German Art Historian Research Articles

THE AESTHETIC AND SENSUAL IN CULTURE: PAINTING EXPERIENCE AND WINE TASTING IN THE CONCEPTION OF CONNOISSEURSHIP OF MAX FRIEDLÄNDER

The article compares the features of sensory and aesthetic perception using the example of wine tasting and expert judgment about the authorship of a work of art from the standpoint of the philosophy of culture. The comparison belongs to the German art historian and theorist of knowledge M. Friedländer (1867–1958). This comparison might seem more conventionally artistic than able to really explain the specifics of aesthetic perception or reasons for the convergence of such cultural phenomena as wine tasting and artistic style, since taste is the most unreliable and most dependent of our senses, in contrast to vision. But the Belgian art theorist T. Lenain shows how a change in the understanding of a work of art (from a normative idealistic approach to a historicist one), firstly, changes our perception of art (which is now understood as a set of imprinted traces – from the cultural characteristics of the era in which the work was created, to the characteristics of the personality of the artist). Secondly, if a work of art grows as a fruit of a certain style and a certain person, then when we perceive it, we see all the features, all manifestations of this style, and we can judge the authorship – just like a true wine specialist will determine its pedigree in just one sip, true connoisseurs are able to recognise the master’s hand at a glance. Thus, the seemingly exotic comparison of the perception of art with the perception of wine becomes quite justified.

The transhistorical, transcultural life of sausages: From medieval morescas to New Mexican Matachines with Aby Warburg

New Mexican Matachines dances have long been discussed as descendent dances of medieval morescas. This article explores this ‘ancestral relation’, beginning on New Year’s Day in 1896 at the colonial outpost of Cubero, New Mexico. There, the German art historian Aby Warburg met a local shepherd who endeavoured to explain the pantomimic killing of a bull in the dance drama by saying the blood was ‘good for making sausages.’ Accordingly, this article investigates Warburg’s lifelong exploration of Matachines antecedents in the margins of his research on early Italian Renaissance images of medieval festive drama, and ‘headhuntress’ figures, such as Judith and Salome. Warburg’s thoughts on New Mexican Matachines meandered over the course of his life from Aztec sacrifice to medieval morescas, to the Mithras cult. Through these explorations, Warburg pursued a cultural evolutionary theory that would situate New Mexican Matachines as a descendent of antique pagan blood ceremony.

The art of orality: how the absence of writing shapes the character of tribal, ‘primitive’ art

This contribution aims to identify a clear link between whether a culture is oral or literate and their distinct styles of visual art. It looks with particular interest to the interconnectivity between the theories of two thinkers from disparate fields: the American philosopher and theorist of linguistics Walter J. Ong and the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer. It considers what we can learn from the intersectionality of their principal theories: the conception of orality and literacy as delineated by Ong and the conception of abstraction and empathy as elucidated by Worringer. It will be shown how the characteristics of oral peoples as explicated by Ong (that is, people entirely detached from literacy, with no written language, sometimes derogatorily called ‘primitive’, or sometimes tribal peoples) are driven by the same ‘urge to abstraction’ which is identified by Worringer in ion and Empathy. In turn, the reason for certain characteristics of oral art is specifically related to their being detached from literacy; as Ong famously proposed, ‘writing restructures consciousness.’ It will be shown how this is verified by the fact that the movement away from universal styles of oral, abstractive art (such as a constraint to two-dimensionality, use of repeated patterns and symbolic counterparts of figures and objects) towards immersive, empathic art (the mimetic, representational, realistic rendering of space and figures) is historically concurrent with a shift from universal orality to widespread literacy. The implication of this theoretical synchronicity is rather radical, allowing for new theoretical alignments between these fields. It also sheds light on the reason behind concurrent characteristics in the visual art produced by disparate societies across time and cultures: their art is reflective of their status as an ‘oral’ culture.

Mit dem Kreidestift und Farben: Revolutionizing Grünewald in the German Democratic Republic

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.

Британские антиквары в Риме второй половины XVIII века

In the second half of the 18th century, an antique market flourished in Rome. That was largely due to the increased interest in the culture of the Ancient World, associated with excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as with the activities of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was convinced of the need to turn to the art of antiquity, which, in his opinion, had ideal beauty and was capable of cultivating a noble artistic taste. In European countries and in Russia, collections of antiques were formed during that period. Travelers who came to Rome tended to buy ancient sculptures, gems, vases. They turned to antique dealers working in this art market. A special place among the antique dealers belonged to the British, such as Gavin Hamilton, Thomas Jenkins and James Byres. It is largely thanks to their efforts that excellent private collections of ancient art have been formed in Great Britain and interest in art in general has been developing. The article examines the activities of these antique dealers on the examples of two English collectors depicted in the portraits of the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni: William Weddell and Peter Beckford.

Role models versus modes of rule: the foundation of GfZK, a public-private museum in Leipzig

ABSTRACT The history of founding GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig reflects both immediate post-1989 euphoria and the conflicting interests and social fears of that time. In the summer of 1989, a group of West German art enthusiasts (patrons, collectors, and entrepreneurs) travelled to Leipzig to meet the East German art historian Klaus Werner. The latter put forth the idea of establishing a new museum in his town, which the West German colleagues accepted and a plan was set in motion. Still, without its own building, the GfZK organized remarkable exhibitions and projects in public spaces throughout the 1990s. At the same time, concerns evoked that the “imported” novel artistic positions would devalue local art production and that, through their money, the private patrons were gaining disproportionate influence to shape public taste and the concept of art. From today’s perspective, both assumptions can be debunked. Through its financing in a public–private partnership, GfZK has embodied a unique museum model in the eastern German states, and the model has proved to be exceptionally productive even beyond the founding years.

METALINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF POLITE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN AUTHOR AND READER (based on 18th-century German art history texts)

The article aims to study the metalinguistic characteristics of polite communication. The analysis is carried out on the material of German art history texts of the 18th century. Through the comparison of art history texts written by J. J. Winckelmann, J. G. Herder and H. E. Lessing it is being revealed how and for what purpose the authors of these texts use formulas of politeness. The analysis is based on the theoretical foundations of pragmatic linguistics, sociolinguistics and metatext research. The results show that the actualisers of positive politeness include, for example, adjectives with the meaning of confidence, emotional expressions and the inclusive pronoun wir. By using these tools the author seeks to solidarise with the reader in the general academic field. Negative politeness strategies are used by the author to avoid imposing their views on the reader. The following negative politeness strategies were discovered: showing caution by hedging, demonstrating a lack of desire to impose one’s point of view and attributing all responsibility for what is written by personalisation. The results demonstrate that in research articles the reader is actively, albeit invisibly, present in the text. In general, positive politeness strategies are used by researchers to demonstrate solidarity with the fellow researchers and the research community at large. Negative strategies either depersonalise the information conveyed or, on the contrary, personalise it. Both approaches aim not to put any pressure on the reader.

Wilhelm von Bode's Way of Art Appraisal

Wilhelm von Bode, 1845-1929, whose full name is Arnold Wilhelm von Bode, added the word "Feng" to his family name after being granted the title of nobility in 1914. He was a famous German art historian, museum director and founder of museology in the 19th century, and served as the general curator of the Berlin Museum from 1905 to 1920. In Bode's more than half a century long art museum work and art appraisal activities, he has identified countless works of art, and it is impossible to accurately count how many works of art he has evaluated and collected for the Berlin Art Museum and other art museums in Germany. His achievements in art appraisal have almost become a legend. These events recorded in the art history present Bode's specific details and ideas in the work of art appraisal, and more clearly delineate the intricate relationship between art appraisal and other social factors in the country's cultural construction.

From Marginalia to the Museum: The Transfiguration of the Doodle by Gottfried Keller, Hans Prinzhorn, and Jean Dubuffet

In 1922 German art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published his groundbreaking monograph Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, which psychologically and aesthetically analyzed the art of the mentally ill. Tucked away in a footnote is reference to an episode in Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich (1855, 1879/80) when the title artist creates a monstrous web of doodles. This essay explores the implications of Keller’s doodle for Prinzhorn’s thesis along with the re-evaluation of doodling as a legitimate creative gesture. It concludes by following the doodle into the museum through the artworks of Jean Dubuffet, a pioneering force behind outsider art who was influenced by Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei and wielded the doodle as critique against traditional notions of art. Doodles’ journey from marginalia to museum-worthy artworks reveals their subversive power to give voice to those marginalized by society, while also exposing the weaknesses and paradoxes of an outsider art for effecting true institutional reform.

Performance, Colonialism, and Survivals

German art historian Aby Warburg’s 1895–1896 trip through the southwestern US reexamined in the context of late 19th‐century colonialism interjects the ethical stakes of displacement and replacement into one of Warburg’s key theoretical terms, “survival.” Working through how power differentials in colonialism shape the way images and affects survive in performance, an unremarked‐upon Matachines dance is reinstated in this travel narrative.

РОЗМИСЛИ НАД ҐОМБРІХОВИМИ РОЗМИСЛАМИ, або ІСТОРІЯ МИСТЕЦТВА ЯК ЗЛИДЕННА РОДИЧКА МИСТЕЦТВОЗНАВСТВА

Our essay was inspired by the lecture by the German art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) «Reflections on teaching art history in art schools paper given, 4th January, 1966». If no one denies the necessity of giving such a course to artists – the provocative question of how modern art history coincides with modern art science (allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft) or with art theory – makes one wonder not only what kind of specialty students acquire, specializing in history of art, but also over the relationship between different disciplines «within» the science of art. Drawing on a number of specific examples, the article attempts to show the difference between the material an art historian and an art researcher work with. It suggests that the history of art is related to the science of art in the same way as paint is related to colour or as the voice is related to singing, or the past is related to the present. It is shown that an attempt by an art historian to turn this history into modernity harms both the history of art and the modern science of art, which is looking for new motives, methods and techniques and the new style of writing. If when the European science of art just began to take its shape as «the theory and history of art», it was the history of art that was the core around which theoretical generalizations arose like iconography or iconology, now the history of art remains the necessary basis for the professional training of an art researcher – a person who is able to independently consider works of art not in the history of art, but in the history of culture, more precisely, in the very whirlpool of culture, which will become history only tomorrow. The science of art becomes an important element of the general science of culture, where history of art occupies its proper place – knowledge about how humanity produces a valuable, expressive surface of being. However, different means serve different goals. I consider an art researcher a person who resorts to theorizing and increment of artistic meanings, or an art historian, and then resorts to the reproduction of knowledge, and not its increment.

민속품과 미술품 사이에서 : 뮌헨 오대륙박물관과 노르베르트 베버의 1926년 기증품

Museum Five Continents in Munich originates from the royal ethnographic collection of non-European World established by the Wittelsbachs, the ruling house of Bavaria. The appointment of the 3rd Director Lucian Scherman in 1907 marked a turning point for the Museum of Ethnology, which is named Museum Five Continents since 2014. This caused an explosive increase in the number of collections, visitors and acclaimed exhibitions. In the expansion of its Korean collection, a gift in the spring of 1926 made by Norbert Weber, archabbot of the Missionary Benedictines in St. Ottilien, who visited Korea a second time and purchased Korean artifacts in 1925, played such a crucial role. Weber became a special adviser with his expert knowledge and experiences of Korean culture for Scherman, who evaluated his travel book, Im Lande der Morgenstille (in the Land of Morning Calm) published the first edition in 1915, as one of the most important standard works for Korea. The stereoscope pictures, which were founded at the archive of Museum Five Continents in the Summer of 2021, based on Weber’s Korean photos. They might have vividly conveyed the Korean people in ordinary clothing, everyday life, and religion, before the eyes of German visitors to the Munich Museum using a modern visual technique. The correspondence between Scherman and Weber suggests that their relationship did not remain as a personal acquaintance but also enriched the exhibitions of the Munich Ethnological Museum.<BR> Furthermore, in the early 20th century when Scherman started in his role as museum director, avant-garde artists such as Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) began to find their artistic inspiration at the ethnological museums. As art historian Wilhelm von Bode’s Plan and the Berliner Museumskrieg (Berlin Museum War) illustrated, there was a tendency to separate the artworks from the ethnographic collections. However, Scherman, who understood one specific culture as an organic synthesis of folklore articles, arts and crafts and artworks in that region, stayed away from the rearrangement of museum exhibits in Berlin. In addition, he insisted that the role of the Museum of Ethnology in Munich was to promote the aesthetic taste of the public and guide the artists and craftsmen. Consequently, by resisting to divide high culture and the primitives Scherman deviated from the colonial ideology permeated in many ethnological museums in Germany. In this respect, the ethnographica Weber purchased his second trip to Korea and donated to the Museum, were primarily ceramics, such as celadon, responses Scherman’s ideal, collecting not only daily necessities, also the unique artworks which are able to show Korean culture in the reopening of the Museum of Ethnology in the Maximilian street. Notwithstanding, the lack of detailed explanations of the Korean collections or then contemporary criticism of Weber’s donation apparently demonstrates the German’s indifferences towards Korea. Such a phenomenon was caused by the late opening of Korea to foreign countries, in comparison with other eastern Asian neighbours, the absence of valuable antique art under the censorship of the Japanese government in Seoul, and the short stay of German art historians and researchers in Korea. It is hoped that Weber’s collection, which is still silent in the dark storage in Museum Five Continents, discovers a way out as it presents a harmonious combination of ethnology and art under Scherman’s tradition.

ОПЫТ ПРОЧТЕНИЯ КНИГИ ГАБРИЭЛЫ КЛЯЙН «ПИНА БАУШ. ИСКУССТВО ПЕРЕВОДА»

This article reviews a book by the German art historian and dance researcher Gabriele Klein, Pina Bausch. The Art of Translation, one of the first monographs on Pina Bausch to be published in Russian (see also the book published by Garage in 2021). The key concept of the book is the praxeology of translation, which addresses not the subject of translation, but the way it is performed. Thus translation is understood in a broad way as the transfer of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre event into the languages of the audience and critics, into other technical media, into other cultural and historical contexts. Particular attention is paid to the mechanisms of this transfer. The author of this book does not analyze the dramatic narrative of dance, as it is common in theatre studies, but explores dance as gesture delivered with the help of the latest technologies.

Suffering and Emancipation

This paper explores selected images from the Salpêtrière Hospital that were later featured in L'Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. It then compares these images to a nude series of photos of the dancer Claire Bauroff, taken by Viennese photographer Trude Fleischmann in 1925, in which Bauroff’s movements are seemingly impregnated with the hysterical gestures of Charcot’s patients at the Salpêtrière. Hereby, I argue that there are distinct continuities between the exaggerated postures in the Salpêtrière photographs and in Fleischmann’s images of Bauroff. To support this argument, I employ the concept of “pathos formula” posited by German art historian Aby Warburg.

Untranslatable: Gottfried Kinkel, Kulturgeschichte, and British Art Historiography

Abstract In 1934, Edgar Wind claimed there was no English equivalent for the word “kulturwissenschaftlich” and the method it denoted: it was untranslatable. Although German art history had been widely read in England since Victorian times, certain methods, as well as the discipline itself, were only hesitantly received. This article focuses on a decisive moment in this entangled history—an attempt to establish in Britain both art history as an academic discipline and a cultural-historical approach to the subject. The key figure is the dashing art historian Gottfried Kinkel, a close friend of Jacob Burckhardt (and archenemy of Karl Marx), who fled Germany after the 1848 revolution. In 1853, he gave the firstever university lecture in art history in England, the manuscripts of which were recently discovered. Kinkel’s case is a prime example of both a socio-historical approach to art history in Victorian times and an exile’s only partially successful attempt to transmit his methodology to a new audience.

“For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought”. Manuscript terminology across languages and scientific disciplines

The complex terminology used in the description of medieval books in manuscript catalogues and other scientific contributions offers a wide range of possible ambiguities and losses across languages and disciplines, losses that become evident most notably on their crossing paths in the Internet. . Sadly enough, true long-term collaboration across countries and disciplines is more the exception than the rule, which is also why the question of terminology and its translation is frequently neglected. The authors of the present contribution, an Italian codicologist and a German art historian – both of whom have provided lexicographical work tools which have seen several translations) – propose an overview of the work tools currently available (theoretical reflections, dictionaries, multilingual glossaries), followed by a small but significant selection of examples of gaps, ambiguities and other problems regarding the building of a shared multilingual language in manuscript studies.

A Journey of the Soul: Catharsis and Salvation in the Mosaic of Casaranello (Italy, 6th Century)

The church of Santa Maria della Croce in Casaranello (Casarano, Italy, 6th century) is an important paleo-Byzantine testimony in Southern Italy. The building is well preserved and corresponds more or less to its original structure because in the late-medieval age the community of Casaranum decided to move the residential area up the hill overlooking the original hamlet. The German art historian Arthur Haseloff (1872-1955) visited the church in 1907, intrigued by a bibliographic indication by Wladimir De Gruneisen, and he found it in the miserable condition of stall for sheep and goats. When he entered the church, he immediately realised he was in front of one of the most important jewels of the paleochristian art: a treasure fallen into oblivion and whose value deserved to be highlighted. Haseloff summarily analysed the site of Casaranello, paying particular attention to the mosaic. This research promoted a new awareness towards Santa Maria della Croce and laid the basis for the restoration interventions carried out during the second half of the ‘900s. In particular, the restoration and preservation interventions performed between 1971 and 1979 outlined new guidelines for the study of the building and its artistic heritage. In 2018 the writer of this essay published a new interpretation of the mosaic of Casaranello for the Esperidi Editions. In 2020, with Alessandro De Marco, first for Christian-Albrechts-Universität of Kiel (Germany), then for the Edizioni Universitarie Romane, he completed this research with further historical, architectural and artistic notes on the entire building. An unknown figure, depicted in fresco, has been identified as the emperor Constantine the Great, while the mosaic revealed its symbolic message: a cathartic journey of the soul <i>per aspera ad astra</i>.

Kurt Badt. Verlust der Mitte (On the Question of Modernism and the Anti-modernism in mid-20th Century German Art History)

On the example of the activities of the German art historian Kurt Badt, the article reveals the complex relationship between modern art and contemporary art history. The outstanding and, obviously, underestimated figure of the scholar, who throughout his long life was ready to confront the rest of the discipline unwilling to become a part of the university system, with all his creativity embodied the very idea of freedom that modern artists and sympathizing art critics strove for. Due to the availability of English-language versions of the art historian’s texts mainly on the masters close to modern art — Delacroix, Constable, and Cézanne — his position in the dispute about modernism seems more or less unambiguous. The aim of this article is to show that this is far from the case, discovering the points of contact of Badt with many of his colleagues who have earned a reputation as unconditional conservatives. First of all, it concerns the Austrian art theorist Hans Sedlmayr, an interest for whom, especially in recent times, is predetermined by widespread ideas about the fundamental incompatibility of academic art history with attempts of unbiased consideration of the history of modern art. Moreover, a deep kinship of such research activity with the most reactionary political ideas is also widely discussed, which, as it should be noted, this outstanding critic of the modern culture was not absolutely innocent of. Nevertheless, his clash with Badt, a polemic that took place in the 1950s and 60s, centered on the work of not Cézanne, but Vermeer van Delft, can be considered from the point of view of the attitude of the two scholars to phenomena less distant in time. This makes it possible to raise the question of the paradoxical similarity of the views of these two authors — with such a different creative and human destiny.

Antonio Rosmini Reader and Interpreter of Winckelmann’s Work

The essay focuses on the never-before-discussed comparison of Rosmini’s thought with Winckelmann’s work. In 1811 Rosmini began reading the French translation of the Histoire de l’Art de l’Antiquite (1781), a text that will be constantly present in all his subsequent reflections on Greek art. Over the years Rosmini consulted and used at least two other important writings by the German art historian: the Reflexions sur l’imitation des Artistes Grecs dans la Peinture & la Sculpture (1764-1765), also in its French translation, and the Monumenti antichi inediti (1768).

Cassirer et Panofsky : un malentendu philosophique

Cassirer and Panofsky: A Philosophical Misunderstanding This paper argues that German art historian and iconologist Erwin Panofsky unintentionally misused the concept of "symbolic form" coined by his friend and colleague, philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Although both shared the same neo-Kantian background, I contend that Panofsky clung to Kant’s dualistic theory of knowledge, while Cassirer explicitly adopted a non-dualistic way of thinking largely inspired by Goethean morphology. That is why Panofsky could distinguish between the "natural" space of perception and the cultural space of artistic representation, when Cassirer refused such a possibility. In so doing, Panofsky proved that he totally missed Cassirer’s point: according to the philosopher of symbolic forms, there is no such thing as a "nature," unless this "nature" is grasped as inherently cultural and historical.