Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed ...in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character.
In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja , purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.
Editorial Schwerda, Mira Xenia
Art in translation,
09/2022, Volume:
14, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The artist Mona Hatoum aims to “expand the idea of a shaky ground to include the entire world.”1 The articles in this varia issue of Art in Translation discuss the topics of translation and ...transformation, and they underline that the global history of art and visual culture is complex, unexpected, and ever-changing—in some ways resembling Hatoum’s “shaky ground.” This issue’s articles foreground unpublished, original research on intercultural translation. While focusing on specific case studies or people, the articles address broader questions that have been at the heart of art history over recent decades: The authors lead us away from the deceptive paradigm of linear rise and decline and from the question of original and copy, which preoccupied art history for so long. They examine specific routes taken by objects and moments of cultural contact rather than searching for illusive origins, explore the development of specific phenomena, ideas, and symbols, and investigate the cultural, political, and personal context of art, artists, and art historians. Geographically this issue’s essay topics range from East Asia, to Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East and West Africa, with some references to European and North American art histories and art historiographies, thereby illuminating specific chapters in a global, interconnected history of art.
The green bloc Fowkes, Maja
2015, 20150630, 2015-04-10
eBook
This book examines the approaches of renowned Central European artists to the natural environment, uncovering an up till now largely unrecognized aspect of their work, which has regularly been ...analyzed through socio-political contexts, but rarely in terms of ecology. It focuses on the period after 1968, which not only brought changes to the political landscape of Eastern Europe, but shifted artistic practice towards conceptualism and was instrumental in spreading environmental consciousness. It comparatively investigates artists and artist groups from Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, at the moment when art exited the gallery and entered the natural environment, while socialist governments attempted to keep control over information about the real state of environmental pollution and block globally emerging ecological discourse. Apart from embedding artistic production in social, political and environmental histories of the region, this book also addresses the problem of art history as a discipline under socialism, presents a more complete picture of its neo-avant-garde art and constitutes an unprecedented application of the ecological paradigm to art history. It demonstrates the creativity, inventiveness and astuteness of Central European artists whose vision could not be controlled by any imposed borders at the dawn of global awareness of ecological crisis.
It is with a fair amount of certainty the one can state today the importance of the Vienna School of art history for the Polish art historians at the beginning of the XX century, in the interwar ...period or the 1960s and 1970s, yet very little is known about the years in-between. It is commonly accepted that strong anti-German sentiment during the second half of the 1940s and the domination of the soviet doctrine in the first half of the 1950s both complicated further dissemination of works and methods of the Viennese scholars. A closer look at the matter would suggest that their works and ideas remained present in the polish art history of the period, allowing it to serve as a chain link between the interwar years and the development of the discipline in the following decades.
Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. ...Una Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy. Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,” which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity, perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world, a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible, erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.
In early 20th century, the art historical institute in Vienna led by Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) offered the unique opportunity to study the arts of Asia and the Middle East at university level ...(fig. I).· 1 The rich material repository for the study of 'Oriental' art - consisting of ca. 4000 books, 52.000 photographs and images, and 20.000 lantern slides - was unparalleled in Europe.2 It attracked a large number of students and turned the institute into a hub for Asian and Islamic art. Numerous guest auditors from all over Europe and abroad further enriched the lively community.3 Between 1910 and 1933, more than one hundred students supervised by Strzygowski completed their dissertations on Northern European, Austrian, Persian, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese and Indian art.4 Suzanne Marchand has directed attention to the strikingly Targe number of female students' at Strzygowski's institute, 'who would make careers outside Central Europe and remain relatively free from racist ideologies' The article pursues the twofold aim of combining a historical intersectional study of the Vienna school with a critique of patriarchal patterns of historiography. This study aims to contribute to research of the co-constitutive relation of art and identity markers such as gender and race.The article consists of three parts: two historical studies (part I and III) embrace a theoretical section on patriarchal patterns in historiography (part II). In the first part, Melanie Stiassny's presidency of the Society of Friends of Asian Art and Culture is the centerpiece of the historical investigation. The society was one of the liveliest in inter war Vienna, and Stiassny, as its managing vice-president, organized exhibitions, broadcasts and adult education, edited the journal of the society, and published articles on Chinese art. Knowledge about Stiassny and the infrastructure of the society sheds light on the processes of valorizing Asian art. It furthermore gives insights into how Strzygowskian graduates built networks and professionalized.23 The second part, the theoretical section, draws on feminist, gender and intersectional studies to analyse patterns and conventions of historiography. A close reading of several articles on Viennese art history reveals how androcentric criteria shape historiography to date. The third part adopts some of the androcentric historiographical criteria such as 'success' to comparatively trace careers of 'successful' women and men art historians.24 Interestingly, their migratory trajectories reveal a gendered and raced pattern of migration: Women and non-European men art historians often found their first academic positions at universities in the Middle East or Asia, whereas European men began their careers at museums in Vienna and Berlin. Eventually, most worked in area studies departments at US-American universities.
