Art History最新文献

This essay traces the emergence and development of the category of ‘popular art’ in Peru between the 1920s and the 1970s, and the relationship of that category to the formations of both modern and postmodern artistic practices in that country. Taking the awarding of the 1975 national prize of art to the retablista Joaquín López Antay as its fulcrum, it argues that this key event, which has been traditionally regarded as a watershed in the history of Peruvian art, was indeed the logical consequence of how indigenist painters framed the field of artistic production in Peru. It also analyses the simultaneous emergence of an alternative view of popular art that did away with notions of cultural authenticity and national representation.

The mutability and physical perfectibility of animal bodies was a scientific and aesthetic preoccupation in nineteenth-century France, channelling anxieties about class, race and national identity into projects of breeding domestic animals. This essay explores how the animal painter Rosa Bonheur figured an imagined agricultural superabundance through depictions of both European and ‘exotic' imported bovines. The cattle that so often functioned throughout art history as illustrated zoological specimens or landscape staffage emerge in these portrayals as central protagonists rich in fur, fat, and muscular force. The seemingly anodyne cow thereby became symbolically charged, associated with both capitalist modernization and pastoral idyll.

The career of photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch began in the early 1920s in the storerooms of Germany's ethnographic museums, and ended in 1966 with the publication of his last photobook, Gestein (Rock). His reputation as a leading exponent of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) developed in tandem with heated debates over sculptural facsimiles and contemporary art in the historical museum in the late Weimar Republic. These debates gave expression to the ‘non-simultaneity of the simultaneous’ (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen), a central concept for the crisis of historicism in the post-inflation years. In an age of mass reproduction, could ‘things’ still reliably embody and convey the past into present? This question took on renewed urgency for Renger at the end of his life – as, indeed, it did for many writers of his generation, who, if they outlived Nazi terror, genocide, and war, looked back on the historical valence of objecthood as unfinished business.

This essay reconsiders the story of a pigment. Prussian blue, discovered at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is often described as a revolutionary colour that instantly transformed painters’ palettes and practices. Grounded in a ‘thick description’ of the pigment's history in Paris, this article challenges the legendary account of Prussian blue through a more granular retelling of its development. It reconstructs the chaîne opératoire of Prussian blue through the laboratories of chemists, the factories of manufacturers, the shops of colour merchants, and the studios of artists. Emphasizing the intersections between the worlds of art, chemistry, and commerce, this essay points to the pigment's transformative impact in the larger history of artists’ materials as a scientifically created and commercially marketed product. Shedding new light on the history of Prussian blue, this study also offers an interdisciplinary methodological approach to artists’ materials through art history, social history, and conservation science.

Histories of settler colonial art galleries have tended to present these institutions as distant attempts to replicate British models. This essay argues that settler/Indigenous interactions, and the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, were fundamental to the formation of settler colonial art galleries, through a case study of the 1880s acquisition and reception of Danish painter A. F. A. Schenck's Anguish (1878) at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, on unceded land of the Kulin nation. Examining the career of the NGV's London art adviser, Alfred Taddy Thomson, from the violence of the colonial frontier in the 1840s, to his art advising practice in late nineteenth-century London, it demonstrates the ways in which frontier violence permeated the formation of British settler colonial cultural institutions. The acquisition and reception of Anguish provides a stimulus to rethink approaches to histories of settler colonial art galleries, and to European paintings in their collections.