Art History最新文献

Alexander Edouart's Blessing of the Enrequita Mine of 1860 commemorates the discovery of a mercury vein in New Almaden, California. It pictures the mine's Anglo-American administrators, its primarily Mexican miners, and industry's impact upon the landscape. Despite the seemingly idyllic nature of the genre scene, the Enrequita Mine and its painted portrayal mark a contentious turning point in the economic and political relationship between the United States and Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, one whose effects still reverberate today. Two moments of tension between the two nations frame this artwork: the US–Mexican War of 1846–48; and the United States v. Castillero court case and appeals (1857–63). Using an ecocritical approach situating the painting in the geopolitics of extraction, this essay contends that the artwork participated in these territorial disputes by constructing ethnic hierarchy, bolstering legal battles, and not only representing but engendering further capitalist exploitation of the land.

Originating in a critical examination of Vernon Lee's perceived ugliness and her excessive talking among her acquaintances, this essay situates historically a series of portraits in which she features as a sitter, subject of comment and commentator, to suggest that the interweaving of voices and faces can be useful to resist the elision of seeing and knowing on which art historians often base their understanding of gender and sexuality in portraiture. As an art critic, Lee maintained an ambivalent position with regard to portraits. Her familiarity with the new psychology informed a response whereby resonance could shift the sensorial boundaries of the genre beyond its function as likeness. By engaging with Lee's interrogation of the voice of portraits, both in art writing and fiction, the essay examines a series of queer attempts to challenge the authority of the look to identify, define or consume the subject of portraiture. As the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of talking styles as audible articulations of the queer self, contemporary representations of Lee and her loquacity may be read as queer propositions at a time when dominant discourses around ‘female inversion’ and the ‘speaking woman’ were being fixed by sexologists.

In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, c. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass-produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self-definition.

The development of art in Austria after 1918 remains little explored; the main focus of research continues to be fin-de-siècle Vienna. Where interwar Austrian modernism is studied at all, interest is mostly limited to the municipal housing sponsored by the Social Democratic council. The main concern of this essay is to examine the reasons for this inconsistency and comparative neglect. It explores the ways in which the historiography of Austrian post-war modernism has been informed by wider historical assumptions, about the role of the First World War as a cultural-political caesura, for instance, or by ambivalence about interwar Austrian history and its slide into fascism, or valorization of the avant-garde. A comparison is also drawn with accounts of art in interwar Czechoslovakia, where modernist practices are much celebrated since they have assumed a legitimating function for Czech and Slovak culture in the present.

This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.

In 1952, the director of East Berlin's Märkisches Museum discovered three drawings by Matthias Grünewald pasted into a Luther Bible. This remarkable find set off a fascinating tale of art-historical espionage, but also served as a generative moment for the construction of the well-worn cliché of Grünewald as a revolutionary and peasant sympathizer. I examine the artist's transformation into an embodiment of the GDR's socialist ideals by interrogating East German art historian W. K. Zülch's analyses of the newly discovered drawings, which used formal analysis – rather than historical evidence – to figure Grünewald as an ideological accomplice in the German Peasants' War of 1525. Significantly, Zülch presented the tools of the artist's trade (‘Kreidestift und Farben’) as a way to reconcile form and political content, offering an alternative Socialist model to the SED's state-sponsored culture.