Horizontal Art History 13 April 2023 Piotr Piotrowski (1952-2015) Centres and Peripheries • ‘The history of European art has been largely the history of a number of centres, from each of which a style has spread out. For a time, whether short or long, this style dominates the art of the period, turning in effect into an international style, while remaining metropolitan at the centre and becoming more and more provincial as it reaches the periphery. A style docs not develop spontaneously over a large area . It is the creation of a centre, a single unit that provides the impulse. The centre may be small, like fifteenth century Florence, or large, like Paris before the war, but it has the self-confidence and coherence of a metropolis.’ Sir Kenneth Clark, Provincialism (London, 1962) p. 3 London Paris Berlin Madrid Rome Florence Venice Vienna Amsterdam Main Art Centres in Europe, 1400 – 1900 According to standard accounts of art history e.g. •Fauré, Histoire de l’art (1921) •Henri Focillon, Art of the West (1938) •Gombrich, Story of Art (1950) •Germain Bazin, A Concise History of Art (1958) Munich Bruges/ Ghent Milan Renaissance Italy The major centres: •Florence •Rome •Venice •Naples •Milan Giotto (Florence) Donatello (Florence) Botticelli (Florence) Masaccio (Florence) Raphael (Rome) Leonardo (Milan) Bramante (Milan / Rome) Michelangelo (Florence / Rome) Bellini (Venice) Titian (Venice) Vasari (Florence) A statue of a person Description automatically generated with low confidence A person in a red robe Description automatically generated with low confidence A person in a uniform holding a shield Description automatically generated with low confidence Defining Centres • ‘One could indeed define the artistic center as a place characterized by the presence of a large number of artists and important groups of patrons who, moved by various motivations – be it their family or self pride, their wish for hegemony, or their quest for eternal salvation – are ready to invest part of their wealth in works of art. This latter point implies evidently that the center must be a place where considerable surplus wealth flows in, which can be directed toward artistic production.’ • Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art History, ‘ Art in Translation 1.1 (2009) p. 9.’ The ‘centres’ of European modernism, 1870 – 1939 •Paris •Berlin •Moscow •Vienna (until 1918) •Munich •Rome / Milan •London The ‘peripheries’ of European modernism: •Prague •Budapest •Warsaw •Madrid •Bucharest •Helsinki •Vienna (after 1918) •Glasgow The peripheries of the peripheries: •Bratislava •Košice •Athens •Salzburg •Edinburgh •Szentendre • Symbolic Domination …. ‘ … the forced adoption of stylistic and iconographical models from the center; the elaboration by the latter of differentiated style codes, some aimed at the center, and the others at the periphery; the pillaging of the symbolic goods of subjected lands; the exodus of the best talents from the periphery toward the center, and the drift toward the latter of works carrying a high symbolic potential.’ • Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography,’ p. 26 > Statue of a man sitting upon a horse and lifting his right arm > > The ‘Master – Slave’ Dialectic (from Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Stages of development of consciousness: 1.Desire, where consciousness is directed at things other than itself 2.Master-slave, where consciousness is directed at another conscious being 3.Universal self-conscious, where a conscious being recognizes itself in another, equal consciousness. The Myth of the ‘Master – Slave’ Dialectic 1.At first, a conscious being tries to treat another conscious being like an object that it can achieve mastery over 2. 2.A struggle arises between two conscious beings and eventually the winner demands recognition and subordinates the other 3. 3.For Hegel, this is a failed relationship, since recognition of mastery is achieved through compulsion 4. 4.For Hegel, true self-consciousness arises only through free and mutual recognition of two conscious being Significance of the Myth of the ‘Master – Slave’ Dialectic 1.A model for understanding social relations (they are always based on conflict and demand for recognition, e.g. Marx’s notion of class struggle) 2.A model for understanding racial and colonial relations (e.g. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks [1967] argues that due to colonial oppression, white colonizers are not fully self-aware) 3. 3.A model for understanding centre-periphery relations in art history (Piotrowski argues that the centre does not know itself due to its refusal of recognition of the ‘periphery’) Symbolic Domination •Hungarian Fauvism A cover of a magazine Description automatically generated with low confidence •Exhibitions at Museum of Fine Art, Dijon (2009) • • City Hall of Brussels (2010-11) 4618.bmp L: Claude Monet, Poppies at Argenteuil (1873) R: Pál Szinyei Merse, Poppies in the Field (1902) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Szinyei_Merse%2C_P%C3%A1l_-_Poppies_in_the_Field _%281902%29.jpg http://artmight.com/albums/2011-02-07/art-upload-2/m/Merse-Pal/Merse-Pal-Szinywi-Mai-feast-breakfas t-in-Nature-Sun.jpg L: Pál Szinyei Merse, Luncheon in May (1873) R: Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) Attendance at Académie Julian (1901-7) in Paris by young Hungarian artists, such as: Dezső Czigány Béla Czóbel Csaba Vilmos Perlrott Róbert Berény Some also study at the Académie Matisse (1908) Exhibit in Paris at the Salon d’automne and the Salon des indépendants. Frequent visitors at the Salon of Gertrude Stein in Paris Dezső Czigány, Self Portrait (1909) http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/gelber/Images/gelber11-13-1.jpg Académie Matisse 1907 – 1911 Hungarian students included: Géza Bornemisza Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba Hungarian Fauvism.tif Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba School of Painters (1907) Hungarian Fauvism_0013.tif Hungarian Fauvism_0014.tif Desző Cigány – Actress with Yellow Hat (1907) Károly Kernstock – Portrait of a Young Girl (1909) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fb/Matisse-Woman-with-a-Hat.jpg Henri Matisse Women with Hat (1905) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Signac_The_Port_of_Saint-Tropez.jpg?uselang=en-g b L: Paul Signac The Port of Saint Tropez (1901) R: Georges Seurat Les Poseuses (1888) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Georges_Seurat_-_Les_Poseuses.jpg Hungarian Fauvism_0011.tif Béla Czóbel – Street in Paris (1905) http://artmight.com/albums/2011-02-07/art-upload-2/r/Rippl-Ronai-Jozsef-Hungarian/img265.jpg József Rippl-Ronai – Park with Nudes (1910) 18a MÁRFFY Ödön, Furdo nok.Aktos kompozicio, 1909, ol v, JPM Pécs.jpg Ödön Márffy Composition with Nudes (1909) Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses (1894-1905) Hungarian Fauvism_0006.tif Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba, Nudes in the Open Air (Eden) (1909) Henri Matisse, Bonheur de vivre (1905) Symbolic Domination •Czech Cubism L: Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Violin (1912) R: Picasso, Woman and Pears (Fernande) (1909) Emil Filla, Head (1912) Bohumil Kubišta, Smoker (Self-Portrait) (1910) Georges Braque L: Violin and Palette (1909) R: The Portuguese Woman (1911) Georges Braque, The Portuguese, 1911, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 81 cm (Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland) L: Bohumil Kubišta, Train in the Tunnel (1913) R: Kubišta, The Hanged Man (1915) Picasso Still Life with Compôte and Glass (1914) L: Juan Gris – The Table (1914) R: Picasso – Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper (1913) Vincenc Kramář, Cubism (Brno, 1921) Vincenc Kramář (1877-1960) Josef Chochol, Vila Kovařovicova, Prague (1912-13) Josef Chochol Apartment block, Vyšehrad, Prague (1914) Jan Koula, Modern Czech Architecture and its Development in the 20th Century (Prague, 1940) Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (Prague, 1930) Zdeněk Kratochvíl, Le plus grand cirque cubist, Umělecký měsíčník (1914) ‘Only the institutional entanglement of the creative work of the four architects with the activities of the artists involved in the Prague Skupina speaks in favour of using the term ‘Cubism’ in connection with Czech architecture from the period after 1912. … it has a paradoxical consequence: it devalues the originality and conceptual depth of Czech ‘modern art’ and reduces it merely to being a marginal articulation of the convergence of the Prague periphery and the Parisian centre.’ Jindřich Vybíral, Český kubismus na trhu symbolických statků in Michal Novotný , ed., Kubismus v české architektuře. Sto let poté (Prague, 2013) p. 18 and 19 Horizontal Art History • Piotrowski, ‘Towards a Horizontal Art History’ p. 54 Some principles: •Approach the ‘center’ from the viewpoint of the periphery ‘the marginal observer sees that the center is cracked’ •Critique the ‘canon’ and ‘style’: both of these are not as uniform as the ‘center’ imagines •‘A canon is always an effect of an analytical and historical construction’ (p. 55) •Dismantle the opposition between ‘universal’ (i.e. French / German / US) modernism and ‘national / local’ (i.e. Czech / Polish / Hungarian / Slovak) modernism •Relativize the center – ‘French’ modernism is also a ‘local’ modernism •‘Transnational’ art history - ‘negotiating values and concepts along other lines than the opposition of the national versus the international’ (p. 58) • Alfred Barr Cubism and Abstract Art (New York, 1936) IRWIN, Eastern European Art Map