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Full-Text Articles in History

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 Apr 2024

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 …


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 Dec 2023

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.


Mediatization Of The Early Automobile: A Visual Analysis Of The Illustrated Press In The Late 19th And Early 20th Century, Nicola Carboni Dec 2023

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 Dec 2023

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.


Le Musée Des Écoles Étrangères Et Le Spectre De La Guerre En Europe Dans L’Entre-Deux- Guerres, Elena Maria Rita Rizzi Dec 2023

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 Dec 2023

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 …


Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam Nov 2021

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.


Provincializing New York: In And Out Of The Geopolitics Of Art After 1945, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Apr 2021

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 …


Notes On The Circulation Of Epistemic Images, Nina Samuel Apr 2021

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.


How To Build A World Art: The Strategic Universalism Of Colour Reproductions And The Unesco Prize (1953-1968), Chiara Vitali Apr 2021

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.


Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann Dec 2019

Beyond Nationalism? Blank Spaces At The Documenta 1955 – The Legacy Of An Exhibition Between Old Europe And New World Order, Mirl Redmann

Artl@s Bulletin

Was the first documenta really beyond nationalism? documenta 1955 has been widely regarded as conciliation for the fascist legacy of the exhibition “Degenerate Art” (1937), and as an attempt to reintegrate Germany into the international arts community. This article employs published and archival sources in order to understand if and how documenta was impacted by the legacy of nationalism in post-fascist Germany. A biographic sketch of Antonio Corpora (1909-2004) shows how the purportedly “universalist” selection criteria employed by documenta erased cultural specificity and solidified nationalist conceptions of center and periphery.


Α “Guarantee Of Clustered Energy And Collective Promotion”: The Association Of Greek Women Artists And Its Exhibitions In The 50s And 60s, Glafki Gotsi May 2019

Α “Guarantee Of Clustered Energy And Collective Promotion”: The Association Of Greek Women Artists And Its Exhibitions In The 50s And 60s, Glafki Gotsi

Artl@s Bulletin

Founded in Athens in 1954 the Association of Greek Women Artists aimed at promoting art among the Greek public, confronting the problems of women artists through collective action, and encouraging the presentation of Greek art on the international scene. In the 1950s and 1960s it organized a significant number of group exhibitions in Greece as well as abroad, where its members showed their work. This paper examines the context of the association’s all-women shows and their meaning in relation to feminist cultural politics inside but also beyond national borders. More specifically, it analyzes the circumstances under which the collectivity was …


L'Esposizione Internazionale Femminile Di Belle Arti (Torino, 1910-1911; 1913). Note Su Genere, Arte E Professione In Italia All'inizio Del Xx Secolo, Francesca Lombardi May 2019

L'Esposizione Internazionale Femminile Di Belle Arti (Torino, 1910-1911; 1913). Note Su Genere, Arte E Professione In Italia All'inizio Del Xx Secolo, Francesca Lombardi

Artl@s Bulletin

Il contributo intende ricostruire la vicenda delle Esposizioni Internazionali Femminili di Belle Arti (1910-11; 1913), prima manifestazione artistica di taglio internazionale riservata esclusivamente alle donne organizzata in Italia. Promosse a Torino dalla rivista La Donna, le due rassegne si svolsero in un momento storicamente determinante per l'affermazione di un nuovo status delle artiste, contribuendo a dare visibilità e legittimità al fenomeno della produzione artistica femminile. La ricerca ripercorre, sulla scorta soprattutto di documenti d'epoca e fonti d'archivio, la storia e gli esiti di questa innovativa esperienza, evidenziando la complessità delle reti istituzionali, sociali, di patronage e matronage che concorsero …


Autour De Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Käsebier Et Catharine Weed Barnes Ward: Stratégies Séparatistes Dans L’Exposition Des Femmes Photographes Américaines Au Tournant Des Xixe Et Xxe Siècles, Thomas Galifot May 2019

Autour De Frances Benjamin Johnston, Gertrude Käsebier Et Catharine Weed Barnes Ward: Stratégies Séparatistes Dans L’Exposition Des Femmes Photographes Américaines Au Tournant Des Xixe Et Xxe Siècles, Thomas Galifot

Artl@s Bulletin

Cette étude inclut une nouvelle analyse de l’exposition des photographes américaines conçue par Frances Benjamin Johnston à l’occasion de l’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1900. Dans une mise en perspective inédite, l’événement est également replacé dans un contexte américain élargi, riche en initiatives et en débats aussi fondateurs que méconnus. Cette enquête, qui donne lieu au premier panorama des expositions collectives de photographes américaines jusqu’en 1914, aboutit à une nécessaire remise à l'honneur de Catharine Weed Barnes Ward et de Gertrude Käsebier, personnalités dont le rôle central sur ces questions est largement mésestimé.


Artistic Emigration From Portugal To Paris In The First Half Of The 1960s: Six Portuguese Painters From Paris Revisited, Joana Baião Jun 2017

Artistic Emigration From Portugal To Paris In The First Half Of The 1960s: Six Portuguese Painters From Paris Revisited, Joana Baião

Artl@s Bulletin

This paper proposes to revisit some issues related to the impact of emigration on the paths followed by a group of six Portuguese painters who settled in Paris between 1958 and 1961. To do that, it will analyze and contextualize the evolution of their work in the first half of the 1960’s, and it will recall the small exhibition Seis Pintores Portugueses de Paris that opened in 1966 in Lisbon with the purpose of highlight the particularities of the artistic research that was being developed by those artists in Paris, integrating them into the international artistic movements of the period.


« Dégénérés » En France. Tentatives De Définition D'Une Identité Collective Par Les Artistes Germaniques Exilés En France À La Fin Des Années 1930, Hélène Duret Jun 2017

« Dégénérés » En France. Tentatives De Définition D'Une Identité Collective Par Les Artistes Germaniques Exilés En France À La Fin Des Années 1930, Hélène Duret

Artl@s Bulletin

Cet article examine les stratégies d'identification mises en œuvre par les artistes allemands et autrichiens exilés en France au moment où les expositions d'art « dégénéré » circulent dans l'Allemagne hitlérienne. Dans un contexte de tensions internationales et d'accueil méfiant des réfugiés allemands en France, certains collectifs d'artistes se définissent tour à tour comme fers de lance de l'« autre Allemagne », d'un héritage français de liberté artistique ou d'une « Internationale » artistique. En revanche, ces artistes ne franchissent pas le pas d'un « retournement du stigmate » (Goffman) vis-à-vis du qualificatif nazi « dégénéré ».


Sondage Autour De L’Exposition Internationale Pour La Palestine De 1978, Nasser Soumi Jun 2016

Sondage Autour De L’Exposition Internationale Pour La Palestine De 1978, Nasser Soumi

Artl@s Bulletin

En 1978, une Exposition Internationale pour la Palestine se tint à Beyrouth dans le but d’exposer les œuvres d’artistes internationaux solidaires du peuple palestinien, dans un quartier contrôlé par les Palestiniens et fréquenté par des militants libanais et arabes pro-Palestiniens. Lors de l’exposition, Nasser Soumi réalisa un sondage auprès du public palestino-libanais. A cette époque, son travail artistique ne correspondait pas à l’art révolutionnaire pratiqué par la majorité des artistes palestiniens. Sa préoccupation était la problématique existentielle de l’être humain—y compris celle des Palestiniens. Au-delà du public, il s’agissait donc à travers ce sondage de mieux se comprendre lui-même.


Past Disquiet: From Research To Exhibition, Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti Jun 2016

Past Disquiet: From Research To Exhibition, Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti

Artl@s Bulletin

An exhibition of an exceptional scale and scope took place in Beirut in the middle of the civil war and today, its archival and documentary traces have been almost entirely lost. The International Art Exhibition for Palestine opened in the Spring of 1978, comprising some 200 works donated by artists hailing from nearly 30 countries, to be a seed collection for a museum in exile. This is a transcript of a presentation of the transformation of research into an exhibition format and a virtual walkthrough of the show Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, …


Tracing Paintings In Napoleonic Italy: Archival Records And The Spatial And Contextual Displacement Of Artworks, Nora Gietz Jan 2016

Tracing Paintings In Napoleonic Italy: Archival Records And The Spatial And Contextual Displacement Of Artworks, Nora Gietz

Artl@s Bulletin

Using a Venetian case study from the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, this article demonstrates how archival research enables us to trace the spatial life of artworks. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic policy of the suppression of religious corporations, followed by the appropriation of their patrimony, as well as the widespread looting of artworks, led to the centralisation of patrimony in newly established museums in the capitals of the Empire and its satellite kingdoms. This made the geographical and contextual displacement, transnationalisation, and change in the value of artworks inevitable.


Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative Of Modern Art In Light Of Quantitative And Transnational Approaches, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Jun 2015

Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative Of Modern Art In Light Of Quantitative And Transnational Approaches, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel

Artl@s Bulletin

The alternative “centre‐periphery” is essential to the myth of modern art and its historiography. Even though Postcolonial studies have denounced the implications of such geopolitical hierarchies, as long as our objects remain centred on one capital city and within national boundaries, it will be difficult to escape the hierarchical paradigm that makes Paris and New York the successive capital cities of Modernism. This paper highlights how approaches focusing on different scales of analysis—from the quantitative and geographic to the monographic—challenge the supposed centrality of Paris through 1945.


Crossing The Atlantic: Emilio Pettoruti's Italian Immersion, Lauren A. Kaplan Feb 2015

Crossing The Atlantic: Emilio Pettoruti's Italian Immersion, Lauren A. Kaplan

Artl@s Bulletin

The painter Emilio Pettoruti (1892-1971) was born to Italian parents in the Argentine province of La Plata. In 1913, he sailed to Florence for artistic training and remained in Europe for eleven years. This article focuses on this formative stint, during which Pettoruti studied Quattrocento masters, conferred with Italian Futurists, and met French Cubists. Ultimately, the painter became a paragon of civiltá italiana, a cosmopolitan culture born in Italy but meant for global dissemination. Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1924, he exposing the Argentine public to this culture, strengthening the already robust bond between the two countries.