Artistic Mission Research Articles

Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (review)

Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine (review)

Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine

The forgotten protagonist of this true account aspired to be a cubist painter in his native Kyiv. In a Europe remade by the First World War, his talents led him to different roles--intelligence operative, powerful statesman, underground activist, lifelong conspirator. Henryk Jozewski directed Polish intelligence in Ukraine, governed the borderland region of Volhynia in the interwar years, worked in the anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet underground during the Second World War, and conspired against Poland's Stalinists until his arrest in 1953. His personal story, important in its own right, sheds new light on the foundations of Soviet power and on the ideals of those who resisted it. By following the arc of Jozewski's life, this book demonstrates that his tolerant policies toward Ukrainians in Volhynia were part of Poland's plans to roll back the communist threat. The book mines archival materials, many available only since the fall of communism, to rescue Jozewski, his Polish milieu, and his Ukrainian dream from oblivion. An epilogue connects his legacy to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

Harriet Monroe's Pioneer Modernism: Nature, National Identity, and Poetry, A Magazine of Verse

Many scholars of modernist verse consider Harriet Monroe--the founder and first editor of Poetry, Magazine of Verse--a curious anomaly. She was dedicated to extending the parameters of American poetry, but in literary history she has been known as the editor who held up publication of T. S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, excerpted and rearranged Wallace Stevens's elegiac masterpiece Sunday Morning, rebuffed Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams with her criticisms, and drove her foreign correspondent Ezra Pound to distraction and his work into the pages of Margaret Anderson's Little Review. (1) She frankly preferred Vachel Lindsay's verse to W. B. Yeats's (Williams 77-78), and she deemed Lew Sarett's poem Box of God superior in every way to The Waste Land (Monroe, A Contrast 325-30). generation older than most of the poets she published in her landmark periodical, Monroe struck many of her charges as prudish, provincial, and backward--a strangely unmodern champion of the modernist verse she worked so hard to bring to the unsuspecting American public. Rather than reproach Monroe for the limitations of her ideas of good verse, I think it more fruitful to approach her through the cultural roots of what she saw as her modern artistic mission. In my reading of the early modernist period, Monroe stands as a central figure rather than an anomaly because her sense of American art so clearly expressed a cultural dilemma common to her time. The American writers who began their careers amid the turmoil of the Progressive Era brought with them an American literary and cultural tradition based on widespread mythologies, born in the early nineteenth century, of an American selfhood rooted in American nature (Miller 197-207; Nash 67-83; Marx 3-11). What America lacked in history, rituals, art, and monuments, it made up for in the peerless beauty of its scenery; this would serve as the basis for a unique cultural identity. However, as scientific management, efficiency, scientific accuracy, expertise, precisionism, and professionalism became the watchwords of American scientific progressivism, the notion that nature functioned as a touchstone of human sympathy and feeling--a resonant space that triggered the recognition of perfect correspondence (to use Thoreau's term) between spirit and matter--came to seem hopelessly naive. The drive in early twentieth-century culture to transform nature into a subject pertinent to a scientific age left the emerging American poets of the Progressive Era in a difficult position. On the one hand, these American writers sensed that, if their art was to be taken seriously as a twentieth-century cultural product, it must somehow participate in the scientific habits of mind that defined the times. On the other hand, many of these same writers felt uneasy about abandoning the orphic, mystical attachment to nature that had first made American literature unique. How was it possible to write American poetry in a scientific age? How might the poet keep faith with American nature and its promise of cultural identity without seeming silly or unscholarly? How might the American poet retain a defining relationship with American nature while reimagining nature as a viable subject of modernity? For Monroe, such questions proved vital to her conception of American art. woman on the cusp between two centuries (Monroe was born in 1860 and started Poetry in 1912), she was well positioned to witness the turn toward scientific management that defined her times. Monroe grew up in late-nineteenth-century Chicago, an urban environment that highlighted the social stresses wrought by massive immigration, rapid industrialization, corporatization, and corruption; many white middle-class Americans feared these forces would destroy American Democracy. The problems that Chicago faced, however, also made it a hotbed of reform activity. hub for the country's identity crisis, Chicago became a living laboratory for experiments in the Progressive scientific control of American society. …

The City Gates of Louis XIV

This article details a study of some forty examples of city gates and shows that the cultural institutions of Louis XIV developed a nationwide classical language for the design of arches, emulating antique and Renaissance forms. On one hand, an academic style, and on the other a military style, were exhibited in classically designed arches and ornamented with carefully guided sculptural iconography and inscriptions. Both were particularly strong forms of royal propaganda. Gates, far from being an isolated phenomenon, were part of a larger artistic mission. Studying their design may revise our understanding of royal squares. More detailed study of gates' decorative programs would allow a more subtle understanding of their place in the vast program of cultural propaganda of Louis XIV, disseminated throughout the interior and the borders of his realm.

An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum

An Imperial Collection explores how women as patrons, painters, and subjects contributed to the cultural history of Russia. Eminent families formed collections and created artistic commissions that brought women artists to Russia and extended the influence of western European art to the royal court of the czars. Some women artists were allowed into the inner circles of the aristocracy, providing an insider view into the private side of court life. Artists whose works are explored in the book include Elisabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun, who from 1795 to 1801 found refuge in St. Petersburg after the French Revolution forced her to flee her own country; French sculptor Marie-Anne Collot, who was commissioned by Catherine to produce a sculpture of Peter the Great, now one of the great landmarks of St. Petersburg; Scotswoman Christina Robertson, whose prestigious commissions to paint the women of the court give a refreshing perspective on the personal relationships of the Imperial family; and Angelica Kauffman, one of the few eighteenth-century women painters to tackle the challenging field of history painting, often with a heightened sensitivity to female roles. Works by these and many other women artists are explored in depth, alongside a ground-breaking study of the importance of the Academy of Arts, the bastion of the artistic establishment since it was founded by Empress Elizabeth in the mid-eighteenth century. This book will appeal to anyone interested in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women artists, the history of Russian patronage of the arts, and Russian imperial history and culture.

Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945

Vargas era elites confronted the same basic question faced by other centralizing political regimes—how to shape Brazil beyond the affairs of Rio de Janeiro (and perhaps even beyond the provincial capitals). Daryle Williams shows how cultural policymakers of the Vargas era confronted the core challenges of political and administrative centralization by looking at the newly created Ministry of Education and Health’s initiatives in art, architecture, and historical memory. These included the creation of a program for protecting—in effect federalizing—historical landmarks, including the city of Ouro Preto; the establishment a network of historical museums that often appropriated regional histories and made them “Brazilian”; the promotion a modern and nationalist vision of Brazil at overseas expositions; and the endorsement of modernist art and architecture as an official symbolic language of brasilidade, or Brazilianness.Culture Wars in Brazil draws the reader into an engaging crossroads in Brazilian history where the politics of a centralizing federal government intersected with the ongoing debate among elites about the nature of national culture. The result is an elegant study of both Brazilian culture in a political context and of Vargas regime politics in a cultural context that should satisfy a broad constituency of readers interested in Brazilian history. Williams’s transparent use of sources for cultural history, the clarity of his narrative, the depth of his characterization of the Vargas regime, and his caution in situating the narrative within broader currents of Brazilian history, all suit this book to undergraduate classroom use.Williams shifts the center of gravity for scholarship on the Vargas era by bringing needed recognition to the importance placed by the regime upon the politics of culture. His analysis reveals not only the ways in which Vargas era cultural politics were embedded in long-standing Brazilian debates about nationhood but also the strategies of state managers who sought to locate the regime within a sympathetic—and often elitist—vision of national history and identity. This is not to suggest that Vargas era culture managers sought to crassly legitimate the regime through appeals to the past. Rather, as the regime courted the participation of artists and intellectuals, it became enmeshed in long-standing cultural, intellectual and aesthetic debates over brasilidade.Culture Wars in Brazil shows us how the recently formed Ministry of Education and Health was envisioned as a “Ministry of Culture” by Gustavo Capanema, the third official to hold the portfolio of minister of education (1934– 45). Capanema became a catalyst linking the Vargas regime’s centralizing tendencies and a simmering debate between aesthetic and intellectual modernists and tradi tionalists about the meaning of Brazilian culture. Within this debate, modernists rejected the Brazil’s traditional adherence to European cultural and artistic trends as well as the sentimental embrace of imagery from the Brazilian colonial past. Largely through Capanema’s involvement in the debate, the modernists succeeded in placing their imprimatur on the major symbolic projects of the Vargas regime, from state expositions to official art, architecture, and the preservation of historical landmarks. Despite the modernists’ ascendancy, traditionalists continued to dominate key institutions which were rendered more prominent by the Vargas regime’s considerable support for cultural projects. While Williams acknowledges that figures such as Oscar Niemeyer, Cándido Portinari, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among many others, were the emerging winners of the debate over national culture, the real weight of Williams’s analysis lies in his examination of the federal government’s choice to become the debate’s sponsor. As Williams explains, “As the debate continues over the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the Revolution of 1930, it is clear that the Vargas era, and most especially the Estado Novo, stood for a time and place in which the federal government established itself as the center of cultural authority” (p. 259).Culture Wars in Brazil fills a conspicuous gap in the English-language historiography of Brazil and points to other crucial areas of study surrounding the Ministry of Education and the politics of culture in Brazil. These include the Ministry’s mainstay initiatives in establishing a federal role over public health and education, the politics of censorship and the press which the Ministry enjoined, as well as the role of the state in mediating popular culture, from radio, music and carnival to cinema, theater and recreation. Williams’s thorough study of the ministry’s cultural politics will serve as a basic reference for future scholarship on Brazilian cultural history. Culture Wars in Brazil convincingly shows that cultural history is not peripheral to the affairs of state traditionally privileged by historians. To the contrary, state managers of the Vargas era, like their counterparts throughout Brazilian history since the arrival of the French artistic mission in 1813, have been firm in their conviction that national culture, and the definition of brasilidade, were crucial areas of state involvement.

Paduan culture in Venetian care: the patronage of Bishop Pietro Donato (Padua 1428–47)

The paper discusses the cultural patronage of the Venetian Pietro Donato, bishop of Padua, concentrating particularly upon his work at Padua's duomo and Studium. Donato presents a useful example of a prolific patron of the arts in a period which currently lacks documented case studies; his artistic commissions bridge the gap between the fall of the Carrara dynasty in 1405 and the flourishing Paduan art market which emerged in the late 1440s. The Council of Basel is identified as having played a key role in the formation of Paduan culture from the early 1430s. Throughout his Paduan office, the bishop's cultural patronage took account of his roles as both father of the Paduan Church and representative of the Venetian authorities. The paper argues that, in both guises, his actions were consistently and strategically defined in relation to the patronage of the previous Carrara rulers in order to address the vacuum left by their sudden fall from power and to nullify their political significance.

Lay Patronage and the Creation of Papal Sanctity during the Gregorian Reform: The Case of Sant'Urbano alla Caffarella, Rome

This article examines representations of papal sanctity in the late eleventh-century wall paintings of Sant'Urbano alla Caffarella. An analysis of these frescoes, which include the earliest known example of the life of Urban I (d. 230), reaffirms that the ecclesiastical environment of the Gregorian Reform influenced the development of new hagiographic imagery. Cults of Early Christian papal martyrs, such as Urban I, were promoted to support the authority of contemporary popes like Urban II (1088-1099). The frescoes in Sant'Urbano, however, were not the product of papal or ecclesiastical patronage; instead, the images were sponsored by two lay donors, who are pictured in the Crucifixion scene. This pictorial program offers an important index of the extent to which reform ideology permeated various levels of society: artistic commissions came not only from high-level ecclesiastics but also from lay members of the community. The wall paintings in Sant'Urbano demonstrate that any concept of an artistic "platform" at the time of the Gregorian Reform must be broadened to include lay commissions. These frescoes, in which private and public themes converge, illustrate that even seemingly peripheral imagery was informed by the ideals espoused by the ecclesiastical reformers.

Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor

States, Bert O. Dreams: The Royal Road to Metaphor Metaphor, as treated here, is not a rhetorical device or strategy but the primary means by which dream and artistic images arise and give rise in turn to further narrative developments. The paper is chiefly concerned with dreams and the possibility that dream coherence-i.e., meaning, making sense-as we recognize it in the waking state may be a largely irrelevant to the organization and function of dreams that obviously have no artistic mission to be shared by others (readers, auditors) as forms of communication. I examine an experiment in dream-splicing conducted by Allan Hobson and his Harvard colleagues with a view to illustrating that bizarreness and discontinuity in dreams are not necessarily, as Hobson claims, signs of incoherence but may be the natural consequence of dreams exercising the power of association while the body is off-line. If dream images arise from a virtually infinite experience in world-association, it is possible that dreams couldn't perform their function-whatever it may be-by offering coherent narratives of the sort that interest waking readers. In other words, the content of dreams-coherent or otherwise from the waking standpoint-may be less important than the act of dreaming itself. Additionally, I briefly discuss two leading theories of dream function-the recorrelation of memory and the vigilance theories and suggest, briefly, how they might apply not only to dreams but to artistic works as well.

Broken Hearts: A B.H. Mystery (review)

At their best, Cornerstone Theater's community-based projects combine provocative social commentary with imaginative playfulness. One of Cornerstone's first productions, a Wild West musical adaptation of Hamlet, presented in Marmarth, North Dakota in 1986, was prompted by the company's interest in engaging small towns in theatre-making and an urge to travel to the state the East Coast-based company knew least about. Following a move to Los Angeles in 1992, Cornerstone's mission evolved to embrace bridge-building within and between communities. In Los Angeles, these "Bridge Shows" have included collaborations among citizens of Pacoima, a senior center, and Arab Americans citywide; an adaptation of Candide (Candude) performed in the city library, featuring police officers, library workers, and postal employees; and The Central Ave. Chalk Circle, bridging fragmented communities in the city of Watts. Cornerstone's most recent performance, "B.H. Residency," brought together participants from Boyle Heights, Baldwin Hills, Broadway and Hill streets, and Beverly Hills. The resultant bridge production, Lisa Loomer's original play, Broken Hearts: A B.H. Mystery, exemplifies Cornerstone's social and artistic mission, while standing on its own as an imaginative journey through seventy years of Los Angeles history and four ethnically distinct resident communities.

Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of Pre‐scientific Archaeology

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s interest in the role of images in constructing historical knowledge underlay the artist’s choice of a mode of representation known as the capriccio, or pastiche of ancient artefacts, to illustrate his archaeological publications of the late 1750s and early 1760s. Piranesi in part derived his attitude towards the capricci from Francesco Bianchini, author and illustrator of L’istoria universale provata coi monumenti, published first in 1697 and reissued in 1747. The significance of the connection between Piranesi and Bianchini is that it demonstrates that the artist upheld that the object or image could address historians’ epistemological concerns, and that the artistic imagination was a viable tool of historical research; these were attitudes typical of archaeology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an addendum, the article suggests that in 1747 or 1748 Piranesi created four capricious compositions known as the Grotteschi with Bianchini’s work in mind, and possibly to earn an artistic commission related to the publication of Bianchini’s texts.

Piété et Commande D'œuvres D'Art Après la Peste Noire

Dans un ouvrage d'histoire interdisciplinaire tout à fait exemplaire, Millard Meiss proposait une explication au bouleversement radical de la peinture florentine et siennoise après la Peste noire. Son hypothèse a suscité depuis un débat continu, vif et fructueux, entre les historiens de l'art. Mais l'histoire littéraire, sociale et économique est peu représentée dans ce débat, bien que les arguments de Meiss lui-même aient été largement tributaires des données et des pratiques liées à ces disciplines, de l'interprétation des lettres de sainte Catherine de Sienne à l'évaluation des banqueroutes florentines de la fin des années 1330. En revenant à un type de faits généralement peu considérés par les historiens de l'art et en recourant à l'emploi de méthodes quantitatives, du comptage simple aux techniques d'échantillonnage et à l'analyse économique, cet article voudrait reprendre la mesure des relations entre art et société en Italie centrale après la Peste noire.

An Artistic Mission in Nazi Berlin: The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre as Sanctuary

These remarks made by the actor, Fritz Kortner, stem from a 1932 book in which the leading stage performers of the Weimar Republic portray themselves in photographs and through their own words. In response to the editor's questions, Kortner—among other artists—analyzes his role as an actor within Germany's greater cultural and historical context, linking the crisis in theatre to existent economic and intellectual crises. Given the unstable socio-economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic, the cultural years ahead looked particularly grim. The actor's commentary reveals the vulnerable situation of German theatre in a country on the brink of dictatorship.

Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center: A community arts success

AbstractA small, nonprofit Latino arts and cultural organization faces a series of critical decisions regarding a diversification of funding sources and a reassessment of its artistic mission to create a balance between the needs of the local community and those of the larger, more diverse Latino community in the United States.

Hermann of Thuringia as patron of the arts: a case study

Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia from 1190 until 1217, is well known as a politician and as a patron of Middle High German poetry. Although less familiar, Hermann's role as patron of the arts was also impressive: two architectural projects and two manuscript commissions are associated with his name. This study examines the form and scale of each of these works and suggests that Hermann intended them to create an elevated princely environment and to buttress his political position. The carefully tuned nature of these commissions becomes more apparent when they are set into the context of Hermann's documented activities and alliances. Likewise, a comparison of Hermann's patronage to that of selected contemporaries illuminates the clear coordination of this man's artistic commissions to his personal view of his place in the Empire.

Render Unto Caesar the Things Which are Caesar's: Humanism and the Arts in the Patronage of Agostino Chigi

In accounts of Rome's “Golden Age of the Renaissance,” the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (1466-1520) has never quite faded from notoriety. His proverbial wealth and flamboyant personality survive in scattered anecdotes as a glittering sideshow to the grander enterprises of Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Indisputably the richest man in Rome between 1500 and 1520, he is best known today for three artistic commissions connected with Raphael: a chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, his mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the suburban villa known since 1579 as the Farnesina.

Paul Klee and the Mystic Center

In his Jena Lecture of 1924 Paul Klee said, “It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. … In the womb of nature in the primal ground of creation where the secret key to all things lies hidden.”1 Klee's Omphalo-Centric Lecture of 1939 (Fig. 1) can be seen as a restatement of what Klee felt was the mission of all artists: to move toward this mystic center as the beginning of all creative thought. And Klee, as much as any other artist of the 20th century, sought the many paths that would lead him there.

Tommaso Campanella and Andrea Sacchi's Fresco ofDivina Sapienzain the Palazzo Barberini

Under the patronage of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, Andrea Sacchi received in 1629 the first great artistic commission of his career, the vault decoration for a reception room of Urban VIII's papal residence, the Palazzo Barberini.1 Information about the fresco, which takes as its subject the theme of Divine Wisdom, is provided by five contemporary sources. The first, Libra mastro A (1623–1630), Taddeo Barberini's incomplete financial ledger, establishes approximate dating for the work.2 This ledger, which contains only entries for December 1629 through December 1630, speaks in general terms of the “lavori” of Andrea Sacchi without being specific about the project.3 We remain uncertain about the exact date of its completion. A codex from the Barberini Library (Bibl. vat., Barb. lat. 6529, misc. v, fol. 52), first published by Giovanni Incisa della Rochetta, is the earliest, most detailed, and reliable account of the iconography of Sacchi's fresco.4 The other seventeenth-century sources, Tetius's Aedes barb...

Solzhenitsyn's Heroes as Russian Historical Types

The reader familiar with the traditional depiction of the Russian national type in literature cannot fail to be struck by the coincidence of the characteristics of Solzhenitsyn's heroes with those of the paradigm. These are specifically and typically Russian heroes; not merely by setting, but by comparison with assessment of the Russian character. Such a comparison calls on historical Human survival, from the moment of birth, depends largely on the ability to communicate and on a sympathetic human response to distress signals. Communication is a sine qua non not only of social life, but of life itself. Just as infantile mental impressions precede the ability to articulate thought, human knowledge in general has outstripped the ability to communicate knowledge, and the gap itself constitutes one of the parameters of intelligent experience. One of the techniques of breaking through the communications barrier has been the adoption of symbolic conventions. Among such conventions in literature is the use of character types. Typification is literary shorthand. Hamlet and Don Quixote, Faust and Onegin-all represent universal human qualities in exaggerated form. Because their traits are universal, we recognize and understand them; because they ,are exaggerated, they are more immediately apparent, and the author more easily communicates that particular vision of truth that constitutes his artistic mission. History, like literature, is focused on the human kind, but in its collective aspect and over a longer span of time. Solzhenitsyn called One Day of Ivan Denisovich a povest'-a tale. History itself, sub specie aeternitatis, might be called a povest': One Age of Ivan Den-

Music

The first volume of Helmut Osthoff's work on Josquin Desprez (ca. 1440–1521) dealing with the Netherlandish master's biography and his Mass compositions marks an epoch in Josquin research. It is the first monograph devoted to the greatest musical figure of the Renaissance.Josquin's genius was mighty enough to encompass both old and new worlds of music, the old world of masterly contrapuntal construction and of mathematical symbolism of Netherlandish vintage, and the new world of euphonious harmony and of musical expression of Italian and of humanistic origin. As an artistic personality Josquin is a novelty in the world of music: he is the first composer in Western history of whom we can form some picture of personality and of whom we have a goodly number of anecdotes, all of which show him to be endowed with a penetrating sense of his artistic mission and a vast, almost condescending, yet at times melancholy, sense of humor toward the great patrons who commanded his services.