful manner than through text alone. The visualizations also reveal the complex role that one maker, Bèma Coulibaly, played in the life of the collection. The addition of the individual narrative to the data was necessary to bring a human element into view.

Nous …

Technologies Of Recovery And Discovery: The Poetics Of “Artefacts”, Kathryn Simpson

Artl@s Bulletin

This article discusses the ways that objects, specifically personal belongings, held in British collections have their stories muted to become imperial signifiers. Using two pieces of jewellery acquired in 1859 by David Livingstone, British missionary and traveller (1813-1873), a lip ring from a Mang’anja woman in present day Malawi and a bracelet from the Kafue valley in present day Zambia, this article evidences how digital tools can be used to layer, in a palimpsestic way, the information available about colonially collected objects, to locate them physically, in the space they inhabit, and narratively, in the space they create.

En este …

What Does It Mean To Keep Kissing-Close To The Evidence, And Why Might It Matter?, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Constantine Petridis

Artl@s Bulletin

African art specialists often lack detailed information to assess the original meanings, uses, and contexts of so-called historical or traditional arts of Africa, and they rely on indirect evidence to interpret the works. Thus, claims about African arts often reflect speculation rather than irrefutable details. When specific documentation for an object does exist, the circumstances of its creation require careful evaluation as well. The assessment of the quality and reliability of any claim is of particular importance in attempts to determine an object’s place of origin in the ongoing debates about restitution.

Les Expositions Turnus, Une Page D’Histoire Transnationale Des Beaux-Arts En Suisse À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle. Et Comment Découvrir Les Humanités Numériques, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article présente le travail de la classe d’introduction aux humanités numériques de l’Université de Genève sur les expositions Turnus en Suisse à partir des années 1840. Près de 50 catalogues ont été retranscrits, décrits et structurés à l’aide de scripts Python, puis géolocalisés. Les données ont été ajoutées à BasArt, le répertoire mondial de catalogues d’expositions d’Artl@s (https://artlas.huma-num.fr/map). Elles permettent de mieux comprendre les premières années de ces expositions et leurs dynamiques locales, fédérales et internationales. Le Turnus fut une plaque tournante pour les artistes suisses, voire un tremplin vers le marché européen de l’art.

Une Europe Par Les Arts ? Les Périodiques Illustrés Au-Delà Du Musée Imaginaire, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Marie Barras, Nicola Carboni

Artl@s Bulletin

Existe-t- il un musée imaginaire européen ? Cet article aborde la question par le biais des illustrations de presse des années 1880-1960. Dans les périodiques illustrés de cette époque, les images d’art traversèrent mieux les frontières que les images non artistiques, en particulier en Europe. Mais plutôt que de conclure à un musée imaginaire européen, une étude multiscalaire plus fine incite à se pencher sur les facteurs sociaux, esthétiques, économiques et techniques de la circulation imprimée des images artistiques.

L’Étoffe De L’Europe, Adeline Rispal

Artl@s Bulletin

Le tissage est le fil conducteur des interventions artistiques qui ont marqué la présidence française dans les bâtiments du Conseil de l’Union européenne à Bruxelles de janvier à juin 2022. Il exprime le travail, la patience, l’agilité et la fragilité face à la monumentalité des bâtiments, et le collectif dans sa force de proposition et d’action et dans sa capacité de résilience. Nous avons créé un textile complexe, joyeux et pétillant, dont la chaîne est composée des couleurs des 27 drapeaux des États de l’Union et la trame l’est des drapeaux des présidences successives, une sorte de data-tissage que nous …

Mediatization Of The Early Automobile: A Visual Analysis Of The Illustrated Press In The Late 19th And Early 20th Century, Nicola Carboni

Artl@s Bulletin

The paper presents a digital analysis of automobile imagery in the early 20th-century press, examining the mediatization of the anti-car movement and the role images played in conveying and furthering the activist discourse. To investigate the phenomenon, the author compiled and analyzed over 5,000 images from in 185 journals published in 45 cities between 1891 and 1950. The analysis revealed a preponderance of positive representations of the automobile in the press, whilst evidence of negative sentiment towards the automobile, such as protests and accidents, was conspicuously absent, with the exception of satirical publications.

War And Peace. The Film Iconeme Of The Urban Square As Image Of Europe In Transition (1944-1948), Paolo Villa

Artl@s Bulletin

A central feature of European urban landscapes, the square represents the public space par excellence. At the end of WW2 and in the immediate postwar time, the role of cinema in representing and reimagining urban squares was crucial. Through film images, they became the stage and the mirror of a Europe in transition. This contribution, examining Italian, French, German, and Czechoslovak cases, posits the square as an essential iconeme in postwar nonfiction cinema and visual culture, acting as a fil rouge to visually retrace the path of Europe from war to peace, and into new forms of political tension.

Europe As A Celebrated Community Of Culture. The Council Of Europe’S Art Exhibitions In The 1950s, Lefteris Spyrou

Artl@s Bulletin

Born as part of a Europe-building process in the aftermath of WWII, the Council of Europe emerged, during the 1950s, as the leading intergovernmental organisation for cultural cooperation in Europe. This paper examines the Art Exhibitions held under its auspices in different western-European cities between 1954 and 1961. Presenting in chronological order the major artistic movements in Europe from the Renaissance to 1914, the exhibitions were quite successful in terms of public attendance, and became the most important institutional initiative in visualising the idea of European unity based on a shared cultural heritage.

Le Musée Des Écoles Étrangères Et Le Spectre De La Guerre En Europe Dans L’Entre-Deux- Guerres, Elena Maria Rita Rizzi

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article examine si et comment la politique artistique du Musée des Écoles étrangères à Paris dans les années 1920 et 1930 put contribuer à définir l’ « art européen » ainsi que l’espace européen. Il étudie ensuite la seule toile exposée par le musée – Europe, réalisée par l’artiste Ismaël Gonzalez de La Serna vers 1935 – qui prêta une attention particulière au sujet. Tout en mettant cette oeuvre en rapport avec les oeuvres portant sur le même sujet réalisées à l’époque par d’autres artistes, il s’agit, enfin, de comprendre la faible circulation de cette image de l’Europe, qui …

Perspectives On Changing Cultural Spaces In 19th Century Europe, Christophe Charle

Artl@s Bulletin

To define the limits of European cultural spaces requires a pragmatic and empirical approach, founded on a comparative overview of the circulations of symbolic goods, of the agents involved in the processes of diffusion and mediatization of these goods, and of their modes of transmission or valorization. In this essay, I illustrate the effects of changing conditions on the specific field of 19th-century opera, one of the first international forms of cultural practice in Europe. I then consider the origins and causes of unequal cultural circulations in other fields, notably the presence or absence of mediators in these processes of …

A Light On Europe. The International And Intermedial Trajectory Of A Medieval Chandelier At The Turn Of The Nineteenth Century, Eveline Deneer

Artl@s Bulletin

This article investigates the shaping of European visual culture by tracing the international and intermedial trajectory of the visual motive of a chandelier from a 15th-century Burgundian manuscript in the decades around 1800. Passing from Brussels, Paris, Lyon, Mannheim, and Vienna to Coburg, and moving from illumination to drawing, archaeological illustration, painting, engraving to the applied arts, its trajectory exemplifies the historical conditions and cultural phenomena that animated the formation of a European visual culture, at a time when historical and national consciousness were developing on the continent.

The New World Debate And The 18th-Century Images Of America That Brought Europe Together, Catherine Dossin

Artl@s Bulletin

The New World Debate offers a privileged site to reconstruct and study Europe’s self-image in the 18th century. Taking on Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, Voltaire’s Alzire et les Americains, and De Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, this paper traces the process through which Europe elaborated a Eurocentric view of the world organization through a paternalistic, usually benevolent but always contemptuous, relation to America that would come to define Europe’s colonial expansion of the 19th century and make colonialism an essential, yet uncomfortable, dimension of Europe’s modern identity.

Fashioning Europe: Identity And Dress In Early Modern Costume Books, Emilia Olechnowicz

Artl@s Bulletin

This article aims to demonstrate how early modern costume books attempted to define the identities of Europeans. They presented a system of social stratifications, describing the presumed differences between people of various origins, age, gender, and, above all, social position. The existence of these differences was presented as part of an order not only social and political but also moral and religious. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that these differences had as much to do with actual cultural disparities between people as with the different perspectives and attitudes of the authors of the individual books.

The Column And The Pediment: The Persistence Of Values?, Areti Adamopoulou

Artl@s Bulletin

There is one icon dispersed worldwide and historically associated with higher values: the façade of a columnated building capped by a pediment. This simple vertical, horizontal, and triangular formation runs through the ages and is firmly associated with values and ideas stemming from Europe. It survived centuries of use and abuse, and served revolutions, nation-states, democracies, colonialism, totalitarian regimes, and commercial culture. It even reached the world of computer graphic symbols and still inspires artists. In this paper, I discuss this icon in terms of its diffusion and persistency and comment upon its link to Europe.

Thinking Europe Visually. A Schizophrenic Certitude, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

Existe-t-il un musée imaginaire européen ? Cet article aborde la question par le biais des illustrations de presse des années 1880-1960. Dans les périodiques illustrés de cette époque, les images d’art traversèrent mieux les frontières que les images non artistiques, en particulier en Europe. Mais plutôt que de conclure à un musée imaginaire européen, une étude multiscalaire plus fine incite à se pencher sur les facteurs sociaux, esthétiques, économiques et techniques de la circulation imprimée des images artistiques.

Artistic Novelties Or Political Tools? Circulating Cold War Art Exhibitions In Finland, Maija Koskinen

Artl@s Bulletin

The cultural Cold War was a global phenomenon, but how was it fought in Finland, on the periphery of Northern Europe? The essay brings a previously insufficiently known Finnish perspective into the study of cultural Cold War by introducing a research project, Mission Finland – Cold War cultural diplomacy at the cross roads of East and West, 1945–1991. The essay discusses study methods of international art exhibitions as soft power and introduces – with concrete Finnish examples – the concept of “state- run exhibition” as a means to comprehend the role of circulating art exhibitions as Cold War cultural …

Exhibiting Across The Iron Curtain: The Forgotten Trail Of Danish Artists Exhibiting In The Context Of State Socialism, Ca. 1955–1985, Kristian Handberg, Yulia Karpova

Artl@s Bulletin

The article presents the research project “Exhibiting across the Iron Curtain: The forgot-ten trail of Danish artists exhibiting in the context of state socialism, ca. 1955–1985” (The University of Copenhagen, 2021–24). Project researchers Kristian Handberg and Yulia Karpova introduce the project and its most important ambitions, especially those related to the theme of cross- border connectivity in the Nordic region through a few examples taken from their most recent work. These case studies illustrate how they approach this particular material and will tackle the questions and challenges that may rise.

Exhibiting Art In A European Periphery? International Art In Sweden During The Cold War, Katarina Wadstein Macleod, Marta Edling, Pella Myrstener

Artl@s Bulletin

The project Exhibiting Art in a European Periphery? International Art in Sweden during the Cold War aimed to investigate international exhibitions in Sweden during the postwar period from circa 1945 to the end of the 1980s. The main objective was to find information beyond preconceived ideas of what is important, interesting, or simply good art. In this article, we present our method for searching through the archives and some of the findings and insights generated.

Exhibiting Contemporary Art In The Early 1990s Nordic–Baltic Realm, Annika Öhrner

Artl@s Bulletin

This article investigates exhibitions of Baltic contemporary art in the Early 1990s, that were directed towards an international audience. Notions of an art life finally freed from the heavy institutional power of the Soviet occupation has served to obscure the arrival of other inter-national and political presences, the ones from Norden. While new Baltic art practices were widely made public in the three Baltic capitals after 1991, the fact that the highest political level of Nordic foreign policy provided an infrastructure for this, was not. “The Nordic–Baltic realm,” is here suggested as a notion of interactions between the contemporary art …

Art Contre/Against Apartheid At Lunds Konsthall: An Entangled History Of Art And Solidarity From Paris To Pretoria, Katarina Wadstein Macleod

Artl@s Bulletin

This article concerns the international touring exhibition Art contre/against Apartheid originating in France and which reached Lunds konsthall, Sweden in 1984 and was to tour the world for ten years. The aim with this exhibition was to raise awareness of the apartheid regime, cause international protest and ultimately remove the repressive political system. Using histoire croisée as a method this article investigates the different interests and stake-holders in the exhibition at Lunds konsthall, including the critique of the exhibition as resting on white supremacy. The purpose of the article is to locate the different intersections regarding international art, international politics …

The Afterlife Of Danish Modern: Design Exhibition In Moscow, 1969–70, Yulia Karpova

Artl@s Bulletin

The exhibition Contemporary Danish Design arrived in Moscow in December 1969, when Danish design was undergoing a crisis. The popularity of “Danish Modern,” the notion centered on excellent artisanship, natural materials, and a balance between tradition and modernity, was diminishing due to shifting tastes in home furnishing and consumer society critiques. This article considers the Moscow exhibition as a twin effort to include design in Danish- Soviet cultural diplomacy and to revive the cultural importance of Danish Modern in the era of waning techno-optimism and student protests.

Exhibiting Cobra Across The Iron Curtain: Exhibition Diplomacy And Modernism As Ostpolitik Across Borders In Northern Europe During The Cold War, Kristian Handberg

Artl@s Bulletin

The article examines how the Danish artists of the group Cobra appeared in front of exhibitions organized by the Danish state touring the state socialist countries during the Cold War from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. This unknown aspect of the international circulation of the artists were part of the official cultural diplomacy of the Danish state and can contribute to a new understanding of art exhibitions in the Cold War as “Ostpolitik” and the commitment of the artists in these efforts. The article observes the importance of cultural diplomacy in relation to border- crossing exhibitions and the …

Art For All! Nordic Art And Cultural Democracy, 1945–1959, Marta Edling

Artl@s Bulletin

The article will by emphasizing a transnational and geopolitical approach, investigate eight exhibitions of modern art from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden presented in Nordic cities 1946–1959. The text highlights the importance of this regional context and argues that the artworks can be seen as socially interconnected signs mediated through the communicative agency of the exhibitions. By focusing on subject matter and artwork titles presented, the article suggests that the exhibitions can be viewed as part of interacting artistic, civic, and political agendas aiming to democratize culture in the postwar Nordic welfare states.

Charting The Beyond. On The Two “First” International Surrealist Exhibitions In Scandinavia, Andrea Kollnitz

Artl@s Bulletin

This article examines two exhibitions introducing international surrealism in the North: Paris 1932 in Stockholm 1932 and Kubisme = Surrealisme in Copenhagen in 1935. Focusing on contents, networks and agents, the analysis shows competitive negotiations of national and local identities in interaction with the promotion of surrealism as a universal international phenomenon. Using a decentralising approach, the article reflects on the role of Paris and other cities as stations as well as elucidates national, transnational and transcultural processes and interactions in the international dissemination of surrealism.