Universal – International – Global: Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe [1 ed.] 9783412520830, 9783412520816

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Beáta Hock, Antje Kempe, Marina Dmitrieva (eds.)

Universal – International – Global Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe

Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte Edited by Robert Born, Michaela Marek †, and Ada Raev Volume 13

Antje Kempe, Beáta Hock, and Marina Dmitrieva (Eds.)

UNIVERSAL – INTERNATIONAL – GLOBAL Art Historiographies of Socialist Eastern Europe

Böhlau Verlag WIEN Köln

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.de. © 2023 by Böhlau, Lindenstraße 14, 50674 Köln, Germany, an imprint of the Brill-Group (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Germany, Brill Österreich GmbH, Vienna, Austria) Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, Verlag Antike and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Umschlagabbildung: Mangelos (Dimitrije Bašičević): Manifest vlaškovulicanski [Manifesto of Vlačka Street],  1977 – 78 (detail). Collection of the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana / Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana. Cover design: Michael Haderer, Wien Typesetting: büro mn, Bielefeld Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-52083-0

Table of Contents Antje Kempe / Marina Dmitrieva Introduction   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global or International? Reconsidering Socialist Art Histories

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35

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Platforms of Exchange and Knowledge Transfer Maja Fowkes / Reuben Fowkes Art History in a Suitcase   . . . . . . . . . . . The Itinerary of Art Trends in Socialist Art Criticism

Krista Kodres Translations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dissemination of Socialist Art History in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s Mária Orišková Shifts and Gaps in the Paradigm of Socialist Internationalism   . . . . . Czechoslovak Exhibitions Abroad, 1956 – 1988

Rereading Source Text: Peter H. Feist A Problematic Neighborship   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kunstwissenschaft in the GDR in its Relation to the History of Art and Kunstwissenschaft in the Neighboring East-Central European Countries Antje Kempe Commentary on Feist’s Text  . .

Integration and Adaptation Ivan Gerát Holy Warriors in Socialist Czechoslovakia  . . Modernists, Iconology and Traditions

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Éva Forgács Towards a European Integration of the Arts and the Art Discourse, 1945 –  1 948   . . . . . . .

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138

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Douglas Gabriel / Adri Kácsor Fraternal Encounters   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socialist Art and Architecture between Budapest and Pyongyang in the 1950s



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Elena Sharnova Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools   . . . . . . A Concept in Soviet-Russian Art History

Rereading Source Text: Dmitri V. Sarabianov Introduction to the book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Comparative Approach (1980) Marina Dmitrieva Commentary on Sarabianov’s Text   . .

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Intercontinental Encounters – Creating New Geographies Corinne Geering Encompassing the World within Regions   . . . . . Soviet Scholars and the Politics of Socialist Internationalism in UNESCO’s Cultural Studies

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Rereading Source Text: Lajos Vayer The General Development and Regional Developments in the History of Art   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Situation in ‘Central Europe’ Robert Born Commentary on Vayer’s Text  

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Piotr Juszkiewicz Modern, Primitive, Folk and Socialist  . . . . . . . . . . Mexican Art in Polish Art History and Art Criticism, 1949 – 1972

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Rereading Source Text: Jan Białostocki On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru   Antje Kempe Commentary on Białostocki’s Text   List of Illustrations   . . Contributors   Index  

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Introduction Global or International? Reconsidering Socialist Art Histories “If we embark on the global study of art, we have to give up any privileged point of reference. The pure play of exchanges, connections, and influences will hardly give us answers we would need”, wrote Jan Białostocki in his article A Comparative History of World Art, Is It Possible?  1 Białostocki’s text reviews new methodological approaches discussed some three years before at the 1979 congress of the International Committee of Art History (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art / CIHA) in Bologna. The author proposed that art history should tackle art from non-European regions in relevant ways and within the framework of existing art history.2 In this regard, Białostocki also contemplated what changes are possible in art history related to fostering novel topics and the very meaning of notions such as ‘art’ and ‘history’. He thus posed the following questions: “To what degree can we actually assume universality of art history? Do we mean the same discipline, do we formulate identical or similar premises related to its geographic and chronological content when we use the term ‘art history’ in San Francisco, London, Sofia, or New Delhi?” 3 Here, Białostocki virtually addresses the same methodological dilemmas and objectives that came to shape art historical writing since a global turn in the 2000s that has emphasized non-European cultures, engagement of various regions, and asymmetries in the writing, framing, and exhibiting of non-Western artifacts. In this, scholars have discussed the phenomena of mobility, migration, and circulations of artists and objects.4 The 1990s are often regarded in this context as an important watershed for the examination, evaluation, and reworking of relevant disciplinary concepts and objectives; at the same time, the decade also marked the collapse of Soviet rule over East-Central Europe. The exhibitions such as Les Magiciens de la Terre (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989), The Other Story (Hayward Gallery, London, 1989/1990) and the 3rd Havana Biennial (1989), 1 Białostocki 1982, 210. 2 Białostocki refers to the common practice of non-Western art being addressed by separate university department(s), or being compartmentalized in separate volumes in survey books such as the Pelican History of Art (1953 – 1958) or Mikhail Alpatov’s Vseobshchaya istoriya iskusstv [General History of the Arts] (1949 – 1955). 3 Białostocki 1982, 207. 4 A host of publications addressed these crucial questions from the mid-2000s on: Elkins 2007. – Zijlmans / Damme 2008. – Juneja 2011. – Kaufmann / Dossin / Joyeux-Prunel 2015. – Mattos Avolese / Condurn 2017. – Bachmann / Klein / Mamine / Vasold 2017.

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which had just become topical, set out to counteract ethnocentric practices within the contemporary art world, opening it up to a more global scale. Nevertheless, this focus on the 1990s can and has been questioned by remembering earlier phases of global interaction and the discipline’s historiography. In one of the initial outcomes of a global opening process, the 2008 volume World Art Studies, edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, Ulrich Pfisterer refers to the very “beginnings” of ‘global’ art history outlined in Weltkunstgeschichte, as coined by prominent representatives of the Vienna School of Art History, including Julius von Schlosser and Alois Riegl, or later the German art historian Oskar Beyer. Pfisterer – as well as Birgit Mersmann and Joseph Imorde in their remarks on the museum and on institutional and conceptual orientations of a world art history in the process of emerging – indicates that a turn to non-European artifacts as parameters for comparison questions the tenacity of essential disciplinary tools such as period style, historical canon, or the conceptualization of artworks as heritage.5 The attention of scholars like Beyer in his book Welt-Kunst. Von der Umwertung der Kunstgeschichte has been placed less on the order of cultural-geographical structures and more on an opening up to other methodological approaches to understanding social and cultural conditions of creation and production of artistic works.6 In this ongoing historiographical and disciplinary inquiry, the legacy of Josef Strzygowski as an early critic of a strong Eurocentric orientation of art history has been widely discussed. While Strzygowski proposed a poly­ phonic, cyclical art history encompassing artistic phenomena from Arabian and Asian contexts, he also connected his approaches with a paradigm of racial determination.7 At the same time, scholars trained in Graz and Vienna adapted his approach of a polyphonic art history, in which each element of this polyphony was based on an original, singular and essential core trait, in the new Eastern European states that emerged after World War I as a way of defining and legitimizing their unique art histories. Therefore, the initial questioning of universally understood patterns through the inclusion of non-European cultures has been rather dispersed and complex in questioning universalism as a legacy of the Enlightenment. However, it has led to a productive methodological opening and a preliminary negotiation of artistic developments and productions. The end of the 20th century saw a departure from basic collectivities such as ‘art’ and ‘history’. The discipline thus fell into a crisis accompanied by a still ongoing process of reflection and exploring disciplinary approaches/boundaries to overcome 5 Pfisterer 2008. – On the concept and orientation of Weltkunstgeschichte, see also Mersmann 2014, 329 – 344. – Imorde 2017. 6 Beyer 1923. 7 This was essential to the book Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften in 1923. Strzygowski 1923. On Strzygowski and his approach, see Pfisterer 2008. – Rees 2012, particularly 37 f., 46. – Vasold 2017. On the concept and orientation of Weltkunstgeschichte see also Mersmann 2014, 329 – 344. – Imorde 2017.

Introduction |

Western and hegemonic manifestations in art history. An increasingly pluralistic particularity displaced the universal.

Questioning Cold War Bipolarity Taking 1989 too readily as a threshold, however, might insinuate that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the bipolar world order, the way for globalization was suddenly paved. Such a perception tends to foreground a new dominant division between the global South and the global North, replacing the earlier East/West geopolitical binary. This view reduces the Cold War to a bipolar confrontation that ignores other actors, primarily cultural interdependencies. The text by Białostocki quoted at the beginning of this introduction shows that there were efforts, calling for more global dimensions on an international stage, to overcome Western domination and a national framing of art history. James Mark, Arting Kalinovsky and Steffi Marung have already pointed out that “the histories of Socialism in Europe rarely take into consideration how the trajectories in other world regions and transregional connections are part of their histories, too.” 8 The assumption that a preoccupation with the former colonial world was a new post1989 phenomenon overlooks and neglects former endeavors in the Eastern and Western hemispheres that had moved in the same direction, among them the exceptional presentation of the African collection at the Völkerkunde Museum in Leipzig, today the Grassi Museum. Perhaps for the very first time in museological history, the artifacts on display were not divided according to ethnological criteria. Instead, European modern art and works from non-European areas stood side by side.9 Also, journals such as the Czechoslovakian Nový Orient (since 1945) and its corresponding English-language version, New Orient Bimonthly, exhibited and published art from around the world, displaying an example of the assumed universal language of art. At around the same time, a wave of biennials, including the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts (founded in 1955) and the first Biennale for Mediterranean Countries (first held in 1955), organized by Spain, Syria, and non-aligned states, were held and promoted as instruments of cultural policy. Such events can be interpreted as a calculated cosmopolite exhibition policy looking beyond 8 Mark / Kalinovsky / Marung 2020, 3. Also other authors have briefly pointed out this dimension of entanglement. See Rampley et al. 2012. – Joyeux-Prunel 2017. 9 On the politically-ideologically driven yet peculiarly pioneering mission of the Museum for Ethnology in Leipzig (Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig, today the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig), see also Schorch 2018. In discussing the exhibition Völker Australiens und Ozeaniens (1970), Schorch comments on how this “Marxist museology” was unique in Europe in that it addressed the colonial past and current anti-colonial struggles. See also Tchibozo 2017.

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the binary of the First and Second World.10 Also, contemporary museum practices that collected modern art from India or Latin America took the challenge of exhibiting art from non-European regions while framing their shows with the topical issues of anti-colonialism and fights for independence.11 Of particular interest is how it became evident that the mentioned museums and collections became places to come into contact with contemporary art for instance from India or the Middle East.12 A first glimpse of this dynamic was provided by a study by Olga Nefedova. She drew attention to exhibitions of modern art from Iraq that were held in Moscow, Baku, and Odessa in the late 1950s based on a bilateral agreement of the Soviet Union and Iraq to foster cultural exchange. While the exhibitions received great interest, the author showed there was a range of opposing opinions on them, as evidenced on entries in the exhibition guest books. As Nefedova points out, national traditions and Socialist Realism were the main points of reference for the reception of this modern Iraqi art.13 Further contact points were the mentioned Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts and the Intergrafik Trienniale in Berlin, which was founded in 1965 by the Association of [East] German Artists and strongly dominated by the political and aesthetic dimensions of Socialist Realism to show alternative formations of art. As Jérôme Bazin highlighted in his study on the art geography of Communist Europe, realist art was equipped with references to local space and to an assumed universal art that produced “a special kind of internationalism” through the traveling of images.14 This presents the question of how far these achievements were reflected and adapted in study, writing, and narratives of art history in the Socialist Bloc. Are the relationships shown here to be understood as a process largely of imagined communities connected by a universal language of Socialist Realism, as mentioned by Bazin? In this respect, we can ask whether Socialist Realism, which even in Socialist countries was often not the main and determining style of art, was really the core of a universal language or was rather supposed to still convey the ideal of Graeco-Roman antiquity and 19th-century art of Realism as common for all European art. Art historical and aesthetic borders thus would not be changed and the search for and claim of universality can be understood as fig leaves for a manifestation of Eurocentric patterns. Wanting to embrace the cultures of the so-called Third World and the decolonizing world has had its specific dilemmas. One of these is the crucial question of whether the 10 Keynote lecture by Anthony Gardner at the conference Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary: Transnational Art Historiographies from Eastern and East-Central Europe (Leipzig, 23 – 25 November 2017). 11 Wille 2019. – Nefedova 2019. 12 See Wille 2019. 13 Nefedova 2019. 14 Bazin 2014, 42, 43 – 48. For further insights see: Bazin / Dubourg Glatigny / Piotrowski 2016.

Introduction |

above-listed exhibitions and other comparable projects simply aestheticized and displayed the work of distant cultures or made conscious attempts to subvert the illusion of Eurocentric superiority in the field of artistic representation. A possible and frequent error totalizes the superpower rivalry between the First and Second Worlds by adopting a simplified scheme of Americanization versus Sovietization. The Third World becomes reduced to a mere field of conflicting claims for political and economic influence and not as diverse groups of actors. Translated into the realm of the high arts, this binary model suggests an equally simplistic view of the Cold War as a rivalry between two universalizing myths: one governed by Modernism and the other by Socialist Realism – a concept that has been critically negotiated in recent years.15 However, the slowly emerging connections, the cultural and artistic relationships – for instance between Cuba and Angola, or India and Eastern European states, as expressed in architecture, graphics, and exhibitions – erode this ‘bipolar’ logic.16

Questioning ‘Socialist Internationalism’ While we can note a comprehensive discussion about the artistic production of Socialist Europe and its framing in narratives, art historiography was until recently only partly visible in this discourse. A series of conferences going back to the initiative of Krista Kodres and Marina Dmitrieva and organized by the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Chair of Art History of Eastern Europe at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO ) shifted scholarly attention from art practice to the writing of art history by pointing to its theoretical underpinnings, methodologies, and legacies. The first event, Art History and Socialism(s) after World War II: The 1940s until the 1960s, was hosted by the Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, in October 2016.17 This opening scholarly meeting focused on the first postwar decades. It examined the heritage left behind by ‘Socialist’ art historians and the institutions they worked at, the exhibitions they organized, the academic texts they produced, and the local discourses they derived from the Marxist-Leninist aesthetics handed down by Moscow. The second event, Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary, from which the present volume emerges, took place a year later, at the GWZO in Leipzig.18 A third conference, 15 Segal / Scott-Smith / Romijn 2012. – Lange / Hildebrandt / Pietrasik 2020. 16 Nadine Sieger at the congress Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary: Transnational Art Historiographies from Eastern and East-Central Europe (Leipzig, 23 – 25 November 2017). 17 Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019. 18 Socialist Internationalism and the Global Contemporary: Transnational Art Historiographies from Eastern and East-Central Europe (Leipzig, 23 – 25 November 2017) https://arthist.net/archive/16708.

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organized by Katja Bernhardt, took place in January 2020 at the Humboldt University of Berlin, with the title Marxism(s) in Art Historiography.19 With the present publication, we are thus contributing to exploring the historiography of Eastern European art history as a research field that has developed in the last decades.20 The Leipzig conference called for revisiting ‘universal art history’ (Всеобщая история искусств) and Weltkunstgeschichte as they were introduced in the countries of the Socialist Bloc under the aegis of Socialist Internationalism. It explored the possibility of identifying alternative starting points of global art history and world art studies: branches that have broadened our discipline’s geographical and methodological scope in recent years. Rossen Djagalov’s book From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds was published literally while we were writing this introduction, and we were glad to discover that the author took a similar approach in narrating the story of cultural relations between the Second and the Third Worlds. In Djagalov’s view, Soviet Internationalism profoundly shaped Cold War–era cultural alliances between these world regions aspiring for a degree of independence from Western formations and, thereby, permitted the drawing up of an alternate genealogy of contemporary post-colonial studies.21 It is well known that being part of the Soviet sphere of influence demanded a great degree of uniformity across different countries regarding the administration of artistic life and the general nature of art-critical and historical discourses. However, belonging to the Bloc also involved an enforced allegiance between ‘friendly states’ across continents in the name of ideological solidarity between peoples struggling for common goals. The transfers and exchanges resulting from this kind of Socialist Internationalism have only started to receive scholarly attention, although they significantly shaped both the Socialist world and beyond during the Cold War.22 The Leipzig conference suggested a tentative link between internationalism as a political and cultural diplomatic principle and the frameworks for writing and teaching art history that were promoted in Socialist times. 19 Marxism(s) in Art Historiography (Berlin, 31 January – 02 February 2020) https://arthist.net/archive/​ 20793. 20 Related publications include Born / Janatkova / Labuda 2004. – Azatyan 2009. – Bakoš 2010. – Rampley et al. 2012. – Born 2013. – Bernhardt / Kempe 2015. – Dmitrieva / Kempe 2015. – ­Bartlová 2016. – Marek / Pluchařová-Grigienė 2016. 21 Djagalov 2020, esp. 3 – 31. Noteworthy in this context is also the volume Socialism Goes Global. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization, edited by James Mark and Paul Betts, Oxford University Press 2022, which appeared during the edition of our book. In that volume one of the chapters is dedicated to the cultural entanglements between the Soviet Union and the Third World. Also Kerstin Schenkweiler and Lena Geuer started to research the topic of global GDR in recent time. 22 See for instance Babiracki / Jersild 2016.

Introduction |

A question emerged and gained importance in this correlation: How did art historians develop and practice art history within the frame of national art histories under Soviet hegemony and beyond? Does the Socialist idea of solidarity and internationalism as overarching shared ideologies interfere with the allegedly universal notion of nationally framed art history? The present collection of essays is based on the Leipzig conference and seeks to call into question the perception that the Cold War was a conflict-ridden relationship between only two major protagonists. With this intention, we agree with Noemi De Haro García, Patricia Mayayo, and Jesús Carrillo, the editors of Making Art History in Europe after 1945, who point out in the introduction of their book an urgent need to overcome the East/ West dyad even within European art history itself and give space to multiple authorial voices.23 It is necessary to add that the Eastern Bloc, or Second World, cannot be examined as a single homogenous entity. Here, too, the approach by Steffi Marung, Uwe Müller, and Stefan Troebst interprets the Eastern Bloc as a historical formation – an experiment, even – determined by entangled national, transregional, and international dimensions of competition.24 While working on this book, the editors asked themselves again and again: Is it worth critically questioning such concepts as Universalism or Socialist Internationalism, which have suffered from the dust of time and propagandistic misuse, in order to discuss them as the premonition discourse of global art history? What is hidden behind the central product of Socialist art historiography – the universal (general) art history: only the hegemonic claim? Or, at the same time, a non-hierarchical inclusion of non-European cultures within the spectrum of disciplinary interests? In this book, we aim to shed light on the complexities of the Socialist world, which is bound up in a national/domestic and hemispheric framework. Picking up on the term ‘internationalism’, we ask if Socialist globalization was more than a state-initiated project, as Mark, Kalinovsky, and Marung argued in their book concerning alternative globalization as seen from a more political-historical perspective. In this respect, we do not position ‘universal’, ‘international’, or ‘global’ as successive paradigms or opposites; however, we are interested in examining them as interwoven trajectories that shape art history after World War II. We aim to interrogate whether internationalism as an ideological, cultural-political buzzword provides a conventionally considered opposite to a national paradigm. Did it help to develop translocal and transregional approaches to art history as a ‘common plural’ in the Socialist countries? How far has this orientation changed and negotiated the understanding of universalism as a shared art historical knowledge system during that time? We thus must reflect on the complexity, diversity, and disparity of art histories in Eastern and Central Europe and their entanglements in and beyond the region. 23 De Haro García / Mayayo / Carrillo 2020. 24 Marung / Müller / Troebst 2019.

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Taking notions of universalism, internationalism, and the global as a point of departure in the examination and comparison of practices, ideas, and processes of institutionalization in Socialist art historiography, we recognize possible pitfalls which might occur with the use of such terms. For instance: How far can we analyze Socialist art historiographies through the lens of our current understanding and conceptualization of a global art history, which is shaped mostly by post-colonial studies? In the aftermath of 1989 and in the context of the broad reception of Edward Said’s study on Orientalism, the terms ‘Other’ and ‘Otherness’ were applied to Eastern Europe in order to highlight the inequalities of perception, distribution, and recognition of cultural phenomena and knowledge production.25 Nevertheless, Piotr Piotrowski, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, and many others pointed out that it is challenging to adapt post-colonial theories to this particular historical context.26 While Joyeux-Prunel suggested that post-socialist art history requires a reading aware of the cultural and mental gap created by decades of totalitarian regimes,27 Piotrowski criticized the reproduction of a simplification and homogenization of European conditions by these post-colonial perspectives, as they consider Europe as an entity and do not take into account heterogeneities and intercontinental differentiations. He also argued that Russians and Poles, despite their cultural and historical differences, move in a similar episteme and possess some form of kinship. Therefore, that relationship is marked by political hegemony but no internal ‘Otherness.’ Instead, he proposed the need to expand and integrate art from Eastern Europe into alter-globalistic art history by referring to the art historical hierarchical term of the periphery as a driving force to rethink and rewrite artistic production beyond Westernness.28 In this context, he ironically re-used one of the most influential phrases of the Communist Manifesto that called for international response: “Peripheries of the World, Unite!” 29 When we focus on internationalism, we also have to ask ourselves how far we can use this notion for critical readings of Socialist art history. The Lexikon der Kunst, an ambitious publication project in five volumes produced by East German art historians, contains an entry on Internationalismus und Kunst (Internationalism and Art). The brief passage is divided into two parts: The first section, drawing on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, presents internationalism as the fundamental ideological principle governing the 25 Kiossev 1995. In regard to this paradigm see also Todorova 2005. – Ţichindeleanu 2011. – Tlostanova 2017. – Annus 2016. – András 2004. – Hornyik 2017. – Kołodziejczyk / Şandru 2017. – Piotrowski 2018. 26 On Eastern Europe critique in a global world, see András 2017. – Joyeux-Prunel 2017, 434. – Hock 2018. 27 Joyeux-Prunel 2017, 434. 28 Piotrowski 2018, 35 – 38. 29 Piotrowski 2018, 9 – 30.

Introduction |

revolutionary working class. The second relates internationalism to the notion of the nation as a dialectical unity of national and international, characterized by alternating processes of appropriation and demarcation, competition and cooperation. It describes how in the process of bourgeois exploitation of the world market, national one-sidedness in cultural production is becoming more and more impossible. The economy is thus declared the primary field or, better, the engine of exchange. However, the closing sentences of the entry stress: “This tendency toward internationalization is, however, not synonymous with the disappearance of unique natural features or regional peculiarities consciously expressed in the arts.” 30 This sentence is remarkable, as it slightly changes Marx’s approach from a national to a regional orientation. Originally, Marx’s internationalism was determined by a national framing because, he argued, proletarians had to win the class struggle in their countries before fighting global inequalities caused by capitalist exploitation. We might say that Marx oversaw the global dimension of capitalism and limited his approach to the proletariat of industrial societies. Under Stalin, the term internationalism changed from having a proletarian connotation, based on the idea of egalitarian cooperation between working classes of various countries, to a more political orientation which, in practice, meant Soviet domination.31 The new national orientation became manifest when Stalin disbanded the Third International (1919 – 1943) in order to enforce ‘Socialism in one country’, underlining the necessity to fulfil the revolution in Russia first. Interpretation of the term was not stable and involved a dichotomy between a more ‘national,’ state-oriented alignment and an ‘international’ one under the umbrella of Soviet-dominated ideology.32 The publication history of the Lexikon der Kunst may be an example of those interwoven spatial dimensions, as its individual volumes were first published between 1969 and 1978 and were strongly oriented toward a ‘German national culture’ (deutsche Nationalkultur) as it was formulated and outlined in various papers of historians and art historians, wherein ‘national’ is taken to mean related to the art located within the borders of both German states. However, a second edition was equipped with a more global direction, encompassing other regions and their artistic productions.33 However, the question of shared national traditions in the context of a Marxist ­Socialist world art was reflected in GDR research also in other fields. For example, Harald Olbrich, who taught at Humboldt University in Berlin, asked in an essay in the leading journal Bildende Kunst about the relationship between the national and the international. In 30 31 32 33

Internationalismus und Kunst 1970, 447 f. (Translation by the authors.) Gleb 2012, 85 – 119. For Hungary, see for instance: Litkei 2017, 249 – 283. Baier 2010, 382 f.

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this context he also brought up Volkskunst – a term that can be understood more in the sense of Popular Art than Folk Art – in relation to the national and the international dialectic.34 Olbrich’s arguments thus fit the tendency towards the internationalization of the leftist movements in the first decades of the 20th century in the name of a post-imperialist culture that used to merge popular traditions in order to create a new world art.35 If one follows his further argumentation, it becomes clear, though, that he understood Folk/Popular Art in the sense of historical materialism, which also saw Socialist Realism as embodying a new stage of social development. Our point here is that non-­European artistic phenomena are still seen in relationship to a Socialist materialistic world art remaining in the center of its own knowledge practices. Therefore, Folk/Popular Art was not further elaborated as a potential term that would encompass new perspectives of European and non-European art, and, instead, it remained affiliated with the notion and the program of Socialist Realism. To conclude, the term internationalism implies the nation-state is literally a setting that determines transregional, intercontinental relations and exchange. Remarkably, it was Białostocki who, in the context of the Seventh Congress of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) in Cracow and Warsaw in 1960 – the first to be held in Eastern Europe – contrasted internationalism not with the nation but with individualism. In this way, as Mathilde Arnoux stated in her study about the relationship between East and West in the era of the Cold War, beyond the schema of confrontation, national tendencies in forming an international contemporary art can be highlighted. She points out that the Polish organizers of the congress introduced national aspects into the debate on contemporary art in order to make a double volte-face. On the one hand, this move was about undermining the Soviet conception of ‘international’ under the doctrine of Socialist Realism; on the other hand, it was about stating that contemporary art encompassed more than Western abstraction.36 A few years later, in 1971, Mikhail Alpatov argued in a special issue of American Art Journal dedicated to the state of art history that there was still a difference between “art centers” of global importance and those which developed “national schools”, usually located in relatively small countries.37 In some way, Alpatov’s explanation refers, intentionally or not, to Marx’s elaboration on “world literature,” which Marx assumed emerges when national or local literary traditions later become common property.38 Alpatov also suggested that each national art history will “sing” its part and thus help shape the art historical canon

34 35 36 37 38

Olbrich 1975, 476 – 479. – Olbrich 1976, 563 – 565. This dimension is already elaborated in the field of literary studies. Clark 2021. Arnoux 2021, 96 – 104. Alpatov 1971, 90. Marx / Engels 1990, 466.

Introduction |

and contribute to the harmony of the “choir of nations”.39 Referring to Alpatov’s survey Vseobshchaya istoriya iskusstv (General History of the Arts), which attempted to demonstrate Russia’s artistic and national merits within the frame of a universal history of art, Vardan Azatyan called such an approach “nationalist universalism”.40 It was a path also followed by other Russian art historians, such as Dmitri V. Sarabianov, and institutionally manifested by the division of art history departments into those dealing with Russian art and those devoted to Western art. There was a course in African art sporadically conducted by Vil Mirimanov at the Lomonosov University in Moscow; it was labelled as Western art. But there were no courses in the art of Socialist Bloc countries or Socialist Baltic republics. The Soviet curriculum reflected the multidimensionality of ideological premises: The art and culture of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union were seen as an integral part of an imaginary unitarian Soviet-Russian tradition. The Socialist countries that emerged after World War II as national republics and passed through the period of being bourgeois nation-states were evaluated in this system as ‘fraternal people’s republics’; this produced a poorly defined phenomenon between the USSR and the rest of Europe. Thus, the label Soviet Internationalism was applied above all to the Socialist countries and post-colonial states (of most remote status) – but not to the Soviet republics. This separation is related to the question of how relationships and entanglements in the arts have been described beyond notions of influence and spatial asymmetries of center and periphery. Interestingly enough, it was a ‘Western’ Marxist, Nikos Hadjinicolau, who had earlier pointed out that the idea of “center and periphery” – an art historical schema dominating artistic entanglement in Europe as well as other parts of the world – was indebted to political claims for power also in the Soviet Union. For Hadjinicolau, the dissemination of the European vision of the ‘Orient’ in the Asian republics of the Soviet Union exemplarily revealed how the related claims to power were carved out, substantiated, and promoted: “Wir müssen aufhören, Machtverhältnisse als Qualitätsverhältnisse zu betrachten” (We need to stop thinking of power relations as quality relations).41 The self-identification with the periphery is called by Azatyan an ‘inferiority complex,’ and what sometimes used to be described in terms of backwardness in relation to Western Europe can also be interpreted – according to Alexander Kiossev – as a kind of self-­colonizing narrative of national identity.42 In this respect, the universal framework emerged also from a competition of national art histories. The notion of universality occurs as a hidden hierarchy. 39 40 41 42

Alpatov 1971, 91. Ernst Gombrich, Jan Białostocki, and Victor Lazarev also contributed to this issue. Azatyan 2009, 291. Hadjinicoloau 1983, 45 f., 51. Azatyan 2009, 291. – Kiossev 1995. About the concept of internal colonization, see also Etkind 2011, 61 – 71. About the broader context of imagining Europe mirroring the position of Russia, see Raev 2010.

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Lajos Vayer had questioned the legitimacy of a universal art historical concept of style as an expression of artistic development and had criticized its connection to the center-periphery model in his opening speech at the 1965 CIHA congress in Budapest.43 Organized by Vayer himself, the congress shed light on the art history of Central and Eastern Europe, presenting it as a topic at an international level. Going beyond the center-periphery model, Vayer proposed a model of microhistory, a history focusing on a regional stage as applicable for establishing new art historical geographies.44 Thus, he shifted focus from the dominant art historical approach of comparison to an art historical approach dedicated to a history of relationships. This approach replaced the art historical universalism hitherto cultivated in terms of style and inevitable progress with a new awareness of the plurality and heterogeneity of regions. Their interconectivity in terms of cultural crossroads was elaborated later by Ján Bakoš.45 It may now surprise us that in 1986, at the CIHA session titled Centre and Periphery: Dissemination and Assimilation of Style, Jan Białostocki referred to the center-periphery concept and titled his paper What Is Bad About Periphery? He quoted regionally diverse examples to elucidate how a permanent flux of spaces and places have been narrativized in art history as centers. However, he omitted the very questions we would ask today: How is such a center created? How much does its status rely on the historical relations of power? To what extent can we reposition the issue of the center by questioning the discursive standards of normative marginalization? In this respect, it is remarkable that the 1986 CIHA congress, Themes of Unity in Diversity, held in Washington and intended to be the first ‘global’ event within the discipline, upon a closer look, reveals that art history in the Western and Socialist worlds shared a common understanding of universal art history.46 In fact, approaches and themes taken from European and North American traditions still dominated this congress. Apart from Białostocki’s questioning of the still-dominant center-periphery concept, André Chastel, one of the plenary speakers, alongside George Kubler and Hermann Fillitz, turned to an art geographical approach. He focused on “Les relations asymétriques: Nord/Sud”, as mentioned in his paper L’art du monde: le problème des ‘universaux.47 However, what appeared to be a potential acknowledgement of the present global division, an ostensible step away from the geopolitical East/West thinking by pointing to the real power relations, turned out to be a Eurocentric perspective. 43 44 45 46

Vayer 1972, see also the translation and commentary in this book. See the commentary by Robert Born in this book. Bakoš 2002. It was the 26th Congress, 10 – 15 August 1986. – Lavin 1989. – About the role of CIHA as a promoter of global art history, see Dufrêne 2007. – Anderson 2012. – Gaehtgens 2012, 1472 – 1473. – Cooke 2018. About the relation of CIHA to Soviet art history see Sarapik 2019. 47 Chastel 1986, 15 – 18.

Introduction |

However, Vayer, as well as Białostocki, implicitly pointed to the fact that art history has to break away from predetermined ideas of hegemony connected to methods and concepts like center-periphery model, canon and style. As to CIHA, Białostocki stressed how necessary a global expansion of art history was.48 With that in mind, he used the example of art historical comparison to point out that this not only involves the inclusion of non-European countries and themes but also calls into question the approaches and premises of a Western art history: A mere comparison of artistic phenomena can lead to false unities, as can be seen in the numbering and categories in museums that standardize all European artistic phenomena. He therefore asked: Are phenomena in different cultural areas that we summarize under the term ‘art’ comparable at all? Although Białostocki adhered to the idea of a possible universal perspective, he concluded that the path from a Eurocentric to a global world art history, while not an easy one, is a necessary one.49 The international cooperation of art historians through CIHA introduces new dimensions. Here, we point to the CIHA congress in Bologna in 1979, where Vayer chaired the session on new methodological approaches. From that session, which also included Białostocki’s above-mentioned paper, Comparative Art History, the paper given by Zdenka Volavka, a Czech art historian who had emigrated to Canada in 1968 and then became a professor at York University, entitled The Study of African Art as an Art Historical Discipline, should be mentioned here, as well as Beatriz de La Fuente’s contribution, Problemas de historia del arte en culturas prehispánicas de México.50 Such studies demonstrate that art history should be acknowledged as a complex fabric of diachronic and synchronic processes of development in entangled regions. In this context, we can pose the question whether these are channeled circulations of approaches and models or to what extent there was feedback on the respective art histories in the Socialist countries. A survey of the GDR journal Bildende Kunst reveals several articles on the topic of African art. Apart from exhibition reviews of African art in Berlin galleries 51, the approach of Karla Bilang, who worked at the Grassi Museum in the 1970s, is particularly noteworthy.52 In her articles, she dealt with the formal principles of African art beyond Western terminology. In particular, she was critical in respect to the relationship of the discovery of African tribal art by Avant-garde artists at the beginning of the 20th century and labelling it as primitivism. Instead, she saw African art as a counterimage of Western modern art and pointed out its origins, instead of seeing it as

48 49 50 51

Białostocki 1979. Ibidem. Vayer 1982, 225 – 235. Hartmann 1986. Luise Hartmann wrote about an exhibition of Shona sculptures in the Gallery am Weidendamm, East Berlin. 52 Bilang 1985. – Bilang 1986.

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reflected through modern art.53 In this respect, it can be stated that beyond the established art historical narrative of periphery, canon, style, and Modernity, a consciousness also developed that independent terminology should be used for non-European art to give them an independent place in art history. Furthermore, something else is remarkable in this context (although these are only very selective findings): what Georg Vasold already formulated concerning Joseph ­Strzygowski’s students, that it was primarily women who were investigating on non-European art.54 It might be speculative to say if it was coincidental, or at least, that due to its status as a new research field in becoming, this range of topics still avoided being dominated by male researchers. The contributions from Vayer and Białostocki to the CIHA congresses show clearly enough that theoretical framings of the geopolitical map and novel approaches to art history were not the only relevant subjects during those meetings; striving for equality and partnership in dialogue was apparently also an important issue. The plea for internationalization – as Vayer and Białostocki called it – was motivated by a wish expressed on both sides of the Iron Curtain to participate in discussions and thus contributed to a higher degree of visibility.55 CIHA can be considered a stage for institutionalized international collaborations. This internationalization can be understood in a dual sense: as occurring on the subjective level (concerning the contact between scholars) and the objective level (concerning the subjects of study), as already pointed out by Białostocki.56 Finally, if we follow this thread, we cannot help but see the topical relevance of these somewhat forgotten chapters of art history, since they actually match the present aims and challenges of global art history. In this context, we can quote Christian Kravagna’s study on cultural contacts outside of European art centers in the first half of the 20th century: He postulates that the investigation of cultural contact zones must lead to an art history that examines contacts and cooperation within the discipline, both institutional and personal – an art history which would enable holistic transcultural thinking and, at the same time, animate diversifying narratives.57

53 Bilang 1989. 54 Vasold 2017, 129. He mentioned, for instance, Olga Schwanenfeld who wrote her dissertation about the Asian influence on Pisanello, Melanie Stiaßny become very influential as curator of Asian collection at the Naturhistorisches Museum (sic!) in Vienna. The first art historical chair dealing with South Asian Art was founded 1954 at the University of Pennsylvania, going back to efforts of Austrian-Czech scholar Stella Kramisch, a specialist in Indian Art. 55 See the article by Białostocki 1978. For the situation of art history (Kunstwissenschaft) in the GDR, mainly art history at the Humboldt University, see Baier 2009, 384 f, 388 f. 56 Białostocki 1982, 208. 57 Kravagna 2017.

Introduction |

About this book The book’s chapters are organized around three themes, each tackling conceptions of exchange and connectivity in national, transnational, and international dimensions. Based on this panorama, we aim to present a comparative approach to the history of art history under the aegis of Socialism. The first section addresses the topic Platforms of Exchange and Knowledge Transfer. Its chapters focus on different concepts of translation and transfer and detail how ideas travel. In their paper on Pop Art and related art historical narratives, Maja and Reuben Fowkes demonstrate how this art movement can be perceived as a global phenomenon. Writing about Pop Art solely in genealogical terms by constantly pointing to its American origins reveals a still-persistent hierarchy of discourse. In this view, American art functions as a center predestined to define any equivalent translocations and regional variations as mere derivatives. Krista Kodres highlights the issue of how art histories circulate, providing an overview of art historical books in translation, with a focus on titles that were available in the Soviet Union but originally published abroad (both in Socialist and non-Socialist countries), as well as of Soviet books translated for foreign readers. Kodres connects her essential study with Yuri Lotman’s cultural-semiotic concept of the semiosphere, a complex system of related language systems and their various references and non-hierarchical relationships. Although for Lotman center and periphery are the core of the internal organization of each semiosphere, it is not of interest here to determine what is central and what is peripheral, but to capture the transition from one to another as a gradual change. Thus, semiospheres and their related groups are both participants in dialogue as well as spaces for dialogue. This is particularly true when considering the construct of Socialist Internationalism in terms of exchange and hierarchies. In her contribution, Mária Orišková examines specific features of Czech exhibition policy in an internationalized exhibition market: She details how such policies interfered with the cultural diplomacy conducted by the state and how they were oriented toward the broader audiences of the West. This strategy aimed at a convergence between the ideal of Socialist Internationalism under communist ideology and a ‘communist geography of art.’ The section concludes with a translation of a book chapter written by Peter H. Feist, which can be considered the first analysis of East German art history after the collapse of the Soviet Union written by an East German art historian. Feist describes the difficulties of an exchange between the individual Socialist states as well as between professional networks within Eastern Europe. The second section, entitled Integration and Adaptation, touches upon how the emergence of universal versus national discourses of art history was not free from the potential for conflict. Concerning the publications of the Czechoslovakian art historian Karel Stejskal, Ivan Gerát shows the competition between shifting understandings of the

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‘universal’ within particular approaches and thus demonstrates the persistence of art historical methods. On the one hand, Stejskal’s use of a ‘universal’ approach, partly oriented around Aby Warburg’s iconology, appeared inappropriate for broader international audiences at the time Stejskal’s works were published. This was not least due to the attempt to develop a Marxist iconology – promoted by Stejskal and other art historians such as Jaromír Neumann – set against the traditional religious understanding of Christian iconography.58 On the other hand, both Czech and Western art history still tended to refer to the paradigm of style in its assumed ‘universality.’ An opposite understanding of the ‘universal’ – namely as ‘international’ – is the topic examined by Éva Forgács, who looks at the formation of the European Avant-garde network after World War II. As she shows, artists linked to the Avant-garde and scholars in Hungary shared the same interest in cultural archetypes, assumed to be forming a ‘collective unconscious.’ Interpreted as timelessly relevant, these archetypes were perceived as undetermined by any national or völkisch commitment and, as such, were systematically equipped with an international, i. e. ‘universal’ character. Elena Sharnova questions another kind of international universalism dominated by Western paradigms. She details the history of the integration of the works of the ‘Russian school’ in exhibitions at the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and points to the issue of how Soviet art historians such as Mikhail Alpatov or Dmitri Sarabianov attempted to broaden the geographical scope of the Western canon of art history for the sake of a postulated ‘universality’ without questioning its basic assumptions. A translation of a chapter from Dmitri Sarabianov’s book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools: A Comparative Approach completes the section. The third section shifts away from a European perspective to Intercontinental Encounters – Creating ‘New Geographies.’ Besides CIHA , the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) also promoted a more global view of art in order to demonstrate art’s contribution to fostering universal exchangeability and connectivity. An example of this is the World Art book series published by ­U NESCO and the New York Graphic Society in 1954. However, as those high-quality books were written mainly by US and European art historians, we have to wonder to what extent these international organizations intended to collaborate with scholars from non-Western or non-European countries. With this context in mind, Corinne Geering draws attention to scholarly exchange via the Cultural Studies Program launched by UNESCO in 1966. By highlighting the position and involvement of Soviet scholars within the field of international cooperation and cultural politics, she elaborates on a regional reorientation both in the Soviet Union’s multinational context as well as in the global context. 58 Gerát 2019.

Introduction |

There is a similar positioning of the regional against the global in the above-mentioned introduction by Lajos Vayer at the 1965 CIHA congress in Budapest that we ­present here in an English translation. The 1960s thus appear, in sum, as a decade in which comprehensive approaches and structures emerged in order to reflect on regionality as providing foundations for the universal expression of diversity in the development of art history in general. Douglas Gabriel and Adri Kácsor focus on spatial issues by analyzing the phenomenon of European architecture translated into a Korean context. The authors describe the nature of intercontinental architectural translocation, accompanied by the adaptation of particular cultural patterns and living conditions, and elaborate on the local afterlife of the implemented building types. Finally, Piotr Juszkiewicz concentrates on the fascination for Mexican culture that developed in 1950s Socialist Poland and details how Mexican style elements became used there. The related issue of the sovereignty of historically and geographically distant art forms gives rise to coordinates for a non-judgmental comparison based on the principle of aesthetic equality. A sort of pre-definition of the shape of global art history is presented with the closing translation of selected excerpts from the book On Art of Ancient America: Mexico and Peru by Jan Białostocki, initially published in Poland in 1972. In this volume, we bring together the perspectives of art historians from different generations – those who have witnessed Socialist rhetoric and others who might see Socialist Internationalism as an antediluvian globalization and a vehicle of transnational networking. With reference to the above quotation by Jan Białostocki: Do we mean the same discipline when we use the term ‘art history’ in San Francisco, London, Sofia or New Delhi? We should ask: Through what instruments, methods, and broader consideration of objects have artists from non-Western parts of the world been introduced to art history? How can the exchanges and interconnections in the arts be conceived beyond the notions of power and hierarchy? And were the questions art historians in the Socialist states posed to art history the same or similar to those that were at the core of the discipline in the Western hemisphere? We observe that international congresses have a lasting impact on art historical practice, both today and in the past. Thus, large exhibitions or art history congresses, such as those organized by CIHA, can be seen as platforms of international exchange directed at a specific community. With this in mind, we do not have to see such initiatives as ‘only’ the result of state cultural policy or ideological framing. Instead, we need to consider the issue of to what extent debates and discourses were developed within a one-sided cultural transfer from the West to the East (today, also from the North to the South) and who had and still has the possibility to participate in such discourse. Furthermore, we have to examine the influence and impact of institutionalized international art historical practices on local environments or communities of art history and art critique.

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Consequently, we suggest using the term ‘communities’ instead of speaking in general of national art histories. In the present book, at least, it becomes clear that notions of diversity and complexity appear to be as distinctive of cultural production in Eastern Europe as the hegemonic impact of the Soviet Union. Thinking back to the provocative question posed in the mid-1990s by Martin Warnke of whether circulation with the Third World was more intense under Socialism than it was in the West,59 one must in any case admit that there were multiple platforms of exchange – albeit under state control and under the premise of global realism, but nevertheless part of the cultural universe and even of everyday life. One can only agree with the editors of Art beyond Borders that Central or Eastern Europe “appears to be a privileged terrain of the geography of art and related reflections on frontiers, circulation and scales.” 60 Beginning in the 1960s and until the end of the 1980s, Eastern European art historians – including Mikhail Alpatov, Lajos Vayer and Jan Białostocki – initiated discussions about changed interactions between the centers and peripheries. “What is bad about the periphery?” – asked Białostocki at the CIHA congress of 1986 to stimulate rethinking and rewriting of art historical assumptions. The tradition was continued by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, who, with his concept of Horizontal Art History, tried to replace centres understood in universalist terms with less hierachical investigations of local art production. With a critical assessment of Post-colonial discourses, he advocated the inclusion of a new geography of art in the university curricula and as an approach within the discipline. Nevertheless, his influential concept features a limitation as it mainly focuses on Modernism. To explore development and space of art in a local or regional situation in a sustainable way, we have also to overcome this paradigm to address truly global concepts of interactions, interconnectivity, and circulations, as Milena Bartlová and Claire Farago point out in their statements to the critical re-envision of Piotrowski’s concept by Matthew Rampley in a special issue of Umění.61 How to write art history and visual studies of Eastern Europe on a planetary scale is still an open chapter and derserved further transdisciplinary approachs as also other authors of the issue dedicated to Piotrowski’s horizontal art emphasize. There are still blind spots, some of which we would like to address directly in order to encourage further research. Most notably, the chapters presented here mainly represent European perspectives. To investigate the dynamics of interconnectedness and to change the mode of telling the history of art would mean opening up and including the voices of non-European scholars and art critics during the Cold War while also investigating the involvement of non-aligned countries and countries of the so-called Third World. 59 Warnke 1994, 40 – 47. 60 Bazin / Dubourg Glatigny / Piotrowski 2016, 2 – 3. 61 Bartlová 2021. – Farago 2021.

Introduction |

However, we hope that these essays reveal art historiography from Central and Eastern Europe to be an exemplary research field on which the issue of interrelated (trans) national and regional histories of art becomes particularly visible. Thus, this book is to be understood as a step toward developing a framework for the complexity of conceptualizing and writing art history that extends beyond the region. The book has been greatly inspired by the presentations and discussions of the participants of the three conferences, held in Tallinn (2016), Leipzig (2017), and Berlin (2020) affiliated with this project; the conferences and the production of this book were generously supported by the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig. We would like to thank the editors of the publication series Das östliche Europa: Kunstund Kulturgeschichte, Ada Raev and Robert Born, for accepting the publication of the proceedings and for their very careful reviews of the manuscripts at multiple stages. Further thanks goes to Viktoria Peter for supporting the work of the editors. Finally, we want to thank the authors, who patiently responded to the peer reviews and gave us the inspiration for our work.

Bibliogr aphy Alpatov, Mikhail: The Mountains of Information Grow. In: The American Art Journal 3/1 (1971), 88 – 94. Alscher, Ludger et al. (eds.): Lexikon der Kunst. Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Angewandte Kunst, Industrieformgestaltung, Kunsttheorie, 2: G–Lh. Leipzig 1971. Anderson, Jaynie: CIHA as an Object of Art History. In: Grossmann / Krutisch 2013, 1474 – 1476. András, Edit: Blind Spot of the New Critical Theory. Notes on the Theory of Self Colonization. In: http://exindex.hu/index.php?l=en&page=3&id=245 [Last accessed 05. 07. 2022]. András, Edit: Orientációváltások a közép-kelet-európai művészetelméletben 1989 után. Nemzeti, regionális vagy globális művészettörténet (a posztszocializmus, posztkolonializmus vagy dekolonialitás jegyében)? [Shifts in Central-East European Art Theory after 1989. National, regional or global art history (under the aegis of postsocialism, postcolonialism or decoloniality)?]. In: Ars Hungarica 43/4 (2017), 395 – 405. Annus, Epp: Between Arts and Politics: A Postcolonial View on Baltic Cultures of the Soviet Era. In: Journal of Baltic Studies 47/1 (2016), 1 – 13. Arnoux, Mathilde: Geteilte Wirklichkeit. Für eine Geschichte der künstlerischen Beziehungen zwischen Ost und West im Europa des Kalten Krieges. Paris / Zürich 2021 (Passerelles). Azatyan, Vardan: Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov’s A Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. In: Human Affairs 19/3 (2009), 289 – 296.

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Babiracki, Patryk / Jersild, Austin (eds.): Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World. Cham 2016. Bachmann, Pauline / Klein, Melanie / Mamine, Tomoko / Vasold, Georg (eds.): Art/Histories in Transcultural Dynamics: Narratives, Concepts, and Practices at Work, 20th and 21st Centuries. Paderborn 2017 (Berliner Schriften zur Kunst). Baier, Christof: “… befreite Kunstwissenschaft”. Die Jahre 1968 bis 1988. In: Bredekamp / Labuda 2010, 373 – 390. Bakoš, Ján: Periféria a umelecký skok [Periphery and Artistic Leap]. Bratislava 2002. Bakoš, Ján: Paths and Strategies in the Historiography of Art in Central Europe. In: Ars 43/1 (2010), 85 – 116. Bartlová, Milena: Unsere “nationale” Kunst. Studien zur Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte. Ostfildern 2016 (Kompass Ostmitteleuropa 1). Bartlová, Milena: From which Vantage Points Does an Art Historian Look? The History of Central European Art and the Postcolonial Impulse. in: Umění LXIX/2 (2021), 175 – 183. Bazin, Jérôme: The Geography of Art in Communist Europe: Other Centralities, Other Universalities. In: Artl@s Bulletin 3,1 (2014), 41 – 48. Bazin, Jérôme / Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal / Piotrowski, Piotr (eds.): Introduction: Geography of Internationalism. In: Idem (eds.): Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945 – 1989). Budapest / New York 2016 (Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe 3), 1 – 28. Belting, Hans / Binter, Julia T. S. (eds.): Global Studies: Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture. Ostfildern 2011. Bernhardt, Katja / Born, Robert / Kempe, Antje / Puth, Andreas (eds.): Verortungen. In: kunst​ texte.de/ostblick 1 (2010). https://doi.org/10.48633/ksttx.2010.1 [Last accessed 25. 08. 2022]. Bernhardt, Katja / Kempe, Antje (eds.): (Dis)kontinuitäten. Kunsthistoriographien im öst­lichen Europa nach 1945. Special issue of: kunsttexte.de/ostblick 4 (2015). https://doi.org/10.48633/ ksttx.2015.4.90697 [Last accessed 21. 06. 2022]. Beyer, Oskar: Welt-Kunst. Von der Umwertung der Kunstgeschichte. Dresden 1923. Białostocki, Jan: A Plea for Internationality. In: Art History (Oxford) 1/4 (1978), 5 – 8. Białostocki, Jan: Die Internationalität der Kunstgeschichte und das Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art. In: Acta historiae artium Academiae Scientiarium Hungaricae 25 (1979), 175 – 178. Białostocki, Jan: A Comparative History of World Art, Is It Possible? In: Vayer 1982, 207 – 216. Białostocki, Jan: Some Values of Artistic Periphery. In: Lavin 1989, 49 – 54. Bilang, Karla: Kunstprozesse in Afrika. Das Verhältnis von Tradition und Modernität. In: Bildende Kunst 33/3 (1985), 108 – 111. Bilang, Karla: Zeichenhaftigkeit und Rhythmus. Gestaltungsprinzipien der traditionellen afrikanischen Plastik. In: Bildenden Kunst 34/4 (1986), 159 – 164.

Introduction |

Bilang, Karla: Bild und Gegenbild. Die Begegnung der Avantgarde mit dem Ursprünglichen. Leipzig 1989. Bod, Rens / Maat, Jaap / Weststejin, Thijs (eds.): The Making of the Humanities (2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048518449 [Last accessed 05. 03. 2021]. Born, Robert: World Art Histories and the Cold War. In: Journal of Art Historiography 9 (2013), 1 – 21. Born, Robert / Janatkova, Alena / Labuda, Adam S. (eds.): Die Kunsthistoriographien in Ostmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs. Berlin 2004 (humboldt-schriften zur kunstund bildgeschichte 1). Bredekamp, Horst / Labuda, Adam S. (eds.): In der Mitte Berlins. 200 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Humboldt-Universität. Berlin 2010 (Humboldt-Schriften zur Kunst- und Bild­geschichte 12). Carreau, Lucie / Clark, Alison / Jelinek, Alana / Lilje, Erna / Thomas, Nicholas (eds.): Pacific Presences: Oceanic Arts and European Museums, vol. 2. Leiden 2018. Chastel, André: L’art du monde: le probléme des “Universaux”. In: Lavin 1989 11 – 24. Clark, Katerina: Eurasia without Borders. The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919 – 1943. Cambridge, Mass. 2021. Cooke, Jennifer: CIHA as the Subject of Art Theory: The Methodological Discourse in the International Congresses of Art History from Post-War Years to the 2000s. In: RIHA Journal 0199 | 30 September 2018, https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2018.0 [Last accessed 21. 06. 2021]. De Haro García, Noemi / Mayayo, Patricia / Carrillo, Jesús (eds.): Making Art History in Europe After 1945, New York 2020 (Studies in Art Historiography 11). Djagalov, Rossen: From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema Between the Second and the Third Worlds. Montreal / Kingston 2020. Dmitrieva, Marina / Kempe, Antje (eds.): Special issue of ARS, Bratislava 48/2 (2015). Dufrêne, Thierry: A Short History of CIHA. In: http://www.ciha.org/sites/default/files/files/ Short_History_of_CIHA.pdf (2007) [Last accessed 03. 05. 2021]. Elkins, James: Is Art History Global? New York 2007 (The Art Seminar 3). Etkind, Alexander: Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Oxford 2011. Farago, Claire: A Very Different Kind of National Art History: Looking to the Future from the Past. In: Umění LXIX/2 (2021), 198 – 202. Featherstone, David: Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. London 2012. Gaehtgens, Thomas W.: Introduction. In: Grossmann / Krutisch 2013, 1472 – 1473. Gerát, Ivan: Marxism and Iconology in Czechoslovakia During the Cold War: Preliminary Remarks. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 100 – 118. Grigorescu, Ion / Chişa, Anetta Mona / Tkáčová, Lucia / Ghiu, Bogdan / Rus Bojan, Maria (eds.): Performing History: Idea, Arts and Society. The Romanian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia. Cluj 2011.

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Gleb, Albert: From “World Soviet” to “Fatherland of All Proletarians”: Anticipated World ­Society and Global Thinking in Early Soviet Thinking. In: InterDisciplines Journal of History and Sociology 3/1 (2012), 85 – 119. Grossmann, Ulrich / Krutisch, Petra (eds.): The Challenge of the Object: 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, 4 Vols., Nuremberg 2013. Hadjinicoloau, Nikos: Kunstzentren und periphere Kunst. In: Kritische Berichte 11/4 (1983), 36 – 56. Hartmann, Luise: Kunst aus Kenia. In: Bildende Kunst 34/4 (1986), 162 – 164. Hock, Beáta: Introduction. Globalizing East European Art Histories: The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski and a Conference. In: Hock / Allas 2018, 1 – 22. Hock, Beáta / Allas, Anu (eds.): Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present. New York 2018 (Routledge Research in Art History). Hornyik, Sándor: (Poszt)kommunizmus és (de)kolonizáció: Kulturális dekolonizáció KeletKözep-Európában? [(Post)communism and (de)colonization: Cultural decolonization in East-Central Europe?]. In: Ars Hungarica 43/4 (2017), 387 – 394. Imorde, Joseph: The Global Dimension of Art History (after 1900): Conflicts and Demarcations. In: Mattos Avolese / Condurn 2017, 71 – 84. [Internationalismus und Kunst 1971]: Internationalismus und Kunst. In: Alscher et al. 1971, 447 – 448. Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice: Art History and the Global: Deconstructing the Latest Canonical Narrative. In: Journal of Global History 14/3 (2019): Historicizing the Global: an Interdisciplinary Perspective, 413 – 435. Juneja, Monica: Global Art History and the “Burden of Representation”. In: Belting / Binter 2011, 274 – 297. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta / Dossin, Catherine / Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice (eds.): Circu­ lations in the Global History of Art. Farnham 2015 (Studies in Art Historiography 10). Kiossev, Alexander: The Self-Colonizing Metaphor. In: Atlas of Transformation. https://monu­​ menttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/s/self-colonization/the-self-colo​ nizing-metaphor-alexander-kiossev.html [Last Accessed 30. 11. 2021]. (First published in: Ginev, Dimitǔr / Sejersted, Francis / Simeonova, Kostadinka (eds.): Cultural Aspects of the Modernization Process. Oslo 1995 (TMV skriftserie 13). Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina / Marek, Michaela (eds.): A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2019 (Das öst­liche Europa: Kunst und Kulturgeschichte 9). Kołodziejczyk, Dorota / Şandru, Cristina (eds.): Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe. London / New York 2017. Kravagna, Christian: Transmoderne: eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts. Berlin 2017 (PoLYpeN).

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Lange, Barbara / Hildebrandt, Dirk / Pietrasik, Agatha (eds): Rethinking Postwar Europe: Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s. Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2020. Langfeld, Gregor / Baudin, Tessel M. (eds.): Modernism in Migration: Relocating Artists, Objects, and Ideas, 1910 – 1970 / Stedelijk Studies 9 (Fall 2019). Lavin, Irving (ed.): World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity; Acts of the 26th International Congress of the History of Art, Washington, D. C., 1986, vol. 1. University Park / London 1989. Litkei, József: The Molnár Debate of 1950: Hungarian Communist Historical Politics and the Problem of the Soviet Model. In: East Central Europe 44/2/3 (2017), 249 – 283. Marek, Michaela / Pluhařová-Grigienė, Eva (eds.): Baroque for a Wide Public. In: Journal of Art Historiography 15 (2016). Mark, James / Kalinovsky, Artemy / Marung, Steffi (eds.): Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World. Bloomington 2020. Marung, Steffi / Müller, Uwe / Troebst, Stefan: Monolith or Experiment? The Bloc as a Spatial Format. In: Marung, Steffi / Middell, Matthias (eds.): Spatial Formats under the Global Condition. Berlin / Boston 2019 (Dialectics of the Global 1), 275 – 309. Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848). In: Marx, Karl / Engels, Friedrich: Werke, Bd. 4, Berlin 111990. Mattos Avolese, Claudia / Condurn, Roberto (eds.): New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias. São Paulo 2017. In: http://www.ciha.org/sites/default/files/files/NewWorldsFron​ tiersInclusionUtopias_2017.pdf [Last accessed 03. 05. 2021]. Mersmann, Birgit: Embracing World Art: Art History’s Universal History and the Making of Image Studies. In: Bod / Maat / Weststejin 2014, 329 – 344. Nefedova, Olga: Art and Artists Crossing Borders: Untold Stories of the First Iraqi Art Exhibition in the USSR. In: Langfeld / Baudin 2019. Nelson, Cary / Grossberg, Lawrence (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago 1988. Olbrich, Harald: Nationale Traditionen und sozialistische Weltkunst. In: Bildende Kunst 23/10 (1975), 476 – 479. Olbrich, Harald: Volkskunsttradition und Modernität. In: Bildende Kunst 24/11 (1976), 563 – 565. Pfisterer, Ulrich: Origins and Principles of World Art History: 1900 (and 2000). In: Z ­ ijlmans / Damme 2008, 69 – 89. Piotrowski, Piotr: Globalne ujȩcie sztuki Europy Wschodniej [A Global View on Art of Eastern Europe]. Poznań 2018. Raev, Ada: Gehört Russland zu Europa? Kunstgeschichte und die Vorstellung von Europa. In: Bernhardt / Born / Kempe / Puth 2010. Rampley, Matthew / Lenain, Thierry / Locher, Hubert / Pinotti, Andrea / Schoell-Glass, ­Charlotte / Zijlmans, C. J. M. (Kitty) (eds.): Art Histories and Visual Studies in Europe:

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Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks. Leiden 2012 (Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History 212/4) Rees, Joachim: Vergleichende Verfahren – verfahrene Vergleiche. Kunstgeschichte als komparative Kunstwissenschaft, eine Problemskizze. In: Kritische Berichte 40/2 (2012), 32 – 47. Sarapik, Virve: CIHA Congresses and Soviet Internationalism. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 240 – 259. Segal, Joes / Scott-Smith, Giles / Romijn, Peter (eds.): Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West. Amsterdam 2012. Schorch, Philipp: Two Germanies: Ethnographic Museums, (Post)colonial E ­ xhibitions, and the ‘Cold Odyssey’ of Pacific Objects between East and West. In: Carreau /Clark / Jelinek / Lilje / Thomas 2018, Vol. 2, 171 – 185. Strzygowski, Joseph: Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften vorgeführt am Beispiele der For­ schung über bildende Kunst: Ein grundsätzlicher Rahmenversuch. Vienna 1923. Tchibozo, Romuald: From Ethno-aesthetic to Socialist Realism, Aesthetic Practices in Africa and New Territories of Art History: The Role of Institutions. In: Mattos Avolese / ­Condurn 2017, 215 – 231. Ţichindeleanu, Ovidiu: Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique. In: Grigo­ rescu / Chişa / Tkáčová / Ghiu / Rus Bojan 2011, 1 – 13. Tlostanova, Madina: Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-existence. New York 2017. Todorova, Maria: The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism. In: Slavic Review 64/1 (2005), 140 – 164. Vasold, Georg: The Revaluation of Art History: An Unfinished Project by Jozef Strzygowski and his School. In: Bachmann / Klein / Mamine / Vasold 2017, 119 – 138. Vayer, Lajos: Allgemeine Entwicklung und regionale Entwicklungen in der Kunstgeschichte – Situation des Problems in “Mitteleuropa”. In: György Rózsa (ed.): Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’histoire de l’art, Budapest 1969. Budapest 1972, Vol. 1, 19 – 29. Vayer, Lajos (ed.): Problemi di metodo: condizioni di esistenza di una storia dell’arte / Problems of Method: Conditions of a History of Art: Atti del XXIV Congresso C. I. H. A., Bologna 1979. Bologna 1982. Warnke, Martin: Gibt es den DDR-Künstler? In: Flacke, Monika (ed.): Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Staat. Die Kunst der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR. Berlin 1994, 40 – 47. Wille, Simone: A Transnational Socialist Solidarity: Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection. In: Langfeld / Baudin 2019. Zijlmans, Kitty / Damme, Wilfried van (eds.): World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam 2008.

Platforms of Exchange and Knowledge Transfer

Maja Fowkes / Reuben Fowkes

Art History in a Suitcase The Itinerary of Art Trends in Socialist Art Criticism In the history of popular culture one of the most famous suitcases appears in the cult film Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino. It’s a mysterious one, as the film revolves around the attempts of a criminal and his henchmen to retrieve it. When the briefcase is opened, the contents (which are never visible) glow and elicit reactions of awe, but no one knows what John Travolta aka Vincent Vega sees inside. Speculations abound as to whether it was diamonds, nuclear matter or even the crime lord’s soul. A similar reverence to the suitcase and its elusive contents can be observed in East European art history, where it seems at times to possess near magical powers to transfer whole art movements from one locality to another. Faith in the efficacy of the suitcase model to explain patterns of cross-border artistic exchange is widespread and rarely challenged in art historical, critical and curatorial accounts of artistic developments in the region. Indeed, the narrative of the unfolding of experimental art practices in Eastern Europe during the Socialist period has frequently been attributed to instances of individual travel and in particular the physical transport of catalogues and other publications dealing with international art trends across the Iron Curtain. An example of this is Piotr Piotrowski’s statement in his In the Shadow of Yalta that “direct inspiration for the development of Polish Art Informel” should be traced to Tadeusz Kantor’s trip to France in 1956, to the extent that “one could say that Kantor brought Art Informel to Poland in his suitcase.” 1 At the other end of the Socialist period, the spread of post-Modernism in Bulgaria has been linked to the circulation of printed materials brought back from New York by Luchezar Boyadjiev in 1983. As curator Maria Vassileva has contended, the artist’s “first-hand introduction to the American art scene proved to be very productive for the development of the Bulgarian art scene in the early 1990s.” 2 Apart from inflating the significance of individual journeys as a mechanism for artistic influence across borders, such a framing is also indicative of the assumed primacy of the direction of travel of ideas from West to East, and the pre-eminence of the Western paradigm within the experimental art circles of the region. That such knowledge transfers were regarded as potentially dangerous by the communist authorities, even in the last decade of the Socialist system, is also illustrated by 1 Piotrowski 2009, 72. 2 Vassileva 2015, 147.

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the affair of French theorist Jacques Derrida, who travelled to Prague in 1981 to speak to the signatories of the “Charter 77” human rights protest. On his way back from an unofficial philosophy seminar, he was imprisoned for three days on suspicion of narcotics smuggling, after border guards discovered packages of brown powder in the lining of his suitcase and accused him of “producing, trafficking and transferring drugs.” 3 This flagrant act of intimidation was designed to discourage contacts between foreign intellectuals and dissidents in Prague and demonstrated the lengths to which communist regimes were prepared to go in their attempt to halt or slow ideological contamination from the West. Actions taken by state authorities to “censor and to block manifestations of culture that challenged the prerogatives of authorities,” were ultimately based on their recognition that the stability of the system depended on the extent to which “ordinary people maintained their loyalty to a canon of authoritative and approved cultural forms.” 4 This essay sets out to examine the development of artistic movements in Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, challenging the frequent recourse to the suitcase model to account for the spread of international art styles. It investigates the degree to which an explanatory scheme based on a uni-directional flow of cross-border artistic transfer implicitly reinforces the aesthetic hierarchies of the Western model. The particular lens through which such premises are verified is in the transnational emergence of Pop Art that since 1964 appeared in several East European art scenes, as well as in other parts of the non-Western world. The article also questions, through analysis of art historical narratives articulated by Socialist and post-Socialist criticism, whether accounts that maintain the hard divide between national artistic traditions and international styles should be considered a remnant of the divisive categories of Cold War art history. To what degree have recent scholarship and exhibition practices sought to establish decentred, global and horizontal artistic accounts to which non-Western, and in this case East European artists, are co-producers and not just recipients of ready-existing styles? Furthermore, it raises the question whether the origins of non-hierarchical global accounts of today can be sought within the art criticism of the period, reflecting the influence within the cultural sphere of the geopolitical agenda of Socialist Internationalism. Art critical positions in third-way Yugoslavia also brings to light a further consideration of the contribution of non-alignment to the decolonizing tendencies within global art. The emergence of Pop Art in Slovakia has regularly been attributed to exposure to international influences, with art historians debating the precise source and itinerary of such external impulses. The primary focus has been on the

3 Peeters 2014, 334. 4 Gorsuch / Koenker 2013, 13.

Art History in a Suitcase  |

direct mediating role of two people – [art critic] Jindřich Chalupecký, who regularly published reports of activities in Paris from May 1964, and [artist] Alex Mlynárčik, who met [French critic and founder of Nouveau Réalisme] Pierre Restany in April 1964 in Paris and communicated much of his information through catalogues which he brought back to his circle of visual artists.5

The underlying model of artistic transfer is not challenged by disputes within local art criticism over whether Slovak art was more strongly influenced by French Nouveau Réalisme or American and British Pop Art. Proponents of the Anglo-American model point instead to Slovak artists visiting the Venice Biennial of 1964, at which Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prix confirming the ascendancy of New York over Paris as the supposed capital of the international art world.6 What such differences of interpretation do underscore is the difficulty of isolating a single line of stylistic influence across porous Cold War borders. A similar tendency to trace the influence of an imported artistic style can be found in established accounts of the emergence of Pop Art in Hungary. In the main overview of The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century, a clear chain of events is suggested by the statement that Pop Art came to Hungary when: “László Lakner, having encountered the works of Robert Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennial, turned his attention to Pop art.” 7 This model is complicated, however, in revisionist accounts, such as in a recent monograph on Lakner by art historian Dávid Fehér, who argues that the significance of the artist’s visit to the 1964 Biennale and encounter with the works of Rauschenberg “may have been over-emphasized, since his earlier photo-based works already contained the possibility of an imaging process similar to Rauschenberg’s montages.” 8 Fehér also points to the fact that while in his work of the time Lakner “evokes Rauschenberg’s compositions by coordinating images from mass media,” in contrast to the American pop artist who used printed materials, “Lakner painted everything by hand.” 9 Although the author identifies here the transformation of Pop Art motifs in Lakner’s work, it could be noted that he still implicitly accepts the primacy of the North American artist as providing the original model for Pop Art, from which the Hungarian version deviates. In the Yugoslav context, the self-proclaimed inauguration of Pop Art also took place in 1964 at the solo exhibition of Olja Ivanjicki in Belgrade, at which the artist exhibited several ‘Pop Art suitcases’ filled with found objects assembled by the artist. As curator 5 6 7 8 9

Gregor 2013, 68. Exh.Cat. Bratislava 1996. Andrási / Pataki / Szücs / Zwickl 1999, 162. Fehér 2016, 39. Ibid.

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Lina Džuverović points out, in 1962 “Ivanjicki was the first Yugoslav artist to obtain a Ford Foundation scholarship which enabled her to visit and travel around the USA, where she became immersed in Pop Art.” 10 However, by the time of her exhibition, Yugoslav audiences were already familiar with Western Pop Art, especially in light of the first prize awarded to Robert Rauschenberg at the Ljubljana Graphics Biennial of 1963. The reserve felt towards Pop Art in Yugoslavia could be discerned from the catalogue text of an exhibition of Anglo-American Pop Art at Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1966, which introduced a movement that “seems today to have come full circle: around 1960 it set the whole world a tremble, but by 1964 it was already ‘on the way out.’” 11 Its trajectory is described as “appearing in England and the USA after Informel as a closed subgenre of those endeavors known throughout the world as ‘new Realism’, ‘new figuration’, ‘neo-Dada’, ‘new vulgarists’, ‘common object painters’ and ‘new narrativity.’” 12 These Pop Art episodes point to the specificities of the movement’s development and reception in the third-way, non-aligned and self-managed system of Yugoslav Socialism. Indicatively, the Croatian art critic situates the particular traits of American Pop Art within a wider set of global practices, and rather than bestowing upon it a paradigmatic status, refers to American Pop as one of a plethora of equivalent regional variations on a common trend. In recent assessments of Pop Art produced in Eastern Bloc countries, critics have grappled with the apparent mismatch between imported artistic styles and the social and economic conditions in the destination countries in which they were practiced. For Slovak critic Richard Gregor, the critical potentialities of Pop Art in the West in commenting on consumer lifestyles could not function in the same way in Eastern Europe, “because to criticize consumerism in the grey socialist society of shortage would be absurd.” 13 Fehér has also noted that Hungarian artists “did not examine the phenomenon of consumer society and the cultural industry,” because neither “existed in that part of the world,” but still used “strikingly similar” forms to Western Pop artists.14 The implication that the lack of a consumer society in Eastern Europe made its Pop Art less authentic than that of the West, or even not considerable as Pop Art at all, depends on at least two factors: firstly, whether it is accurate that consumerism did not meaningfully exist in the East, and secondly, if a fascination with commercial advertising and consumer products was indeed an essential component of Pop Art as a global phenomenon.

10 11 12 13 14

Džuverović 2017, 151. Exh.Cat. Zagreb 1966, n. p. Transl. by Maja and Reuben Fowkes. Ibid. Gregor 2017. Fehér 2015, 131.

Art History in a Suitcase  |

Although the differences between Socialist society and Western capitalism were stark at the height of Stalinism, by the early 1960s a significant degree of convergence could be observed in standards of living and even access to consumer goods. Recent scholarship has challenged assumptions about the “grey blandness” of everyday life in the Eastern Bloc, pointing to the materialization of a “new Socialist ‘mass culture’” complete with, “new shopping centers, mail-order catalogues, fashion, furniture, household goods, and shiny consumer durables of all varieties.” 15 Cultural historian David Crowley has also made the point that it was not access to actual consumer goods that was key to the dynamics of consumer society under Socialism, but the spread of information about them through magazines and advertisements.16 As a result, although during the period “the citizens of the people’s republics might have been unable to consume many branded goods, or everyday luxuries like cars, washing machines and fashionable clothes […] they were aware of the aesthetic codes that accompanied modern consumerism.” 17 There was therefore no particular reason why the common preoccupation of Pop Art with the brash visuality of consumer society should not resonate with East European audiences and artists. Furthermore, recent curatorial investigations have also emphasized the fact that many other issues were inscribed in Pop Art, apart from a fascination with the glossy surfaces of consumer culture. According to this more politicized view, Pop was never merely a “celebration of Western consumerism,” but also about “creating a political, feminist, subversive, language of protest, as well as a reflection on a shifting societal order.” 18 For art historian Piotr Piotrowski, who was dealing with the more traditional apolitical understanding of Pop, it was the very fact that Pop Art wanted to be “anti-elitist, immersed in everyday imaginary and street poetical art manifestation,” that made it “suspect for Eastern Europeans,” for whom traditional notions of the autonomy and elevated position of art acted as a defense against state interference.19 The political positioning of Pop Art in relation to the Socialist state was however less straightforward than suggested in this reading (fig. 1). For instance, in Croatia, Tomislav Gotovac worked consistently with the ephemera of popular culture, both Yugoslav and Western, to create his collages in the 1960s, without compromising his radical independence from ideology, social norms and the institutions of the artworld.20 In Serbia, Dušan Otašević, who’s painterly style was close to North American Pop Art, chose when depicting pop icons to portray 15 16 17 18 19 20

Betts 2014, 5. Crowley 2017, 133. Ibid., 134. Dercon 2015. Piotrowski 2017, 33. Šijan 2018.

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Fig. 1  Tomislav Gotovac, Untitled (Budweiser), 1964. Mixed media: printed photograph, newspaper, glue on hardboard, 61 × 61 cm. Collection Sarah Gotovac / Courtesy Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb. Photo: Boris Cvjetanović.

revolutionary Socialist figures, such as Lenin and Tito. While some interpretations insist on the exclusively ironic character of such references to communist iconography, art historian Branislav ­Dimitrijević has suggested that “it might be more appropriate to read them as ambivalent.” 21 In Romania, Vladimir Şetran and Ion Bitzan appropriated Pop Art techniques to serve the ideological purposes of official art, exhibiting an enlarged reproduction of the celebration of Lenin’s birthday from the 1920s in their photomontage History Pages / Pagini de istorie (1970). While cultivating the illusion of stylistic modernity, the work remained within “the strict confines of officially sanctioned art.” 22 In Hungary, instances of coalescence around the progressive agenda of 21 Dimitrijević 2015. 22 Preda 2017, 179.

Art History in a Suitcase  |

Fig. 2  Dušan Otašević, Towards Communism on Lenin’s Course, 1967. Painted wood, 95 × 95 × 2 cm (3 ×). Collection Mira Otašević. Courtesy artist.

Socialist Internationalism included Lakner’s Saigon (The Protest of the Buddhist Monks of Saigon) (1965), which used the vocabulary of Pop Art to deliver an anti-militarist political message. Here the artist’s expression of solidarity with the Vietnamese struggles corresponded to the decolonial intentions of the state-sponsored peace exhibition for which it was realized.23 This illustrates the complexity of Pop Art positions in relation to the ideology of the socialist state, encompassing criticality, ambivalence, identifying with the goals of official art, as well as occasionally coinciding with the progressive ethos of Socialist Internationalism. It also demonstrates the extent to which Pop Art practices were embedded in the social, economic and political processes of East European countries (fig. 2). The critical positioning of Pop Art within national art narratives has frequently been undertaken in relation to the perceived domination of the Western model. In the catalogue text for her exhibition Variations on Pop Art from 1993, Katalin Keserü builds her case for Hungarian Pop Art on a rhetorical observation: “How can we explain the appearance of paintings embellished with color photographs taken from a French magazine in 1965, shall we attribute it simply to the issuing of passports?” 24 The particular context for this comment, is that following the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, it was only in 1963 that diplomatic relations with the West were restored and artists were able to make occasional individual trips abroad. Indeed, for a number of Hungarian artists travel to Western Europe in the 1960s turned out to be transformative in the development of their practice.25 Nevertheless, while there is a temptation to see a causal relationship between encounters with international movements abroad and individual stylistic directions, the artists themselves regularly insist that contacts with the Western 23 László 2018, 421. 24 Keserü 1993, 12. 25 Fowkes 2018, 21.

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art world were always filtered through the prism of individual critical responses.26 As Keserü implied, accounts of the development of Pop Art based merely on the arbitrariness of the possibility for artists to travel to the West are inadequate. A decade later, Katalin Timár posed another rhetorical question, namely “is your Pop our Pop?” in the title of a text on art history as a tool of self-colonization.27 Disputing the use of a label originating in Western art historical narratives for art produced in Hungary, she denounced the denominator Hungarian Pop as a manifestation of ‘cultural imperialism’ in which a “particular universalist understanding of the notion of art is imposed in a local context.” 28 Her specific argument was that the unreflecting adoption of the term Pop Art overwrote or suppressed the use of a locally-sourced term, the “genuinely Hungarian category of ‘sur-naturalism’”, a figurative approach which combined “‘realist’ details of surrealism’ and naturalist academic techniques.” 29 However, it is not so straightforward to substitute ‘sur-naturalism’ for Pop Art, not least because this local painterly trend emerged somewhat earlier in the late 1950s in reaction to Socialist Realism, and had little to say about the technological and societal advances of the new decade Timár refers to Bulgarian theorist, Alexander Kiossev’s post-Socialist concept of “self-colonizing cultures”, as offering a “highly plausible analysis” for the Hungarian situation.30 The direct transposition of terminology from post-colonial theory onto the Central European context could be seen as problematic, since its histories are not directly comparable to those of non-European territories and peoples that suffered colonial domination. As Piotrowski emphasized, the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism has little to say about intra-European imbalances and presents a homogenizing view of the continent, when in fact “‘there was not one Europe: it was both the colonizer, and colonized, imperial and occupied, dominating and subordinated.” 31 What is more, the risk of over-emphasizing a harsh divide between the interests and values of the West versus those of the countries of Central Europe is that such positions may be instrumentalized in pursuit of isolationist political agendas.32 The stream of critical assessments of the relationship between local artistic production and international trends in the context of Hungarian art can be traced further back. In the context of a major exhibition at the Hungarian National Gallery in 1991 on the art of the 1960s, curator László Beke observed that “the information wires were crossed in Hungary, thus the effects of Pop Art and Informel, its formal antagonist, got somewhat 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Obrist 2018. Timár 2002. Ibid. Ibid. Timár 2002. Piotrowski 2014. András 2016.

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mixed up amongst younger painters.” 33 Here the stylistic particularities of Hungarian Pop are attributed to an accidental confusion in the adoption of two rival foreign styles by inexperienced local artists, rather than contesting the model of the unidirectional transfer of aesthetically coherent tendencies. Beke also made a pertinent distinction between the development of modernist art practices along a national line that was independent from the influence of ‘western isms’ and those Hungarian art practices of the 1960s which, as he emphasizes, “can be defined more or less clearly in terms of the international isms.” 34 A precursor to the discussion of ‘isms’ also appeared in Cold War era art criticism in a text published by art historian Eva Körner under a pseudonym in Studio International in 1973 with the title No Isms in Hungary.35 Her use of ‘ isms’, or as she also puts it, “how to deal with the East-European-Hungarian problem”, is a direct reference to a work by conceptual artist János Major.36 Encountering the tombstone of a certain Kubista Lajos, a name literally meaning Louis Cubist, prompted the artist to speculate in a typewritten booklet about the fate of international art movements in Hungary. In his Cubist Concept (1971) he states that “no isms were born in Budapest or Hungary”, “Pop art was born in the USA, its influence extended to Hungary,” and “many fine ideas were born abroad and come to die in Hungary.” 37 Although Körner does not directly comment on or dispute any of these assertions, the underlying message of her account of the development of contemporary Hungarian art is that local Avant-garde streams of Modernism were an equal or more important source for the new generation than isms coming from the West. More speculatively, the references she makes in the context of abstraction to the presence of an “essentially East European element” consisting for example in a tendency to stress “the ethical value of the forms as well as pure formal values,” indicate the existence, or at least potential, of a common, non-Western, regional, position within international art.38 The ambition of a 2015 exhibition at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest to reflect on the East European context of Pop was suggested by the title Ludwig Goes Pop + East Side Story.39 Curated by Timár, the exhibition set itself the explicit goal of exploring “how the notions of ‘Western’ art history can be interpreted in a context where the social and cultural conditions for the emergence of this tendency were fundamentally different from the original scenes where Pop Art had been created.” 40 Although 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Beke 1991, 316. Ibid., 315. Asztalos 1974. Ibid. Quoted after Asztalos 1974, 107. Asztalos 1974, 107. Timár 2015. See the curatorial statement to the exhibition: https://www.ludwigmuseum.hu/en/exhibition/ludwiggoes-pop-east-side-story [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022].

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attention is paid here to the variegated terrain on which East European Pop developed, the operating assumption is still that authentic Pop Art originated in the West and that there was a single direction of transmission of the movement. The alternation between advocates of the suitcase model of imported art styles, and those who downplay the significance of foreign influences in the development of national art histories, and between critics who discover or deny the existence of East European varieties of Pop Art, appears interminable and irresolvable. Notably what the proponents of these rival positions rarely seem to do is to question the homogeneity of Pop Art. In this context a process of decolonization would not just be about rejecting the narratives of external impositions and asserting the right to have your own Pop Art, but about voicing the demand to be part of the formation of the general category of this international ism on equal terms. The exhibition International Pop held at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, also in 2015, set out to chronicle the global emergence of Pop Art from the 1950s through the early 1970s, with the work of artists from a number of countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Germany and a handful of East Europeans displayed alongside that of North American and British Pop Art stars. Laying out the cultural and economic dominance of the United States in the period, the curators explain that the exhibition shows “artists responding to, absorbing, and coming to terms with this influence.” 41 Pop Art is described as “one of the most ‘nomadic’ of post-World War II movements, migrating beyond its origins in Britain and the United States to Japan, Latin America, and Eastern as well as Western Europe.” 42 Curator Darsie Alexander then specifically lays out the claim and proviso that: “This exhibition and this book do not seek to erase the prevalent narrative on Pop to invent an art history that the vagaries of taste, power and geography have obscured. Rather, it opens U. S. Pop Art to a richer set of contextual layers, to a more critical and embedded history.” 43 In other words, the prevalent Cold War narrative of the spread of Pop Art, the suitcase model, essentially still stands. The role of international, including East European, artists is to contextualize, embed and enrich the core North American story of Pop Art. The Hungarian contributor to the catalogue appeared to concur by acknowledging the centrality of the US prototype, stating that “it would be a mistake to speak of something called ‘Hungarian Pop art,’” rather what can be discerned is “the free transformation of certain Western tendencies.” 44 Opening a few months after the Minneapolis show, Tate Modern’s The World Goes Pop took a much more strongly revisionist line, excluding all the well-known Western Pop 41 42 43 44

Alexander 2015. Ibid., 77 – 78. Ibid., 78. Fehér 2015, 148.

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artists and only showcasing international manifestations. In addition to denying that Pop was only about glorifying Western consumerism and drawing attention to its subversive use by artists, the Tate show declared Pop to be “a global movement, with artists from different regions joining in.” 45 As curator Jessica Morgan wrote in the catalogue: “Many Pops emerged simultaneously, and were often imbued with an ambivalence, if not outright hostility, to the notion of American economic (and implicitly artistic) dominance.” 46 This could be read as a direct counter to the Walker show’s curatorial premise, as does her statement that “Pop iterations” across the world “deformed, extended or inverted certain strategies of American Pop,” a much more substantial transformation or even mutation of North American Pop than entertained in Minneapolis.47 Tate’s take on Pop proposed not just a geographical expansion, but also entailed somewhat tendentiously making a broad claim for its politically radical potential, subversive attitude to consumerist culture, as well as articulation of a feminist language of protest. In this regard, women artists intervened in male-dominated Pop Art circles to expose “mass culture’s patriarchal pitfalls for women,” as well as by giving voice to a “variety of transgressive feminist concerns – the most prominent being the retrieval of female sexuality and pleasure from its silencing in Western culture.” 48 However, there is one revealing passage from the catalogue of the Walker show in which Czech art historian Tomáš Pospiszyl sheds a different light on the contemporary feminist project: The representation of women was stereotypical, as shown for example in the Slovak artist Stano Filko’s work. One of his largest series from the 1960s and 70s is entitled Venus, connecting ancient female archetypes with images from contemporary media. It may sound somewhat bizarre, but for many artists, a single issue of a Western pornographic magazine could serve as source material for several years.49

The content of this suitcase was apparently just as or more inspirational for the artist than Western Pop Art catalogues. At the same time, this example suggests that there was nothing intrinsically feminist about Pop, since Western patriarchal transfers also fell on fertile ground in the East. On the one hand, it might be possible to detect traces of an instrumentalizing approach in terms of imposing certain attitudes and programs – even if progressive ones – onto artistic practices that arose within a different frame of reference. On the other, the approach of this curatorial undertaking, by excluding the 45 46 47 48 49

Dercon 2015, 9. Morgan 2015, 15. Ibid., 15. Minioudaki 2015, 73. Pospiszyl quoted in Cotton 2015, 200.

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dominant Western names and opening up to transnational interpretation of Pop Art, could be seen as a welcome gesture of decolonization. The Tate exhibition in their uneven global overview included a number of artists from the region: Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, Slovakian and Polish artists were part of the selection, but no works by Hungarian or Estonian artists were included. This is perplexing since these were the two countries singled out by Piotrowski in the book Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop as exceptions to the general lack of interest in North American Pop Art in Eastern Europe.50 In contrast to the Hungarian reservation towards the use of the term, Estonian curator Sirje Helme has not hesitation in referring to Estonian Pop Art in Popkunst Forever: Estonian Pop Art at the Turn of the 1960s and 1970s.51 She offers a capacious interpretation of its formation, stating: “Estonian Pop Art at the turn of the 1970s was influenced by US and British Pop Art, but it basically grew out of specific historical and social circumstances, and its importance lies in its ability to take in the local situation and use it in works of art. […] Estonian Pop Art is thus seen as a local version of Pop Art, and was defined by local conditions.” 52 While recognizing the interconnectedness with international trends, she insists on the pre-eminent role of the local context in producing a local variant of Pop. Arguably the same could be claimed about the North American variant of Pop. In this way the suitcase approach is abandoned, while maintaining the claim of local participation in the transnational movement. Regarding the usage of the term Pop Art, due to its persistent valorization within the institutional structures of the international artworld, this denominator has received much more attention and prominence than other related terms, and as such should be reclaimed for relevant art practices across the globe. Its usage should however be understood along the lines of Croatian critic Kelemen’s text from the mid-1960s, which located American and British Pop Art as just one of many variants of artistic engagement with mass media, counterculture and consumer society in the global sixties. The recent international exhibitions that address the global appearance of Pop give indications as to how to go about recovering Pop Art from its close association with a specific Anglo-American artistic, cultural, socio-economic and political context. The anxiety over the restricted scope and exclusivity of the movement that can still be felt in many critical assessments of Pop Art in Eastern Europe reflects what is essentially a false dichotomy between hetero­geneous local practices and a unitary Western style. Such sharp distinctions betray a polarized view that can be regarded as a residue of the rhetoric of the Cold War era, when the effort put into maintaining the aesthetic purity of Western art movements was part of a wider strategy of geopolitical domination. 50 Piotrowski 2017, 24. 51 Helme 2010. 52 Ibid., 41.

Art History in a Suitcase  |

The question could be posed whether there are precedents for transcending the polarized view of artistic communication during the Cold War period. In that sense, it is worth returning to the style that Kantor ‘smuggled in his suitcase’ from Paris. Informel was the first transnational style that appeared in post-Stalinist Eastern European art, emerging in Poland from 1957, in Yugoslavia around the same time, in Czechoslovakia from 1959, and dominating the discourse of non-official art around 1960 in many countries across the region. It was embraced in Eastern Europe as an antidote to the thematic and aesthetic confines of state-endorsed Socialist Realist art and a means to align with international currents during the post-Stalin Thaw. Stylistically it encompassed the broad category of non-objective, non-geometric art, manifest in structural abstraction, gesture painting, and experiments with the physical matter of the canvas. In his discussion of Yugoslav art, art historian Ješa Denegri expressed the view that: “Art Informel is explicitly international in its character, but in the context of Yugoslavia should be approached from two parallel perspectives: as one of the components of European Informel and as a phenomenon which acts within the coordinates of its own environment, where it has concrete expression, and which at the same time conditions the development of a series of specific artistic, cultural and conceptual processes.” 53 In his approach there noticeably appears to be no contradiction between recognizing that Informel is an international phenomenon and acknowledging that in Yugoslavia it took a particular form in response to local conditions. It is also apparent that Denegri does not refer to a normative or monolithic idea of the West, or to the axis of United States or West European artistic dominance, but speaks rather of the “European Informel”, a term that, through his inclusion of Yugoslav art within it, transcends Cold War geopolitical polarities. The availability within the Yugoslav context of critical positions that advanced a non-national approach to contemporary art practices and looked beyond polarized WestEast interpretations of international exchange reflected the particular circumstances of the country’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Founded in Belgrade in 1961, NAM “functioned as a social movement in the international system, a third way between the Blocs, aiming to change the existing global structures and to create a more just, equal and peaceful world order,” and was in its very essence, “anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist.” 54 The concomitant struggle against cultural imperialism within the artistic sphere involved contesting the assumed primacy of specific styles or dominant interpretations of them, whether North American Abstract Expressionism or Soviet Socialist Realism. Expression of the decentred, progressive and internationalist artistic outlook of non-alignment could also be found for example in the New Tendencies 53 Denegri 2016, 71. 54 Piškur 2018, 347.

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exhibitions held in Zagreb during the decade.55 Non-alignment and Socialist Internationalism were closely related initiatives in terms of their rejection of Western political and cultural dominance over the Third World, although the latter, by virtue of its association with the Soviet Bloc, was perhaps more prescriptive in its advocacy of the Socialist system as an alternative, non-exploitative and egalitarian world order. The mythical suitcases that populate the imagination of East European art history are an overly literal metaphor for the transmission across Cold War borders of west-centric modernity. That their elusive contents had to be selected by the artist or critic concerned from a variety of competing sources, and then adapted and reinterpreted based on particular historical, social and technological conditions complicates the idea of a unidirectional transfer of a defined art style. East European artists were not passive recipients of artistic models smuggled in from the West, but co-producers of heterogenous art movements. The suitcases also travelled in all directions, carrying their volatile cargo of artistic influence from east to west, or bore stamps of more distant locations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, reversing or upsetting the assumed primacy of the western paradigm in the development of global art styles. What is more, the suitcases of East European art critics active during the era of actually existing socialism were packed with obscure catalogues, short print run publications and articles in regional languages. Their glowing contents reveal the source of today’s decentred global art narratives in the transnational art criticism of Socialist internationalism.

Bibliogr aphy Alexander, Darsie: Introduction: The Edge of Pop. In: Exh.Cat. Minneapolis 2015 – 2016, 77 – 84. András, Edit: What does East-Central European Art History Want? Reflections on the Art History Discourse in the Region Since 1989. In: Jurman / Erharter 2016, 53 – 77. Andrási, Gábor / Pataki, Gábor / Szűcs, György / Zwickl, András: The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century. Transl. John Bátki. Budapest 1999. Asztalos, Cs. Anik. Pseud. Éva Körner: No isms in Hungary. In: Studio International 187/3 (1974), 105 – 111. Beke, László: Hidden Dimensions of Hungarian Art of the 1960s. In: Exh.Cat. Budapest 1991, 313 – 318. Betts, Paul: The Politics of Plenty: Consumerism in Communist Societies. In: Smith 2014, 424 – 440.

55 Medosch 2016.

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Cotton, Charlotte. Roundtable: Pop and the Travelling Image. In: Exh.Cat. Minneapolis 2015 – 2016, 194 – 201. Crowley, David: Consumer Art and Other Commodity Aesthetics in Eastern Europe under Communist Rule. In: Jakubowska 2017, 129 – 144. Denegri, Ješa: Posleratni modernizam. Neoavangarde / postmodernizam [Post-War Modernism. Neo-Avant-Garde / Post-Modernism]. Belgrade 2016. Dercon, Chris: Foreword. In: Exh.Cat. London 2015 – 2016, 1 – 9. Dimitrijević, Branislav: Pop Art and the Socialist “Thing”: Dušan Otašević in the 1960s. In: Tate Papers 24 (Autumn 2015). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/ pop-art-and-the-socialist-thing-dusan-otasevic-in-the-1960s [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022]. Džuverović, Lina: Pop Art Tendencies in Self-Managed Socialism. Pop Reactions and Countercultural Pop in Yugoslavia in 1960s and 1970s. PhD thesis Royal College of Art. London 2017. [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022]. Exh.Cat. Bratislava 1996: Šesťdesiate roky v slovenskom výtvarnom umení [The Sixties in the Fine Arts]. Bratislava, Slovenská národna galleria, 1996. Ed. by Zora Rusinová. Bratislava 1996. Exh.Cat. Budapest 1991: Hatvanas évek. Új törekvések a magyar képzömüvészetben. [The Sixties. New Endeavours in Hungarian Fine Arts]. Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 14.3. – 30. 6. 1991. Ed. by László Beke. Budapest 1991. Exh.Cat. Budapest 2015 – 2016: Ludwig Goes Pop + East Side Story. Budapest, Ludwig Múzeum – Kortárs Müvészeti Múzeum, 9. 10. 2015 – 3. 1. 2016. Ed. by Katalin Timár, Soma Bradák and Viktória Popovics. Budapest 2015. Exh.Cat. London 2015 – 2016: The World Goes Pop. London, Tate Modern, 10. 9. 2015 – 17. 1. 2016. Ed. by Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri. London 2016. Exh.Cat. Ljubljana 2019: Southern Constellations. The Poetics of the Non-Aligned. Ljubljana, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, 7.3. – 31. 8. 2019. Ed. by Tamara Soban and Moderna Galerija Ljubljana. Ljubljana 2019. Exh.Cat. Minneapolis 2015  –   2 016: International Pop. Minneapolis, Walker Art Centre, 11.4. – 29. 8. 2015; Dallas, Museum of Art, 11.10. 2015 – 17.1. 2016; Philadelphia, Museum of Art, 18.2. – 15.5. 2016. Ed. by Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan. New York 2015. Exh.Cat. Zagreb 1966: Pop Art. Zagreb, Galerija Suvremene Umjetnosti Zagreb, 8. – 22. 3. 1966. Ed. by Boris Kelemen. Zagreb 1966. Fehér, Dávid: Where is the Light? Transformations of Pop Art in Hungary. In: Exh.Cat. Minneapolis 2015 – 2016, 131 – 148. Fehér, Dávid: László Lakner. Transl. András Mendly. Budapest 2016. Fowkes, Maja / Fowkes, Reuben: Intentionally Contemporary: Expanded Horizons of the Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde. In: Székely 2018, 18 – 24. Gorsuch, Anne E. / Koenker, Diane P.: Introduction: The Socialist 1960s in Global Perspective. In: Ibidem. (eds.): Socialist Sixties: Crossing Borders in the Second World. Bloomington 2013, 1 – 24.

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Gregor, Richard: Haberernová’s Eye: Post-Informal Figuration in Slovak Visual Arts of the 1960s. Transl. John Minahane. Bratislava 2013. Gregor, Richard: Short Introduction on Applying the “Homonymic Curtain” to Recent Pop Art Exhibition. In: Post for College Art Association (CAA) blog. 18. 05. 2017. https://www. collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/gregor.pdf [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022]. Helme, Sirje: Popkunst Forever. Estonian Pop Art at the Turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Tallinn 2010. Janevski, Ana / Marcoci, Roxana with Ksenia Nouril (eds.): Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe. A Critical Anthology. New York 2018. Jakubowska, Agata (ed.): Natalia LL. Consumer Art and Beyond. Warsaw 2017. Jurman, Urška / Erharter, Christiane (eds.): Extending the Dialogue. Ljubljana 2016. Keserü, Katalin: Variations on Pop Art. Chapters in the History of Hungarian Art Between 1950 and 1990. Budapest 1993. László, Zsuzsa: Exhibition as Diplomatic Tool: The Search for Artist Solidarity. In: Fowkes, Maja and Reuben (eds.): Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism. Special issue of: Third Text 32/4 (2018), 412 – 433. Medosch, Armin: New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961 – 1978). Cambridge / London 2016 (Leonardo). Minioudaki, Kalliopi: Feminist Eruptions in Pop, Beyond Borders. In: Exh.Cat. London 2015 – 2016, 73 – 94. Morgan, Jessica: Political Pop: An Introduction. In: Exh.Cat. London 2015 – 2016, 15 – 28. Morganová, Pavlina: Czech Action Art. Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain. Transl. Daniel Morgan. Prague 2014. Obrist, Hans Ulrich: Interviews. In: Székely 2018, 26 – 97. Öhrner, Annika (ed.): Art in Transfer in the Era of Pop. Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies. Stockholm 2017 (Södertörn Academic Studies 67). Peeters, Benoit: Derrida: A Biography. Cambridge 2014. Piotrowski, Piotr: In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945 – 1989. Transl. Anna Brzyski. London 2009. Piotrowski, Piotr: East European Art Peripheries Facing Post-Colonial Theory. In: Non-Site 12 (2014). https://nonsite.org/article/east-european-art-peripheries-facing-post-colonial-theory [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022]. Piotrowski, Piotr: Why There Were No Great Pop Art Curatorial Projects in Eastern Europe in the 1960s? In: Öhrner 2017, 21 – 36. Piškur, Bojana: Solidarity in Arts and Culture. Some Cases from the Non-Aligned Movement. In: Janevski / Marcoci / Nouril 2018, 347 – 350. Preda, Caterina: Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships A Comparison of Chile and Romania. London 2017. Smith, Stephen A. (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism. Oxford 2014.

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Šijan, Slobodan: Tomislav Gotovac. Life as a Film Experiment. Zagreb 2018. Székely, Katalin (ed.): Bookmarks. Revisiting Hungarian Art of the 1960s and 1970s. London / Cologne 2018. Timár, Katalin: Is your Pop our Pop? The History of Art as a Self-Colonising Tool. In: Artmargins Online. Published 16 March 2002. https://artmargins.com/is-your-pop-our-pop-the-historyof-art-as-a-self-colonizing-tool/ [Last accessed 25. 02. 2022]. Timár, Katalin: Talking About Differences. Pop Art in East and West. In: Exh.Cat. Budapest 2015 – 2016, 19 – 29. Vassileva, Maria (ed.): Art for Change, 1985 – 2015. Sofia 2015.

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Translations The Dissemination of Socialist Art History in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s “The Soviet Union was the leading force of the sought new world order,” Peter H. Feist, the leading art history professor in the former GDR, declared in 2001.1 In this paper, I will examine how the Soviet Union implemented its aspiration of serving as the leader of a new world order, specifically through the translation, publication and dissemination of literature in the field of art history in the Socialist Warsaw Pact (1955) countries, starting from the mid-1950s to ca. 1970. The abovementioned activities were a component of a policy of Socialist Internationalism, which took on a more definite form during the process of de-Stalinization and the modernization of the USSR, commencing in 1954 – 1955, and defining a clear domestic policy dimension.2 This new direction was negotiated with leaders of the communist and workers’ parties in the satellite states, with the first meeting for the consolidation and coordination of these activities taking place in Moscow in 1957.3 The general policy framework of Socialist Internationalism undoubtedly went beyond the geographical space of the Soviet Union and Socialist countries and can be seen in the context of the political situation of the post-World War II world. As we know, this was a polarized world in which two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, organizing along capitalist and Socialist lines, sought to expand their geopolitical spheres of influence. Both superpowers co-opted artistic culture in the process of substantiating the superiority of their social order, with culture becoming a bloodless equivalent of ‘real warfare.’ In the Soviet Union, this was treated as a ‘struggle’ (bor’ba), in which, as Soviet Minister for Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, stated in 1966 at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),4 it was important to remain on the offensive. A similar aspect of this policy of internationalism was articulated in 1969, by the Soviet Academy of Sciences member, Aleksander Joffe: “Establishing cultural ties abroad was always considered, in Soviet foreign policy, to be one of the most effective ways of raising Soviet prestige in the world arena.” 5

1 2 3 4 5

Feist 2004, 422. Rupprecht 2015, 4. History 1975, 575. Pravda 1966, 7 April, p. 4. – History 1975, 578 – 580. – Zezina 2013, 118 – 131, 119. Joffe 1969, 95.

Translations |

As I proceed from the position that the USSR predominantly initiated and directed the culture-related Socialist Internationalism, I will explore the principles and institutional basis for Soviet foreign policy in the field of artistic culture. From there, I will attempt to provide insight into the translation, publication and dissemination practices taking place in the art history field of the Socialist world. In addition, I will discuss the content of the translations, and investigate the type of art historical discourse that was disseminated, and the values that were emphasized. Finally, I would like to briefly address the issue of the impact of translations, specifically examining how successful the Soviet-guided construction and distribution of the Marxist-Leninist art historical discourse actually was or could have been.

Institutions and levels of internationalization Following the death of Stalin in 1953, a new foreign policy direction was implemented under Nikita Khrushchev, in which, as it was proclaimed from the podium at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, the party’s foreign policy would henceforth adhere to a soft power approach designed to increase the attractiveness of Socialism.6 This was to be achieved by way of cultural diplomacy.7 The first steps to find a platform for this had already started with the USSR joining UNESCO in 1954. In 1955, a cultural cooperation agreement with the GDR was signed, while other Warsaw Pact members concluded similar agreements in 1956.8 First among the capitalist countries to join was France in 1957,9 in parallel with various developing countries,10 and by 1965, the USSR had cultural cooperation agreements in place with 57 countries.11 In addition to the international agreements, social organizations called ‘friendship societies’ were founded in the Soviet republics, under the umbrella of the Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (USSF). The union’s organizational base was established in Moscow in 1958, and by the 1980s, it had relations with 141 analogous organizations abroad.12 The new cultural policy was controlled by the USSR via various state, and as noted, non-governmental institutions as well. 6 History 1975, 557 – 560. 7 The most recent research published on cultural diplomacy during the Cold War is Mikkonen / ­Suutari 2015. The extensive list of literature in this research field also can be found here. 8 Kasack 1973, 374. Agreements with Socialist countries were renewed in 1964 – 1965 for the next five years. 9 Romanovski 1966, 45. – Gilburd 2013, 362 – 400. 10 Rupprecht 2015, 9. 11 Romanovski 1966, 9. 12 Rose 1988, 273 – 274.

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The Soviet state’s new trend was also set forth in writing, via a new party programme adopted in 1961, which listed these foreign policy principles: respecting the sovereignty of other countries, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit. Goals articulated: the expansion of cultural ties with countries in the Socialist system, and other countries as well.13 In foreign policy, three main areas were distinguished: in relation to capitalist countries, a ‘principle of peaceful coexistence’ was relied upon, in the case of Socialist countries, ‘Proletarian Internationalism’ was the goal, and in terms of the new countries freed from the colonialist yoke, the main quality emphasized was ‘support for independence.’14 International cultural cooperation agreements had the most wide-ranging effect, encompassing nearly all fields of culture and science. The objective was to, “create a new Socialist culture, and educate employees in the spirit of a uniform [my italics] Marxist-Leninist worldview.” 15 The method of cooperation in the international agreements was to be via mutual exchange (obmen), which imposed an obligation to introduce each other’s culture throughout all states, including the insertion of relevant material into school curricula.16 At least the agreements with Socialist countries followed a standard model. Besides the exchange of researchers and cultural figures, there was also a clause concerning the translation and dissemination of cultural achievements: “Cooperation shall take place in the fields of translation, publication and distribution of books and publications by authors from other countries.” 17 The contract also specified that, “the exchange of periodicals, books, research/scientific works and materials, artworks, films, audio recordings and other cultural, research and information media shall be supported and developed.” 18 Besides introducing the contemporary art and literature of the partner countries, the agreement with the GDR also made a separate commitment to the introduction and promotion of cultural heritage.19 The abovementioned functions were outlined in an agreement offered to, “institutions and organizations which may, within their remit, make plans and enter into mutual agreements.” 20 In the context of our topic, these institutions were the ministries of culture, academies of science, academies of art, artists’ unions, universities, state libraries, and publishing houses. 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

Romanovski 1966, 8. Romanovski 1966, 8 – 9. Romanovski 1966, 144. The agreement between the USSR and Czechoslovakia, signed on 23 April 1966. See: Romanovski 1966, 185. „Übersetzung wertvoller literarischer und künstlerischer Werke des anderen Landes, den Austausch und die Herausgabe von schöngeistiger Literatur und künstlerischen Büchern, von Materialien informa­ torischen Inhalts, von Musikwerken, den Austausch von Filmen, Schallplatten und Tonbändern“. – Heller / Krause 1967, 97. In the 1966 agreement with Czechoslovakia: Romanovski 1966, 187. Romanovski 1966, 146 (description of the agreement, pp. 145 – 147). – Heller / Krause 1967, 127. Romanovski 1966, 188.

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Tr anslations and Publishing The sources I have relied on to study the translation and publishing practices outlined above initially included two leading art magazines – the Moscow-published Iskusstvo (= IK ; Art) and the East Berlin-published, Bildende Kunst. Zeitschrift für Malerei, Plastik, Grafik, Kunsthandwerk und Volkskunst (= BK ) (fig. 1, 2).21 A section at the end of both publications introduced new books, including foreign ones. BK often published translations of articles by Soviet art historians, while IK published authors from the GDR and other satellite states less often, and usually translated from BK .22 In 1958, BK also launched the publishing initiative Kunstbücher in der russischen Sprache.23 It was the BK that provided GDR readers with more information than the IK about developments in Central European art history research. Thus, both IK and BK covered a selection of Western art historical works or their translations into German or Russian, which I will discuss later. Starting in the mid-1950s, both magazines provided regular overviews of art exhibitions and art magazines abroad (including in the West). They predominantly covered exhibitions of older art, while in the case of Western publications and modern art exhibitions, the commentary was often critical. As a digression, it should be noted that one sign of ‘internationalization’ in the case of IK was the fact that, starting in 1958, the magazine’s list of contents began to be translated into French – following the old cultural tradition of Tsarist Russia.24 To continue the story behind the research on this topic, it must be said that, at a certain juncture, it became clear that BK and IK did not provide a full picture of the translation and publication activity between the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Based on the obligation stated in the agreements of that time, to not only translate, but also to disseminate publications in each other’s countries, I began my investigations using the Estonian National Library (once called the F. R. Kreutzwald Estonian SSR National 21 Iskusstvo was published by the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Artists’ Union of the USSR from 1933 on and is still issued now (with gaps 1941 – 1946 and 1995 – 2002, while Bildende Kunst was published by the Association of [East] German Artists (VBKD, after 1970 renamed VBK-DDR). Later released in the years from 1956 – 1970, each volume consisting of twelve monthly issues. Today the journal Iskusstvo is a magazine with other goals and backgrounds. 22 E. g. Friedrich Möbius’s article about the art historian as a scientist and critic (IK, 1962/6); the article of Ingrid Schulze about the museums in Western Germany as servants of the imperialistic politics (IK 1962/12) as well as the contribution of Ullrich Kuhirt on the struggle against imperialist ideology and revisionism in aesthetics and in art (IK 1970/1 – 2). 23 It was not a consistent feature and disappeared quite soon thereafter. 24 The heading, “The care taken by the Soviet state with regard to development of fine art, meant for our foreign readers”; also appeared in three issues in 1961, in French translation. It described Soviet art policy in glowing terms.

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|  Krista Kodres Fig. 1  Cover of Iskusstvo (Art), journal of the Artists Union of the USSR (1961/1).

Library) search engine, ESTER ,25 and discovered something I had known years earlier, but had managed to forget, which was that the only foreign-language contemporary books that I could read back when I was studying at the Tartu State University, and later while working in the State Institute of Cultural Heritage, were mainly published in the GDR , Poland or Czechoslovakia. It is highly likely that the catalogs of the Estonian National Library hold most of the art history literature published in former Eastern Bloc countries. I am also quite certain that the same books can be found in all other former Soviet republic state libraries. As revealed by a random check, books published in Socialist countries (along with many Russian-language art and art history treatments) can be found in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library) in Leipzig.

25 https://www.ester.ee/ [Last accessed 04. 11. 2020].

Translations | Fig. 2  Cover of Bildende Kunst (Fine Art), journal of the Association of [East] German Artists (VBKD) (1968/6).

From Russian into German What was the translation practice during the Socialist Internationalism era? While the number of works and authors translated from Russian into German in the GDR seems quite small at first, this is actually quite deceptive. Already in the first half of the 1950s, the translation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, along with aesthetics and art history classics and works by modern scholars, was encouraged.26 A series of theoretical lectures,27 and explana­ tory texts,28 concerning art history treatments – long articles treating the key art period styles in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, as well as articles about some artists considered key 26 E. g. Grundlagen der marxistischen Philosophie (1959), Grundlagen der marxistisch-leninistischen Ästhetik (1962). 27 Kemenov 1955. 28 Shdanov 1951. – Alpatow 1953. – Nedoschiwin 1953 – 1955.

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|  Krista Kodres Fig. 3  Cover of Mikhail V. Alpatov’s Die Dresdner Galerie. Alte Meister. German translation. Dresden 1966 (here the cover of the 13th edition, 1978).

to the Marxist-Leninist canon – were translated and published as brochures.29 In Berlin, the magazine, Kunst und Literatur (Sowjetwissenschaft) was published regularly,30 with the telling subtitle, Zeitschrift zur Verbreitung sowjetischer Erfahrungen, and in which, from time to time, writings by Soviet aestheticians and art historians were published. In Bildende Kunst as well, treatments of historical art by Soviet art historians were published, as well as articles of an informative type (predominantly) regarding works considered important from the standpoint of the German art history canon housed in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow, and the State Hermitage Museum collection, in Leningrad. The low amount of specialized translations of Soviet art historians into German was partially compensated by two massive publications: the Moscow Institute of Art History (Институт искусствознания) compiled Geschichte der russischen Kunst in six volumes, from 1957 to 1976, and the eight-volume Allgemeine Geschichte der Kunst, published from

29 Michailow 1951. – Sidorow 1954. – Malitskaja 1954. – Lasarew / Iljin 1954. Brochures on Karl Brüllov (see: N. N. 1954a), Venice School of Painting (see: N. N. 1954b), Romanik, Gotik, Renaissance (see: N. N. 1956) from GSE were also published by the publishing house Henschel in Berlin. 30 Kunst und Literatur was published under the aegis of the German-Soviet Friendship Association from 1953 to 1990, a total of 38 issues.

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1961 to 1970, which was compiled by the Institute of Art Theory and History at the USSR Academy of Arts (Институт теории и истории изобразительного искусства).31 In addition, a few solitary examples of the most prominent Soviet authors were translated into German, such as Mikhail Alpatov (fig. 3),32 Viktor Lazarev,33 and other authors dealing with either the history of Russian art (Andrei Rublyov, Ilya Repin), or topics apparently considered of particular importance (e. g. Tatyana Kaptereva’s book about Diego Velázquez, Julia Lebedeva’s book on the icon painter Andrei Rublyov, and Konstantin Paustovski’s book about the 19th century Realist landscape painter, Isaak Levitan).34 A list of Soviet art historians considered important in the GDR is provided under the heading Kunstwissenschaft in the second volume of the monumental GDR Lexikon der Kunst (1971, 1976).35

From Other ‘Socialist Languages’ into Russian The translation of books by GDR art historians into Russian in the 1950s and 1960s was infrequent. Two of the major publishing houses producing Socialist art history books were Iskusstvo and Progress. In 1958, the German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann’s Aesthetics 36 was published, while translations of Otto Nagel’s treatment of Heinrich Zille (fig. 4),37 as well as Heinz Lüdecke’s books about the monumental sculptor Fritz Cremer and the Buchenwald concentration camp monument were scheduled for publication.38 It appears that the same attitude also applied to writings by art historians from other Socialist countries – few of them were translated, and only rarely. If we examine the list of art historians in the already mentioned Lexikon der K ­ unst,39 40 the ‘Pantheon’ of Socialist art history, to see who was translated into Russian,41 I 31 A General Art History was also translated into Greek. Information in: Iskusstvo 2 (1966). 32 In GDR – Altrussische Ikonenmalerei (1958), Geschichte der Kunst (1959 – 1966), Die Dresdner Galerie. Alte Meister (1959) were published. 33 Lazarev was also a member of the British Academy (1959), the Venice Institute of Science, Art and Literature (1959) and the Florence Drawing Academy (1963). His Chardin (1966), Theophanes der Grieche (1968), Ikonen de Moskauer Schule (1977) were published in the GDR. Old Russian Murals and Mosaics (1966) was published in London. See: Turchin / Tuchkov 2009, 268 – 309. 34 See bibliographic notes at the end of the article: Kapterewa 1961. – Lebedewa 1962. – Paustowski 1965. 35 The list included: M. Alpatov, V. Lazarev, B. Vipper, I. Grabar, N. Brunov, G. Nedoshivin, M. ­Libmann. Kunstwissenschaft 1971, 790. 36 Hartmann 1958. 37 Nagel 1962. 38 Lüdecke 1960; Bartke et al. 1966. 39 Kunstwissenschaft 1971, 790. 40 On the process of compiling the Lexikon see: Pätzke 1991, 40 – 45. 41 My reference library was, among others, the onetime Lenin Russian State Library’s electronic catalog: http://www.rsl.ru/ [Last accessed 04. 11. 2020].

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|  Krista Kodres Fig. 4  Cover of Otto Nagel’s Heinrich Zille. Russian translation. Moscow 1962.

found translations of Stanisław Lorentz’s, Polish Renaissance, and an overview of the collections of Polish museums,42 as well as Jan Białostocki’s books, Polish Graphic Art 1945 – 55, and European Painting in Polish Collections. 1300 – 1800;43 Mircea Popescu’s booklet on the 19th-century Romanian Realist painter, Nicolae Grigorescu (1962, Bucharest);44 George Oprescu’s Romanian Folk Art (1960, Moscow), and Chefs d’oeuvres of World Painting in Romanian Museums (1960, Bucharest);45 Klára Garas’s 18th-Century Hungarian Painting (1957), and Venetian Painting of the Settecento (1968, Budapest),46 42 The book Polish Renaissance was published originally in 1954 in Warsaw (Warszawa) and one year later translated into Russian. Lorentz 1955. – His book Museums and Collections in Poland was also translated into Russian and into English in the same year of its publication. Lorentz 1956b (1956a). 43 The book on Polish graphic arts was published at the same time in German, English, French, Russian. Białostocki 1956. – Białostocki / Walicki 1958 (1955). 44 Popescu 1962b (1962a). 45 Oprescu 1960a (1937) – Oprescu 1960c (1960b). 46 Garas 1957 (1955) – Garas 1968b (1968a).

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Atanas Stojkov’s Abstract Art Theory and Criticism Th ­ eory (1964, Moscow);47 Krâstju Mijatev’s The Rila Monastery: History, Architecture, Carvings, Paintings (1957, Sofia), and from the same author in 1961, two books on Balkan icons in collaboration with Yugoslavian art historian, Svetozar Radojčić, from the Sofia and Belgrade Academy of Sciences Press.48 It is worth noting that for the Soviet Union, cooperation with publishing houses from other Socialist countries was necessary, because the Soviet printing industry could not manage to produce quality reproductions. For example, the Hermitage’s catalogs were printed by Berlin’s Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, in collaboration with the French publishing house, Cercle d’art.49 The GDR’s own ‘Marxist art historians’ (also categorized as ‘art historians who carry on with the field’s humanist tradition, e. g. Richard Hamann’), were on the Lexikon list, including, among others Kurt Junghanns, Heinz Lüdecke, Gerhard Strauss, and Hermann Weidhaas. Besides Lüdecke, few authors I am aware of were translated into Russian, and notably omitted were Peter H. Feist’s Prinzipien und Methoden marxistischer Kunstwissenschaft (1966),50 and Wolfgang Hütt’s popular Wir und die Kunst (1959). The latter was heralded by the publishing house Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft as the “first Marxist overview introductory work written by an art historian from our republic.” 51 As to the full extent in which art history works by Soviet authors were translated into other Eastern European languages, I will have to defer on an exact answer. Insofar as the cooperation agreements were in place, a Socialist Internationalism translation practice similar to that of the GDR was probably in effect elsewhere. Robert Born has written that, from 1951 to 1969 in Hungary, both translations of leading Soviet authors, and the series Szovjet Művészettörténet (Soviet Art History) appeared, containing Hungarian language summaries of monographs and articles by Soviet authors.52 A conspicuous feature in the case of Eastern Europe’s Socialist publishing activity is another phenomenon – the work by Prague’s Artia and the Czech Republic’s Academy of Sciences publishing house, which translated a number of art history works by Czech authors into German, and similar work by Warsaw’s Arkady Press and the Polish Academy of Sciences, which published Polish authors in German. Publishing often took place in collaboration between the publishing houses of the GDR, and publishing 47 Stojkov 1964 (1963). 48 Hristov / Mijatev / Stojkov 1957; Mijatev 1961; Weitzman / Chatzidakis / Mijatev / Radoičić 1967 (1966) – all these books were also published in GDR in German. 49 n. n. 1965, 549. 50 This was in the collections of the Estonian SSR State Library but is not found in the catalogue of the former Lenin State Library. One of the few theoreticians from the Eastern Bloc whose work was translated into Russian and German was the Bulgarian Marxist aesthetician, Todor Pavlov. 51 Richter 1970, 493. 52 Born 2015, 171.

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houses of other Socialist countries. In any case, a clear trend seen in the latter half of the 1950s and 1960s, is the role of the German language as the Eastern Bloc’s ‘lingua franca’ in the field of art history, in the same way it had been the ‘lingua franca’ of the geographical axis of art history in Vienna and Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s. Along with the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe, beneficiaries of this linguistic preference included the art history disciplines of Soviet Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had only started developing in the years between World War I and World War II, and which traditionally ‘thought’ largely in German. In the post-war conditions of privation, the German language remained the ‘lingua franca’ of the Soviet-occupied Baltic states and the rest of Eastern Europe. This was well suited, albeit for different reasons, to Soviet ideologists, probably because it was the official language of the GDR,53 a country of key importance for the Soviet Union’s foreign politics.

Tr anslation of Western Books Finally, it must be said that Western European works translated into other languages also circulated within the Socialist Internationalism-influenced publishing and distribution network. Here, too, I do not pretend to have all-encompassing information, as I have a better overview only with regard to translations into Russian and German. On the basis of my research, I would confidently assert that the authors who were translated into Russian were ones who were known for their Socialist views, or authors from capitalist countries with whom the USSR deemed it important to have friendly relations (and whose communist parties received generous support), most notably Italy and France. The most popular artists in art publications dealing with contemporary art trends were Rockwell Kent, the Latin American Diego Rivera, and the Italian anti-fascist Renato Guttuso. Other authors whose art historical works 54 were introduced in the art magazine Iskusstvo included the Italian anti-fascist art historian, Lionello Venturi,55 the American Marxist Sidney Finkelstein (fig. 5),56 the French art historian Henri Perruchot,57 a victim of fascism who had emigrated to the US, John Rewald (fig. 6),58 the American, ­Bernard Berenson 59 and the Swedish anthropologist, Bengt Danielsson.60 Harvard professor 53 Kasack 1973, 387. 54 See Zezina 2013, 126. 55 Venturi 1956 (1949). – Venturi 1958 (1950). 56 Finkelstein 1956 (1954). See also: Solomon 1973, 274. 57 Perruchot 1966 (1956). – Perruchot 1969 (1958). 58 Rewald 1959 (1946). – Rewald 1962 (1956). 59 Berenson 1965 (1899). 60 Danielsson 1969 (1965).

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Fig. 5 

Cover of Sidney Finkelstein’s Realism in Art. Russian translation. Moscow 1956.

­Benjamin Rowland’s book, Art in East and West: An Introduction through Comparisons (1954, in Russian 1958),61 was probably chosen because of content that dealt with the art of the ‘Third Word.’ The print runs of the books, incidentally, ranged from 30,000 to 75,000 copies. The GDR published more Western art historians than did the USSR.62 One thing that really stands out is that Western Marxists, such as Frederick Antal, were not translated into Russian (although Antal was translated into German in the GDR in 1958 and 1975); the same is true for Arnold Hauser, Meyer Shapiro and Herbert Read, all of whom were critiqued in articles and anthologies.63 The latter practice was a more general strategy for Soviet science and cultural policy: not to make the original 61 Rowland 1958 (1954). 62 Socialist countries also had cultural cooperation agreements with capitalist countries. For example, Peter H. Feist was the deputy chairman of the German-Italian Friendship Association in the GDR. See also the list of books in the series Fundus-Bücher of the Verlag der Kunst in Dresden, GDR: https:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundus-Reihe [Last accessed 04. 11. 2020]. 63 For example, Antal was first praised and then critiqued because, in his ‘Florentine Painting and its Social Background’ (London 1947), socio-economics was treated as a passive phenomenon, and, as a result, the artistic form appeared merely as a reflection of the structure of consciousness, i. e. as a thought

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Fig. 6  Cover of John Rewald’s History of Impressionism. Russian translation. Moscow 1959.

texts available, but rather to introduce their content, coupled with Marxist-Leninist criticism, thus aiming to keep them in the ‘Soviet mould’.64 Here it should also be mentioned that the first collection of criticism of this type, Against Bourgeois Art and Bourgeois Art History (1951) had already been translated into German in 1954.65 The anthologies – On Contemporary Bourgeois Aesthetics (1963), and Contemporary Foreign Art History (1964),66 both published only in Russian, contained plenty of criticism of Western philosophers, aestheticians and Marxists, social art historians and ‘formalist’ art historians (Friedrich Nietzsche, Benedetto Croce, André Malraux, Johan Huizinga, José Ortega y Gasset, Hans Sedlmayr, Alfred Barr etc.). Paradoxically, establishing this kind of intertextual relationship between Western and Soviet discourses allowed the discerning reader to find quality information behind the criticism. A telling example is an article by Svetlana Tshervonnaya, a researcher at the Moscow Art Theory and History Institute, Against Falsification of the Art History of the Soviet Baltic Republics, in which, along with citations, one could find all manner of information that art historians in figure (образ мышления). Antal also arguably ignored the true revolutionary character of the epoch. See: Nedoschiwin 1964, 18 – 20. 64 See also Sherry 2012, 272 – 273. 65 The book was published in 1954 under the title Gegen die bürgerliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft. Grabar / Kemenow 1954. 66 Vipper / Livanova 1964.

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exile had written about Baltic art.67 In the absence of specific studies, it is difficult to say how many original works by Western authors were available in the public libraries – there must have been such works in the central art historical institutions of Moscow and Leningrad, as they were cited by the researchers working there.68 The Soviet experience is that there were special collections within libraries, where, if readers were able to provide a corresponding institutional recommendation, they could access certain Western periodicals and books.69 As to whether this applied to the libraries of other Socialist countries will require further study.70

Thematic R ange of Tr anslations Finally, when we look at the thematic range of translated literature, a number of interesting aspects come to light. Somewhat surprisingly, a large number of treatments of impressionism were translated into Russian. This is probably related to the tentative beginnings of the discursive side. In 1946, the Soviet Union proclaimed that the works of Matisse, Picasso and other ‘formalists and decadents’ had nothing to do with art. Following the post-Stalinist ‘Thaw’ in late fifties, these works, and the works of other French impressionists, were included and still remain in the Russian collections and exhibition halls. Impressionism was therefore the subject of rehabilitation.71 As an aside, it should be noted that one of the first books concerning 20th-century Modernism/Abstractionism to be translated into Russian was a 1959 collection of writings by French, German and Polish authors on the works of Picasso, an International Peace Prize and Stalin Prize winner.72 Moreover, as we have already seen, in the GDR it was above all texts that conveyed the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist art theory, as well as works on general and Russian 67 Chervonnaya 1961, 70 – 73. 68 The electronic catalogs of libraries unfortunately do not show the time at which the library acquired the books. Estonia’s central libraries received many donations from the West after restoration of independence in the 1990s, including books published in the post-war period, which today are, of course, in the catalogs. Thus, the catalogs do not provide any information on the availability of Western art history literature during the Soviet period; this information can probably be found in archive documents. 69 See Sinitsyna 1999 4 – 10. 70 See Grala / Jankowska 2000, 233 – 238. 71 Zezina 2013, 105 – 106. – n. n. 1957, 3 – 9. 72 See Dmitrieva 2019, 143 – 169. – Vladimirski 1957. The title of the collection of articles was: Пикассо. Сборник статей о творчестве. Перевод с немецкого, французского и польского [Picasso. Collected articles on his work. Translations from the German, French and Polish]. Москва 1957. The article was translated from: Materialy do studiów I dyskusji. Warszawa 1955, 1 – 2, 140 – 164. http://www.picasso-­ pablo.ru/library/picasso-sbornik-statey-o-tvorchestve6.html [Last accessed 22. 10. 2020].

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art history, that were translated from Russian, obviously with the aim of disseminating this theory throughout the entire Eastern Bloc. The voluminous Allgemeine Geschichte der Kunst, for instance, was structured so that for each topic, the ‘right’ interpretation was provided at the beginning or end; in between, there was a stylistic analysis that relied upon the pre-war mainstream discourse for art history. One other aspect of Allgemeine Geschichte der Kunst must be highlighted. One of the political and cultural ambitions of Socialist Internationalism, was that the spatial and geographical boundaries of the Western art history canon be discarded, and replaced by a rise in interest in the history of the Third World’s visual culture. The General Art History was one of the first publications to attempt to expand this kind of ideological approach outside the Western cultural space.73 When special works were translated into German, the focus was on art periods and persons whose art idiom was “realistic”, and whose works were seen as reflecting “popular” or folksy qualities (standard examples being artists of the Renaissance, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and the art of the 19th-century Russian Peredvizhniki). Such choices were in line with the GDR’s policy of building a ‘sozialistische Nationalkultur’, a Socialist national culture, which began to be articulated at the first and second Bitterfeld Conference of Writers of cultural policy makers and creative intellectuals, held in 1959 and 1964. In his address to the second Bitterfeld Conference, GDR Minister for Culture, Hans Bentzien, specified three groups of themes that art historians needed to deal with: firstly, the mutual relations between technical revolution and cultural revolution in the GDR; secondly, the image of Socialist man in modern art; and thirdly, the developments in 19th and 20th-century art.74 Art historians working in art museums were soon tasked with preparing a ‘large and comprehensive’ exhibition of 19th and 20th-century German Realist painting, sculpture and graphic art.75 The Artia 76 and Corvina publishers in Prague and Budapest published German art history texts and German translations of Russian works. Soviet authors mainly offered overviews of (Western) art collections in Soviet museum holdings. Works of local authors translated into German primarily engaged with medieval and post-Renaissance art history as well as domestic museum collections.

73 74 75 76

See also: Elkins 2002, 89 – 97. Bentzien 1964, 380. Bartke 1963, 507. Bogatsova 1973.

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Concluding R emarks In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union evolved the concept of Socialist Internationalism, and developed an institutional system to implement the concept through its relations with the Warsaw Pact countries. From the point of view of the Soviet authorities, Socialist Internationalism was an instrument in the Sovietization of Eastern Europe. New Marxist-Leninist history and art history narratives were components of this process, and therefore had to be shared with ‘brotherly’ Socialist countries. Formulated by a belief in the emancipatory power of culture and art, these new cultural narratives were supposed to work toward a common goal, which was reiterated by the new (third) Communist Party of the Soviet Union programme, adopted at the 22nd Congress in 1961: to educate a ‘New Man’ who would contribute to building communism.77 This goal was considered to be, “the Soviet Union’s world history mission that it carries out through cultural ties with the abroad.” 78 The policy of Socialist Internationalism, and the cultural diplomacy that was implemented to put it into practice, can thus be regarded as a social engineering project on an international scale. We must, of course, remember that the capitalist adversary also had a political mission of its own. Alfred A. Reisch, who worked as the Hungarian national editor for the Press and Special Projects Division of Free Europe in Munich from 1960 to 1974, provides an overview of the extensive book program that the CIA implemented throughout Eastern Europe. This program was initiated in 1956, out of a desire to ensure that the influence of the West’s free culture, “would finally spread to similar groups [i. e. leaders, intellectuals and other elite] in the Soviet Union, which [would make] the consequences of subjugation of Eastern Europe complicated for Moscow…” 79 The CIA’s book program targeted Socialist countries, using a very similar methodology to that of the Socialist Internationalism program. In practice, the internationalist process involved the self-Sovietization of the elites in the target countries, something Matthias Middell has termed, “self-stylization.” 80 This can be clearly seen in the field of art history. In the GDR materials I reviewed, both political and academic leaders in the 1950s and 1960s write constantly about the lagging and inadequate state of art theory and art history, referring to the need to look to the USSR as an example.81 The Soviets were perceived as the model for Socialist cultural identity building, as a counterweight to ‘bourgeois’ art history, especially in terms of 77 78 79 80 81

History 1975, 598. Kim 1957, 369. Reisch 2013a, 137 – Reisch 2013b. Middell 1997, 84 – 85. See Bitterfeld Conferences I and II. Cf. also Ullrich Kuhirt’s foreword for the first volume of Allgemeine Geschichte der Kunst. Kuhirt 1961, 7 – 8.

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the ‘other’ Germany’s art scholarship.82 At the close of the decade, art history’s official (anonymous) voice could finally accept that, “Today, the history of art in the GDR is closely linked to the practice of the Socialist cultural revolution.” 83 Translation was the central tool for dissemination of these new ‘objective’ history and art history narratives. We have good reason to believe that the texts translated from Russian into the languages of Eastern Bloc countries were carefully chosen when it came to the discursive frames and thematic reach. An exhaustive answer to the question of what kind of changes resulted from this politically-oriented disciplinary transfer to Eastern Bloc countries is, naturally, not possible, as the study and analysis of the Socialist national art history narratives has only recently begun.84 Thus, at the current stage of research, it might be reasonable to question the ‘power of translations’ in more general terms. Translation is a translingual act of transcoding cultural material – a complex act of communication.85 Authoritarian societies such as the Soviet Union were in a position to control the construction of the narratives, as well as to disseminate them, via officially sanctioned translations. These translations were therefore inevitably of a political nature, designed to convey ideologically defined narratives predicated on changing or reinforcing existing cultural situations. Yet translation also functioned as an act of more specific, disciplinary (art history) communication in the Sovietization period. The question is whether the politically-informed translations of works promoting a Marxist-Leninist vein were capable of giving rise to a new art history discourse in the cultures at which the translations were aimed. Viewed from a theoretical viewpoint, all cultural processes have a ‘translation-like’ nature, as the way culture develops is invariably through interactions with other cultures.86 One of the ideas presented in Yuri Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere is that all cultural processes involve a constant ‘filtering’ of messages from the outside, and their ‘translation into their own language’, which in turn functions in the context of a given ‘cultural memory system.’87 “Culture not only creates its internal organization, but also its own type of disorganization […]. External structures, distributed on that side of the semiotic boundary, are presumed to be non-structures.” 88 Lotman also writes 82 See Schulze 1970. 83 Kunstwissenschaft 1971, 790. 84 These titles provide an introduction on the situation in the countries of the Socialist Bloc: Born / Janatková / Labuda 2004. – Kivmaa 2010. – Dovydaitytė 2012. – Rampley 2012. – Bakoš 2013. – Morozova 2014. – Bartlová 2016. – Bernhardt / Kempe 2015. – Dmitrieva / Kempe 2015. – Marek / Plucharova-Grigiene 2016. – Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019. 85 Howland 2003, 45 – 60. 86 See Torop 2011. – Middell 2000, 7 – 41. 87 Lotman 1999, 15, 25. 88 Lotman 1999, 17.

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that, “the (external) reality [non-structure – K. K.] becomes a ‘reality in itself ’ for a given semiosphere, only insofar as it has been translated into [that semiosphere’s] language [my emphasis].” 89 In light of Yuri Lotman’s theoretical discussions, we must ask whether, and to what extent, a Marxist-Leninist approach to art history could be imposed upon cultures forcefully incorporated into the Eastern Bloc, as a way of reaching the core of the recipient cultures i. e. whether it was possible for Socialist Internationalism to shape a new disciplinary identity for art history, via the ideological control of translation. The question for subsequent research is largely bound up in the various ways this coercive approach corresponded with the local art history traditions, the local disciplinary ‘memory systems,’ and the effect it had on diverse members of art history community. In closing, I would return yet again to Socialist Internationalism, in order to reiterate several important aspects that, in my opinion, should be borne in mind when studying this period. First of all, Socialist Internationalism was a post-Stalinist ‘Thaw era’ policy, and was only one part of a Soviet foreign policy that claimed to promote ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West. It has been stressed that it was precisely during the Thaw era that the concept of ‘cultural universalism’ arose in the Soviet Union, in which fundamentally equal value was accorded to world culture (i. e. not only with progressive culture, as had previously been the case).90 Secondly, we must not forget that in connection with the Thaw era, a multiplicity of opinions became possible in the USSR (within certain limits), which allowed humanities, including art history, to be depoliticized (via an admittedly slow and arduous process).91 Thirdly, the Thaw era’s Socialist Internationalism policy made it possible for art historians from different countries to meet personally, and for academic networks to take shape. In connection with this third point, we should recall that Socialist art history did have its quotidian and very personal side that sometimes has left traces in the form of diaries, correspondences, interviews, and recollections.92 The everyday, more prosaic side of art history in the firm embrace of Socialist Internationalism naturally requires further study, if only to better understand and critically decode one’s own disciplinary heritage.

89 Lotman 1999, 14. 90 Gilburd 2013, 389 – 390. See also Scherry 2012. 91 See Kodres / Jõekalda 2019, 11 – 35. 92 Alpatov 1994. – Feist 2016.

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Bibliogr aphy Anweiler, Oskar / Ruffmann, Karl-Heinz (eds.): Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion. Stuttgart 1973. Alpatow, Michael W.: Die reaktionäre Geschichtsschreibung im Dienste der Kriegsbrandstifter. Berlin 1953. Alpatow, Michael W.: Altrussische Ikonenmalerei. Berlin 1958. Alpatow, Michael W.: Geschichte der Kunst. T. 1: Die Kunst der alten Welt und des Mittelalters. Transl. Kurt Küppers. Dresden 1961. Alpatow, Michael W.: Geschichte der Kunst. T. 2: Die Kunst der Renaissance und der Neuzeit. Transl. Kurt Küppers. Dresden 1964. Alpatow, Michael W.: Die Dresdner Galerie Alte Meister. Dresden 1966. [Alpatov]: Алпатов, Михаил: Воспоминания [Memoires]. Москва 1994. Alscher, Ludger et al. (eds.): Lexikon der Kunst. Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Angewandte Kunst, Industrieformgestaltung, Kunsttheorie, 2: G–Lh. Leipzig 1971. Bakoš, Ján: Discourses and Strategies: The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping Central European Approaches to Art History & Related Discourses. Frankfurt/Main / New York 2013 (Series of Slovak Academy of Sciences 5). [Bartke  / Kuhirt  / Lüdecke]: Бартке, Эберхард  / Кухирт, Ульрих  / Людеке, Хайнц: Памятник в Бухенвальде [The Memorial in Buchenwald]. Москва 1966. Bartke, Eberhard: Die Aufgaben der marxistischen Kunstwissenschaftler an unseren Museen. Referat auf einer Tagung des Ministeriums für Kultur. In: Bildende Kunst 10 (1963), 507 – 512. Bartlová, Milena: Unsere “nationale” Kunst. Studien zur Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte. Ostfildern 2016 (Kompass Ostmitteleuropa 1). Bentzien, Hans: Der Platz der Kunst in der Gesellschaft. Aus der Rede des Ministers für Kultur, Hans Bentzien, auf der II. Bitterfelder Konferenz. In: Bildende Kunst 7 (1964), 378 – 380. Bernhardt, Katja / Kempe, Antje (eds.): (Dis)Kontinuitäten. Kunsthistoriografien im östlichen Europa nach 1945. In: kunsttexte.de/ostblick 4 (2015). [Last accessed 04. 11. 2020]. Berenson, Bernard: The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, with an Index to their Works. New York et. al. 1899. [Berenson]: Бернсон, Бернард: Венецианские художники эпохи Возрождения. Пер. С англ. и вступ. статья Н. А.Белоусовой [The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance. Transl. and introduction Natalia A. Belousova]. Москва 1965. [Białostocki]: Бялостоцкий, Ян: Польское графическое искусство 1945 – 1955 [Graphic Arts in Poland 1945 – 1955]. Варшава 1956. Białostocki, Jan / Walicki, Michał: Malarstwo europeijskie w zbiorach polskich, 1300 – 1800 [European Paintings in Polish Collections 1300 – 1800]. Warszawa 1955. [Białostocki / Walicki]: Бялостоцкий, Ян, Валицкий, Михаил: Европейская живопись в польских собраниях, 1300 – 1800 [European Paintings in Polish collections]. Варшава 1958.

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[Bogatsova]: Богатцова, Мирьям: Чешская книга выходит в мир (Артиа 1953 – 1973) [Chechoslovak Book Enters the World (Artia 1953 – 1973)]. Прага 1973. Born, Robert / Janatková, Alena / Labuda, Adam S. (eds.): Die Kunsthistoriographien in Osmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs. Berlin 2004 (humboldt-schriften zur kunst- und bildgeschichte 1). Born, Robert: Die Renaissance in Ungarn und Italien aus marxistischer und nationaler Perspektive. Beobachtungen zur Situation in Ungarn vor und nach 1945. In: Ars: Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences 48/2 (2015), 48/2 (2015), 160 – 178. Danielsson, Bengt: Gauguin in the South Seas. Garden City, NY 1965. [Danielsson]: Дaниельссон, Бенгт: Гоген в Полинезии. Пер. Со шведского Л.Жданова [Gauguin in Polynesia. Transl. L.Zhdanov]. Москва 1969. Dmitrieva, Marina / Kempe, Antje (eds.): Elastische Dialektik: Zur dynamischen Entwicklung der marxistischen Renaissance-Forschung. In: ARS: Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences 48/2 (2015), 111 – 117. Dmitrieva, Marina: The Riddle of Modernism in the Art Historical Discourse of the Thaw. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 143 – 169 Dovydaitytė, Linara (ed.): (Un)blocked Memory: Writing Art History in Baltic Countries. Special issue of: Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 21/3 – 4 (2012). Elkins, James: Stories of Art. New York / London 2002. Feist, Peter H.: Schwierige Nachbarschaft. Die Kunstgeschichtswissenschaft in der DDR in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kunstgeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft in den benachbarten ostmittel­ europäischen Ländern. In: Born / Janatková / Labuda 2004, 421 – 434. Feist, Peter H.: Hauptstraßen und eigene Wege. Rückschau eines Kunsthistorikers. Berlin 2016. Finkelstein, Sidney: Realism in Art: The Relation between Artistic Beauty and Real Life in Painting from Primitive Origins to Today. New York 1954. [Finkelstein]: Финкелстайн, Сидни: Реализм в искусстве. Пер. В. М. Закладной / Ю. В. Семенова [Realism in Art. Transl. V. M. Zakladnaya / Yu. V. Semenov]. Москва 1956. Garas, Klára: Magyarországi festészet a XVIII. században [Painting in Hungary in the 18th Century]. Budapest 1955. [Garas 1957]: Гараш, Клара: Живопись Венгрии в XVIII веке [Painting in Hungary in the 18th Century]. Будапешт 1957. [Garas 1968a]: Garas, Klára: A velencei settecento festészete [Venetian Painting of the Settecento]. Budapest 1968. [Garas 1968b]: Гараш, Клара: Венецианское сеттеченто. Пер. с венг. Марии ПоганьБерталан [Settecento in Venice. Transl. Maria Pogany-Bertalan]. Будапешт 1968. Gilburd, Eleonory: The Revival of Soviet Internationalism in the Mid to Late 1950s. In: Kozlov / Gilburd 2013, 362 – 400. Grabar, Igor E. / Kemenow, Wladimir S. (eds.): Gegen die bürgerliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft. Ein Sammelband mit Aufsätzen. Berlin 1954 [1951].

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Grala, Ewa / Jankowska, Jolanta: Biblioteka [Library]. In: Sokół, Lech / Benedtyktowicz, Zbigniew (eds.): Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk 1949 – 1999 [Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences 1949 – 1999]. Warszawa 2000, 233 – 238. [Hartmann]: Гартман, Николай: Эстетика. Пер. с нем. Т. С. Батищевой и др. [Aesthetics. Transl. T. S. Batishcheva a. o.]. Москва 1958. Heller, Ilse / Krause, Hans-Thomas: Kulturelle Zusammenarbeit DDR – UdSSR. Berlin 1967. Helme, Sirje (ed.): Art and Political Reality. Tallinn 2013 (Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia. 3[8]). [History]: Nõukogude Liidu Kommunistliku Partei ajalugu [History of the Communist Party of Soviet Union]. Tallinn 1975. Howland, Douglas: The Predicament of Ideas in Culture: Translation and Historiography. In: History and Theory 42/February (2003), 45 – 60. [Hristov / Mijatev / Stojkov 1957a]: Христов, Христо / Миятев, Кръстю / Стойков, Георги: Рилският манастир: История. Архитектура. Резби. Стенописи [The Rila Monastery: History, Architecture, Carvings, Paintings]. София 1957. [Hristov / Mijatev / Stojkov 1957b]: Христов, Христо / Миятев, Крыстю / Стойков, Георги: Рильский монастырь: история, зодчество, резьба, живопись [The Rila Monastery: History, Architecture, Carvings, Paintings]. София 1957. [Joffe]: Иоффе, Александр E.: Интернациональные научные и культурные связи Советского Союза 1918 – 1932 гг [International Scientific and Cultural Relations of the Soviet Union 1918 – 1932]. Москва 1969. Kapterewa, Tatjana: Velazquez und die spanische Porträtmalerei. Leipzig 1961. Kasack, Wolfgang: Kulturelle Außenpolitik. In: Anweiler, Oskar / Ruffmann, Karl-Heinz (eds.): Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion. Stuttgart 1973, 345 – 390. Kemenov, Vladimir. S.: Über den objektiven Charakter der Gesetze der realistischen Kunst. Berlin 1955. [Kim]: Ким, М. П.: 40 лет советской кульуры [Forty Years of Soviet Culture]. Москва 1957 Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina: Introduction to Socialist Art History: On Formulating the Soviet Canon. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 11 – 35. Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina / Marek, Michaela (eds.): A Socialist Realist Art History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019 (Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9). Kozlov, Denis / Gilburd, Eleonory (eds.): The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Toronto 2013, 362 – 400. Kuhirt, Ullrich: Einleitung. In: Kuhirt 1961, 7 – 8. Kuhirt, Ullrich (ed.): Allgemeine Geschichte der Kunst. Bd. 1 Die Kunst der Alten Welt. Leipzig 1961. [Kunstwissenschaft 1971]: Kunstwissenschaft. In: Alscher et al. 1971, 816 – 817.

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Lasarew, Wiktor N. / Iljin, Michail A.: Der Barock. Berlin 1954 (Grosse Sowjet-Enzyklopädie. Reihe Kunst und Literatur 32). Lazarev, Viktor N.: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Dresden 1966. Lazarev, Viktor N.: Theophanes der Grieche und seine Schule. Dresden 1968. Lasarew, Viktor N.: Ikonen der Moskauer Schule. Berlin 1977. Lebedewa, Julia: Andrei Rubljow und seine Zeitgenossen. Dresden 1962. Lorentz, Stanisław: Odrodzenie w Polsce [Renaissance in Poland]. Warszawa 1954. [Lorentz 1955]: Лоренц, Станислав: Возрождение в Польше [Renaissance in Poland]. Варшава 1955. [Lorentz 1956a]: Lorentz, Stanisław: Przewodnik po muzeach i zbiorach w Polsce [Museums and Collections in Poland 1945 – 1955]. Warszawa 1955. [Lorentz 1956b]: Лоренц, Станислав: Музеи и коллекции Польши, 1945 – 1955 [Museums and Collections in Poland 1945 – 1955]. Варшава 1956. Lotman, Juri: Semiosfäärist [On Semiosphere]. In: Lotman 1999, 7 – 36. Lotman, Juri: Semiosfäärist. Tallinn 1999. [Lüdecke]: Людеке, Гейнц: Фриц Кремер: творческий путь немецкого скульптора [Fritz Cremer. The Artistic Path of a German Sculptor]. Москва 1960. Malickaja, Ksenija M. / Lazarev, Viktor N.: Velazquez. Berlin 1954 (Grosse Sowjet-Enzyklo­ pädie. Reihe Kunst und Literatur 27). Marek, Michaela / Pluhařová-Grigienė, Eva (eds.): Baroque for a wide public. Special issue of: Journal of Art Historiography 15 (2016). https://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/15-dec16/ [Last accessed 22. 10. 2020]. Michailow, Boris P.: Architektur. Berlin 1951. Middell, Matthias: Wissenschaftliche Schule in der Historiographie der DDR? In: Sabrow 1997, 84 – 85. Middell, Mattias: Kulturtransfer und historische Komparatistik – Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis. In: Comparativ 10/1 (2000), 7 – 41. [Mijatev 1961a]: Миятев, Кръстю: Боянските стенописи. Монографня. [Wall Paintings in Boyana Church]. София 1961 [Mijatev 1961b]: Миятев, Крыстю: Боянские стенописи [Wall Paintings in Boyana Church]. Дрезден / София 1961. Mikkonen, Simo / Suutari, Pekka (eds.): Music, Art and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and The Cold War. London / New York 2015. [Morozova]: Морозова, Анна Валентиновна: Отечественное искусствознание (1964 – 1985) [National Art Historiography (1964 – 1985)]. In: Вестник ЦПбГУ 2/1 (2014), 123 – 136. [Nagel]: Нагель, Отто: Генрих Цилле [Heinrich Zille]. Москва 1962. Nedoschiwin, German A.: Abhandlungen über Theorie und Kunst. Studienmaterial für die künstlerische Lehranstalten. 4 Hefte. Berlin 1953 – 1955.

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[Rewald]: Ревалд, Джон: Постимпрессионизм. От Ван Гога до Гогена [Post-Impressionism. From van Gogh to Gauguin]. Ленинград / Москва 1962. Richter, Antje: 25 Jahre Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft. In: Bildende Kunst 9 (1970), 492 – 493. [Romanovski]: Романовский, Сергей К.: Международные культурные связи СССР [International Cultural Relations of the USSR]. Москва 1966. Rose, Clive: The Soviet Propaganda Network. A Directory of Organisations Serving Soviet Foreign Policy. London / New York 1988. Rotenberg, Evsej, I. / Sadowen, W. W. / Gerzenberg, B. P.: Schlachtenmalerei. Transl. Melitta Bailleu. Berlin 1953 (Grosse Sowjet-Enzyklopädie. Reihe Kunst und Literatur 16). Rowland, Benjamin: Art in East and West: An Introduction through Comparisons. Cambridge 1954. [Rowland]: Роуленд, Беньямин: Искусство Запада и Востока. Пер. А. М.Членова [Art in East and West: An Introduction through Comparisons. Transl. A. M.Chlenov]. Москва 1958. Rupprecht, Tobias: Soviet Internationalism after Stalin. Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War. Cambridge 2015. Sabrow, Martin (ed): Verwaltete Vergangenheit. Geschichtskultur und Herrschaftslegitimation in der DDR. Leipzig 1997 (Geschichtswissenschaft und Geschichtskultur im 20. Jahrhundert 1). Shdanow, Andrej. A.: Über Kunst und Wissenschaft. Berlin 1951. Schulze, Ingrid: Der Missbrauch der Kunstgeschichte durch die imperialistische deutsche Ostpolitik. Leipzig 1970. Sherry, Samantha: Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union in the Stalin and Khrushchev Eras. (Dissertation University of Edinburgh) 2012. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/ handle/1842/7586/Sherry2012.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y [Last accessed 25. 08. 2022]. Sidorow, A. A.: Die Gotik. Transl. Ruth Brückner. Berlin 1954 (Grosse Sowjet-Enzyklopädie. Reihe Kunst und Literatur 31) Sinitsyna, Olga: Censorship in the Soviet Union and its Cultural and Professional Results for Arts and Art Libraries. In: Art Libraries Journal 24/1 (1999), 4 – 10. https://www.cambridge. org/core/journals/art-libraries-journal/article/censorship-of-art-books-in-the-soviet-unionand-its-effect-on-the-arts-and-on-art-libraries-(1/7A6A3EA5E72D7CC48BF24DBA23296A50 [Last accessed 22. 10. 2020]. Solomon, Maynard (ed.): Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary. Detroit 1973. [Stojkov 1963]: Стойков, Атанас: Критика на абстрактното изкуство и неговите теории [Critique of Abstract Art and its Theory]. Sofija 1963. [Stojkov 1964]: Стойков, Атанас: Критика абстрактного искусства и его теории [Critique of Abstract Art and its Theory]. Москва 1964. Torop, Peeter: Tõlge ja kultuur [Translation and Culture]. Tartu 2011.

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[Chervonnaya]: Червонная, Светлана A.: Против фальсификации истории искусства Советской Прибалтики [Against the Distortion of Art History of the Soviet Baltic Republics]. In: Искусство 10 (1961), 70 – 73. [Turchin / Tuchkov]: Турчин, В. С. И. / Тучков, И. И. (eds.) История искусства в Московском Университете: 1857 – 2007 [History of Art at Moscow University: 1857 – 2007]. Москва 2009. Venturi, Lionello: Pittori Moderni. Firenze 1949. [Venturi]: Вентури, Лионелло: Художники нового времени. Пер. Л. М.Бродской [Artists of our Time. Transl. L. M.Brodskaya]. Москва 1956. Venturi, Lionello: Da Manet a Lautrec: Manet, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec. Firenze 1950 (Maestri moderni IV Impressionisti e simbolisti). [Venturi]: Вентури, Лионелло: От Моне до Лотрека. Пер. Цецилии И. Кин [From Monet to Toulouse-Lautrec.Transl. Caecilia Kin]. Москва 1958. [Vladimirski]: Владимирский, A. (ed.): Пикассо. Сборник статей о творчестве. Перевод с немецкого, французкого и польского [Picasso. Collected Articles on his Work. Translations from the German, French and Polish]. Москва 1957. [Vipper / Livanova]: Виппер, Борис, P. / Ливанова, Татьяна H. (eds): Современное искусствознание за рубежом: очерки [Contemporary Art Historiography Abroad. Essays]. Москва 1964. Weitzman, Kurt / Chatzidakis, Manolis / Mijatev, Krastju / Radoicić, Svetozar: Вайцман, Куртt / Хадзидакис, Анолис / Миятев, Кръстю / Радойчич, Светозар, Икони от Балканите: Синай, Гърция, България, Югославия / Ikone sa Balkana: Sinaj, Grčka, Bugarska, Jugoslavija [Icons in the Balkans. Sinai, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia]. Sofija / Beograd 1966. [Weitzman / Chatzidakis / Mijatev / Radoičić]: Bеицман, Kурт / Xадзидакис, Mанолис / Миятев, Кръстю / Радойчич, Светозар и др.: Иконы на Балканах. Синай. Греция. Болгария. Югославия [Icons in the Balkans. Sinai, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia]. София, Белград 1967. Zezina, Maria: Foreign Contacts of Moscow Artists: Between Ideology and Art. In: Helme 2013, 118 – 131.

Mária Orišková

Shifts and Gaps in the Paradigm of Socialist Internationalism Czechoslovak Exhibitions Abroad, 1956 – 1988 Official international exhibitions, in particular those which were organized during the Cold War, are distinguished by numerous contradictions and ambiguities. This is not just because of the complicated relationship between art and politics: there is also the political and cultural conditioning, or situatedness, of our knowledge. From a contemporary perspective, it is evident that many profound changes were brought about in the 20th century, including a reevaluation of the concepts of art and culture. What seems particularly fundamental, from a contemporary standpoint, is the culture of international exhibitions, which started with the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851, and which continued into the 20th and 21st centuries, encompassing the overall processes of mobility, the technologization of society, and the circulation of goods. This culture did not bypass Czechoslovakia and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, but rather took on specific features. The aim of this paper will be to examine various examples of state-administered cultural-diplomatic exhibitions, in order to explore the ways in which communist ideology functioned in the field of cultural exchange. An additional goal will be to comprehend how the communist world was framed, affirmed and transformed in this domain. Furthermore, a specific sort of world art history that grew out of the ideal of Socialist Internationalism will be investigated. Within this particular historiography, the art of the developing world was assessed as being equally ‘progressive’ as Western art. Apart from the direct political implications (in terms of the politico-historical framework of the Cold War), one cannot avoid consideration of how exhibition projects were perceived in terms of the dominant art-historical narratives of the time. After World War II, irrespective of the social order, ‘national’ exhibitions were universally predominant, and, in the form of international travelling shows, were often a type of media which effectively promoted the idea of the nation state.1 In the Eastern Bloc, the expounded narrative of Socialist Internationalism took its point of departure from the unquestionable reality of national art. Undoubtedly, both the exhibitions of national art, and national art histories, were constructs which tended to oversimplify art and facilitate its use, or indeed abuse, for various purposes. 1 Given that there were two nations (Czech and Slovak) in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the idea of ‘Czechoslovakism’, deriving from the First Republic, continued unimpeded in the form of a Czechoslovak art. In parallel, there was also a viable idea of independent Czech and Slovak art, and hence exhibitions were also conceived in this spirit.

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Socialist Internationalism and the Expanding Geogr aphy of the Eastern Bloc When Czechoslovakia became part of the Eastern Bloc in 1948, the country was required to adapt to Soviet politico-cultural practices and theoretical dogmas. This included Socialist Internationalism, which was positioned as a new kind of relationship in the field of foreign policy. This term, initiated by Vladimir I. Lenin,2 was supposed to represent a higher degree of Proletarian Internationalism, as well as a continuation of the Communist International, however, in the first few years after World War II, Czechoslovakia was confronted with the dilemma of orientation towards the West or the East. As a consequence, the country found itself in a decisive historical moment that led Czech art theoretician Jindřich Chalupecký to make a fundamental evaluation. “One must consider,” he said, “to what extent the Czechoslovak cultural tradition is bound up with the East, i. e. with the Slavs, and how much it is indebted to imports from the West. Or in other words: how much does it wish to accept the tendencies realized in the Soviet Union, and how much does it wish to share its political and cultural fate with the western democracies?” 3 Chalupecký situated his reflections in an all-European context, where the crisis of Modernism intersected with the historical perspective of Socialism, and he understood that both were inseparable. After the communist coup of 1948, Czechoslovak cultural policy acquired a clear pro-Soviet orientation, and, during the postwar period of Stalinism, books by Andrei Zhdanov and Georgi Plekhanov were translated into the Czech and Slovak languages.4 At the same time, an emphasis on national art was interwoven with the idea of Proletarian Internationalism. The Prague Slavic Congress of 1948 delineated not only a 2 The term, Socialist Internationalism, was for first used by Lenin in his work, Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism. How the International Can Be Restored [Lenin 1914]. The text was never translated into the Czech and Slovak languages. Lenin’s concept was based on the necessity of ideological and organizational convergence of Socialist forces in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Russia before 1914. He was critical of the prevalent social-patriotism or ‘Socialist’ chauvinism developed by some Social Democrats (e. g. Czech-Austrian philosopher and Marxist theoretician, Karl Kautsky, one of the founders of the Second International). According to Lenin, “The International consists in the coming together (first ideologically, then in due time organizationally as well) of people who were ‘being the next to shoot’ at the government and the ruling classes of their own respective ‘fatherlands’. […] However, for the very reason that it is no easy task, it must be accomplished only together with those who wish to perform it and are not afraid of a complete break with the chauvinists and with the defenders of social-chauvinism.” The outbreak of the Great War in 1914 threw the International into crisis. A group of Social Democrats tried to work out a joint platform, but failed to unite the Social Democrats. However, they did bring together a left wing which supported the Russian Revolution and laid the basis for the Third (Communist) International. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/ dec/12.htm [Last accessed 25. 08. 2022]. 3 Chalupecký 1946, 469. 4 Ždanov 1949. – Ždanov 1950. – Plechanov 1956.

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new concept of culture according to the Soviet model, but manifested a national culture, based on folk/Slavic tradition, in line with the international communist movements.5 In the early 1950s, the concept of Proletarian Internationalism, as declared by official cultural nomenclature (Zdeněk Nejedlý, Václav Kopecký, Ladislav Štoll, Vladimír Šolta and Jaroslav Bouček), was merging with Socialist patriotism on one hand, and with the idea of Socialist Realism as an international style on the other. At that time, internationalist ideology was accompanied by a backlash to Western formalist art and Western Cosmopolitanism.6 After 1956, an expanded concept of Socialist Internationalism came from Moscow, dictating the principles and norms of cooperation within the Socialist camp. This new type of relationship was designed to offer aid to developing countries, but also to support the working class and the revolutionary movement in capitalist countries. Socialist Internationalism also demanded that Socialist countries take a responsible and active part in solving global problems.7 The concept of a Socialist world system also contained unconcealed global ambitions. A closer examination of official international exhibitions shows that the referential frame for the production of exhibitions (export and import) consisted of the ‘geography of the bloc.’ This concept, currently used by many Slovak historians of the 20th century, represents a political grouping of states that were conditioned by power relationships. As historians have pointed out, the formation of the bloc can already be traced to the World War II, during which time various treaties of alliance, involving friendship and cooperation, were concluded with the USSR (Czechoslovakia signed one such treaty with the USSR in 1943), and among individual countries separately. The Soviet Union was by then a world power, which not only supervised, but actively intervened in, discussions about treaties of alliance involving the states of Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe;8 these states being drawn into a bloc headed by the USSR.9 The power relationships created within the bloc therefore cannot be regarded as marginal: on the contrary, it is through this prism that one must necessarily view the existing geography of art. As we shall see later on, it is essential to understand that in certain periods, the networks of cultural relationships, though at first sight liberal, or indeed global, were subordinated, directly serving the bloc’s propaganda arm with its military and economic interests. One may state categorically that throughout the Cold War, the geography of the bloc was not static, but expansive, growing accordingly as various 5 6 7 8 9

Nejedlý 1948. Starý 1951 – 1952, 357. – Kopecký 1952. See closer: Bajcura 1986, 56 – 71. Štefanský / Michálek 2015, 30. Let us remember also that on the USSR’s side, what had greatest significance was the Czechoslovak-­ Soviet agreement of 1945 about shipments of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia, which was the basic raw material for the Soviet atomic bomb. Strategic military significance, as an important component of the politics of the bloc, takes pride of place here.

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countries fell under Soviet influence (or at least became sympathizers). These were mainly states that had freed themselves from colonial rule, and had gradually become part of the spheres of influence of the West or the East. The East-West political dichotomy was thus geographically extended to various parts of the world, and, in the field of cultural exchange, one can trace new and unexpected alliances. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, little attention has been devoted to the official state exhibitions in the Czech and Slovak Republics, as though they had not been part of our communist heritage. One must therefore mention a number of projects in the past six to seven years which have addressed these issues. In particular, there is the exhibition and publication project, Budování státu. Reprezentace Československa v umění, architektuře a designu (Building the State. Representations of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture and Design), 2015; and furthermore, Art Beyond Borders. Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe,1945 – 1989, a publication by Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Piotr Piotrowski (2016).10 An essential point here is that the authors cast doubt on the total isolation of countries behind the Iron Curtain, and “find clues about exchanges with other countries – exchanges with other people’s democracies, but also relations with the western democracies (with their official environments and the sympathizers of the communist cause).” 11

The Communist Geogr aphy of Art and the Tr avelling Concept of Socialist R ealism When one systematically maps and collects the facts about communist Czechoslovakia’s official international exhibitions, it is truly surprising to find such a wide-ranging exchange between Czechoslovakia and the rest of the world. It might seem that the concept of isolationism has no validity here, however I believe that this question needs to be researched more thoroughly. The terrain of the geography of Eastern European art was notably mutable and dependent on the politics of individual states, as well as on the specific changes which occurred in East-West relations during the 1945 – 89 period. It is particularly striking how the official geography of art literally copied the political relationships between the ČSSR and the USSR, and between the USSR and the USA, and furthermore, the relationships of these two great powers to the former colonies, which were also called ‘developing countries.’ At the same time, one must note that apart from the brief period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, cultural contacts did not imply an absolutely free or direct exchange between artists and curators. Throughout the 10 One of the most recent contributions: Hock / Allas 2018. 11 Bazin / Dubourg Glatigny / Piotrowski 2016, 2.

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entire period, there were certain types of direction, control or censorship in operation, and, in parallel, various forms of resistance in the form of secret exhibitions of alternative art in studios, apartments, or in the countryside. There is a need, therefore, to advance a thesis on the multiplicity of international cultural relationships. If we want to visualize the map of international exchange exhibitions concerning the art of Czechoslovakia after World War II, then the collaboration between the USSR and Eastern European countries must be explored. However, from 1950 onwards, exhibitions were also staged to showcase Chinese, Indian and Mexican (1956) art and the ‘progressive’ art of France, Italy and Belgium,12 where strong communist parties existed. Prior to the communist seizure of power in 1948, there were still many exhibitions coming from Western Europe (France, England, Spain) and the USA, with Czechoslovak exhibitions being exported mainly to France. After 1948, the situation radically changed. It was not simply that Advancing American Art (1947), an American exhibition which was brought to Prague, Brno and Bratislava, was immediately succeeded in Prague by National Artists from the USSR, an exhibition presenting Soviet Socialist Realism.13 What followed was a complete rupture of contact with the West from 1948 to 1955.14 Following the first exhibition of Czechoslovak Art of the 19th and 20th Centuries (conceived in the traditions of Realism) in Moscow and Leningrad in 1954,15 Czechoslovak art was gradually presented, not only within the People’s Democracies, but also in several distant, though not randomly-selected, locations. We will attempt to elucidate this situation via two examples: an exhibition in Vietnam in the 1950s, and an exhibition in Cuba in the 1960s. The exhibition of Czechoslovak Visual Art in Hanoi in 1956, organized at a time when Stalinism was on the wane, may serve as the earliest example of an expanding communist geography of art. No catalogue was published, but the official Czech art magazine, Výtvarná práce, published an extensive text entitled, Výstava našeho umění v Hanoji (An Exhibition of our Art in Hanoi).16 Photographs showing President Ho Chi Minh and representatives of the Czechoslovak diplomatic corps visiting the exhibition space testify to the significance of the exhibition. Notably, the abovementioned text refers to

12 In the early 1950s the following exhibitions were held in Czechoslovakia: Gabrielle Mucchi, Renato Guttuso, Boris Taslitzky and Mireille Miailhová. 13 See Exh.Cat. Prague / Brno / Bratislava 1947. – Exh.Cat. Prague 1947. 14 For the purposes of this research, it is especially useful to track the agreements that the Czechoslovak state concluded with various countries after 1945. The first Czechoslovak cultural agreement was concluded with France in 1945; in 1947, there were cultural agreements with Belgium, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, and trade agreements with Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico; in 1952 there was cultural cooperation with the Chinese People’s Republic, and trade agreements with Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. See in: Petruf 2007. 15 Liesler 1954, 213 – 215. 16 Diviš 1956, 12.

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the concept of the exhibition and the exhibited works very briefly, as the tone of the article is more like an example of travel writing: firstly, it describes the train journey from Prague to Moscow, then through Asia and China, and on to distant Vietnam. In the chapter, Encountering the Tropics, Vladimír Diviš, the exhibition organizer and author of the article, makes a detailed reference to the knowledge he has freshly acquired, enthusing about the tropical and subtropical nature, the landscape, the fruits, the mode of life, etc. To be sure, an admiration for the industrious working people of Vietnam, and their recent heroic revolution, appears in the text. Although the curator’s journey to the distant tropics is accompanied by a fear of the unknown, he expresses the view that one can believe only the truthful information of Soviet sources, whereas other sources of information are to be regarded as false, or products of capitalist advertising.17 Where it all boils down to is that Vietnam, although depicted as a geographically remote and exotic country, is not entirely alien for the Czech art critic/traveler. The message of, “the exotic that is not alien,” 18 is delivered on the basis of an identical (communist) social order and ideology. The purpose of intercultural dialogue was therefore not an exchange of entirely different values, but rather an affirmation and expression of ideological closeness, kinship or fraternity. During the post-Stalinist period, the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism was slowly ebbing away, and preference was given to an art of various realisms as a comprehensible universal manifestation of language, fulfilling the role of mediator throughout the Eastern Bloc and South-East Asia. The article observes that, “the painting of China and Vietnam is realistic in all its wide traditional range.” 19 A variety of realisms thus made it possible to integrate new (including exotic) countries into ‘the geography of the bloc.’ Although there is not an existing list of the exhibited works, one gathers from the article that the exhibition concept was in two parts: color reproductions of Czech and Slovak historical art (from Gothic to the 19th-century Realism), and contemporary art (original paintings, sculptures, graphics and posters) with an emphasis on realistic traditions. The stereotypical and ideologically colored travel account eventually uncovers the common denominator of cultural cooperation between Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: Socialist Realistic art. What the report does not mention, however, is that in 1956 (the time of the Czechoslovak exhibition), Vietnam was officially divided along the 17th parallel into two ideologically separated parts, North (VDR) and South Vietnam. From 1956 onwards, China, the USSR and the ČSSR provided the VDR with military and economic aid, while the USA helped the ‘democratic’ South Vietnam.20 It is clear that 17 18 19 20

Diviš 1956, 12. Slobodník / Pirický 2003, 8. Diviš 1956, 12. Štefanský / Michálek 2015, 270.

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this exhibition was an instrument of cultural diplomacy, and played a role in the wider ideological conflict of the Cold War. The rhetoric of ‘fraternal aid,’ rooted in the original paradigm of Socialist Internationalism, was thus able to incorporate art, and geographically-strategic art exhibitions, into the dissemination of communist ideology. One might even say that the master narrative of Socialist Realism had been turned into a travelling concept (even if its essential postulates were dogmatic or actually restrictive). Over the course of time, it transpired that whenever the political interests of the Soviet Union required a populist spectacle to ‘win hearts and minds,’ officially-sanctioned exhibitions of Socialist Realist art were exported to whatever location required it. Cuba, which had joined the expanding geography of the bloc in 1960, is a good example of this. The Soviet Union had been supporting Fidel Castro since 1959, with tense relations between the America and Russia climaxing in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the world found itself on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. At the same time, Czechoslovakia was furthering its relationship with Cuba. In 1960, a Czechoslovak Embassy was established in Havana, and Czechoslovakia concluded an economic and military agreement with Cuba concerning the supply of ‘special materials’ (i. e. weapons). In that same year, Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che‘ Guevara visited Czechoslovakia for the purposes of securing cooperation and loans. One of the outcomes of this cooperation was, El arte eslovaco contemporáneo, an exhibition held in Havana in 1964 (fig. 1), organized by the Ministry of Culture and the Slovak Union of Artists (with the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava making its collections available). The concept of the exhibition, clarified by an introductory text in the catalogue, was based on works which addressed the theme of the Slovak National Uprising and the struggle against fascism, with the assumption that these were common themes linking the Slovak and Cuban peoples.21 Cuba was thus conceived, in the first instance, as ‘Revolutionary Cuba,’ with the Slovak exhibition aiming to present works with the kind of revolutionary ethos that the Slovak National Uprising (1944) represented. This enormous exhibition encompassed painting, sculpture, graphics and theatrical set models by artists of several generations, including some who had been honored by the state as national artists. The most fitting designation for this exhibition would be as a ‘panorama’ of official, Socialist modernist Slovak art.22 By the mid-1960s, however, this art, which was altogether dependent on communist iconography, was in many ways outdated. Nonetheless, it was shipped to Eastern Bloc countries as an affirmation of a common line. Like Socialist Realism in the 1950s, Socialist Modernism in the 1960s and 1970s became an instrument for the homogenization of ‘Socialist culture.’ The difference between the exhibitions in Hanoi and Havana were not so striking: while 21 Exh.Cat. Havana 1964. 22 Bazin / Dubourg Glatigny / Piotrowski 2016, 15.

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Fig. 1  Cover of the exhibition catalogue El arte eslovaco contemporáneo, La Habana, August 1964. Bratislava 1964.

the Hanoi exhibition featured Czechoslovak work that confirmed Socialist Realism, the Cuban exhibition focused on Socialist art based on revolutionary iconography. Both exhibitions, as state representations, were acceptable to communist authorities because of the figurative form and Socialist content of the work. Regarding the above-mentioned exhibitions from the 1950s and 1960s, one might say that an intricate relationship was constructed here between political power and the cultural sphere, which survived with greater or lesser intensity until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many exhibitions of foreign art came to Czechoslovakia, and other bloc countries, only with the agreement of the highest organs in Moscow. The organized shows of Art of the Socialist Countries, held in Moscow from the 1950s, testify to the fact that ideology came before art. Despite that, problems gradually surfaced in the constellations of power and art (as propaganda). For example, in various articles and reviews, faults were found with the ‘national form’ and ‘Socialist content’ of non-European art. It was

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evident that the art of China and Korea did not fit into the unifying schema. Despite the fact that internationalist ideology emphasized the importance of national cultures, it failed to account for not only (Asian) exoticism, or traditional local art technologies, but also the appropriation of European oil painting. Contemporary Vietnamese or Korean art, in contrast to Eastern European art, was deemed to have, “many problems, because it is still too young and only recently set out on the path to Socialism.” 23 Manifestly, the concept of the ‘world Socialist system’ not only had pre-set standards, but also revealed fissures, gaps, and a certain asymmetry. The art of Socialist Realism was supposed to emerge from ‘national traditions,’ which differed diametrically between European and non-European cultures. For example, a 1959 Moscow exhibition, The Art of the Socialist Countries, found it necessary to assign two sections to China and Korea: one for ‘traditional,’ i. e. historical art, and a second for contemporary art.24 Socialist Realism, with its global ambitions, thus gradually revealed particular gaps and hierarchies, creating centers (Soviet Europe) and peripheries (Soviet non-European) at the very heart of its system.

Socialist Internationalism and the National Treasure Show The contradictions accompanying the functioning of the art of the Socialist camp unquestionably affected the encounters of different cultures. International cultural-diplomatic exhibitions were therefore conceived as a combination of historical and contemporary art, so that they might affirm the continuity of national culture (in a linear chronology to the present day) while exalting national characteristics in the context of international exchange. Though outwardly not new, this format of surveying exhibitions of national art fulfilled the expectations imposed by the paradigm of Socialist Internationalism. As a result, large-scale exhibitions of national art, founded on a slippery concept of nationality, gradually came into circulation in the countries of the communist East and the capitalist West.25 In the 1950s, almost parallel to the exhibition in Hanoi, we can observe another event: L’art ancien en Tchécoslovaquie, in the Paris Louvre (Musée des Arts Décoratifs), that was staged in 1957. This was a large exhibition of original (and copied) altar frame paintings, altar sculptures, craft works and Czech crown jewels from the 14th and early 15th centuries, drawn from the holdings of the National Gallery Prague, and the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava. The curators of the national galleries extended the medieval range with a 23 Kotalík / Baba / Pak 1959, 362 – 380. 24 Formánek 1959, 2. 25 After 1956 one can also trace a considerable export of exhibitions of applied art, especially Czech glass despatched both to the east and the west. See further: Pachmanová 2015, 282 – 288.

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kind of ‘overture’ of selected objects from the palaeolithic and neolithic and models of the Great Moravian churches, so as to present the ‘antiquity’ of our culture, or whatever is meant by the phrase, “a long artistic tradition.” 26 The exhibition was structured around masterpieces of Gothic art (1350 – 1450), with an extension to the predecessors (Great Moravia) and successors (late Gothic and early Renaissance art). However, while pre-Gothic art objects, catalogued under the heading Origins of Art in Czechoslovakia, were installed jointly in one section, Gothic art from the Czech and Slovak lands were exhibited separately in different rooms. Catalogue essays by Czech curator, Albert Kutal (Medieval art in Bohemia and Moravia) and Slovak curator, Karol Vaculík (Medieval art in Slovakia) expressed a quest for different styles as an expression of national character. Such divisions were considered obvious, and were interpreted as different development in the past. Of course, this exhibition concept implies that historical scholarship, as well as curatorship, serves present-day concerns. The Paris exhibition referred to an act of acknowledgement, not only in the affirmation of Czech and Slovak Gothic as national schools, but in the advancement of the idea that Gothic was not derived from Germany, but rather France (through its connections with France from the time of the Luxembourgs). Relations to France – the spiritual ones – stood above all other issues. Probably no one would describe this exhibition as propagandistic. However, it was held as an official state representation in the framework of an international cultural agreement, and financed by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Czechoslovak embassy in Paris. The exhibition could be categorized as a ‘national treasure show,’ its aim being to showcase both cultural heritage and masterpieces of high art. It is understandable that, at the given time, this exhibition was of considerable importance for Czechoslovakia, as it served as a reaffirmation of Czech and Slovak culture by Paris, establishing a firm connection with the culture of (Western) Europe. Not only the authors of Czech-commissioned texts, but also the French press, made a point of emphasizing, “the unity of culture between East and West.” André Chastel in Le Monde actually wrote that, “one end of the Iron Curtain has been lifted,” and, “the awe-inspiring greatness of Czechoslovak art,” had been revealed.27 Contemporary post-national sensibility, however, can provoke a critical attitude that goes beyond the affective ties of nation, national identity and national heritage. In the words of the art historians, this exhibition showed an art that was not epigonal, but original, presenting its highest, independent national values to the extent that it

26 Exh.Cat. Paris 1957. 27 During the exhibition, Ľudmila Peterajová, an assistant curator from the Slovak National Gallery, oversaw media communication in Paris. Collected media coverage from the French press was used in a series of articles written by Peterajová. Two statements by André Chastel are quoted from her texts. See: Peterajová 1957, 3 and also Peterajová (Ľ. P.), 10.

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was literally called a treasure.28 Certainly, treasure shows are favorite exhibition formats to this day. Brian Wallis has aptly called them, “intricate and multilayered engines of global diplomacy designed to sell the nation’s image.” 29 The Czechoslovak exhibition in Paris in 1957 could therefore be seen as an attempt to ‘sell’ an image of a nation that did not exist, apart from its social construction, as there was no distinctive ‘Czechness’ or ‘Slovakness’ in the presented work, apart from that determined by specific political circumstances. The national agenda, in the form of a survey exhibition packaged as a condensed and edited national history, was prepared for foreign consumption in the West. This ‘repackaging’ from the 1950s demonstrated that Czechoslovakia historically belonged to Western culture, even if it was part of the Eastern Bloc at the time. During the period of communism, the format of the survey/exhibition of national masterpieces was used repeatedly, and thus an almost identical model was produced entitled, Tradiciones y arte moderno de Checoslovaquia, in Mexico in 1968.30 Similar formats were also exhibited in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and in the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in 1971, as well as in the Grand Palais in Paris in 1975, in an exhibition entitled, Dix siècles d’art Tchéque et Slovaque.31

Internationalising Czecho/Slovak Modern Art and the (Western) Canon of Art History From the mid-1960s, in the more liberal atmosphere of the Prague Spring, there was a gradual build-up to an intensive circulation of exhibitions of Czech and Slovak modern and contemporary art in Western Europe, many of which were travelling and exchange exhibitions. For example, the Slovak National Gallery prepared an exhibition of Contemporary Czechoslovak Art,32 which travelled around Western Europe well into the 1970s. A similar production was, Actual Grabado Eslovaco / Contemporary Slovak Graphics,33 which circulated globally, and was featured in Latin American states, including Cuba and Mexico, as well as India and Canada. Contemporary art was represented here by a selection of work by the younger generation of artists, though almost exclusively in the traditional media of painting and graphics, and occasionally sculpture. Many of these exhibitions were sent to Czechoslovak cultural centers, especially in Arabic countries (Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia). Despite control by the Ministry of Culture, the curators often 28 29 30 31 32 33

Hoffmeister 1957, 1. – Vaculík 1957, 176. – Horváth 1957, 6. Wallis 1994, 266. Exh.Cat. Mexico 1968. Exh.Cat. Paris 1975. Exh.Cat. Namur / Brussels 1968. Exh.Cat. New Delhi 1968. – Exh.Cat. Ottawa 1968.

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ventured to choose works by young artists that were close to Neo-Surrealism, Informal and Structural Abstraction, Op Art and Pop Art.34 In this period, cooperation began to develop with western gallerists and collectors, mainly through emigrants from Czechoslovakia. However, this overture to the international artistic community was interrupted after the Soviet occupation of 1968. The 1960s also saw the appearance of a specific format of the international exhibition, represented by Paris–Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contemporains tchèques, at the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1966 (fig. 2, 3).35 While the specialized concept of the exhibition was devised by the curators of the National Gallery Prague, the principal credit for its production belonged to Adolf Hoffmeister, the Czech ambassador in Paris, a writer, visual artist and organizer of cultural life, without whose involvement no significant Parisian exhibition of Czechoslovak art would have taken place. The 1966 exhibition was a reiterated affirmation of the cultural links between Prague and Paris, as the title itself testified. Unquestionably, Paris was the Mecca of art during the first half of the 20th century, and there was a long-term continuity in its relations with Prague. According to Hoffmeister, one could date this from Auguste Rodin’s exhibition in Prague in 1902, and through the work of Czech artists who had lived in Paris, including Alphonse Mucha, František Kupka, and Josef Šíma. Hoffmeister also liked to stress the concept of the dialogue of modern art, whether in the form of exhibitions or collections (especially the private collection of French Cubism held by Dr. Vincenc Kramář, which later became an important component of the National Gallery Prague’s collections). In this instance, the concept of mutual friendship between two artistic centers (Hoffmeister called it ‘joined vessels’),36 did not have an ideological character: it moved rather on the level of mutual cultural cooperation, transcending the purely official plane. Paris-Prague, like the following year’s exhibition of Cubist Art from Czechoslovakia (Tate Gallery London, Brussels, Rotterdam, 1967),37 represented an attempt to find connecting points between the Western canon of art history, and an interpretation of the art of the Central European region. Czech Cubism was gradually becoming a ‘brand’ (and article of export) and many Czech art historians staked their fortunes on it. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the curatorial concept of exhibiting the National 34 The artists most frequently featured at exhibitions of contemporary art in the 1960s included: Fulla, Hložník, Dubay, Brunovský, Dobeš, Jankovič, Gažovič, Lebiš, Gergeľová, Bombová, Kočišová, Fila, Filko, Kompánek, Medek, Dlouhý, Nepraš, Veselý, Vožniak, Kučerová, Anderle, Balcar, Šimotová, John, Sklenář, Istler, Preclík, Boudník, Plíšková, among others. 35 Exh.Cat. Paris 1966. Exhibiting artists: Beneš, Čapek, Filla, Gutfreund, Kremlička, Kubin, Kubišta, Procházka, Špála, Zrzavý, Gočár, Hofman, Janák, Chochol, Braque, Derain, Picasso, Rousseau. 36 Hoffmeister 1966, 1, 7. 37 Exh.Cat. London 1967.

Shifts and Gaps in the Paradigm of Socialist Internationalism  | Fig. 2  Cover of the exhibition catalogue Paris – Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contem­porains tchéques. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne 17.3. – 17. 4. 1966. Prague 1966.

Gallery collection, where famous examples of Czech Cubism were presented together with works by Picasso, Braque and others, represented an attempt to return Czech art to the cultural map of Europe. The National Gallery Prague maintained continuity in its concept of exhibiting collections of French and Czech Avant-garde art until the end of the 1980s. Its director and chief-curator, Jiří Kotalík, often characterized as a man “with organizational capacities and diplomatic adroitness,” and “a successful cultural ambassador in both West and East,” 38 managed to balance the Western-orientated exhibition policy with exhibitions in communist countries, which figured in the first place of the National Gallery’s exhibition plans. Kotalík’s ability to negotiate and reach agreement not only with friends, but even with enemies (in other words, his competent diplomacy), made the National Gallery a recognized institution abroad. In the field of international exhibitions, Kotalík was exceptionally active and productive (it was he who coined the thesis of, “art history in action”), and he was able to use specific professional cooperative ventures and personal friendships to create long-term institutional cooperation. As examples, among 38 Jaskmanický 1995, 17, 22.

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Fig. 3  Views of the exhibition Paris – Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contemporains tchéques. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne 17.3. – 17.4. 1966. Prague 1966.

other actions of this kind, one must include, Arte Maestra da Monet a Picasso: Cento Capolavori della Galleria Nazionale di Praga in Pallazzo Pitti in Florence in 1981,39 and other collaborations with the most important art museums in the USA. In the 1980s, the National Gallery Prague and the Museum of Modern Art in New York cooperated in a series of art loans that were of major importance. These exchanges culminated in the six-month loan exhibition, Nine Paintings by Masters of European Painting of the 19th and 20th Centuries from the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1985 – 1986), in reciprocation for works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau, and other loans by MoMA . Vincenc Kramář’s exceptional collection of French modern art, owned by the National Gallery Prague, again made it possible to develop working contacts with many art museums. Loans of modern masterpieces additionally opened up cooperation with American partners. In 1988, personal contacts and a friendship with the director, Thomas M. Messer, led to the first exhibition, an exchange between the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the National Gallery Prague. As a kind of reciprocation for Modern Art Treasures from the Collections of the Guggenheim Foundation, curated by Thomas Messer in Prague, the Czechoslovak exhibition, Modern Treasures from the National Gallery in Prague, curated by Jiří Kotalík, was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum (fig. 4).40

39 Exh.Cat. Firenze 1981. 40 Exh.Cat. New York 1988.

Shifts and Gaps in the Paradigm of Socialist Internationalism  | Fig. 4  Cover of the exhibition catalogue Modern Treasures from the National Gallery in Prague. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York, 1988. Prague 1988.

The exhibitions ran almost simultaneously, and were both focused on modern masterpieces: the Guggenheim collection concentrated on European modern masters and Jackson Pollock, whereas the National Gallery Prague’s New York exhibition introduced modern European masters, including Czechs, who were little known in the US. Even though the Czech exhibition in Guggenheim was received with mixed reviews, in Czechoslovakia (according to media coverage) both exhibitions were considered to be highly successful. Needless to say, the exhibition concept was hardly challenging for the New York public in the 1980s, but in Czechoslovakia, the exhibition of great modern masters also represented the diplomatic achievement of “not provoking” the communist authorities. However, for a curated exhibition, it was not provocative enough. The changing ideological atmosphere at the end of the Cold War, plus transformations in the globalized art scene, were already signaling radical shifts, including the development of a different kind of international collaboration and cultural circulation. Exhibitions of the treasures, or highlights, of a collection were no critical innovations, but were rather residual cultural elements that derived from a grand tradition. Yet, despite the not very progressive curatorial format, the travelling exhibitions that came from the US to Eastern Europe during the period of Perestroika were extremely popular, opening up a new transatlantic cultural dialogue on a threshold of a new era.

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Official displays of national art often sought to enhance the cultural prestige of a country within the bloc, and to achieve a certain independence from Moscow. One might say that the curators of these exhibitions wished to free themselves from Soviet ideological dominance by stressing the specific national character of the exhibited artworks. In this, they unquestionably created, and for a long time maintained, a nationally fixated account of art history. This narrative both emphasized the uniqueness of Czech and Slovak art, and attempted to find points of connection between the Western canon and the artistic output of Central Eastern Europe. Mystifying a pure ‘national style’ was not, however, the happiest of solutions, especially when indiscriminately applied to both older art and modern/Avant-garde art created before Czechoslovakia existed (i. e. before 1918). To speak of Czech and Slovak Gothic, or Czech Cubism, meant applying a construction retrospectively, and perhaps pragmatically, from the standpoint of the current need. Paradoxically, this concept did not integrate the art of Czechoslovakia into an international context. On the contrary, it created an, “effect of geographical separatism on the principle of nationality.” 41 Explicit proof of this paradox can be found in the exhibitions of the National Gallery collections of modern art, where not only the catalogue texts, but the installations themselves, demonstrate the separate existence of ‘world’ art (from Paris) and ‘domestic’ national art (from Prague) (see fig. 3). The art-historical and exhibiting criteria did not examine relationships or juxtapositions between works, or extend their context. On the contrary, they directed attention to tried-and-trusted masterpieces set in a static, closed system. Since the meaning and value we give art objects depends largely on the narrative structures within which we place them, Czechoslovak art has played, at best, a marginal role in the dominant art-historical narratives. Even if on numerous occasions, and in various reviews, in Western countries Czechoslovak art was described as unique or magnificent, this was usually a formal act, or an act of solidarity with Czechoslovakia under Soviet domination.

Conclusion If we were to represent the cultural exchanges during the Cold War cartographically,42 exhibitions of Czechoslovak art would reach well beyond Europe, all the way into Asia, Central and South America, and North Africa. Given that this map would be dominated

41 See further Clarkson 2019. 42 In Atlas of World Art (2004) John Onians and other contributors have devoted a number of cartographic presentations to Central Eastern Europe. The last of these, “High Modernism in Eastern and Central Europe 1945 – 1989,” portrays the communist countries behind the Iron Curtain as static, monolithic appendages of the USSR, where one might find wooden architecture, pottery, a national

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by exhibitions held within the expanding Eastern Bloc, Western Europe and North America would need to be here also. The map (or more properly speaking, its reconstruction today) would probably show a political division of the world, accompanied by a series of dualistic stereotypes (e. g. hostility vs. friendship), or a conflict of stylistic categories (Abstraction vs. Socialist Realism), which is not, in itself, a sufficiently interpretive framework. Through the exhibitions analyzed here, one can follow at least three simultaneous narratives. Firstly, the narrative of the construction of the Eastern Bloc and communist art geography, using the formal paradigm of Socialist Internationalism and the art of Socialist Realism. Although the goal was the homogenization of the communist art world, among the results was a bond with the western left, as well as an asymmetric exchange with the non-European South. Secondly, the narrative of official cultural diplomatic exhibitions occurred as a ‘decorative’ accompaniment to the state’s economic, commercial and military activities, often as part of the broader political agenda of the Eastern Bloc. These exhibitions had a propagandistic character, even if the curators and artists were not always aware of it. Thirdly, the narrative of official exhibitions of historical and modern art of the state-run national galleries and their collections (collections as ‘ambassadors’). This inspired a simultaneous crystallization of emancipatory ‘national Modernism,’ and a curatorial narrative of inclusion, or a ‘return’ to world/universal art history. In the static vision of art history, thus conceived, there emerged the paradox of ‘geographic separatism.’ Recent scholarship and diverse contemporary initiatives are attempting to see the production and display of art history in a global dynamic, and from many perspectives. Exhibition histories, as a ‘subdiscipline’ of global art histories, offer the possibility to reframe the entire agenda. Instead of fixed relationships, and the separation of national styles and cultures, the goal has been to add visibility to the transmission of ideas and ideologies, including the simultaneity of different (sometimes contradictory) exhibition concepts and art historical narratives. Here, certainly, the situated knowledge of the artist or curator also has a role to play. Hence, in the post-Soviet era, the story of Socialist Realism, or of modern art, may be told differently from the perspective of a Russian, Azeri, Estonian, Chinese, Cuban, Italian, or Slovak art historian. The question that must be asked is, what exactly did Socialist Internationalism represent, and what was its meaning for Czechoslovakia after World War II? Was it brought into being through revolutionary ideas, a political change, or new social order, or was it simply imported and implemented by a victorious power? Or was it all of these factors together? Traditional interpretations of the paradigm of Socialist Internationalism usually style of modern architecture, totalitarian architecture, experimental modern architecture, and several centres of contemporary art (Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana, Skopje and Bucharest).

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divide it into several progressive stages, from the initial stage of revolutionary Proletarian Internationalism, to an expanded concept of the cooperation of nations within the Socialist Bloc. However, from a contemporary point of view, it seems to be more suitable to employ the notion of shifts in the existing power relations, as well as the political and economic interests of the time. Two major shifts happened in Czechoslovakia in 1956 and in 1968: in the post-Stalinist era, the paradigm of Socialist Internationalism not only preserved the ideas of cooperation among nations within the expanded Socialist camp, but shifted towards cooperation within the larger democratic western world. And after the Soviet occupation of 1968, it turned into a formal internationalist ideology orchestrated by Moscow, but was downgraded by the emergence of an anti-communist opposition. Returning to the roots of Socialist Internationalism, it is worth recalling Zdeněk Nejedlý’s speech from 1948, proclaiming the importance of national culture within the Eastern Bloc: “There is no internationalism without a genuine national culture.” 43 This phrase, calling for unity within the Socialist camp, paradoxically reveals the gaps in the unifying schemes and the pre-set standards of Soviet Internationalism. Without recognizing the (genuine) national culture as a construct, the category of ‘the national’ was simultaneously referring to Soviet internationalist ideology, as well as Eurocentric modern internationalism. Thus, the concept of national culture legitimized both Socialist Realism and modern Realism (i. e. the 1956 exhibition in Hanoi, and the 1964 exhibition in Havana), and the curatorial concept of historic national art as a national heritage (i. e. the exhibition of ancient art in Paris in 1957). Based on national values, Gothic and cubist art (exhibitions of Czech and French Cubism in Paris in 1966, and in New York in 1988) became a state-authorized representation of Socialist Czechoslovakia, at a time when Avant-garde and NeoAvant-garde art had been excluded from the official domestic exhibitions. Regardless of the reimposition of Socialist Realism after the 1968 Prague Spring, a strong tradition of modern Avant-gardes enmeshed with a kind of ‘national spirit’ remained an important value that confirmed the international prestige of Czechoslovakia. Undoubtedly, different curatorial strategies – using art more or less for political ends – coexisted at the heart of the communist internationalist agenda during the Cold War.

Bibliogr aphy Bajcura, Ivan: Socialistický internacionalizmus [Socialist Internationalism]. Bratislava 1986. Bartlová, Milena / Vybíral, Jindřich et al. (eds): Budování státu. Reprezentace Československa v umění, architektuře a designu [Building the State. Representations of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture and Design]. Praha 2015. 43 Nejedlý 1948, 15.

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Bazin, Jérôme / Dubourg Glatigny, Pascal / Piotrowski, Piotr (eds.): Art Beyond Borders. Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe 1945 – 1989. Budapest / New York 2016 (Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe 3). Chalupecký, Jindřich: Kultura a politika [Culture and Politics]. In: Listy I/3 (1946), 468 – 473. Clarkson, Verity: Exhibiting Central-European Barock Art in Cold War Britain: “The Works Themselves Refute Geographical Separatism”. In: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress. com/2016/11/clarkson.pdf [Last accessed 11. 01. 2019]. Diviš, Vladimír: Výstava našeho umění v Hanoji [An Exhibition of Our Art in Hanoi]. In: Výtvarná práce 4 – 6/12 (1956). Exh.Cat. Prague 1947: Obrazy národních umělců SSSR [National Artists from the USSR]. Praha, Umělecká beseda, Slovanský ostrov, 12.4. – 2. 5. 1947. Exh.Cat. Prague / Brno / Bratislava: Umění moderní Ameriky [Advancing American Art]. Praha, Umělecká beseda, Slovanský ostrov, 6.3.– 27. 3. 1947; Brno, Dům umění, 30.3. – 14. 4. 1947; Bratislava, Umělecká beseda, 18.4. – 4.5. 1947. Praha / Brno 1947. Exh.Cat. Paris 1957: L’art ancien en Tchécoslovaquie. Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, June – October 1957. Ed. by Vladimír Novotný, Jaroslav Boehm, Albert Kutal and Karol Vaculík, The National Gallery Prague, The Slovak National Gallery. Bratislava 1957. Exh.Cat. Havana 1964: El arte eslovaco contemporáneo [Contemporary Slovak Art]. La Habana, August 1964. Ed. by Ladislav Gandl, The Slovak Ministry of Culture, The Union of Artists. Bratislava 1964. Exh.Cat. Paris 1966: Paris–Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contemporains tchéques. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 17.3. – 17. 4. 1966. Ed. by Bernard Dorival, Adolf Hoffmeister, Miroslav Lamač, Jaromír Zemina, The National Gallery, Prague. Praha 1966. Exh.Cat. London 1967: Cubist Art from Czechoslovakia. London, Tate Gallery, 15.9. – 29. 10. 1967. Ed. by Jaromír Zemina, London Arts Council. London 1967. Exh.Cat. Mexico 1968: Tradiciones y arte moderno de Checoslovaquia. Festival Internacional de las artes. Mexico, Sala Nacional del Palacio de Bellas Artes, August 1968. Ed. by Jiří Kotalík, Jiří Mašín, Karol Vaculík, The National Gallery, Prague, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Bratislava 1968. Exh.Cat. Namur / Brussels 1968: Art Tchéco-Slovaque Contemporain. Brussels, Maison de la Culture, April 1968. Ed. by Ľudmila Peterajová, Karol Vaculík, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava and the Ministry of Culture. Bratislava 1968. Exh.Cat. New Delhi 1968: Contemporary Slovak Graphics. New Delhi, 1968. Ed. by Eva Šefčáková.The Slovak Ministry of Education, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Bratislava 1968. Exh.Cat. Ottawa 1968: Contemporary Prints of Czechoslovakia / La gravure contemporaine en Tchécoslovaquie. Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, October–November 1968. Ed.

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by Eva Šefčáková, and Eva Petrová. The National Gallery Prague, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Bratislava 1968. Exh.Cat. Paris 1975: Dix siècles d’art Tchéque et Slovaque. Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, October–December 1975. Ed. by Victor Bayer, Jiří Mašín and Karol Vaculík. The National Gallery Prague, The Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Bratislava 1975. Exh.Cat. Firenze 1981: Arte maestra. Da Monet a Picasso. Cento capolavori della Galleria Nazionale di Praga. Monet to Picasso: a hundred masterpieces from the National Gallery in Prague. Firenze, Pallazzo Pitti, 27.6. – 20. 9. 1981. Ed. by Jiří Kotalík and Achille Bonito Oliva. The National Gallery, Prague. Praha 1981. Exh.Cat. New York 1988: Modern Treasures from the National Gallery in Prague. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1988. Ed. by Jiří Kotalík, The National Gallery Prague. Praha 1988. Formánek, Václav: Umění zemí socializmu [The Art of the Socialist Countries]. In: Výtvarná práce VII/1 (1959), 2. Hoffmeister, Adolf: Československé umění v Paříži [Czechoslovak Art in Paris]. In: Výtvarná práce V/13 (1957), 1. Hoffmeister, Adolf: Paris-Prague. Proslov na zahájení výstavy českého a francouzského umění z našich sbírek v Paříži [Paris–Prague. A Speech at the Opening of the Exhibition of Czech and French Art from Our Collections in Paris]. In: Výtvarná práce 14/6 (1966), 1, 7. Horváth, Julo: Vystavíme gotiku v Paríži. Rozhovor s Dr. K. Vaculíkom [We Will Exhibit Our Gothic in Paris. An Interview with Dr. K. Vaculík)]. In: Kultúrny život 23 (1957), 6. Jaskmanický, Jiří: Historik umění Jiří Kotalík [The Art Historian Jiří Kotalík]. Praha 1995. Kopecký, Václav: Proti kozmopolitizmu jako ideologii amerického imperialismu [Against Cosmopolitanism as the Ideology of American Imperialism]. Praha 1952. Kotalík, Jiří / Baba, Corneliu / Pak, Mun Von et. al: Umenie a skutočnosť. Diskusie o výstave diel výtvarného umenia socialistických krajín. 1. medzinárodná výstava výtvarného umenia socialialistických krajín v Moskve [Art and Reality. A Discussion on an Exhibition of Artworks from the Socialist Countries: 1st International Exhibition of Visual Art of the Socialist Countries in Moscow)]. In: Výtvarný život (1959), 362 – 380. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism. How the International Can Be Restored.. First published in: Sotsial-Demokrat No. 35/December 12 (1914). In: https:// www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12.htm [Last accessed 29. 06. 2019]. Liesler, Josef: Poznámky o výstavě československého výtvarného uméní v Moskvě [Remarks on the Exhibition of Czechoslovak Visual Art in Moscow]. In: Výtvarné umění 4 (1954), 213 – 215. Nejedlý, Zdeněk: Za lidovou a národní kulturu [Towards Folk and National Culture]. In: Var I/1 (1948), 5 – 21. Onians, John (ed.): Atlas of World Art. Oxford / New York 2004. Pachmanová, Martina: Výstavní praktiky státu: export československého umění [Exhibition Practices of the State: the Export of Czechoslovak Art]. In: Bartlová / Vybíral 2015, 282– 288.

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Peterajová, Ľudmila: Kultúrny čin nedozierneho významu. Ohlasy francúzskej tlače na výstavu Staré umenie v Československu [A Cultural Feat of Incalculable Importance. Responses in the French press to the exhibition L’art ancien en Tchécoslovaquie]. In: Kultúrny život 31 (1957), 3. Peterajová, Ľudmila (Ľ. P.): Naša výstava v Paríži [Our Exhibition in Paris]. In: Kultúrny život 35 (1957), 10. Petruf, Pavol: Československá zahraničná politika 1945 – 1992. Vybrané udalosti a fakty v dátumoch [Czechoslovak Foreign Policy 1945 – 1992. Selected Events and Facts in Dates]. Bratislava 2007. Plechanov, Georgij Valentinovič: Umění a literatura [Art and Literature]. Praha 1956. Sherman, Daniel J. / Rogoff, Irit (eds.): Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. Minneapolis 1994. Slobodník, Martin / Pirický, Gabriel (eds.): Fascinácia a (ne)poznanie: Kultúrne strety Západu a Východu [Fascination and (Non-)Knowledge. Cultural Encounters of West and East]. Bratislava 2003. Starý, Oldřich: Boj proti kozmopolitizmu je cesta k socialistickému umění [Fight Against Cosmopolitanism is the Path to Socialist Art]. In: Výtvarné umění (1951 – 1952), 357. Štefanský, Michal / Michálek, Slavomír (eds.): Míľniky studenej vojny a ich vplyv na Československo (Od Trumanovej doktríny po Vietnam) [Cold War Landmarks and Their Impact on Czechoslovakia (From the Truman Doctrine to Vietnam)]. Bratislava 2015. Vaculík, Karol: Parížska výstava českej a slovenskej gotiky [The Paris Exhibition of Czech and Slovak Gothic]. In: Výtvarný život II/1 – 10 (1957), 176. Wallis, Brian: Selling Nations: International Exhibitions and Cultural Diplomacy. In: S­ herman / Rogoff 1994, 265 – 281. Ždanov, Andrej Alexandrovič: O umění [On Art]. Praha 1949. Ždanov, Andrej Alexandrovič: O socialistickom realizme [On the Socialist Realism]. Bratislava 1950.

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Rereading Source Text: A Problematic Neighborship The Kunstwissenschaft in the GDR in its Relation to the History of Art and Kunstwissenschaft in the Neighboring East-Central European Countries

How did art historiography in the GDR relate to the art history of East-Central Europe and to the national discourses of the art historiographies of that region? This subject from the history of sciences has not yet been examined in depth, and the reflections presented here can only be an outline. The author has not himself worked in the field of older East-Central European art history. He can only draw on his general experiences within the discipline in East Germany and some recent reading material. Given this circumstance, he deems absolutely essential to include a question that has not yet been dealt with systematically: How did the GDR tackle its own national tradition, the ‘Germanness’ in its art? In order to explore this, we need to consider both politics and the related discipline of historical scholarship. It is worth remembering several fundamental preconditions: Even as a member state of the Warsaw Pact with formal equal rights, the GDR was in an exceptional position. In actuality, to the end it remained a successor state to the defeated German Reich, occupied by the Soviet Army, and the smaller part of this former Empire whose fictitious continued existence was laid down by the neighboring, larger and more potent German Federal Republic in its constitution. Of course, geographically the GDR was a part of East-Central Europe. However, for political reasons, this definition, which dates back to the 1930s, was certainly not deployed when the eastern and southeastern neighboring states sought to dissociate themselves from the leading power, the Soviet Union, by using this term. Undoubtedly the latter would have been able to stop its westernmost outpost from drifting further towards the West. In principle, it was easier in the GDR to co-operate with other ‘Eastern Bloc’ states in matters of art history or to study their art than to do research through the ‘Iron Curtain’ in the direction of the West. For a long time, visas and funding for such enterprises were refused in both ideological Blocs. And yet very few art historians in the GDR did research on the older history of art in Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary etc., whilst art historians in the German Federal Republic dealt in depth with the art history of France, Italy, the Netherlands as well as, to a certain degree, that of East-Central Europe. On the other hand, art historians in the GDR looked at their Eastern neighbors with

Rereading Source Text: A Problematic Neighborship  |

some envy, seeing as they had more opportunities to participate in international co-operation, including with the West. Creating an Institute for the History of Art of the GDR in Warsaw or Prague, comparable with the (West) German institutes in Italy, was unthinkable. Likewise, the idea for such an institute in Moscow only came up very briefly in internal deliberations between art historians. There were several reasons for this: Firstly: Both political authorities and academics in the GDR were determined to avoid any similarities with the pre-1945 German ‘research on the East’ (Ostforschung). Secondly: With this in mind, Poland and Czechoslovakia would, with good reason, offset any renewed German interference through mounting up their own national art histories. In contrast, both sides supported the study of the history of Soviet art. The Soviet Union was the leading power of the new world order they were striving for. This is where a supposedly authentic Marxism-Leninism was being taught. A purported Russian lead in the development of artistic Realism since the 19th century was to be emphasized. However, these endeavors primarily caused problems in the sphere of contemporary art, which are not relevant here. Thirdly: All things related were also a question of the general appreciation or, in many cases, the depreciation of art historical work by the leading party of the GDR, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)1, and therefore a question of material resources earmarked for the subject and, ultimately, a question of necessary language skills. The government was only ready to subsidize relatively few art historians, and the funds budgeted for this discipline were supposed to be used for domestic assignments and for the study of more recent art. Furthermore, if any Slavic languages were to be learned, it ought to have been that of the leading power. Fourthly: There was no precedence in German art history overall in terms of research into the national art history of the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians themselves, respectively. The situation was somewhat different with regard to the history of Russian art, not to mention the ‘Eastern Christian’ development in Byzantium, the Caucasus and the Balkan.2 However, this has only ever been the concern of a few specialists and is therefore not relevant here. These points need to be differentiated a little – not only in terms of the developmental line of art history over the past 45 years, but also with a view to several exceptions. Several university lecturers, who either continued to teach in the eastern zone of Germany after 1945 or took up a job elsewhere, continued their work on ‘German’ art in East-Central Europe, or had a special affinity to this particular area of art history. Wilhelm Worringer 3, formerly active in Königsberg, then in Halle, however, did not 1 A first overview was presented by Harald Olbrich and Ernst Badstübner at the 22nd German Congress for Art History (XXII. Deutscher Kunsthistorikertag). See: Olbrich / Badstübner 1991. 2 This also applied for the Federal Republic of Germany, including Berlin (West). See Drengenberg 1980, 886 – 899. 3 Feist 1999e.

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return to his bold ethno-psychological sketches in which he once respectfully referred to the existence of a ‘Slavic character’.4 Although these sketches used the term race in a way that was common in the first half of the century, they were now occasionally misinterpreted as an expression of Nazi racism. What was most damaging for Worringer, however, was his reputation of having been the first to give credence, both theoretically and historically, to expressionist and abstract art, which was now attacked as mere formalism. This was one of the reasons why he moved to Munich as early as 1950. Richard Hamann 5, who was briefly a professor in Posen before the First World War, worked as a guest professor in Marburg from 1948 onwards; concurrently he was acting director of the Art Historical Institute at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. He also headed the advisory board of the State Secretariat for Education/Art History, became a member of the Academy of Sciences and established a research unit for art history within it. In a short essay from 1949, he speculated that German brass-founders had contributed to the bronze door of the Gniezno Cathedral.6 In his Geschichte der Kunst (The History of Art), which was reprinted in the GDR in 1955, however, anything east of Brandenburg only appeared in the tabular appendix.7 The fact that in 1951 (German translation in 1954) the Soviet art historian Mikhail V. Alpatov wrote, “Hamann’s writings have no scientific value whatsoever” 8 had no consequences at first. Heinz Ladendorf 9, formerly active in Berlin and later teaching in Leipzig, did not resume his research into Andreas Schlüter. Instead, he was interested, to a degree unusual for German art historians, in older Russian as well as Caucasian architecture. At the third German Congress for Art Historians in (West) Berlin in 1951, he perplexed the audience with a presentation in which he compared the new Stalinist high-rise buildings in Moscow with Russian belfries using a form-analytic approach.10 In Dresden, Walter Hentschel continued his research into Saxon art of the 18th century in Poland.11 Karl-Heinz Clasen 12, who first taught in Königsberg, later in Rostock, from 1949 on in Greifswald and finally in Berlin, clung tightly to his research into the Gothic architecture of the Teutonic Order.13 He steered students such as Nikolaus Zaske, amongst others, towards the art of the Hanse.14 In

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Worringer 1924. – Worringer 1928. Feist 1999b. Hamann 1949. Hamann 1933. Alpatow 1954, 170. Feist 1999d. Ladendorf 1951, 270 – 271. Hentschel 1967. Feist 1999a. Clasen 1955. – Clasen 1958. Zaske 1957. – Zaske 1968. – Zaske / Zaske 1985.

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1974, after moving to the Federal Republic of Germany, he published his controversial interpretation of the ‘Beautiful Madonnas’ around 1400, several of the best of which are of course either in eastern Central Europe or were lost during the war.15 He was able to go on relevant research trips while still living in the GDR . Among these researchers, only Hermann Weidhaas 16 had a command of Slavic languages. He had obtained his PhD in Russian Architecture in Dresden in 1935 before gaining a second doctorate in Prague. Drawing upon results of his war time research into West-Slavic early medieval architecture, he habilitated in Greifswald in 1946 and became the Head of the Institute there until he was recruited by the College of Architecture and the Art of Construction in Weimar in 1949. In the mid-1950s, he failed to gain support for a research department for East European Art History at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Thereafter he was only able to lead a private study group, consisting of junior staff he had gathered around him.17 He tried to combine Christian and religious-historical thinking with historical materialism, but didn’t receive permission to conduct new research in situ. Johannes Jahn 18, who continued to teach at the University of Leipzig and in addition taught in Halle for several years from 1952 onwards, but most notably was in charge of the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts from 1945 on, was originally from the area surrounding Posen, but did not work specifically on East-Central European art history. Gerhard Strauss 19, the consultant in charge of the subject at the German Central Administration for National Education in the Soviet-occupied zone from 1945 – 1950 and then at the Ministry of National Education in the GDR , had been a student of Worringer and Clasen in Königsberg and worked in East Prussian historic preservation, as well as with Weidhaas in the Zips after 1939. From 1951 onwards, he headed the Institute for Theory and History of Architecture at the newly founded Bauakademie (Academy of Architecture) that published a series of books on art history. After Hamann’s fairly rude dismissal from his teaching position, he was a tenured professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin from 1958 to 1966. Then, at the end of the ’60s and during the ’70s, when students of these professors superseded their seniors and were themselves working towards an art history founded in Marxism, four out of the seven professors at the universities in Greifswald, Berlin, Leipzig, Halle and Jena, were from Bohemia: Karl Max Kober, Harald Olbrich, Ernst Ullmann, and the author. This automatically implied a sensitivity towards the art history

15 Clasen 1974. 16 Ficker 1997. – Ficker 1998. 17 Weidhaas 1967. His work on the art in Poland, the ČSSR, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria is also worth mentioning, here 467. 18 Feist 1999c. 19 Strauss 1975. – Strauss 1983/84. – Strauss 1983/84a.

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of the regions we are discussing here; however, only Olbrich, who had studied in Prague, focused specifically on this area – and he, too, on the 20th century only. After 1945 it had taken a while until there some kind of cooperation developed with the neighboring countries. In 1954, on the invitation of the Czechoslovakian Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs, a group of art historians, led by Johannes Jahn was introduced to the achievements in the field of historic preservation and museum studies in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. Hans-Joachim Mrusek (active at the University of Halle) published an extensive travelogue about the historic preservation, with the clear intention of making those in charge of historic preservation and town planning in the GDR aware of this example.20 Ten years later, Polish and Czech colleagues, Jan Białostocki among them, made a premiere appearance at an international conference in Berlin on Michelangelo, which also included a presentation by two younger Polish academics, Henryk Kondziela and Wojciech Fijałkowski, about new findings regarding the artistic work of Andreas Schlüter in Poland.21 Thus, 250 years after the death of the Danzig-born master, the initiator of the Berlin conference, Gerhard Strauss, criticized for his involvement in the removal of Schlüter’s Berlin castle, revived the memories of the architect and sculptor whom he had honored as a mediator between the centers of present-day Poland and the GDR. In the following year, in 1965, art historians from the GDR attended an international symposium hosted by Jaromír Neumann in Prague on the occasion of the opening of the Prague Castle Picture Gallery. This was followed, in 1969, by GDR representatives being admitted to the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art at the 22nd International Congress of Art History in Budapest. From then on, the author acted as chairman of the National Committee of the GDR, although it had no authority to act domestically. The subject of the congress was General Development and Regional Developments in The History of Art, with a special emphasis on the problem of Central Europe, which referred to both German states, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Poland, plus the northeastern tip of the Netherlands, the western Soviet republics as well as parts of Italy and Romania. In his carefully meandering introduction, the president of the congress, Lajos Vayer, highlighted the concomitant problems by using the example of St. George in the courtyard of the Prague Castle in 1373.22 The author of the present essay feels obliged to mention that for him, too, it became the most distinctive symptom of East-Central European art history and ‘heritage policy’ that he could find the creation by the Klausenburg bronze 20 Mrusek 1956/57. 21 Michelangelo heute. Appendix: Schlüter in Polen. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Here: Białostocki 1965. – Kondziela / Fijałkowski 1965. 22 Vayer 1972. See the translation of this article in this volume (the editors).

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founders – with which he was acquainted for example thanks to Wilhelm Pinder’s Vom Wesen und Werden deutscher Formen – in histories of Czech art as well as in casts preserved in the National Museums of both Hungary and Romania. From the 1970s onwards, there were more visits, excursions, conferences, exchange programs between universities and exchanges of guest lectures than can be listed here, with particularly close relationships resulting from projects engaging brick architecture and presuming connections across the entire Baltic area – most notably those which were of political interest. For instance, Nikolaus Zaske spoke at a congress in Gdańsk in 1976; the meeting was organized by the Association of Polish Art Historians and dedicated to the art of the territories of the Baltic Sea region.23 There were also joint efforts to explore the common specifics of art in mining regions such as Upper Saxony, Western Bohemia and the Slovakian Spiš.24 However, as mentioned previously, the GDR had no experts on older East-Central European art, whereas several research papers were written on Old Russian and Caucasian art,25 as well as on 20th-century art, from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.26 These studies were partly conceived during times spent at local universities or on other extended visits by the various authors, e. g., as German lecturers. How was the ‘national’ element tackled in art historical research in the GDR? The kind of art historiography that was based on Marxism and the prerogatives of which were to be respected even by those who did not agree, or only partially agreed with its premises, focused its methodology on the socio-cultural components of artistic creation. In that respect there was a lot of catching up to do internationally, and, as a result, substantial new findings were produced, even outside of ‘orthodox’ Marxism. The question of the role of ethnic factors in art history was discredited by the racist hypertropization of these elements since the beginning of the 20th century, if not earlier, and especially following its horrific consequences during the Nazi regime, to such an extent that it remained entirely excluded and was not discussed theoretically until the 1980s.27 ­Fundamentally, 23 Zaske 1978. 24 The Bergakademie Freiberg as well as the museums and the office for the monument protection in Saxony were mostly involved in this project. 25 Noteworthy are the volumes Old Russian Monuments edited by Konrad Onasch and Hubert Faensen: Onasch 1961. – Faensen / Iwanow 1972. – Neubauer 1970. – Neubauer 1976. – Neubauer 1984. – Beridse / Neubauer 1980. – Nickel 1974. 26 Impulses were especially provided by Harald Olbrich. See: Internationale sozialistische Kunst­ prozesse. – Entwicklungsprobleme der proletarisch-revolutionären Kunst. Here among others: Horn, Ursula: Wechselbeziehungen deutscher und ungarischer revolutionärer Kunst, 109 – 114; Jähne, Svoboda: Einige Entwicklungsfragen der bulgarischen Kunst, 115 – 119. – Hammer 1978. – Olbrich 1986. 27 One early exception is a shorter article by Kunstwissenschaftler Ernst Wüsten, who had returned from emigration. Wüsten 1949.

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and this is probably still the case, this problem was only addressed vaguely, based on respective current political interests. Unfortunately, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s work 28 was not yet available. Instead, Kunstwissenschaft in the GDR took a great interest in Jan Białostocki’s novel ideas on the progression of art history and the resultant methodological consequences.29 Politics and historiography also dictated thought patterns and terminology for the discipline of Kunstwissenschaft. These varied over the years but always displayed a strong emotional component. The term ‘identity’ only appeared much later. The ‘national discourse’ was mainly focused on determining relationship between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany. The terms ‘people’, ‘nation’, and ‘nationality’ were sometimes used differently and sometimes identically. The category ‘nation’ was defined primarily, but not exclusively, in historical and social terms. The German ‘people’ supposedly originated from sometime between the 9th and 11th century; the ‘nation’ associated with the existence of a middle class emerged when feudalism turned into capitalism, and was only considered fully formulated after the Bismarck era. Around 1970, the notion of the ‘Socialist nation’ emerged in the GDR; this nation was claimed to have achieved a higher level of social development than the still capitalist Federal Republic. Accordingly, the German nation was thought to have been split in two constitutive peoples.30 The political distance-taking from the Federal Republic was linked to the rejection of, amongst others, the FRG’s claim to exclusive expertise over German history and therefore over the history of German art, too. Finally, in 1984, the then President of the Historical Society of the GDR, Heinrich Scheel, wrote: ”We claim the entire German history as our own national history […], including the entire cultural heritage […], in every respect […], in temporal […], territorial […]] (and) socio-structural respects.” 31 In all publications, historians and pre-historians drew on the territorial principle. Local ethnic groups were only mentioned in passing. The main focus was on social conditions. The standard works on German history, published since 1960, 1965, and 1982, took the prehistoric man on German soil as their starting points.32 What was the attitude of art historians towards these political frameworks and problems? As mentioned earlier, there was no first-hand research into East-Central European 28 Kaufmann 1998. 29 Białostocki 1966. – Białostocki 1981. – Białostocki 1989. Five and ten authors from the GDR and the FRG, respectively, as well as 6 (respectively 14) additional congratulants contributed to the commemorative publication. Ars auro prior 1981. 30 Bartel et al. 1969 – 1970, 125 – 127. – Summarizing: Meier / Schmidt 1988 (with extended bibliography). 31 Erbe und Tradition […] 1984, 1. 32 Meusel / Schmiedt et al. 1960 ff, altogether 12 Vol., later edided by other researchers. – Bartmuss et al. 1965 ff – Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, 1982 ff (unfinished).

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art history. The early essay by Hermann Weidhaas, West-östliche Beziehungen in der Baugeschichte des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (West-East Relationships in the Building History of the 17th and 18th Century), was the result of previous studies.33 The commonly-known, popular introduction to the European history of art by Wolfgang Hütt, Wir und die Kunst (Us and the Art, 1925),34 a publication that has been revised several times since 1959, only covers a few Bohemian phenomena from the 14th and 18th century. In contrast, the Europäische Kunstgeschichte in Daten (European Art History in Dates)35 by several younger authors clearly endeavored to consider East-Central Europe (from the 10th century onwards) as well as Southern Europe and, naturally, Russia, in the selection of objects and illustrations and to integrate them into a general European development. The most important opportunity to discuss both East-Central European and German art was offered by the Lexikon der Kunst (Dictionary of Art, published by the Seemann-Publishing House), a publication initially launched in 1959 by Gerhard Strauss at the Institute of Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and later overtaken by Harald Olbrich. From 1968 onwards it was available in five volumes, and from 1987 – 1994 in seven.36 Numerous international authors contributed to the undertaking. Articles on the respective countries adhered strictly to current political borders. Although a socio-cultural definition dominated the inevitably brief portrayal of art historical processes, a not quite intentional reliance on approaches using ethnic criteria is notable. For instance, under the headings of Czechoslovakia (1978) and Czech Art (1994), the following is being said: “Over the centuries, the Czech countries, united by the Přemyslid dynasty at the end of the 9th century, proved to be of utmost relevance for East-Central Europe in terms of economy, politics and art, both giving and taking […]”; and: “During some periods of art in the Czech countries, the coexistence and cooperation between Czechs and the German immigrants, who had arrived as part of an internal colonization in the 13th century, was important.” 37 A dictionary entry could not provide sufficient space to expand in detail on what the potential, specifically artistic consequences, visible in the works, consisted of. Neither were these issues explored when addressing the history of German art. The quest for the ‘Germanness’ in art, which used to be so common, was taboo. During a phase when the GDR still strove for German reunification and, in addition, the Stalinist 33 Weidhaas 1955/56. – The study is dedicated to the historian Eduard Winter (formerly Prague, now Halle), „the scholarly pioneer of German-Slavic interrelations “. 34 Hütt 1959. 35 Betthausen et al. 1984. 36 Lexikon der Kunst 1968 – 78 and 1987 – 94; reprint as softcover in Munich in 1996. According to Hanno Rauterberg, it was „[T]he most thoroughly German reference book“. In: Die Zeit 50 (06. 12. 1996). 37 Lexikon der Kunst, Vol. 7, 1994, 431.

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formula for the national form of the Socialist content still had validity, Pinder’s erstwhile colleague in Leipzig, Johannes Jahn, published a series of short, popular articles in Bildende Kunst (1955 – 1957). They discussed topics like German Idiosyncrasy in Medieval Sculpture, The German Form of the Gothic Style etc., right up to The Unique and the Alien in German Baroque, using very careful phrasing, free of any nationalist superiority.38 In 1972, as part of the comprehensive ‘appropriation’ of the national ‘heritage’, underway since the 1970s, the Academic Council for the Study of Art and Culture at the Institute for Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the SED decided to compile a several-volume strong Geschichte der deutschen Kunst (History of German Art). After lengthy discussions and preparations, the volumes were published between 1981 and 1990 by the publishing house Seemann in Leipzig; the individual parts, however, did not come out in chronological order. The publication gathered its material according to territorial units that could be defined either as regnum Teutonicum or ‘German State’. To this effect, art historians in the GDR had to be given the opportunity, at least to a certain extent, to conduct autopsy on artworks from outside their own national territory, and to cooperate with West German colleagues. Work on the periods before 1200 and from 1550 to 1760 did not come to fruition. The years from 1200 – 1550 were discussed by groups of authors under the tutelage of Friedrich Möbius (Jena) and Ernst Ullmann (Leipzig), respectively, and the more recent phases up until 1945 under my or Harald Olbrich’s direction in Berlin.39 Consequent volumes, although ostensibly part of the series of volumes, were no longer entitled The History of German Art, but simply The Art of the GDR (Kunst der DDR) or The Art of the FRG and West-Berlin (Die Kunst der BRD und Westberlins).40 There was a lack of focus when it came to the selection and identification of the art historical phenomena discussed. Just like their West German colleagues, GDR art historians were determined to stick to a traditional knowledge base in designating what was ‘German art’ and, therefore, their ‘own’ heritage. However, they held back where the current areas of Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics were concerned.41 The German-speaking Austrian regions were included up until the 19th century. The entirely justified notion of the artists’ linguistically determined nationality as well as the concept 38 Jahn 1955. – Jahn 1955a. – Jahn 1956. – Jahn 1957. – Jahn 1957a. 39 Möbius / Sciurie 1989. – Ullmann 1981. – Ullmann 1984. – Ullmann 1985. – Feist / Häntzsche / Krenzlin / Lammel 1986. – Feist / Häntzsche / Krenzlin / Lammel 1987. – Olbrich 1988. – Olbrich 1990. 40 Kuhirt 1982. – Kuhirt 1983. – Raum 1977 was published in the same format, but separately from the series and, as individual work, it came out earlier than the collaborative work. 41 As Boockmann’s debate with Böker demonstrates, this also created a problem for art historical research in the FRG. Boockmann 1990. – Böker 1988. In the GDR, „Ostforschung“ was critically addressed: Schulze 1968. – Schulze 1970.

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that ‘German art’ was what German artists created, regardless of where they were active, remained undecidedly virulent. Authors did consider the mobility of artists, the export of art works, as well as the transfer of genres and stylistic characteristics. Thus at least the peak output such as that by Peter Parler in Prague, Veit Stoss 42 in Cracow, or the Fischers von Erlach and the Dientzenhofers in Bohemia were treated as part of German art history, along with the Strasbourg Cathedral or Bernt Notke’s St. George in Stockholm. On the other hand, according to the methodological concept of regional or local ‘art scenes’, Nikolaus Gerhaert’s sculptures, for instance, or the works of Swiss artists temporarily active in Germany as well as Scandinavian painters were also included. Or, as the delegates were told at a conference of the Comité international d’histoire de l’art in Eisenach in 1982, “We have to face up to the rich historical traditions of our people with all their contradictions, because they are part of the prerequisites/preconditions for our present and future.” 43 It was hard to proudly appreciate the art of the German Order in the GDR,44 although Friedrich Gilly’s and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s achievements regarding the restoration of the Marienburg Castle were lauded.45 The historic preservation which Poland provided for this building, and whose partial destruction during the battle between the SS and the Red Army the author was forced to witness, by coincidence, as a 16-year-old anti-aircraft auxiliary, was praised with deference. Despite a few conceptual attempts, no concept developed that could be deemed sound from the perspective of methodology or the theory of history and art in art historiography in the GDR of what might constitute the specificity and the novelty, as well as the emanating impact of artistic endeavors: innate peculiarities, a national or regional nature or the practical life experiences of the artists. How historically constant and how changeable are the ramifications of specific ethnic mentalities that find expression in art works? What is the relationship between the ‘style-forming’ effect of a concrete socio-cultural situation, which is generally also grounded in multi-ethnicity, and the intrinsic motion of an artistic search for form? To be sure, these and other questions have not as yet been satisfactorily answered in other countries either. Translated by Britt Pflüger

42 Sachs 1972. After the author became acutely ill, the examination of the subject was delegated to Piotr Skubiszewski (1985). 43 Cf. Feist at the opening of the CIHA-colloqium Art and Reformation/Kunst und Reformation on 6. 9. 1982 in Eisenach. Feist 1983, 7. 44 Lexikon der Kunst, Vol. 2, 1989, 150. 45 Findeisen 1980, 317 – 320.

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Bibliogr aphy Alpatow, Michail W.: Zur Verteidigung der Renaissance. In: Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der UdSSR (ed.): Gegen die bürgerliche Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft. Berlin 1954 (Moskva 11951), 161 – 193. Ars auro prior: Studia Ioanni Białostocki sexagenario dicata. Warszawa 1981. Badstübner, Ernst: Referat auf dem Deutschen Kunsthistorikertag in Aachen 1990. In: Kunst­ chronik 44/4 (1991), 234 – 238. Bartel, Horst et al. (eds.): Sachwörterbuch der Geschichte Deutschlands und der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Vol. 2. Berlin 1969 – 1970. Bartmuss, Hans-Joachim et al. (eds): Deutsche Geschichte in drei Bänden. Berlin 1965 – 1968. Beridse, Wachtang / Neubauer, Edith: Die Baukunst des Mittelalters in Georgien vom 4. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin 1980. Betthausen, Peter et al.: Europäische Kunstgeschichte in Daten. Dresden 1984. Białostocki, Jan: Der Manierismus zwischen Triumph und Dämmerung. In: Michelangelo heute. Anhang: Schlüter in Polen. Berlin 1965 (Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der ­Humboldt-­ Universität zu Berlin. Gesellschaft- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, Sonderband 1965), 73 – 90. Białostocki, Jan: Stil und Ikonographie. Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft. Dresden 1966 (Fundus-Bücher 18). Białostocki, Jan: Langsames und schnelles Geschehen in der Geschichte der Kunst. In: Möbius, Friedrich / Sciurie, Helga (eds.): Stil und Epoche. Periodisierungsfragen. Dresden 1989 (Fundus-Bücher 118/119), 210 – 216. Böker, Hans Josef: Die mittelalterliche Backsteinarchitektur Norddeutschlands. Darmstadt 1988. Boockmann, Hartmut: Wissenschaftliche Annexionen? In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53 (1990), 145 – 149. Clasen, Karl-Heinz: Die Baukunst and der Ostseeküste zwischen Elbe und Oder. Dresden 1955 (Deutsche Bauakademie. Schriften des Instituts für Theorie und Geschichte der Baukunst). Clasen, Karl-Heinz: Deutsche Gewölbe der Spätgotik. Berlin 1958 (Deutsche Bauakademie. Schriften des Instituts für Theorie und Geschichte der Baukunst). Clasen, Karl-Heinz: Der Meister der Schönen Madonnen. Herkunft, Entfaltung und Umkreis. Berlin / New York 1974. Drengenberg, Hans-Jürgen: Osteuropäische Kunstgeschichte in Deutschland. Versuch einer Bilanz und Standortbestimmung. In: Osteuropa 20 (1980), 886 – 899. Entwicklungsprobleme der proletarisch-revolutionären Kunst von 1917 bis zu den 30er Jahren. Arbeitskonferenz des Bereiches Kunstwissenschaft der Humboldt-Universität Berlin 1977. Erbe und Tradition in der Geschichte der DDR. Dokumentation der gemeinsamen Tagung des Nationalen Rates der DDR zur Pflege und Verbreitung des gemeinsamen Kulturerbes und des Präsidiums der Historiker-Gesellschaft der DDR. Berlin, 3. Oktober 1984 (typescript), 1.

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Exh.Cat. Berlin 1980 – 1981: Karl Friedrich Schinkel 1781 – 1841. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Hauptstadt der DDR in Zusammenarbeit mit den Staatlichen Schlössern und Gärten Potsdam-Sanssouci und mit Unterstützung des Instituts für Denkmalpflege in der DDR. Berlin, Altes Museum 23. 10. 1980 – 29. 03. 1981. Berlin 1980. Faensen, Hubert / Iwanow, Wladimir: Altrussische Baukunst. Berlin 1972. Feist, Peter H.: Bei der Eröffnung des C. I. H.A-Kolloquiums „Kunst und Reformation“ am 6. 9. 1982 in Eisenach. In: Ullmann, Ernst (ed.): Von der Macht der Bilder. Beiträge des C. I. H.A-Kolloquiums „Kunst und Reformation“ (Martin-Luther-Ehrung 1983 der DDR). Leipzig 1983, 7. [Feist 1999a]: Feist, Peter H.: Clasen, Karl-Heinz. In: Metzler Kunsthistoriker L ­ exikon, 49 – 51. [Feist 1999b]: Feist, Peter H.: Hamann, Richard. In: Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, 146 – 149. [Feist 1999c]: Feist, Peter H.: Jahn, Johannes. In: Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, 187 – 190. [Feist 1999d]: Feist, Peter H.: Ladendorf, Heinz. In: Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, 235 – 237. [Feist 1999e]: Feist, Peter H.: Worringer, Wilhelm. In: Metzler Kunsthistoriker L ­ exikon, 493 – 495. Ficker, Friedbert: Hermann Weidhaas und die osteuropäische Kunstgeschichte. Im Gedenken an seinen 20. Todestag. In: Via Regia. Blätter für internationale kulturelle Kommunikation 54/55 (1997), 86 – 92. Ficker, Friedbert: Hermann Weidhaas und die Erforschung der Kunstgeschichte Osteuropas. In: Thesis. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 44/3 (1998), 9 – 17. Findeisen, Peter / Badstübner, Ernst: Die „Erhaltung der Vaterländischen Altertümer.“ In: Exh.Cat. Berlin 1980 – 1981, 315 – 328. Hamann, Richard: Geschichte der Kunst von der altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin 1933, New Edition 1955, revised 1965. Hamann, Richard: Das Grabmal des Hl. Adalbert. In: Strauss / Ehmsen / Henselmann / Stichnote 1949, 49 – 52. Hammer, Jutta: Corneliu Baba. Berlin 1978. Häntzsche, Thomas / Krenzlin, Ulrike / Lammel, Gisold (eds.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1760 – 1848. Leipzig 1986. Häntzsche, Thomas / Krenzlin, Ulrike / Lammel, Gisold (eds.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1848 – 1890. Leipzig 1987. Hentschel, Walter: Die sächsische Baukunst des 18. Jahrhunderts in Polen, Vol. 1, 2. Berlin 1967 (Deutsche Bauakademie. Schriften des Instituts für Städtebau und Architektur). Hütt, Wolfgang: Wir und die Kunst. Eine Einführung in Kunstbetrachtung und Kunstgeschichte. Berlin 1959, 5 (revised 1977).

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Internationale sozialistische Kunstprozesse seit der Oktoberrevolution. 2. Jahres­ tagung der Sektion Kunstwissenschaft des Verbandes Bildender Künstler der DDR. Magdeburg 1977. Bearbeitetes Protokoll (). [Jahn 1955]: Jahn, Johannes: Deutsche Eigenart in mittelalterlicher Plastik. In: Bildende Kunst 3 (1955), 198 – 202. [Jahn 1955a]: Jahn, Johannes: Der Magdeburger Dom, ein großartiges Denkmal deutscher Baukunst. In: Bildende Kunst, Bildende Kunst 3 (1955), 344 – 348. Jahn, Johannes: Die deutsche Form des gotischen Stils. In: Bildende Kunst 4 (1956), 314 – 318. [Jahn 1957]: Jahn, Johannes: Was ist deutsche Renaissance? In: Bildende Kunst 5 (1957), 18 – 21. [Jahn 1957a]: Jahn, Johannes: Eigenes und Fremdes im deutschen Barock. In: Bildende Kunst 5 (1957), 539 – 543. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta: Höfe, Klöster und Städte. Kunst und Kultur in Mitteleuropa 1450 – 1800. Köln 1998. Kondziela, Henryk / Fijałkowski, Wojciech: Die künstlerische Tätigkeit Andreas Schlüter in Polen. In: Michelangelo heute. Anhang: Schlüter in Polen. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Sonderband 1965, 267 – 288. Kuhirt, Ulrich (ed.): Kunst der DDR 1945 – 1959. Leipzig 1982. Kuhirt, Ulrich (ed.): Kunst der DDR 1960 – 1980. Leipzig 1983. Ladendorf, Heinz: Zur nachmittelalterlichen Kunstgeschichte Osteuropas. In: Kunstchronik 4 (1951), 270 – 271. Meier, Helmut / Schmidt, Walter (eds.): Erbe und Tradition in der DDR. Die Diskussion der Historiker. Berlin 1988. Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: Metzler-Kunsthistoriker-Lexikon. Zweihundert ­Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Ed. by Peter Betthausen, Peter H. Feist and Christiane Fork. Stuttgart / Weimar 1999. Meusel, Alfred / Schmiedt, Roland-Franz et al. (eds.): Lehrbuch der deutschen Geschichte (Beiträge), 12 Vol. Berlin 11960. Möbius, Friedrich / Sciurie, Helga (eds.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1200 – 1350. Leipzig 1989. Mrusek, Hans-Joachim: Denkmalpflege in der Tschechoslowakei. In: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Gesellschafts- u. Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 6 (1956/57), 237 – 255. Neubauer, Edith: Armenische Baukunst vom vierten bis vierzehnten Jahrhundert. Dresden 1970. Neubauer, Edith: Altgeorgische Baukunst. Felsenstädte, Kirchen, Höhlenklöster. Leipzig 1976; Wien / München 1981. Neubauer, Edith: Zu den Beziehungen zwischen der kaukasischen mittelalterlichen Baukunst und der mitteleuropäischen Romanik. In: Möbius, Friedrich (ed.): Stil und Gesellschaft. Ein Problemaufriss. Dresden 1984 (Fundus-Bücher 89/90), 303 – 317.

Rereading Source Text: A Problematic Neighborship  |

Nickel, Heinrich L.: Kirchen, Burgen, Miniaturen. Armenien und Georgien während des Mittelalters. Berlin 1974. Olbrich, Harald (ed.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1890 – 1918. Leipzig 1988. Olbrich, Harald: Proletarische Kunst im Werden. Berlin 1986. Oblrich, Harald / Badstübner, Ernst: [Referat auf dem XXII. Deutschen Kunsthistorikertag in Aachen 1990]. In: Kunstchronik 44/4 (1991), 228 – 238. Onasch, Konrad: Ikonen. Berlin 1961. Raum, Hermann: Die bildende Kunst der BRD und Westberlins. Leipzig 1977. Sachs, Hannelore: Veit Stoß. Berlin 1972 (Welt der Kunst). Schulze, Ingrid: Böhmische Kunst im Spiegel der bürgerlichen deutschen Kunstgeschichtsschreibung. Eine wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zu Fragen der deutschslawischen Wechselseitigkeit auf dem Gebiet der Kunstgeschichte. Phil. Habil.-Schr. Univ. Halle 1968 (typescript). Schulze, Ingrid: Der Missbrauch der Kunstgeschichte durch die imperialistische deutsche Ostpolitik. Leipzig 1970. Seemanns Lexikon der Kunst. Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Angewandte Kunst, Industrie­ formgestaltung, Kunsttheorie, Bd. 1 – 5. Leipzig 1968 – 1978 u. Bd. 1 – 7. Leipzig 1987 – 1994. Seemanns Lexikon der Kunst, Bd. 2. Leipzig 1989. Seemanns Lexikon der Kunst, Bd. 7. Leipzig 1994. Strauss, Gerhard / Ehmsen, Heinrich / Henselmann, Hermann / Stichnote, Werner E. (eds.): Festgabe an Carl Hofer zum 70. Geburtstag. Potsdam 1949. Strauss, Gerhard: Neubeginn ab 1945. In: Abteilung Dokumentation und Information der Sektion Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ed.): Künstlerisches und kunstwissenschaftliches Erbe als Gegenwartsaufgabe. Referate der Arbeitstagung vom 16. bis 18. April 1975., Berlin 1975, 197 – 210 (typescript). [Strauss 1983/84]: Strauss, Gerhard: Entrümpelung und Denkmalpflege. In: Humboldt-­ Universität, Organ der SED-Kreisleitung 28 (1983/84), Nr. 25, 7. [Strauss 1983/84a]: Strauss, Gerhard: John Heartfield: „…welch‘ beglückliche Entwicklung!“. In: Humboldt-Universität, Organ der SED-Kreisleitung 28 (1983/84), Nr. 28/29, 11. Ullmann, Ernst (ed.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1350 – 1470. Leipzig 1981. Ullmann, Ernst (ed.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1470 – 1550. Architektur und Plastik. Leipzig 1984. Ullmann, Ernst (ed.): Geschichte der deutschen Kunst 1470 – 1550. Malerei, Graphik und Kunsthandwerk. Leipzig 1985. Vayer, Lajos: Allgemeine Entwicklung und regionale Entwicklungen in der Kunstgeschichte – Situation des Problems in „Mitteleuropa“. In: György Rózsa (ed.): Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’histoire de l’art. Budapest 1969. Budapest 1972, Vol. 1, 19 – 29.

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Weidhaas, Hermann: West-östliche Beziehungen in der Baugeschichte des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 3 (1955/56), 75 – 147. Weidhaas, Hermann: Zum Anteil der Kunstgeschichte an der Begegnung deutscher und sowjetischer Wissenschaft. In: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 14 (1967), 465 – 471. Worringer, Wilhelm: Die Anfänge der Tafelmalerei. Leipzig 1924, 45 – 139. Worringer, Wilhelm: Griechentum und Gotik. Vom Weltreich des Hellenismus. München 1928, 91 – 108 (altrussische Malerei). Wüsten, Ernst: Das Nationale in der Kunst. In: Strauss / Ehmsen / Henselmann / S­ tichnote 1949, 33 – 40. Zaske, Nikolaus: Hinrich Brunsberg, ein ordenspreußischer Baumeister der Spätgotik. In: Baltische Studien NF 44 (1957), 49 – 72. Zaske, Nikolaus: Gotische Backsteinkirchen Norddeutschlands zwischen Elbe und Oder. Leipzig 1968. Zaske, Nicolaus: Henryk Brunsbeg – jego twórczość i znaczenie [Heinrich Brunsberg – his Œuvre and his meaning. In: Sztuka pobrzeża Bałtyku. Materiały sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki Gdańsk, 1976. Warszawa 1987, 167 – 201. Zaske, Nikolaus / Zaske, Rosemarie: Kunst in Hansestädten. Leipzig 1985. Zaske, Nikolaus: Henryk Brunsberg – jego twórczość i znaczenie [Heinrich Brunswerg – his work and his role]. In: Sztuka pobrzeza Bałtyku. Materialy sesji Stowarzyszenia Historików Sztuki Gdańsk, 1976. Warszawa 1978, 167 – 201. Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR (ed.): Deutsche Geschichte in zwölf Bänden. Berlin 1982 ff. (not completed).

Originally published as: Schwierige Nachbarschaft. Die Kunstwissenschaft in der DDR in ihrem Verhältnis zur Kunstgeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft in den benachbarten ostmitteleuropäischen Ländern. In: Born, Robert / Janatková, Alena / Labuda, Adam S. (eds.): Die Kunsthistoriographien in Ostmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs. Berlin 2004 (humboldt-schriften zur kunst- und bildgeschichte 1), 421 – 434.

Antje Kempe

Commentary on Feist’s Text Peter H. Feist (1928 – 2015) was a contemporary witness and an involved person in East German art history, as he described it himself. After his studies at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, he followed a career path that led him over such positions as assistant of Wilhelm Worringer in Halle to the Institute of Art History at the Humboldt University in East Berlin. While his dissertation (1958), probably influenced by ­Worringer, explored the issue of the impact of art from ancient Near East on early medieval art, his habilitation (1966) was devoted to French impressionism. The latter became his primary research focus, accompanied by a keen interest in sculpture of the 20th century and contemporary art. In 1969, he became a professor and led the section Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft at the Humboldt-University from 1977 until 1982. Furthermore, he held several functions such as a member of the executive board of the Association of [East] German Artists (VBKD, after 1970 renamed VBK-DDR). From 1982, he was likewise head of the Institute for Aesthetics and Science of Art in the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (AdW), the most renowned research institute in East Germany. Feist was one of the leading art historians in the GDR which he represented at CIHA congresses and meetings of the AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art). Furthermore, he shaped a Socialist art history conceptually, among others, with books like the small publication Prinzipien und Methoden marxistischer Kunstwissenschaft. The translation of that book, along with texts by, for example, Meyer Shapiro, Werner Hofmann, Mikhail Alpatov, Adolf Goldschmidt, and Mieczysław Porȩbski, also found its way into an anthology edited by Jan Białostocki in 1976 under the title Ideas, Problems, Methods of Contemporary Science on Art (Pojȩcia, problemy, metody współczesnej nauki o sztuce). The here translated paper by Feist, presented initially at a conference devoted to the art historiographies in East-Central Europe and the national discourses at the Humboldt-University Berlin in 2001, was one of the first voices in the debates after the Peaceful Revolution and the German reunification in October 1990 on the part of representatives of the former GDR art history.1 As a matter of fact, it actually needs to be read together with his autobiography entitled Hauptstraßen und eigene Wege. Rückschau eines Kunsthistorikers, published in 2016.2 The number of mentioned conferences, journeys, and activities by Feist in both publications resembles a personal account of what 1 I. a. Badstübner 1991. – Olbrich 1991. – Möbius 2001. 2 Katja Bernhardt already highlined the meaning of the autobiography for the art historiography of the GDR in her review of the book. Bernhardt 2021.

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has been experienced and done in this time and reveals thus an insight how art history was organized in the GDR. Feist’s paper and autobiography acknowledge the complex trajectories of international exchange which was, on the one hand, determined by the constantly changing political situation in Eastern Europe and around the world and, on the other, dependent on visa procurement and the lack of foreign currency for those art historians who wished to travel. Although Feist mentions that he experienced several mutual visits of scholars from the GDR and other Socialist countries, field trips, meetings, and guest lectures since the 1970s, he does not add that art historians from the GDR in and beyond European Socialist states were subject to travel restrictions. His unique position in the GDR cultural policy can also be highlighted by adding journeys to India and Burma. Furthermore, although he expressed a general interest in non-Western art, those journeys – unlike Białostocki’s – did not provide any further impulse for Feist to deal professionally with non-European art. However, the paper by Feist offers more than a basic overview on occasions and possibilities of exchange with colleagues from other Socialist countries. It reveals, moreover, a system of coordinates for both limitation and magnitude of the Kunstwissenschaft, a term he used continuously. Kunstwissenschaft was framed and defined in the prominent journal Bildende Kunst and also by Feist himself as operative Kunstwissenschaft.3 This formulation signified a reference of all areas of art history to problems and needs of the present, which also included popular culture and the promotion of contemporary art. Thus, it was intended to have a changing social effect. The GDR’s understanding of art history differed, therefore, from the term used in the 1920s in the German-speaking world for a broader understanding of artistic production that focused on elaborating a historical perspective on conditions of production and accordingly developed a contextual analysis of objects. An entry in the Lexikon der Kunst (Lexicon of Art), a collaborative venture of East German art historians – among them Peter H. Feist – published in the late 1980s, was devoted to the term Kunstwissenschaft.4 In this context, the ‘bourgeois science of art’ was criticized as eurocentristic. While using ideologically motivated rhetoric against the West German art history, the authors of the entry pointed to the fact that the focus on European art, beginning with the end of the Ancient era, had been substantiated with “only partially factual and mostly rather ideological reasons”.5 The realms of non-European art and even art in the Eastern and Southeast Europe, moreover that of the primitive,

3 Concerning the creation and conceptualizing of GDR Kunstwissenschaft in Bildende Kunst see profound analysis in Bernhardt 2019. Furthermore Feist itself Feist 1966. 4 The first edition was finished with the publication of the 5th band 1978. A second revised edition has been published 1987 – 1994. About the compilation of the editorial project see Pätzke 1991, 40 – 45. 5 Kunstwissenschaft 1971, 790.

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or/and ancient societies (Urgesellschaften) were thus proclaimed to have been left over to other disciplines. But, the neglection of these topics was indebted to an incomplete imagination of the development of art, so the authors of the entry. As such, the West German art history – and thus Western art history in general was might be intended – carry improper, narrowed aesthetical opinions, nationalistic and racist theories a. o., like those of the ‘Occident’ (Abendland).6 Although the entry is inhered in a Cold War rhetoric directed against ‘bourgeois’ art history, it included considerations concerning the issue of how to understand the diversity of intercultural entanglements. On the one hand, the authors pointed out the equality of art across all geographical and temporal parameters. On the other hand, they highlighted that several notions still used in art history had been coined in the colonial or historically racist context. This understanding of Kunstwissenschaft had a great impact also for the book chapter written by Feist and translated in the present volume. However, he introduced the notion of heritage in order to explain the processes of nationalistic and disciplinary appropriation of artworks. Feist’s entry reveals the realm of heritage as both burden and prospect. He identified the burden with the Austro-German pre-war dominance in the discipline of art history and its modes of interpretation, especially those related to art in the Eastern European states, which stressed its independence of German art. Taking up on Lajos Vayer’s plenary talk on the groundbreaking CIHA Congress in Budapest related to the art in East-Central Europe and his example of St. George statue in Prague, Feist admitted that this artwork also became for him the best example of heritage as an expression of the struggles for hegemony between different national art histories and their models of interpretation. For Vayer, the statue became an exponent for how regional entanglements and exchange processes can be understood, instead of embodying any kind of national territoriality that would allow to see art in terms of its declarative ascriptions as Czech, Romanian, or Hungarian. Taking up on the idea of a trans-territorial or trans-local realm, Feist’s encounter with this object made him focus – without going into further detail – on the issue of media-based dissemination and reception of art in the form of copies, pictures, or books – media which were used to claim a heritage, acknowledge it, or, to the contrary, let it fade into oblivion. He thus understood inheritance in the Marxist terms of an active process of appropriation and social relevance, as a ‘work on heritage’. Thus, East-Central Europe became for him a region of common heritage that must be conceived on a transnational level. In another context, Feist and also later the literary scholar Stefan Willer argued that without the German-German heritage controversy the theoretical reflection and the examination of heritage would have never achieved such a significance in the scientific and cultural-political debates expressed in 1970s in journals like Bildende Kunst edited 6 Kunstwissenschaft 1971, 790.

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by the Association of [East] German Artists and Weimarer Beiträge, the leading literary periodical of the time.7 Only when the Basic Treaty between the two German states (Grundlagenvertrag) was signed in 1972, the debates were focused differently. With this political act, the division of Germany was accepted and regulated in terms of mutual acknowledgment, sovereign equality, and independence of both states. This also included the recognition of the GDR as a UN member (1973). In this respect, the independent representation of the GDR art history in the CIHA (1969) and AICA (1965) can be evaluated as diplomatic and disciplinary success. However, with the Basic Treaty, the idea of shared national culture was abandoned. Instead, the goal was then to create a new definition of one’s ‘own’ national culture. As a result, the competition of two narratives of the German past became an issue, as each of the two German states claimed to be ‘more progressive’ than the other. In this context, the GDR scholars highlighted the role of heritage in the consolidation of the Socialist awareness of history by claiming that heritage is an intellectually productive driving force of artistic progress.8 Heritage as a concept that encompasses much more than a mass of conveyed art production provoked the question of whether it can be perceived as a ‘raw material’ for the sake of the construction of scientific, ideological, or historical values, and finally, for the manifestation of Social Realism. Accordingly, the question which is relevant for the present approach of critical heritage studies refers not just to heritage but to the complex issue of how it can be appropriated by different communities. The concept of heritage proved useful for the integration of the hitherto neglected periods of art (like e. g. art of the 19th century and the proletarian art of the early 20th century) or those that were not compatible with historical materialism. In sum, the paper by Feist reveals a hesitant and never further elaborated thought on art geography seen through the prism of the circulation of images and the reproduction of objects. Particularly Feist’s vision of heritage as a realm that includes much more than any political or national determination of culture and also his acknowledgment of the role of media in the processes of inheritance are still relevant in the critical heritage studies today.

Bibliogr aphy Badstübner, Ernst: Referat auf dem Deutschen Kunsthistorikertag in Aachen 1990. In: Kunstchronik 44/4 (1991), 234 – 238. 7 An overview about the debates provides Willer 2014, 309 – 328. 8 Möbius 1974.

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Belting, Hans: Identität im Zweifel. Ansichten der deutschen Kunst. Köln 1999. Bernhardt, Katja: Congenial Kunstwissenschaft The Discussion on Art in the East German „Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte“ (1947 – 1950). In: Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina / Marek, Michaela (eds.): A Socialist Realist Art History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019 (Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9), 58 – 80. Bernhardt, Katja: Peter H. Feist: Hauptstraßen und eigene Wege. Rückschau eines Kunsthistorikers. Berlin 2016 / Peter H. Feist: Nachlese: Aufsätze zu bildender Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft. Berlin 2016. In: Kunstform 22/6 (2021). https://www.arthistoricum.net/kunstform/ rezension/ausgabe/2021/6 [Last accessed 16. 11. 2021]. Feist, Peter H.: Prinzipien und Methoden marxistischer Kunstwissenschaft. Versuch eines Abrisses. Leipzig 1966. Feist, Peter H.: Die Kunstwissenschaft in der DDR. In: Kunst und Politik 8 (2006), Special issue: Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten in der Nachkriegszeit. Ed. by ­Martin ­Papenbrock, 13 – 49. [Kunstwissenschaft 1971]: Kunstwissenschaft. In: Alscher, Ludger et al. (eds.): Lexikon der Kunst. Architektur, Bildende Kunst, Angewandte Kunst, Industrieformgestaltung, Kunsttheorie, 2: G–Lh. Leipzig 1971, 816 – 817. Möbius, Friedrich: Realismusbegriff und Erbeforschung. Bemerkungen zu einem neuen Buch. In: Weimarer Beiträge: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft, Ästhetik und Kulturwissenschaften 20 (1974), 179 – 191. Möbius, Friedrich: Wirklichkeit, Kunst, Leben. Erinnerungen eines K ­ unsthistorikers, Jena 2001. Olbrich, Harald: Referat auf dem Kunsthistorikertag in Aachen 1990. In: Kunst­chronik 44/4 (1991), 228 – 233. Willer, Stefan: Erbfälle. Theorie und Praxis kultureller Übertragung in der M ­ oderne. Paderborn 2014.

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Integration and Adaptation

Ivan Gerát

Holy Warriors in Socialist Czechoslovakia Modernists, Iconology and Traditions A popular assumption concerning the modernist art of the early 20th century is that the work was informed by ‘the modern world,’ or, at least, the modern world at that time. A visitor to the Lenbachhaus Museum in Munich might therefore be surprised to find paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, in which the subject matter is a modernist treatment of religious motifs from the medieval age, such as the iconic image of Saint George on his horse.1 The lively colors, simplified forms, and sometimes even the reverse glass painting technique used by Kandinsky were inspired by the simpler images of the earlier folk artists who had devoted themselves to similar topics. Heroic depictions of Saint George were said to have featured prominently in the Folk-art collection that hung on the wall of the Munich flat shared by Kandinsky and his partner, Gabriele Münter, in 1908 (fig. 1).2 Popular prints of other iconic characters, such as Ilya Muromets, a folk hero of medieval Kievan Rus’ and Eastern Slavic mythologies, were also part of the Kandinsky / Münter collection. Saint George appears in works by other members of Der Blaue Reiter group (e. g. August Macke), and popular images of military saints and other religious subjects were recurring motifs in the modernist art of the time. Examples of this can be found in, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (The Blue Rider Almanac), published in 1912, and which is still considered to be one of the most important publications of the expressionist movement.3 In the early 20th century, an interest in the power of images that were once considered naïve or primitive was part of the Avant-garde struggle against the cultivated, socially-exclusive sphere of academic art. Kandinsky realized that the efficacy of images with spiritual overtones could be liberated from the rigid schema and rational conventions that had dominated the artistic process. Looking into the neglected spheres of image production, he developed an alternative understanding of the relationship between images and the human psyche. Nevertheless, when he wanted to further define the spiritual meaning of art, Kandinsky ended up focusing on the formal aspects of painting, instead of on its themes.4 In this article, I will argue that there was a s­imilar tension between 1 2 3 4

Jaccard / Podorga / Bowlt 2018. Exh.Cat. Bielefeld 2003. Gollek 1974. – Hüneke 1989. Kandinsky 1946.

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|  Ivan Gerát Fig. 1  Saint George, Southern Europe, 19th century, from the collection of folk art of Gabriele Münter, Munich, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. Foto: Ivan Gerát.

the reflection of the artistic form of medieval art, and the Socialist historiography that followed World War II. Around the time Kandinsky was investigating religious iconography, Aby Warburg was maintaining a similar interest in images from the sphere of high art.5 He famously studied visual patterns, which appeared, and then reappeared, in images from diverse cultural contexts, arguing that the root of these images, present in historical memory, could be associated with a primitive, ‘mythopoetical thought.’6 Scholarly interest in archetypes which preceded the more articulated works of high culture was a part of broader search for values that could be found in the aftermath of World War I. Carl Gustav Jung hit upon a highly appropriate name for this process in the title of his groundbreaking, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.7 Since that time, one branch of the anthropology of images has been interested in exploring the psychological response to image, whereas 5 Beyer 2017, 150 – 163. 6 Taylor 2011. 7 Jung / Dell / Baynes 1933. – Jung 1933.

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other fields of art history focus predominantly on the cultural contexts of images, and their role in social communication and ideological struggle.8 George Didi-Huberman studied over-temporal aspects of images by looking at their ‘anachronism’.9 It might be a coincidence, but Didi-Huberman also devoted several publications to the pictorial cult of Saint George.10 Seen in this context, the phenomenon of medieval visual culture becomes a kind of mirror, in which the basic principles of a theoretical position concerning ‘image’ can be reflected, providing a valid sample for historiographical insight. The kind of mythological structures of imagination generally associated with holy figures of Christianity has been a recurring subject of interest for philosophers of religion in the early 20th century. Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms, as used in the tradition of iconology, is of particular interest,11 while Arthur Drews, who was considered more radical at the time, had only an indirect influence on the historiography of art in the Socialist countries, as he had inspired some of Lenin’s ideas on religion and culture.12 In the case of the Socialist historiography that evolved in the wake of World War II, the question was whether a similar way of considering religious iconography could be ‘sold’ to the academic decision makers in states under communist control. This article will examine this question in relation to some of the ideas developed by Karel Stejskal, a historian of medieval art at the Institute of Art History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, in Prague, who spent the greater part of his professional life working in Socialist Czechoslovakia. His creative dialogue with Vlasta Dvořáková, his colleague at the Institute, can be read as an example of tension between hypotheses concerning medieval art, based on ethnic nationalism on one side, and international moments of stylistic development on the other.

Legal and Ideological Fr amework The Constitution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, which imposed the supervisory role of the Communist Party over all aspects of Czechoslovak society in 1960 (Art. 4), defined the basic rules of a system in which, “all upbringing and education should be based on a scientific worldview.” 13 The first sentence of the constitution’s 8 9 10 11

Dekoninck 2017, 177 – 178. Didi-Huberman 2014. Didi-Huberman / Garbetta / Morgaine 1994. – Didi-Huberman / Lacarriere / Busine 2000. Cassirer 1923. – Cassirer et. al. 1927. – Cassirer 1953. – Füssel 1979. – Ferretti 1989. – Levine 2013. 12 Drews 1910. – Drews 1911. – Drews 1924. – Drews 1928. – Drews / Zindler 1997. – Drews 1998. Lenin was commenting on Die Christusmythe by Arthur Drews, published in 1910. 13 All translations are by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Translation of the original Art 24, (3): „Celá výchova a všetko vyučovanie sú založené na vedeckom svetovom názore“. (retrieved from https://

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article 16 ­associates the meaning of ‘scientific worldview’ with Marxism-Leninism: “All of the cultural policy in Czechoslovakia, the development of upbringing, education and teaching, are performed in the spirit of a scientific worldview – Marxism-Leninism – and in close connection with the life and work of the people.” 14 This kind of open-ended formulation allowed a great deal of latitude in the interpretation of what ‘scientific worldview’ actually meant, and in many cases, the rigidity of Marxism-Leninism could be creatively avoided. In the praxis of the regime, the ideological control of scholarly work was a complicated mechanism, with discourse being formulated at the highest levels of the state, disseminated through the institutions of surveillance and repression, and enacted via the unofficial ‘diplomacies’ of academic institutions, including systems of censorship, and of self-censorship.15 Such official and self-imposed supervision severely constrained non-ideological research in the social sciences and humanities, with the entire sphere of art considered an important tool in the propagation of an ongoing ideological struggle.16 Interpretations of medieval art were therefore negotiated within these limits, however some ČSSR scholars did manage to publish articles concerning religious iconology without any reference to the ideology of the state or party,17 while others criticized the study of icons and artifacts, preferring to stay in a scholarly safe zone in which the ideological relevance of their work could avoid political scrutiny.18 Additionally, there were scholars serving the regime who took an active role in trying to promote atheism.19 One such example was Jiří Loukotka, the director of the Institute for Scientific Atheism of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, in Brno, who wrote a book concerning the relationship between art and religion. According to this work, Christian mythology did not inspire artists directly, but only vicariously, through the social reality in which they lived, and which formed and influenced their consciousness.20 According to Loukotka, the best works of Christian art were, in fact, created in ‘deep contradiction’ to Christian ideology and were actually ‘against its spirit,’21 with

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www.slov-lex.sk/pravne predpisy/SK/ZZ/1960/100/ vyhlasene_znenie.html [Last accessed 25. 08. 2022]. To the evaluation of the document see Bobek/ Molek/ Šimíček 2009. „Celá kultúrna politika v Československu, rozvoj vzdelania, výchova a vyučovanie sa vedú v duchu vedeckého svetového názoru, marxizmu-leninizmu, a v úzkom spojení so životom a prácou ľudu.“ Ibid, Art. 16 (1). In this respect, the totalitarian regime intensified the phenomena, which was present elsewhere; see Hammer 1983. – Weber 1984. – Brockmeier / Kaiser 1996. Štoll 1972. Bakoš 1970. Bakoš 1979 – 1980. – Bakoš 2014. For the concept of atheism as revelation see Thrower 1983, 88. Loukotka 1977, 47. Loukotka 1977, 111.

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even the most famous examples of Gothic art being interpreted as ‘revolutionary,’ and ‘anti-religious.’22 These paradoxical statements show the kinds of difficulties scholars experienced when writing about Christian art in communist Czechoslovakia, however the kinds of texts disseminated by Loukotka were not aimed at the international community of art historians. For Western audiences, the academic writers of communist Czechoslovakia found ways to export articles of a far superior quality. A good example of this is Gothic Mural Painting in Bohemia and Moravia, by Vlasta Dvořáková, Josef Krása, and Karel Stejskal, published by Oxford University Press in 1964.23 The authors of the book, along with its contributors Jaroslav Pešina and Albert Kutal repeatedly found their way into Western publishing houses.24 Other texts targeting the academic communities of non-Socialist countries were published in Prague by Czechoslovak firms such as Melantrich, Odeon, Pragopress, and Artia.25 Instead of providing an analytical account of the full body of these scholarly texts, this article will present some of the ideas developed by Karel Stejskal on the subject of ‘holy warriors,’ as a way of illustrating the difficult path trodden by academics when trying to establish an acceptable mid-point between the ‘universal’ and ‘Socialist’ historiographies of art. Stejskal established a scholarly reputation outside the borders of Czechoslovakia and the Eastern Bloc, in part by developing lines of enquiry into Neo-Platonic interpretations of the human soul. At the time, the religious concept of ‘the soul’ was either ignored or rejected outright by the official thinkers of the communist apparatus, however Stejskal found creative ways to explore such spiritual concepts as they pertained to his study of medieval art.

Saint George as a Mythical Figure The image of Saint George was a key figure in Stejskal’s exploration of the human soul, formulated during the writing of his dissertation, written before 1964 and devoted to an illustrated manuscript that was kept in the St. George’s Convent in Prague.26 In this text, published in a revised form in 1975, Saint George was interpreted on a number of levels, one of them based on medieval Neo-Platonism, in which he was the knight who liberated a human soul from the prison of this world.27 By establishing a Neo-Platonist focus, Stejskal 22 23 24 25 26

Loukotka 1977, 51. Dvořáková / Krása / Merhautova 1964. Kutal 1972. – Neubert / Stejskal 1978. – Mandeville / Krása 1983. – Pešina 1989. Friedl 1956. – Pešina 1958. – Chadraba 1964. – Stejskal 1970. – Stejskal 1974. – Chadraba 1974. The author started developing the topic in 1956, and the dissertation was defended in 1964 (see editorial remark in Urbánková / Stejskal 1975, 146). 27 Urbánková / Stejskal 1975, 31.

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was able to ensure that the concept of the soul could not be avoided, and could therefore be discussed as a key point of reference in the artwork. To achieve this, he performed an analysis of the complicated structure of symbols and metaphors in the manuscript, an interpretation that was acceptable within the Socialist structure of Czechoslovak academia, but which left him open to later criticism that his work condoned the ‘paganization’ of Christian ideas.28 For the purposes of this article, the scholarly validity of Stejskal’s interpretation is not of primary importance. Of more interest is the creative achievement of an Eastern Bloc academic finding ways to discuss the spiritual overtones of medieval Christian art within the prevailing dogma of the modernist, anti-religious culture of the time. Stejskal repeatedly returned to the roots of Christian imagination as being part of an older mythology, associating these mythical ideas and images with ancient cosmology. For example, Saint George was described as, “the hero of the Spring Sun, who, on the 24th of April, overcame the dragon, the demon of cold and darkness.” George’s martyrdom (far less prevalent in works of medieval art than his victory over the dragon) was declared to be, “an allegory of the declining strength of the sun in autumn.” 29 Following the path of Warburgian iconology, George’s victory and martyrdom was subject to complex astrological allegory,30 in which the saint was understood to be a “fairy-tale being […] created on the model of the Egyptian solar deity, Horus, […], as well as according to the myth of the sun-hero Perseus […]” 31 Stejskal went so far as to make comparisons with other real and mythic archetypes, such as Alexander the Great, Hercules, and even Samson. These interpretative strategies had some obvious weak points, but they helped keep the archetype of the victorious saint in the collective memory of the predominantly atheist public. For self-confessed Marxists, a purely psychological assessment of Saint George would have been viewed as suspiciously reductionist, so with that in mind, Stejskal’s analysis of religious ideas was informed by what he claimed to be the “expression of the needs and ideals of the society of the time, and of its different classes.” 32

Mythological Ideas in Slovak Folk Art Anyone wishing to study the mythological archetypes of Christian art in the context of Socialist ideology might not immediately consider a manuscript from the library of a medieval chapel to be ideal source material. However, the murals in medieval churches,

28 Toussaint 2003, 24 – 26. 29 Dvořáková / Krása / Merhautova 1964, 24. 30 See Gerát 2019. 31 Urbánková / Stejskal 1975, 43. 32 Dvořáková / Krása / Merhautova 1964, 21.

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created also for audiences of working peasants, offered far better opportunities for interpretive study, as the association between church congregations and folk culture was not the exclusive domain of communist intellectuals. A sentimental patriotic interest in popular culture and folklore had risen in many European countries as part of their nation-building practices, incorporating many romantic ideas along the way.33 Folk art had been coopted for many purposes throughout history, including the advancement of the cultural agenda of National Socialism, but what was the function of similar interpretation strategies in Socialist Czechoslovakia? Did these strategies serve the officially declared internationalism, or were they also an instrument in the fight for more specific national interests? In the case of Slovak folklore, the inclination to try and associate explanatory models of art history with ethnographic data is based on a traditional and national self-­ understanding that dates all the way back to the late Austro-Hungarian Empire.34 Similar ideas can also be found in Czechoslovakia between the wars. Karel Šourek, in Art in Slovakia – Heritage of the Country and its People, placed a great deal of emphasis on the virtues of rural living, celebrating the special relationship between people and the land upon which they worked.35 Similar ideas, rooted in the agrarian Romanticism of the 19th century, gained a new importance during the First Slovak Republic (1939 – 1945), at which time the country was under the control of Nazi Germany. The roots of Slovak national identity, given the years of German and Russian patronage, have always been of great importance in political arguments,36 with interpretations of folk art and peasant folklore taking on a patriotic association in the form of the Slovak national myths that have been featured in numerous publications and exhibitions.37 Such interpretation did not escape the attention of Karel Stejskal and his colleagues in Prague, who spent the decades between 1956 and 1978 engaged in a systematic study of medieval wall paintings in Slovakia, exploring the parallels between religion and folklore in a variety of texts.38 When seeing the elements of paganism in medieval art through the prism of traditional folkish narratives and styles, one of the most interesting sources is a 1967 essay by Karel Stejskal, concerning the interpretation of medieval paintings in Slovakia. It is reasonable to assume that Western readers of this Slovak text might not be privy to the kinds of stressful and diplomatic challenges faced by a typical ‘Socialist’ academic tasked with the development of a coherent line of enquiry for an audience that would have included political censors and the secret police. Ideology was therefore something that needed to be ‘overcome’ for a scholar in order to meet the international standards of academic work. 33 34 35 36 37 38

Hroch 1985. – Hroch 2015. Seton-Watson 1908, 352 – 391. Šourek/ Budaváry 1938. – Budaváry/ Sedlačková 1939. Teich / Kováč / Brown 2011, 95 – 136. Krekovič / Mannová / Krekovičová 2005. – Krekovičová 2005. – Hrabušický 2006. Dvořaková / Krása / Stejskal 1978.

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It is no surprise, then, that Stejskal can be found using a quotation from Lenin to justify his interest in myths and religion, making the case for the importance of the study of myths in the social criticism of religious superstitions and legends.39 Such theoretical implications could also be applied to the social stratification of cultural production. According to Lenin’s theory of two different cultures coexisting within any society divided into classes, the culture of working people was immediately framed as being of a higher value. Therefore, when confronted by communist hardliners, Stejskal’s stated interest in the culture of peasants could be seen to balance his study of religious imagery, which might otherwise appear suspicious. The folk art and narratives of the rural communities, with their pagan values, could be seen as having relevance to the perspective of class struggle, as well as the process of nation-building.40 It was, of course, not so easy to apply this theory to the medieval murals in Slovakia’s village churches, as no artworks were commissioned or produced by the peasants themselves. An iconological study of historical paintings indicated that folkloristic mythologies tended to survive in the imagination of the people. Thus, even without obvious mythological themes, Christian paintings could be understood to be an expression of ancient mythological ideas or storylines, which had been living in the imagination of rural communities for centuries. The medieval culture of Slovakia, for example, can be viewed as an outcome of the Christianization of tribal and popular traditions.41 This level of interpretation can be differentiated from the established theological systems installed by the ruling class, and from the official ideology of the medieval kingdom of Hungary, of which contemporary Slovakia was then a part.

The R eincarnation of the Archetype Stejskal’s interpretation of Saint George was that of a religious icon informed by the pagan elements of sun and land.42 Nonetheless, when considering to the amount of Slovak art devoted to his adventures, we can see that George was not the most important incarnation of the warrior/saint archetype in the region. Paintings dedicated to the more local heroism of the Saint (King) Ladislas I,43 were almost twice as numerous, the signature narrative of this particular saint being an act of combat with a Cuman (a Turkic ‘pagan’

39 Stejskal 1965, note 24 on p. 217, discussing Lenin’s appreciation and criticism of Drews (see footnote 12). 40 Anderson 1983, 1 – 7. 41 Stejskal 1965, 186. 42 Stejskal 1965, 198. 43 Comp. Klaniczay 2002, 155 – 194.

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marauder) he has caught in the act of abducting a Hungarian girl.44 When dealing with this material, Stejskal used the same strategy of diplomacy he employed when discussing the Passionale Cunegundis, an illuminated manuscript from 1312 depicting the Passion of Christ, the historical importance of which transcended ideology.45 In the case of Ladislas I, the heroic saint, with his Christoform face, was interpreted essentially as being a solar (or elemental) deity who had been worshipped in pre-Christian times, and was transformed into the figure of a saint while preserving at least a part of his original mythological function.46 The Cuman pagan that Ladislas is depicted fighting can be interpreted as a replacement of the dragon of Saint George, a demon associated with the evil forces of darkness. The concept of the ‘solar rider’ can therefore be represented as a leader of Christian armies, while at the same time retaining a pagan association with the ‘sun/ king.’47 Using the same logic, the liberated girl is, “a princess, with whom the king, after his victory, goes into a grove in blossom, and is his partner in a ‘holy wedding,’” 48 Stejskal wove the idea of ‘holy wedding’ into various interpretations of medieval art, even though such events did not take place in the actual legends of Saint George and Saint Ladislas. By appropriating the kind of sentimental narrative that occurs in fairy tales or Hollywood movies, Stejskal was able to move forward with his research. Cosmological constructs like ‘sun riders,’ or ‘holy weddings,’ were useful tools in skirting the ideological constraints that communism had imposed on Eastern Bloc academia at the time. In some of the medieval paintings that depict the legend of Ladislas I, the Hungarian girl he has liberated decapitates the Cuman marauder who has tried to abduct her. This folklorish narrative can be likened to the Renaissance and Baroque paintings of Judith decapitating Holofernes but can also be presented cosmologically as a representation of Venus – often labeled as a ‘clear parallel’ to the old Slavic deity, Zora 49 – who presents the victorious king with a wreath, as seen on his head in the Kraskovo murals. Because of the circular form of the wreath, this motif can be further interpreted as a symbol ‘of eternity, of eternal cycle,’50 at which point, Stejskal resumes his pseudo-astronomical argumentation: “The change of the evening star into the morning star and back is paralleled with the change of seasons, and understood as an ‘eternal cosmic fight’”.51 After this wild ride of poetic imagination, Stejskal’s rhetorical celebration of the forces of nature 44 Jékely 2015. – Gerát 2013. 45 He referred to his work on the passional as “in print“, even if it needed eight more years until it was published in 1975. 46 Stejskal 1965, 185, 186. 47 Stejskal 1965, 200. 48 Stejskal 1965, 198. 49 „Judita = Ester = Ištár = Aštartot = Aftorét = Afrodita = Venuša“. Stejskal 1965, 198. 50 Stejskal 1965, 199. 51 Stejskal 1965, 199.

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Fig. 2  Ladislas Cycle. Church of St. Catherine at Veľká Lomnica, 1310 – 1320. Foto: Ivan Gerát, archive.

can be associated with the pagan idea of circular time and eternal recurrence, and also other spheres of artistic production, such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The artistic aspect of Stejskal’s interpretation is obvious when assuming parallels of with the history of style. Even the “formal stylistic perfection” of one of the oldest images of Ladislas fighting in the Cuman in Veľká Lomnica, somehow manages to correspond with the “purity of mythological-astrological thinking.” 52 (fig. 2) Nevertheless, this ‘purity’ is more of a rhetorical flourish and an example of wishful thinking, than an exact feature of a homogenous artistic style that was inspired by mythical cosmology of the rural inhabitants of Slovakia. According to Stejskal, pictorial cycles that appear in religious/folk art have two levels of meaning – one created by mythologizing the forces of nature, the other proclaiming the power of ‘the king’ in a specific historical context. According to such interpretations, the tradition of Christian hagiography is incorporated into a broader circle of mythological narrative and image, and then coopted into a kind of royal propaganda, without putting too much emphasis on the interests of the aristocrats who had commissioned the work in the first place, and who were, in fact, the patrons of the images and the buildings in which they were placed.

Byzantine Influence and Internationalism The most pointed criticism of Stejskal’s ideas came from Vlasta Dvořáková, one of his colleagues at the Institute of Art History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, in Prague. In a large article, published in French in 1972, Dvořáková provided a detailed stylistic analysis of the cyclic motifs that appeared in the mural of Ladislas fighting the Cuman marauder in Veľká Lomnica, suggesting several possible sources of inspiration, such as the art from Southern Italy during the Angevin Empire, as the work was most 52 Stejskal 1965, 202.

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probably the result of a royal commission by Charles Robert of Anjou.53 The style of the painting contained the typical visual language of the Italian social elite, including a Christo-mimetic expression of a ‘saintly king,’ while the competent rendering of the mural was no doubt the product of highly-trained artists, presumably working for a courtly commissioner. Seen in this light, Stejskal’s mythological evaluation of the work, rooted in ethnographic material from Slovakia, left him open to criticism from his colleagues. The remaining mythological elements of the work – bodies miraculously surviving brutal attack, the demonization of the Cuman marauder – can be explained in terms of the Christian belief in miracles, actualized through a context of social problems of the new dynasty in medieval Hungary, such as conflicts with oligarchs, or the remaining tensions with the ethnic and cultural Otherness of the Cuman people. Stejskal’s colleagues at the Institute of Art History, Vlasta Dvořáková and Josef Krása, with whom he would later co-author, Medieval Murals in Slovakia in 1978, decisively rejected the radical, speculative, and cosmological aspects of his signature interpretation of medieval art. The influence of the rural environment of Slovakia in the way Ladislas is depicted fighting the Cuman marauder, for example, was deemed to only work on a stylistic level. According to Dvořáková, the painting represented a creative process of “transformation, based on local traditions, conventions and needs,” 54 in which the “sincere, genuine and purified” values created by this process were “almost timeless, so that they could, even after centuries, be an inspiring source for modern visual art.” 55 Through these and similar formulations, the authors were able to shift the emphasis of Stejskal’s analysis of medieval work from an ‘ethno-expressive’ to a ‘socio-functional’ viewpoint,56 a shift that reflected the problems of internationalism. The authors de-emphasized the attention devoted to framing the specific features of Slovak medieval painting in terms of ethnographical material and made it an organic part of a larger ‘polyphonic’ structure of art in Central Europe.57 As there were no pre-Christian archetypes of a warrior saint in the Slavic tradition, the Byzantine component of international inspirations became more important.58 In the extensive catalogue of Medieval Murals in Slovakia, the interpretation of the most important paintings of Ladislas I (Veľká Lomnica, Kraskovo, Rimavská Baňa), were undertaken by Vlasta Dvořáková, featuring brief comments on the mythological connotations of the paintings, and without specific ethnic associations. The heroic legend of Ladislas is framed as a modernization of an old myth, “which used to be close to all 53 54 55 56 57 58

Dvořáková 1972, 28. Dvořáková / Krása / Stejskal 1978, 67. Dvořáková / Krása / Stejskal 1978, 67. Bakoš 1984, 233. Bakoš 1984, 281 – 282. See e. g. Stejskal 1974.

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ethnic elements, later united under the rule of Magyars’ in the spirit of a Gothic narrative style,” in which the original motifs “of good and evil were transformed according to the Byzantine text of the epic poem, Digenis Akritas.” In the Digenis Akritas, the most famous of the Acritic Songs, the conflict between Ladislas and the Cuman marauder is transposed into a colorful image of a “knightly tournament, a fight for a castle girl,’ in which ‘a feudal knight’ is confronted with a ‘Cuman hunter.’” In this way, the legend is shown to be a product of courtly culture, while remaining “close to the people, still kept in the captivity of paganism,” a narrative could be used to mobilize the Slavic people to fight an actual enemy.59 This interpretation by Dvořáková was therefore focused on the function of images in their historical context, instead of underlining the anachronistic level of the archetypes. Karel Stejskal was given an opportunity to address the criticism of his colleagues in the catalogue they co-authored, but when commenting on the less important cycles and fragments of the medieval work he had studied for decades, he limited his scope to a purely stylistic commentary. In the Vítkovce mural, for example, some potentially mythical elements had been added – crows and a fox can be seen to be feeding on the corpse of the vanquished Cuman – but Stejskal elected to avoid this iconography, focusing instead on the simplification, or ‘rusticalization’ of the painting style (fig. 3). Thus, although he could present his analysis of rural communities from a psychoanalytic-rhetorical perspective this time, he did so in a sort of ‘castrated’ form, avoiding any resurrections of old myths and without the ethnical bias he would have usually exhibited. It had become quite clear that turning artistic styles more vernacular could not be interpreted as a unique characteristic of the Slovak or Slavic ethnicities anymore, as similar transformations of styles were common throughout Europe.60 The main aim of this article has been to describe the features of scholarly inspiration, as represented by Stejskal’s original version of iconology. This perspective is interesting when trying to visualize the avenues of art-historical research that were available to scholars under the difficult conditions of institutionalized academia. In such conditions, the most important task of an art historian was to develop a strategy to overcome the ideological constraints of a totalitarian culture. Stejskal’s creative combination of religious iconography with local romantic traditions allowed him to pursue his work without contradicting the prevailing ideology of the ČSSR. In this, he and his colleagues were able to remain true to their intellectual ideals, maintaining a rational approach in the evaluation of medieval art, while sometimes employing mystical or fantastic lines of enquiry to have their work approved by the censors. The concept of ‘Socialist Humanism’ required the development of clever arguments to prove its worth in the universal patterns 59 Dvořáková / Krása / Stejskal 1978, 165. 60 Bakoš 1984, 258 – 259.

Holy Warriors in Socialist Czechoslovakia  | Fig. 3  The Dead Cuman from the Ladislas Cycle, Vítkovce, c. 1320 – 1350. Foto: Ivan Gerát.

of human imagination. One of the key motifs of Modernism, ‘a rider symbolizing the energy of artistic and spiritual creativity,’ paired with an ‘acceptable’ representation of religion and a solid historical knowledge, allowed the academics of the Institute of Art History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences to work within the Socialist system without compromising their integrity as scholars. Almost half a century later, we can still appreciate the inspirational creativity of these Prague-based academics,61 especially as their texts have taken on a new relevance in the context of recent study. Of particular relevance are the various methodologies used to examine folk art and folk culture, based on the assumption that, “any art object has representational qualities on a number of cultural levels.” 62 An unorthodox study of archetypes transcending the usual domain of psychology can sometimes shine a productive light on the similarities between the artistic products of various cultures,63 ­contributing 61 See the studies in Benešovská 2011. 62 Layton 1991. 63 Hatcher 1985, 110 – 111.

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to the multiplicity of approaches that are presently available in the study of medieval art.64 The psychological investigation of iconic archetypes, as undertaken by Karel ­Stejskal and his colleagues, is still considered to be of international relevance, as it attempts to uncover the meaning of images and symbols in a framework of reference that transgresses ethnic, social and confessional borders.65

Bibliogr aphy Anderson, Benedict R.: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London 1983. Bakoš, Ján: Kritiky ikonológie a Albert Kutal [Criticism of Iconology and Albert Kutal]. In: Sborník prací filozofické fakulty brněnské univerzity 23 – 24 (1979 – 1980), 9 – 18. Bakoš, Ján: Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal: Methodological Parallels. In: Umění 62/5 (2014), 406 – 422. Bakoš, Ján: Model umenia v ikonológii [Model of Art in Iconology]. In: ARS 4 (1970), 145 – 158. Bakoš, Ján: Dejiny a koncepcie stredovekého umenia na Slovensku: explikácia na gotickom nástennom maliarstve [History and Conceptions of Medieval Art in Slovakia. Explications on the Gothic Murals.]. Bratislava 1984. Benešovská, Klára (ed.): V zajetí středověkého obrazu: kniha studií k jubileu Karla Stejskala [Captured by the Medieval Image. Studies on the Anniversary of Karel Stejskal]. Praha 2011. Beyer, Andreas: Denken in Bildern: was Franz Marc und Wassily Kandinsky mit Aby Warburg verband. In: Idem.: Die Kunst – zur Sprache gebracht. Ed. by Lena Bader, Johannes Grave and Markus Rath. Berlin 2017, 150 – 163. Bobek, Michal / Molek, Pavel / Šimíček, Vojtěch (eds.): Komunistické právo v ­Československu: kapitoly z dějin bezpráví [The Communist Law in Czechoslovakia. Chapters from the History of Lawlesness]. Brno 2009. Brockmeier, Peter/ Kaiser, Gerhard R.: Zensur und Selbstzensur in der Literatur. Würzburg 1996. Budaváry, Vojtěch / Sedláčková, Ema: Die Kunst in der Slowakei. Prag 1939. Cassirer, Ernst: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. 3 vols. Berlin 1923. Cassirer, Ernst: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. 4 vols. New Haven 1953. Cassirer, Ernst: Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance. Leipzig / ­Berlin 1927. Chadraba, Rudolf: Dürers Apokalypse, eine ikonologische Deutung. Prag 1964. Chadraba, Rudolf: Charles Bridge. Praha 1974. 64 Rudolph 2010, 38. 65 See e. g. Ronnberg / Martin 2010.

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Dekoninck, Ralph: The Anthropology of Images. In: Hourihane 2017, 175 – 183. Didi-Huberman, Georges: Devant le temps: histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images. Paris 2014. Didi-Huberman, Georges / Garbetta, Riccardo / Morgaine, Manuela: Saint Georges et le dragon: versions d’une légende. Paris 1994. Didi-Huberman, Georges / Lacarrière, Jacques / Busine, Laurent: Saint Georges et le dragon: De la légende au mythe. Bruxelles 2000. Drews, Arthur: Die Christusmythe. Jena 1910. Drews, Arthur: Die Christusmythe. Zweiter Teil. Die Zeugnisse für die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu. Eine Antwort an die Schriftgelehrten mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der theologischen Methode. Jena 1911. Drews, Arthur: Die Petruslegende. Ein Beitrag zur Mythologie des Christentums. Jena 51924 (1910). Drews, Arthur: Die Marienmythe. Jena 1928. Drews, Arthur: The Christ Myth. Amherst / New York 1998. Drews, Arthur / Zindler, Frank R.: The Legend of Saint Peter: A Contribution to the Mythology of Christianity. Austin 1997. Dvořáková, Vlasta: La légende de saint Ladislas découverte dans l’église de Veľká Lomnica. In: Buletinul Monumentelor Istorice 41/4 (1972), 25 – 42. Dvořáková, Vlasta / Krása, Josef / Merhautova, Anežka / Stejskal, Karel: Gothic Mural Painting in Bohemia and Moravia, 1300 – 1378. London et. al. 1964. Dvořáková, Vlasta / Krása, Josef / Stejskal, Karel: Stredoveká nástenná maľba na Slovensku [Medieval Murals in Slovakia]. Praha / Bratislava 1978. Exh.Cat. Bielefeld 2003: Der Blaue Reiter: Avantgarde und Volkskunst. Sammlung H ­ ertha Koenig. Bielefeld Kunsthalle 5. 10. 2003 – 11. 1. 2004. Ed. by Jutta Hülsewig-Johnen. Bielefeld 2003. Ferretti, Silvia: Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History. New Haven 1989. Friedl, Antonín: Magister Theodoricus: das Problem seiner malerischen Form. Prag 1956. Füssel, Stephan (ed.): Mnemosyne: Beiträge zum 50. Todestag von Aby M. Warburg. Göttingen 1979. Gerát, Ivan: Marxism and Iconology in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 100 – 117. Gerát, Ivan: Svätí bojovníci v stredoveku: úvahy o obrazových legendách sv. Juraja a sv. Ladislava na Slovensku [Holy Fighters in the Middle Ages: An Essay on Pictorial Legends of St George and St Ladislas in Slovakia]. Bratislava 2011. Gerát, Ivan: Pictorial Cycles of St. Ladislas – Some Problems of Interpretation. In: Homza / Lukačka / Budak 2013, 293 – 307. Gollek, Rosel: Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München: Katalog der Sammlung in der Städtischen Galerie. München 1974.

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Hammer, Felix: Selbstzensur für Forscher? Schwerpunkte einer Wissenschaftsethik. Zürich 1983. Hatscher, Evelyn Payne: Art as Culture: an Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. ­Lanham MD 1985. Homza, Martin / Lukačka, Ján / Budak, Neven (eds.): Slovensko a Chorvátsko: historické paralely a vzťahy (do roku 1780) [Slovakia and Croatia: Historical Parallels and Connections till 1780]. Bratislava / Zagreb 2013. Hourihane, Colum (ed.): The Routlege Companion to Medieval Iconography. New York 2017. Hrabušický, Aurel (ed.): Slovenský mýtus [The Slovakian Myth]. Bratislava 2006. Hroch, Miroslav: Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative A ­ nalysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge / New York 1985. Hroch, Miroslav: European Nations: Explaining their Formation. London 2015. Hüneke, Andreas: Der Blaue Reiter: Dokumente einer geistigen Bewegung. Leipzig 21989. Jaccard, Jean-Philippe / Podoroga, Ioulia / Bowlt, John E.: Kandinsky, Malevitch, Filonov et la philosophie: les systèmes de l’abstraction dans l’avant-garde russe. Nantes 2018. Jékely, Zsombor: Narrative Structure of the Painted Cycle of a Hungarian Holy Ruler: the Legend of St. Ladislas. In: Hortus Artium Medievalium. Journal of the International Research Center for Late Antiquity and Middle Ages 21 (2015), 62 – 74. Jung, Carl Gustav: Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Transl. William Stanley Dell / Cary F. Baynes. London 1933. Kandinsky, Wassily: On the Spiritual in Art. Transl. Hilla Rebay. New York 1946. Klaniczay, Gábor: Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe. Cambridge / New York 2002. Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina / Marek, Michaela (eds.): A Socialist Realist Art History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019 (Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9). Krekovič, Eduard/ Mannová, Elena/ Krekovičová, Eva: Mýty naše slovenské [Our Slovakian Myths]. Bratislava 2005. Krekovičová, Eva: Mentálne obrazy, stereotypy a mýty vo folklóre a v politike [Mental Images, Stereotypes and Myth in Folklore and Politics]. Bratislava 2005. Kutal, Albert: Gothic Art in Bohemia and Moravia. London / New York 1972. Layton, Robert: The Anthropology of Art. Cambridge / New York 21991. Levine, Emily: Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago et. al. 2013. Loukotka, Jiří: O náboženství a umění [On Religion and Art]. Praha 1977. Mandeville, John / Krása, Josef: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: A Manuscript in the British Library. NewYork 1983. Neubert, Karel / Stejskal, Karel: Karl IV. und die Kultur und Kunst seiner Zeit. Hanau/M. 1978.

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Pešina, Jaroslav: Tafelmalerei der Spätgotik und der Renaissance in Böhmen, 1450 – 1550. Prag 1958. Pešina, Jaroslav: The Master of the Hohenfurth Altarpiece and Bohemian Gothic Panel P ­ ainting. London / New York 1989. Ronnberg, Ami / Martin, Kathleen (eds.): The Book of Symbols. Reflexions on Archetypal Images. Köln 2010. Rudolph, Conrad: A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe. Malden, Mass. 2010. Seton-Watson: Robert William: Racial Problems in Hungary. London 1908. Stejskal, Karel: K obsahovej a formovej interpretácii stredovekých nástenných malieb na Slovensku [A Contribution to the Interpretation of Content and Form of the Murals in Slovakia]. In: Váross 1965, 175 – 223. Stejskal, Karel (ed.): Velislai Biblia picta. 2 vols. Pragae 1970. Stejskal, Karel: Le Monastère d’Emmaüs de Prague: monastère de rite slavon. Praha 1974. Stejskal, Karel / Neubert, Karel: European Art in the 14th Century. London 1978. Šourek, Karel / Budaváry, Vojtěch: Umění na Slovensku, odkaz země a lidu [The Art in Slovakia, a Heritage of the Country and its People]. Praha 1938. Štoll, Ladislav: Umění a ideologický boj [Art and Ideologic Struggle]. Praha 1972. Taylor, Paul: Henri Frankfort, Aby Warburg and ‘Mythopoetic Thought’. In: Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011), 1 – 16. Teich, Mikuláš / Kováč, Dušan / Brown, Martin (eds.): Slovakia in History. New York 2011. Thrower, James: Marxist-Leninist ‘Scientific Atheism’ and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Berlin / New York 1983. Toussaint, Gia: Das Passional der Kunigunde von Böhmen: Bildrhetorik und Spiritualität. Paderborn 2003. Urbánková́, Emma / Stejskal, Karel: Pasionál Přemyslovny Kunhuty; Passionale abbatissae Cunegundis. Praha 1975. Váross, Martin (ed.): Zo starších výtvarných dejín Slovenska [On the Older Art History of Slovakia]. Bratislava 1965. Weber, Christoph: Kirchengeschichte, Zensur und Selbstzensur: ungeschriebene, ungedruckte und verschollene Werke vorwiegend liberal-katholischer Kirchenhistoriker aus der Epoche 1860 – 1914. Köln 1984.

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Towards a European Integration of the Arts and the Art Discourse, 1945 – 1948 In the early 20th century, following the end of World War I, the idea of establishing a united, pan-European art and culture was the driving force of a creative internationalism that was embraced by the Avant-garde movements. As the interwar period of peace turned out to be a temporary truce with rising nationalism – making this dream a mere utopia – the end of World War II seemed to be the right time for real, international, European integration, with artists willingly serving as path breakers. Before the Stalinization of Eastern Europe that attempted to integrate art and culture into Soviet ideology, there was a three-year interval between the end of the war in 1945, and the formation of the Eastern Bloc in 1948. Although Winston Churchill used the ‘Iron Curtain’ metaphor as early as in 1945, the implementation of the Yalta Treaty took full effect in 1948 when domestic communist parties tightened their grip on power in Eastern European countries and the GDR. In art and culture, the period between 1945 and 1948 was colorful and diverse, open and internationalist, presenting an intriguing idea of what might have followed, had the Cold War period not set in. The forceful attempt to bend the art and culture of Eastern Europe to the will of the Soviet model was a political dictum that had not yet affected the deep layers of the respective local cultures. While the communist bureaucrats who controlled the institutions of culture had given rise to a group of loyalist artists and art bureaucrats who enjoyed state support, the regime had not succeeded in entirely eliminating oppositional or alternative voices, nor the cultural heritage of the previous decades and centuries. Both Socialist – Communism’s alternative left-wing outlook – and nationalist-religious art had been forced out of the public arena but had managed to survive in the margins. Communist control created a deep division of Eastern European cultures along this fault line, which was revealed again after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Representatives of both the left wing and right-wing traditions shared a viewpoint that ignored ‘Eastern European-ness.’ The socialists had an internationalist outlook, while the nationalists were anchored in local tradition, with neither of them paying attention to the region, or being overtly hostile to neighboring countries. Eastern Europeans had never had a regional consciousness. The term ‘Eastern Europe’ does not surface in Eastern European historiography, especially not in art history, as the art from these territories had been in close connection with various Western artistic cultures from medieval times. This tradition continued into the20th century, with Eastern Europeans attending the Munich and Paris art academies and developing personal and professional contacts with various

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Western artists and institutions. The terminology used in the Eastern European art discourse is, for better or worse, that of the Western ‘isms.’ The concept of regionalization originates from Western scholars of Eastern European art,1 seeking common features among cultures that had been very different and diverse throughout their histories, in which the shared decades of Soviet occupation weighed much less, and represented a much shorter episode, than that of previous centuries and cultural traditions. The horrific experience of World War II had been a watershed in global culture, particularly in Europe, the major theater of war. We cannot underline enough the importance and significance of the postwar moment. “What had happened,” as Tony Judt writes, “was that Hitler had successfully discredited at least one radical alternative to political pluralism and the rule of law.” The exhausted populations of continental Western Europe aspired, above all, to recover the trappings of normal life in a properly regulated state. But in Central Europe, Judt adds, quoting J. J. McCloy, “there was a complete economic, social and political collapse … the extent of which is unparalleled in history, unless one goes back to the collapse of the Roman Empire.” 2 In order to assess the subsequent cultural and artistic developments in Central and Eastern Europe, we must first understand that the emotional and intellectual turmoil of the postwar period made it impossible to analytically approach the inconceivable nature of what had happened. Postwar imagination, strange as it may sound, skipped the war, looking back to the normal times that had preceded it, but also looking forward to the future as the continuation of that previous normalcy. Therefore, the many concepts of a new internationalism that appeared on the European horizon in the wake of World War II may seem utopian from our current perspective, especially in the light of 21st century globalism and ‘its discontents.’ A myriad of well-intentioned visions in which the many cultures of the continent could be united were mutually exclusive. Western artists, committed to the inauguration of a new international era and a correction of prewar conditions, imagined a universally Socialist Europe with a uniformly progressive art and culture. Examples of this included a flurry of activities in Eastern Europe, such as the Avant-garde, supra-national CoBrA movement (an acronym for its member cities, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) and the post-World War II activities of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which had one of the most progressive exhibitions program of pre-war Avant-garde art, including presentations of the De Stijl group, Kazimir Malevich, and contemporary progressive art pioneered by the CoBrA group.

1 For detailed discussion of this issue see Passuth 1988. – Wolff 1994. – Todorova 1997. – Forgács 2003. – Forgács 2014. – Piotrowski 2009. – Kemp-Welch 2014. 2 Judt 2005, 39. John J. McCloy was U. S. High Commissioner for Germany after World War II.

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For Western Europeans, recovering from the war entailed efforts to unite and improve a continent that had been divided into bitterly hostile nations. Eastern Europeans, who had opposed the status quo during the interwar and war years, and had experienced oppression by aggressive nationalism and conservatism, were hoping to finally have their progressive ideas publicly recognized. At the same time, more left-leaning, communist-affiliated artists who had been active in underground communist movements in Eastern Europe had attached their hopes to the Soviet Union, and to the legitimacy of the so-called socially engaged art. These ‘old-school’ communists, most of whom had little or no information about Stalinist crimes, believed in proletarian internationalism, class-based instead of nation-based, that had become the official cultural policy of the Eastern Bloc. All of these different approaches were being established during the early postwar years, from 1945 – 1948, competing to become mainstream. While many different artistic directions were being explored by the above-mentioned political and cultural factions, a fundamental fault line in postwar European art throughout the continent was the divide between figurative art and abstraction. While both had a number of sub-currents, the acceptance and legitimacy, or absolute rejection of abstraction was a profoundly divisive issue, inherited from the interwar era, but gaining new currency as a source of conflict between communist and liberal outlooks. As the American art critic and theorist, Clement Greenberg, argued in his 1939 essay, AvantGarde and Kitsch,3 figurative art was lazy, populist, easy to please, not requiring work from the viewers, and politically soothing. Abstraction, on the other hand, was intellectually demanding, representing an advanced level of visual expression, shifting attention from the obvious, to hidden general connections and universal rules. The progressive consensus was that the postwar era needed to be based on the value of knowledge, intellectual progress, and freedom of expression, and, more than anything else, to reject the ideology of fascism. This was the shared, dominant view among those who believed that European humanism had ultimately defeated the powers of inhumanity. Since painterly abstraction first appeared in the early years of the 20th century, usually attributed to Wassily Kandinsky, abstraction was also on the front line of the nationalist versus internationalist debate. Abstraction, the artists claimed, was a universal expression of the inner world of the artist that was shared with everyone, regardless of national background – the ‘inner ring’ (innerer Klang) as Kandinsky called it in his extended essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art 4: “The choice of object […] must be decided only by a corresponding vibration in the human soul.” 5 Abstraction was therefore positioned as an authentic, universalist artistic expression, as opposed to an anecdotal, populist 3 Greenberg 1986, 5 – 22. 4 Kandinsky 1977 (orig. 1912). 5 Kandinsky 1977, 32.

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figurative representation that the abstract artists regarded as cheap, or, in Greenberg’s words: ‘kitsch.’ As opposed to a visceral response to colors and forms in abstract art, and the appeal of what Carl Jung termed the ‘collective unconscious,’ the Soviet project of ‘proletarian internationalism’ was based on commonly understandable narratives, discipline, and ideology. While the internationality of abstract expression originated from the human psyche, the Soviet concept of ‘proletarian internationalism’ was sociological. Rooted in 19th-century working class movements, it held to the theory that class-consciousness needed to be put before national identity as a supra-national collective identity that championed the exploited poor against the wealthy exploiters. Through ‘Socialist Internationalism,’ political institutions used the working-class doctrine as a political weapon, denouncing real or potential political enemies as ’enemies of class.’ In this process, art and aesthetics were weaponized and turned into propaganda. The terms ‘internationalism,’ ‘supra-nationalism,’ ‘proletarian internationalism,’ and ‘Socialist Internationalism’ held different meanings for social organizations throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. For the progressive interwar Avant-garde, ‘internationalism’ meant the opposite of the ultra-nationalist politics that set the stage for World War I. As former Bauhaus student Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack put it: “All were united in one aim: (…) negation of all those forces which had caused the First World War.” 6 ‘Proletarian internationalism’ was, however, a Soviet propaganda term used to oppress minority cultures inside the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, which was replaced after the enforcement of the Yalta Treaty by ‘Socialist Internationalism,’ a term of similar meaning extended to the Warsaw Pact countries. Once the communists had implemented their doctrines through Socialist Internationalism, the utopian-optimistic left-wing intellectuals attached utopian hopes of an undivided world to it; while the fascists – a self-styled national version of Socialism – ridiculed it. The post-World-War II efforts of European artists and art writers to usher in a new age of progress and internationalism entailed that they, in good but naïve faith, set out to unify the European continent’s art and culture. They believed that the time had finally come for intellectually demanding and aesthetically progressive art to be declared the visual face of Europe. Their idea was an all-inclusive new community of the European nations. The post-war assessment of the loss of Modernism to dictatorial politics and World War II motivated the artists who survived the war to urgently attempt to recover modernist art. A dominant idea, prompted by the rampant nationalist cataclysm of the war, was that the art and the art discourse of the East and the West needed to be integrated into a new European art and culture. The negative forces of national and racial hatred activated during World War II therefore needed to be wiped out. 6 Hirschfeld-Mack 1963, 2 – 3.

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Since abstract art was not favored by establishments at either side, a certain West-East solidarity developed between progressive artists who struggled for intellectual freedom and recognition. One of the most important internationalist Western initiatives was the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (Salon of New Realities), organized for the first time in 1939, and taken up after World War II in 1946, in the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. The resurrection of the Salon was meant to emphatically retrieve the spirit and practice of pre-war Modernism. As the announcement of London art dealer Hanina Fine Arts sums it up: The phrase was originally coined by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the association evolved out of the Abstraction Création group of the 1930s. The first committee was led by Fredo Sidès, and included Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay, and Albert Gleizes, all of whom were frustrated with the establishment’s slowness to embrace the abstract movement. By 1948, it had grown to include artists from 17 nations, and Solomon Guggenheim joined the committee. The association marked a bold transition from the occupation years, when the Nazis prohibited abstract art for being ‘degenerate.’ The Réalités Nouvelles was to define a new era of progressive liberty, not of a singular ideology, but a diversity of ‘new realities.’7

Although it was an internationalist initiative, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles was a project fraught with internal rivalries of very different political and aesthetic concepts. One of its stated ambitions was to replace the École de Paris, the officially most accepted art trend in interwar France, while framing abstraction, as Georges Folmer puts it, as being synonymous with foreign (that is, non-French) art.8 Such hostility to abstraction was further complicated by the Soviet-influenced view of internationalism advanced by the French Communist Party between 1946 and 1948, which promoted the concept of Socialist Realism, and was vehemently against abstract art. The French Communist Party vigorously attempted to terminate the presence of various kinds of abstraction, especially the spontaneous, gesture-painting ‘informel,’ while allowing some tolerance for rigorous geometric abstraction only.9 While the number of participants in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles grew from 89 in 1946 to 366 in 1948, there was left-wing critique of what was called ‘unprincipled abstraction’ in the Paris press, urging control over the ‘anarchy’ of ‘senseless’ lyrical abstract directions.10 Progressive artists saw abstraction as being eminently suitable for international discourse among artists of different nationalities and traditions. As Theo van Doesburg 7 8 9 10

http://www.haninafinearts.com/exhibitions/new-era-new-realities [Last accessed 13. 08. 2021]. Folmer 1946 – 1955. Folmer 1946 – 1955, 6. Massat 23. 7. 1948; quoted by Folmer 1946 – 1955, 5.

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wrote in his 1930 Manifesto of Concrete Art, “A work of art does not derive from nature, but is an autonomous reality composed of color and form, an object for intellectual and spiritual use…. [Art] should receive nothing from nature’s formal properties or from sensuality or sentimentality. We want to exclude lyricism, dramaticism, symbolism…” 11 New artwork would therefore need to leave behind everything that would place it in a specific national narrative and should attempt to be entirely self-referential and autonomous. Whether an abstract artwork can be void of any message or narrative is a theoretical issue beyond the frames of this essay. Suffice it to say, the claim that a work of art should exclude ‘lyricism, dramaticism, and symbolism,’ is a message in itself. In the 1920s, many iterations of abstraction were seen as the visual framework for the anticipation of a better future of humankind, with a shared new supra-national culture and visual language. Redeeming this program of the classic Avant-garde was the aspiration of a number of post-World War II artists throughout Western and Eastern Europe. It was in this spirit that one of the founding members of the CoBrA group, Asger Jorn, reached out to the East Europeans, making initial contact with Czech artists, who needed allies. CoBrA initiated contacts with the Czech Ra group, hoping to develop further cooperation within Eastern Europe, where they saw a future of new collective societies. Prague-based artist Josef Istler was invited to participate at CoBrA’s 1949 exhibition in Amsterdam. These connections, however, were severed that same year, following the Stalinization of Eastern Europe.

A case in point: the split Hungarian group, E urope a n S chool From all of the flourishing postwar artist groups, I would like to discuss the Hungarian European School, a large and broad society of artists, art critics, and theorists, which came together in Budapest in 1945. This loose organization demonstrates that even the idea of internationalism was rooted in very different aesthetic programs. The founders of the group, painters Margit Anna, Jenő Barcsay, Lajos Kassák, Dezső Korniss, Ödön Márffy and theorists Árpád Mezei, Imre Pán, László Pál Kiss, and Ernő Kállai,12 took action with a sense of urgency as soon as Budapest was liberated on February 13, 1945, even though the war was not yet over in half of Hungary. As if these artistic directions had been synonyms of freedom, they set out to make the international 11 Quoted in Dempsey 2002, 159. The manifesto was signed by Carlsund, Doesburg, Helion, Tutundjian and Wantz. 12 The full list of founders and members was printed on the inside of the cover page of each European School Booklet published in 1946 in the series ‘Európai Iskola Könyvtára’(Library of the European School), but the list kept changing as more members joined.

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currents of cubism, surrealism, and abstraction finally recognized as a legitimate part of Hungarian art as well. They believed that the time had come to unite the two parts of Europe in a common artistic and spiritual program, as well as validate an international theoretical framework for the modernist tendencies. In 1945, the European School issued a Manifesto that addressed this program: Europe and the old European ideal have been destroyed. The idea of Europe has, until now, entailed Western Europe. From now on, we have to reckon with the concept of a Whole Europe. This new Europe can emerge only as the synthesis of East and West. Everyone has to decide, in 1945 A. D., if s/he is entitled to be considered a European. We have to create a living European school that will redefine the relations between life, the individual, and society. This task delineates the activities of the first European School. Our talks, exhibitions, and publications serve this goal. We seek the sages’ stone, knowing that it is not a chemical substance, but a living idea that comes to life only through the efforts of the individual and the society.13

One of the main theoretical directions of the European School was surrealism. Sigmund Freud’s writings had been shunned in Hungary during the interwar years, but because surrealism used Freud’s interpretation of dreams as a starting point for the exploration of the unknown and the unconscious, the theorists of the European School wanted to familiarize progressive Hungarian audiences with these concepts. Several founding members of the school maintained an interest in folkloric and non-European traditions that mirrored Freud’s ideas concerning the human psyche, and his hypothetical history of the origins of human culture. The leading theorists, Árpád Mezei, and his brother Imre (Mezei) Pán, were determined to fathom the archaic layers of the human psyche. Folkloric traditions that dated back to prehistoric times were therefore valuable sources for them. On his 1947 trip to Paris, Mezei had the chance to meet André Breton, which amplified his enthusiasm for surrealism and his deep faith in its international relevance. The European School posthumously adopted two Hungarian painters who had died during 13 ’Európa és a régi európai eszmény: romokban hever. Európai eszmény alatt eddig nyugat-európai eszményt értettünk. Ezentúl Egész-Európára kell gondolnunk. Az új Európa csak Nyugat és Kelet szintéziséből épülhet fel. Mindenkinek el kell döntenie, Kr. után 1945-ben, hogy jogosan viseli-e ezt a megjelölést: európai ember. Meg kell teremtenünk az élő európai iskolát, amely megfogalmazza élet, ember, közösség új kapcsolatát. Ez a feladat határozza meg az első „Európai Iskola” tevékenységét. Ezt a célt szolgálják előadásaink, kiállításaink és kiadványaink. A bölcsek kövét keressük, de tudjuk jól, hogy a bölcsek köve nem vegyi anyag, hanem eleven eszme, mely csak az emberekben és társadalomban állítható elő. Budapest, 1945. EURÓPAI ISKOLA’

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the Holocaust, Imre Ámos, and Lajos Vajda. Vajda had spent time in Paris in the early 1930s and had created a number of surrealist collages demonstrating the absurdities and horrors of human actions. His legacy, as well as the Mezei brothers’ equally French orientation and views, positioned surrealism in the postwar modernist Hungarian art scene, at least within the European School, as the par excellence universalist direction. They also believed that surrealism contained the relevant methodology to achieve a deep understanding of the powers lurking beneath the visible surface of reality. Margit Anna, and Vajda’s widow, Júlia Vajda, were among the strongest representatives of surrealist painting in the group. Juxtapositions of motives from different realities, including a propensity for childlike and folk traditions, as well as playfulness, characterized their compositions. The group had a number of shows in art galleries during its existence, some of which were positively received by critics, such as outspoken supporters of surrealism, Imre Pán, Árpád Mezei, and Ernő Kállai.14 The members of the group were invested in a tradition of folk art that they saw as being the visualization of archetypes of the collective unconscious, and therefore timelessly relevant. Ethnologists, Kázmér Fejér, and Dr. Pál Zoltán Szabó, conducted research and collected material on a Šokci folk tradition preserved in Mohács, a small town in the south of Hungary.15 Members of the European School took a profound interest in ethnography and ancient traditions, supporting and studying all the ethnographical publications they could find. The Serbian-Croatian Šokac tradition of unfathomable origin entailed a carnival to mark the end of winter, involving the wearing of masks and marching through town in mask and costume, frightening away evil powers. This evoked the fascination of European School members, who interpreted the tradition stating: It is the compelling force of the soul, the ultimate wind-up of the instincts that forced the visions of restless imagination into the forms of masks. The chilling grins, frightening words, the rough colors, red and black, surface from the deepest depths of the life of the community and the individual. (…) We are struck by the ‘superhuman’ power of the shaman. The busó tradition has come down to us in its original construction. The town of Mohács is located in a corner of the country where the preservation of ancient tradition and habits has been possible. One of the most interesting manifestations of the several thousand-year-old mythical traditions is the Šokac busó parade. A tall fire was burning in the central square of the Kolistye, or Kóló Square. This square is called, to this very day, Kolistye, or Kóló Square, and is renowned as a square of the traditional folk dance. Men in Busó masks wandered around 14 See Kállai 9. 6. 1946. 15 The Šokac are a ethnic group native to the historical regions Apatin, Baja, Odžaci, and Palanka. Today, most of the members declare themselves as Croats. However, Fejér tought it was a Serbian tradition.

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town covered by the masks, and the sheepskin turned inside out that they wore allowed the free flow of their impulses.16

Studying folklore was, at that point, not an inquiry into national art or nationalism, but the study in ethnography and history, illuminating the archaic layers of the psyche. Surrealism, however, along with the broad field of ethnographic research that accompanied it, was not the only dominant trend in the European School. An equally strong direction was pure, non-narrative abstract expression. Several abstract artists who believed in the superiority of nonfigurative forms disagreed with the surrealists, who aspired to dominate the entire group, and who seceded from the European School in 1946. These abstract artists held the belief that the interwar tradition of international abstract art was the most important and most advanced form of visual expression. They created their own group and named it Galéria a 4 Világtájhoz (Gallery to the Four Directions), the name one-upping the original, merely ‘European’ group. Members of the abstract group, in particular, Tamás Lossonczy, claimed to have participated in the 1947 Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris, and several among them additionally claimed to have participated in the following year, before the descent of the Iron Curtain. Memoirs of Hungarian painter, Tihamér Gyarmathy, includes a reference to participation, but the catalogues of the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles do not include their names. The group had yet another initiative to become integrated into the international community of abstract art. With the help of Swiss architect and painter, Max Bill, they organized the exhibition, Moderne Kunst in Ungarn in the Galérie des Eaux Vives in Zurich, in September 1946.17 One of the major losses of Hungarian culture was the absence of articulate debates concerning the core ideas of the various postwar artistic directions. The practice and interpretations of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstraction were suppressed by the imposition of the aesthetic theory and artistic practice of Socialist Realism across the board in 16 Fejér / Szabó 1946. Research and publication sponsored by the town of Mohács and the Dunántúli Tudományos Intézet (Transdanubian Scientific Institute). ‘A lelki rugó, az ösztönök végső fokozása kényszerítették álarc-formába a nyugtalan képzelet vízióit. Az egyén és a közösség legmélyebb életéből törnek fel a dermesztő vigyorok, félelmetes szavak, a durván éles, piros és fekete színezés… Megcsap a „varázsló emberfeletti” hatalma. A busó ősi felépítettségében megmaradt. Mohács az ország ama szögletében fekszik, ahol ősi szokások megőrzése lehetséges volt. A messze évezredekre visszanyúló mithikus hagyományok legérdekesebb megnyilvánulása a sokác busójárás. A sokác negyed főterén hatalmas máglya lobogott, ezt a teret ma is Kolistyének, Kóló-térnek, tehát a népi tánc terének nevezik. Busóálarcos emberek járták a várost és az álarc, meg a visszájára fordított báránybőr ismeretlenségében felszabadultak az indulatok.’ 17 The catalog lists the following Hungarian participants: Etienne Beőthy (Paris based sculptor), Zoltán Borbereki, Tihamér Gyarmathy, József Jakovits, Tamás Lossonczy, Ibolya (Viola) Lossonczy, Gyula Marosán, Ferenc Martyn, and Magda Zemplényi. Exh.Cat. Zürich 1946. For more details, see Forgács 2016, 154, note 43.

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both Central and Eastern Europe. Ernő Kállai, for example, engaged in a heated debate with a conservative critic who had attacked his review of the exhibition of Abstract artists.18 At the same time, as we saw, the attempts of the French communist party to influence visual arts and literature had little success. In Hungary, however, the aesthetics of Socialist Realism was personally advocated by György Lukács, who went into attack mode in 1947, forecasting the hardline communist regime’s dictum. He made a vigorous attack against all representatives of non-representational art, targeting artists and theorists of surrealism and abstraction, regardless of their differences in outlook and artistic practice. The Surrealists and Abstract artists ought to have learned how to co-exist. Both parties required time to understand each other’s views, however, this kind of mutual tolerance would have been possible in a relaxed, free, and multifaceted environment, in which the constant fight for a mainstream position that excluded every other outlook, style, and concept, would not have been necessary. The ideas and artistic initiatives of the postWorld War II years were brutally crushed by the Soviet-controlled political powers in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, initiatives were taken in Western and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1948 to try and raise the status of International Modernism, redefining the Avant-gardes that had been marginalized during the interwar period as being oppositional and the art of a minority. These various undertakings aimed to validate these modernist trends by re-positioning them as mainstream international art. The idea was not only to retrieve this lost culture, but also to elevate it internationally, as well as locally, as an acknowledged and leading artistic form. It is more than regrettable that there was no time for the local debates to play out, let alone the international ones. The wounds that every group, every trend, and every individual suffered were toxic, as was usually the case in these kinds of power-dominated cultural environments.

Bibliogr aphy Dempsey, Amy: Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Styles, Schools & Movements. New York 2002. Exh.Cat. Zürich 1946: Moderne Kunst in Ungarn. Zürich, Galerie des Eaux Vives, 16.9.  –​  10. 11. 1946. Zürich 1946. Fejér, Kázmér / Szabó, Pál Zoltán: A mohácsi busók [The Busó of Mohács]. Budapest 1946.

18 Kállai 13. 6. 1946. Kállai responded to the critique by János Andrássy-Kurta in an article in the same journal titled „Szelíd válasz egy csípős kritikára” (Meek response to a biting critique). Kállai 27. 6. 1946.

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Folmer, Georges: Le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles: pour et contre l’art concret, 1946 – 55. In: http://www.folmer.net/wpcontent/uploads/2012/01/salondesrealitesnouvelles.pdf [Last accessed 12. 08. 2018]. Forgács, Éva: How the New Left Invented East-European Art. In: Centropa 3/2 (2003), 93 – 104. Forgács, Éva: How the New Left Invented East-European Art. In: Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit. Künstlerkritik an Politik und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart. Ed. by Cornelia Klinger: Berlin 2014 (Wiener Reihe. Themen der Philosophie 16), 61 – 84. Forgács, Éva: A Forgotten Group: The Gallery of the Four Directions. Theory, Politics and the Practice of Abstract Art in Budapest 1945 – 1948. In: Eadem. Hungarian Art. Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement. Los Angeles 2016, 138 – 155. Greenberg, Clement: Avant-Garde and Kitsch. In: Greenberg, Clement: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgements 1933 – 1944. Ed. by John O’Brian. Chicago / London 1986 (first published in: Partisan Review, Fall 1939). Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig: The Bauhaus. An Introductory Survey. Croydon 1963. Judt, Tony: Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945. New York 2005. Kállai, Ernő: Az Európai Iskola III. kiállítása [Third Exhibition of the European School]. In: Esti Szabad Szó 9. 6. 1946. Kállai, Ernő: Absztrakt csoprtkiállítás [Group Exhibition of Abstract Artists]. In: Köztársaság 13. 6. 1946. Kállai, Ernő: Szelíd válasz egy csípős kritikára” [Meek Response to a Biting Critique]. In: Köztársaság 27. 6. 1946. Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). Transl. M. T. H. Sadler. New York 1977. Kemp-Welch, Klara: Antipolitics in Central European Art. London 2014. Klinger, Cornelia (ed.): Blindheit und Hellsichtigkeit. Künstlerkritik an Politik und Gesellschaft der Gegenwart. Berlin 2014 (Wiener Reihe. Themen der Philosophie 16). Massat, René: 3ème Salon des Réalités nouvelles. In: Le courrier des arts et des lettres 23. 7. 1948, 1. Passuth, Krisztina: Les avant-gardes de l’Europe Centrale. Paris 1988. Piotrowski, Piotr: In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945 – 1989. Transl. Anna Brzyski. London 2009. Todorova, Maria: Imagining the Balkans. New York / Oxford 1997. Wolff, Larry: Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlighten­ ment. Stanford 1994.

Elena Sharnova

Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools A Concept in Soviet-Russian Art History This concept, which I have designated using the title of Dmitri Sarabianov’s book of the same name,1 was formulated in the 1970s, during a time commonly referred to as détente, an ‘easing of international tension.’2 After an extended period of cultural isolation in Soviet Russia, in which Soviet culture was considered superior to that of the decadent West, and obvious parallels between Russian and Western art were ignored, it was eventually permitted to speak of Russian art as a form of European art. Prior to this détente, art history had suffered greatly during the campaign against cosmopolitanism in the USSR (1949 – 1953). This campaign was directed not only against Jews, but also broadly against the independently thinking intelligentsia, and was designed to foster anti-Western feelings in the lead-up to the Cold War. In 1949, the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts 3, in Moscow, was nearly destroyed: all of the rooms were occupied by the huge exhibition of gifts to Joseph Stalin (the exhibition stayed opened until 1953), while the Western European art collection was ‘exiled’ to the storage rooms. The study of Western art was banned at the Department of Art History at Moscow University, and two leading professors, Viktor Lazarev and Mikhail Alpatov, were dismissed in 1949.4 Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Soviet culture entered a more liberal era, and the study of European art was gradually revived. The most striking examples of this were the publication of the six-volume World History of Art, in 1956 – 1966.5 The landmark exhibition of 15th to 20th century French Art from Soviet collections was held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the State Hermitage in Leningrad, in 1956. The same year, both museums hosted an exhibition of Picasso’s work. After a long period of neglect, the Soviet public was finally able to see works by artists who had previously been denigrated as formalists, such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Even so, it was not until the beginning of the 1970s that an interest in Russian–European ties began to emerge among scholars and academics, as well as within the Soviet museum community.

1 2 3 4 5

Sarabianov 1980. The term ‘détente’ is commonly used in relation to the Soviet foreign policy of the late 1960 – 1970s. In the following the Pushkin Museum. Viktor Lazarev came back only after the death of Stalin in 1953. Mikhail Alpatov never returned. Vseobshchaya istoriya iskusstv 1956 – 1966.

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The Exhibition The Portr ait to early 20t h  C enturies

in

European Painting

from the

15t h

A 1972 exhibition at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, entitled, Portret v evropeiskoi zhivopisi XV – nachala XX veka (The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to early 20th Centuries), played a pivotal role in the revival of Russian appreciation of Western art. For the first time in the Soviet period, the exhibition showed, important works in the Russian portrait genre, not separately from European portrait painting, but combined with works by artists from other countries, on the one hand allowing the viewer to better observe similarities in their development, and on the other, to reveal the originality and realistic power of the Russian portrait school.6

The exhibition organizers could not resist the traditional clichés of Soviet art criticism, such as samobytnost (originality) and realisticheskaya sila (realistic power), although rhetoric of this kind was actually very restrained in the exhibition catalogue. Mikhail Alpatov, one of the most influential art historians of the epoch, and recognized outside Russia as a scholar of Old Russian art,7 was invited to write the introductory text. He was distinguished by the breadth of his scientific research and had published important books on Russian art of the 19th century,8 as well as the art of the Italian Renaissance.9 The exhibition posed a topical question of the time: should national and foreign art be presented in the same museum? In Russian pre-revolutionary collections, this practice was quite widespread. For instance, at the Tretyakov brothers’ gallery, which was opened in Moscow in 1892, in the European section containing pictures from the collection of the elder brother Sergei, one could find parallels in the works of contemporary Russian painters from the younger brother Pavel’s collection. In 1925, the gallery was divided into two parts, and paintings from Sergei Tretyakov’s collection were transferred to two museums of European art: the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and the State Hermitage in Leningrad. After the 1972 portrait exhibition at the Pushkin Museum, the inclusion of Russian artists in museum expositions of Western art, and, by contrast, European art in museums of Russian culture, gradually became customary once again. This practice was particularly characteristic in the Pushkin Museum’s exhibiting policy throughout the 1980s (Moscow–Paris, 1900 – 30 in 1981, Still-life in European Painting of the 16th–20th Centuries in 1984), and was later adopted in the Tretyakov Gallery. 6 7 8 9

Exh.Cat. Moscow 1972, 5. Alpatoff / Wulff 1925. Alpatov 1956. Alpatov 1939.

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The crowning achievement of the 1972 portrait exhibition was the exceptionally high quality of the works displayed, the centrepiece being Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, from the National Museum in Cracow. In the early 1970s, the Moscow public had not been exposed to art shows that included masterpieces from European collections. For the Soviet audience, the idea of travelling outside the country, even to the countries within the Socialist camp, seemed like a pipe dream. Consequently, this exhibition, with its display of paintings from museums in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, also served, to some extent, as a breakthrough. In addition to Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, the exhibition presented masterpieces from Hungary (Paolo Veronese Portrait of a Man (1580), Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), the GDR (several pictures from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden like Hans Holbein the Younger Double Portrait of Thomas Godsalve and his Son, Sir John (1528); Bernardino Pinturicchio Portrait of a Boy (1480/85); Titian Portrait of Titian’s daughter Lavinia (1560/65)) and Czechoslovakia (Francisco de Goya Portrait of Don Miguel Lardizábal (1815), National Gallery, Prague). The portrait exhibition at the Pushkin Museum pre-dated the so-called ‘blockbuster’ shows of the mid–1970s, in particular, the 1975 – 1976 exhibition, 100 Masterpieces from the Metropolitan Museum, displayed at both the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the State Hermitage in Leningrad. However, unlike the ‘blockbuster’ shows from the mid-1970s to the 1980s, which became vehicles for advancing Soviet foreign policy, serving the purpose of strengthening relations between ideological opponents, especially after the 1975 Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, in Helsinki, the portrait exhibition held no such political implications. In the 1970s, it was not customary for the curators of an exhibition to be mentioned, but the 1972 portrait show was a rare exception. The exhibition catalogue provides two names, Irina Kuznetsova, the Pushkin Museum’s curator, and Irina Danilova, the museum’s deputy director of research. This is the only museum catalogue of the period that makes no mention of the director’s name. Hence, the exhibition was recognised as a reflection of Kuznetsova’s and Danilova’s ideas about the placement of Russian art within the European context. Kuznetsova, a leading specialist in French and English painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, was responsible for comparing the styles espoused by Russian artists to the different styles of European Art, including French Rococo, English Romanticism and European Neo-Classicism. Danilova was similarly enthused by unexpected visual parallels, and sought to expand the boundaries of the traditional fields of research conducted by Russian art historians. Many of the comparisons proposed by these curators were new and are still widely used by Russian museum curators and researchers today. Together with works by recognized masters, Danilova exhibited examples of parsuna – early Russian portraits of the 17th and early 18th centuries – along with Sarmatian portraits,10 which extended the 10 The term used to describe Polish baroque portraits. See: Tananaeva 1979.

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Fig. 1  View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15 th to early 20 th Centuries. First on the right: Nikolai Argunov Portrait of Countess Praskovia Sheremeteva in a striped dressing gown, 1803, Museum-Estate Kuskovo. Third from the right: Louis Michel van Loo Portrait of Countess Ekaterina Golitsyna, 1759, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. First on the left: George Romney Portrait of Miss Harriet Greer, 1781, The State Hermitage, Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

traditional concept of how portraiture developed throughout the 17th century. From the 18th and 19th centuries, provincial Russian portraits were exhibited alongside works by Louis-Michel van Loo, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, and George Romney, representatives of the ‘exemplary’ European art schools (fig.1). The Portrait of Countess Praskovia Sheremeteva in a striped dressing gown, by a serf painter of count Nikolai P. Sheremetev, Nikolai Argunov, from the Museum-Estate Kuskovo, became one of the ‘stars’ of the exhibition. The portrait is unique for several reasons. It represents the actress of the serf theatre, Praskovia Zhemchugova, later the wife of count Nikolai Sheremetev. Following the canons of a formal portrait, the artist creates a very unusual image of a pregnant woman in a housecoat. The exhibition coincided in time with the rediscovery of provincial Russian portraits that were neglected in the Soviet period, or were considered to be marginal at that time. The first exhibition devoted to provincial portraits from the Kostroma region was organized two years later by prominent Soviet art restorer, Saveli Yamshchikov, in Leningrad in 1974.11 11 Exh.Cat. Leningrad 1974.

Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools: A Comparative Approach  |

Fig. 2  View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15 th to early 20 th Centuries. Second on the right: Valentin Serov Girl with Peaches, 1887, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Third from the right: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Portrait of Jeanne Samary, 1877, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Fig. 3  View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15 th to early 20 th Centuries. From right to the left: Pablo Picasso Portrait of the Poet Jaime Sabartes, 1901, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Pyotr Konchalovsky Portrait of George Jakulov, 1910, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Martiros Saryan Self-Portrait, 1909, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Nathan Altman Portrait of Anna Akhmatova, 1915, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Kees van Dongen Spanish Woman, 1911, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Paul Gauguin Self-portrait, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

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The show included a striking display of art from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, in which Valentin Serov’s Girl with Peaches (1887, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) was hung next to Auguste Renoir’s Portrait of Jeanne Samary (1877, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow) (fig. 2). As a result, Serov was dubbed the ‘Russian Impressionist’. And finally, after a long interval of neglect, Russian modernist paintings were hung next to works by contemporary European masters. In one section, works by Pablo Picasso and Kees van Dongen appeared alongside works by Pyotr Konchalovsky, Nathan ­Altman, and Martiros Saryan (fig. 3). The special emphasis placed on 19th and early 20th century painting was linked to the rediscovery and reassessment of the art of this period in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1930s, modernist and Avant-garde painting was regarded as a deviation from realism and was strongly criticized by official Soviet art historians. Modernist painters, deemed as having little or no artistic worth, were consigned to oblivion in the storerooms of the Russian museums. In 1971, Dmitri Sarabianov, a professor of Russian art at the Moscow State University, published the essay collection, Russkaya zhivopis 1900-kh – nachala 1910-kh godov: Ocherki (Russian Painting from the late 1900s–early 1910s: Essays), which was the first post-World War II study of Russian Modernism to be published in Russia.12 Curators from the Pushkin Museum quickly responded to this rediscovery of Russian Modernism by including artists of the Bubnovyi valet (Jack of Diamonds) group, Pyotr Konchalovsky, and Ilya Mashkov, in the exhibition. Two years later, in 1974, the Pushkin Museum expanded its own display of modern French painting from the Impressionists to Matisse and Picasso. The exposition, which previously occupied two rooms on the ground floor, was expanded to occupy six rooms on the first floor, and for many years, these spacious and well-lit rooms were regarded as the most prestigious spaces in the museum’s permanent exposition. Unfortunately, exhibitions of this period were poorly documented. Besides the short exhibition catalogue that featured Mikhail Alpatov’s introductory text, only a few photos were preserved, which are presently held in the Department of Reproductions at the Pushkin Museum.13 Most of these photographs were taken during the exhibition opening, so it is not easy to reconstruct the arrangement and display of the pictures in the museum’s rooms. Regardless, I want to emphasize how this show became a turning point in the history of art exhibitions in Russia. Parallels between Russian and European

12 Sarabianov 1971. As for the rediscovery of Russian Avant-garde, it was perpetrated by Western art historians, such as Camilla Gray’s pioneering study, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863 – 1922, published in London in 1962. Gray 1962. 13 I would like to thank Elena Zinicheva, the chief of the Department of Reproductions in the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, who helped me to find these photographs.

Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools: A Comparative Approach  |

art were highlighted by the fact that the pictures were facing each other in every room. It was perhaps the first curated presentation of art in Russia in the second half of the 20th century, long before the term ‘curator’ acquired its modern meaning. Not all of the Eastern and Western parallels presented in The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to early 20th Centuries seem convincing today, but this in no way detracts from the significance of the exhibition, which provided an extremely important prompt for further research on the topic.

Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools Dmitri Sarabianov’s book, Russkaya zhivopis 19 veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol. Opyt sravnitelnogo issledovaniya (Russian Painting of the Nineteenth-Century Painting among the EuropeanSchools. A Comparative Approach), was published in 1980, and furthered the development of a number of ideas posed by the 1972 exhibition. As the Head of the Department of the History of Russian and Soviet Art at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Sarabianov was closely associated with the Pushkin Museum, which became the main center of artistic life in Moscow in the 1970s and was perceived by Soviet intelligentsia as being a forum for the most progressive ideas and trends in art history at the time. In his text, Sarabianov aspired to provide an all-encompassing global picture of the development of Russian art. Although the book’s title only refers to the 19th century, the author begins with a comparison of ‘Russian’ and ‘European’ art, from Ancient Rus and Andrei Rublyov onwards, ending with Russian Art Nouveau, and the works of Mikhail Vrubel. Sarabianov’s main aim was to prove that Russian painting had developed in parallel with European painting, and that the artistic standards of its highest achievements were in no way inferior to that of their European counterparts. He strived to find a suitable European analogue for each major phenomenon in Russian painting, and he disagreed with the widespread ‘pan-French’ concept of artistic development in the 18th–20th centuries, preferring to argue that the evolution of painting followed diverse creative paths. Apart from the French, he argued that the Northern and Eastern European paths were represented by German and Russian art. In his opinion, judging by the basic patterns of development, Russian art was closest to the art of Germany. Just like the curators of the 1972 portrait exhibition, Sarabianov was constantly looking to the art of Eastern Europe for comparison. For example, in the chapter on the historical paintings of Vasili Surikov, Sarabianov refers to Polish artist, Jan Matejko, and Czech artist, Jaroslav Čermák, undoubtedly reflecting the author’s desire to abandon the ‘pan-French’ idea of 19th-century painting.

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From a present-day perspective, the Sarabianov’s methodology is questionable in many respects. Since I have unwittingly becoming a critic of his ideas, I cannot ignore the extraordinarily strong impression his monograph made on Russian art historians, including myself. However, in my opinion, the weakest aspect of Sarabianov’s approach is that he shows scant interest in, “specific facts about the connections Russian artists had with those in the West,” because, in his view, this is the “lower level of comparison.” 14 If we ignore the actual connections, only external analogies can be obtained that are based on parallels in subject matter, or motifs, and certain superficial visual similarities. Proceeding from these criteria, Sarabianov selects a European analogue for every major phenomenon in Russian painting. For example, the school of Alexei Venetsianov is compared to the German and Austrian Biedermeier period, the work of Alexander Ivanov to the romantic painting of the Nazarene movement, Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov to the French Impressionists, Mikhail Vrubel to Franz von Stuck, and Victor Borisov-Musatov to the Nabi group. Since it is impossible to analyse every parallel suggested in the book, let us bear in mind that many of Sarabianov’s comparisons seem highly subjective, and really only seem to function on the level of a first impression. The unreliability of many of Sarabianov’s parallels can also be explained by the fact that he deals with the chronology in a rather arbitrary manner. Regarding the European artistic process as an alternation and intertwining of diverse styles, he states that Russian painting developed at an entirely different pace compared to the phenomena relating to various art periods. Apparently Russian artists either lag behind in relation to European artists (i. e. the Russian and French Impressionists), or, on the contrary, they overtake European phenomena. The art of Orest Kiprensky allows Sarabianov to suggest the ‘prematurity’15 of the Russian version of Romanticism, while the Art Nouveau Style in Russia seems to be, “before its time.” 16 Occasionally, paradoxical conclusions can be found in the book. Sarabianov considers one of the essential features of Russian Romanticism to be its “implicit nature […] that it is even hard to define as a tendency.” 17 The chapter, Surikov and European Historical Painting in the second half of the 19th century, begins with the statement, “There is nobody with whom to compare Surikov.” 18 Indeed, Sarabianov was forced to admit that every Russian artist cannot have a definite analogue in modern European painting. For Surikov’s historical paintings, a dialogue with the 16th-century Venetian tradition was far more important, especially in the case of the monumental canvasses of Veronese, as Mikhail Allenov observed in the 1990s.19 14 15 16 17 18 19

Sarabianov 1980, 18. Sarabianov 1980, 71. Sarabianov 1980, 192. Sarabianov 1980, 71. Sarabianov 1980, 141. Allenov 1996, 87.

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Sarabianov is a brilliant master of metaphor, and many of his definitions have been incorporated into the academic history of art in Russia, for instance, his concept of ‘hidden baroque’20 in relation to 17th-century Russian art, or ‘the unrealized Renaissance,’21 he discusses when writing about 15th-century Russian art. This concept of ‘unrealized Renaissance’ obviously draws on Mikhail Alpatov’s earlier writings, which were supported by many Soviet art historians, including Irina Danilova. From the point of view of Alpatov, Andrei Rublyov was, “a representative of one of those Renaissances that arose everywhere in Europe, even before the Italian Renaissance.” 22 Such metaphors are spectacular, but they disregard the historical principles of artistic development. Nonetheless, the paradoxes cited do not negate the merits of Sarabianov’s book, or the accuracy of the author’s characterization of different artists, or the artistic phenomena he describes. In the end, his main aim was to prove that Russian art was worthy of being integrated into the European artistic canon. The book was written during the period when Sarabianov became interested in the various aspects of Russian and European Art Nouveau, and the conclusions he makes in the chapter, The Russian Version of Art Nouveau, are still relevant to this day.

A View from Russia A new stage in the discussion of the topic, Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools, began in the mid-1980s, when Russian Avant-garde became popular in the European context, but the first serious experience of such a comparison is linked to the breakthrough exhibition, Moscow–Paris, 1900 to 1930, staged in 1981 at the A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, in Moscow. This exhibition provided a longawaited opportunity to study the development of early 20th-century Russian art, and the cultural interchange between Russia and France. Partly as a continuation of this exhibition, and partly due to the peculiarities of art collecting in Russia – a country with collections of French Modernism of unique artistic merit – the context of the French Avant-garde seemed to be of particular interest to the Russian art historians. The point of view of Russian art historians was aphoristically and clearly formulated in the title of the exhibition, Gauguin. Vzglyad iz Rossii (Gauguin. A View from Russia), held at the Pushkin Museum in 1989. When speaking about comparative studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the exhibition projects in the art museums were at the forefront of art criticism, with the genre 20 Sarabianov 1980, 44. 21 Sarabianov 1980, 41. 22 Alpatov 1972, 181.

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of the exhibition catalogue supplanting more traditional studies, such as the monographs on artists. It was during this time that the phenomenon of ‘curated exhibitions’ began to appear in the Russian museums. This was due to the growing importance of exhibitions in the development of art history, since the 1980s, not only in Russia. Previously, museum staff really only performed custodial duties in the maintenance and preservation of the collection, and their scholarly functions were limited to processing and displaying the work. The production of ideas, including suggestions for exhibitions, was not within their given competence at the time. The exhibition, Gauguin: A View from Russia, which Marina Bessonova had prepared, was one of the first authorial-curatorial projects. Bessonova had been a curator of modern French painting at the Pushkin Museum since 1970, organizing numerous exhibitions on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and contributing to many exhibition catalogues, including Moscow–Paris, 1900 – 30. The task of comparing Russian painters to Gauguin was treated very carefully. Russian artists were isolated in a separate room, as if the curator was afraid that Russian painting might not withstand close proximity to the French master (fig. 4). This contrasted with the exhibition, The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th–early 20th Centuries which had no qualms about directly comparing Russian and European painters. In the Gauguin exhibition, a section of the official catalogue, Russian Dialogues with Gauguin,23 is of particular interest, with Bessonova aiming to demonstrate how Russian painters were inspired to reject the artistic languages of the past. In her opinion, Russian artists acquired from Gauguin’s pictures, “central reference points, in order to break free from the academic-salon treatment of color and the chiaroscuro moulding of form.” 24 Unlike Sarabianov, Bessonova, who belonged to the next generation of art historians, was far more attentive to the historical context. In the catalogue, there is a section devoted to historical sources, in which Bessonova collected numerous responses to Gauguin by early 20th-century Russian art critics. She writes in detail about the 1906 Gauguin retrospective’s influence on Russian artists, and finally, when comparing Russian painting to Gauguin’s works, cites work from the Moscow collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, which had a direct and similar impact on several generations of Russian painters. Unlike the exhibition itself, the catalogue makes obvious visual comparisons between Russian masters and that of Gauguin. One entire section of the catalogue Russian Dialogues with Gauguin, features an album in which Bessonova constructs visual analogies between the French master and his Russian followers. At times, she goes too far with this. Along with Natalia Goncharova, Pyotr Konchalovsky, and the Golubaya roza (Blue Rose) artists, all of whom were clearly influenced by Gauguin, she attempts to find similarities with the early improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky, and in Kazimir Malevich’s paintings 23 Exh.Cat. Moscow 1989, 300 – 322. 24 Exh.Cat. Moscow 1989, 302.

Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools: A Comparative Approach  | Fig. 4  View of the exhibition Gauguin: A View from Russia, exhibition section Russian Dialogues with Gauguin. In the centre: Natalia Goncharova: Picture from the tetraptych Rape of Fruit, 1907 – 1909. The State Russian Museum, Leningrad. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

of peasants, neither of which seems convincing. But, in general, the parallels outlined in the catalogue are well thought-out, and were subsequently used by other Russian art historians. Paul Gauguin: A View from Russia, also actualized an early 20th-century exhibition practice, in which, during popular exhibitions of works by the Zolotoe runo (Golden Fleece) and Jack of Diamonds groups, work by Russian artists was hung next to the work of their European – especially French – contemporaries. The message of both the exhibition and catalogue was to emphasize the French influence on Russian Avant-garde. According to Bessonova, without the precedents of the Post-Impressionist painters, such as Gauguin, Russian art would have followed a very different path. However, when discussing Gauguin’s influence on Russian painting, Bessonova paid tribute to some substantive aspects of both Gauguin’s work, and the work of Russian painters at the time. Comparing Gauguin and Natalia Goncharova, for example, Bessonova pointed to Gauguin’s early images of Breton women, asserting that he had produced, “the first ever ‘primitive’ style in the History of Art,” long before his trip to Polynesia.25 Something similar can be said about Goncharova, who had become interested in Primitivism, even before her encounter with Gauguin’s art, after she had seen the peasant women of Kaluga and Tula. 25 [Bessonova 1989], 12.

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Bessonova’s curative approach turned out to be extremely popular in Russia and has influenced the way in which subsequent exhibitions have been staged. In 1998, the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage realized a similar project, Cézanne i russkii avangard (Cézanne and the Russian Avant-Garde), which highlighted the work of artists from the Jack of Diamonds group. When, in 2005, the Tretyakov gallery arranged a large exhibition dedicated to Jack of Diamonds, its curators included paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, and Derain in each of the sections, providing a kind of reference point for the Russian painters. The Pushkin Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Al’ber Marke: otkrytoye okno (Albert Marquet: Open Window) is a more recent example of Bessonova’s influence in curation, the exhibition following the well-trodden path of lending an authorial aspect to a project exported from France, by including pictures by Soviet artists of the 1930s, who were influenced by Marquet. Since the portrait exhibition of 1972, and the release of Sarabianov’s book on Russian painting of the nineteenth century among the European Schools, there have been numerous books, articles and exhibitions dedicated to different aspects of Russian art, and its links and interrelations with the Western culture. Both Dmitri Sarabianov, and the Pushkin Museum curators, Irina Danilova and Irina Kuznetsova, proposed a comparative point of view, instead of the usual traditional distribution of painting by according to school and or national affiliation. Today, the history of Russian art cannot be discussed in isolation from its dialogue with the West. Even speaking about the Peredvizhniki (Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions), who were traditionally considered one of the most ‘national’ movements in Russian painting of the 19th century, art historians tend to emphasize the diverse connection with Western art. One of the introductory articles in the recent catalogue of a Tretyakov gallery show of Ilya Repin, widely acknowledged to be the preeminent exponent of critical realism in the 19th century, is devoted to his reception of modern French painting.26 Museum curators therefore highlight the painter’s receptivity to the new western art. The relationship between Russian and European painting continues to be explored through examples of specific episodes of creative contact, influence and borrowing, which should ultimately provide us with an adequate picture of Russian art within a European context.

Bibliogr aphy [Allenov 1996]: Алленов, Михаил: Суриков [Surikov]. Москва 1996. Alpatoff, Michael / Wulff, Oscar: Denkmäler der Ikonenmalerei in kunstgeschichtlicher Folge. Hellerau bei Dresden 1925. 26 Nesterova 2019.

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[Alpatov 1956]: Алпатов, Михаил: Александр Иванов [Alexander Ivanov]. Москва 1956. [Alpatov 1939]: Алпатов, Михаил: Итальянское искусство эпохи Данте и Джотто [Italian Art of the Epoch of Dante and Giotto]. Москва 1939. [Alpatov 1972]: Алпатов, Михаил: Андрей Рублев [Andrei Rublev]. Москва 1972. [Bessonova 1989]: Бессонова, Марина: Наследие Гогена и современный художественный процесс [Gauguin’s Heritage and the Contemporary Art Process]. In: [Exh.Cat. Moscow 1989], 7 – 22. [Exh.Cat. Leningrad 1974]: Костромские портреты 18 – 19 вв. Новые открытия. Каталог. Гос. Русский Музей. Ленинград. Автор-составитель Савелий В. Ямщиков [Portraits of Kostroma of the 18 – 19th Centuries. New Discoveries. Catalogue. State Russian Museum Leningrad. Compiled by Saveli V. Yamshchikov]. Ленинград 1974. [Exh.Cat. Moscow 1972]: Портрет в европейской живописи. XV век – начало XX века: выставка произведений из советских и зарубежных музеев / Гос. музей изобразительных искусств им. А. С. Пушкина, Гос. Русский музей, Гос. Третьяковская галерея, Гос. Эрмитаж (каталог составлен И. А. Кузнецовой). Москва 1972. [The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to Early 20th Century. Exhibition of Works from Soviet and Foreign Museums. A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, State Russian Museum, State Tretyakov Gallery, State Eremitage. Catalogue compiled by Irina A. Kuznetsova]. Москва 1972. [Exh.Cat. Moscow 1989]: Гоген. Взгляд из России. Москва. Гос. Музей изобразительных искусств им. А. С. Пушкина. Автор-составитель Марина Бессонова [Gauguin: A View from Russia. A. S. Pushkin State Museum, Moscow. Compiled by Marina Bessonova]. Москва 1989. [Exh.Cat. Moscow 2019]: Илья Репин. Москва. Гос. Третьяковская Галерея. Отв. ред. Татьяна Карпова [Ilya Repin. State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow. Directed by Tatyana ­Karpova]. Москва 2019. Gray, Camilla: The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863 – 1922. London 1962. [Nesterova 2019]: Нестерова, Елена: Путь через Париж. И. Е. Репин и французское искусство [Way through Paris. I. E. Repin and French Art]. In: [Exh.Cat. Moscow 2019], 41 – 55. [Sarabianov 1971]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Русская живопись 1900-х  – начала 1910-х годов: Очерки [Russian Painting from the Late 1900s–Early 1910s: Essays]. Москва 1971. [Sarabianov 1980]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Русская живопись 19 века среди европейских школ. Опыт сравнительного исследования [Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools]. Москва 1980. [Tananaeva 1979]: Тананаева, Лариса Ивановна: Сарматский портрет: Из истории польского портрета эпохи барокко [Sarmatian Portrait. From the History of the Baroque Polish Portrait]. Москва 1979. [Vseobshchaya Istoriya Iskusstv]: Всеобщая История Искусств в шести томах. Ред. коллегия Борис В. Веймарн и др. [World Art History in six volumes. Ed. board Boris V. Veymarn a.o]. Том 1 – 6. Москва 1956 – 1966.

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Rereading Source Text: Introduction to the book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools. A Comparative Approach (1980) These essays do not set out to provide a chronological review of the question under consideration. Today it is not possible to trace through from the beginning to the end of the 19thcentury and until the year 1905 (i. e. within the time-frame we have chosen) the links between Russia and the West and the influence they exerted on each other. Neither is it feasible to undertake a comparative analysis of the Russian and West-European schools of painting. It would be more than a single person could take on, because this question has so far only been examined in an extremely superficial way. At this point in time we have to be content with a quite different form of research: we shall focus merely on certain phenomena in Russian painting, while omitting others completely and mentioning still others only in passing. The themes chosen for this study were not the fruit of lengthy research. Their selection was like a foregone conclusion, resulting from a sense of ‘primary necessity’, which comes into play as soon as we raise the issue of the comparative examination of different schools. Closer study of the issue duly selected is bound to lead to the identification of further questions as well. It is easy to imagine how the essays we have presented to readers will lead to others and that the initial range of subjects will be extended. First of all, however, we shall concentrate on our key objectives. Unfortunately, the comparative study of Russian and West-European painting – particularly that of the 19th and early 20th centuries – has rarely been the focus of attention from our art historians and, in the recent past, even less so. There were several factors leading to this situation. There was a time when the comparative approach as a method for historical research was fully out of question, and this legacy makes itself felt to the present day. In addition, the tendency to treat Russian painting in isolation – as a peculiar phenomenon beyond comparison – was too firmly established. This approach was always reinforced by the narrow specialization of art historians, who would distribute among themselves and separately consider Russian and West-European artistic cultures. Among historians of Russian art, shades of the previous one-sided interpretation of the national heritage as the only source of progressive development in Russian art were still sometimes to be observed. Historians of West-European painting of the 19th and 20th centuries have, until very recently, retained the prejudices preventing them from singling out questions of interest to us, continuing to base their approach on the pan-French

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concept, which essentially ignores phenomena in other schools of art – apart from the French one – when considering the main path of world painting. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that Russian art often came under the influence of the German school. Compared to French artists, Russian ones were often viewed as figures of only secondary significance. For that reason, the very idea of comparing them with advocates of the pan-French concept of the art of that period appeared ill-founded. All these considerations (along with certain others, on which we shall not dwell at this juncture) made it difficult to outline the question we are seeking to consider in this collection of essays. This does not, of course, mean that in our research there has not been anyone or anything to make meaningful references to. If we consider how varied the paths could be which researchers follow when examining this question and the different components of which they might (and probably should) consist, it then becomes evident that among the writings of art historians, there is a considerable number to which we might turn for support, although not all the questions we discuss are directly raised by them. Let us attempt first of all to paint the ideal situation, to which it would be appropriate to aspire through our analysis, but which it would naturally not be possible to achieve within the confines of our current publication. It would also be important to describe the paths via which it would be appropriate to seek to attain our goal. The crucial way to start understanding the material is to clarify the concrete facts concerning – among other factors – the links between Russian artists and those from the West, the influences they experienced and the art education accessible in the countries involved. These facts form the ‘ground’ level, the foundation on which opportunities for key comparisons emerge. By no means all such facts can be used as we seek to identify the final situation. Many will be set aside or initially appear to be outside the framework for that end goal, but even then might have a part to play by providing arguments indirectly supportive of our ideas. The next step is to examine paths along which the artistic development of the various schools advanced. This step is not ‘at odds’ with the first one. Different facts are needed, however – namely the main phenomena to be observed in the history of art of a particular country. Yet, naturally, objective research into the latter is a task in its own right. Only if those phenomena are viewed from a specific angle can they serve our ends. This approach means a comparative examination of the subject, which should involve the identification of the distinctive paths followed and the analysis of the artistic qualities that emerged in consequence. For the first step it is necessary to study the general national patterns to be observed in artistic development. The second step involves examination of individual works – juxtaposing and comparing them, considering parallels and contrasts. In our view, analysis has to be aimed not only at establishing specific national features, but also at explaining them. In an effort to simplify the issue and present it at a basic level, we might say that the distinctive paths of artistic development to be observed and

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the specific features of individual works of art, in which the paths of that development are reflected, depend on two factors. First, on how the development of culture is taking shape at a particular time and the kind of situation emerging in a country which, in its turn, determines the course of that process. This factor we can refer to as the ‘situational’ one. It can, however, never be described in its pure form, since in all aspects of any modern situation historical tradition still manifests itself. The second factor consists in the constant features of national identity, which have already taken shape and which depend on the national identity of the people under consideration. That involves the national psychology and the national view of the world order. These factors are naturally not something that can be viewed separately: they are two parts of a single whole. Yet, at different turns in the history of culture, the first set of factors will predominate and the second at others. The comparative examination method requires an analysis of the historical mechanism that sets in motion national characteristics. The different approaches to the resolution of the question under consideration here are not capable of resolving it once and for all. Moreover, if they are exaggerated, they can to a certain extent ‘blur’ the shape of that question. Only a combination of those different approaches – emphasis of first one of them and then the other – will make it possible to achieve the goal we seek. The focus has to be on synthesis. The question of the historical existence of Russian painting among the European schools does not merely involve singling out national characteristics, simply deciding on the features of its developmental path, or simply considering what Russian painting had borrowed from elsewhere or what sort of impact influences have had: it is all these things taken together. If we take into consideration all these selected aspects of the question, we shall appreciate that despite the small number of art historical studies providing direct answers, there exist many other works touching upon the subject. Let us now turn our attention to some of these. The question as to the interaction between Russian and West-European art was raised back in the 19th century, particularly in connection with Russian artistic culture in the medieval period. The Slavophiles focused their attention on Byzantium, denying any possible links with the West. Such a viewpoint might have seemed perfectly natural to them. They suggested that there was no source for Russian culture other than Byzantium. I. E. Zabelin was totally convinced that Russian artistic culture was unique, unlike any other. In the 1870s the French scholar Viollet-le-Duc published a book entitled L’art russe, voicing an astonishing view of Russian art: he described this art as something wholly cut off from the West, which drew its inspiration from Eastern cultures, those of China, India, Iran and also from Tatar culture and others. These views were not supported by either facts or analysis. This conception was seriously and decisively rejected by F. I. Buslaev in 1879 in his review entitled “Russian art as assessed by a French scholar”.1 1 See: [Lazarev 1970], 2, and also Note 5.

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By this time, Buslaev had already developed his own concept of the distinctive nature of Russian art.2 Given his role as the founding father of art history in our country, it was no coincidence that Buslaev immediately found himself up against this question. He noted the close link between medieval Russian art and the art of Byzantium and, to a lesser extent, the link between it and the art of the West, after acknowledging the classical foundation underlying Russian medieval art. This led him to examine from the outset the question as to its originality. He singled this out both in its iconography and imagery. Buslaev wrote: “The national character of every people destined to have a great future (and the Russian people is surely one such) possesses a special gift for making everything that comes to it from the outside, its own”.3 It is difficult not to agree with this formulation. It is also clear that it stems from the special conditions, in which Russian art developed. It is evident that, at the time in question, the issue would not have arisen in relation to other schools of art – the French or German one, for instance. That thought of Buslaev’s would be repeated many times over and become something in the way of an axiom. After Buslaev, almost all Russian medieval historians writing in the late-19th or early 20th century – among them Nikodim Kondakov, Dmitri Ainalov and Yegor Redin – in one way or another touched upon the question of the national roots of medieval Russian art and its links with Byzantium and the West. Kondakov, in particular, put forward his ‘Italian’ theory explaining, as he saw it, the development of art in medieval Russia in the 14th and 15th centuries which was, however, to prove unconvincing subsequently. It is perfectly understandable that for scholars researching medieval Russian art, the question of its foreign links and sources would be of key importance. As for Russian art from later periods and right up to the beginning of the 20th century, the task of any comparative historical examination of art in Russia and the West was not at the forefront of attention. For Vladimir Stasov and the art critics of his circle, the task of asserting the distinctive national character of Russian art in the second half of the 19th century was a practical rather than a theoretical question. In cases when Stasov applied it to the past (in particular to the art of the 18th and early 19th centuries), the criteria of his contemporaries would lead him astray, preventing Stasov from regarding almost the whole of Russian painting prior to the movement of the Peredvizhniki (Association of Travelling Art Exhibitions) as genuinely national. It was not until the 20th century that there was a chance to open the way for a more objective understanding of Russian painting of the 18th and 19th centuries and embark upon wider comparisons of national schools. The first important step in this direction was that made by Alexandre Benois with his books The History of Painting in the 19th Century. 2 For more information on this, see: [Alpatov 1967 a]. 3 [Alpatov 1967 a], 13.

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Russian Painting (1901), The Russian School of Painting (1906) and various articles published in the first two decades of the 20th century. Although we do not agree with the conclusions drawn by Benois, he nevertheless raised important questions. In his History of Painting in the 19th Century, Benois devoted the introductory chapter to these questions. He put forward the idea that the visual arts in Russia were underdeveloped. Let us consider how he expounded that idea. Benois starts out by establishing the fact that, in Russia, fine art was less well-developed than literature and he goes on to examine possible reasons for this. He rejects the idea that Russians, by their very nature, lack ability in the sphere of the visual arts, negating that suggestion through references to various examples of impressive mastery and considerable talent. He doesn’t agree that the skills of Russian craftsmen are of a low level and prevent them from keeping pace with writers. He sees the reason for such misconceptions to lie in Russians having “lost their connection to the soil” and in the “unbridgeable gulf existing between the authentic life of the people and the superimposed culture, which we have always found so difficult to acknowledge, failing to develop a comfortable relation to it even after two centuries”.4 Benois believed that literature possessed more firmly established traditions and that the reforms of the Petrine era had not caught it unawares. Benois’s explanation for the different positions of literature and the visual arts is not particularly convincing. The reasons why painting had not kept pace with literature were of different nature: they were not of a specifically national character. It would be more appropriate here to talk about the ‘literary’ 19th century that had placed the visual arts in a difficult position. Furthermore, the criteria on which Benois bases his assessments are not clear. Why should we believe that the British nation, for example, revealed itself in painting more than the Russian one? Or that the German nation did so? Concrete comparisons of individual and, in addition, simultaneous phenomena would have produced different results. In this instance, Benois appears to adopt the viewpoint and position of a foreigner. It is, indeed, a manifestation of the concept of Eurocentrism (only in a narrower form), which emerged and asserted itself in countries that did not recognize the merits of cultures the development of which, when compared to their own lands, lagged behind, even if by only a small margin. As a result, we most probably need to regard Alexandre Benois’s answer to a question of central importance as misguided. Nevertheless, all that Benois and his like-minded companions did to promote the study of Russian art – particularly that of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th – became an important contribution to the history of art and for that reason significant for resolving the issues we have raised. First of all, we needed to appreciate the value of Russian art. After that it would be possible to compare it with the art of other countries. 4 [Benois 1901], 2 – 3.

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Members of the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement are often reproached for having advanced the conception of Russian art as something provincial. In general, this is true, although the ‘sin’ committed by the movement was overblown and exaggerated to an extreme degree in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when art criticism lurched towards another extreme in the opposite direction. The concept of provincialism had indeed been around. It was cultivated above all by Nikolai Wrangel, who had in general made a significant contribution to the study of Russian artistic culture of the 18th and early 19th centuries and, in particular, drawn attention to the creative work of foreigners in Russia. The roots of that concept were clear. It manifested itself precisely in the Westernizer group (Zapadniki) within the World of Art movement. The idea of Russian artistic culture of that era associating itself more closely with that of Western Europe – then something very much in the forefront of discussion – was projected onto the history of Russian art. It was through the prism of that discussion that the whole of Russian artistic culture of the modern era was being viewed. Today we no longer share that idea, although neither do we share the position from which it was being criticized twenty years ago. Among the pre-1917 scholars, the one whose ideas appear closest to current views on this subject is Igor Grabar, who was responsible for editing the History of Russian Art published by Iosif N. Knebel. When Grabar began his activities as an art historian, he was confronted by the unresolved question of crucial importance for any historian of Russian art: was there truly great art to be found in Russia? At that time, when Russian artistic culture was being considered in conjunction with its links to the West, this question was bound to loom large. Despite the fact that Grabar never fell victim to nationalist tendencies, his answer to that question was a positive one and resolutely so.5 The whole of Grabar’s subsequent activity was a confirmation of the position he adopted at that point. He succeeded in finding objective grounds for comparing such phenomena as the works of Rokotov or Levitsky, the architecture of Bazhenov or Starov, the painting of Ivanov or Repin with parallel phenomena in the West. Each time such comparisons were bound up with the singling out of national features of whichever master was under consideration. When making a comparison, for example, between Levitsky and British portrait-painters of the 18th century, Grabar draws attention to the ‘serious and pensive’ nature of Levitsky’s work – qualities brought together with such ‘striking mastery’. Grabar went on to write that “all his painting and skillful techniques are distinguished by an astonishing modesty, almost diffidence and his creations are permeated by … a tenderness and warmth of emotion.” 6 5 [Grabar Introduction], 1 – 132. 6 [Grabar Introduction], 80.

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There was also another aspect of the question as to what was national in the history of Russian art for Grabar. When probing the question regarding the interaction between various national cultures, he wrote: The stronger a certain culture might be, the more it will dominate weak ones. What is far more significant is another feature of Russian culture: despite its evident poverty when compared with foreign cultures, there lies hidden within it an elusive power of attraction, which had on several occasions compelled some of the finest representatives of Europe’s foremost cultures to be drawn into its orbit. After settling in Russia and participating in the creative work in progress in their new homeland with ardent enthusiasm, Italians, Germans and Frenchmen had often completely forgotten their original homeland and became Russians in the full sense of that word – Russians in their outlook, their spirit and their emotions.7

Grabar compares these foreigners with Theotokopoulos the Greek, who was to become a great Spanish painter, or with Jean de Boulogne, the Frenchman, who transformed in Italy into the famous Giovanni da Bologna. The number of such foreigners, who turned into Russians in Russia, was very considerable. They took on the tasks of Russian culture and the creative work of many of them helped chart the main paths of development in Russian art. This stance adopted by Grabar involves fundamental ideas that are not just different from what Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote about Russia’s ‘universal responsiveness’ (to which reference will be made later), but that run directly opposite to it. Russia, in Grabar’s opinion, is not only responsive itself, but also compels others to be responsive. In actual fact this contrast is misleading: after all, in both cases the point at issue is the possibility of cultures enriching each other. Compelling another to respond is easier, if you yourself are capable of responding to others. The ideas advocated by Grabar, Benois and a number of their contemporaries are not confined to the first two decades of the 20th century, but their influence continued into the Soviet period as well. They came to constitute major source material for Soviet research into Russian art (not to mention research into Grabar himself, who was to become one of the founders of Soviet art history). In the 1920s however, a new concept came to the fore – the sociological approach. Those representing this new trend (Vladimir Fritsche, Natalya Kovalenskaya, Alexei Fedorov-­Davydov, Natalya Sokolova, A[lexei] I. Mikhailov) typically showed no particular interest in the subject central to this present study. The sociological explanation of artistic phenomena does not stipulate their obligatory examination through the prism of national identity. In articles by Kovalenskaya, Fedorov-Davydov and Sokolov there are, 7 [Grabar Introduction], 1 – 2.

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however, a number of remarks to be found, which are of value and significance for us. Kovalenskaya, for instance, introduces the concept of ‘Russian Biedermeier’, admittedly without developing it further or explaining it. Sokolova and Fedorov-Davydov single out certain distinctive features in Russian Impressionism and Art Nouveau. The period in the development of Soviet art history, which began in the 1930s and continued in a one-sided way into the late 1940s and early 1950s led, because of those limitations, to a distorted view first and foremost about the contribution of Russian art to world art. That was the time when Russian art in the second half of the 19th century was seen as the high-point in the advance of the world’s artistic culture. Every more or less well-known Russian painter was claiming at that time to be of international importance. This meant that the question of interest to us was, essentially speaking, resolved. We note only a few exceptions from this general pattern. An example of these was the useful survey of questions important for our study to be found in an article by Alexei Fedorov-Davydov entitled: Fundamental Questions in the History of Russian Art published in Issue No. 1 of the journal Iskusstvo (Art) in 1947.8 It would be wrong not to draw attention to the works of Mikhail Alpatov significant in relation to the subject of this article. First of all, in 1950 he published in English a previously little-known article entitled Russian Impact on Art. After that a number of articles appeared in Russian – chapters from the afore-mentioned book. Also of direct relevance for our study were the two volumes of his Studies on Russian Art. They were aimed primarily at answering the question as to the nature of the ‘Russian contribution’. Alpatov was a master of comparisons based on his analysis of the content and formal structure of individual works. These comparisons he presented as reflections of the general national features of Russian culture. He devoted less space to comparison of the historical paths traced by cultures over time. Another book vital to mention in this context is Two Centuries of Russian Art by Abram Efros, which came out in 1969, although it had been written in the 1930s and 1940s. This original scholar and brilliant critic provided in the above-mentioned work not only a general survey of the development of Russian art in the modern period, but within that survey he discussed questions concerning the interaction of national cultures. Among more recent works reflecting a major shift in views on our current subject, it is worth focusing attention on the lecture delivered by Viktor Lazarev at the XIII International Congress of Historical Sciences entitled The Art of Medieval Russia and the West (11th–15th centuries) [Moscow 1970]. Although the period under consideration was confined to the 11th–15th centuries and far removed from the question on which we are focusing, this work is nevertheless of fundamental importance from the methodological point of view. It provides an objective picture of the interaction between the art 8 [Fedorov-Davydov 1947].

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worlds of different countries based on factual analysis and on comparisons of parallel phenomena in artistic culture. Medieval Russia was shown in this lecture more often than not in the role of responder. At the same time, resemblances do not extend beyond certain clear limits. Belonging, as it did, to the Orthodox world in the medieval period meant that Russian culture could not set out on the West-European path. Nevertheless, ­Lazarev makes it clear that any kind of borrowings were aimed at an organic enrichment of Russian culture. This lecture should be regarded as a model of objectivity in the pre­ sentation of its subject matter. We have only mentioned publications that are of immediate importance for our study. If we so desired, it would be easy to extend the scope of our historical review. Yet, the more we might broaden it, the more indirect the links between the works touching upon our subject would be. Let us remember that up until now there have not been any works providing general coverage of this subject, providing a direct response to our question, but only certain articles which there is no need to mention at this point, articles that indicate the path to general conclusions. In our short survey space needs to be allocated not merely to works by art historians. It would appear that works by philosophers, historians, literary scholars and finally writers – progressive authorities of their day, who were expressing their ideas throughout the 19th century and enriching the whole of Russian culture – played an equally important role. There is a whole range of questions, which have always stirred the finest Russian minds. That range of questions is relevant for our subject as well. If we ignore it, we shall lose an important base or foundation for our investigation of art history. These questions, among them centuries-old ones like the position of Russia in Europe, moved Alexander Pushkin and Pyotr Chaadaev, Westernizers and Slavophiles, Fyodor Dostoevsky and many Russian thinkers of the early 20th century. It is not possible to list them all; we are well aware that, for the overwhelming majority of figures in the world of Russian culture, the central question was that of Russia’s position among other countries, of her future, of her past, of what set Russia, her culture and her people apart and so on. A detailed treatment of those questions would lead us too far away from our original theme. It could become a separate subject all of its own. Let us focus on just some of the crucial turning points. In terms of the broad question of ‘Russia’s relations with the West’, Chaadaev’s views occupied the most prominent place in the first half of the 19th century; Chaadaev being an author of particular interest to historians of Russian culture in recent decades as well. At the beginning of that century, he combined within himself in a unique way concerns linked to diametrically opposed trends, which had emerged during his lifetime – those of the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. Chaadaev felt an affinity with the idea of the messianic destiny setting Russia apart from other states and the Russian people apart from other peoples. This idea was very much alive in Russian philosophical thought

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even until recent times. On the other hand, the idea of Russia’s special destiny did not prevent Chaadaev from subjecting her history and the country he was living in to harsh criticism. Admittedly it is possible to object that there were a number of very different periods in Chaadaev’s thought, which in many respects might appear to contradict each other. In the final analysis, however, that is not so important. The changes in Chaadaev’s ideas stemmed from the nature of his personality and they were not chance vacillations resulting from specific outside influences. Chaadaev estimated that Russia’s main misfortune stemmed from the Orthodox Church which – unlike Catholicism – never attempted to unite the Christian world. As a consequence, Russia remained outside the general cultural process and was lagging behind Europe. According to the philosopher, the key factor for the advancement of his homeland would have been moving closer to Europe’s culture. To achieve that goal Russia needed to overcome the haphazard course of her development, which had meant that there had been no continuity through the various stages of her history and that it had not been possible to build truly profound traditions. In the 1830s and 1840s those Russian weaknesses turned into strengths as far as Chaadaev was concerned, for he had become convinced that Russia was capable of rapid development, that she could catch up with Europe and, thanks to having avoided the contradictions inherent in that development, eventually enrich Europe. The forward movement would in the end – according to Chaadaev – lead to social harmony, to the perfection of the whole human race, for the sake of which each nation needed to play its own particular role. It should be noted that the idea of it being possible for a national culture, which had been lagging behind the rest, to take such a leap forward is highly significant. There had been no precedents in Russia for the national question as presented in Chaadaev’s philosophy. His particularly pronounced awareness of nationhood had led Chaadaev to what has been called in the philosophy of history ‘national nihilism’, to his conversion to Catholicism, to his expressing his love for his homeland based on strictly impartial criticism, which would later be embraced by revolutionary democrats and in particular by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It is thought likely that the question of national characteristics in Russia and the distinctive nature of the paths of development in that country initially assumed a really important place in philosophy and in social thought. In the 18th century, this question was approached as a practical one, but it had now become a subject for philosophical interpretation. Russian culture had become aware of its own historical path. This meant that it had become possible and indeed necessary to start to contrast and compare. After Chaadaev, no major philosopher, writer or public figure in Russia failed to confront these urgent and difficult questions. Pushkin’s preoccupation with these questions assumed a poetic form, for which his poem The Iron Rider (Russ. Медный всадник) is a great example. Many different ideas were woven together in this piece: that of the

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greatness of the new Russia created by Tsar Peter I; the idea of man’s weakness and humble stature in comparison to the interests of the state and the nation as a whole; the impossibility of harmony in Russia between the state and the individual citizen; the position of the poet caught between the two. (Alexander Pushkin presents a lofty poetic image of a ruler destined to transform Russia, but combines this praise for Peter with the portrayal of Yevgeni, a figure of his own semblance –, a small man in the face of Peter’s greatness.) All of this – the problems of Russia, Russian contradictions, the constant polarities – had been a feature of Russian life for many centuries. Intrinsic to that life were the contrasts between greatness and nonentity, predestination and the wretchedness of everyday existence in the Russia of that period – strength side by side with weakness, beauty with ugliness, purity with squalor. Gogol, the Slavophiles, the Westernizers, Belinsky, ­Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky all sought to confront these problems. In these essays there is no point in expounding once again the ideas of the Slavophiles and the Westernizers – they are well-known and familiar. To this day the arguments about them have not died down. Suffice it to recall the discussion about the Slavophile movement, which filled the pages of the journal, Voprosy literatury, in 1969. Our task here is not to adopt the position of one or other side in the argument. The ideas of that period need to be investigated as a historical phenomenon. Let us focus our attention on one important fact: the main controversy in Russia in the middle of the 19th century was concerned with the relationship between Russia and the West, with the paths Russia should follow, with its present and future. That is in itself extremely symptomatic. Russia could plainly see the experience of the European countries, which had moved on and had uncovered contradictions in the new stage of their historical development. Russian philosophers, historians and writers were always thinking about that experience: they could imagine before their very eyes the historical situation in which Russia might find itself at some later stage. At the same time, in Russia itself there was potential for major progress, which would have made it possible not just to catch up with Europe but to compare Russian achievements with Europe’s and to consider possible paths leading forward. In addition to those issues there was the question of relations between East and West (to narrow it down more – those between the Orthodox Church and Catholicism), a question which would long remain topical. It would be important for Dostoevsky, Vladimir Solovyov and the religious philosophers of the early 20th century. In addition to the question of appropriate ways forward, involving the philosophical interpretation of practical needs, there remained the question of national identity. Dostoevsky probably proved to be the most sensitive thinker in his response to all those questions. For Dostoevsky, Russia was the place where East met West. He resolved issues of the relationship between the two from a religious-philosophical angle. Central to ­Dostoevsky’s thinking was the human individual: starting out from that he would

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move on to general – national or global – issues. He was not interested in how life was ordered, only in human beings. Man’s fate, his freedom, its possibilities, its limits and how that freedom might degenerate into willful obstinacy, which is already a negation of freedom. It is in connection with this issue that Dostoevsky contrasts the “God-manhood” principle with the self-elevation of man to God. Dostoevsky, an advocate of “God-manhood”, opposes the ideas of Nietzsche who propagated the deification of man and the Übermensch. For Dostoevsky there was an insuperable divide between Russia and the Catholic West. He believed that man perishes when aspiring to self-elevation to divine status, while he survives and lives on in “God-manhood”. The great writer also expressed in a fairly consistent way his view of the features of the Russian national character and of Russian national culture. Dostoevsky summed up these ideas in his famous speech about Pushkin delivered not long before his death in 1880. That speech about Pushkin gave rise to much debate and criticism. It touched on a number of issues, expressed as always in Dostoevsky’s work in forceful, incisive and resolute terms. It is worth focusing our attention on some of them. With penetrating insight, Dostoevsky singles out Pushkin as the initiator of national consciousness. Pushkin for him had set in motion faith in Russian self-reliance. ­Dostoevsky wrote: Were it not for Pushkin, our faith in our Russian self-reliance would perhaps not have asserted itself with such unswerving strength (as it did later, although still not yet in us all, but only in a few), nor our faith in our Russian self-dependence, hope in the strengths of our people, of which we are now at last aware.9

The second part of Dostoevsky’s speech was devoted in its entirety to the “universal responsiveness” of the Russian genius promoting the all-embracing coming together of mankind. When comparing Pushkin with Shakespeare, Cervantes and Schiller, it is precisely in Pushkin’s writing that Dostoevsky finds the features of ‘universal responsiveness’, which are within his reach as a Russian writer. In his Scenes from Faust, Don Juan and The Covetous Knight, Pushkin’s ability to capture the very essence of other national cultures comes very much to the fore. It is precisely that ability which makes him a writer with an appeal embracing all mankind, an idea which in Dostoevsky’s opinion is intrinsic to the Russian nation.10 All these definitions voiced by Dostoevsky and indeed other ideas of his (for example about the Russian ‘sufferer’ or ‘seeker’) demonstrate this great Russian writer’s aptness for unusually penetrating insight, while also show the signs of national self-delusion. 9 [Dostoevsky 1956], 454. 10 [Dostoevsky 1956], 454 – 458.

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It is interesting to note that many of the ideas voiced by Dostoevsky had to a greater or lesser extent been formulated by his predecessors. This applies, in particular, to questions of ‘universal responsiveness’. Let us recall, in this connection, Vissarion Belinsky, who wrote: National barriers are something that Europeans cannot overcome. Perhaps this is our greatest advantage, the fact that all nationalities are equally accessible for us and that our poets can in their own works transform themselves so easily and freely into Greeks, Romans, Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen, Italians and Spaniards. That is an advantage for the future, however, an indication that our nationality needs to develop widely in all its facets.11

This thought we also encounter in the writing of Alexander Herzen: Slavonic peoples, on the other hand, stand out on account of their versatility – the remarkable ease with which they master the languages, customs, art and technology of other peoples. They manage to settle just as easily next to the Arctic Ocean as on the shores of the Black Sea. A British bourgeois will overwhelm you with questions, displaying such profound ignorance of the region neighboring his own, that you do not know where to start providing him with answers. A Frenchman, in his turn, is capable of living in Leicester Square for five years without understanding what goes on around it. How can it be explained that German science, which fails to cross the Rhine, has no problem crossing the Volga or that British poetry becomes distorted once it has crossed the Channel, while it can sail unscathed through the Baltic Sea? Moreover, how is all that going on under a government, which is suspicious and autocratic and which goes out of its way to separate us from Europe?12

Dostoevsky finds himself halfway between the two, so to speak. While Belinsky and Herzen were his predecessors, Vladimir Solovyov follows him. Solovyov, a young contemporary of Dostoevsky, accepted many features intrinsic to the philosophy and world-outlook of the writer. First and foremost, this applies to the belief formulated by Dostoevsky, “Beauty will save the world”. This link between the ethical and the aesthetic was quite a significant phenomenon in 19th-century Russia (the ethical element was important for Solovyov as well, because he was counting precisely on mankind’s ethical transformation). This link was the reason why Solovyov ‘half-­ accepted’ Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, although the two thinkers endorsed opposite principles when it came to basic philosophical questions. Common ground between them emerged on the basis of the fact that Solovyov found the beauty, purportedly playing 11 [Belinsky 1955], 439. 12 [Herzen 1957], 187 – 188.

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such an important role in the advancement of mankind, in life itself. In his view it was ontological. Starting out from that all-important idea, Solovyov then pursued questions of historical philosophy. By way of ethics and aesthetics Solovyov moved on to questions about Russia and the path she might follow. For him the question of East and West was also an all-important one. He saw the ‘inhumane God’ of the East and the ‘godless man’ of the West as direct opposites. Russia, in the eyes of a still young Solovyov, ought to reconcile those two opposites through her mediation. It is surely natural to assume that this was an echo of the idea of ‘universal responsiveness’, which Dostoevsky had elaborated in such detail? At the same time, when writers, critics and philosophers were putting forward their ideas, historians were bound, in their turn, to focus their attention on the same questions. The most cogent voices in these discussions were those of Sergei Solovyov and Vasili Klyuchevsky. Their works contain a good number of ideas useful for our investigation. Sergei Solovyov maintained that the historical paths followed by Russia and Europe during the medieval period were similar. He thus rejected the idea that the Russian path had been a completely isolated one, as propagated by the Slavophiles. Solovyov expressed many interesting thoughts in connection with the question as to how the Russian nation took shape. Klyuchevsky was to take up those ideas and develop them further. As we recall the ideas expounded by such prominent representatives of Russian historical thought in the 19th and early 20th century and compare their stance with the views of Soviet historians, we realize that the question regarding the identity of the Russian nation – as indeed that of any other nation – is an extremely complicated one. Deliberately dedicated research would be necessary to describe, even in brief, the positions adopted by Soviet historians. In the framework of these essays, we cannot claim to resolve the question comprehensively and are merely able to outline it. We know that the national features of a people are the result of long-term historical development. Let us take as the starting point for the nation (already clearly defined) – in accordance with the Marxist interpretation of the national question – the establishment of its capitalist social formation. It is clear that a certain amount of historical experience had already been accumulated by that time. Before the nation had taken shape, certain national characteristics of the people had already existed and many of those features would become features of the eventual nation. We can therefore speak of a development expanding over many centuries, in the course of which stable national features would emerge. At this point we immediately come up against special circumstances shaping, as it were, the Russian nation and its people. The nation was formed at an earlier stage in the ethnic community’s development than was the case in a number of European countries or in America, where broadly similar processes of settlement took place in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Russia, on the other hand, because of special geographical and historical

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conditions they took place earlier. It should, however, be pointed out that the final stage in the formation of the Russian nation took place in a later period – in the second half of the 19th century. It is, however, evident that important features of the nation began to take place in the medieval period. It can thus be seen that the distinctive feature of Russian history is the way in which Russian people were able to settle in a very large territory over a relatively short period of time. Klyuchevsky stated that “The history of Russia is the history of a country which colonizes itself ” 13 – growing in actual size through its colonization of new lands. Extensive areas to the North and the East were open to the Russians for settlement and there were enormous possibilities for ‘pastures new’. In the 13th century Russians had already made their way to the River Pechora and the Kola Peninsula. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Urals were being settled. From the 12th century onwards, expeditions set out northwards from Novgorod to the northern part of Western Siberia. In the 17th century, parts of the population from the Urals were resettling in Siberia. By the middle of the 18th century, Russians had even made their way to the Kamchatka Peninsula. If we bear in mind the size of the territory, then it can only be compared with the most extensive of conquests – those of Alexander the Great or the Mongols. Yet in Russia this process, in the course of which Slavic tribes mingled with others, was a gradual one and did not resemble conquests of an undeniably violent type. The process involved in the settling of Russia’s lands, intensified through the consolidation of feudal relations, shaped some important features of the Russian people’s character, which would later become national features. The Russians’ capacity for endurance, forged by the constant need to stand up to the elements, their ability to adjust rapidly in new situations, their preference for small settlements as many people were moving north and east and, finally, their distinctive relationship with Nature as the most suitable setting, in which man and human communities can exist, all helped create the roots for those national characteristics, which went on to develop and adapt but were based precisely on the features outlined above. Misfortunes, endless journeys, ‘no fixed abode’ – all that was part of Russian life over many centuries. We could add to that list the long period of the Mongol-Tatar yoke and the process of winning back Russian lands, which was so important for the formation of a nation which had begun much earlier. Geography in conjunction with specific historical situations determined to a large extent the nature of Russia’s path through history. The Russians’ long-suffered patience was reinforced by the role they were destined to play in the 13th–15th centuries, when Russia functioned as a buffer protecting Western Europe from the Mongol-Tatar onslaught. It was at that time that many features 13 [Klyuchevsky 1956], 31.

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of its historical path took root. During the period of Mongol-Tatar occupation, medieval Russia proved unable to make the most of the chance to move forward as the main European countries had. Its general pattern of development was disrupted. From that time on Russia has been catching up, disregarding unresolved issues and moving on to new ones, bracketing the two steps together in the process. At this point and in those particular conditions, in which features of the Russian people’s character had been taking shape since as far back as the pre-Mongol period, new additional circumstances also have to be taken into account, which introduce highly distinctive features into Russian history. Perhaps the coming together of those two principles led not only to a strengthening of some specific features but also to contradictions and contrasts of movements heading in different directions. The experience of long suffering can sometimes turn into an unwillingness to endure any more: peaceful co-existence with other peoples can give way to a resolute tendency to dissociate from them. Drawing a conclusion from all of the above, it should be possible to define the question in general outline. The roots of national features should be sought in the historical paths along which, first, the character of the Russian people developed and, then, that of the Russian nation, and also in the conditions in which they took shape. The “universal responsiveness” referred to earlier probably stemmed from the ancient process, by which the Russian people became integrated with other peoples, when they were settling diverse new lands. There are, without doubt, historical reasons for the contradictory nature of the development of the Russian nation – factors which at various times shaped and consolidated some features or others. These features are often defined in the historical literature. It is said, for example, that the Russians are a people of extremes – moderation is not for them. The Russian soul is not deterred on the very edge of extreme situations: it can be intoxicated by the prospect of imminent death. Let us recall the self-immolation of the more ardent of the Old Believers, condemning themselves to torture and death, and the noblewoman Feodosia Morozova, who in Vasili Surikov’s painting as well, remains defiant in an extreme situation. On one occasion Nikolai Berdyaev formulated his ideas about the distinctive features of the Russians and other nations, saying that Russian people were either apocalyptic by nature or nihilists; Germans were mystics or compulsive critics, and the French were dogmatics or sceptics.14 This idea, expressed as a list of aphorisms, sums up as it were the reflections and comparisons voiced not only by Berdyaev, but also by Dostoevsky. It was in a book about Dostoevsky that Berdyaev expressed the above-mentioned idea. It has often been pointed out that Russian culture has always been of a very intense kind, was always taking on tasks involving struggle, aimed at defending the interests of those who were humiliated, who were oppressed. Only once at the beginning of the 14 [Berdyaev 1968], 13.

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19th century – during Pushkin’s lifetime – did certain elements of Renaissance excess appear. In particular, Pushkin’s genius could embrace everything: he possessed the ability, unusual for Russians, to distance himself in his thoughts from the burning issues of the day. It was no coincidence that Pushkin’s personality is presented to Russians as a certain kind of ideal of the free individual. In other eras there is no such abundance – culture has tasks to fulfill, it has commitments, it is subordinated to the requirements of more important objectives. This is a feature of the nation rooted in its socio-historical origins. Russian society was always under pressure from reactionary forces: culture became an arena in which social ideas clashed. Another factor was the gulf between the rulers and the poor, the educated classes and the common people. Education was perceived by those who possessed and promoted culture as a source of shame vis-à-vis the people, as guilt. That explains why, in the history of Russian culture, the people are often at the forefront of attention, idealized or even venerated. In Western Europe there was no such phenomenon as narodnichestvo (radical populism) – it was an exclusively Russian phenomenon. When we consider how it arose, we reach the conclusion that it was not simply a question of class divisions, as in the cases of other countries and peoples. There was something additional beyond that which was usual elsewhere. The difference resulted from the Petrine reforms having introduced changes that separated more than ever before the high from the low, the rich from the poor, the cultured from the ‘uncultured’. The reforms implemented by Peter the Great resulted, in their turn, from the historical situation rooted in the 13th–15th centuries, when the gap between medieval Russia and Western Europe had formed. At this moment so important in Russian history, when the divide between Russia and the West had been swept away, when the distance between them shrank – the distance that had resulted from the Mongol-Tatar yoke – the moment marked by the major reforms at the turn of the 17th century, many other features also emerged. Let us mention some of them: the intensive nature of the historical development, to which we have already referred and the pattern of that advance in rapid spurts, of which more later; the uneven pace of historical development in which bursts of rapid change led to large gaps between generations, which would reject what had gone before or come after them; the lack of tradition, which might have ensured at least a superficial link between successive phenomena. If we consider all these questions, we encounter those very features of the national culture rooted in the essential features of the nation. Time and time again we encounter cases in which, against the background of a great past, a situation in the here and now appears to be unique, although of course it too has its roots in the traditions of the past. Every time all these factors are woven into a phenomenon which appears as something special, never to be repeated.

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So far we have drawn attention to some features which render the Russian nation and its culture so distinct, and addressed the historical roots of these. Another, historically oriented aspect of the same question would be interrogating the role that the Orthodox Church played in the formation of the Russian nation. This particular question is a highly complex one. It is, however, impossible to discuss the distinctive nature of Russia’s national character without considering it. Medieval Russia adopted the Orthodox variant of Christianity and later – in particular after the fall of Constantinople – it assumed the role of heir to the great empire, taking on the role of the ‘Third Rome’. The Orthodox world, which had made it possible for culture to flourish and advance so impressively in the medieval period, proved unable to adjust to what was new in the periods which followed, to break free from the confines of the Middle Ages and participate in cultural advance. One important external ­situation naturally played a part in this: most of the countries from the former Byzantine world were invaded by barbarians, nomadic peoples or various conquerors, who either suppressed cultural activity (as had been the case in Byzantium itself ) or isolated certain peoples over long periods from the progressive cultural developments proceeding in gradual stages throughout Europe (as was the case in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Armenia and, to some extent, in Russia itself ). Yet can this state of affairs be explained with reference to conquests alone? Had not those conquests themselves and their consequences been predetermined from within – at least to some extent? If we cast a cursory glance at the general destiny of the countries within the Byzantine orbit, it is easy to observe that not one of them scaled great cultural heights after the medieval period – in the 18th or 19th century. Not a single one of them, apart that is from Russia. Yet for Russia too, the process of the transition from the old path to the new one – a process involving the combination of the old and the new – would constitute one of the most fundamental problems on her path as a nation. That particular transition is most probably the most important point which needs to be resolved in order to explain the fate of Russia as a nation. Byzantine culture itself did not appear to have a straight and easy path forward. Viewed from a historical perspective it appeared to be extremely stable. Changes were gradual and it seems to be constantly returning to its original roots. Attention has long since been focused on the fact that Byzantine art passed through a series of ‘rebirths’, revivals. This is a unique case, which is not repeated and for which there are no precedents in the history of art anywhere in the world. It reflects the very essence of Byzantine art 15. Without having the opportunity to develop this theme here, we should like to outline once again, in just the most general of terms, the already well-known idea to the effect that there was no direct path via Byzantine culture leading to the periods that followed it. 15 For more on this, see: [Alpatov 1967 b].

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We mention this merely in order to emphasize another very unusual feature of Russian culture. Russia is the only country in the Orthodox world having brought forth a high culture of its own in the post-medieval period. Moreover, Russia succeeded in promoting her variant of the general cultural process in Europe. How can this be explained? Through that ability of hers to absorb something alien and make it her own? Through a superficial attitude to certain national principles, resulting in a betrayal of her own very self? The latter prospect is surely out of the question, because we know about the difficulties and pain involved, when Russia moved on to new paths. Furthermore, the new paths did not in any way mean that Russia was renouncing her past. It is impossible to answer this question in just a few words: it requires special examination. The answer, however, needs to be sought in the question about Russia’s national identity, regardless of where its deepest roots are – either in national characteristics which took shape long ago and are well established or in a particular historical situation (such a situation will inevitably also be linked to those characteristics to some extent). Thus, we can safely say that the actual history of Russia, the process of the emergence of the Russian nation and the special conditions in which that process took place, were all involved in determining the character of the nation and the national culture. In order to take into consideration the many roots of the national character, it is essential to include all of the following: the historical path, religion, geography and the specific nature of social relations. Admittedly, national characteristics are usually considered in a clear form, which has already taken shape. It might seem that we could simply state what those are and then ‘apply’ them to artistic culture every time we seek to determine the implications of the question of key interest to us. It is, however, only a question of ‘might seem’. It is always very important to bear in mind precisely to which historical roots and factors a particular national feature can be traced back. Otherwise, many phenomena will remain difficult to understand. We have already mentioned historians – mainly those of the 19th century. Still ‘hot on the trail’, they examined questions regarding specific national characteristics at a time when those very characteristics had only just succeeded in finally taking shape. Of interest to us, however, are not only ideas that took shape within the framework of historical research or the philosophy of history. We should also mention some of those studying Russian literature who have, on various occasions, raised questions similar to the one discussed here. In this connection we were keen to avail ourselves of some of the latest research, turning to the experience of Soviet literary studies of recent years and taking advantage of the fact that such material is available, while this is not the case in the field of art-history. In the work of literary historians several trends are to be observed which interconnect with the subject of our study. Links between Russia and the West are examined fairly actively. Discussion of them has appeared in a large number of separate articles

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treating various specific questions and brought together in collections published at regular intervals and also in broader reviews attempting to bring together a cross-section of such material. On the other hand, questions are raised in this context about the national features of Russian literature and its international significance. It is to the first of these questions that Boris Bursov devoted his book, The National Identity of Russian Literature, the second edition of which was published in 1967. The book does not provide a broad survey of material on Russian literature: Bursov conveys the nature of the selected question with reference to a small number of writers and to a small number of themes, which have been developed in Russian literature. In this study Bursov dwells mainly on the literature of the 19th century. For us what is of particular interest is the introductory chapter, in which Bursov raises a number of fundamental questions about literary and historical relations between Russia and the West. He focuses on Russia’s position halfway between East and West, on the patterns to be discerned in the process of Europeanization, which was particularly intensive at the turn of the 18th century, in the context of the “duel with Europe” 16 in which Russia was then embroiled and finally on the way in which Russia remained for a long time the European country “outside Europe” 17. It is above all with reference to the “duel with Europe” that the author explains the universality of Russian literature, which Dostoevsky had termed its “universal responsiveness”. The literary historian, Naum Berkovsky, adopted a different approach in his work On the World Significance of Russian Literature (which finally appeared in Leningrad in 1975). It was published posthumously but it had been written much earlier – in the 1940s. This book, though small in size, had extremely cogent content: it had been conceived as an analysis of how Russian literature was being criticized from abroad and evaluated. That was the key issue underlying the ideas expressed by this author. In his thought process, however, Berkovsky moved far beyond the limits initially laid down for his research. He put forward a whole series of interesting ideas directly concerned with the national identity of Russian literature and the contribution it had made to world literature as a whole. In his sensitive analysis of foreign literary criticism and works of Russian literature, he unfolds before us a number of its most characteristic features – its anthropocentrism, its profound preoccupation with the key elements of the life of the people, the unique importance of the ‘communal’, the rare prospects for its future, the potential for its development and much more besides. When we focus our attention on comparing the analysis of this question proposed by Berkovsky with the task before us in the current study, we are bound to conclude that literature provides us with far richer material for formulating clear and well-defined 16 [Bursov 1957], 18. 17 [Bursov 1957], 25.

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ideas than fine art does. Its link to philosophical thought and historical ideas is a closer one and at times it can even provide a mouthpiece for them. If we attempt to assign the same role to painting, we are bound to encounter difficulties. The ‘Russian idea’ is mediated in painting in a more indirect way. It can only lead us to profound and widescale conclusions with the help of a whole series of intermediate links. In view of this, we shall not search for ways in which to draw direct comparisons between features of Russian painting and any constant national features peculiar to it, even if this makes it look as if the current preface covers a wider range of issues than the study itself. When continuing our discussion of works of literary criticism of recent years, we cannot fail to mention an article which provoked wide public controversy – an article by Vadim Kozhinov entitled On the Principles for Structuring a History of Literature, published in the book Context-1972 (Moscow, 1973)18. Specifically, the subject is the history of Russian literature. Kozhinov proposes that the history of Russian literature in the 18th–19th centuries should be presented in a totally new way. The conception of the latter as a succession of styles and trends, which had been based on European literary schools – in particular the French one – should be rejected. In Russian literature the author finds an abundance of deviations from the European course of development, which obliges him to shift the influence of the Enlightenment from the 18th century to the middle of the 19th and to position Romanticism later still, after defining its roots as a reaction to the Enlightenment, revealing Sentimentalism to have been a phenomenon of the 1840s and Pushkin’s work to have been a manifestation of the Renaissance. There is an element of irony to be found in Kozhinov’s arguments, yet he does not abandon the actual periodization, which had been formulated on the basis of the path followed by European literature. If that literature is taken as the key criterion, it is still possible nevertheless to assemble a larger number of arguments in support of the traditional concept, than in favor of a new one. We shall not, however, embark on that task – the history of Russian literature is not our direct concern. As for painting, the whole course of our subsequent examination of that material will, to some extent, be an answer to the questions raised by Vadim Kozhinov. It would be wrong, however, not to accept that Kozhinov’s conception of literature provides us with food for thought. Works by literary historians can in many respects serve as ‘stimuli’ for examination of our central subject. We can find in them examples of practical and correct resolution for a number of questions significant for our purposes. One of these is the attitude to the question of influences. It would seem evident that we need to adopt the reasonable position, which is, as a rule, the one argued by the majority. (In truth though, when one particular position is asserted, opinions voiced in particular resolutions of a question can diverge). This position with regard to influences can be summed up as follows. 18 See also: [Kozhinov 1973].

Introduction to the book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools |

An influence, when assimilated, is to some extent at least predetermined in that it is not there to correct a path or a trend in the existing development of art. Absorbing influences does not therefore necessarily testify to a lack of independence. Identifying an instance of influence does not undermine a national school of art. In our opinion, this is a sensible approach to the phenomenon of influence. We can, of course, only adopt such an approach when considering important phenomena and trends in art. Historians of literature treat this question much more freely than do art historians. For them, it is not in any way humiliating to define features as borrowed, to designate subjects, motifs or features of a method as having been adopted from another writer. They are well aware that the literary process cannot move on without borrowings, influences or exchange. It is interesting to look at how literary historians interpret the question of borrowings in the work of Gogol. In a number of his early works 19, the linguist and literary critic, Viktor Vinogradov, wrote directly about how many motifs in Gogol’s work were borrowings from elsewhere. He singles out, for example, the subject of Gogol’s story The Nose, which he interprets as being derived from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Motifs concerning the artist, who squanders his talent, are often to be found in the work of E. T. A. Hoffmann who, as we know, was a writer in whom Gogol definitely showed an interest. Vinogradov also found parallels with the French variant of ‘littérature frénétique’ – the work of Jules Janin. Another theme that probably also helped shape Gogol’s ideas was that of the mad artist, as depicted in Hoffmann’s Kater Mohr. Vinogradov picks out parallels of this kind in the work of Dostoevsky as well. This example is by no means an exception. Literary historians very much enjoy comparisons of this kind. For them it is a separate theme all of its own which, incidentally, could also be applied to art criticism. Analysis of this kind within one national school or between schools can lead to interesting conclusions and to important comparisons. Yet, most important of all is that the essence of the question should not be lost sight of when influences are being discussed. Gogol was predestined, as it were, to move in a particular direction. The apt word here is specifically ‘predestined’. There is no need for us to be afraid of that word. If we believe in patterns of artistic progress, we must assume that more often than not the beginning of that process, early signs of where that movement might lead, imply from the outset what the results of that movement might be and its final goal. Even if that goal is not yet completely clear, nor its eventual impact assured, it should at least be emerging before us in general outline. So, while Gogol is fulfilling his destiny in the literary process, he experiences influences and borrows. After setting out on this path, he still remains Gogol, even more strikingly than before. Neither Sterne, nor Hoffmann nor Jules Janin can prevent him from remaining true to himself. 19 See: [Vinogradov 1929] – [Vinogradov 1925].

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Another question which literary historians help us to resolve is whether the advance of art is proceeding at too intense or fast a pace. This is a particularly important issue for historians of Russian art for understandable reasons. Russia has often leapt over certain stages in her development. We often encounter the blending together of different periods within the context of the historical-cultural process. Suffice it to recall that in relation to artistic culture, the 18th century in Russia took upon itself not only the tasks of that period, but also those associated with the Renaissance. It was setting art free from its religious function, lending it a more secular character and narrowing the gulf between art and science. It focused attention on the tasks linked with trends of the Enlightenment, which had set the tone for the 18th century in Europe as a whole. Those stages merged in the Russian art of the 19th century and even more so in Russian art of the early 20th century. In the latter case we are confronted by the coalescence over a short space of time of artistic phenomena from disparate stages – ranging from the traditions of 19th-century Critical Realism to the wildly Avant-garde trends and far-left movements of a kind only possible in European art at the beginning of the 20th century. Back in his day Belinsky had written: “We are suddenly experiencing all the milestones in European life, which in the West unfolded in a gradual and consistent way.” 20 Here he outlines in a fairly accurate account the accelerated, concentrated development of Russian culture as a whole. This idea of collapsing several different stages into one had originally been attached to the 18th and the early 19th centuries, but later it was also taken further by Natalia Kovalenskaya 21. Yet her theory of ‘stages growing together’ met with little approval among art historians. Meanwhile, although it was not elaborated in sufficient depth or with sufficient thoroughness, it should be acknowledged that the theory did have a rational core: unfortunately, it was interpreted as anti-historical. In the meantime, literary historians were investigating this question further from the point of view of historical theory. Let us mention here first and foremost the book by Georgi Gachev entitled The Accelerated Development of Literature and his series of articles on the same question and about existing branches of theories and histories of literature. To one degree or another, this question touches upon various national schools of literature. In the history of literature and art, as a rule, only certain national schools achieve ‘exemplary’, logical and consistent development. In general, such development usually proceeds at an uneven pace, in bursts. Those lagging behind sometimes catch up, advance to the forefront and by doing so once again interrupt any even development. What interests literary historians is the actual mechanism behind that movement, which defines its patterns. That would be a step towards establishing the types of the movements concerned, as it were, the types of combined and accelerated development. What this 20 [Belinsky 1954], 198. 21 See: [Kovalenskaya 1951].

Introduction to the book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools |

would involve is the incorporation within a system of what is, essentially speaking, the reflection of the disruption of a defined system – namely the pattern of the exception – which represents a kind of rule. Raising the question in this way would be very fruitful for art historians. The questions we have touched upon in this introduction can only be resolved through profound historical analysis. If we attempt to detach any particular moment in history (for example the 19th century) and isolate it from the rest, we shall fail. At any ‘point’ in the 19th century, we shall be confronted by the whole path that preceeded that moment. National features and the identity of art have taken shape over centuries. It is essential to take into account the whole movement and all the stages that went before, because in history we are up against an unusual form of memory – one that appears to embrace several different spheres of social reality. Art always appears to be one of the agents promoting that memory. At every stage, one has to bear in mind everything that has, by that point in time, characterized the historical path already traversed. For this reason, it is essential for us – at least in the most general of terms – to carry out a comparative examination of Russian and West-European art in the medieval period and the 18th century. It should, however, be pointed out that in this examination we shall not confine our investigation to painting alone. We shall not be carrying out the tasks of specialized analysis but making general comments, which are – in our opinion – important for the subsequent research. Translated by Katherine Judelson

Bibliogr aphy Alpatov, Mikhail: Russian Impact on Art. New York 1950 (Trans. by Ivy Litvinov). [Alpatov 1967]: Алпатов: Этюды по истории русского искусства [Studies on the History of Russian Art], т. 1 – 2. Москва 1967. http://artyx.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000006/index. shtml (14. 05. 2021) [Alpatov 1967 a]: Алпатов, Михаил Владимирович: Из истории русской науки об искусстве [From the History of Russian Research on Art]. In: [Alpatov 1967], т. 1. [Alpatov 1967 b]: Алпатов Михаил Владимирович: Проблемы изучения византийской живописи [Questions in the Study of Byzantine Art]. In: [Alpatov 1967], т. 1. [Belinsky 1954]: Белинский, Виссарион Григорьевич: «Герой нашего времени». Сочинение М.Лермонтова [„The Hero of Our Time”. A novel by M. Lermontov]. In: [Belinsky 1953 – 1958], т. V. Москва 1954.

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[Belinsky 1955]: Белинский, Виссарион Григорьевич: Мысли и заметки о русской литературе (1848) [Thoughts and Notes on Russian Literature (1848)]. In: [Belinsky 1953 – 1958], т. IX. Москва 1955. [Belinsky 1953 – 1958]: Белинский, Виссарион Григорьевич. Полное собрание сочинений в 13 томах [Complete works in 13 volumes]. Москва 1953 – 1958. [Benois 1901]: Бенуа, Александр Николаевич: История живописи в XIX веке. Русская живопись [A History of Painting in the 19th Century. Russian Painting]. С.-Петербург 1901. [Benois 1904]: Бенуа, Александр Николаевич: Русская школа живописи [The Russian School of Painting], т. 1 – 2. С.-Петербург 1904. [Berdyaev 1968]: Бердяев, Николай Александрович: Мировоззрение Достоевского [The Worldview of Dostoevsky]. Paris, 1968. [Bursov 1957]: Бурсов, Борис Иванович: Национальное своеобразие русской литературы [The National Identity of Russian Literature]. Ленинград 1957. [Dostoevsky 1956]. In: [Dostoevsky 1956 – 1958], т. 10. Москва 1956. [Dostoevsky 1956 – 1958]: Достоевский, Федор Михайлович: Собрания сочинений в 10 томах [Collected Works in ten volumes]. Москва 1956 – 1958. [Efros]: Эфрос, Абрам Маркович: Два века русского искусства [Two Centuries of Russian Art]. Москва 1969. [Fedorov-Davydov 1947]: Федоров-Давыдов, Алексей Александрович: Основные вопросы истории русского искусства [Fundamental Questions in the History of Russian Art]. In: Iskusstvo 1 (1947). [Grabar 1910 – 1913]: Грабарь, Игорь Эммануилович: История русского искусства [History of Russian Art], т. 1 – 6. Москва 1910 – 1913. [Grabar Introduction]: Грабарь, Игорь Эммануилович: Введение в историю русского искусства Introduction to the history of Russian Art. In: [Grabar 1910 – 1913], 1 – 132. [Herzen 1957 – 1965]: Герцен, Александр Иванович: Полное собрание сочинений в тридцати томах [Complete Works in Thirty Volumes]. Москва 1957 – 1965. [Herzen 1957], Герцен, Александр Иванович Старый мир и Россия. Письма Искандера к В.Линтону. Письмо третье [The Old World and Russia. The letters of Iskander to V. Linton. Third Letter]: In: [Herzen 1957 – 1965], т. 12. Москва 1957, 187 – 188. [Klyuchevsky 1956]: Ключевский, Василий Осипович: Лекции по русской истории. Лекция П. In: [Kluchevsky 1956 – 1959], т. 1. Москва 1956. [Klyuchevsky 1956 – 1959]: Ключевский, Василий Осипович: Сочинения в восьми томах [Works in eight volumes]. Москва 1956 – 1959. [Kovalenskaya 1940]: Коваленская, Наталья Николаевна: Русское искусство ХVIII века [Russian Art of the 18th Century]. Москва 1940. [Kovalenskaya 1951]: Коваленская, Наталья Николаевна: История русского искусства первой половины XIX века [The History of Russian Art in the First Half of the 19th Century]. Москва 1951.

Introduction to the book Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools |

[Kozhinov 1973]: Кожинов, Вадим Валериянович: О принципах построения истории литературы (методологические заметки) [On the Principles for Structuring a History of Literature]. In: Контекст-1972: Литературно-теоретические исследования. Москва 1973. [Lazarev 1970]: Лазарев, Виктор Никитич: Искусство средневековой Руси и Запада (ХI – XV веков) [The Art of Medieval Russia and the West (11th–115th centuries)]. Москва 1970. [Lenin 1958]: Ленин, Владимир Ильич: О национальной гордости великороссов [On the National Pride of the Great Russians]. In: [Lenin], т. 26. Москва 1958, 106 – 110. [Lenin 1958 – 1966]: Ленин, Владимир Ильич: Полное собрание сочинений в 55 томах [Complete Works in 55 volumes]. Москва 1958 – 1966. [Vinogradov 1925]: Виноградов, Виктор Владимирович: Гоголь и натуральная школа [Gogol and the Natural School], Leningrad, 1925. [Vinogradov 1929], Виноградов, Виктор Владимирович: Эволюция русского натурализма. Гоголь и Достоевский [The Evolution of Russian Naturalism. Gogol and Dostoevsky]. Ленинград 1929.

Originally published as: САРАБЬЯНОВ, Дмитрий Владимирович: Русская живопись 19 века среди европейских школ. Опыт сравнительного исследования. Москва 1980 [Sarabianov, Dmitri: Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools: A Comparative Approach. Moscow 1980]

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Commentary on Sarabianov’s Text From 1959 on, and for most of his career, the Soviet and Russian art historian Dmitri Vladimirovich Sarabianov (1923 – 2013) taught the history of Russian art at the Department of Art History of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he had also completed his studies. He was first employed as a lecturer and later as Head of Department and professor. Sarabianov’s work focused on the history of 19th- and early 20th-century Russian art. In parallel to his academic career, Sarabianov belonged to the artistic milieu of ‘Soviet Modernism’ that emerged in the Thaw-era.1 He also worked as an art critic. The weight of his research and teaching had the capacity to open doors to, and increasingly explore, subject areas previously neglected or purposefully disavowed due to the ideological constraints defining Soviet art historiography. One such study field was the Avant-garde art of the 1910s. Sarabianov’s son, Andrei Sarabianov, renowned connoisseur of the Avant-garde, continued to develop these areas of study. Andrei Sarabianov edited, beside several other publications, the reference work Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-garde.2 The interrelationship between Russian art and European art movements was a leitmotif of Sarabianov’s research. The first monograph he published on the subject was Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools. Our volume makes the introduction to this book available in English translation, while Elena Sharnova’s essay, also in the current volume, clarifies the art historical context in which the book came into being. Sarabianov considers Russian painting in an international context and from a comparative perspective. His analytical method is based on typological, structural as well as stylistic characteristics. In his view, “the comparative approach aims at analyzing the historical mechanism setting national features in motion”.3 This was meant more as a generalized affirmation of the existence of corresponding phenomena in the art of various national contexts rather than an investigation of concrete cases of direct influence. In subsequent studies, Sarabianov further examined the topic of East-West European relationships and encounters. These publications include the monographs 1 The period in Soviet history from the mid 1950’s to the mid 1960’s in which social repression and censorship were overturned and a new freedom was instituted under the Party Chairmanship of Nikita Khrushchev is known as the “Thaw”. 2 [Sarabianov, Andrei D. 2013 – 2014.]. The editors thank Andrei Sarabianov for the permission to publish an extract from his father’s book in English translation in this volume. Citations in this Introduction are provided in the editors’ translation. 3 [Sarabianov 1980], 19.

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Art Nouveau (1989)4 and Russia and the West: Historical and Artistic Connections from the 18th – to the Beginning of the 20th Century (2003)5 as well as numerous articles and catalogue contributions.6 Dmitri Sarabianov was a master of metaphor and analytical description, qualities which Sarabianov himself appreciated in fellow-art historian and his senior, Mikhail Alpatov’s essayistic writing. As a student of Alexei A. Fedorov-Davydov, who represented the sociological method in early Soviet art history, Sarabianov was also interested in the history of the discipline,7 while also followed current trends offered in the publications of Western art historians. The most important methodological instrument in Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools was the author’s interdisciplinary approach. Drawing on insights from neighboring disciplines such as History and Philology, the book placed Russian art in a broad cultural context. The key theme therein is the controversy between pro-Westerners and Slavophiles, which has shaped Russian cultural discourse from the 19th century to this day: is Russia part of Europe or does it represent a special cultural path? In examining this question, Sarabianov first engages with the critical thinker Petr Ya. Chaadaev and his concept of ‘national nihilism’, then moves on to introduce the ideas of the philosopher Vladimir S. Solovyov and the historian Vasili O. Klyuchevsky, both held in disfavor at the time. As a next step, Sarabianov evaluates the imperial dimensions of Russia as a country shaped by “internal colonization” (a term coined by Klyuchevsky), and also outlines the ‘condensation’ or ‘acceleration’ of Russia’s cultural development after the paradigm change instituted in Russia through Peter the Great’s Europeanizing reforms, as well as the ‘discontinuities’ therein.8 In the first chapter of the book entitled The Art of the Old Rus and the 18th Century in the Face of Western Europe the Russian art historian proposed a concept of a ‘double face’ of the pre-Petrinian Russian art: one looking toward Greek-Byzantine tradition and another oriented to Western Europe. By analyzing the complexity of artistic development Sarabianov discussed the idea of the ‘failed Russian Renaissance and Baroque’ referring to Jan Białostocki’s concept of the temporary inconsistency of the Polish Renaissance art and the problem of the ‘folk Mannerism’ 9 as well to studies on reminescences of Gothic tradition in the Renaissance art by Nikolaus Pevsner and Ernst Gombrich.

4 [Sarabianov 1989]. 5 [Sarabianov 2003]. 6 F. e. Sarabianov in Strauss (ed.), 45 – 57. – Sarabianov in [Exh.Cat. Berlin Moscow 1995 – 1996], 97 – 103. – [Sarabianov 2000 a], 62 – 71. 7 [Sarabianov 1989 a], 5 – 15. 8 [Sarabianov 1995], 31. 9 Białostocki 1966, 36 – 56.

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Sarabianov was inspired by philologists and literary scholars of his time. Seeking acknowledgment of his comparative approach,10 he opened a kind of dialogue with the scholars of the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School and their predecessors, the Russian formalists of the 1920s. These were in charge, for instance, of the almanac Context-72, an important publication of the time, engaging with the method of semiotic analysis and publishing articles by the likes of philosopher Alexei F. Losev on the philosophy of symbols, or a linguistic essay by Pavel A. Florensky, a fellow-philosopher and a martyr of the Soviets’s anti-religious campaigns. Soviet literary scholars of the 1970s and 1980s extensively contributed to exploring the history of interactions between European and Russian literatures, also constructing the concept of ‘cultural landscapes’– an orientation that Sarabianov shared with them. This structuralist approach was embedded in a broader trend in European and American art historiography (championed, among others, by Jan Białostocki and George Kubler) that was at the time busy to re-discover the notion of the geography of art (Kunstgeographie), first practiced in the 1920s. Sarabianov studied the position of various art historians on the topic of Russian-European cultural transfers. He consulted the work of Fyodor I. Buslaev, the godfather of Russian art history as a discipline as well as the contribution of his own contemporary colleagues, Mikhail V. Alpatov 11 and Viktor N. Lazarev’s studies on Byzantine and Old-Russian art. The most crucial reference points on this topic were, however, A ­ lexander N. Benois and Igor I. Grabar. They both were art historians and painters, having conducted ambitious art historical projects before World War I and into the 1950s, which situated Russian art into the European cultural context. Their History of Russian Painting in the 19th Century (1901)12 and History of Russian Art (1910 – 1913)13 focused on themes like the impact of European art on Russian visual culture, a topic notoriously neglected by Soviet art history. The art historian Gleb Pospelov prefaced Sarabianov’s Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools and pointed out that the study offers more inspiring hypotheses than answers or solutions. Some of Sarabianov’s positions surely have to be re-evaluated given the historical distance; his compulsive search for stylistic analogies between Russian and European art (see e. g. his notion ‘Russian Biedermeier’) or his pursuit for a certain psychological constancy being reflected in the ‘national character’ through centuries seem hardly tenable from today’s perspective. Nevertheless, Sarabianov’s work provide an important contribution to the study of the interconnexions of Russian and European art in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. 10 For the analyze of the interconnections of visual arts and literature see [Sarabianov 2000], 62 – 71. 11 Especially relevant was the book Russian Impact on Art (Alpatov 1950). 12 [Benois 1901]. 13 [Grabar 1910 – 1913].

Commentary on Sarabianov’s Text  |

Bibliogr aphy Alpatov, Mikhail: Russian Impact on Art. Transl. by Ivy Litvinov. New York 1950. [Benois 1901]: Бенуа, Александр Николаевич: История живописи в XIX веке. Русская живопись [A History of Painting in the 19th Century. Russian Painting]. С.-Петербург 1901. Białostocki, Jan: Stil und Ikonographie. Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft. Dresden 1966. Białostocki, Jan: Manierismus und „Volkssprache“ in der polnischen Kunst. In: Białostocki 1966, 36 – 56. [Exh.Cat. Berlin Moscow 1995 – 1996]: Berlin – Moskau 1900 – 1950: Bildende Kunst, Photo­ graphie, Architektur, Theater, Literatur, Musik, Film. Berlinische Galerie, Puschkin-Museum für bildende Künste Moskau, 5, März 1996 bis 30. Juni 1996. München, 1995. [Grabar 1910 – 1913]: Грабарь, Игорь Эммануилович: История русского искусства [History of Russian Art], vol. 1 – 6. Москва 1910 – 1913. [Ivanov / Paperny / Parnis (eds) 2000]: Иванов, Вячеслав В. / Паперный, Зиновий С. / Парнис, Александр (eds.): Мир Велимира Хлебникова. Статьи. Исследования (1911 – 1998) [The World of Velimir Chlebnikov. Articles. Studies (1911 – 1998)]. Москва 2000. [Sarabianov, Andrei D.]: Сарабьянов, Aндрей Д.: Энциклопедия русского авангарда: Изобразительное искусство. Архитектура [Encyclopedia of the Russian Avant-garde], т. 1,2, 3/1, 3/2. Москва 2013 – 2014. [Sarabianov 1980]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Русская живопись XIX века среди европейских школ. Опыт сравнительного исследования [Russian Nineteenth-Century Painting among the European Schools. A Comparative Approach]. Москва 1980. [Sarabianov 1989]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Стиль модерн. Истоки. История. Проблемы [Art Nouveau. Sources. History. Problems]. Москва 1989. [Sarabianov 1995]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Некоторые методологические вопросы искусствознания в ситуации исторического рубежа. In: Вопросы искусствознания, 1/2 (1995), 5 – 15. [Sarabianov 2000]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Неопримитивизм в русской живописи и поэзии 1910-х годов [Neo-primitivism in the Russian Painting and Poetry of the 1910s]. In: [Ivanov / Paperny / Parnis (eds)], 619 – 636. [Sarabianov 2000 a]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Малевич между французским кубизмом и итальянским футуризмом. In: Русский авангард 1910 – 1920-х годов в европейском контексте. Москва 2000, 62 – 71. [Sarabianov 2003]: Сарабьянов, Дмитрий Владимирович: Россия и Запад. Историкохудожественные связи XVIII – начала XX в. [Russia and the West. Historical and Artistic connections, 18th – beginning of the 20th centuries]. Москва 2003. Sarabianov, Dmitri V.: An der Spitze der internationalen Avangarde. Russische und deutsche Kunst von 1910 bis in die zwanziger Jahre. In: Exh.Cat. Berlin Moscow 1995 – 1996, 97 – 103.

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Sarabianov, Dmitri V.: Fauvismus – Expressionismus – Neoprimitivismus. In: Strauss, Thomas (ed.), 45 – 57. Strauss, Thomas (ed.): Westkunst – Ostkunst: Absonderung oder Integration? Materialien zu einer neuen Standortbestimmung. München 1991.

Intercontinental Encounters – Creating New Geographies

Corinne Geering

Encompassing the World within Regions Soviet Scholars and the Politics of Socialist Internationalism in UNESCO’s Cultural Studies Since the 1990s, several volumes and monographs have introduced new approaches to global art history in response to the soaring critique of Eurocentrism. These publications proposed to focus on circulations, transfers and exchanges in order to reflect the multiple centers and orientations in the discipline of art history throughout the world.1 Whereas these approaches have been marked with claims of novelty, this article argues that cross-cultural transfers and exchanges were an integral part of the methodologies of art and culture studies during the period that followed the Second World War.2 During the Cold War, and against the background of decolonization, world historiographical accounts were increasingly shaped by cultural, political and economic regionalism. Forming part of efforts to decenter Western scholarship, these accounts often involved transnational and cross-regional research cooperation, and thus produced scholarship through collective, rather than individual, efforts. One platform for this kind of multidisciplinary and transnational scholarly exchange took shape within the framework of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ), and, in particular, through the Cultural Studies 3 program launched in 1966. This article will discuss the involvement of Soviet scholars in the UNESCO-sponsored International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia (IASCCA), and the International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (IASDSC). Alongside studies of other regions, these associations provided many exchange opportunities for scholars from world regions that had assumed marginal positions in the international scientific community, in an effort to respond to the contemporary critique of a Western-centered academic discourse. A discussion of the position of scholarship from 1 Elkins 2007b. – Zijlmans / van Damme 2008. – Casid / D’Souza 2014. – DaCosta Kaufmann / Dossin / Joyeux-Prunel 2015. 2 For recent publications on precursors of world art history since the late 19th century, see ­Pfisterer 2008. – Azatyan 2009. – Born 2013. 3 Initially, the programme was listed as ‘studies in the culture section,’ and from 1970, it was referred to as Cultural Studies, comprising studies of different cultures usually defined along regional lines. By using this notion in this article, there is no intention to imply a connection of these studies to the contemporary Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham.

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the Soviet Union is particularly insightful, because of the USSR’s location in Eastern Europe and Asia, thus promoting a non-Western outlook as part of international cooperation, as well as between the Soviet republics. Furthermore, notwithstanding their different underlying ideologies, UNESCO’s efforts to promote unity in diversity across the globe shared similar objectives with the Socialist Internationalist paradigm of friendship between peoples, as both worked with a common understanding of cultural particularism based on state sovereignty.4 Against this background, the goals of Socialist Internationalism could be incorporated into the framework of UNESCO, as Socialist countries were seeking to increase cooperation within the structure of intergovernmental organizations that transcended ideological divides. The design of common research endeavors across ideological boundaries was shaped by the international political objectives of the respective states and the international organizations. Therefore, Socialist Internationalist interests were aligned with other objectives, most importantly, the post-colonial agenda.5 In light of these circumstances, this chapter discusses international projects coordinated by UNESCO, in order to analyze how scholars from Socialist countries contributed to international scholarly debates, with a view to understanding how they positioned themselves in the world. This chapter will also shed light on the interdependence of scholarship and cultural politics, by first establishing the historical context for the emergence of the UNESCO Cultural Studies program, before analyzing the world art historiography contributions by Soviet scholars within this framework.6 Publications by IASCCA and IASDSC, as well as archival sources from UNESCO and Soviet institutions, reveal how the multinational setting of the Soviet Union, and within the regions bordering the Soviet state, served as a prism through which scholars could conceive of the world art at large. This included an array of new approaches based on regional outlooks that intended to move away from Western-centered epistemologies. At the same time, this regional re-orientation was structurally supported through the establishment of scholarship centers outside the West and funding conferences and publications.

4 For the prevalence of state sovereignty in international organization in the early Cold War, see M ­ uschik 2018. 5 See Iacob 2018. For Socialist Internationalism and the Socialist Globalization project involving the Global South, see Babiracki / Jersild 2016. – Mark / Kalinovsky / Marung 2020. 6 Most scholars investigating artistic production in IASCCA and IASDSC were active in the fields of iskusstvovedenie and iskusstvoznanie that can both be translated either as art studies, art history or art criticism. Depending on the academic traditions of the Soviet republics, these fields exhibited porous boundaries with other disciplines, such as monument protection and archaeology.

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Post-War Universalism and UNESCO’s Cultur al Studies The question of how world art should be conceived has been subject to intense scholarly debate. Whereas some researchers have supported the need for one universally relevant account, others have argued against the idea of global art history as being a single enterprise, applicable to all countries throughout the world.7 In the first instance, scholars have resorted to expanding the scale of their enquiry, by transferring Western accounts of art historiography to other regions, in an effort to include non-Western art.8 In many cases, the concept of world art also entailed expanding the scope of research to include different media and materials of artistic production. Canvas, miniature painting, mural, sculpture, stone and wooden architecture, among others, motivated scholars to draw on the work of several disciplinary traditions. Analogous reflections on world literature and world history by philologists and historians have also provided further sources of inspiration. While the conception of world art has received considerable attention, research has tended to neglect the simultaneous existence of divergent understandings of universalism that inform this concept. This is particularly relevant in the decades following the Second World War. Against the background of Cold War conflict, incompatible universalisms defined by both sides of the ideological divide claimed authority to project an account of world history and culture that could be applied across the globe.9 In this heated political setting, the tension between the notion of one shared world culture, on one hand, and cultural differences across the globe, on the other, was a central element of the way the cultural politics of Socialism sought to develop a distinct global artistic style. This involved the appropriation of ideas formulated in the West, and the reintegration of these ideas into the ideological construct of ‘Socialist world culture.’ One particularly illustrative example of such an appropriation is the exhibition, On the Happiness of People (Vom Glück des Menschen), which opened in East Berlin in 1967, and was conceived as a Socialist rendition of the popular exhibition, The Family of Man, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1953.10 Contrasting with such initiatives, the Soviet cultural political slogan of ‘Socialist in content, national in form,’ underlay the creation of a distinct artistic style that could be discerned as ‘Socialist’ across the globe.11 At the same time, aesthetic production in the style of Socialist Realism indicates that the normative artistic style in the Soviet Union still reflected orientalist attitudes. The history of Socialist Realism in the Asian Soviet republics reveals 7 For a comprehensive overview of the arguments in favour and against, see Elkins 2007a. 8 For a representative account, see Carrier 2008, xi. 9 See Del Pero 2014. – Geering 2019. 10 Goodrum 2015. 11 See, e. g., Nash 2016.

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the framing of the USSR’s “own Orient,” 12 vis-à-vis the centers in Moscow and Leningrad.13 Both the appropriation of Western models and the promotion of non-Western perspectives from within the USSR, shaped the participation of Soviet scholars in the discussion of world art. International organizations that transgressed the ideological divide between socialism and capitalism were nonetheless able to promote an understanding of world culture that could be compatible with a variety of different political outlooks.14 Among other international organizations, UNESCO was established in 1946, after the devastation of the Second World War. Many of UNESCO’s early projects were aimed at strengthening peace by promoting mutual understanding between peoples. Art served as a universal language to foster international unity, as can be seen in the publication series, Treasures of World Art, launched in 1954.15 This series set out to familiarize a global audience with the artistic achievements of different regions that had previously been less known. A three-person UNESCO crew collected materials for the publications on-site, in expeditions organized in cooperation with the national commissions. The publication dealing with the USSR was devoted to Russian icons, presenting them as a significant contribution to the history of world art. One of the authors of the volume, Soviet art historian, Viktor N. Lazarev, placed emphasis on the under-representation of this art in Western galleries and museums.16 The entire publication series highlighted the involvement of scholars from different regions in the dissemination of world art. The initiative reaches back to the immediate post-war years, when UNESCO, at this point still mostly comprised of Western states, intended to increase global knowledge about the cultural differences between nations. In 1947, the Committee of Experts for the Comparative Study of Cultures recommended enquiries, “into the conceptions that people have of their own cultures,” 17 thus promoting an emic research approach. In the following years, ­UNESCO’s composition had changed radically with the accession of Socialist states, and with newly independent states in Africa and Asia. Against this background, endeavors to study cultures from an emic perspective fell on fertile soil, not merely from an epistemological, but also from a political, point of view. After joining UNESCO , many newly independent Asian states were interested in making their voices heard in the international organization and, in the wake of the Korean War, trying to prevent the further escalation of international conflict in their region. The Indian and Japanese delegations, both UNESCO member states since 12 A term coined by Vera Tolz, see Tolz 2011. 13 Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen 2016, 156. 14 See Huxley 1946, 6 – 7. 15 Pearson 2010, 55. 16 Lazarev 1958, 13. 17 1949 November 2, Committee of Experts for the Comparative Study of Cultures (UNESCO Archives), 1.

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1946 and 1951 respectively, proposed to launch a project in order to promote mutual understanding between the Eastern and Western world. This proposal was approved by the General Conference of UNESCO , in New Delhi in 1956, in which a decision was made to launch the Major Project on Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values (1957 – 1967, hereafter the East–West Major Project), the goal of which was to incorporate a variety of perspectives in dialogue. Although reproducing the bipolarization of the Orient and Occident, this large-scale project neither defined the notions of ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western,’ nor that of ‘cultural values,’ in order to prevent political debates that were expected to emerge instantly.18 In the Soviet context, the notions of East and West were highly ambivalent. While the West was construed as the Slavs, the East referred to the peoples of Asia, including the Soviet territories in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia.19 Due to the vagueness of terms, the East–West Major Project nevertheless inspired international collaboration across a vast geographical area, motivating hundreds of diverse activities that were coordinated by special committees set up by forty-four National Commissions of UNESCO .20 Some of these activities explicitly distanced themselves from contemporary politics. For example, the publication series, Man through His Art, launched by the World Confederation of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP ) in 1963, presented art as being ahistorical and apolitical, “vanquish[ing] both time and conflict,” and thus providing, “a perfect basis for the introduction of one culture to another.” 21 At the same time, the publication series still reflected orientalist narratives. In a contribution entitled Samarkand the Fabulous, in the UNESCO Courier of 1962, the Uzbek town of Samarqand was presented as a relic from a distant past, rather than a contemporary city.22 The article featured photographs of ruined structures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by the Czech art historian, Miloš Hrbas, that, “still testif[ied] to the city’s former magnificence,” according to the image caption (fig. 1 and 2).23 During the 1960s, world art increasingly became the subject of scholarly enquiry from multiple centers, against a background of the global transformation of the academic discipline of Oriental studies. Across the world, many new institutes were founded beyond Western centers, which reflected the decentralization of scholarship. The East–West Major Project established regional research centers in Tokyo for East Asia, New Delhi for South-East Asia, and Tehran for Iranian culture, among 18 19 20 21 22

Wong 2008, 359 – 360. See, e. g., Tikhomirov / Ghafurov 1965. UNESCO 1968, 11. n. n. 1962a. For a discussion of how the ‘historical monuments’ of Samarqand have been framed by Russian imperial administration and the persistence of this perspective, see Gorshenina 2014. 23 n. n. 1962b, 19. The photographs were later reproduced in Knobloch / Hrbas 1965.

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|  Corinne Geering Fig. 1 Gūr-I Amīr, mausoleum of Timur (1403 – 1404) in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. Photograph by Miloš Hrbas. Source: UNESCO: Samarkand the Fabulous. In: UNESCO Courier 15.12 (1962), 17.

others.24 Decentralization also included the expansion of the subject matter of Oriental studies, gradually subsuming further non-Western regions of the world, foremost in Africa. In the Soviet Union, the position of Oriental studies (vostokovedenie) assumed a new political relevance. In 1950, the Institute of Oriental Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences (IVAN ), was moved from Leningrad to Moscow, the center of Soviet foreign policy. Bobojon G. Ghafurov, a politician and former First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Tajik SSR , assumed the post of director of IVAN in 1956. He supported the Soviet authorities’ vision of demonstrating the success of the modernization and nationality policies in the Soviet Union’s southern republics, as they could serve as a model for other parts of the world.25 The overlap of political and scholarly interests, personified by Ghafurov, made him the ideal choice as chairman of the Committee for the East–West Major Project, established within the USSR Commission for UNESCO . Ghafurov’s Tajik identity confirmed 24 An overview is provided in UNESCO 1968, 12 – 13. 25 Kemper 2015, 174.

Encompassing the World within Regions  | Fig. 2  Timur’s summer palace (1380 – 1404) in Uzbekistan. Photograph by Miloš Hrbas. Source: UNESCO: Samarkand the Fabulous. In: UNESCO Courier 15.12 (1962), 19.

the presentation of Soviet Oriental studies as emic scholarship, conducted in close cooperation with scholars based in Moscow and Leningrad. The political meaning of this innovation in Oriental studies was emphasized by Sultan Umarov, the President of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, at the First All-Union Congress of Orientalists in Toshkent in 1958, in which he described the self-reliant activities of scholars from the southern republics as, “a feature which the Oriental studies of old could not have, and had not.” 26 In the context of the East–West Major Project, some of the more recently acceded UNESCO member states attempted to promote the reform of scholarly enquiry to include, or even rely upon, emic perspectives, in order to reflect the global diversity of cultural expression. As a result, the East-West Major Project stated the need for more in-depth studies of other regions, including Africa, Latin America and Central Asia, and their interrelations with the world.27 The project’s recommendation provided the basis for 26 Sultan Umarov cited in Braginsky / Landa / Khalfin 1968, 7. 27 Glaesser 1973, 363 – 364.

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a resolution on so-called Cultural Studies, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in 1966. The resolution authorized the Director-General to initiate new projects concerning Oriental cultures, African cultures, cultures in Latin America, Central Asia and, “certain neglected aspects of European culture.” 28 The wording of the latter phrase highlights the post-colonial agenda underlying these research endeavors, to decenter the previously dominant Western scholarship, and to integrate regional expertise. The study of the cultures of Central Asia implemented a proposal made by Ghafurov to the Advisory Committee for the East–West Major Project a few years earlier.29 In contrast to other world regions, UNESCO ’s Cultural Studies did not focus on Europe in its entirety, but on sub-regions within Europe. This included the International Association of South-East European Studies (AIESEE), established in the context of the East–West Major Project in 1963, following a proposal by the Romanian delegation.30 Finally, in 1970, the General Conference of UNESCO additionally launched studies on Slavic cultures within the framework of European cultures.31 The main activity of UNESCO’s Cultural Studies largely consisted of organizing international scientific conferences and publications. The implementation of these studies was similar to that of the East–West Major Project, and the multilateral structure of exchange and cooperation relied upon the initiative and active participation of individual scholars and national committees.32 However, the lack of organized units in member states had the effect of hindering the further development of these studies, as U ­ NESCO’s circular letters failed to elicit a large response.33 Nonetheless, the conditions in the 1970s helped expand the involvement of scholars from Socialist countries in the new ­UNESCO program. Vladimir A. Tiurin, a Soviet orientalist specializing in South East Asia, assumed the post as Cultural Studies program officer for the UNESCO Secretariat. Lev I. Miroshnikov, another Soviet orientalist specializing in Iran, was appointed deputy chairperson of the joint Central Asia working group of the Academy of Sciences, and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the same time, he was also responsible for the studies on Central Asia, as a member of the UNESCO Secretariat.34 From the onset of the new program, the mission reports by Tiurin and Miroshnikov highlight how they, 28 Resolution 3.32 in: UNESCO 1967, 60. 29 1967 March 29, Expert Meeting for Central Asian Studies (UNESCO Archives), 1. 30 The East–West Major Project provided the matrix for the study of the Balkans as a mini multicultural setting. See Iacob 2015, 14 – 19. – Mishkova 2017, 79 – 82. 31 Resolution 3.312 (g) in UNESCO 1971, 51. 32 Borde Meyer 2016, 307. 33 1978 January 19, Minutes of the Meeting of the bureau of the International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (UNESCO Archives), 9. 34 Miroshnikov was a member of the UNESCO Secretariat from 1963 – 1970, and again, from 1979 – 1984. He was also the deputy chairperson of the Central Asia study programme, between 1974 and 1992.

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as UNESCO representatives, facilitated the collaboration between scholars in different Socialist countries. Against this background, UNESCO soon faced criticism of having intervened prematurely and too strongly in the program’s activities, especially when plans to establish an international association for Slavic studies had emerged.35 Under these circumstances, Soviet scholars received new opportunities to expand international exchange in the study of their own cultures.

Approaching World Culture within R egions Moscow emerged as the institutional center of both UNESCO Cultural Studies programs, dealing with regions bordering the Soviet state. Studies concerning the cultures of Central Asia and Slavic cultures, were institutionalized in the form of international associations overseen by members of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Bobojon Ghafurov assumed the position of chair of the International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia (IASCCA), initiated in 1973, while the International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (IASDSC) was chaired by Dmitrii F. Markov, a philologist from the Russian SFSR, and director of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies. The involvement of Soviet scholars in studies concerning two regions bordering the Soviet Union brought about a degree of regional differentiation in international scientific relations, both inside the Soviet Union, and the Socialist Bloc. The primary objective of both IASCCA and IASDSC, as defined by their meetings, was to intensify the international contacts of researchers from countries in the region. This approach involved organizing international conferences and establishing new specialized research centers.36 In the case of IASCCA, the Soviet committee continued the work of the committee of the East–West Major Project, and the Academies of Sciences in the Soviet republics in Central Asia took on the organization of international conferences held in the Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik SSRs.37 The dissemination of research conducted in these countries formed another important objective. The translation of Russian works into English or French received funding as a way of increasing the level of knowledge about the respective regions in the international scholarly community, and the world

35 1977 April, International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (UNESCO Archives), 2. 36 1973 March 11, Consultative Meeting on the Central Asian Culture Studies Program ( UNESCO Archives). 37 Undated Ghafurov (ca. 1970), On the Participation of Soviet Scholars in the Estabishment of the UNESCO Project ‘The Study of Civilization of the Peoples of Central Asia’ (Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences).

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public at large.38 In this way, the global dimension was emphasized by firstly framing the study of Slavic and Central Asian cultures as a ‘part of world culture,’ and secondly by defining, ‘the peoples of the world,’ as the target audience.39 These associations provided Soviet scholars with new opportunities to influence global discourse, with ideas and scholarship from their own academies, the goal of which was to decenter the Western narratives that Soviet scholars perceived as having dominated international scholarship. At the IASDSC conference in Minsk in 1982, Dmitrii Markov articulated a critique of Eurocentrism in Eastern Europe, rejecting a ‘West-Europocentrism’ (Zapadnoevrotsentrizm) that ignored Eastern Europe when dealing with the research on world culture. In particular, he rejected the criteria of reception and popularity as a way of gauging the world significance of research. Instead, he drew on the Marxist-Leninist theory of historical progress, advocating a study of culture designed to advance a “context of the historico-cultural development of mankind.” 40 He argued that the conception of artistic culture should be broad enough in order to be able to recognize the ‘great contribution’ of the Slavic peoples to European and global culture, ranging from oil painting and ballet to vernacular art. A more narrow definition of artistic culture, in his opinion, would run the danger of being overlooked by Western audiences. Markov urged his colleagues to develop new, alternative approaches that focused on comparative research of the global historical process.41 One tangible expression of these new approaches was the ten-volume edition of Istoriia vsemirnoi literatury (History of World Literature). Irina G. Neupokoeva, who initiated the edition, rejected a universal history of literary production as bourgeois conception that ignored class struggle, and instead described world literature as the result of the interconnections and interactions of national literatures.42 Adhering to principles of Socialist Internationalism, she stressed that the idea of “supranational literature,” was “unacceptable to the Marxist student of literature,” and advocated for a world culture that was based on particularism.43 Both Neupokoeva and Markov were explicit in the political agenda behind the scholarly endeavors they oversaw. In their publications, they referred to the policy of building Communism (kommunisticheskoe stroitel’stvo) as the primary objective of the study of world literature. This political position was a central 38 1976 January 1, Tiurin (UNESCO Archives). For a discussion on the political strategies of translation during the Cold War, see Gordin 2015. 39 1975 December 19, Consultative Meeting on Problems Connected with the Study of Slav Cultures (UNESCO Archives), 2. 40 Markov 1988, 12. This argument was first presented in the Russian language, at the IASDSC conference in Minsk in 1982. See Markov 1985. 41 Markov 1973. 42 Neupokoeva 1965. 43 Neupokoeva 1973, 130.

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element of the various planning documents and reports written by Soviet members of the international associations. The Soviet authorities considered UNESCO, and especially its publication sector, as a useful channel to propagate what they considered to be Soviet achievements in a global context.44 The participation of Soviet scholars in IASDSC and IASCCA resulted in the presentation of Marxist viewpoints concerning the development of culture and the history of humanity, as noted in an internal memo of the USSR Commission for UNESCO in 1984.45 In view of such statements, it comes as no surprise that Western scholars also commented on the dominant position of scholars from the Soviet Union and the disparity of contributions from different academic communities to the proceedings of the international associations.46 Soviet scholars translated their political objectives into activities within the framework of UNESCO ’s Cultural Studies, and the international associations. The working plan of the Slavic and Central Asian cultural studies was to place the study of art history alongside that of archaeology, history, science, literature and philosophy.47 In the discussions between UNESCO representatives and members of the USSR Academy of Sciences, publications dealing with art and architecture figured prominently among the potential avenues of research to be explored.48 The criteria for these themes were not confined to specific disciplines, but to shared issues designed to facilitate intra-regional cooperation. According to the stated objectives of both constituting meetings, themes focusing on mutual relationships between past and present cultures were deemed to be of particular interest. Moreover, a desirable outcome of the research was to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and necessitate international cooperation, bringing scholars with different regional specialization together.49 The overreaching agenda was to try to build a coalition of philologists, historians, archaeologists and art historians. Against this background, the studies did not deal with artistic production as a separate issue, but as part of a general cultural history and a system of cultural activity.50 The scholars did not seek to promote merely the study of a particular area, but rather to engage with, and disseminate regional knowledge to, the international academic community. In this way, UNESCO ’s Cultural Studies catered to the growth of regionalism, as supported by the United Nations, in strengthening cooperation 44 Kulnazarova 2017, 265. 45 1984 March 14, Secretariat of the USSR Commission for UNESCO (State Archive of the Russian Federation), 58. 46 Gardin 1987. 47 1967 June 9, Meeting of Experts for the Study of Civilizations of Central Asia (UNESCO Archives), 5. – 1976 January 1, Tiurin (UNESCO Archives), 1. 48 See, e. g., 1976 January 1, Tiurin (UNESCO Archives), 3 – 4. 49 1967 June 9, Meeting of Experts for the Study of Civilizations of Central Asia (UNESCO Archives), 4. 50 See Ritchik 1988, 128.

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between countries that shared not only a geographical location, but also faced common socio-economic challenges.51 The conception of art history as explored within the frameworks of Slavic and Central Asian cultures depended on the institutional conditions of IASDSC and IASCCA. The head office of IASDSC was based at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and the first international meetings of experts were held simultaneously with international conferences on Slavic literature.52 The notion of ‘Slav cultures’ was based on linguistic commonalities in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe, which spawned the predominance of philologists in UNESCO-affiliated activities.53 On the other hand, IASCCA was established in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and was primarily focused on economics, history and international relations.54 Within the framework of Oriental studies, the examination of art history formed part of the historical and archaeological research into ancient civilizations and medieval empires. These different institutional settings defined Slavic culture as being based on language, whereas Central Asian culture was based on ancient empires. In the 1960s, the study of Central Asian art began to emerge as a separate field to Oriental art.55 The geographical designation of ‘Central Asia’ was a neologism that reflected a political desire by the USSR to reposition the Soviet republics at the center of a newly conceived world region. According to the definition by IASCCA, this region would comprise Afghanistan, India, Iran, Pakistan, and the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek Soviet republics.56 The designation of this area also had the benefit of expanding the scope of the Russian notion of Sredniaia Aziia (Middle Asia), which, at the time, only included the Asian Soviet Republics. The concept of Central Asia, on the other hand, was built on earlier efforts of Soviet Oriental studies to explore the history and culture of these republics, not in isolation from each other, but rather as an, “organic part of the entire Eastern civilization.” 57 Hanna Jansen has argued that the definition of Central Asia with the Soviet republics at its center reflected the Soviet political agenda of overcoming 51 Waldheim 1981, xi. 52 See 1976 January 1, Tiurin (UNESCO Archives), 2 – 4. 53 The region was defined depending on the member states of UNESCO “where Slavic tribes had settled in ancient times”, which included Bulgaria, Byelorussia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the USSR, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. See Ritchik 1988, 124. This also explained the difference to AIESEE whose centre was in Romania. 54 See, e. g., the edited volume on Oriental studies in the USSR, which shows that the focus of Oriental studies in the USSR was on economics, history and bilateral relations with other countries. Ghafurov / USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Studies 1975. 55 See Pugachenkova 1967, 7. 56 1967 June 9, Meeting of Experts for the Study of Civilizations of Central Asia (UNESCO Archives), 2 – 3. 57 ‘органическая часть всей восточной цивилизации’. Ghafurov / Litvinskii 1977a, 3.

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Chinese Orientcentrism, which regarded China as the primary point of reference, following the Sino-Soviet split (1956 – 1966).58 Because of the efforts to re-­position Central Asia at the center of Asia, IASCCA documents generally tended to omit China in the definition of the region.59 The geographical definition of Central Asia was subject to repeated debates at international meetings, and gradually, western China and Mongolia were incorporated into the region, largely due to the preparatory work on the History of Civilizations of Central Asia.60 This larger definition of the region became more widely accepted as a result of the UNESCO project, Integral Study of the Silk Roads: Roads of Dialogue, launched in 1988, which put China at the center of a trade route that spanned Central Asia and Europe. Therefore, the neologism of Central Asia, and the debates on the delimitation of this region, reflected the changing political objectives of the Soviet republics that the cultural studies pursued between the 1960s and the 1980s.

World Art Historiogr aphy à la soviétique Many initiatives by IASCCA and IASDSC were informed by the desire of Soviet scholars to forge new connections within and beyond the region, and to overcome their marginal position in international scholarship. In 1969, Bobojan Ghafurov contributed an article to the UNESCO Courier showcasing IASCCA’s research on the Kushan Empire. The article emphasized the ‘world significance’ of historical artistic production and in doing so, it provided a particularly illustrative example of how research on the past could be used to advance contemporary political objectives. The Kushan Empire (ca. the first to third centuries, AD) extended from the contemporary Tajik SSR to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India. Ghafurov was able to draw on both Socialist Internationalist policies and contemporary UNESCO discourse, connecting contemporary Asian Soviet republics with Northern India, by means of a historical argument relating to antiquity. He claimed that it was during this period that, “the peoples of the East first became aware of the tremendous importance of relations between peoples, as well as states, and created common cultural values.” 61 Ghafurov insisted that the greatness of Kushan art was on par with the artistic culture of ancient Greece and Rome, thus directly challenging the Western historical canon. The emphasis on antique connections between Central Asian states also sought to legitimize the economic and political cooperation in the present, in particular, between the Soviet Union and India. These endeavors proved to be very 58 Jansen 2015, 158. 59 Ghafurov / Miroshnikov 1976, 3, 37. 60 See Miroshnikov 1999, 470. 61 Ghafurov 1969, 11.

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durable, and this international exchange, established since the 1960s, continued to exist after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the course of three decades, scholars from Soviet republics were involved in several projects that required a steady exchange, in which researchers’ respective materials and contributions were re-used, extended or modified. Many scholars involved in IASCCA activities submitted work to a multi-volume publication project titled, History of Civilizations of Central Asia, which was published in the post-Soviet period, between 1992 and 2005. UNESCO launched this project in 1976, as part of a new world history series designed to, “synthesize the results obtained from the study of particular regions, macro-regions, with their comparative typological features.” 62 This approach had already been tested in the General History of Africa (launched in 1964). The historiography project on Central Asia also comprised research on the Kushan Empire, thus highlighting the way in which contemporary political interests were able to make the examination of art history more readily available to the global academic community. For example, the preliminary findings on Kushan art presented by Galina A. Pugachenkova at an IASCCA conference in Dushanbe, in 1968, were extended to an entire chapter in the second volume of the series.63 While this chapter offered a detailed formalist analysis of artistic production, Pugachenkova’s engagement with Kushan art was, in no small way, informed by the political objectives outlined in Ghafurov’s UNESCO Courier article, the goal of which was to elevate the art history of Central Asia to being on par with European art history. Many IASCCA and IASDSC projects took several years, if not decades, to unfold, and some of the planned publications or meetings never materialized in the end. Although the associations had devised working plans for publications, the vast geographical distance between the participating countries made it difficult for many of the appointed members of the editorial boards to meet in person. As a result, some of the publication initiatives that were launched at the symposiums and conferences often remained without follow-up meetings. In these instances, it was up to the initiative of the individual scholars to bring the project to successful completion.64 Against this background, the focus on interaction between cultures was not merely an academic undertaking; the associations were also forced to invest considerable time and energy to the establishment of the necessary infrastructure for transnational exchange. Markov, the chair of IASDSC, 62 Dani / Masson 1992, 19. 63 Pugachenkova 1970. – Pugachenkova / Dar / Sharma / Joyenda / Siddiqi 1994. 64 This was the case for a publication project on arts in book production including calligraphy, illumination and miniature painting in the Timurid period that was launched at a symposium in Samarqand in 1969. The editorial board was dissolved soon after and the publication appeared under the editorship of Basil Gray, a retired curator of the British Museum who specialised in Persian art. See Gray 1979 – UNESCO 1973, Annex III, 1.

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even claimed that the scholarly question of world culture could only be resolved by structural means, via the strengthening of multilateral international cooperation.65 In line with the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of Socialist Internationalism, Soviet scholarship did not regard the international dimension as an incidental background, but rather as a fundamental condition for the existence and development of culture in general.66 In light of this position, scholars active in the study of Slavic cultures expressed interest in exploring connections to the culture of other regions, based on shared cross-regional characteristics.67 This interest manifested itself in a preference for combining research on different regions when deciding which topics should be investigated in the conferences. Here, the structural conditions of scholarly exchange helped shape the research discourse. For example, at the symposium on Cultural Relations between Scandinavia and the Slavic World in the 19th and 20th Centuries, held in Copenhagen in 1984, presentations were focused on a display of Russian art at the Baltic exhibition in Malmö in 1914, and provided a survey on Soviet-Scandinavian artistic exhibitions.68 The overall objectives of IASDSC’s research endeavors into ‘Slav art’ were explained in more detail by Vladimir Tiurin, UNESCO’s Cultural Studies coordinator, in a meeting of the working group that prepared the first publication of the Slavic art series in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1974. The IASDSC commission on art studies planned to publish volumes showcasing wooden architecture and sculpture, fabrics and costumes, as well as ceramics and glassware.69 Tiurin informed the scholars about UNESCO’s intention to fund the publication series as a way of familiarizing large groups of people in non-Slavic countries with the masterpieces of Slavic art.70 The publications concerning Slavic art went back to an initiative of Juliusz Starzyński, a professor at the Institute of Art History at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who passed away during the preparatory work, in 1974. The publication project drew on the methodological debates of philologists outlined above. The central question examined by the authors concerned the existence of common characteristics in the artistic culture of Slavic people, that would be, “comparable with their linguistic relatedness.” 71 Only one of the planned volumes, Le bois dans l’architecture et sculpture slaves, was published by UNESCO in 1981. In this edited volume, fifteen authors from across the 65 66 67 68 69

Markov 1982. Verves 1985. 1971 March 22, Tiurin (UNESCO Archives), 6. Lauridsen 1990, 59. 1978 March 15, International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (IASDSC) (UNESCO Archives), 2. 70 1974 June 21, Réunion du groupe de travail sur la préparation des albums concernant l’art slave ­(UNESCO Archives), 1. 71 Ryszkiewicz 1980, 30.

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|  Corinne Geering Fig. 3  Publication cover featuring the Church of the Intercession of the Virgin on the island of Kizhi, Karelia. Photograph by E. Gippenreiter. Source: Ryszkiewicz, Andrezej [sic] (ed.): Le bois dans l’architecture et la sculpture slaves. Paris: 1981.

region of Eastern and Central Europe sought to address the research question, by presenting wood as a common denominator of Slavic cultures. According to the authors, the use of wood distinguished Slavic cultures from Western Europe, a dominant example of such usage being the onion-shaped domes of the wooden Orthodox churches (fig. 3). Determining these shared characteristics was a challenging task, given the very different histories and traditions, as outlined in the introduction by Andrzej Ryszkiewicz, a Polish art historian who acted as the IASDSC Vice-President, from 1976 until 1982, and who headed the commission on Slavic art. Ryszkiewicz emphasized the novel character of the authors’ approach, by expressing the sweeping claim that no one had previously studied the artistic activities of a multiplicity of countries combined, ranging from Poland, the USSR, to Czechoslovakia, and including Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.72 The publication argued that the medieval period was the timeframe in which common traditions distinguishing Slavic culture from the culture of Western Europe could be identified. This period was deemed to represent the authentic Slavic styles before they were overwritten 72 Ryszkiewicz 1981, 9.

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by the general European styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This overwriting, according to the authors, also entailed a shift from vernacular artistic traditions to fine art, exhibiting bourgeois connotations rejected by Marxist-Leninist doctrine.73 By the 1980s, IASDSC had opted for the medium of exhibition, rather than publication, in order to disseminate an understanding of Slavic art to the global public. UNESCO had promoted the medium of travelling exhibitions as a way of imparting knowledge to diverse populations since the 1950s.74 At the twenty-first session of the UNESCO General Conference in 1980, the decision was made to dedicate the fifteenth travelling exhibition to the theme of Slavic art. The travelling exhibition was envisaged as a display of Slavic artworks in countries outside their location of origin, and the organizers, “expressed the hope that the role of Slavonic art would be shown in the context of world art.” 75 Aleksandr I. Rogov, a Russian historian specializing in the medieval and early modern periods, was appointed chief-coordinator of the exhibition. The selection of artworks for display followed the same comparative-typological principle that was applied to the publication series. Moreover, it followed the criterion of ‘artistic value,’ and the artworks represented what the organizing committee conceived to be masterpieces of world significance.76 In addition to the items displayed chronologically from the seventh to the twentieth centuries, the organizers requested every country to supply a thirty-minute tape with samples of music that could be played during the exhibition.77 This exhibition, as well as the publications showcasing art from Slavic and Central Asian countries, aimed to establish the reputation of these objects as outstanding masterpieces. In one of IASCCA’s five priority themes, the “history of arts of the peoples of Central Asia,” 78 scholars sought to popularize the architecture, miniature paintings, calligraphy and decoration of books from the Timurid Empire (ca. 1370 – 1507), spanning contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasian and Central Asian Soviet republics, as well as parts of India, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey.79 To this end, a committee was established at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, with the goal of organizing an international symposium on the art of Central Asia in Samarqand, the first capital of the Timurid Empire.80 This committee also prepared a publication concerning the architecture of Central Asia in the 15th century, originally published in Russian, and translated into French a few years later, under the editorship of renowned art historian and archaeologist, Galina A. 73 Bočarov 1981, 164. 74 See Osborn 1953. 75 n. n. 1983, 36. 76 n. n. 1983, 29. 77 n. n. 1984, 13. 78 1967 March 29, Expert Meeting for Central Asian Studies (UNESCO Archives), 1. 79 1967 June 9, Meeting of Experts for the Study of Civilizations of Central Asia (UNESCO Archives), 7. 80 Ghafurov / Miroshnikov 1976, 65 – 70.

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Pugachenkova.81 Her biography reflects the close connection between the fields of art history and historic conservation in scholarship dealing with Central Asia. Pugachenkova was not only a corresponding member of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, but also a member of the Union of Architects, the Scientific Methodical Council for the Protection of Monuments within the Ministry of Culture, and the Soviet Committee of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS).82 Along similar lines to the approach devised by IASDSC, she maintained that art historical enquiry should be focused on commonalities, rather than differences, in historical artistic production. The methodological emphasis on commonalities was long-reaching in scope, resulting in structural initiatives that facilitated international cooperation with the Academies of Sciences in the Central Asian Soviet republics, and the integration of artworks from Central Asia, a region that Western scholarship had long neglected.83 At the same time, scholarly exchange in the field of art history also involved the provision of other resources. For example, Afghan scholars used the symposium in Samarqand on the art of Central Asia as an opportunity to request technical and financial assistance from UNESCO, for the preservation of monuments in Afghanistan.84

Conclusion The Cultural Studies program of UNESCO provided a platform for the study of regions that had previously assumed a marginal position in international scholarship. These studies differed from earlier attempts to develop world art histories based on anthropological enquiry, through an emic approach that relied on the contribution of scholars throughout the regions, and differed from the kind of global art history studies that would later emerge in the 1990s–2000s. Soviet scholars did not embrace the concept of the world being an inherent characteristic of objects; instead, they presented it as a framework that the scholars themselves would need to create through international cooperation. In this, they showed that their understanding of world art was inspired by the objectives of Socialist Internationalism. This form of scholarly exchange attempted to impose the structural conditions for presenting world art to a target audience of diverse populations, in a way that reflected the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the international dimension as a fundamental condition of the existence and development of culture in general. 81 Pugachenkova 1976. – Pugatchenkova 1981. 82 Pugachenkova regularly participated in archaeological expeditions and international meetings in Western Europe, the Middle and Near East as well as South Asia, in her capacity as member of these organizations. Her involvement in these organizations is outlined in: Gorshenina 2000, 201 – 208. 83 Pugachenkova / Rempelʹ 1965, 6 – 7. 84 Ghafurov / Miroshnikov 1976, 69.

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Initiatives undertaken by IASCCA and IASDSC were informed by contemporary political objectives promoted by UNESCO , in tandem with Socialist Internationalist policies. Scholars were looking to expand the scope of art historical enquiry, both geographically and thematically, by transcending national frameworks, and, as a consequence, both IASDSC and IASCCA attempted to broaden Western-centered scholarship. IASDSC diversified the spectrum of European studies in opposition to a clear Western-­ centeredness (‘West-Europocentrism’) within this field, while IASCCA strengthened intra-Soviet cooperation involving scholars from the southern Soviet republics. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the new framework of Slavic and Central Asian cultures served as a prism through which scholars could explore trans-border circulations and shared features throughout the region. Thereby, this scholarship set out to develop methodologies relating to world culture at large. UNESCO’s Cultural Studies launched many multidisciplinary endeavors in which the boundaries between art history and other disciplines including archaeology, philology, and the preservation of monuments, were fleeting. Art historical research in IASDSC was based on the philological tradition of Slavic studies, whereas IASCCA continued and expanded on the work of Oriental studies. The legacy of these international and multidisciplinary research initiatives in today’s study of world art and global art history has been vastly different. Some of the methodologies articulated between the 1960s and the 1980s re-emerged after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. These included the focus on routes and global connections, especially in the context of the UNESCO project, Integral Study of the Silk Roads: Roads of Dialogue. This project repositioned the post-Soviet states in Central Asia as a ‘key region’ that was ‘gradually reclaiming its place,’ bridging Asia and Europe. As part of these efforts, the International Institute for Central Asian Studies was established in Samarqand in 1995, in an effort reflective of the earlier Cultural Studies program.85 In contrast, the notion of West-Europocentrism appears to have disappeared from scholarly debates, replaced by the discourse of Eurocentrism, and the positive reassessment of Europe as the ‘Common European Home,’ during Perestroika. These shifting patterns of common political, economic and ideological frameworks reveal the way in which the historical enquiry of world art continues to be confronted by multiple orientations that are constantly changing. On one hand, efforts to decenter Western scholarship were a crucial element of the Cold War era discourse between Soviet scholars. On the other, the focus on the global dimension as defined by circulations, transfers and connections has resulted in the consolidation of scholarly cooperation on a smaller scale, via the establishment of regional research institutions. Regions were considered the gateway to a new methodology of world culture, while, at the same time, this scholarship reflected a political interest to promote social and economic objectives 85 UNESCO 2002, 3, 5.

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pertaining to international cooperation. In the case of the Soviet Union, this complied with Marxist-Leninist ideology that disregarded the possibility of formulating new discourse without attempting to change the political substructure.

Archival Sources UNESCO Archives, Paris 1949 November 2, Committee of Experts for the Comparative Study of Cultures: Statement of the Enquiry, in: UNESCO Archives / UNESDOC http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ 0015/001551/155168eb.pdf (10/05/2018). 1967 March 29, Expert Meeting for Central Asian Studies. UNESCO House, Paris, April 24 – 28, 1967, Studies on the Civilizations of the Peoples of Asia. Information Document, in: U ­ NESCO Archives  / UNESDOC http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001862/186207eb.pdf (10/05/2018). 1967 June 9, Meeting of Experts for the Study of Civilizations of Central Asia. UNESCO House, Paris, April 24 – 28, 1967, Final Report, in: UNESCO Archives / UNESDOC, http://unesdoc. unesco.org/images/0018/001862/186203eb.pdf (10/05/2018). 1971 March 22, [Tiurin]: Vladimir Tiourine: Report on Mission to Poland, USSR, Ukraine and Byelorussia, 16 February – 5 March 1971, in: UNESCO Archives, Box 192, UDC 008 (=81), ‘Slav Cultures – General – 1972 – 1975’, Part 1. 1973 March 11, UNESCO: Consultative Meeting on the Central Asian Cultural Studies Programme, in: UNESCO Archives / UNESDOC. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0001/000173/017319 eb.pdf (10/05/2018). 1974 June 21, UNESCO: Réunion du groupe de travail sur la préparation des albums concernant l’art slave. Bulgarie, 9 et 10 avril 1974. UNESCO Archives / UNESDOC. https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000010735?posInSet=1&queryId=N-EXPLORE-f01f1719-f1d3-46a3879c-773a4a0ee217 (09/19/2019). 1975 December 19, UNESCO: Consultative meeting on problems connected with the study of Slav cultures, Berlin, 9 – 11 September, 1975, In: UNESCO / UNESDOC. https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000017465?posInSet=1&queryId=N-EXPLORE-9465ee8e-06ec4da4-8233-e5bca89fa7dc (09/19/2019). 1976 January 1, [Tiurin] Vladimir Tiourine: UNESCO and the Project for the Study of Slav Cultures, in: UNESCO Archives, Box 192, UDC 008 (=81), ‘Slav Cultures – General – 1976 – 1977’, Part 2. 1977 April, International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures [Information document], in: UNESCO Archives, UDC 008 (=81) A 01 AIEDCS, ‘International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures’, Part 1.

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1978 January 19, UNESCO: Minutes of the Meeting of the Bureau of the International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures. Zagreb, 5 September 1978, in: UNESCO Archives / UNESDOC. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000038503?​ posInSet=1&queryId=2daedbfd-44bc-4240-b3f5-e2d86fc858dc (09/19/2019). 1978 March 15, International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures (IASDSC): Meeting of the Bureau, Moscow, 31 May–3 June 1977. UNESCO Archives, UDC 008 (=81) A 01 AIEDSC, ‘International Association for the Study and Dissemination of Slav Cultures’, Part 2.

Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN), Moscow Undated [ca. 1970]: [Ghafurov]: Б. Г. Гафуров: Об участии советских ученых в осуществлении проекта ЮНЕСКО ‘Изучение цивилизаций народов Центральной Азии’ (Справка) [On the Participation of Soviet Scholars in the Establishment of the UNESCO Project ‘The Study of Civilizations of the Peoples of Central Asia’ (Information)]. Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ARAN), f. 579, op. 4, d. 425, ll. 100 – 105.

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Moscow 1984 March 14. [Secretariat of the USSR Commission for UNESCO]: Секретариат Комиссии СССР по делам ЮНЕСКО: СССР и ЮНЕСКО (Справка) [The USSR and UNESCO (Information)]. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. R-7928, op. 3, d. 6149, ll. 50 – 59.

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n. n.: Second Consultative Session on the Preparation of the 15th Mobile Photo Exhibition of the Art of Slavonic Nations. Final Report. In: Information Bulletin; International Association for the Study and Dissemination of the Slavonic Cultures 12 (1984), 13 – 15. Nash, Mark (ed.): Red Africa. Affective Communities and the Cold War. London 2016. [Neupokoeva]: Неупокоева, Ирина Григорьевна: Методологические вопросы построения Истории всемирной литературы [Methodological questions of Composition of the History of World Literature]. In: Вестник Академии наук СССР 7 (1965), 59 – 62. Neupokoeva, Irina: Dialectics of Historical Development of National and World Literature. In: Neohelicon 1/1 – 2 (1973), 113 – 130. Osborn, Elodie Courtier: Manual of Travelling Exhibitions. Paris 1953. Pearson, Christopher E. M.: Designing UNESCO. Art, Architecture and International Politics at Mid-Century. Farnham 2010. Pfisterer, Ulrich: Origins and Principles of World Art History – 1900 (and 2000). In: ­Zijlmans / van Damme 2008, 69 – 89. [Pugachenkova]: Pougatchenkova, Galina A. (ed.): Chefs-d’œuvre d’architecture de l’Asie centrale. XIVe – XVe siècle. Paris 1981. [Pugachenkova]: Пугаченкова, Галина А.: Искусство Туркменистана. Очерк с древнейших времен до 1917 г. [The Art of Turkmenistan. Essays from Ancient Times until 1917]. Москва 1967. Pugachenkova, Galina A.: Kushan Art in the Light of Recent Discoveries in Northern Bactria. In: Ghafurov / Asimov / Bongard-Levin / Stavitsky / Litvinsky et al. 1970, 177 – 178. [Pugachenkova]: Пугаченкова, Галина А. (ed.): Зодчество Центральной Азии XV в. Ведущие традиции и черты [Architecture of Central Asia of the 15th Century. Master Traditions and Features]. Ташкент 1976. [Pugachenkova / Rempel’]: Пугаченкова, Г. А. / Ремпелъ, Л. И.: История искусств Узбекистана. С древнейших времен до середины девятнадцатого века [The History of the Arts of Uzbekistan. From Ancient Times to the Middle of the 19th Century]. Москва 1965. Pugachenkova, G. A. / Dar, S. R. / Sharma, R. C. / Joyenda, M. A. / Siddiqi, H.: Kushan Art. In: Harmatta / Puri / Etemadi 1994, 323 – 385. Ritchik, Yuri: Soviet Scholars and International Cooperation in Slavic Culture Studies. In: Zlydnev / Ritchik 1988, 125 – 141. Ryszkiewicz, Andrzej: Albums d’art des peuples slaves (Suggestions). In: Bulletin d’information/ UNESCO Association internationale pour l’étude et la diffusion des cultures slaves 3 (1980), 29 – 31. Ryszkiewicz, Andrezej [sic] (ed.): Le bois dans l’architecture et sculpture slaves. Paris 1981. Tikhomirov, Mikhail / Ghafurov, Bobojan (eds.): The Slavs and the East. Paris 1965. Tolz, Vera: Russia’s Own Orient. The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods. Oxford 2011. UNESCO (ed.): USSR. Early Russian Icons. New York 1958 (UNESCO World Art Series 9).

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Lajos Vayer

Rereading Source Text: The General Development and Regional Developments in the History of Art The Situation in ‘Central Europe’ The main subject underlying our congress is the diverse interrelations between the universal development and regional developments within European art history, with a specific emphasis on the so-called Central European art history, and the analogue problems which have emerged in the course of research into other areas of the history of Pan-­ European art, as well as those problems which may still arise in the future. Considering that our congress, from all the most pertinent topics, has specifically singled out the problems relating to Central Europe and given priority to them in terms of our discussions, this is a direct result of the conference venue itself. The fact, however, that we don’t want to approach this set of problems as an isolated issue, but rather consistently and without exception not solely in methodical parallelism with questions concerning other European areas which are closely related in terms of subject matter, but as a sign and in the spirit of historical and organic unity, demonstrates and vouches for the fact that the 22nd congress, just as the previous ones, aims to explore the entire previous subject matter of universal European art which followed on from antiquity, and to place the emphasis of the dominant aspect of the main theme not on the odd part here and there, but on its entirety. Rebus sic stantibus it goes without saying that these introductory words, which summarize the essential goals of our congress, are not qualified to find an answer to the numerous relevant questions, but that, on the contrary, it is a task whose solution, in concise and condensed form, and according to the current state of research, is reserved for the ca. 200 papers of the upcoming congress, which is divided into ten sections. Here we are restricted to a rough outline of the presuppositions in hand, and to brief allusions to the tasks ahead as well as a few potential solutions, while – and this needs to be emphasized – most decidedly refraining from prejudices of any kind. We ask for your patience and kind lenience if, in order to simplify and facilitate the congress papers and discussions, the mention of certain widely-known facts and truisms cannot be entirely avoided. In order to reach the common goals, we have been set, we hope to conceptualize the categories in question at least to a certain degree. In these categories, due to the changeable nature and different interpretation of their historical concerns and backgrounds, by nature, in order to occasionally simplify the research arising from our discipline, we can only catch a glimpse of useful auxiliary categories, in other words, work hypotheses

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which can temporarily make our research easier. The categories are as follows: The universal development, regional evolvement, and finally Central Europe itself. The first is so obvious that in our opinion, and based on experiences in the field of the history of science – regardless of the current ideological view with which one approaches it – there is only one single possible, real definition on which we can all agree. What we mean by the universal development of European art is the more or less distinct and clearly delineated powerful thread which, following the fall and decline of ancient culture and having become the eternal inheritance in the history of medieval, (early) modern and contemporary art, indicates the subsequent great cultural eras in the representative trends of the art-historical style periods par excellence. This process, which was shaped by social, political, commercial, and cultural factors, not to mention the history of ideas, followed its own path, prescribed by time and space, occasionally stumbling over hurdles or jumping over them, often forked and then again united as a great stream. By achieving ideals – not in the aesthetic, but historical sense – this uninterrupted process occasionally reached heights in its master pieces by the greats that can be described, in both a scientific and a sociological sense, as true moments of glory. When clarifying the terms further, we need to emphasize strongly that we don’t consider the universal and the regional as separate, self-contained ‘antitheses’, but rather as complementary, correlative categories. And now an elimination: what we mean by regional is neither provincialism nor something peripheral, nor that which the art-geographical terminology tends to call a local note or idiosyncrasy in a development. In addition, we’d like to put on record that the latter definitions form categories which are not only measured by the universal, but also, and equally, by the regional, and which refer to special phenomena in the history of art. In this context it should be mentioned as an aside that in our view, a revision of the pejorative value judgement which has long been associated with the above-mentioned epithets of these less significant phenomena, is overdue, not least from the perspective of the universal development. Henceforth, regarding the regional development itself, we would like this category to be defined by all those processes which, as quantitative, trendsetting and, last but not least, qualitative components of differing intensity, are the resultants of the universal development of pan-European art. Thus, parts of these regional components trickle into the entirety, which has organically grown and is closely interwoven with it, and the universal and the regional become truly correlative categories. However, as we are dealing with historical categories, it is of course always and everywhere impossible to clearly differentiate, much less isolate, the different regional developments of the history of pan-European art in the way which is temporarily the case in, for instance, some local phenomena. For just as all other live, creative processes of individual or collective forms of consciousness – such as literature, music, religion or science –, form a complex web in the spiritual life of society, the artistic pursuit, from a historical perspective and

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also in terms of its regional developments, is interwoven with countless threads in both the past and present of the respective cultural eras. It is also equally evident that the importance of regional developments in terms of the universal is subject to respective fluctuations and changes. In addition, individual regions have at their disposal centers which change both in terms of space and time, and it is via these centers that the path of our European culture has been leading for thousands of years, constantly changing due to the moments of glory of the universal development, a path which people, countries and nations have been walking in the midst of rise and fall of the national hierarchy, according to the laws of history. This leads us to the clarification of the third category, the term generally classified under the category ‘Central Europe’. And in this context, we need to clarify above all that by Central Europe, in terms of universal development, we refer by no means to the setting of a single, common regional development, but to the art-historical area of several concurrent regional developments. The geographical term ‘Central Europe’ in itself is fluctuating and vague considering that Alexander [von] Humboldt called the entire European continent a mere offshoot, a Eurasian peninsula tapering towards the west. The geographical division of our continent into Northern and Southern Europe is much less justified and therefore far less common than the division into Western and Eastern Europe. Just as since the era of humanism, historians have coined the term ‘Middle Ages’ for the centuries between Antiquity and the Renaissance, a term which serves as a periodizing stopgap and therefore means nothing in itself, geographers, when dividing our continent into larger units, made do with the insertion of an area complex called ‘Central Europe’ between the continental East and the Mediterranean West, and to a certain degree North and South. This only vaguely delineated sketch of Central Europe certainly formed neither a precise circle, nor an exact square, and was therefore only a relative term which usually denotes the two imaginary vertical areas whose western part stretches from the Eastern border of the Frisian Islands to the Gulf of Genoa while the Eastern art extends from the Gulf of Riga to the East coast of the Adria. Based on current national borders, this wider area consists of the Northeastern tip of the Netherlands and the Western Soviet republics in the north, Italian and Romanian parts of the state in the south, and the German Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Poland in their entirety. The image of Central Europe according to this geographical outline is even far more varied and diverse in terms of its ethnography. Leaving the albeit very important splinter groups aside, the following ethnic elements are more or less extensively represented by this area: French, Italian, German, Austrian, Czech, Moravian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Romanian, and Bulgarian. At the same time, these ethnic groups constitute the presence of almost all the major European linguistic families in Central Europe. It needn’t be emphasized specifically what huge tasks, or

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what complex problems arise for the comparative ethnological research into Central Europe as well as every other discipline – from this diverse ethnic panorama. And it is in this context that we need to approach the particularly significant problem of folk art, or more precisely the history of folk art. To clarify, by folk art we mean the artistic work of the masses which has been shaped by traditional foundations and determined by the collective taste, and in no way a lower cultural grade compared to high art. Regarding the ever-cross-pollinating interactions between art and folk art, we think of – if you’ll allow me this approximate comparison – the mutual influences and relationships between folk song and a song set to music, in particular between the Hungarian folk songs and songs by [Béla] Bartók. Undoubtedly research focused on the specific national characteristics of regional art-historical developments in Central Europe benefit considerably from a more detailed examination of the differentiation and integration processes in folk art, respectively, as well as from the successful completion of numerous tasks which are yet to be undertaken by comparative ethnology. Hence, in our attempts to define the term ‘Central Europe’, after the problematic nature of its geographical and ethnographical definition, this leads us to its intrinsically historical problems which may of course appear even more difficult and complicated in the eyes of those researchers who approach the Central European subject from the ‘outside’. From the perspective commonly described as politico-historical, since the Migration Period the Central European region has presented an even more colorful, varied, and multi-layered image than Eastern or Western Europe in terms of the rise, growth, and fall of national hierarchies. Naturally, here too, when periodizing, one has to be careful to avoid perspectival errors and not to force historical timelines into a quasi-standardized procrustean bed. During the crucial times of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires, and later the Frankish and Holy Roman Empires (of the German Nation), and Byzantium, formed poles for Western and Eastern Europe whose magnetic field of force the other states struggled to evade and which Central Europe was unable to rival even as a framework in terms of similar longevity and extent. Later, at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Era, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in the hierarchy of the centralized European monarchies which was comprised one or more nations, those researchers who strove to gain useful information and learn valuable lessons from a comparison between the European states and the Western and Eastern European ones, were faced with increasingly complicated problems; drawing Western European and Eastern European analogies which are driven too far and therefore distorted, poses a dangerous risk because the genesis of the central monarchies, both in Western and Eastern Europe, despite significant shifts in the politico-historical chronology, has a surprising amount in common. As early as in this transition period and later on during the Modern period, Europe’s politico-historical development in terms of the rise of the states which included one or more nations is moving, increasingly

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unified dialectically, towards a unified world which far exceeds the European continent. And this is where we finally need to leave the outline of the geographical, ethno-graphic and politico-historical topic of Central Europe, because, in the course of general European social development and of the evolvement of national cultures, the national and nationality states confront us with the very subject which, from the perspective of the universal and the regional art-historical evolution, has always proven to be the most problematic: the subject of national art. At this point it should be emphasized that in our view, this topic proves to be no less problematic in Western or Eastern than in Central Europe. If, however, this gives a different impression, we need to ascribe it to a research perspective which was either too distant or too close, and the concomitant optical illusion. Our aim here is not to engage with an interpretation of the term ‘nation’ which is not only universal in regard to Europe, but, with sociological legitimacy, to all continents. And yet I believe that we can all agree – regardless of the ideological perspective from which we approach the term ‘national’ – that the evolution of the European peoples into nations occurred at each point, determined by diverse chronological periods on the European continent, when those psycho-characteristic community bases came into existence which had been unfolding since the transition period between the middle ages and the modern era, particularly in terms of a common language, later in regions populated by peoples who spoke the same language, and finally – most importantly in this context – in communities which were united by a common culture, and where they found their visible expression. Approaching the term ‘nation’ from this perspective, neither biological nor political factors set a precedent for our art-historical aspect, even if we need to extensively take into consideration the frequent and multifold coincidence between the emergence of the previously mentioned monarchies and those of the national cultural communities. At the same time, in Western, Eastern and Central Europe, we should bear in mind not only those driving forces which originated from the internal social development, but not lose sight of external power components, such as, for instance the threat of Islam to the political and cultural structure of large region, particularly in Central Europe, a threat which extended far into the modern era. Numerous papers given at our congress are going to discuss the national character of the art of those peoples in the Central-European region which, over the course of centuries, joined forces as national communities. At this point we would merely like to express our opinion that, even in the analysis of the national, we consider the pursuit of precisely the regional art-historical developments in their emergence and evolvement in the rise and fall of their centers, in the strengthening and gradual weakening of their influence, and ultimately research into their fading traces, as an important methodical principle. This methodical process is certainly not the only key to an exhaustive examination and interpretation of Central European national artistic expressions. And yet it demonstrates one of those passable paths which, both in terms of the mutual interrelationships of those

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national artistic own interests revealed by Central European regional developments, and in the relationship of these national idiosyncrasies with the universal European development, may lead to more satisfactory research results. In this context we would like to point out several significant conditions. The analogies drawn outside the Central European region cannot be only about temporally different regional processes but must include temporally coincidental ones. On the other hand, regional developments within Central Europe can exhibit not only temporally concurrent, but equally temporally diverse phenomena. In our view, the method often used when citing Western or Eastern analogies, which constantly operates with the biased term ‘delay’, i. e. temporal retardation, is erroneous. The assumption of a ‘competition’, however, which often crops up when citing analogies within the Central European region and is just as prejudiced, is equally misguided. In the latter case we consider both the anticipation and the flashback of either the historic-ethnographic or the historic-political situation equally unjustified. Equally erroneous is, in our view, operating with constant geographical conditions which does not sufficiently consider variable historical factors. All this can be avoided by duly considering above all the social development of all of Europe, and in particular the social development in Central Europe, which exhibits such diverse gradations as can also be seen in the art-historical processes, whilst one must of course always, and with strict consistency, refrain from all vulgarizing and sociological or psychological generalizations. This is where our research work is faced with an increasingly inevitable set of problems which, when analyzing the art-historical processes, leads towards those phenomena which are associated with the sponsor, the commissioner, the buyer, the art expert and the art lover, or, in other words, the patron of the arts, the critic and the audience. In this context we need to draw attention to certain conditions which can of course also be encountered in the analogue Western and Eastern European developments. Even so, because of the ethnic complexity and the changeability of the political conditions in the Central European region, we need to approach these historical intermediaries of artistic work particularly carefully. Again and again the question arises not only of the ethnic background of the artist himself who created the work in question, but to a greater degree this results in problems regarding whether the respective patron, ruler or territorial prince, the landlord, the spiritual or civil high official, the more or less wealthy citizen, down to the art sponsor or art collector of more recent times, came from the leading of a specific region or from a national minority, or occasionally even an enclave. Under the convoluted ethnic conditions of Central Europe, this question generally cannot be answered definitively, either in the time of feudalism or capitalism, and not even during the same period and in the same location. This problem proves even far more complicated when approaching the history of a work of art from the perspective of the consistently entirely heterogeneous audience, i. e. of that medium which not only had a passive influence on the artistic work, but which took an active

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part in creating it. Allow me to give you one example of many, a widely known creation which can justifiably claim a prominent place among the masterpieces of the universal European art history. A single example, which, in our view, demonstrates particularly vividly the complexity of the Central European regional art-historical processes as well as the complicated interwovenness of the research problems we have outlined here. This masterpiece, which the art-historical literature has been discussing for a century, and which, from the reproductions of generally accepted manuals to arguments in specialized monographs, has been unsettling numerous prominent researchers since, both inside and outside of Central Europe, is the bronze statue of St. George in the courtyard of the Hradschin in Prague – as can be read in the maybe most widely-known art history published by Propyläen, with the since-outdated Epitheton ornans: „as a free-plastic piece … the oldest surviving work.” This is neither the time nor the place to delve into the extremely contrasting set of problems surrounding the genesis of this piece of art, its localization, and its attribution, and much less do we want to attempt an elaboration on this vexata quaestio of 14th-century sculpture here. We shall be content with listing a few concrete facts related to our chosen example: The equestrian statue adorns the royal castle of the city of Prague, the Bohemian center of the Holy Roman Empire (of the German nation), under the French-born Luxemburg emperors. The sculpture was created by the brothers George and Martin, who had a great reputation as sculptors and bronze casters, and who were from the city of Klausenburg (Cluj; Kolozsvár), which was populated by Hungarians, Germans, and Romanians, in the very Transylvania which, in political terms, belonged to the Hungarian kingdom of French-turned-Italian Anjou kings. On other occasions the very same sculptor brothers worked on the order of Hungarian spiritual leaders. As revealed by the relevant iconographic and stylistic studies, in terms of the prevailing contemporary trends, it is mostly connections with Italian and German national art that are in question. Henceforth, considering all these facts from our aspect, we come to the conclusion that, in order to be able to finally determine this masterpiece’s due place in an entirely convincing and reassuring manner, both outside and inside of Central Europe, required, and will require in the future, a diligent examination of those regional developments which were of vital importance to the universal European development in the 14th century, and of the national cultures which originated and unfolded in Central Europe. Once again we emphasize that it is not our task here to evaluate the sources and literature in reference to this work of art, which is why we ask those of our valued colleagues of different nationalities who are directly or indirectly interested in this masterpiece to be satisfied with the statement that we consider the results that have so far been achieved in the clarification of the St George issue, without a more in-depth examination of the relations and correlations, as not yet concluded. Following on from what we said earlier, we believe that a brief glance at the history of science of the art-historical research which is focused on Central Europe, may also

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reveal the path towards a successful solution of those issues which remain unsolved in terms of the Central European region. Earlier general research spotted, in the Central European regional developments – based on a procedure in the history of science which was standard at the time – geographically distant and therefore delayed accompanying symptoms of the universal development which led via the Western or Eastern European centers. Unless qualitatively significant creations fitted into the category of peripheral art, it resorted to the so-called migration theory, i. e. the theory of an outflux of artists, or the deportation of art, because this was the most obvious. Thus, for instance, the most beautiful Byzantine icons were exported from the East to Central Europe, and the masons’ guilds of the most beautiful Roman churches from the West to Central Europe. At this point we would like to emphasize that even from the current research position we consider an examination of the migration of artists and works of art by no means to be outmoded, but that on the contrary, we consider it to be vital in terms of future complex research methods, although of course new source material would have to be extrapolated and an authentic reconstruction of the economic and historic-cultural correlations would need to take place. Furthermore, we’d like to emphasize that this research activity would not only extend to artists and works that emigrated to Central Europe, but also those that migrated from Central Europe to the Western and Eastern parts of the continent. On the other hand, during this first phase related to the history of science, neither art historians who were active outside of Central Europe nor those who were ‘local’ were sufficiently schooled in the artistic past of the respective central European nation they belonged to that they didn’t consider albeit too general proficiency of their ‘foreign’ colleagues to be a model example. This is also why they declared these equal to those phenomena which, based on initial results from research which had only just started and relied on source investigations and topographical works, could not be explained, or at least appeared inexplicable, in terms of active and passive migration. We refer to the first phase, because in our view it would be misguided in relation to our still comparatively new discipline to think along the lines of strictly historic-scientific ‘periods’ where both universal research and special areas are defined by overlapping research trends and even in the life’s work of the most eminent researchers, due to experience and progress, changes in perception, views and evaluations can be noted. The subsequent second phase, as a result of the more in-depth research activity, was characterized by a certain reticence towards the Central European concerns on the part of those art historians who were active outside of Central Europe. This reticence was due on the one hand to a lack of information about the research results which had been achieved in Central Europe itself, not least because of linguistic difficulties when ­studying the relevant domestic publications, and on the other a hesitance to disprove the deeply established determinations and findings of famous predecessors. The progress made during the second phase by local Central European researchers in the investigation and

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analysis of the national artistic past was far more remarkable. It was no doubt helped considerably not only by the complex source research and topographical registration conducted by the Vienna School, which belonged to the Central Europe interior, but also by the, from our perspective, foreign French, German, and Italian research schools, thanks to the highly useful applicable analogies of their universally valid and in many respects mature methodical procedures. However, during the same historic-scientific phase many Central European researchers – it is important to note that we always think extra et intra muros regni Hungariae – increasingly chose a path which, considering the growing recognition and understanding of the idiosyncrasy of national cultures, is understandable and, in terms of their desire to gain appreciation for them, even forgivable, but which led many a deserving researcher to stray from the straight path of soberly deliberated objectivity. This wrong track then led to the above-mentioned competition and often, as a result of the multivalence of historic-political factors which we also mentioned earlier, to an unscientific cannibalization of art-historical research results. Under the banner of this stance, which is detrimental to objective research, the initial defensive against the exaggerated emphasis on Western or Eastern European so-called ‘influences and effects’ turned into an aggressive fighting spirit in favor of an equally exaggerated emphasis on central European ‘native traditions.’ Thus, for example researchers of one Central European nation competed with those from another, equally Central European nation for the priority of Gothic or Renaissance achievements which had come to light earlier in their own home country, whilst the specific national achievements were confronted with each other not on equal terms, but eyeing each other suspiciously: vestigia terrent. If however one wanted to briefly characterize these two historic-scientific phases in one concise epithet each, in the in our view ‘foreign’ research, the first phase could be called the one of certainty undeterred by facts, and the second the one that had become more reticent due to more clearly recognized facts, while in the ‘domestic’ Central European research the first phase could be called primitive, and the second as that in which a particularistic parochialism prevailed. Definitions which, I repeat, are marked by simplification. Following these phases, which despite all their negative traits also possess many positive traits, we now move on to research into the history of Central European art in its third phase, which is – post tot discrimina rerum – in a more clarified atmosphere and a more substantially unified, direct and swift exchange of reciprocal publications, characterized by an increasingly complex occupation with the methodical problems of our discipline. It would be all too simple and convenient to conclude from this that not the negatives, but the undoubtedly existing positives should be called as witnesses to the real progress of our discipline. But in order to reach this goal, we need to contribute a great amount ourselves, to continue our research with tireless persistence, process and, finally, contemplate and consider our new findings. Naturally not in the way we approached, so to speak only marginally, the problems here, which for the sake

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of brevity is highly compressed and abstract, but in a concrete way which raises the comparative efforts, such as can be achieved and is demanded by an in-depth and comprehensive investigation of the regional developments. And in this context, we would like to emphasize strongly that the working hypothesis of this auxiliary category needs to be aimed at not the destructive dismantling of the overall development, but rather its constructive erection. As the application of the deductive method in Central European art-historical research has in the past gone too far, we may also in the future increasingly need to use the inductive methods when conducting research into the universal history of European art. In doing this, we ‘natives’ must not be led by any kind of apologetical mentality, and we can reassure our ‘foreign’ colleagues that there is no need to fear that the eternal historical values of the universal development will in any way be compromised by a provincial tendency originating from the periphery. Ultimately, everything that we have briefly explained here is merely aimed at promoting the work of our imminent congress, and at simultaneously creating an appropriate basis for discussion. I would like to conclude by giving the series of papers which start tomorrow and which are both rich in variety and justifiably eagerly awaited by all of us, a classic quote to take along which, aside from the fact that in all modesty, it also includes my own self-criticism, is as constantly valid in terms of its topicality when referring to the history of art as it is for any other area of historical research: Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla! Translated by Britt Pflüger Originally published as: Allgemeine Entwicklung und regionale Entwicklungen in der Kunstgeschichte – Situation des Problems in „Mitteleuropa“. In: György Rózsa (ed.): Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, actes du XXII e Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art; Budapest 1969, vol. 1. Budapest 1972, 19 – 29.

Robert Born

Commentary on Vayer’s Text Lajos Vayer’s inaugural address to the 22nd Congress of the International Committee for Art History (CIHA) in Budapest in 1969, presented here in its English translation, is a milestone on the way to the emergence of the idea of an (East-)Central European regional cohesion.1 So far, this programmatic speech has been contextualized primarily in the framework of research on the history of CIHA as an institution.2 Vayer’s lecture will therefore be situated against the background of the paradigm shift in art historical research in Hungary and the former Eastern Bloc. In this context, the development of the concept of (East-)Central Europe will form a primary focus. In addition, the impact of the Budapest Congress on the development of the discipline in Hungary and in a transnational science-political environment will be highlighted. Lajos Vayer was born in Budapest in 1913 as the son of a professor of Latin at the University of Budapest. He nurtured the classical education of his youth throughout his life, as evidenced strikingly by the Latin phrases interspersed in the CIHA plenary lecture and especially the dictum from Seneca’s Epistulae morales placed as its conclusion. Between 1931 and 1935, Vayer studied history and art history in Budapest, where the heritage of the Vienna School of Art History, its historical-critical method, with the use of primary source materials and the cultural-historical approach were highly valued. He also became acquainted with the views of the circle around Aby Warburg regarding the cultural-historical interpretation of portraits, as demonstrated by his doctorate under Tibor Gerevich on the iconography of Péter Pázmány, a leading figure of the Counter-Reformation in Royal Hungary and the namesake of the Budapest University in the interwar period.3 Iconographic questions also formed a focus of his subsequent work in the Historical Picture Gallery, which at first constituted an integral part of the Graphic Department of the Museum of Fine Arts and in 1939 was integrated into the Hungarian National Museum.4 An essential impulse for Vayer’s later career was his sojourn as a fellow at the Collegium Hungaricum/Accademia d’Ungheria in Rome between 1947 and 1948, where he prepared the groundwork for many of his later studies on the Early Italian Renaissance and its

1 Dmitrieva-Einhorn 2004, 132 – 133. – Kaufmann 2004, 96 – 97. – Bakoš 2010, 110 – 111. – Labuda 2010, 2. 2 Cooke 2018. – Sarapik 2019, 245 – 246. 3 Vayer 1935. 4 Vegh 2001, 415. – Sinkó 2009, 21, 43 – 44.

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impact on Hungary.5 Tibor Gerevich had pinpointed this network of relationships as an important focus of the work agenda of Hungarian art historical research as early as 1923 in his inaugural lecture The European Place of Old Hungarian Art.6 During his stay in Rome, Vayer also engaged with the current positions of Italian art and philosophy historiography. In addition to Benedetto Croce, these included Adolfo and Lionello Venturi, Roberto Longhi and Mario Salmi, who were connected to his doctoral supervisor, Tibor Gerevich.7 Vayer’s return to Budapest coincided with the seizure of power by the Hungarian Workers’ Party (Magyar Dolgozók Pártja, MDP). The system change and the successively installed Stalinist dictatorship exerted a lasting influence over research work in art history. A first step in this direction was the reform of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1949, which henceforth, like in the other recently established people’s democracies, had a significant role in elaborating the guidelines for scientific work and university teaching. One of the formative figures of this transitional period was the art historian and theorist Lajos Fülep, who was appointed chair of the newly founded Committee for Art History of the Academy of Sciences and in 1951 took over the chair of art history at Budapest University, which had been renamed Eötvös-Loránd-Tudományegyetem meanwhile. Fülep had been a member, along with György (Georg) Lukács, of the short-lived Sunday Circle (Hung. Vasárnapi Kör) founded in 1917, which had also included the art historians Frederick (Frigyes) Antal, Arnold Hauser, Johannes Wilde, and Charles de Tolnay (Karl von Tolnai).8 Following his return from exile in the Soviet Union, György Lukács was appointed professor of aesthetics and philosophy of culture in Budapest in 1948 and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Even though two members of the Sunday Circle held leading positions, the ideas about a revision of the classical methods of art history based on historical materialism, developed by Antal and Hauser in exile from the 1930s onward, were not considered during the realignment of the discipline in Hungary.9 During the transition period, marked by fear and uncertainty, Fülep formulated in his speech on the occasion of his admission to the Academy in 1950 a program for future scientific research, published the following year under the title The Tasks of Hungarian Art History. In it, he took up ideas on Hungarian art that he had initially presented in 1917 with the Budapest Sunday Circle and published in a book in 1923.10

5 6 7 8 9 10

Prokopp 2001, 339. Gerevich 1923, 114 – 115. Marosi 2001, 1123. Born 2011, 94 – 96. Marosi 1999, 357 – 358. – Born 2015, 169 – 172. Sinkó 2010 – 2011, 50 – 51; as well as the introductory commentary by Nóra Veszprémi in Fülep 2014.

Commentary on Vayer’s Text  |

Fülep’s criticism in 1950 was twofold and touched on general ideological complexes and issues of the discipline and methodological questions. The primary aim of this intervention was to separate the chauvinist tradition of Hungarian art historiography and the prevailing theory of cultural supremacy from the tradition of art historiography as a science. Fülep proposed a differentiation between ‘art in Hungary’ and ‘Hungarian art’. The former encompasses all artistic manifestations created and/or found on the historical territory of Hungary, while the latter refers only to art created by the Hungarian nation.11 The methodological reflections on the functions of the conceptual pair ‘Hungarian’ and ‘Hungarianlandic’ and criticism of the nationalist instrumentalization of art history played a significant role in determining the Central European character of art historical processes in Hungary from the late 1950s onwards.12 The initiatives associated with this have so far hardly been addressed outside Hungary, which is nonetheless astonishing, as the adoption of a Central European perspective was also envisaged from the outset as a component of international cooperation. At the start of these discussions were the contributions of Géza Entz on problems of Central European art in the Romanesque period and the reflections of László Gerevich on the role of royal workshops in the spread of the Gothic style in this region.13 In 1962, Dezső Dercsényi outlined an agenda for research into selected periods of architectural history (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque).14 The inclusion of the research results on art and architecture in medieval Hungary, with particular attention to the geographical, cultural constellations of the proximate Central European regional context, into the international debate on the relevance of concepts of style also fulfilled a science policy-related role of bridging the gap between the two political blocs. In this process Lajos Vayer had a long-lasting impact as a mediator.15 His career received significant support from Fülep. On his return in spring 1949, Vayer resumed work at the Museum of Fine Arts as head of the graphics department. Following the death of Tibor Gerevich, Vayer was appointed professor of art history at Budapest’s Eötvös-Lórant-University in 1955, and in 1957, after Fülep’s retirement, he became chair of the department.16 Only one year later, he was named Ministerial Commissioner for the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.17 Vayer directed this platform, which was very important for the representation of Hungary abroad in the West, especially in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 events, until 1978. In the early 1960s, he furthermore published 11 Cf. Marosi 1975. 12 Marosi 1999. 13 Entz 1958. – Gerevich 1958. 14 Dercsényi 1964. 15 Marosi 2011, 16 – 17. 16 Végh 2001, 415 – 416. 17 Prokopp 2001, 340.

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several studies on the early Italian Renaissance, including his Academy dissertation (1962) on the frescoes by Masolino da Panicale in the Capella del Santissimo Sacramento in San Clemente in Rome, commissioned by the cardinal and humanist Branda Castiglione, Bishop of Veszprem and papal legate in Hungary. Methodologically, Vayer’s work links stylistic criticism, iconological considerations and research into the program with cultural history in the tradition of Burckhardt. The focus on the triad: patron-artist-audience was praised as a genuine enterprise of a Marxist art history, without, however, mentioning Frederick Antal. The influences of Antal’s studies can hardly be overlooked, however, such as the particular emphasis on the interplay between Italian Quattrocento and European Late Gothic Art. The exploration of the complex social and intellectual-historical foundations of this exchange also provided important insights for studies on the Hungarian Proto-Renaissance and Renaissance.18 In addition, Vayer’s monograph also addressed the problem of a uniform approach to the universal art historical processes within the historic Hungarian Lands, an aspect that ties in with Fülep’s agenda and anticipates some of the questions addressed in the opening lecture in 1969. The monograph, published only in Hungarian, is a significant contemporary document illustrating the gradual loosening of the dogmatic dictate towards art history in those years.19 Amid this new climate, contacts between Hungarian historical research and scholars abroad also intensified, from which art history also benefited.20 Participation in the conferences under CIHA auspices was not possible at first. At the congress organised in New York in 1961 by Millard Meiss, participants from the communist states, except for Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, remained excluded in the wake of the confrontation in Cuba and the erection of the Berlin Wall.21 All this changed at the follow-up event in Bonn in 1964, the thematic focus of which had been Style and Tradition in the Art of the Occident. Hungary, which had gained international acceptance after the two amnesties proclaimed in 1960 and 1963 for those politically persecuted in the aftermath of the 1956 events, was represented by a notable delegation. In addition, the Hungarian National Committee was officially readmitted, and Vayer elected a member of CIHA. In his report on the Bonn event and meeting of the CIHA-Board, Vayer also referred to the efforts to include the Soviet Union as a full member and the plans to have the subsequent international congress either in Athens or in Leningrad or Moscow. As a further symbolic gesture towards peaceful cultural cooperation, two colloquia were also planned in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia on medieval and modern topics, respectively.22 18 Vayer 1962, see also Marosi 1967, 291. 19 Cf. Born 2015, 174 – 175. 20 Marosi 2011. 21 Cooke 2018, [16]. 22 Vayer 1964 – 1965, 286; Regarding the planning of an international congress for art history in the Soviet Union see also Cooke 2018, [23].

Commentary on Vayer’s Text  |

The international conference on problems of the Gothic and Renaissance in Central Europe, organised in May 1965 by the Hungarian CIHA National Committee in cooperation with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was another momentous step towards broadening cooperation across the Iron Curtain. This event constituted an important conceptual preliminary stage for the international congress of 1969, concerning the regional focus, which tellingly was relocated from the ‘Occident’ to Central Europe and regarding the sets of questions addressed in the five sections. In addition to the relations between Italy and Europe, these included the links between the Gothic building tradition and the architectural forms of the Italian Renaissance in Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Moldavia, Poland and Slovakia. The subject of the third section, the Renaissance concept of man, offered the opportunity to present considerations of iconography and iconology, two methodological approaches that had largely been marginalised in the people’s democracies in the 1950s. The last two sections on patrons and on the work of the artists provided the platform for social-historical considerations. After the conference, the CIHA board present in the Hungarian capital voted for Budapest as the venue for the 22nd International Congress of Art History in 1969.23 The main thematic focuses proposed by Vayer as president of this event were endorsed by the CIHA meeting in Split in 1968.24 The Budapest meeting concentrated on the general evolution and the regional artistic developments, taking up some aspects that had already been dealt with in 1965, focusing specially on the Central European region. This new, expanded framework involved a closer examination of those models in which the occidental centres appeared formative for style and the notions of hegemonism and universalism.25 In designing the conference program and discussion forums, Vayer succeeded in bringing the methodological innovations of the Budapest Sunday Circle to the attention of the Hungarian audience and especially to the Eastern European participants. Charles de Tolnay, who significantly had the honour of speaking about Bruegel in one of the plenary lectures, also referred to this same tradition. Moreover, the socio-historical approach of Arnold Hauser became the focus of several panel presentations, including some by Eastern European scholars.26 In the run-up to the Budapest Congress, Vayer endeavoured to broker admission of the Soviet Union as a full CIHA member, but without success, since it could not be decided which was the primary centre for art history: Moscow or Leningrad?27 A large 23 Prokopp 1971, 38. 24 Kontha 1970 – 1971, 208. 25 See Bakoš 1991, 1. 26 Born 2015, 176. – Cooke 2018, [25]. 27 Marosi 2011, 16.

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delegation nevertheless travelled from the Soviet Union, with prominent representatives of the discipline such as Mikhail Alpatov, Viktor Lazarev, and Mikhail Liebmann entrusted with chairs of sections at the Congress.28 Furthermore, Vayer engaged in talks in East Berlin on the establishment of a national CIHA committee for the GDR. Although such a national committee did not materialize, two representatives of the GDR were then accepted into the CIHA at the Budapest Congress.29 The suppression of the Prague Spring at the end of August 1968 also impacted the Budapest Conference. Jaromír Neumann and Edgar Lehmann, two close friends and supporters of Vayer’s Central European perspective, were prevented from attending the Budapest conference. Against the background of these developments, Vayer’s choice of the bronze equestrian statue of Saint George killing the dragon, situated in the third courtyard of the Prague Castle, as the only work of art mentioned explicitly in his lecture, takes on a special significance. This example enabled Vayer to demonstrate that non-central regions cannot be regarded as non-creative by definition. Furthermore, he used the example of the individual stages of the extensive research on the Prague statue to vividly illustrate the shifting positions regarding the role of peripheral areas. From a diachronic viewpoint, Vayer diagnosed a sequence of three phases in the evaluation of Central Europe as a region. In the first period, a deduction of the development depending on the developments in the Western European and Southern European centres, which were universally applicable, took place. Herein, Central Europe often appeared as a backward periphery. As a characteristic of the second phase, Vayer identified the search for national characteristics, mainly pursued by scholars from the region. The search for the region’s autochthony was characteristic for the transition from the universalism standing in the tradition of the Enlightenment to the search for manifestations of national forms following the tradition of Romanticism. For the third phase, Vayer saw the social-historical investigations on the patrons, above all rulers and ecclesiastic dignitaries, as a key to uncovering the international connections and their entanglement with regional specificities.30 The 1969 Budapest CIHA Congress impacted in different areas. For art history as a discipline, this scientific event proved to be a momentous catalyst for the establishment of an art historical research department within the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and furthermore influenced the conceptual restructuring of the museums of Buda Castle to a considerable extent.31

28 29 30 31

Sarapik 2019, 245 – 246. Kontha 1970 – 1971, 209 – 210. Vayer 1972; See also Bakoš 1991, 6 – 7. Marosi 2011, 16 – 17. – Born 2015, 176.

Commentary on Vayer’s Text  |

Viewed from a long-term perspective, the concept of a “Central European art” prepared the ground for historical and literary discourses regarding the existence of a Central European region, which started in the seventies. Moreover, according to Katalin Sinkó, the emergence of this cultural-geographical model can hardly be overestimated in light of the Hungarian context. The concept of ‘Central Europeanness’ constituted a counter-project to the political division of the continent and, in addition, to the idea of ‘Europeanness’, which had been appropriated entirely by Western Europe. Simultaneously, this was associated with a negatively imbued image of the ‘East’. The shift of the historical perspective in and about the region was a major hallmark of the Central European integration process of that time predating the political shifts.32 Even after the political upheavals of 1989, the question of the role of categories, which Vayer had addressed in his plenary lecture remained pertinent for the discipline. Thus, the motto of the first CIHA congress held in Budapest in the 21st century was “How to write art history – national, regional or global?”

Bibliogr aphy Bakoš, Ján: Peripherie und kunsthistorische Entwicklung. In: Ars 1 (1991), 1 – 11. Bakoš, Ján: Paths and Strategies in the Historiography of Art in Central Europe. In: Ars 43/1 (2010), 85 – 116. Born, Robert: Budapest und die Entwicklung des Sozialgeschichtlichen Ansatzes in der Kunst­ geschichte. In: Hüchtker / Kliems 2011, 93 – 123. Born, Robert: Die Renaissance in Ungarn und Italien aus marxistischer und nationaler Perspektive: Beobachtungen zur Situation in Ungarn vor und nach 1945. In: Dmitrieva, Marina / Kempe, Antje (eds.): Special issue of ARS, Bratislava 48/2 (2015), 160 – 178. Born, Robert / Janatkovà, Alena / Labuda, Adam S. (eds.): Die Kunsthistoriographien in Osmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs. Berlin 2004 (humboldt-schriften zur kunst- und bildgeschichte 1). Cooke, Jennifer: CIHA as the Subject of Art Theory: The Methodological Discourse in the International Congresses of Art History from Post-War Years to the 2000s. In: RIHA Journal 0199 | 30 September 2018, https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2018.0 [Last accessed 11. 12. 2021]. Dercsényi, Dezső: Közép európai építészettörténet felé [Towards a Central European Architectural History]. In: Építés és Közlekedéstudományi Közlemények 8/1 – 2 (1964), 225 – 231. German translation: „Probleme der mitteleuropäischen Baugeschichte“, ibidem, 232 – 240. Dmitrieva-Einhorn, Marina: Gibt es eine Kunstlandschaft Ostmitteleuropa? Forschungspro­ bleme der Kunstgeographie. In: Born / Janatkovà / Labuda, 2004, 121 – 137. 32 Sinkó 2009, 125 – 127.

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Entz, Géza: A közép-európai művészet kérdései a román korban [Problems of Central European Art in the Romanesque Period]. In: Építés- és Közlekedéstudományi Közlemények 2/3 – 4 (1958), 541 – 546. Exh.Cat. Budapest 2010 – 2011: XIX. Nemzet és művészet: kép és önkép = XIX. Art and Nation: Image and Self-Image; Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galéria 2010 – 2011. Eds. Erzsébet Király/ Enikő Róka/ Nóra Veszprémi. Budapest 2010 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai = Veröffentlichungen der Ungarischen Nationalgalerie = Publications by the Hungarian National Gallery; 2010, 6). Fülep, Lajos: The Task of Hungarian Art History (1951). Translated and edited by Nóra Veszprémi. In: Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014) https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/ veszprc3a9mi-trans-fulep.pdf [Last accessed 11. 12. 2021]. Gerevich, László: Közép-európai királyi műhelyek a XIV. században és a későgótika [Central European Royal Workshops in the XIV Century and the Late Gothic]. In: Építés- és Köz­ lekedéstudományi Közlemények 2/3 – 4 (1958), 491 – 534. Gerevich, Tibor: A régi magyar művészet európai helyzete [The European Position of the Old Hungarian Art]. In: Minerva 3 (1923), 98 – 122. Hüchtker, Dietlind / Kliems, Alfrun (eds.): Überbringen, Überformen, Überblenden. Theorie­ transfer im 20. Jahrhundert. Köln / Weimar / Wien 2011. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta: Toward a Geography of Art. Chicago / London 2004. Kodres, Krista / Jõekalda, Kristina / Marek, Michaela (eds.): A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades. Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019 (Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 9). Kontha, Sándor: A XXII Nemzetközi Művészettörténész Kongresszus Budapesten [The XXII International Congress of Art Historians in Budapest]. In: A MTA Filozófiai és Történettudományok Osztályának Közleményei 19/2 – 3 (1970 – 1971), 201 – 222. Labuda, Adam S.: Ostmitteleuropa – Schicksalsgemeinschaft, Forschungsfeld, Kunstregion, in: kunsttexte.de/ostblick 1 (2010), 1 – 12. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ kunsttexte/article/view/87666/82037 [Last accessed 11. 12. 2021]. Marosi, Ernő: Die wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit des Lehrstuhls für Kunstgeschichte in den Jahren 1960 – 1965. In: Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Budapestesis de Rolando Eötvös Nominate, Sectio Historica 9 (1967), 287 – 303. Marosi, Ernő: Fülep Lajos és “A magyar művészettörténelem föladata” [Lajos Fülep and “The Task of Hungarian Art History”]. In: Jelenkor 18/9 (1975), 823 – 827. Marosi, Ernő: Utószó. Programok a magyar művészettörténet írás számára [Afterword. Programs Related to the Hungarian Art History Writing Project]. In: Idem (ed.): A magyar művészet­ történet-írás programjai. Válogatás két évszázad írásai-ból [Programmes of Hungarian Art History Writing. A Selection of Writings from Two Centuries]. Budapest 1999, 322 – 326. Marosi, Ernő: Vayer Lajos 1913 – 2001. In: Magyar Tudomány NS. 46/9 (2001), 1121 – 1127. Marosi, Ernő: Megjegyzések az MTA Művészettörténeti Kutatóintézet nemzetközi helyéről.

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[Remarks on the International Presence of the Institute for the History of Art of the MTA]. In: Ars Hungarica 37/1 (2011), 16 – 30. Prokopp, Mária: A XXII. Nemzetközi Művészettörténeti Kongresszus. Budapest, 1969 [The XXII International Congress of Art History. Budapest, 1969]. In: Művészettörténeti Értesítő 20/1 (1971), 38 – 46. Prokopp, Mária: Vayer Lajos (1913 – 2001). In: Művészettörténeti Értesítő 50/3 – 4 (2001), 339 – 341. Sarapik, Virve: CIHA Congresses and Soviet Internationalism. In: Kodres / Jõekalda / Marek 2019, 240 – 259. Sinkó, Katalin: Nemzeti képtár. „Emlékezet és történelem között” [The National Picture Gallery. “Between Memory and History”]. Budapest 2009 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria Évkönyve/ Annales des la Galerie Nationale Hongroise 26/11, 2008). Sinkó, Katalin: A művészettörténet nemzeti látószöge. Kánonok és kánontörések [The National Perspective of Art History. Canons and Canon Breaking]. In: Exh.Cat. Budapest 2010 – 2011, 29 – 79. Vayer, Lajos: Pázmány Péter ikonográfiája [The Iconography of Péter Pázmány]. In: Századok 69 (1935), 273 – 350. Vayer, Lajos: Masolino és Róma. Mecénás és művész a reneszánsz kezdetén [Masolino and Rome. Patron and Artist at the Dawn of the Renaissance]. Budapest 1962. Vayer, Lajos: A XXI. Nemzetközi Művészettörténeti Kongresszus [The 21st International Congress of Art History]. In: A MTA Társadalmi-Történeti Tudományok Osztályának Közleményei 14/3 (1964 – 1965), 273 – 286. Vayer, Lajos: Allgemeine Entwicklung und regionale Entwicklungen in der Kunstgeschichte – Situation des Problems in „Mitteleuropa“. In: György Rózsa (ed.): Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art; Budapest 1969, vol. 1. Budapest 1972, 19 – 29. Végh, János: Vayer Lajos (1913. június 30. – 2001. március 31) [Lajos Vayer (June 30, 1913 – March 31, 2001)]. In: Ars Hungarica 29 (2001), 415 – 418.

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Fraternal Encounters Socialist Art and Architecture between Budapest and Pyongyang in the 1950s 1 Introduction Throughout the Cold War, the road between Budapest and Pyongyang invariably led through Moscow. A 1961 map denoting a rail line that connects the Hungarian and North Korean capitals thus stands as a visual metaphor for the flow of knowledge, material culture, and bodies that ensued when the two states established political and cultural ties in the early 1950s (fig.1). Both countries had recently adopted the Soviet model of communism and, in the aftermath of World War II, fostered an ambition to construct a Socialist world based on international alliances under the auspices of the Soviet Union. By the early 1950s, both Hungary and North Korea had embraced and experimented with Socialist Realism as the primary aesthetic means of building a new world, even if this Soviet method of producing socially engaged and politically committed art never became a clearly defined style during its decades-long history.2 The Socialist friendship that transpired between Hungary and North Korea was inaugurated by a major art exhibition titled Korea a szabadságért (Korea for Freedom), which travelled to Budapest from the still war-torn Pyongyang in 1953. The exhibition aimed to educate Hungarians about the North Korean people’s ongoing fight to liberate South Korea from imperialist occupation by the United States. One year later, in 1954, a cohort of Hungarian architects journeyed to Pyongyang by way of Moscow to assist in reconstructing the North Korean capital, which had been devastated during the Korean War. These examples of cultural exchange between Budapest and Pyongyang provide an apt opportunity to examine how Socialist fraternity served as a means of knowledge production in the 1950s. Beyond archival and published sources, such as a unique report documenting Hungarian museum visitors’ responses to the Korean show in Budapest, or 1 We would like to thank András Kácsor for digitizing research materials for this project. We are also indebted to Klára Héjj and Csilla Bényi, who facilitated our research at the Műcsarnok Könyvtár in Budapest in 2016 – 18, as well as to the editors of this volume for their insightful comments. 2 Socialist Realism was introduced in Hungary after the Communist Party gained power in 1949, even though several Hungarian artists experimented with politically committed, realist art practices already in the 1930s. In North Korea, Socialist Realism was introduced by the Soviet Union following the liberation of Korea from Japan at the end of World War II in 1945.

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Fig. 1  Railroad between Budapest and Pyongyang. Source: PÉNZES, István: Barangolás Hajnalországban (Wanderings in the Land of Dawn). Budapest 1961, 24 – 25. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image.

first-hand observations authored by the Hungarian architects who travelled to Pyongyang in 1954, works of art, including large-scale Socialist Realist paintings as well as architectural plans and built structures, offer new insights into the operations of international socialist circuits. Drawing from these materials, this essay examines how the heuristic of socialist friendship might be understood as an alternative to historical narratives associated with the so-called global contemporary art world, in which the global flow of capital along with decentered networks of art objects, art workers, and exhibitions serve as ubiquitous tropes. To cite one of the most barefaced characterizations of the latter, Hans Belting alleges that contemporary art “assumed an entirely new meaning when art production, following the turn of world politics and world trade in 1989, expanded across the globe.” 3 Belting stresses how art objects inevitably yield to the social structures that facilitate their fabrication and distribution, much as Jonathan Harris suggests that the global contemporary art world should be seen as a “world system created from, and working to reproduce, a set of asymmetrical power relations and nodes highly differentially placed geopolitically.” 4 3 Belting 2009, 39. 4 Harris 2017, 44.

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If these widely influential frameworks understand art objects as pawns in the grand scheme of the global, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s formulation of the “multitude,” which likewise maintains a significant hold within discourses of contemporary art, stands as a counterpoint.5 As opposed to the homogeneity of the ‘masses,’ Hardt and Negri define the multitude as a resounding plurality that continuously threatens to destabilize the mechanisms of Capitalism’s empirical grip through affective means, such as art production. In line with these signal texts, the most prominent frameworks of the global contemporary conceive of artworks as either readily complicit with or decidedly opposed to the dominant world order. By contrast, a study of international Socialist aesthetics enables us to rescript conventional histories of global contemporary art by situating them in relation to a longer and more nuanced trajectory of artistic production – one that departs from a perceived standoff between affirmative aesthetics and criticality. Socialist Internationalism, when defined as a mode of knowledge production, operated through artworks, theories, and institutional practices that were set in a multitude of places around the world, fostering a critical and at times bellicose stand against the imperialist political and economic structures of capitalism. Yet, rooted in a shared investment in the Communist project, Socialist Internationalism also produced and disseminated a number of affirmative – and, one could easily argue, didactic – values that the whole network of actors was meant to endorse, such as mutual love, understanding, and respect for one another. Such principles can be gleaned from a dictum drafted by the North Korean delegation that travelled to Budapest for the Korea for Freedom exhibition. The document, which was translated into Hungarian in advance of the exhibition, reads: Our beloved leader Kim Il-Sung said: The help that the people of the fraternal countries offer us now ‘is the new relationship of the indistinguishable unity and friendship of Marx and Lenin’s Internationalism, which is based on the mutual understanding, help, respect, and equality of states and people.’ 6

Under the model of international amity expressed here, artistic appropriation and a commitment to the loosely consolidated rubric of Socialist Realism would allow diverse nations to learn from and about one another, with the artworks of fraternal Socialist countries ideally maintaining their legibility across discrepant national contexts. In practice, however, such cultural transmissions often miscarried in subtle ways, giving 5 Hardt / Negri 2005. 6 1953, A koreai nép feltétlenül győzni fog! (Archives of the Műcsarnok Library (MKeA), 13. Unless other­wise noted, all translations from Hungarian are Adri Kácsor’s and all translations from Korean are Douglas Gabriel’s.

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rise to unwitting and unforeseen – but nevertheless generative – forms of collaboration between Socialist countries. Beyond merely promoting or negating established conventions and ideologies, artworks that circulated across geographic and cultural borders throughout the Socialist world came to embody the hybridity and plurality that were part and parcel of Socialist Internationalism.

From the Trenches to the Salon: K or e a for F r eedom , 1953 On 19 February 1953, North Korea’s official party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun (Workers’ Newspaper), announced that a corpus of recently produced artworks had been dispatched to Budapest for a major exhibition of Korean art.7 News of this event came amidst a stream of exigent reports on the Korean War, which was now in its third year after breaking out in the summer of 1950 between Communist North Korea and the US - and UN -supported South Korea. The war effort had sparked a close relationship between North Korea and other Socialist countries including Hungary. Indeed, as a token of solidarity during the turbulent wartime period, Hungary had subsidized the construction of a hospital named after the Hungarian Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi in Sariwon, a city located sixty-five kilometers south of Pyongyang.8 Kim Il-Sung, by then the de-facto leader of North Korea, expressed gratitude for the evolving friendship between his country and Hungary just two days before the announcement of the Budapest exhibition. His words were recorded by the Hungarian envoy to Korea, Károly Pásztor, who met the North Korean leader in private, though in the company of a Korean comrade who translated from Korean to Russian. According to Pásztor’s notes, Kim Il-Sung proclaimed: [w]ithout this powerful assistance, we would be unable to continue successfully the fight against such an enemy as American imperialism. This is why we cannot give enough thanks for this help to the friendly countries, the Hungarian people, and Comrade Rákosi, who is so attentive and who took a position so resolutely to help the Korean people from the very first day of the war.9

7 Li 19. 2. 1953. 8 The first team of Hungarian doctors responsible for setting up the hospital left Budapest for Pyongyang on 20 July 1950. See: Csoma 2016, 18 – 19. 9 Pásztor 1953. Károly Pásztor served as Hungarian envoy to North Korea between April 1951 and April 1954.

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With the translator’s help, Pásztor explained to Kim that his diplomatic unit sought to forge more intimate relationships with organizations in North Korea, including the Democratic Women’s Association and the Youth Association, so as to learn about their experiences and the difficulties they faced. Such interactions, he reckoned, would enable the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to more efficiently respond to the needs of the North Korean people. In his summary report to the Ministry in Budapest, Pásztor relates that Kim “responded that this is very natural and experiences must be shared. He requested that we reciprocate by sharing with them all of our people’s experiences building Socialism, ‘because after the war we will also be building’.” 10 In light of this exchange, the two states’ motives for staging an exhibition of North Korean art in Hungary can be seen as extending from their stated desire to learn from each other’s experiences, which was, after all, a core value of Socialist Internationalism. However, the exhibition would complicate the idealistic notion that such fraternal knowledge could be seamlessly shuttled between distinct geographic and cultural contexts. Korea for Freedom opened at Budapest’s National Salon on 15 April 1953. The exhibition featured more than fifty monumental Socialist Realist oil paintings and at least ten examples of ‘Eastern painting’ (‘keleti festészet’ in Hungarian, ‘tongyanghwa’ in Korean), which employed Korean traditions of ink painting to depict Socialist content.11 Also included were works in media as varied as sculpture and embroidery, along with printed propaganda posters. This immense body of work was meant to broadcast the North Koreans’ emphatic commitment to anti-imperialism, a theme underscored by the fact that the artists had produced the works with makeshift materials in underground bunkers due to the near constant threat of bombing during the war.12 The exhibition’s opening served as a veritable high-class parade of Socialist cultural diplomacy, with the Soviet, Chinese and North Korean ambassadors to Hungary joining a delegation from Pyongyang and the Hungarian political elite in celebrating the newly established Socialist friendship between the two countries. In his opening speech, the Hungarian Deputy Minister of Culture Ernő Mihályfi emphasized that the show would have a lasting impact on the development of Hungarian art. In addition to the leading Socialist Realist art of the Soviet Union, he declared, North Korean art would from then on serve as a crucial model for Socialist artistic production in Hungary.13 Such statements indicate that Socialist Internationalism was envisioned as a multi-sited project rather than simply a direct channel between the Soviet Union and individual Socialist countries.

10 Pásztor 1953. 11 By the 1960s this genre would become consolidated as chosŏnhwa (literally, ‘Korean painting’), with the North Korean state touting it as an explicitly national form specific to Korea. 12 1953 April 16, Ünnepélyesen megnyitották (MKeA). 13 1953 April 16, Ünnepélyesen megnyitották (MKeA).

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Fig. 2  Rim Pek, Comrade Stalin’s Present for the Korean People, ca. 1953. In: Exh.Cat. Budapest 1953: Korea a szabadságért: Képző mű vészeti kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban, Budapest: Kultúrkapcsolatok Intézete, 1953 [Korea for Freedom: Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Salon. Budapest: Institute of Cultural Relations, 1953]. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image.

Of the works in the show, Rim Pek’s oil painting Comrade Stalin’s Present for the Korean People perhaps best captures the exhibition’s underlying thesis; already days before the opening, the work was reproduced in the Hungarian press as an exemplary representation of the “brotherly assistance of the Soviet Union.” 14 (fig. 2) The painting suggests that participation in the community of Socialist nations would yield both material as well as immaterial profits, including Soviet ideology, new forms of sociality, and the evolving system of Socialist Realist cultural production. Standing over one-meter high and stretching to nearly two-meters in length, the picture depicts a jubilant moment when a war-torn North Korean village receives hefty bags of flour from the Soviet Union. In the foreground, two women and a child surround the precious bags. A woman on the right opens one of them and sifts the grains with her hands, as if requiring the tactile experience in order to believe her eyes. In contrast to the women in the foreground, who direct their attention downward, a separate coterie of Koreans surrounding a portrait of the benevolently gleaming Joseph Stalin, which hangs on a public building, affectionately 14 1953 April 12, Koreai képzőművészeti kiállítás nyílik (MKeA).

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gaze upward at the Soviet leader. Connecting the two discrete bands of figures, a male peasant directs his body toward Stalin’s portrait while turning his head to the women in the foreground. By dint of his contorted pose, the figure visually links the bag of flour – a material token of Socialist friendship – to the portrait of Stalin, which here stands as a symbol for the many benefits bestowed upon nations that aligned themselves with the project of fraternal Socialism. The leitmotif of Socialist fraternity reappeared in copious images throughout the exhibition. A large oil painting titled In the Hungarian Hospital (fig. 3), for example, thematizes the close relationship between North Korea and Hungary through a scene set in the aforementioned Mátyás Rákosi Hospital. The painting highlights the brotherly relationship of Korean soldiers, depicting a moment when two members of the Korean People’s Army arrive in the Hungarian hospital to visit an injured compatriot. The hospital room, whose walls are decorated by Korean war posters as well as portraits of Stalin, Rákosi, and Kim, encapsulates the virtues of Socialist fraternity. The Korean soldiers find their heroic comrade with his head wrapped in a bandage and confined to a hospital bed, where, as indicated by the conspicuously placed magazine at his side, he spends his time absorbing a Russian language text about Hungary. Bearing the title Vengriia, the Russian word for Hungary, the magazine features on its cover one of the chief architectural symbols of Budapest, the Statue of Liberty, which was erected in 1947 in honor of the Soviet soldiers who liberated Hungary from fascism at the end of World War II. The artist’s careful insertion of this publication in the scene brings to light how the prospect of knowledge exchange lay at the heart of Socialist fraternity. As the soldier finds himself treated by Hungarian nurses in a hospital gifted by the Rákosi government, he endeavors to learn about Hungary in Russian, the lingua franca of the Soviet world and the most commonly taught foreign language in both North Korea and Hungary at the time. In turn, the painting prods the viewer to speculate on how this encounter of multiple cultures and languages might unfold: whether, for instance, the attendant Hungarian nurse will attempt to communicate in Russian with the Korean visitors who interrupt her routine act of care. Although such a pursuit could easily entail misunderstandings, the cheery figures in the painting nevertheless endeavor to forge a community through the affective bonds of Socialist friendship. The impetus behind the Korea for Freedom exhibition as a whole stemmed from the same ideal of Socialist friendship celebrated by the painting In the Hungarian Hospital. However, as the painting indicates by literally picturing Russian as a mediating language between the Hungarians and Koreans, cultural exchange within the Socialist world was not always a frictionless endeavor. Indeed, in the realm of visual culture, Socialist Realism hardly amounted to a universal aesthetic language. Instead, its omnipresent mandate for works to be ‘national in form and Socialist in content’ at times occasioned notable misunderstandings between fraternal countries.

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Fig. 3  Kim Jong Dzsun, In the Hungarian Hospital, 1953, oil painting, 125 × 188 cm. Source : Exh. Cat. Budapest 1953: Korea a szabadságért: Képző mű vészeti kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban, Budapest: Kultúrkapcsolatok Intézete, 1953 [Korea for Freedom: Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Salon. Budapest: Institute of Cultural Relations, 1953]. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image.

A report sent by a museum employee to the Hungarian Ministry of Public Education following the closing of Korea for Freedom confirms as much. Summarizing the results of a survey that roughly 550 visitors had completed after viewing the exhibition in Budapest, as well as in two additional venues in the countryside, the report offers a unique insight into the ways in which fraternal Socialist countries came to learn about one another.15 According to the employee named Márta Szurdi, the most disappointing lesson to be drawn from the survey responses was that Hungarian audiences primarily read the exhibition’s contents as documentary evidence of everyday life and politics in North Korea rather than as aesthetic objects. Szurdi states: [T]he visitors considered less the artistic value than the political meaning of the works, and they looked at the show as if it was rather a documentary exhibition. It is also worth mentioning that the visitors found it hard to navigate among the works… [F]or other foreign exhibitions in the future, we must use the material and the explanatory texts to gain a stronger 15 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA). To the best of our knowledge, the individual surveys have not been archived.

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understanding of the given country’s culture and fine arts, and we cannot be satisfied with general political effects.16

The disappointment expressed in this passage speaks to the expectation that Socialist fraternity would result in more than the establishment of political alliances between different countries. Rather, engaging with and learning about each other’s culture and artistic traditions were seen as equally essential prospects. Despite the letdown of the show, Szurdi noted in her report that the most valuable comments of the exhibition survey came in response to the following question: “what could Hungarian artists learn from the Koreans?” Szurdi quoted what she deemed to be some of the most instructive answers, many of which addressed both the desired form and content of Socialist art. In terms of aesthetics, the Hungarian respondents seem to have appreciated the overt naturalism of Korean paintings. Indeed, numerous responses praised the exaggerated realist style, the detailed mode of depiction, and the legibility of North Korean art. Some of the visitors, for example, insisted on the need to learn from the Koreans’ style of realism and their “technical absorption in details, paired with [their] ability to highlight the typical and important.” 17 Meanwhile, ­others stressed how the Korean works on view modeled “a clear and definite message, and natural composition.” 18 On the other hand, the comments highlighted by Szurdi indicate that there were certain moral values embedded in the project of Socialist Internationalism, which the Hungarian visitors seem to have identified as ideal content.19 For these viewers, the comments suggest, Korean artists had eclipsed Hungarians both in terms of their perseverance and their capacity to follow the Soviet Union. The survey respondents indicated that, compared to their Hungarian counterparts, Korean artists were much better equipped with “deep humanism”; the “will to learn from the Soviet example”; a “firm standing despite all hardships”; and “hatred toward the imperialists.” 20 The same report underlines how art should play a central role in establishing the core values of Socialist Internationalism by transferring and shaping them through aesthetics. On this score, Szurdi emphasized the importance of sending the results of the surveys to the Union of Hungarian Painters and organizing a public event in which Hungarian artists and critics could evaluate the lessons of the exhibition. Her report also suggested translating the surveys into Korean and sending them to the

16 17 18 19 20

1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA), 1. 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA), 1 – 2. 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA). 1 – 2. 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA). 1 – 2. 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA). 1 – 2.

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artists featured in the exhibition so that they too might learn from the feedback of the Hungarian workers.21 While it is unclear whether or not the survey responses were ever imparted to Korean artists, artistic exchange between North Korea and Hungary continued throughout the 1950s as a result of relationships that had been forged through the Korea for Freedom exhibition. In January 1956, for instance, the North Korean critic Yu Jin-myŏng published a commentary on an album of one hundred works by the Hungarian sculptor Aladár Farkas (1909 – 1981), which the artist had recently sent to his counterparts in Pyongyang along with a personal letter.22 Farkas had met the North Korean sculptor Mun Sŏk-o in Budapest in 1953, when, in preparation for Korea for Freedom, Mun used his studio to repair plaster works that had been damaged in transit. While working in Farkas’s studio, the North Korean artist also produced a sculpture of Mátyás Rákosi as a gesture of respect for the Hungarian leader. Citing this meeting as emblematic of Socialist artistic collaboration, Yu writes that “sculpture came to facilitate friendship amongst the international proletariat, and there was a promise to exchange works [in the future].” 23 As if to return the Korean sculptor’s gesture of camaraderie, Farkas had produced a series of works entitled Korea’s Liberation Struggle (Chosŏnŭi haebang tujaeng), stating in his letter to Korean artists: “Your heroism in defending, with your body and soul, the whole world from the murderous imperialists, encouraged me to create sculptures that reflected this struggle.” 24 Farkas’s series comprised twenty-three works of various themes, including Korean-Hungarian Friendship, General Kim Il-Sung, The Struggle for Peace, and The People’s Army. Yu’s brief descriptions show that Farkas’s sculptures stood as analogues to the North Korean works featured in Korea for Freedom. Indeed, at least one of the sculptures would have read as a direct correlate to In the Hungarian Hospital, for it also represented the Rákosi Hospital and members of the Hungarian Red Cross who worked there.25 Likewise commemorating cultural relations between the two countries, a separate sculpture titled Korean Warrior (Chosŏn chŏnsa), which depicted one of the many Korean exchange students studying in Budapest, prompted Yu to remark that the work accurately “brings out the brave and fighting spirit of the Korean youth.” 26 21 1953 July 6, Szurdi (MKeA), 2. Another document suggests that the museum curators met with the Korean delegation before their departure and mentioned to them the surveys and their general results. See: 1953 July 7, Fehér / Maróti (MKeA). 22 Yu 1956, 49 – 53. 23 Yu 1956, 49. 24 Yu 1956, 49. 25 Some of Farkas’s Korean sculptures are preserved at the Military Museum [Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum], Budapest; however, the current locations of the specific works discussed here are unknown to the authors. 26 Yu 1956, 50.

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As the exultant rhetoric of his review makes clear, Yu took the Hungarian sculptor’s works as confirmation that the Korea for Freedom exhibition had effectively showcased the Korean people’s meritorious commitment to Socialist ideals. Moreover, with the transmission of works made in Hungary about Korea, Socialist Internationalism made its full circuit. For Yu, Farkas’s sculptures were proof that Socialist values could be co-produced through artistic exchange, thereby providing Socialist countries with the means to learn from and about each other. Nevertheless, much as the museum employee Szurdi tacitly implied in her report for the Ministry regarding how some visitors dismissed the Korean artworks as documentary artifact, Socialist artistic exchange at times disrupted the idealistic veneer that Socialist Realism would retain its legibility across national borders. In doing so, however, such exchanges could still advance the project of Socialist Internationalism. The disappointing survey responses pertaining to Korea for Freedom proved productive for Szurdi, who used the occasion to reflect on how future exhibitions of international socialist art might more effectively parse the aesthetic and cultural singularities of the works on view.

“We Will Also Be Building”: Pyongyang’s “Hungarian Street” When the Korean War came to a temporary halt with the signing of an armistice agreement three months after the opening of Korea for Freedom, only a handful of buildings remained standing in Pyongyang.27 The prodigious task of rebuilding the capital therefore required substantial foreign aid. Kim Il-Sung managed to secure financial and technical contributions from a host of fraternal Socialist countries including China, East Germany, Albania and Romania.28 Hungary likewise played a significant role in the project, and in October 1954 a team of thirty-two young architects and technicians led by Emil Zöldy made their way to Pyongyang to assist with the reconstruction by drafting architectural plans for the new Socialist city.29 Throughout their yearlong stay, the team worked with North Korean architects to design a wide range of buildings and spaces including a medical university, an opera hall, dormitories for Kim Il-Sung University, and apartment complexes that would line the entirety of Potongmun Street, or ‘Hungarian Street,’ as it came to be called in reference to its designers.30

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Szalontai 2010, xi – xii. Kim 2005, 282 – 289. n. n. 7. 10. 1954. – Prakfalvi / Szűcs 2010, 110. Förster 1957, 264. Potongmun Street remained the thoroughfare’s official name in reference to the Potongmun gate in Pyongyang. In this essay we refer to the street as Hungarian Street in keeping with the rhetoric employed during its construction.

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All of these plans were made at an extremely rapid pace. Zöldy emphasized this in a 1956 article recounting how his team had to immediately dive into work upon arriving in Pyongyang, as some construction projects were already scheduled to begin in just a few months’ time.31 This caused difficulties because, as Zöldy explains, the Hungarian architects had sought to acclimate themselves to the material and cultural contingencies of North Korea so as to devise architectural plans befitting local needs: “During the short planning, we had to get to know Korean needs, the Korean man, building materials, and the available means of construction…[T]he task seemed even more difficult given that we had to make buildings in accordance with the old traditions of Korean architecture, as well as with the needs of modernity.” 32 In response to the challenge of fusing the old and the new, the traditional and the modern, Zöldy produced a number of sketches of historic Korean monuments.33 With the vast majority of such structures having been destroyed during the war, the city gates, which were concurrently undergoing restoration, offered Zöldy and his team a glimpse of East Asian architectural traditions. Despite studying these and other monuments that they had encountered while traveling through China en route to North Korea, the designs that the Hungarian unit ultimately submitted do not outwardly reveal any attempts to incorporate what they had come to know of traditional East Asian architecture.34 Rather, as the Hungarian technician Tamás Förster pointed out in a 1957 article detailing his participation in the project, the buildings they designed recalled the “classicizing aesthetic of the new architecture that is to be found in any of the people’s democracies.” 35 As a result, these designs ensured that the new Pyongyang would bear scant resemblance to its prior manifestation under Japanese colonial rule.36 In just a few years’ time, Pyongyang would boast “modern residential buildings and wide avenues [that] could be the pride and joy of any European capital,” as a 1961 Hungarian filmstrip on the city put it (fig. 4).37 The radical transformation of the city was not lost on foreign visitors who commented on the sudden appearance of a new architectural aesthetic – one which had its origins in the Hungarian architects’ designs. Already in 1956 the Russian screenwriter Arkadi Perventsev could remark:

31 32 33 34 35 36

Zöldy 1956. Zöldy 1956, 232. One such sketch is reproduced in Zöldy 1956, 232. Examples of the architects’ sketches of traditional Chinese architecture appear in Zöldy 1956, 232 – 233. Förster 1957, 265. The peninsula was annexed by Japan in 1910 and remained under colonial occupation until the end of World War II in 1945. 37 1961, Ják (Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest), frame 19.

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Fig. 4  “Modern lakóházai, széles sugárútjai bármely európai fővárosnak díszére válnának” (Its modern apartment buildings and wide avenues could be the pride and joy of any European capital). Source: Ják, Sándor (ed.): Látogatás a baráti Koreában (A visit to friendly Korea). Page 19. HU OSA LibSpColl_Dia_7319; Library. Special collections. Hungarian propaganda filmstrips; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. Electronic record.

Wide thoroughfares, tall and beautiful western type houses, ministry buildings, buildings of higher educational institutions and colleges, hotels, department stores […] The long arms of cranes are sweeping high over the city while beneath them brick walls of new houses stretch in rows. Pyongyang has changed so much that we could scarcely find any traces of yesterday.38

For Perventsev, the lost “traces of yesterday” included “enigmatic and mysterious back streets” as well as houses with grass roofs, all of which had been obliterated during the war.39 These traces would find no equivalent in the newly developing Socialist city (fig. 5). As Perventsev’s description suggests, the Hungarian architects imported what would become the classic vocabulary of Socialist aesthetics, which was perhaps most explicitly evidenced by the flat, simple, cubic forms of the apartment buildings they designed for 38 Perventsev 1957, 40. 39 Perventsev 1957, 40.

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Fig. 5 Ch’ŏngnyŏn (Youth) Street, Pyongyang. Postcard published in Pyongyang by Kungnip Misul Ch’ulp’ansa (Pyongyang), 1961.

Hungarian Street. That said, the architects did not completely disregard the local characteristics of North Korea either. On this point, Zöldy related the difficulties his team faced in accommodating certain aspects of everyday life particular to the Korean context, such as ondol, a traditional heated floor system, which they sought to include in the 1,500 apartment units that were slated to line Hungarian Street. Although his team had no experience with this technology, Zöldy stressed the cultural significance of ondol in a Hungarian language text explaining its mechanisms: The stone tubes running under the floor warm up the floor itself too, which is also made of stone. [This is important] because the Korean apartment has no furniture in the European sense. One enters the room through the small entrance and kitchen; before entering, the Korean man removes his or her shoes. The floor of the room is covered with thick rug made of rice straw, on which they sit, as the apartments have no chairs. A tiny, 30-centimeter tall table serves for dining. The only piece of furniture in the apartment is a decorative box, approx. 1-meter high, in which they keep their clothes.40 40 Zöldy 1956, 232.

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To this almost ethnographic description, Förster’s aforementioned article adds that the Koreans did not just sit and dine on the floor – they also slept on it, which further increased the need to resolve the technical difficulties of implementing this 2,000-year old tradition in multistoried, Socialist architecture.41 The Hungarians’ efforts to incorporate floor-heating into their plans perhaps came at the behest of Kim Il-Sung, as the North Korean leader would proclaim publicly in November 1955: “Because Koreans have long inhabited housing with ondol floor heating, they have a predilection for it. We should install it in multistory apartment complexes.” 42 The resolve of Zöldy’s team in this venture stands out because prior to Kim’s 1955 decree, even Kim Jŏng-hui, a leading North Korean architect who had completed his training in Moscow, allegedly dismissed the technology as old-fashioned and non-hygienic, and therefore contrary to the Soviet fashion of modernization.43 Despite their tenacity, however, Zöldy’s team was only able to incorporate the traditional heating mechanism into designs for ground floor apartment units. Their plans were thus left open-ended in anticipation that modern, centralized heating might be installed on the upper floors in the future.44 Although the Hungarians undoubtedly maintained a distinctly European perspective of what Socialist architecture should look like, in this instance the task of accommodating habits of everyday life specific to North Korea forced them to rethink the inner workings of structures as fundamental as apartment blocks. In turn, when Zöldy’s team left Korea in October 1955, Pyongyangites were left to inhabit the resulting living spaces on Hungarian Street, which combined elements of European Socialist and traditional Korean architecture. In this way, the apartment complexes that lined Pyongyang’s Hungarian Street offer themselves as a metaphor for Socialist Internationalism in the post-World War II period. For the buildings bore traces of architectural traditions from separate cultural contexts, which were consolidated through collaboration between Hungarians and North Koreans.

Conclusion If the Korea for Freedom exhibition demonstrated how Socialist Realist artworks provoked misreadings and mixed responses internationally, the Hungarian reconstruction of Pyongyang showed how the project of Socialist fraternity gave rise to hybrid aesthetic forms that 41 42 43 44

Förster 1957, 264. Pyongyang Gŏnsŏljŏnsa 2, 1997, 247. Shin / Jung 2016, 170. Gárdonyi 1. 6. 1955.

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did not conform to any established national traditions. However, such exchanges were not fated to last forever. As Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea took an increasingly nationalist posture in the immediate aftermath of the construction of Hungarian Street, the state began criticizing the apartment complexes designed by Zöldy’s team, deeming them “not agreeable to the sentiments and customs of the Korean people,” presumably because of their lack of ondol heating on the upper floors.45 Due to their unfavorable reputation, in 1979, even after the problem of incorporating ondol heating had been fully resolved by Korean architects, Kim’s son Kim Jong-il ordered the demolition of the street. Much like the buildings they designed, the Hungarian unit has been almost entirely effaced from official North Korean accounts of post-war reconstruction. Nevertheless, recuperating the history of the objects and ideas that trafficked along the passageway between Budapest and Pyongyang in the 1950s enables us to see beyond the frameworks of affirmation and criticality so often invoked in discussions of the global contemporary art world. The encounters between Hungary and North Korea examined in this essay sit outside these binary poles, shedding light on the compelling forms of fraternity that took hold under the banner of international Socialism.

Archival sources Archives of the Műcsarnok Library (MKeA: Műcsarnok Könyvtár és Archívum), Budapest 1953, A koreai nép feltétlenül győzni fog! [The Korean People Will Undoubtedly Win!]. Unsigned and undated. Box ‘X 1953 Korea.’ Typed, 14 pages. 1953 April 12, Koreai képzőművészeti kiállítás nyílik a Nemzeti Szalonban [Korean Art Exhibition Will Be Opening in the National Salon]. Box ‘X 1953 Korea.’ Press clipping from the daily paper Népszava, n. p. 1953 April 16, Ünnepélyesen megnyitották a “Korea a szabadságért” képzőművészeti kiállítást [Amidst Celebrations Opened the “Korea For Freedom” Fine Arts Exhibition]. Box ‘X 1953 Korea,’ Press clipping from the daily paper Népszava, n. p. 1953 July 6, Szurdi Márta. Koreai Kiállítás kérdőíveinek értékelése [Survey Results of the Korea Exhibition]. Box ‘X 1953 Korea.’ Typed, 4 pages. Report made for the Ministry of Public Education, Budapest. 1953 July 7, Fehér, Zsuzsa, Dr. / Maróti, Lajosné. Jelentés a Műcsarnok 1953. június havi munkájáról. Művészeti Csoport és Gazdasági Csoport [Report on the Work of the Műcsarnok in June 1953, Cultural Section and Economic Section]. Box ‘X 1953 Korea.’ Typed, 7 pages. Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest

45 Quoted in Springer 2003, 63.

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1961, Ják, Sándor (ed.): Látogatás a baráti Koreában [A visit to the friendly Korea]. HU OSA LibSpColl_Dia_7319; Library. Special collections. Hungarian propaganda filmstrips. Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest. Electronic record: http://hdl.handle. net/10891/osa:0305850e-5dc4 – 42c6-b17d-4341d55e6262 [Last accessed 19. 8. 2018]

Bibliogr aphy Belting, Hans: Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate. In: Belting / B ­ uddensieg / Araújo 2009, 38 – 73. Belting, Hans / Buddensieg, Andrea / Araújo, Emanoel (eds.): The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums. Ostfildern 2009. Csoma, Mózes: From North Korea to Budapest: North Korean Students in the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Seoul 2016. Exh.Cat. Budapest 1953: Korea a szabadságért: Képzőművészeti kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban, Budapest: Kultúrkapcsolatok Intézete, 1953 [Korea for Freedom: Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Salon. Budapest: Institute of Cultural Relations, 1953]. Budapest, Nemzeti Szalon, 15. 4. 1953 – 1. 5. 1953. Budapest 1953. Förster, Tamás: Korea és Kína városaiban [In the Cities of Korea and China]. In: Magyar Építőipar 6/7 – 8 (1957), 262 – 275. Gárdonyi, János: Magyar mérnökök Koreában. Beszélgetés a Phenjanból hazaérkezett Vellay Istvánnal [Hungarian Engineers in Korea. Interview with István Vellay, who Recently Arrived Home from Pyongyang]. In: Magyar Nemzet 1. 6. 1955. Hardt, Michael / Negri, Antonio: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York 2005. Harris, Jonathan: The Global Contemporary Art World. Newark 2017. Horlyck, Charlotte: Korean Art: From the 19th Century to the Present. London 2017. Kim, Cheehyung Harrison: Pyongyang Modern: Architecture of Multiplicity in Postwar North Korea. In: Journal of Korean Studies 26/2 (2021), 271 – 296. Li, Ok-yŏng: Wenggŭriya inmindŭrege ponaenŭn chosŏn misul chakp’umdŭl [Korean Artworks Sent to the People of Hungary]. In: Rodong Sinmun 19. 2. 1953. n. n.: Elutazott Koreába a magyar épitészek egy csoportja [A Group of Hungarian Architects is on its Way to Korea]. In: Szolnokmegyei Néplap 7. 10. 1954, 2. Pásztor, Károly: Report, Legation of Hungary in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry. Transl. József Litkei. Wilson Center History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive. http://digitalarchive.wilson center.org/document/113203. [Last accessed 03. 03. 2022]. Perventsev, Arkadi: Meeting with Friends. In: Korea Through the Eyes of Foreigners. Pyongyang 1957, 39 – 48.

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Prakfalvi, Endre / Szűcs, György: A szocreál Magyarországon [Socialist Realism in Hungary]. Budapest 2010. Pyongyang gŏnsŏljŏnsa 2 [The History of the Construction of Pyongyang 2]. Pyongyang 1997. Shin, Gunsoo / Jung, Inha: Appropriating the Socialist Way of Life: The Emergence of Mass Housing in Post-War North Korea. In: Journal of Architecture 21/2 (2016), 159 – 180. Springer, Chris: Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital. Budapest 2003. Springer, Chris (ed.): North Korea Caught in Time: Images of War and Reconstruction. Reading 2010. Szalontai, Balázs: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in North Korea: The Forgotten Side of a Not-So-Forgotten War. In: Springer 2010, ix–xxviii. Yu, Jin-myŏng: Wenggŭriya chogakka p’ŏrŭkkŏsŭ ŏllŏdarŭ [Hungarian Sculptor Aladár Farkas]. In: Chosŏn misul 1 (1956), 49 – 53. Zöldy, Emil: A magyar építészcsoport munkája Koreában [The Work of the Group of H ­ ungarian Architects in Korea]. In: Magyar építőművészet 8 (1956), 230 – 239.

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Modern, Primitive, Folk and Socialist Mexican Art in Polish Art History and Art Criticism, 1949 – 1972 The relationship between Socialist Internationalism, and current attempts to write a universal account of global art history, sheds light on a number of ideas and practices concerning the conceptualization, as well as the function, of art history narratives. For the purposes of this paper, I will define ‘internationalism’ as an element of the ideology that was an instrument of power in the countries of the Soviet zone of influence between the end of World War II, and the early 1990s. Originated by liberals such as philosopher and economist, Adam Smith, and British politicians like Richard Cobden and John Bright, internationalism was modified by the Marxist idea of class solidarity, which was held up as being more important than human relationships of any kind, including the relationship between citizen and nation. In functional terms, the ideology of internationalism was used to subvert national ties, impose Soviet political and cultural models on the territories under control, and facilitate the political expansion of the USSR after World War II. The political and ideological significance of internationalism was additionally determined by the Kominform, founded in 1947, the task of which was to advance the political and cultural unification of the communist countries.1 From this sort of understanding of internationalism, a certain degree of tolerance for diversity emerged. The art of a particular country within the Soviet sphere of influence was supposed to be ‘national in form and Socialist in content.’ As a consequence, internationalism implied the unification of cultural practices according to the Soviet model, in contrast with everything that appeared on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The differences of ‘national forms’ were meant to convey the idea that ‘Otherness,’ was merely a particular way of expressing an identical message. But it was actually the term, ‘cosmopolitism,’ that became the antonym of internationalism in the Eastern Bloc after World War II. This term was used in different contexts, and had many different meanings and overtones, depending on its desired political function in specific circumstances. In the Soviet Union of 1948, for example, ‘cosmopolitism’ had strong antisemitic connotations, because of Stalin’s oppressive reaction to the political activity of the Jewish Antifascist Committee (Еврейский антифашистский комитет) throughout the 1940’s, which cumulated in a 1953 campaign directed at Jewish physicians, and their alleged conspiracy against Soviet leaders. In 18th- and 19th-century Poland, 1 Kołakowski 2000, 204.

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the term ‘Cosmopolitism’ was used as a label for any manifestation of anti-patriotic behavior, from the refusal to wear traditional clothes, to activity in the service of the states, which played a main role in the partition of Poland. Until the country regained national independence in 1918, ‘Cosmopolitism’ meant the preference of personal profits over national duties, whereas in the beginning of the 1950’s, it was shorthand for the acceptance of western culture and lifestyle: clothes, haircuts, movies, jazz, intellectual trends, individualism, etc. Today’s appeals to study art from a global perspective have been mainly inspired by post-colonial studies aimed at critiquing Eurocentrism, and revealing the procedures involved in generating the concepts and images of ‘Otherness.’ In one of his last texts, Piotr Piotrowski stressed the problems of applying this approach to the study of the artistic culture of Central Eastern Europe, and to the history of art in that region.2 In his opinion, the critique of Eurocentrism and the concept of the ‘Other’ do not make sense when the culture of Central and Eastern Europe is an object of historical interpretation. Still, Piotrowski did not reject post-colonial studies en bloc, but rather encouraged scholars to take advantage of their critical potential to develop their own forms of comparative research. The result of such studies should, in Piotrowski’s opinion, form the base of a new alter-globalist approach to art history, designed to reveal the disciplinary practices of art study, which, in fact, are acts of repression against many ‘marginal’ or ‘peripheral’ subjects and topics. The essence of alter-globalist art history, Piotrowski writes, should be its critical potential, and resistance to the centralistic and foreclosing procedures of art history, and the mechanisms underlying art historical hierarchies and hegemonies.3 The keen interest in, and eager reception of, Mexican art in Poland from the late 1940s to the early 1970s – including exhibitions, specialist studies, printed publications and documentaries – can neither be explained as a mere function of Cold War-era internationalism nor adequately subsumed under the contemporary rubric of global art history. While the former reduces multifarious cultural phenomena onto one common denominator (namely, the pressure of an enforced homogenous ideology in Socialist societies) and the latter centers on the struggle against European cultural hegemony, our case has its own specific historical complexity to unroll. Piotrowski was presumably aware that such complexity should be a key element of his project of alter-globalist art history pointing out Hans Belting’s Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks, as the kind of desirable art history that draws its critical potential from the reconstruction of precise historical contexts – in this case, the invention of a visual perspective rooted in Arabic science, but put into practice 2 Piotrowski 2013, 13 – 19. 3 Piotrowski 2013, 24.

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in Florentine art.4 The question I will attempt to answer, following Belting, is why, in postwar Poland, Mexican art was the subject of serious attention – revered more highly than the art of Japan, India or Arabia – in which a number of popular shows were organized, written up by art critics and art historians, with catalogs published, books issued, and twelve documentaries made between 1955 and 1989. The first postwar show of Mexican art in Poland presented graphic works by the group, Taller de Grafica Popular (Workshop of Popular Graphics), founded in 1937 and inspired, like other groups of Mexican graphic artists (30 – 30, LEAR), by the output of José Guadelupe Posada (fig. 1). The exhibition was transported to a number of Polish cities and towns: Poznań in the spring of 1949, and in the same year, Sopot, Łódź, and Wrocław, followed by Warsaw, Cracow, Szczecin, Jelenia Góra, Bydgoszcz, and then Łódź once again in 1950. This might have been an introduction to a kind of exhibition diplomacy, initiated by Mexico in the early 1950s, when it had organized shows of its artists in Paris, at the Venice Biennale, in Stockholm, in Bolivia, and again in Poland. The first Polish exhibition of Mexican art had the joint patronage of the Polish Minister of Culture, Stefan Dybowski, and the chargé d’affaires of the Mexican embassy in Warsaw, Lamberto H. Obregon-Serrano. Texts for the exhibition’s small catalogue were written by Juliusz Starzyński, director of the Institute of the Propaganda of Art before the war, and after it, director of the Institute of Art, and professor of the University of Warsaw, with additional writing by Norbert Fryd, a former inmate of German concentration camps, turned writer and journalist, and official of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, in 1947, became the cultural attaché of the Czechoslovak embassy in Mexico, later serving as a diplomat in other Latin American countries, and the USA.5 The exhibition therefore had a strong political overtone, which was reflected in the contribution of both authors. In his very short introduction, Starzyński argued that the most important feature of the Mexican graphic artists’ work was a ‘combative attitude’ that connected art and reality with the goal of condemning fascism, imperialism, and warmongering. In his slightly longer essay, Fryd explained the origin of the popular graphic arts movement, whose practitioners strove to address the Mexican people using a form of visual content pioneered by José Posada. Since many Mexicans were illiterate, the simplicity and accessibility of graphic art served as an effective propaganda tool in the support of revolutionary struggle. According to Fryd, Posada’s art was rooted in Mexican folk culture, as well as the medieval art of the artist-craftsman, so the work of the Taller de Grafica Popular members was, in fact, an ideal example of communist art: committed, intelligible, and based on folk tradition.

4 Belting 2008. 5 Exh.Cat. Poznań 1949.

Modern, Primitive, Folk and Socialist  | Fig.1  The Exhibition of Mexican Graphics, Warsaw 1950. Exhibition poster.

All of these points were made by the various Polish critics who wrote about the Mexican show.6 Information about this travelling exhibition could be found in regional newspapers such as, Express Poznański (Poznań), Ziemia Pomorska (Sopot), Trybuna robotnicza (Wrocław), Gazeta Krakowska (Cracow), Dziennik (Łódź), Kurier Szczeciński (Szczecin), as well as national papers like, Trybuna Ludu, popular magazines like Moda i Życie, and Kuźnica, and in such professional artistic journals as the monthly, Przegląd Artystyczny. The exhibition was reviewed and discussed by columnists, but it was also an important topic for influential critics like Janusz Bogucki, Andrzej Banach, and Ignacy Witz (who was also an artist), as well as the abstract, and, after 1949, Socialist Realist painter, Jan Lenica. In spite of the diversity of the authors and places of publication, we can grasp the general features of this critical discourse. First of all, Mexican art was, for Polish critics, an object of intensive aesthetic experience. The main value of Mexican artworks was, for them, the artistic expression understood 6 Bogucki 1949. – Lenica 1949. – Szleyen 1949. – Witz 1949. – Banach 1950. – Witz 1950.

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in Worringerian terms, which meant the ability of a Mexican work to evoke the strong emotions conveyed through the line or the blot. According to the opinion of these critics, the energy, courage, strength, simplicity and sincerity of the Mexican graphic works originated from pre-Columbian art, later influenced by the Spanish culture, and was also the result of the impact of some modern trends in European art, such as Surrealism and Expressionism, and the heritage of the political satire of Honoré Daumier, William Hogarth, and Francisco de Goya, as well as contemporary folk art. This particular combination of Primitivism, historicity and modernity all owed its appeal to the revaluation of modern art, which no longer functioned in a state of ‘aesthetic detachment,’ but naturally drew on, ‘the primitive,’ ‘the national,’ and folklore, contributing to a realistic vision. Polish critics therefore perceived Mexican graphic art to be both modern and politically valid, formally advanced and persuasive in terms of content, politically relevant and emotional, and, above all, collective and popular. To the Polish modernists, this art seemed to be a perfect alternative to the Socialist Realism looming on the horizon in the late 1940s. Janusz Bogucki explicitly compared Mexican art to the “debates about Realism,” arriving at the conclusion that the road to Realism should run through, “a creative revaluation of contemporary art and its natural association with the tradition of historical and folk art of each and every nation.” 7 Another travelling show of Mexican art was exhibited in the Warsaw National Gallery of Art, Zachęta in 1955, and later relocated, with a different arrangement and selection of works, to the Palace of Art in Cracow, and then to the Silesian Museum in Wrocław (fig. 2). As was the case in the earlier exhibitions, the show was part of a comprehensive political and diplomatic campaign directed at the people of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania at around the same time. The Warsaw version included a large number of works by contemporary Mexican artists, 93 exhibits in total, including the works of David Alforo Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo, along with a selection of graphic works from the 16th to the 19th century. The main commentaries for the exhibition were written by Juliusz Starzyński, once again, accompanied by ­Ignacio Márquez Rodiles, representing Mexico (fig. 3). While the Mexican art of the 1949 and 1950 exhibitions was characterized as a combination of past and present, Primitivism and modernity, and ideological content and political function, Starzyński supplemented this characterization in 1955 with the claim that the art was, in the first place, national, as a result of the revival of the ancient heritage of the Mayas and Aztecs.8 He also argued that the Mexican artists’ rejection of naturalism was in deliberate opposition to the passionless representation of visual facts allegedly typical both of academic art and Impressionism. On the contrary, Mexican art sought to achieve expression 7 Bogucki 1949, 3. 8 Starzyński 1955.

Modern, Primitive, Folk and Socialist  | Fig. 2  The Exhibition of Mexican Art in Warsaw, 1955. Exhibition poster.

through distinct contour, as it was simultaneously rooted in both pre-Columbian and modern art, in particular, Cubism and Expressionism. Ultimately, Starzyński ignored the visual aspects of the artifacts, arguing that what determined the national and ideological meaning of all art was the artist’s intention to control the specific features of the form. The artist’s success therefore depended on his or her ability to come up with unambiguous and persuasive symbols. On the Mexican side of the discourse, Ignacio M. Rodiles stressed the revolutionary character of the art in terms of the unique role of the ‘Great Triad,’ – Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros – who influenced the subsequent generations of Mexican painters. Interestingly, he paid most of his attention to the graphic art of the exhibition, emphasizing its folk origin and educational function, and listing artistic groups and educational centers.9 Three more exhibitions of Mexican art in Poland are of further significance. The first, organized in 1961, and shown at the National Museum in Warsaw, was called, Treasures 9 Rodiles 1955.

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|  Piotr Juszkiewicz Fig. 3  Cover of the exhibition catalogue Mexican Art in Warsaw, 1955.

of the Mexican Art from the pre-Columbian Times to the Present. Its director and author of the catalog text was Fernando Gamboa, who directed exhibitions on Mexican art in various museums and fairs worldwide, while the Polish curator was Maria Ludwika ­Bernhard, an archeologist and art historian, and then curator of the Gallery of Ancient Art of the Warsaw museum, and later professor of archeology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (fig. 4). This exhibition was impressive in size, including more than 1800 objects from ca. 1500 to the present, and was followed by, Exhibition of the Ancient Mexican Art, organized in 1965 at the National Museum in Poznań, and prepared by Maria Frankowska, later professor of ethnology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The third show was titled, José Guadalupe Posada and Contemporary Mexican Art, arranged in 1966 by Irena Jakimowicz, Jerzy Zanoziński, and Józef Kojdecki at the National Museum in Warsaw (fig. 5). The catalog texts of the last show were prepared on the basis of catalogs of earlier exhibitions in Mexico. While the third exhibition again stressed the folk and historical origin of Mexican art and its political function, the other two shows created an ethnological and historical perspective, different from previous accounts in terms of the

Modern, Primitive, Folk and Socialist  | Fig. 4  Treasures of Mexican Art. From pre-Columbian Times to the Present, Warsaw, 1961. From the right: Władysław Gomółka, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Worker’s Party; Józef Cyrankiewicz, Polish Prime Minister; Eduardo Espinosa y Prieto, Ambassador of Mexico in Poland.

popular and primitive backgrounds presented in the context of their political functions. Before I examine this change in tone, let me first address the question of why Mexican art attracted so much attention in postwar Poland. In my opinion, the main reason why Mexican art became the subject of intense artistic interest was a result of the continuity and in the same time the modification of the modernist model of what art was ‘supposed’ to be in postwar Poland, a model that was still a crucial point of reference for the Polish artists of those times. Firstly, Mexican art had, or seemed to have, the value of the ‘primitive,’ which was one of the key ideas of Modernism, defining a historical nature understood to be a combination of ideological projects and artistic practices brought together by the myth of the regenerative influence of art in a world debased by the first wave of modernity. The British historian, Roger Griffin, emphasizes a special change in the viewing and construction of ‘modernity’ that occurred from the mid-19th century onward, in terms of the collapse and degeneration of the modern world. This, apparently, was at its most intense after the end of World War I, when many revitalizing and regenerative movements and ideologies were established. For Griffin, Modernism is a generally understood to be a diversity of palingenetic reactions to the supposed anarchy and cultural corruption allegedly resulting from the transformation of traditional institutions, social structures and belief systems under the influence of the first phase of western modernization. These reactions were powered by the development of reflectiveness and the accompanying progressive temporalization of history, one of the consequences of which was the tendency to envisage the future as a realization of utopia within the boundaries of historical time.

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Fig. 5  Cover of the exhibition catalogue Jose Guadalupe Posada and Contemporary Mexican Art in Warsaw, 1966.

What became the central figure of Griffin’s idea of modernity was a new type of artist and technocrat – with no Promethean features – prone to constructing a new world via the use of design, planning and technology. A symptom of the primary dimension of this technocratic Modernism was a new imperative: that of cleaning, sterilizing, restoring order and eliminating dirt and dust. As a result of this new enthusiasm for regeneration, a great number of artists, researchers and technocrats looked for possible sources of regenerative inspiration, not only in the realms of science and technology, but also in the national traditions and areas of primitive and exotic folk culture: African, Aboriginal, etc. As was the case with ideology and politics, this approach was designed to regulate the relationship between the past and the future, turning the former into a source of regenerative energy to be used in the construction of an alternative modernity. The goal was to build a modern world that was ‘cured’ of the diseases of civilization, and ready to be inhabited by ‘a new man,’ whose way of life was to be shaped in reference to forgotten or abandoned principles, which, in the distant past, allegedly made the human life more spiritual, spontaneous and in the same time, more rational, devoid of any social conflict, economic disparities, sexual frustrations, healthier and closer to nature. This was not merely a question of

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emulating traditional models, but of trying to resurrect the foundations that had fallen into oblivion in the course of the post-Enlightenment revolution.10 From such a point of view, the eclectically constructed concept of the ‘primitive,’ was supposed to be an important instrument in the renewal of art, turning it into a reinvigorating force and connecting it to many other aspects of regeneration, such as a desirable new spirituality or the reform of social life. Secondly, this idea of the ‘primitive’ is also a construction that had been created in anthropological discourse. As Adam Kuper points out, “the idea of primitive societies [was] intimately related to other potent and beguiling notions concerning primitive mentality, primitive art, primitive money, and so on,” 11 and crystallized in the 1860s and 1870s, with the study of anthropology itself. But while this idea appeared to be motivated by objective, scientific study, it was actually strictly informed by the vision of a revolutionary transition to a new, regenerated society: Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century believed that they were witnessing a revolutionary transition. Marx defined a capitalist society emerging from a feudal society; Weber was to write about the rationalization, the bureaucratization, the disenchantment of the old world; Tönnies about the move from community to association; Durkheim about the change from mechanical to organic forms of solidarity. Each conceived of the new world in contrast to ‘traditional society,’ but behind this ‘traditional society’ they discerned a primitive or primeval society. The anthropologists took this primitive society as their special subject, but in practice primitive society proved to be their own society (as they understood it) seen in distorting mirror. For them, modern society was defined above all by the territorial state, the monogamous family and private property. Primitive society must therefore have been nomadic, ordered by blood ties, sexually promiscuous and communist. There had also been a progression in mentality. Primitive man was illogical and given to magic. In the time he developed more sophisticated religious ideas. Modern man, however, had invented science. Like their most selective contemporaries, in short, pioneer anthropologists believed that their own age was an age of massive transition. They looked back in order to understand the nature of the present, on the assumption, that modern society had evolved from its antithesis.12

Let us also add that this antithesis was understood to be the origin of the profound values forgotten by the modern man. When approached in such terms, the explanation why modern European artists seeking to explore the ‘primitive’ reaches beyond the usual rigid post-colonial perspective, and 10 Griffin 2007, 15 – 126. 11 Kuper 1988, 1. 12 Kuper 1988, 4 – 5.

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interlocks better with the general characteristics of modernity. An analysis of interwar Polish discourse on this subject reveals an evolutionist approach to the combination of folklore, primitivism, and childhood, as ideas and phenomena that shed light on each other. At the time, the fertile background of social theories and reformist programs, as well as doctrines and teaching methods, both in general and art education, were quite prevalent. This can be illustrated by invoking Stefan Szuman’s writings on the art of children in the context of primitive and folk art. Szuman, a psychologist, educationalist, philosopher, physician, professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, and active member of the Polish artistic milieu, identified a key dynamic principle in the transition of a child’s drawing, from an internal model (in younger children) to an external one (in older children). Without detailing the full notion of the model (which mediates between object and concept in a way that approaches Gestaltism, as framed by Evolutionism), Szuman’s theory equates this transition with a shift from the stage of the ideoplastic to that of the physioplastic, or, in other words, from a knowledge of an object to its visual imitation. According to Szuman, a child’s art will eventually lose its freshness of emotion and expression when, in their teenage years, they start attempting to imitate ‘adult’ visuality. The discerning phase of the developmental stage of art, according to Szuman, is a transition that can be likened to the growth of a plant, in which it is possible to apply the resulting schema to all forms of artistic activity, by placing their given manifestations at an appropriate level. Szuman ascribed the specificity and values of folk art to the fact that it remains somewhere between the schematic and post-schematic stages, enriching itself with diverse decorative and ornamental values that have been preserved and developed for generations.13 Interestingly, he considers the art of ‘primitive peoples’ to be somewhat more advanced, situating it at the stage of typicality, in which a fully developed, fundamentally correct schema is used. Children’s art and primitive art share an immanent sense of ornamental balance and order, while at the same time employing a strong, expressionistic form of experience, which the viewer should approach with contemplative naivety. Modern artists, Szuman noted, had awoken within themselves a flair for primitive and folk art, thus bringing about a revival of decorative arts and highbrow art, as a result of having shed the shackles of ‘extreme naturalism.’ Still, he warned the contemporary artist against ‘toying’ with artificial primitiveness, in other words, naively trying to imitate what is natural for the child or primitive man. Instead, he advocated the study of such art forms as a way of understanding their compositional principles, the simplicity and ornamental orientation of which had the power to revive the modern decorative arts, as well as figural compositions.

13 Szuman 1927, 77.

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Szuman consistently called for the kind of education that would not hinder the natural creativity of children, by confronting them with the task of faithfully imitating real objects at an early age, and thus subjecting them to the pressure of the visual patterns present in the contemporary iconosphere. This approach, focused on the protection of a child’s innate creativity, was very popular during the interwar period, and widely promoted by the modern, ‘personalistic pedagogy’ movement espoused by numerous education theoreticians, notably Sergiusz Hessen, Janusz Korczak, Karol Mazurkiewicz, Henryk Rowid and Szuman himself. Generally speaking, the personalist pedagogues were interested in the development of creative personality as the final product of an individually animated spiritual process, i. e., self-creation. The goal of education, therefore, was to “release the child’s psychophysical energies, and develop the ability of personal self-expression […] to awaken the forces lying dormant in the child’s soul […] to initiate the creation of material and spiritual values and to understand and acknowledge the child’s personality, as well as respect its rights.” 14 After the conclusion of World War II, the evolutionist approach would eventually give way to the modernist project in its pure form.15 As I have already mentioned, Polish critics reviewing the Mexican exhibitions of 1949 and 1955 believed that the strong appeal of Mexican art stemmed from its essence, i. e. its combination of past and present, and its focus on practical purposes.16 In this sense, the expression as defined by Wilhelm Worringer, and the aesthetic equality of works of art from different periods according to Alois Riegl, influenced their view of Mexican art as being a modern reinterpretation of the reinvigorating primitive style, which, in turn, was able to trigger a political transformation of reality. Filled with primitive energy, Mexican art became an argument in an ongoing discussion about the possibility of transforming Polish Socialist Realism into a form of art that would be politically correct, but also visually effective. This aim would be achieved via a dialog with surrealism or Expressionism, which would provide some protection against the charges of bourgeois decadence. Polish artists made two attempts to take the Socialist Realist style in this direction, firstly from 1947 to 1949, and then again from 1954 to 1955. At the end of 1940’s, progressive artists like Tadeusz Kantor tried to convince the communist authorities that the best way to change Polish visual art into a new kind of Socialist and political-engaged artistic activity would be to adopt the visual idioms of the cubists, constructivists and surrealists. In the latter half of the 1950’s the failure of Soviet-mandated Socialist Realism in Poland, particularly in the case of Polish painting, was evident for the party leaders, 14 Bartkowiak 2012, 94 – 95. 15 Juszkiewicz 2016, 191 – 196. 16 Bogucki 1949. – Lenica 1949. – Szleyen 1949. – Witz 1949. – Banach 1950. – Witz 1950. – Kałużyński 1952. – Bogucki 1955. – Jackowski 1955. – Jakimowicz 1955.

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officially sanctioned critics, the public, and the artists themselves. In the end, the authorities agreed to try and change the control mechanisms of the artistic field, with the idea of renouncing strict stylistic regulations, by which time, many of the younger Polish painters were already starting to produce work in an expressionist manner. In 1957 the idea of making Socialist Realism more esthetically advanced and politically effective was ultimately abandoned in favor of the French Informel and the painting of the matter. However the Soviet paradigm of artistic activity was not merely replaced by the Western one. Polish versions of both trends of abstract painting were discursively constructed as the artistic forms of representation of the reality, which were to be based on the scientific knowledge about macro and microstructures of the matter. Unlike on the West such terms like unconsciousness, psychological automatism and sexual or scatological allusions were excluded from Polish artistic discourse of the time. In other words, Polish artists and critics were trying to make the formulas of abstract painting ideologically acceptable. The traces of the free artistic gestures on the canvas or the visual qualities of the non-painterly materials were to express rather scientific knowledge about the objective world than subjective worlds of artist’s imagination. Mexican art was also subject to historical and anthropological interpretation. Again, let us look at one more example of the interwar Polish discourse on Mexican art. This appeared in the texts by Michał Sobeski, a philosopher and aesthetician, and author of the posthumously published book, Sztuka egzotyczna (Exotic Art).17 The descriptions of pre-Columbian cultures made by Sobeski – a few years before his tragic death in a freight car, in which, in 1939, he had to leave Poznań with other Poles deported from the city by the German troops – belonged to an evolutionist paradigm which allowed the scholar to establish analogies among primitive art, folk art, and the art of the children. Even though Sobeski was a relativist in the Alois Riegl mode, he described himself as a ‘relative pluralist,’ thus accepting an organic model of the evolution of art. In such terms, he considered pre-Columbian art to be superior to that of the absolute primitive (i. e. the prehistoric, or Aboriginal, or African art) that had been blocked in its development by the European colonization. Another renowned Polish art historian who was interested in Mexican art was Jan Białostocki. His journey to South America, made possible thanks to the support of George Kubler, resulted in a 1972 book on the art of that continent.18 Kubler’s idea of ‘prime objects,’ and their ‘mutations’ and ‘replications’ in the long series, not only provided inspiration for Białostocki, but also allowed him, a European art historian, to investigate and interpret art that was completely alien to his culture. Białostocki’s general impression of pre-Columbian and early modern Mexican art was shaped by two basic features: firstly, in his opinion, a crucial element of Mexican civilization has always involved an 17 Sobeski 1971. 18 Białostocki 1972. See translation in this book.

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obsession with death, which was determined by the very hard natural living conditions and secondly, the total ‘Otherness’ of pre-Columbian cultures, which was, according to Białostocki, completely alien to Europeans who usually consider pre-Columbian art in purely aesthetic terms, while not being aware of the abominable customs of the society that created it and the system of beliefs of its members. Pre-Columbian art was exclusively religious, serving the fundamental process of guaranteeing the world’s continuing existence through incessant human sacrifice. This art was a kind of the anonymous ritual addressed rather to the eternity than to the people. Under such circumstances, students of pre-Columbian art could only adopt a distant, non-emotional and scholarly approach, Białostocki going so far as to claim that the European art historian could be fascinated with what made South American art different, and, at the same time, unexpectedly similar to the European form. In his view, the familiar appeared in two ways: firstly through modifications of European art, mainly Spanish Baroque architecture, and secondly, through associations with some characteristic features of Modernism: “… these works, so astonishing by the Otherness of its imagined world, surprisingly attract the spectator used to the laconic message of our twentieth-century art.” 19 Białostocki also sought to reduce the distance brought about by Otherness, discovering affinities, visual transformations, and mutations in Mexican art, which bore traces of the Kublerian ‘prime objects’. “In those magnificent paintings [in Bonampak],” he wrote, the peoples of Mesoamerica expressed their will of life, which let them survive in a new cruel system of slavery; they could express their creative passion in a different, alien artistic idiom, and then, after three hundred years, regain their independence and seek new ways of development, not only for their society and country, but also for their art. For millennia, the history of the Mexican people has been connected with its art, and the discovery of its continuity is one of the most moving experiences of everyone who has come to know it.20

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Poland’s enthusiasm for Mexican art as an artistic model and example of cultural Otherness came to an end, following the embrace of an alternative interpretation of primitive art, inspired by the French anthropology of Roger Caillois and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the ideas of the Polish sociologist and cultural historian, Stefan Czarnowski. Of equal importance was the theoretical writing of Polish art historian and art critic, Mieczysław Porębski, for whom modern art was informed by the primeval gestures of festival paroxysm and transgression, which, having lost its ritual function, continued as an impulse to reach beyond the boundaries of the modern form.21 19 Białostocki 1972, 36. 20 Białostocki 1972, 36 – 39. 21 Porębski 1966.

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Conclusion The ‘primitive’ is one of the critical categories of Modernism. Many European artists, critics and scholars have explored this category in their search for sources of energy and inspiration with the power to rejuvenate European culture. The range of ‘primitive’ art was quite diverse, including the art of non-European societies, as well as folk and children’s art, and, from the beginning of the 20th century, primitive and folk art became the object of intensive study for Polish art historians, art critics, and ethnologists. The main theoretical framework – evolutionism – urged them to compare the stages of children’s artistic development with different types of primitive art, as they were believed to contain elements of the same evolutionary pattern. Polish artists, critics, art historians and social thinkers hoped that the alleged originality, freshness, spontaneity and sincerity of folk, primitive and children’s art would somehow pave the way for a complete regeneration of contemporary art, especially as applied to the fields of Polish national style in art, design and architecture. Shortly after World War II, the idea of the ‘primitive’ was elevated to an important discursive position concerning the future of Socialist Realism, with many Polish artists and art historians accepting the idea of politically-engaged and ideologically-loaded Socialist art, while at the same time calling for the right to conduct formal artistic experiments. This is perhaps why Mexican art captured the imagination of Polish artists, critics and art historians at the time, as it provided an example of the possibility of coexistence between experimental form and Socialist meaning. The postulates of Socialist Realism, specifically the role of art in the in the process of political change and creation of the ‘new man’ may have sounded very familiar to modernist ears, but modernist eyes preferred the visual paradigms devised by the cubists, the constructivists, and the surrealists. Mexican art was proof that that ideologically loaded, politically effective and in the same time modernist art is possible, functioning as a paradox that fulfilled all of the defining criteria of Socialist Realism, while significantly deviating from the quasi-academic portraits, genre scenes, or figurative group compositions that were acceptable under Soviet ideology. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Thaw era followed allowed Polish artists to explore Western Modernism in all of its diversity, and Mexican art was relegated to the background, ceasing to be an important point of reference. Polish art historians did return to a study of Mexican art in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but this time, from an anthropological perspective, replacing evolutionism with structuralism, and George Kubler’s ideas of historical change.

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Bibliogr aphy Banach, Andrzej: Grafika meksykańska. Wystawa w warszawskim Muzeum Narodowym [Mexican Engraving. Exhibition in the National Museum in Warsaw]. In: Dziennik Literacki 20 (1950), 3. Bartowiak, Edyta: Uczeń (dziecko) w pedagogice personalistycznej okresu Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej [Pupil (a Child) in Pedagogical Practice of the Second Polish Republic]. In: ­Dormus / Ślęczka (eds.) 2012, 91 – 108. Belting, Hans: Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks. München 2008. Białostocki, Jan: O sztuce dawnej Ameryki. Meksyk i Peru [On Art of Early America. ­Mexico and Peru]. Warszawa 1972. Bogucki, Janusz: Meksykański morał [Mexican Moral]. In: Odrodzenie 22 (1949), 3. Bogucki, Janusz: Morał meksykański Nr 2 [Mexican Moral No. 2]. In: Przegląd Kulturalny 9 (1955), 8. Dormus, Katarzyna / Ślęczka, Ryszard (eds.): W kręgu dawnych i współczesnych teorii wychowania. Uczeń – szkoła – nauczyciel [In the Circle of Old and Contemporary Theories of Education. Pupil – School – Teacher]. Kraków 2012 (Biblioteka współczesnej myśli pedagogicznej 1). Exh.Cat. Poznań 1949: Wystawa grafiki meksykańskiej [Exhibition of Mexican Graphics]. Poznań, Muzeum Wielkopolskie w Poznaniu, May–June 1949. Foreword by Juliusz Starzyński, introduction by Norbert Fryd. Poznań 1949. (No pagination) Exh.Cat. Warsaw 1955: Exhibition of Mexican Art (Wystawa sztuki meksykańskiej). Warszawa, Central Bureau of Artistic Exhibitions (Centralne Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych), 1.02. – 31. 03. 1955. Warszawa 1955. Exh.Cat. Warsaw 1966: José Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913) i współczesna sztuka meksykańska [José Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913) and Contemporary Mexican Art]. Warszawa, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, 7.03. – 30. 03. 1966. Ed. Irena Jakimowicz. Warszawa 1966. Exh.Cat. Warsaw 2016 – 2017: Polska. Kraj folkloru? [Poland. Country of Folklore?]. Warszawa, Zachęta – Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 15. 10. 2016 – 15. 01. 2017. Ed. Joanna Kordjak. Warszawa 2016. Jackowski, Aleksander: Refleksje po-meksykańskie [After-Mexican Reflections]. In: Przegląd Kulturalny 18 (1955), 3. Jakimowicz, Andrzej: Wielka sztuka Meksyku [Great Art of Mexico]. In: Trybuna Ludu 63 (1955), 4. Juszkiewicz, Piotr: Folk, Children’s, Primitive, Modern. On Antoni Kenar’s Ceramics. In: Exh.Cat. Warsaw 2016, 189 – 201. Kałużyński, Zygmunt: Od anarchicznej groteski do nowego realizmu. Wystawa malarstwa francuskiego w Zachęcie [From Anarchistic Grotesque to New Realism. The Exhibition of French Painting in Zachęta Gallery]. In: Nowa Kultura 14 (1952), 8. Kołakowski, Leszek: Główne nurty marksizmu [Main Currents of Marxism], vol. III. Poznań 2000.

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Kuper, Adam: The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London 1988. Lenica, Jan: Grafika w Ameryce Łacińskiej [Engraving in Latin America]. In: Odrodzenie 6 (1949), 8. Piotrowski, Piotr: Od globalnej do alterglobalistycznej historii sztuki [From Global to Alterglobalist Art History]. In: Poprzęcka 2013, 7 – 29. Poprzęcka, Maria (ed.): Historia sztuki wobec globalizacji [Art History in the Face of Globalization]. Warszawa 2013. Porębski, Mieczysław: Sztuka a informacja [Art and Information], In: Porębski 1966, 146 – 186. Porębski, Mieczysław: Pożegnanie z krytyką [Farewell to Art Criticism]. Kraków 1966. Rodiles, Ignazio, Marquez: [untitled]. In: Exh.Cat. Warsaw 1955, 15 – 21. Sobeski, Michał: Sztuka egzotyczna [Exotic Art]. Warsaw 1971. Starzyński, Juliusz: [untitled]. In: Exh.Cat. Warsaw 1955, 9 – 14. Szleyen, Zofia: Malarstwo meksykańskie w walce o postęp [Mexican Painting in the Fight for Progress]. In: Odrodzenie 18 (1949), 8. Szuman, Stefan: Sztuka dziecka. Psychologia twórczości rysunkowej dziecka [Art of the children. Psychology of children’s drawing creativity]. Warszawa 1927. Witz , Ignacy: Warsztat artystów ludowych? [Workshop of Folk Artists?]. In: Kuźnica 21 (1949), 6 – 7. Witz, Ignacy: Grafika meksykańska w Muzeum Narodowym [Mexican Engraving in National Museum]. In: Przegląd Artystyczny 1 – 2 (1950), 38 – 41.

Jan Białostocki

Rereading Source Text: On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru The publication that follows comprises text and photographs. Both elements are indivisible components of the book. The text complements and provides a commentary on the visual insights into the early artistic culture of Mexico and Peru, by way of historical information, reflexion and aesthetic analysis. The book only relates to these two fields, and is limited to the personal experiences of the author. It is in no way an art history of early America; it only presents observations and comments related to this topic. The author is not a specialist in the field of American art and was not attempting to become one. However, he has become a lover of art in Latin America and wished, at last, to share some of his impressions and thoughts and to convey these to the Polish reader, together with some essential information. This notwithstanding, he has not written about everything, but about those things that particularly struck him, that caused him to wonder, seeming to him to be either especially original or unexpectedly similar to things known from elsewhere. The author owes his interest in the art of early America to his friendship with professor George Kubler from Yale University (New Haven), one of the greatest experts on this subject, whose publications taught him a great deal. He is grateful to him, as he is to Professor Ricardo de Robin from the Department of the Conservation of Architectural Heritage at the University of Mexico, for making possible a stay in Mexico of sufficient duration to facilitate his acquaintance with the country’s artistic culture. Polish diplomatic employees, Ambassabor Ryszard Maychrzak, Councillor Jakowiec in Mexico, and the Polish representative trade official in Lima, Marian Leśniewski, spared no effort in facilitating the art historian’s work and travels. There would have been many heritage sites the author could not have seen without their support. Not being an expert in the field to which the book that follows is devoted, the author was all the more reliant on a wide range of publications, as sources of information, or, in some cases, of citations. Not wishing to encumber the book with footnotes, which would have given it the character of an academic treatise, which it is not, the author compiled a bibliography at the end, composed solely of the titles of works he made use of. This is in no respects a complete or even rudimentary bibliography of the subject, though it may, potentially, be of use to those who are interested, as a guide to further reading. Niedica 1 – 10 August 1971 

J. B.

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I saw the things which have been brought to the king from the new land of gold: a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armor of the people there, and all manner of wonderous weapons of theirs, harness and darts, very strange clothing, beds and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use much better worth seeing than prodigies. All these things are so precious that they have been valued at a hundred thousand guilders. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in distant lands. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there Albrecht Dürer.22

IV Latin American art of the 17th and 18th centuries represents an interesting phenomenon for the European researcher. We see, therein, the simultaneous processes of the provincialization of Spanish models and the formation of particular local traditions rub up against one another. This is expressed, among others, in the selection of certain forms and solutions from the wealth of the European repertoire which have gone on to become so common that they may be considered to be typically American. There are researchers (e. g. A[lfred] Neumeyer) who believe that certain characteristics of the American Baroque are the result of the survival of pre-Columbian traditions and predilections. Others (G[eorge] Kubler), demonstrate that these had no prior meaning; that precedents can be found in Spain for all significant artistic phenomena in Latin America. There can be no doubt that the Spanish art’s orientally-inclined interest in the decorative, which dates back to Arab times, has found extremely positive echoes in Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador. While Iberian art was, beyond doubt, imported in a repeated set of waves, certain local traditions also continued, in line with the different realities and conditions particular to this land. For the Polish viewer, the process of the adaptation of Western European Baroque forms, in Mexico, takes on particular significance, in view of rather unexpected analogies with instances of the adaptation of artistic forms in Poland. There are sometimes surprising similarities in the processes of the multiplication, simplification, popularization, and exaggeration of painterly and decorative effects. The cloisters of La Merced monastery in Mexico City, dating from the years 1634 – 54, serve as an example of the way in which decorative painterliness dominates traditional European forms of classical origin. In comparison with the simplicity of the elements 22 Dürer, Albrecht: Diary of Journey to the Netherlands, 1520. In: Conway, William Martin (trans. and ed.) The Writings of Albrecht Dürer. London 1958, 101 – 102.

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of the cloisters in Acolmán from a hundred years earlier, form has been subjected to fragmented and made to appear to vibrate at La Merced. Only the shafts of the columns supporting the arcades on the lower stories have been left smooth, as in Acolmán. All the others are furrowed, divided, segmented, carved with rhomboidal forms or rectangular protrusions, whose alternately smooth and decorative surfaces enrich the ornamental rhythm. The motifs of the rosette and the conch are a constant feature of the composition: conch-like rosettes fill the fields of the metopes between the triglyphs of the frieze, and religious scenes are to be found in the larger conches, embedded in the keystones of the arcades of the lower stages. The columns of the upper stages, as though covered with a net of decorative threads or ferrules, support narrow arcades with jagged profiled arches. The architecture reveals the impact of the graphic models which influenced the delicate interior architecture of altars, choir stalls, and pulpits in Central Europe, above all. Recent studies by American scholars (S[antiago] Sebastián [López], J[osé] de Mesa [Figueroa], T[eresa] Gisbert [de Mesa]) have revealed the power of the impact and popularity of the architectural models of Sebastiano Serlio in Latin America. The fact that Serlio was most influential in France – where the art of the Renaissance coincided with a strong late-Gothic tradition – and in Poland, helps to explain the visual similarities that can be felt in the manner of grasping forms in Mexico and in [other] areas which adapted, albeit not without opposition, the art of the Renaissance to their taste. The second half of the 17th century saw the creation of many architectural and decorative works which serve as examples of this sort of adaptation of Iberian Baroque m ­ odels to an aesthetic taste luxuriating in decorative exaggeration, in the multiplication of motifs to the absolute limit. The Dominican church in Oaxaca (nave, 1657) is an excellent example; its Rosary Chapel, like the analogous one at the Dominican [church] in Puebla (1650 – 90) is overwhelming in the almost barbarous wealth of its colored and gold stucco decorations, with their symbolic overtones: vases, from which there emerge long branches morphing into ornament, angelic heads and ‘rollwerk’ scroll decorations surround the representations of the Saints. In Tlacolula, which is not far from Oaxaca, the Capilla de los Mártires has fantastic vaulting, covered with purely decorative inter-twined bars and ferrules, colored and abstract, unlike the majority of vaulting, which invariably has some sort of symbolic intention, albeit relatively straightforward, in iconographic terms. The interiors of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca and the Rosary Chapel are lined with gold. The intricate, flat decoration on the walls and vaulting is arranged in a disciplined manner in architectural fields, retaining a good deal of modesty. Echoes of Mannerist and late-­ Renaissance principles of the late 16th century, such as the buildings of the “cathedral era” (the cathedral in Puebla, begun in 1555 – 58 by Claudio de Arciniega, nave c. 1585 – 1649; reflecting [Juan de] Herrera’s plan for the cathedral in Valladolid), with their powerful fluted columns, remain very evident. In the later parts of San Domingo in Oaxaca the decoration begins to expand, rising above and exploding beyond its frame, leaving insufficient

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room for the ferrules and bars; at Santa Maria Tonantizintla, solid, shapely stucco elements, like stalactites, surround the window openings, encapsulating all the features, giving the surface of the walls of the church interior an almost organic, elastic, quality. This last building, south of Cholula, is also distinguished by a particular, painterly type of exterior decoration, typical of the Puebla region. These facades are covered with multicolored ceramic tiles, their glazing shining, which, in combination with their rich visual profile, creates an incredibly colorful and brilliant effect. Santa Maria ­Tonantizintla gives the impression of a vast ceramic masterpiece – it is completely inimitable. The nearby church of San Francisco Acatepec has much more modest forms: the façade of the portico and its keystone, modelled in ceramics, constitute a separate element against the background of the smooth wall. The tone of the ceramic [bell] tower refers to that of the façade. Ceramics have also been used in the decoration of the interiors (cupola Camarín de la Virgén in the Tepotzotlán sanctuary south of Mexico City, c. 1680). But the most popular use of ceramic tiles was to be in the decoration of secular buildings in cities. Whole streets in Puebla have these sorts of walls, which gives this town its particular aspect. Their genealogy is to be found in Spain, where they had taken root, adopted from Arab models. In Mexico City, the first use of enamel tiles was after 1751, for the decoration of the façade in the popular house known as the Casa de los Azulejos, which stands in the commercial centre of the old town. Brown walls of so called tezontle, blocks of lava, a light and effective building material, readily accessible on the volcanic territory of central Mexico, were more typically employed in secular architecture in the capital. An example is Conde de Santiago de Calimaya palace, constructed in its original form in 1528, today housing the museum of the history of the city [Museum of Mexico City]; stone pilaster-strips cause the vertical frames of the windows to protrude from the rusty-colored lava walls. The entrance is shaped like an ostentatious portico, uniting classical and late Gothic motifs. There are many similar residences in Mexico; their particular style combines the sharply broken entablature of the porticos with walls of reddish-brown lava, opening onto arcaded courtyards, contributing considerably to the specific atmosphere of the old city centre of the capital. 17th century art in Mexico was an adaptation and a transformation of European models. Nevertheless, these models constantly made their presence felt. The tendency to repeat these, to connect and to juxtapose smooth and richly decorated elements (such as, for example, ‘diamond’ arcades with truncated pyramidal stone blocks), was Mexican. The motifs themselves were originally Renaissance, or even Gothic. The composition of the façade of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca, a typical two-[bell] towered façade, is based on the form of a triumphal arch. Mexican builders tended to position the ornate central form of a façade between unadorned towers. Three tiers of triumphal arches are superimposed in Oaxaca. In the central tier, instead of an arch, there is a rectangular relief,

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known as a ‘didactic relief ’, characteristic of Mexican facades. Interestingly, the motif of the triumphal arch also shapes the upper tiers of both [bell] towers: repeated four times, it forms the matrix of the composition. In the years 1730 – 40, there was a fundamental change in style in Mexico, which led to the formation of a late Baroque phase in architecture and decoration. Though the motifs and impulses, in this instance, too, hail from Spain, they attained an intensity in Mexico that was unparalleled on the Iberia Peninsula. Very likely the first expression of the changes that were under way was the altar in the Royal Chapel in the Cathedral in Mexico, erected in the years 1718 – 37 by the Spaniard Jerónimo Balbás, from Seville, who brought with him a specific Andalusian Rococo tendency (Kubler). This altar, rapidly imitated universally, became something of a stylistic key to late Baroque Mexican art. Justino Fernandéz [Garcia] took its name as the title of a treatise on the aesthetic character of Mexican art (El Retablo de los Reyes, 1959). The unique character of this altar is particularly striking when compared with the traditional form of Mexican altars of Spanish origin, in which the regular vertical and horizontal divisions of the single, or in some cases multiple, small spiral columns and cornices opened out onto rectangular niches with figures placed in them (e. g. the altar in the Dominican church in Puebla). The core element of the new altar of the cathedral and the architectural and sculptural works based on its model was a decorative pilaster known as an estípite, in which Renaissance traditions of architectural form ceded to painterly decorative elements arranged in the form of candelabra. These motifs, stacked in a vertical rhythm, retain a semblance of the pilaster formation, but entirely erase the contours of the forms. The arrangement of motifs in each individual vertical is the same, which gives rise to a series of horizontal accents, the wealth of forms linking elements into an almost woven whole. Areas filled according to the estípite system acquire a network of horizontal and vertical accents by way of chiaroscuro rhythms. It would seem that the Renaissance architectonic model is completely shattered in these sorts of buildings. Altars, or the facades of churches based on their compositional principles, break out of this tradition and create their own world of forms, stunning in their wealth and dynamism. Churrigueresque, which had remained a relatively isolated phenomenon in Spain, became a typical late Baroque form in Mexico. The Mexican architectural historian [Víctor Manuel] Villegas went so far as to refer to estípite as ‘the major formal emblem of the Baroque’. The transfer of the decorative system of estípite to the façade led to the formation of a new version of those which historians of architecture call the fachada-retablo, the façade-altarpiece. Similar tendencies, doubtless associated with the ancient idea of the ‘outdoor’ church, had already previously appeared in Mexico: the façade of Soledad church in Oaxaca could be classed as an external equivalent of the earlier form of the altar, an example of which we have already sketched out in the form of the main retabulum of Santo Domingo in Puebla. The façade, there, was already in the process of being obscured, its forms becoming aligned with those the altar.

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The pinnacle of this new concept of the ‘façade-altar’ is the chapel of the Holy Sacrament, El Sagrario Metropolitano, next to the Cathedral of Mexico City, erected by Lorenzo Rodríguez of Cadis in the years 1749 – 68. Framed by simple pilasters, the upper half of the façade is organised according to a rhythm of six estípites; below, four more solid ones flank the portico. Between these, which are solid, their features protruding markedly outwards, there is a second row of ‘between-column’ estípites, filling the background. The whole is brimming with a wealth of decorative forms and an intense game of chiaroscuro pulsates in the sharp Mexican sunlight. The Sagrario system has been applied to the façades of the [bell] towers. The re-construction of the church of the Holy Trinity in this same style (1755 – 83) is (probably incorrectly) attributed to Rodríguez himself. The Sagrario façade, formed of variations on the theme of the estípite was enormously influential, reaching as far as the state of Texas today. Estípites are deployed in the composition of the façades of the [bell] towers of Santísima Trinidad in Mexico City, as well as in the church of San Martín in Tepotzotlán, to the south of the capital, traditionally, though probably incorrectly, associated with Rodriguez. The Mexican tradition was dominated by two [bell] tower façades, initially wide and exaggerated, later narrower. Often the full plan remained unrealized and occasionally one sees asymmetric designs with a [bell] tower on [just] one side. In the mid 18th century, one of the most perfect, dynamic designs for a two-[bell] tower façade was to be the church of St Sebastian and Santa Prisca, in Taxco, on a mountainous site beside the route from Mexico to the Pacific coast. The composition of this façade offers a remarkably interesting solution to aesthetic structure; the lower stages of the [bell] towers are smooth up to the top of their respective façades, only interrupted with circular windows, while the surface of the façade, still based on a traditional arrangement of stacked triumphal arch motifs, each with a ‘didactic’ relief and window, is full of movement and visual features; the columns in the upper tier are spiral, which further intensifies the dynamic. Level with the top of the façade, a strongly protruding cornice separates the upper part of the [bell] towers, forming two narrows, elegantly-proportioned tiers. The arrangement of the upper tier has an aesthetically contrasting structure: above the central, rich tier of the façade, there is the emptiness of the space dividing the [bell] towers, which, in turn, are filled with decoration: columns layered with rings or spiral strips, figurative sculpture and even estípite motifs on the coping. This church was built in the years 1751 – 58 according to plans attributed to the Spaniard Diego Durán Berruecos. The main altar of this chapel is a wonderful example of the estípite style, contrasting with the relatively severe architecture of the interior. When estípite motifs were employed on [bell] tower churches, these were initially incomplete projects, with one tower, as in the Mexican Holy Trinity, and also in the beautiful, brilliantly restored Jesuit monastery of San Miguel in Tepotzotlán, built before the 17th century. The interior, with its marvelous, excessively rich estípite motif altars, was

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built in the years 1755 – 58, and its façade erected in the years 1760 – 62, shortly before the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. The absence of the left tower lends charm to, rather than detracting from, the façade – the front elevation is all but unparalleled in its lightness; amplified by a division into three tiers of increasingly dynamically differentiated rhythms. Above the curvilinear ‘star-shaped’ window in the lower field of the second tier, two somewhat raised shafts of estípite thrust the middle of the coping stage upwards, producing a picturesque, asymmetric pinnacle, and the vases positioned on top of it foreclose the upwards trajectory of the series of estípite. There being only one tower means that this dynamic is expressed as though diagonally, finding its coda in the narrow stages flanking the façade on the right hand side of the tower. The pilgrim Church of Our Lady on the Hill at Ocotlán, near Tlaxcala, whose construction began in 1745, with a façade erected in the latter years of the triumph of the estípite, circa 1780, came to be a combination of the model of Santa Prisca in Taxco with the excellent façade of Tepotzotlán. It is linked to Santa Prisca in Taxco by the two [bell] tower structure of its front elevation, and to Tepotzotlán by the role played by the many estípites in the composition of the central part of the façade, and, finally, with the tradition of nearby Puebla by the rich use of colorful ceramic cladding in the decoration of the lower tiers of the towers and of the side walls of the church. As in Taxco, the unusually rich upper tiers of the towers have been visually contrasted with smooth lower parts, which enclose the white, almost soft, sculptural forms of the façade itself in a calm dark red frame. The unknown author of this work has pushed the principle of contrast even further than in Taxco, contrasting with one another the upper and lower views of the towers: they are brought into relief by way of a semi-cylindrical additions up as far as the middle portion of the façade; above the cornice separating the upper portions, the view of these two traceried stages is concave, while the extended open arcades appearing to continue – in negative form – the semi-cylinders of the protrusions. In the central part of the façade, the designer has neither exactly repeated Rodríguez’s model from the Sagrario, nor the excellent solution in Tepotzotlán. The rows of estípites breaking through the cornice above the lower portico produce a vibrant canopy beneath the star-shaped window, from which flowing stone or stucco draperies are suspended, and, still higher, the composition is completed by a vast conch, running the whole length of the distance between the towers, its naturalism reduced by its abstract portrayal and the introduction of scrolls on its flutes. This unification of ornament and meaning, characteristic of Ocotlán, of figurative and decorative forms, recalls associations with pre-Columbian works (Xochicalco), though the Baroque sources inherent in the art of Borromini are probably, ultimately, closer. The relatively small interior of the sanctuary is dripping with gold, shining from the walls of the presbytery, crowded with forms, culminating in an altar which melts in an uncontrolled multiplicity of decorations, whose by now too weak structure is made

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up of vertical chains of estípites. These fashionable motifs also appeared in the secular architecture of the capital, most interestingly, perhaps, rather sparingly, as features lending rhythm to the rusticated walls of the Casa de los Mascarones (1766 – 71). However, another style, entirely different to the picturesque madness of the estípite, was also developing in non-church buildings. Examples include the Jesuit college, with a rather severe three-story elevation framed by brownish red tezontle, completed by Cristóbal de Escobar y Llamas in 1740 (the monumental portico is older and introduces estípites as early as 1714 – 18), and, above all, the enormous, highly refined, building known as Las Vizcaínas [Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola Vizcaínas], intended to serve as a school for poor girls and for commercial spaces, constructed in the years 1734 – 53 by Pedro Bueno [Bazori]. This relatively low complex, filling a whole block on the city map, seemingly monotonous, with two stories, vertically divided by pilasters and with an extended plinth, entails a good deal of thoughtfulness and invention in its utterly unorthodox treatment of traditional elements, their use calling to mind a Mannerist freedom. It is striking that typically Mannerist architectural principles, formulated more than thirty years ago by Rudolf Wittkower and referring to the 16th century, are found in works of American architecture, two hundred years later; the dual function of many of the elements, their reversal, their inter-penetration in the most unexpected of manners (the pilaster strip intersecting the window accentuates its strong winged framing) are constant features of this façade, whose extraordinarily powerful decorative forms, in view of the relatively flat elevation, introduce an instance of alternating relief and flatness, solidity and linearity. An analysis of the façade of Las Vizcaínas demonstrates that, when one examines artistic phenomena at a global level, certain principles of style associated in Europe with defined chronological moments, have been deployed in distant locations in completely different moments. The process of transformation, sometimes of the shattering of the ‘ready’ form, whether found or appropriated, to which Adolph Goldschmidt once devoted interesting remarks, may constitute a primary phenomenon, encompassing a variety of Mannerisms: Italian 16th century, Polish 17th century and Mexican 18th century. Probably the most original personality among the producers of 18th century Mexican architecture was the Creole Francisco Antonio Guerrero y Torres, born in Guadalupe, whose imagination, perhaps less hindered than that of some others by the same degree of familiarity with the wealth of the Spanish repertoire, produced many instances of surprising works not connected with tradition and without parallel. One of these is the chapel known as Pocito [El Pocito], erected above a spring in which the Holy Virgin is said to have appeared, beside the pilgrim church of Guadalupe, north of Mexico City. In constructing the chapel in 1779, Guerrero y Torres deployed a design by Serlio, but freely, to create a work which was unique in these parts by making use of a variety of Spanish and Mexican motifs; the arrangement of the three central spaces, covered by cupolas, on

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a curvilinear plan, utterly foreign to Mexico, and only really occurring in Brazil of all places on that side of the Atlantic, with the exception of a few late Peruvian buildings. The inventive composition of forms and the placement of additional entrances on the opposite axes of the complex make it possible to discern as though several façades within it. The colorful ceramic cladding of the cupolas and the drum attics covering them, contrast vividly with the reddish walls of lava; the flexible walls of the sacristy curve inwards and outwards, in turn, and the star-shaped windows characteristic of Guerrero have within them the dynamic of an explosion. The Pocito-Chapel draws a dignified close to a series of masterpieces of the Mexican Baroque. Its originality was doubtless too great to be able to call forth an imitator. It remained a unique phenomenon.

VI The KLM flight from Lima to Europe stopes en route on the island of Curaçao, colonized by the Dutch. The sight of Willemstad town is an instructive experience: narrow, three-windowed Dutch town-houses, with steep, high-gable roofs, stand, to this day, under the tropical sky. Seeing this piece of Holland entrenched in the central American sub-tropical landscape brings home very clearly the process of artistic and civilizational invasion, which followed in the footsteps of the first, barbarian and plundering invasion of the adventurers and fortune seekers. Cortez and Pizarro killed people; their successors – even those who, in the best of faith, trusting in utopian ideas, imposed European religion, language customs and art, on the Indians – killed the continuity of cultural tradition. This process developed in various ways in different provinces of the New World. It is also the case that it was not possible to entirely kill off cultural tradition. Its life, whose traces are so moving to us, whenever we see them, was, nevertheless, stifled, underground, reduced to marginal signs of folk tradition, magical customs, superstitious worship of an idol or holy place. The adaptation of Spanish or Italian models brought by the Spaniards, was, undoubtedly, very specific and particular. But signs of primitivism and a love of picturesque abundance, a predilection for surface decoration are not the result of the intersection of the European model with pre-Columbian habits, but rather originated in America, as in other territories, taking over the leading achievements of artistic culture from the most creative centres. Thence the often striking similarities that the Polish art historian observes between the ‘native’ variety of late Renaissance and Mannerism which he knows well – in Lublin province or in the vicinity of Kielce – and Mexican art, colorful, painterly and somewhat naïve. There is little that is original to be found in American painting, which is often based on Flemish or Italian graphic models. I omit painting almost entirely in the remarks

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that follow, despite the fact that: Baltasar de Echave Ibía and Alonso Vázquez, from the beginning of the 17th century, and José Juárez from the second half of the century, are interesting painters; the series of ‘military archangels’, which are popular in the southern Andes, have the charm of a primitive copying the refined models of fashionable costumes; and that one can almost detect the contemplative beauty of Chardin in the still life of Antonio Pérez de Aguilar in the Mexican Museum (Biblioteca y Pinacoteca del Virreinato). The vibrant caricatural tapestry representing the adventuring Spaniards, produced in Peru in the 18th century, also has not a little charm. However, Latin America did acquire originality in the field of architecture and decorative sculpture. Sometimes this was the originality of true invention, as in the porticos of Cuzco, or the altars pulsating with gold, with vibrating arrays of estípites. Sometimes it was a strange originality, of unexpected, exploratory, building effects, making light of the rules of European architecture, like those who, in the cathedral at Tlaxcala, designed the strange ‘composite’ piers, carving the spiral shaft of a ‘Solomonian’ column into the solid bloc of an Ionian pilaster. Subsequent generations of Iberian masters brought new models and local Mexican and Peruvian inventions only became possible in later periods. The situation changed radically when the regaining of political independence, though far from being a true liberation for many ethnic groups, particularly in Peru, which was far less unified thank Mexico, opened [people’s] eyes to their own history and produced the conditions for attempts at so called indigenismo, the enlivening of local traditions, the renewal of elements of pre-Columbian art. This process occurred, above all, in Mexico, which yielded architecture and architectural decoration of serious international significance in the 20th century. The revolutionary painters Rivera and Siqueiros, like Juan O’Gorman and Chavez Morado, who were more programmatically fixated on the revival of the forms of the pre-Columbian decorators, created an entirely new tradition of large-scale, colorful, popular wall decoration. The symbolic fresco – with the heraldic motifs of the national emblem of Mexico, the snake and the eagle – by the excellent painter Rufino Tamayo, which adorns the entrance hall of the new national museum, is the most recent of the beautiful additions to this repertoire of monumental art. The Museo Nacional de Antropología, erected, like the museum of modern art and many other public buildings, under the presidency of [Adolfo] López Mateos, one of the most beautiful and most excellently thought-out and executed museums in the world, where the beauty of the historical exhibits goes hand in hand with an understanding of them and the exhibition does not kill history nor didacticism aesthetic experience, is, in all likelihood, the most fulsome historical examination of conscience of the Mexicans as a nation, conscious of its distant pre-Columbian past. In Peru, which is still a long way from the uniting of its diverse ethnic groups into a single nation, which has already taken place in Mexico, where the Indians protest against schooling in the quetchua

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language, treating it as a form of discrimination, and not as an expression of a connection with tradition, the museums, despite their beauty, do not have this foundation of popular consciousness enlivened by its own history. Mexico is a nation of mestizos, an ever-broader popular base of immeasurable wealth and diversity, for which the history of pre-Columbian culture is one of the elements of national unity. The countries of Latin America, once Iberian provinces, such as Nueva España or Nueva Granada, or at least some of these, have regained their distinct identities on the artistic map of the world. Pondering several thousand years of the history of art in America, it is hard to refrain from a somewhat ahistorical reflection – from the question of how the cultural fortunes of this part of the world would have developed, if, despite the differences between their civilizations, the inhabitants of Mexico and Peru had been able to head off the handful of invaders attacking then at the beginning of the 16th century. Of course, other invaders would have followed these first ones. But we know, after all, that various civilizations were able to retain their independence in relation to the Christian-Classical world. In parallel with it, there were vast, independent, religious and cultural formations, with foreign customs, India and China, and the Arab world also coexisted with Europe, though not always peaceably, on an independent basis. How would the pre-Columbian world have evolved, had the arrival of Columbus opened its eyes to the achievements of another part of humankind, rather than bringing fire, the sword and irons? The civilizational-technical difference between these two cultures was too great, and the moral level of the Europeans was too base for this coexistence to have been possible. The ‘age’ difference in the sphere of the autonomous cycle of development was insurmountable. For the inhabitants of Mexico, living in part in the Stone Age, the bearded Spaniards were not so much visitors from distant space, as from the depths of a distant time. George Kubler wrote that if anyone had ever stood eye to eye with the distant future, it was the Mexicans in the year 1519. It must have been an experience like a thunderbolt. This is probably the source of the tragedy of the profound dissolution of pre-Columbian culture and its art, one from which, despite the creative talents and the originality of the colonial and post-colonial periods, the American world proved unable to recover. Will it be able to find a path to the full recovery of its forces, to heal the mortal wound inflicted upon it by the Europeans? The path to this is not yet very near, but contemporary artistic practice, like the experience of the greatness of past art and pre-Columbian civilization, undoubtedly has a fundamental part to play in the process of renewal and in the healing of the social consciousness of Mexico. Translated by Klara Kemp-Welch Originally published as: O sztuce dawnej Ameryki. Meksyk i Peru. Warszawa (Wydawnictwa Artystyczne i Filmowe) 1972.

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Fig. 1a  Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972.

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Fig. 1b  Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972.

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Fig. 2a

Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972.

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Fig. 2b Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972.

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Fig. 3  Mexico, ambulatory of the cloister in Merced, 1634 – 54 (fig. 100 in the book). Foto by Jan Białostocki, archiv of Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki (SHS), Warsaw. Fig. 4  Lima, front of San Augustín, 1720 (fig. 174 in the book). Foto by Jan Białostocki, archiv of Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki (SHS), Warsaw.

Antje Kempe

Commentary on Białostocki’s Text The book O sztuce dawnej Ameryki / On the Art of Early America has not yet been acknowledged within the present attempts to delineate a global art history. This negligence is caused, on the one hand, by the language barriers still prevalent between research in the East and the West, and, on the other, because of its popular-scientific character, which is hardly compatible with current theoretical reflection on global art phenomena. However, it may be seen today as an art-historiographical contribution on how to overcome Eurocentric superiority. In 1956, Jan Białostocki (1921 – 1988) became the long-term curator of the gallery for foreign paintings in the National Museum in Warsaw, where he was employed after World War II. At the same time, he also started working as an assistant in the Department of Medieval Art at the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw, where he became a professor of Art History in 1962. Białostocki’s research, to date substantial for Polish art historical tradition, resulted in a great number of studies dealing with European artistic phenomena, mainly from the Middle Ages till Romanticism. Within this broad research scope, he had a particular interest in Northern art – notably Rembrandt van Rijn and Albrecht Dürer – as well as in Italian art. His investigations were determined by the search for the genesis and trajectories of change of mainly iconographical motifs perceived in their longue durée, with a special focus on traditions and artistic inventions. His two most internationally well-known publications: Spätmittel­ alter und beginnende Neuzeit in the series of Propyläen Kunstgeschichte (1972) and The Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe (1976). Furthermore, he repeatedly examined research methods used in art history, a venture which is expressed in his studies on style and iconography as well as in his considerations on art history as a sovereign discipline within the humanities.1 However, his methodological approaches were regarded very diversely. On the one hand, he was seen as a follower of Erwin Panofsky in respect to his iconological model of interpretation. But Białostocki was also seen, on the other hand, as applying a more critical or social iconology in the way he adapted and further developed Aby Warburg’s perspective on the ability of images to endure through time. The latter being a concept that Białostocki combined with Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms.2

1 Białostocki 1980. – Białostocki 1981. 2 See Bałus 2010 for a more extending reading of Białostocki’s approachs.

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In this context, Art of the Early America proves an exception – due to its geographical framework, but also in its ambition to deliver a kind of popular story of art dedicated to a broader, non-academic audience. Białostocki thus avoided giving the impression that he claimed to be an expert in the field. At the same time, it gave him space to share observations on an essayistic style of a travelogue. The richness of the illustration material, provided mainly by the author himself, also contributes to the book’s status (fig. 1 – 4). As Piotr Juszkiewicz explains in the present volume, this publication can be perceived as a scholarly expression of the wide-spread interest in non-European art, thanks in part to the series of ‘exhibitions’ about pre-Columbian and contemporary art from Mexico that had been organized in Poland a decade before. The writing of On the Art of Early America was based on a longer research stay that Białostocki owes in part to the support given to him by George Kubler, whom he mentions in the foreword of the publication. Białostocki was keenly interested in Kubler’s research and reviewed his book The Shape of Time of 1962 for the Art Bulletin (1965), as well as penned its translation into Polish (1970) – the first at all in a long line of translations in French (1973), Spanish (1975), Italian (1976), German (1982), Hungarian (1992), Portugiese (1998). As Chairman of a newly established CIHA Commission, Kubler had already in 1961 initiated the delineation of a new CIHA statute, which would facilitate a more global approach and more intensive collaboration with certain National Committees.3 A result of these efforts was that in the same year, in two sessions at the CIHA congress in New York, the art of the Western hemisphere in connection to World Art was discussed.4 Subsequently, Białostocki became a member of the Polish National Committee in 1964. After first participating in the CIHA congress in Bonn in the same year, he became the clear representative of Polish art history, if not Eastern European art history as a whole.5 From 1969 till his death, he also served CIHA as one of its vice-presidents. In this position, and utilizing the broad scope of his studies, he promoted the acknowledgment of Eastern Europe in art history as well as an internationalization and exchange of art historical research. In addition to his driving curiosity, it was most likely the multilateral intertwining of his disciplinary and institutional connections that facilitated his research stays in Mexico and Peru. However, the book not only proves the wide-spread interest in Mexican art in Poland but can also be seen as paradigmatic for Białostocki’s broad perspective, projected across all artistic phenomena. A description of pre-colonial art in present-day Mexico and Peru (Ch. I and II) is followed by a discussion of the 17th-century architecture of the regions (Ch. III -V), after which he concentrated on painting in the final chapter (Ch.  VI ), 3 The statutes were finally approved in a general assembly in 1963. See Cooke 2018, 9. 4 Anderson 2012, 176 f. – Cooke 2018, [8 – 9]. 5 Michalski 1999, 54.

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including modern examples. Białostocki thus aimed for a comparative overview. As a result, the focus is set neither on pre-colonial nor on colonial and modern art. At the time, the latter was often seen through the prism of aesthetic and artistic principles of Muralismo represented by Diego Rivera, Diego Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, considered a universal phenomenon and a ‘Mexican Renaissance’, similar to the contemporary architecture in Mexico which has been perceived as revealing the outlines of universal Modernism (as shown, for instance, in the exhibition Latin American Architecture since 1945 at the MoMA in 1955 – 56). Instead, Białostocki focused on the art of the 17th century and addressed the development of local traditions as well as the process of ‘provincialization’ of Spanish and European models. Thus, he took upon anglophone discussions about center and periphery relationships formulated by Kenneth Clark in 1962 and by Kubler in the same year. Clark conceived center in terms of metropolises characterized as driving forces of world styles, equipped with international quality.6 Likewise, Kubler’s consideration of slow and fast happening, formulated in Shape of time, found its way into the explanations of architecture. Białostocki thus questioned uniform artistic developments. It is not out of the question that he was familiar with another book by Kubler, published in 1968 under the title The Problem of Non-Iberian Contributions in Latin American Colonial Architecture. Kubler drew attention to non-Iberian examples to interpret Latin American art. Also, Białostocki related the export of Iberian art and its melange with local traditions to their European analogies of adaptation. For instance, those of French artistic forms in the Polish Baroque, a concept surpassing the framework of the book’s intended audience. By choosing to do this, he once again disproved Western universalism as associated with the concept of style and, with it, the paradigm of stylistic unity within an epoch. Instead, he perceived a global network of artistic exchange as a benchmark. For example, he used the façade of the Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola Vizcaínas in Mexico City as a representative example to underpin the fact that European stylistic principles can neither be associated with a specific chronology nor with any European stylistic formation. Interestingly enough, though, he described the process of transformation – a breakup of forms – as a type of manneristic change and thus, once again, referred to a problematic category of art history. These thoughts he proved already in the European context with his explanation of the fragmentation of mannerism due to the adaptation of folk art, artistic migration, and translation processes. However, this can be seen as a first step to overcome the concept of progress expressed in the idea of a universal, linear development of style that still prevailed in the art history of the 1970s. Furthermore, in a certain way, his explanation continues the Warburgian approach of Nachleben, as it underlines the potential of change and modification embedded in the process of a gradual shift of context, function, and meaning instead of pointing to any 6 Clark 1962, 11.

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stability of easily identifiable cultural values. It is in this context that we must understand Białostocki’s final remark in On the Art in Early America which reads, again, like a reference to Kubler: “Pondering several thousand years of the history of art in America, it is hard to refrain from a somewhat ahistorical reflection.” 7 Therefore, it was also Białostocki who evaluated yet another art-historical instrument of exclusion from a prevailing canon: that of periphery. With the assumption that 17th-century art in Mexico was based on diverse forms of adaptation, transformation, and appropriation of European models, he aimed to demonstrate the independent processing of certain artistic patterns and thus to underline the productivity and sovereignty of peripheries. Years later, in his paper included on the panel entitled Centre and Periphery: Dissemination and Assimilation of Style at the CIHA congress in Washington in 1986, which was dedicated to World Art, Białostocki mentioned El Periferico, the outside highway in Mexico City. He depicted it as an example of vitality and showed it in opposition to the stagnation and degradation of old city centers in the United States of America. Thus, he returned again to Kubler’s approach of the fast and the slow happening to explain developments. This comparison served to illustrate the shifting allocations of what was periphery and what was centre at that time. With a reference to Ljubo Karaman’s book On the Impact of the Local Milieu on the Art of Croatian Region (1963), he referred to this author’s concept of centre, province, and periphery and resumed his idea of the distance from the center as a measure of artistic independency. On the basis of the valuation of the notion of periphery, he thus questioned the dominating hierarchical and mostly Franco-, Germano-, or Italocentric orientation of art history, arguing for the acknowledgment of the plurality of the margins. It can be said that, with these suggestions on the potential of decentralization, he opened the door for a new understanding of comparative art history and for creating a new art and artistic geography. But, although he continued to underline the supranational and supraethnical character of artistic and cultural macro­ regions or megaregions – such as the Baltic Sea region, for example,8 – based not least on social, economic, and political factors rather than ethnically isolated entities, he did not overcome the idea of a cultural nation (Kulturnation) as related to a community of traditions, culture, and language. This attitude is apparent in the way he shaped his critique of contemporary Peru in the book discussed here. Insofar, his volume On Art of Early America can be seen as a solitary and inconsistent, though substantial element of Białostocki’s view on the contemporary potential of art-historical research as characterized by conforming to the idea of global art history, which operates beyond the Eurocentric premises of geohistory. When answering the question of whether any universality of art history is possible, Białostocki shows his truly modern understanding. He points to the 7 See in this volume, in the original Polish version p. 106. 8 Białostocki 1976.

Commentary on Białostocki’s Text  |

need of global cooperation between art historians from various countries and pleads for the overcoming of national art histories, thus revealing a vision of an international and global art history which remains valid even today.

Bibliogr aphy Anderson, Jaynie: CIHA as a Object of Art History. In: Grossmann, Ulrich / Krutisch, Petra (eds.): The Challenge of the Object. 33rd Congress of the International Commitee of the History of Art, vol. 4, Nuremberg 2013, 1474 – 1476. Białostocki, Jan: Pojęcia i problemy współczesnej historii sztuki [The Concepts and Problems in Contemporary History of Art]. In: Ibidem: Reflexsje i syntezy ze świata sztuki. Cykl pierwczy. Warszawa 1978, 9 – 22. Białostocki, Jan: The Baltic Area as an Artistic Region in the Sixteenth Century. In: Hafnia 4 (1976), 11 – 23. Białostocki, Jan: Historia sztuki wśród nauk humanistiycznych [Art History under Humanistic Science]. Wrocław 1980. Białostocki, Jan: A Comparative History of World Art, is it possible? In: Vayer, Lajos (ed.): Problemi di metodo. Condizioni di esistenza di una storia dell’arte / Problèmes de ­méthodeles conditions d’existence d’une histoire de l’art / Problems of Method. Conditions of a history of Art. Acts of the XXIVth International Congress of the History of Art. Bologna 1979. Bologna 1982, 207 – 216. Białostocki, Jan: Perspektywy porównawczej historii sztuki w skali światowej [Perspectives for Comparative Art History on a Global Scale]. In: Idem: Reflexsje I syntezy ze świata sztuki. Cykl drugi. Warszawa 1987, 213 – 224. Białostocki, Jan: Some Values of Artistic Periphery. In: Lavin, Irving (ed.): World Art. Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art. Washington, D. C. 1986. Vol. 1. University Park / London 1989, 49 – 54. Bakoš, Jan: Jan Białostocki and Center-Periphery Problem. In: WRÓBLEWSKA, Magdalena (ed.): Białostocki. Materiały z Seminarium Metodologicznego Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuku “Jan Białostocki – między tradycja a inovacja. Warszawa 2009, 63 – 75. Bałus, Wojciech: Jan Białostocki and George Kubler: an Attempt to Catch up with the System. In: Ars 43/1 (2010), 119 – 125. Clark, Kenneth: Provincialism. The English Association Presidential Address. London 1962. Cooke, Jennifer: CIHA as the Subject of Art Theory. The Methodological Discourse in the International Congresses of Art History from Post-War Years to the 2000s. In: RIHA Journal 0199 | 30 September 2018, https://doi.org/10.11588/riha.2018.0.70278 [Last accessed 09. 07. 2021].

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Kaufmann, DaCosta Thomas: La geografía artística en América: el legado de Kubler y sus límites. In: Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas XXI/75 (1999), 11 – 27. https:// doi.org/10.22201/iie.18703062e.1999.74 – 75.1882 [Last accessed 15. 12. 2021]. Kubiak, Ewa: El arte colonial de América Latina y los investigadores polacos. El panorama de los textos. In: Estudios Latinoamericanos 38 (September 2019), 93 – 109. Michalski, Sergiusz: Jan Białostocki a ewolucja historii sztuki po roku 1945 [Jan Białostocki and the Evolution of Art History after 1945]. In: Poprzęcka, Maria (ed.): Ars longa. Prace dedykowane pamięci profesora Jana Białostockiego. Materiały Sesji Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki, Warszawa, listopad 1998. Warszawa 1999, 53 – 68. Ziemba, Antoni: Jan Białostocki (1921 – 1988). In: Rocznik historii sztuki 36 (2011), 157 – 171. Ziemba, Antoni: Jan Białostocki. In: Baraniewski, Waldemar / Tygielski, Wojciech / Wróblewski, Andrzej Kajetan (eds.): Monumenta universitatis Varsoviensis 1816 – 2016. Portrety uczonych Profesorowie Uniwesytetu Warszawskiego po 1945. A–K. Warszawa 2016, 94 – 109.

List of Illustrations Jan Białostocki Fig. 1a: Fig. 1b: Fig. 2a: Fig. 2b: Fig. 3: Fig. 4:

Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972. Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972. Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972. Page from the book On the Art of Early America. Mexico and Peru. Warsaw 1972. Mexico, ambulatory of the cloister in Merced, 1634 – 54 (fig. 100 in the book). Foto by Jan Białostocki, archiv of Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki (SHS), Warsaw. Lima, front of San Augustín, 1720 (fig. 174 in the book). Foto by Jan Białostocki, archiv of Stowarzyszenia Historyków Sztuki (SHS), Warsaw.

Maja / Reuben Fowkes Fig. 1:

Fig. 2:

Tomislav Gotovac, Untitled (Budweiser), 1964. Mixed media: printed photograph, newspaper, glue on hardboard, 61 × 61 cm. Collection Sarah Gotovac / Courtesy Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Zagreb. Photo: Boris Cvjetanović. Dušan Otašević, Towards Communism on Lenin’s Course, 1967. Painted wood, 95 × 95 × 2 cm (3x). Collection Mira Otašević. Courtesy artist.

Douglas Gabriel / Adri Kácsor Fig. 1:

Fig. 2:

Fig. 3:

Fig. 4:

Railroad between Budapest and Pyongyang, 1961. In: Pénzes, István: Barangolás Hajnalországban (Wanderings in the Land of Dawn). Budapest 1961, 24 – 25. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image. Rim Pek, Comrade Stalin’s Present for the Korean People, ca. 1953. In: Korea a szabadságért: Képzőművészeti kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban, Budapest: Kultúrkapcsolatok Intézete, 1953 [Korea for Freedom: Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Salon. Budapest: Institute of Cultural Relations, 1953]. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image. Kim Jong Dzsun, In the Hungarian Hospital, 1953, oil painting, 125 × 188 cm. In: Korea a szabadságért: Képzőművészeti kiállítás a Nemzeti Szalonban, Budapest: Kultúrkapcsolatok Intézete, 1953 [Korea for Freedom: Fine Arts Exhibition at the National Salon. Budapest: Institute of Cultural Relations, 1953]. Despite the best efforts, the authors were unable to locate the copyright holders for the image. “Modern lakóházai, széles sugárútjai bármely európai fővárosnak díszére válnának” [Its modern apartment buildings [and] wide avenues could be the pride and joy of any European capital]. In: Ják, Sándor (ed.): Látogatás a baráti Koreában [A visit to the friendly Korea], 1961, 19. HU OSA LibSpColl_Dia_7319; Library. Special collections.

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Hungarian propaganda filmstrips; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. Electronic record. Fig. 5: Ch’ŏngnyŏn [Youth] Street, Pyongyang. Postcard published in Pyongyang by ­Kungnip Misul Ch’ulp’ansa (Pyongyang), 1961.

Corinne Geering Fig. 1: Fig. 2: Fig. 3:

Gūr-I Amīr, mausoleum of Timur (1403 – 1404) in Samarqand, Uzbekistan. Photograph by Milos Hrbas Source: UNESCO: Samarkand the Fabulous. In: UNESCO Courier 15.12 (1962), 17. Timur’s summer palace (1380 – 1404) in Uzbekistan. Photograph by Milos Hrbas Source: UNESCO: Samarkand the Fabulous. In: UNESCO Courier 15.12 (1962), 19. Cover featuring the Church of the Intercession of the Virgin on the island of Kizhi, Karelia. Photograph by E. Gippenreiter Source: Ryszkiewicz, Andrezej [sic] (ed.): Le bois dans l’architecture et sculpture slaves. Paris: 1981.

Ivan Gerát Fig. 1: Fig. 2: Fig. 3:

Saint George, Southern Europe, 19th century, from the collection of folk art by ­Gabriele Münter, Munich, The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus. Foto: Ivan Gerát. Ladislas Cycle. Church of St. Catherine at Veľká Lomnica, 1310 – 1320. Foto: Ivan Gerát, archive. The Dead Cuman from the Ladislas Cycle, Vítkovce, c. 1320 – 1350. Foto: Ivan Gerát.

Piotr Juszkiewicz Fig.1: Fig.2: Fig.3: Fig. 4:

Fig. 4:

The Exhibition of Mexican Graphics, Warsaw 1950. Exhibition poster. The Exhibition of Mexican Art in Warsaw, 1955. Exhibition poster. The Exhibition of Mexican Art in Warsaw, 1955, Cover of the exhibition catalogue. Treasures of Mexican Art. From Pre-Columbian Times to the Present, Warsaw, 1961. From the right: Władysław Gomółka, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Worker’s Party; Józef Cyrankiewicz, Polish Prime Minister; ­Eduardo Espinosa y Prieto, Ambassador of Mexico in Poland. Jose Gadalupe Posada and Contemporary Mexican Art, Warsaw, 1966. Cover of the exhibition catalogue.

Krista Kodres Fig. 1: Fig. 2:

Cover of Iskusstvo (Art), journal of the Artist Association of Soviet Union (1961/1). Cover of Bildende Kunst (Fine Art), journal of the Association of [East] German ­Artists (VBKD) (1968/6).

List of Illustrations  |

Fig. 3: Fig. 4: Fig. 5: Fig. 6:

Cover of Mikhail V. Alpatov’s Die Dresdner Galerie. Alte Meister. German translation. Dresden 1966 (here the cover of the 13th edition, 1978). Otto Nagel. Heinrich Zille. Translation into Russian. Moscow 1962. Cover of Sidney Fineklstein’s Realism in Art. Translation into Russian. Moscow 1956. Cover of John Rewald’s History of Impressionism. Translation into Russian. Moscow 1959.

Mária Orišková Fig. 1: Fig. 2: Fig. 3: Fig. 4:

El arte eslovaco contemporáneo, La Habana, August 1964. Bratislava 1964. Paris–Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contemporaines tchéques. Musée National d’Art Moderne 17.3. – 17. 4. 1966. Prague 1966. Paris–Prague 1906 – 1930. Les Braque et Picasso de Prague et leur contemporaines tchéques. Musée National d’Art Moderne 17.3. – 17. 4. 1966. Prague 1966. Modern Treasures from the National Gallery in Prague. Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum 1988. Prague 1966.

Elena Sharnova Fig.1:



Fig.2:



Fig.3:



View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to early 20th Centuries. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. First on the right: Nikolai Argunov Portrait of Countess Praskovia Sheremeteva in a striped dressing gown, 1803, Museum-Estate “Kuskovo”. Third from the right: Louis Michel van Loo Portrait of Countess Ekaterina Golitsyna, 1759, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. First on the left: George Romney Portrait of Miss Harriet Greer, 1781, The State Hermitage, Leningrad (St. Petersburg). View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to early 20th Centuries. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Second on the right: Valentin Serov Girl with Peaches, 1887, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Third from the right: Pierre August Renoir Portrait of Jeanne Samary, 1877, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. View of the exhibition The Portrait in European Painting from the 15th to early 20th Centuries. Department of Reproductions, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. From right to the left: Pablo Picasso Portrait of the Poet Jaime Sabartes, 1901, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Pyotr Konchalovsky Portrait of George Jakulov, 1910, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Martiros Sarian Self-Portrait, 1909, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Nathan Altman Portrait of Anna A ­ khmatova, 1915, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Kees van Dongen Spanish Woman, 1911,

299

Fig. 4:



A. S.Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow; Paul Gauguin Self-portrait, A. S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. View of the exhibition Paul Gauguin: A View from Russia, exhibition section Russian dialogues with Gauguin. Department of Reproductions, A. S.Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. In the centre: Natalia Goncharova: Picture from the tetraptych Rape of Fruit, 1907 – 1909. The State Russian Museum, Leningrad (St. Petersburg).

Contributors |

Contributors Robert Born is an art historian and research fellow 
at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (BKGE ) in Oldenburg. He previously held various positions at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO ) in Leipzig. Visiting Professor of Art and Architectural History at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin (2010–2011). Co-curator of the exhibition The Sultan’s World – The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art, on display in Brussels and Kraków (2015). Co-editor of the volumes Transottoman Matters. Objects Moving through Time, Space, and Meaning (Göttingen 2021), Apologeten der Vernichtung oder “Kunstschützer”? Kunsthistoriker der Mittelmächte im Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2017); Die Kunsthistoriographien in Ostmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs (Berlin 2004). Marina Dmitrieva is an art historian based in Leipzig. Her publications include Community and Utopia: Artists’ Colonies in Eastern Europe from the Fin-de-Sciècle to Socialist Period, co-ed. with Laima Lauckaite (Art history Studies. Lithuanian Culture research Institute, 8. Vilnius: 2017); Italiya v Sarmatii. Puti Renessansa v Vostočnoy Evrope [Italy in Sarmatia. The Ways of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe] (Moscow: NLO 2015); Zwischen Stadt und Steppe. Künstlerische Texte der ukrainischen Moderne aus den 1910er bis 1930er Jahren (Berlin: Lucas Verlag 2012). A thematic issue on the Renaissance historiography in Eastern Europe is co-edited with Antje Kempe (Ars. Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovac Academy of Sciences 48/2 (2015). She has published edited volumes, catalogues and essays on the transnational visual culture of Central and Eastern Europe and art historiography. Éva Forgács is critic, curator, and adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She is a scholar of German, Central-European and Russian Avant-gardes. Her new book Malevich and Interwar Modernism will be published in 2021. Her other publications include Hungarian Art. Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement, (Dopplehouse Press, 2016); The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, (CEU Press 1995,) the co-edited volume (with T. O. Benson) Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (The MIT Press, 2002), and two volumes of collected essays. She has widely published essays and reviews in journals, edited volumes, and catalogues. Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at University College London and founders of Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames &

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Hudson, forthcoming 2022), the edited volume Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), a special issue of Third Text on Actually Existing Worlds of Socialism (2018) and Maja Fowkes’s The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde and Ecology under Socialism (2015). They lead the collective research programme Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History. www.translocal.org Douglas Gabriel is the 2020 – 21 Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University, Washington, D. C. Previously he held the 2019 – 20 Soon Young Kim Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University. His recently published articles on North Korean art and architecture include “Reality Effects for a Dangerous Age: Projecting North Korean Youth on the International Screen” (Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, 2020), and “Revolution from 360 Feet Below: Form and Ideology in the Pyongyang Metro” (Journal of Korean Studies, 2018). His research on North Korean landscape painting is forthcoming in Art Journal. Corinne Geering currently leads a junior research group on comparative studies of Eastern Europe at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig. She received her PhD in history from the University of Giessen in 2018 where she was a doctoral fellow at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). Her research interests include material culture, the history of international cooperation, and the use of the past in rural and urban development. She is the author of Building a Common Past: World Heritage in Russia under Transformation, 1965 – 2000 (Göttingen 2019). Ivan Gerát (Ph. D. Freiburg 1994) is director of the Institute for Art History in the Art Research Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and art history professor at the University of Trnava. He held fellowships at numerous reputable academic institutions, including a visiting professorship at the University of Vienna (2020). His English-language publications include Legendary Scenes: An Essay on Medieval Pictorial Hagiography (Bratislava, 2013) and Iconology of Charity (Leuven, 2020). In Slovak he has also published on medieval pictorial themes, pictorial legends of Saint Elisabeth, and the holy fighters of the Middle Ages. Beáta Hock is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. Formerly she was visiting professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Recent publications that she (co-)edited (Doing Culture under Socialism: Actors, Events, and Interconnections, 2013 and Globalizing East European Art Histories, 2018) approach the art and cultural history of Eastern Europe from the

Contributors |

perspectives of global history. Her current research explores the role of international cultural sponsorship in East-Central Europe around the political changes of 1989. Beáta also occasionally works as independent curator; her latest exhibition Left Performance Histories was on view in Berlin’s nGbK in 2018. Piotr Juszkiewicz is an art historian and professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where he lectures at the Institute of Art History. His interests include art, art history and art criticism in the 18th–20th centuries. He is the author of several books: Wolność i metafizyka. O tradycji artystycznej twórczości Marcela Duchampa [Freedom and metaphysics. On the artistic tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s art] (1995); Od rozkoszy historiozofii do gry w nic. Polska krytyka artystyczna czasu odwilży [From the bliss of historiosophy to the “game of nothing”. Polish art criticism of the post-stalinist “Thaw”] (2005); Cień modernizmu [The shadow of Modernism] (2013). He was also leader of a research project (2012 – 2015) investigating Polish documentaries on art 1945 – 1989. Adri Kácsor is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She is interested in the entangled histories of leftist aesthetics and politics, with a focus on 20th-century European and Soviet art and visual culture, Socialist Realism, political propaganda, and mass culture. Her dissertation Migrant Aesthetics: Hungarian Artists in the Service of Soviet Internationalism, 1919 – 1956 rethinks, through the figure of the migrant, the relationship between Avant-garde and Socialist Realist aesthetics. Her research has been supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Social Science Research Council Mellon Dissertation Fellowships. Antje Kempe is an art historian and senior researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO), University of Greifswald, where she is member of the project “Shared Heritage”. Her interests include memory culture, cultural heritage, art historiography, garden and landscape architecture from the early modern period till today. Publications and co-editions in the field of art historiography under socialism, including a journal issue devoted to the reception of the Renaissance in art historical discourse (Ars. Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences 48/2 (2015)) and further studies on political narratives of art history after WW II (kunsttexte.de/ostblick). Krista Kodres is professor at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia. Her interests include history and theory of art historiography and history of art and architecture in the early modern period. She is the author of the books Ilus maja ja kaunis ruum [Beautiful House and Room] (2001); Esitledes issend. Tallinlane ja tema elamu varauusajal [Presenting Oneself. The Early Modern Tallinn (Reval) Citizen and his House] (2014) and contributed a chapter to Art

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History and Visual Studies in Europe. Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks (Brill 2012). She recently co-edited A Socialist Realist Art History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades (Böhlau 2019) and is the editor-in-chief of History of Estonian Art. [email protected] Mária Orišková is Associate Professor at the Trnava University, Slovakia. Her research areas are East-Central European art history, critical museology, gender/feminism and exhibition histories. In 2013 she edited Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories Through the Exhibition, and recently contributed to the volumes From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum (2015) and Hot Art, Cold War: Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945 – 1989 (2020). Elena Sharnova is Head of the Bachelor’s Degree Programme “History of Art” at The National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), Moscow. Between 1980 and 2002 she was curator of French painting in the 16th–19th centuries at the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Beyond French painting of this period, she also researches the history of collecting European art in Russia. Sharnova is the author of exhibition catalogs (among others, on the A. S. Stroganov Collection; on Repin and Old Masters) and a recent essay on J. B. Greuze, published in Iskusstvoznanie.

Index Index of Persons A Abykaeva-Tiesenhausen, Aliya  198, 214 Akhmatova [Achmatova], Anna A. (1889 – 1966)  152, 298 Ainalov, Dmitri V. (1862 – 1939)  164 Alexander the Great, also known as Alexander III. of Macedon (356 BC–323 BC)  126, 176 Alexander, Darsie  44, 49 Allenov, Mikhail M. (1942 – 2018)  156, 160 Alpatov, Mikhail V. (also Alpatow, Michael, Alpatoff, Michael, 1902 – 1986)  9, 18, 24, 26, 27, 57, 58, 59, 69, 70, 100, 113, 149, 150, 154 157, 160, 161, 165, 169, 179, 185, 189, 190, 191, 215, 236 Altman, Nathan I. (1889 – 1970)  153, 155, 299 Ámos, Imre (1907 – 1944)  145 Anderle, Jiří (b. 1936)  88 Andrássy-Kurta, János (1911 – 2008)  147 Anjou, Charles Robert of (1288 – 1342)  131, 227 Anna, Margit (1913 – 1991)  143, 145 Antal, Frederick (Frigyes) (1887 – 1954)  63, 64, 232, 234 Apollinaire, Guillaume (1880 – 1918)  142 Arciniega, Claudio de (1527 – 1593)  277 Argunov, Nikolai I. (1771 – 1829)  152, 299 Arnoux, Mathilde  18, 27 Arp, Jean (1886 – 1966)  142 Azatyan, Vardan  14, 18, 19, 27, 195, 215 B Babiracki, Patryk  14, 27, 196, 215 Badstübner, Ernst (b. 1931)  99, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116 Bakoš, Ján (1890 – 1967)  20, Balbás, Jerónimo (1673 – 1748)  279 Balcar, Jiří (1929 – 1968)  88 Banach, Andrzej (1910 – 1990)  261, 269, 273 Barcsay, Jenő (1900 – 1988)  143 Barr, Alfred Hamilton Jr. (1902 – 1981)  64

Bártok, Béla (1881 – 1945)  224 Bazhenov, Vasili I. (1737 – 1799)  167 Bazin, Jérôme  12, 26, 28, 80, 83, 95 Bazori, Pedro Bueno  282 Beke, László (b. 1955)  42, 43, 48, 49 Belinsky, Vissarion Gr. (1811 – 1848)  172, 174, 184, 185, 186 Belting, Hans (b. 1935)  28, 30, 117, 241, 256, 259, 260, 273 Beneš,Vincenc (1883 – 1979)  88 Benois, Alexander N. (1870 – 1960)  165, 166, 168, 186, 190, 191 Bentzien, Hans (1927 – 2015)  66, 70 Beőthy, Etienne (1897 – 1961)  146 Berdyaev, Nikolai A. (1874 – 1948)  177, 186 Berenson, Bernard (1865 – 1959)  62, 70 Berkovsky, Naum Ya. (1901 – 1972)  181 Bernhard, Maria Ludwika (1908 – 1998)  264 Bessonova, Marina A. (1945 – 2001)  158, 159, 160, 161 Beyer, Oscar (1890 – 1964)  10, 28 Białostocki, Jan (1921 – 1988)  9, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 60, 70, 102, 104, 108, 113, 114, 189, 190, 191, 270, 271, 273, 275 – 297 Bilang, Karla (b. 1945)  21, 28 Bill, Max (1908 – 1994)  147 Bismarck, Otto von (1815 – 1898)  104 Bitzan, Ion (1924 – 1997)  40 Bogucki, Janusz (1916 – 1995)  261, 262, 269, 273 Bombová, Viera (b. 1932)  88 Borbereki, Zoltán (1907 – 1992)  146 Borisov-Musatov, Victor E. (1870 – 1905)  156 Borromini, Francesco (1599 – 1667)  281 Bouček, Jaroslav (1912 – 1987)  79 Boudník,Vladimír (1924 – 1968)  88 Boyadjiev, Luchezar (b. 1957)  35 Braque, George (1882 – 1963)  88, 89, 90, 95, 299 Breton, André (1896 – 1966)  144 Bright, John (1811 – 1889)  258

306

|  Index of Persons

Brunov, Nikolai I. (1898 – 1971)  59 Brunovský, Albín (1935 – 1997)  88 Burckhardt, Jacob (1818 – 1897)  234 Bursov, Boris I. (1905 – 1997)  181, 186 Buslaev, Fyodor I. (1818 – 1898)  164, 165, 190 C Caillois, Roger (1913 – 1978)  271 Čapek, Josef (1887 – 1945)  88 Carlsund, Otto Gustaf (1897 – 1948)  143 Carrillo, Jesús (b. 1966)  15, 29 Cassirer, Ernst (1874 – 1945)  123, 134, 135, 136, 291 Castiglione, Branda (1360 – 1443)  234 Castro, Fidel (1926 – 2016)  83 Čermák, Jaroslav (1830 – 1878)  155 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547 – 1616)  173 Cézanne, Paul (1839 – 1906)  74, 77, 149, 160 Chaadaev, Pyotr Ya. (1794 – 1856)  170, 171, 189 Chalupecký, Jindřich (1910 – 1990)  78, 95 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon (1699 – 1779)  59, 73, 284 Chastel, André (1912 – 1990)  20, 29, 86 Che’ Guevara, Ernesto (1928 – 1967)  83 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai G. (1828 – 1889)  171, 172, 174 Chervonnaja, Svetlana (1936 – 2020)  65, 76 Chochol, Josef (1880 – 1956)  88 Churchill, Winston (1874 – 1965)  138 Clark, Kenneth (1903 – 1983)  293, 295 Clasen, Karl-Heinz (1893 – 1979)  100, 101, 108, 109 Cobden, Richard (1804 – 1865)  258 Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, Hernán (1485 – 1547)  283 Cremer, Fritz (1906 – 1993)  59, 73 Croce, Benedetto (1866 – 1952)  64, 232 Crowley, David (b. 1966)  39, 48 Cyrankiewicz, Józef (1911 – 1989)  265, 298 Czarnowski, Stefan (1879 – 1937)  271 D Damme, Wilfried van (b. 1960)  9, 10, 31, 32, 195, 219, 220

Danielsson, Bengt (1921 – 1997)  63, 71 Danilova, Irina Ye. (1922 – 2012)  151, 157, 160 Daumier, Honoré (1808 – 1879)  262 De Haro García, Noemi  15, 29 Delaunay, Sonia (1885 – 1979)  142 Denegri, Ješa (b. 1936)  47, 49 Derain, André (1880 – 1954)  88, 160 Dercsényi, Dezsö (1910 – 1987)  233, 237 Derrida, Jacques (1930 – 2004)  36, 50 Didi-Huberman, George (b. 1953)  123, 135 Dientzenhofer,Family 107 Dimitrijević, Branislav (b. 1967)  40, 49 Diviš, Vladimír (b. 1925)  81, 82, 95 Djagalov, Rossen (b. 1979)  14, 29 Dlouhý, Bedřich (b. 1932)  88 Dobeš, Milan (b. 1929)  88 Doesburg, Theo van (1883 – 1931)  142, 143 Dongen, Kees van (1877 – 1968)  153, 154, 299 Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. (1821 – 1881)  168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 183, 186, 187 Drews, Arthur (1865 – 1935)  123, 128, 135 Dubay, Orest (1919 – 2005)  88 Dubourg-Glatigny, Pascal (b. 1969)  80, 83, 95 Durán Berruecos, Diego (active ca. 1740 – 1760)  280 Dürer, Albrecht (1471 – 1528)  136, 276, 291 Durkheim, Émile (1858 – 1917)  267 Dvořáková, Vlasta (1920 – 2005)  123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 132, 135 Dybowski, Stefan  260 Džuverović, Lina  38, 49 E Echave Ibía, Baltasar de (1585 – 1650)  284 Efros, Abram M. (1888 – 1954)  169, 186 El Greco (Theotokópoulos, Domínikos) (1541 – 1614)  168 Engels, Friedrich (1820 – 1895)  16, 18, 31 Entz, Géza (1913 – 1993)  233, 238 Escobar y Llamas, Cristóbal de (1608 – 1673)  282 Espinosa y Prieto, Eduardo (1910 – 1966)  265, 298

Index |

F Fedorov-Davydov, Alexei A. (1900 – 1969)  189 Fehér, Dávid (b. 1987)  37, 39, 39, 44, 49 249, 255 Feist, Peter H. (1928 – 2015)  23, 52, 61, 63, 69, 71, 113 – 117 Fejér, Kázmér (1923 – 1989)  145, 146, 147 Fernandéz Garcia, Justino (1904 – 1972)  279 Fijałkovski, Wojciech  102, 110 Fila, Rudolf (1932 – 2015)  88 Filitz, Hermann (b. 1924)  20 Filko, Stanislav (1937 – 2015)  88 Filla, Emil (1882 – 1953)  88 Finkelstein, Sidney (1909 – 1974)  62, 64, 71, 298 Fischer of Erlach, family  107 Florensky, Pavel A. (1882 – 1937)  190 Frankowska, Maria (1906 – 1996)  264 Freud, Sigmund (1856 – 1939)  144 Fritsche, Vladimir M. (1870 – 1929)  168 Fryd, Norbert (1913 – 1976)  260, 273 Fülep, Lajos (1885 – 1970)  232 – 234, 238 Fulla, Ľudovít (1902 – 1980)  88 Furtseva, Yekaterina A. (1910 – 1974)  52 G Gachev, Georgi D. (1929 – 2008)  184 Gamboa, Fernando (1909 – 1990)  264 Garas, Klára (1919 – 2017)  60, 71 Gardner, Anthony  12 Gauguin, Paul (1848 – 1903)  71, 74 – 76, 149, 153, 157 – 159, 161, 299 Gažovič, Vladimír (b. 1939)  88 Gerevich, László (1911 – 1997)  233, 238 Gerevich, Tibor (1882 – 1954)  231 – 233 Gergeľová, Viera (1930 – 2004)  88 Gerhaert, Nikolaus (Nicolaus, Niclaes or Niklas van Gerhaert) (1430 – 1473)  107 Ghafurov, Bobojon G. (1908 – 1977)  199 – 203, 206 – 208, 211, 212, 215, 216, 219 Gilly, Friedrich (1772 – 1800)  107 Gippenreiter, E.  210 Gisbert de Mesa, Teresa (1926 – 2018)  277 Gleizes, Albert (1881 – 1953)  142

Gočár, Josef (1880 – 1945)  88 Gogol, Nikolai V. (1809 – 1852)  172, 183, 187 Goldschmidt, Adolf (1863 – 1944)  113, 282 Gombrich, Ernst (1909 – 2001)  18, 27, 189, 215 Gomółka, Władysław (1905 – 1982)  265, 298 Goncharova, Natalia S. (1881 – 1962)  158, 159, 299 Gotovac, Tomislav (1937 – 2010)  39, 40, 50, 297 Goya, Francisco de (1746 – 1828)  151, 262 Grabar, Igor’ Em. (1871 – 1960)  59, 64, 71, 167, 168, 186, 190, 191 Gray, Basil (1904 – 1989)  208, 217 Gray, Camilla M. (1936 – 1971)  154, 161 Greenberg, Clement (1909 – 1994)  140, 141, 148 Gregor, Richard (b. 1974)  38, 49, 50 Griffin, Roger (b. 1948)  265 – 267 Grigorescu, Nicolae (1838 – 1907)  60, 74 Guadelupe Posada, José (1852 – 1913)  260 Guerrero y Torres, Francisco Antonio (1727 – 1792)  282 Guggenheim, Solomon (1861 – 1949)  90, 91, 96, 299 Gutfreund, Otto (1889 – 1927)  88 Guttuso, Renato (1911 – 1987)  62, 81 Gyarmathy, Tihamér (1915 – 2005)  146 H Hadjinicolau, Nikos (b. 1938)  19 Hamann, Richard (1879 – 1961)  61, 100, 109 Hartmann, Nicolai (1882 – 1950)  59, 72 Hauser, Arnold (1892 – 1978)  63, 232, 235 Helion, Jean (1904 – 1987)  143 Helme, Sirje (b. 1949)  46, 50, 72, 74, 76 Hentschel, Walter (1899 – 1970)  100, 109 Herrera, Juan de (1530 – 1597)  277 Hercules (mythological character)  126 Herzen (Gertsen), Alexander IV  174, 186 Hessen, Sergiusz (1887 – 1950)  269 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig (1893 – 1965)  141, 148 Hložník, Vincent (1919 – 1997)  88 Ho Chi Minh (1890 – 1969)  81 Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus) (1776 – 1822)  183 Hoffmeister, Adolf (1902 – 1973)  87, 88, 95, 96

307

308

|  Index of Persons

Hofman,Vlastislav (1884 – 1946)  88 Hofmann, Werner (1928 – 2013)  113 Hogarth, William (1697 – 1764)  262 Holbein, Hans the Younger (c. 1497 – 1543)  151 Holofernes (biblical character)  129 Hrbas, Miloš (b. 1922)  199 – 201, 217, 298 Huizinga, Johan (1872 – 1945)  64 Humboldt, Alexander von (1769 – 1859)  29, 71 Hütt, Wolgang (1925 – 2019)  61, 105, 109 I Imorde, Joseph (b. 1963)  10, 30 Istler Josef (1919 – 2000)  88, 142 Ivanjicki, Olja (1931 – 2009)  37, 38 Ivanov, Alexander A. (1806 – 1858)  156, 160, 167 J Jahn, Johannes (1892 – 1976)  101, 102, 106, 109, 110 Jakimowicz, Irena (b. 1922)  264, 269, 273 Jakovits, József (1909 – 1994)  146 Jakowiec 275 Janák, Pavel (1882 – 1956)  88 Janin, Jules (1804 – 1874)  183 Jankovič, Jozef (1937 – 2017)  88 Jean de Boulogne (Giovanni da Bologna, Giambologna) (1529 – 1608)  168 Jersild, Austin  14, 27, 196, 215 Joffe, Aleksander Evg. (1918 – 1976)  52, 72 John, Jiří (1923 – 1972)  88 Jorn, Asger (1914 – 1973)  143 Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice  9, 11, 16, 30, 195 Juárez, José (1617 – 1670)  284 Judith (biblical character)  129 Judt, Tony (1948 – 2010)  139, 148 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875 – 1961)  122, 136, 141 Junghanns, Kurt (1908 – 2006)  61 K Kahlo, Frida (1907 – 1954)  262 Kalinovsky, Arting  11, 15, 31, 196, 216 – 218 Kállai, Ernő (1890 – 1954)  143, 145, 147, 148 Kandinsky, Wassily (1866 – 1944)  121, 122, 134, 136, 140, 148, 158

Kantor,Tadeusz (1915 – 1990)  35, 47, 269 Kaptereva, Tatyana P. (also Kapterewa, Tatjana) (1923 – 2019)  59, 72 Karaman, Ljubo (1886 – 1971)  294 Kassák, Lajos (1887 – 1967)  143 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta (b. 1948)  9, 30, 104, 110, 195, 216, 231, 238, 296 Kautsky, Karl (1854 – 1938)  78 Kent, Rockwell (1882 – 1971)  62 Keserü, Katalin (b. 1946)  41, 42, 50 Khrushchev, Nikita S. (1894 – 1971)  53, 75, 188 Kiossev, Alexander (b. 1953)  16, 19, 30, 42 Kiprensky, Orest A. (1782 – 1836)  156 Klyuchevsky, Vasili O. (1841 – 1911)  175, 176, 186, 189 Knebel, Iosif N. (1854—1926)  167 Kober, Karl Max (1930 – 1987 101 Kočišová, Dagmar (1932 – 2000)  88 Kojdecki, Józef  264 Kompánek,Vladimír (1927 – 2011)  88 Konchalovsky, Pyotr P. (1876 – 1956)  153, 154, 158, 299 Kondakov, Nikodim P. (1844 – 1925)  165 Kondziela, Henryk (b. 1931)  102, 110 Kopecký, Václav (1897 – 1961)  79, 96 Korczak, Janusz (1878 – 1942)  269 Körner, Éva (1929 – 2004)  43, 48 Korniss, Dezső (1908 – 1984)  143 Korovin, Konstantin A. (1861 – 1939)  156 Kotalík, Jiří (1951 – 2020)  85, 89, 90, 95, 96 Kovalenskaya, Natalya N. (1892 – 1969)  168, 169, 184, 186 Kozhinov, Vadim V. (1930 – 2001)  182, 187 Kramář,Vincenc (1877 – 1960)  88, 90 Kramisch, Stella (1896 – 1993)  22 Krása, Josef (1933 – 1985)  125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 135, 136 Kravagna, Christian  22, 30 Kremlička, Rudolf (1886 – 1932)  88 Kubin, Otakar (1883 – 1969)  88 Kubišta, Bohumil (1884 – 1918)  88 Kubler, George (1912 – 1996)  20, 190, 270 – 272, 275, 279, 285, 292 – 294 Kučerová, Alena (b. 1935)  88

Index |

Kuhirt, Ullrich (1925 – 1983)  55, 67, 70, 72, 106, 110 Kuper, Adam (b. 1941)  267, 274 Kupka, František (1871 – 1957)  88 Kutal, Albert (1904 – 1976)  86, 95, 125, 134, 136 Kuznetsova, Irina A. (1913 – 2002)  151, 160, 161 L Ladendorf, Heinz (1909 – 1992)  100, 109, 110 Lajos, Kubista (1880 – 1963)  43 Lakner, László (b. 1936)  37, 41, 49 Lazarev, Viktor N. (also Lazarew, Wiktor, Lasarew, Wiktor, 1897 – 1976)  18, 59, 73, 149, 164, 169, 170, 187, 190, 198, 218, 236 Lebedeva, Julia A. (also Lebedewa, Julia)  59, 73 Lebiš, Ján (b. 1931)  88 Lehmann, Edgar (1909 – 1997)  236 Lenica, Jan (1928 – 2001)  261, 269, 274 Lenin, Vladimir I. (Ulyanov, Vladimir I.) (1870 – 1924)  40, 41, 78, 96, 123, 128, 187, 242 Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)  151 Leśniewski, Marian  275 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908 – 2009)  271 Levitan, Isaak I. (1860 – 1900)  59 Levitsky, Dmitri Gr. (1735 – 1822)  167 Liebmann, Mikhail Ya. (1920 – 2010)  236 Longhi, Roberto (1890 – 1970)  232 López Mateoso [Mateos], Adolfo (1909 – 1969)  284 Loo, Louis-Michel van (1707 – 1771)  152, 299 Lorenz, Stanisław (1899 – 1991)  60, 73 Losev, Alexei F. (1893 – 1988)  190 Lossonczy, Ibolya (Viola) (1906 – 1992)  146 Lossonczy, Tamás (1904 – 2009)  146 Lotman, Yuri (1922 – 1993)  23, 68, 69, 73 Loukotka, Jiří (1925 – 1981)  124, 125, 136 Lüdecke, Heinz (1906 – 1972)  59 Lukács, György (Georg) (1885 – 1971)  147, 232 M Macke, August (1887 – 1914)  121 Major, János (1934 – 2008)  43

Malevich, Kazimir S. (1879 – 1935)  139, 158, 300 Malraux, André (1901 – 1976)  64 Márffy, Ödön (1878 – 1959)  143 Mark, James  11, 31, 218 Markov, Dmitrii F. (1913 – 1990)  203, 204, 208, 209, 218 Marosán, Gyula (1915 – 2003)  146 Marquet, Albert (1875 – 1947)  160 Márquez Rodiles, Ignacio (1910 – 2001)  262 Martyn, Ferenc (1899 – 1986)  146 Marung, Steffi  15, 31, 196, 218 Marx, Karl (1818 – 1883)  16 – 18, 31, 242, 267 Mashkov, Ilya I. (1881 – 1944)  154 Masolino da Panicale (1383 – 1447?)  234, 239 Matejko, Jan (1838 – 1893)  155 Matisse, Henri (1869 – 1954)  65, 149, 154, 160 Mayayo, Patricia (b. 1967)  15, 29 Maychrzak, Ryszard (1926 – 1992)  275 Mazurkiewicz, Karol (1845 – 1929)  269 McCloy, John J. (1895 – 1989)  139 Medek, Mikuláš (1926 – 1974)  88 Meiss, Millard (1904 – 1975)  234 Mersmann, Birgit (b. 1966)  10, 31 Mesa Figueroa, José de (1925 – 2010)  277 Messer, Thomas M. (1920 – 2013)  90 Mezei, Árpád (1902 – 1998)  143 – 145 Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475 – 1564)  102, 108, 110 Middell, Matthias (b. 1961)  31, 67, 68, 73 Mijatev, Krâstjo (1892 – 1966)  61, 72, 73, 76 Mikhailov, Alexei I. (1904–?)  168 Mirimanov, Vil B. (1929 – 2004)  19 Miroshnikov, Lev I. (b. 1924)  202, 207, 211, 212, 216, 218 Mlynárčik, Alex (b. 1934)  37 Möbius, Friedrich (b. 1928)  55, 106, 108, 110, 113, 116, 117 Monet, Claude (1840 – 1926)  76, 90, 96 Morado, José Chávez (1909 – 2002)  284 Morgan, Jessica  45, 49, 50 Morozov, Ivan A. (1871 – 1921)  158 Morozova, Feodosia P. (d. 1675)  68, 73, 177 Mrusek, Hans-Joachim (1920 – 1994)  102, 110 Mucha, Alphonse (1860 – 1939)  88

309

310

|  Index of Persons

Müller, Uwe  15, 31 Münter, Gabrielle (1877 – 1962)  121, 122 Muromets, Ilya (mythological character)  121 N Nagel, Otto (1894 – 1967)  59, 60, 73, 298 Nedoshivin, German A. (1910 – 1983)  57, 59, 64, 73, 74 Nefedova, Olga  12, 31 Nejedlý, Zdeněk (1878 – 1962)  79, 94, 96 Nepraš, Karel (1932 – 2002)  88 Neumann, Jaromír (1924 – 2001)  23, 102, 236 Neumeyer, Alfred (1901 – 1973)  276 Neupokoeva, Irina G. (1917 – 1977)  204, 219 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844 – 1900)  64, 173 Notke, Bernt (1435 – 1509)  107 O O’Gorman, Juan (1905 – 1982)  284 Obregon-Serrano, Lamberto H. (1900–?)  260 Olbrich, Harald (b. 1936)  17, 31, 99, 101 – 103, 105, 106, 111, 113, 117 Oprescu, George (1881 – 1969)  60, 74 Orozco, José Clemente (1883 – 1949)  262, 263, 293 Ortega y Gasset, José (1883 – 1955)  64 Otašević, Dušan (b. 1940)  41, 49, 297 P Pál Kiss, Laszlo (1923 – 2007)  143 Pán, Imre (1904 – 1972)  143 Panofsky, Erwin (1892 – 1968)  135, 136, 291 Parler, Peter (1330 or 1333 – 1399)  107 Paustovski, Konstantin G. (also Paustowski, Konstantin) (1892 – 1968)  59, 74 Pázmány, Péter (1570 – 1637)  231, 239 Pavlov, Todor (1890 – 1977)  61 Pérez de Aguilar, Antonio (18th century)  284 Perronneau, Jean-Baptiste (c. 1715 – 1783)  152 Perruchot, Henri (1917 – 1967)  62, 74 Pešina, Jaroslav (1912 – 1992)  125, 136, 137 Peter the Great (1672 – 1725)  178, 189 Peterajová, Ľudmila (1927 – 2015)  86, 95, 97 Pevsner, Nicholas (1902 – 1983)  189

Pfisterer, Ulrich (b. 1968)  10, 31, 195, 219 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz (1881 – 1973)  65, 76, 88 – 90, 95, 96, 149, 153, 154, 299 Pinder, Wilhelm (1878 – 1947)  103, 106 Pinturicchio, Bernardino (Bernardino di Betto di Biaglio) (1454 – 1513)  151 Piotrowski, Piotr (1952 – 2015)  12, 16, 26, 28, 30, 31, 35, 39, 42, 46, 50, 80, 83, 95, 139, 148, 259, 274 Pizarro y González, Francisco (1478 – 1541)  283 Plekhanov, Georgi (1856 – 1918)  78 Plíšková, Naděžda (1934 – 1999)  88 Popescu, Mircea  60, 74 Porębski, Mieczysław (1921 – 2012)  113, 271, 274 Posada, José Guadelupe (1852 – 1913)  260, 264, 266, 273, 298 Pospelov, Gleb G. (1930 – 2014)  190 Pospiszyl, Tomáš (b. 1967)  45 Preclík, Vladimír (1929 – 2008)  88 Přemyslid dynasty (9th century–1306)  105 Procházka, Antonín (1882 – 1945)  88 Prometheus (mythological character)  266 Pugachenkova, Galina A. (1915 – 2007)  206, 208, 212, 217, 219 Pushkin, Alexander S. (1799 – 1837)  170 – 173, 178, 182 R Radojčić, Svetozar (1909 – 1978)  61 Rauschenberg, Robert (1925 – 2008)  37, 38 Read, Herbert (1893 – 1968)  63 Redin, Yegor K. (1863 – 1908)  165 Reisch, Alfred (1931 – 2013)  67, 74 Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669)  66, 291 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841 – 1919)  76, 153, 154, 299 Repin, Ilya E. (1844 – 1930)  59, 160, 161, 167, 303 Restany, Pierre (1930 – 2003)  37 Rewald, John (1912 – 1994)  62, 63, 74, 75, 298 Riegl, Alois (1858 – 1905)  10, 269, 270 Rivera, Diego (1886 – 1957)  62, 263, 284, 293 Robin, Ricardo de  275

Index |

Rodiles, Ignacio Márquez (1910 – 2001)  262, 263, 274 Rodríguez of Cadis, Lorenzo (1727 – 1792)  280 Rogov, Aleksandr I. (1936 – 1996)  211 Rokotov, Fyodor S. (1735 – 1809)  167 Romney, George (1734 – 1802)  152, 299 Rousseau, Henri (1844 – 1910)  88, 90 Rowid, Henryk (1877 – 1944)  269 Rowland, Benjamin (1904 – 1972)  63, 75 Rublyov, Andrei (also Rubljow, Andrei) (c. 1360 – 1427/1430)  59, 157, 161 Ryszkiewicz, Andrzej (1922 – 2005)  209, 210, 215, 219, 298 S Said, Edward (1935 – 2003)  16 Salmi, Mario (1889 – 1980)  232 Sarabianov, Andrei D. (b. 1949)  188, 191 Sarabianov, Dmitri V. (1923 – 2013)  18, 24, 149, 154 – 158, 160 – 192 Saryan, Martiros (1880 – 1972)  153, 154 Scheel, Heinrich (1915 – 1996)  104 Schiller, Friedrich (1759 – 1805)  173 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich (1781 – 1841)  107, 109 Schlosser, Julius von (1866 – 1938)  10 Schlüter, Andreas (1634 or  1659 – 1714)  100, 102, 108, 110 Schwanenfeld, Olga (1900 – 1943)  22 Sebastiań López, Santiago (1931 – 1995)  277 Sedlmayr, Hans (1896 – 1984)  64 Serlio, Sebastiano (1475 – 1554)  277, 282 Serov, Valentin A. (1865 – 1911)  153, 154, 156, 299 Şetran, Vladimir (b. 1935)  40 Shakespeare, William (1564 – 1616)  173 Shapiro, Meyer (1904 – 1996)  63, 113 Shchukin, Sergei I. (1854 – 1936)  158 Sheremetev, Nikolai P. (1751 – 1809)  152 Sidès, Fredo (b. 1953)  142 Sieger, Nadine  13 Šíma, Josef (1891 – 1971)  88 Šimotová, Adriena (1926 – 2014)  88 Sinkó, Katalin (1941 – 2013)  231, 232, 237, 239

Siqueiros, David Alfaro (1896 – 1974)  262, 263, 284, 293 Sklenář, Zdeněk (1910 – 1986)  88 Smith, Adam (1723 – 1790)  258 Sobeski, Michał (1877 – 1939)  270, 274 Sokolova, Natalya I. (1897 – 1981)  168, 169 Solovyov, Vladimir S. (1853 – 1900)  172, 174, 175, 189 Solovyov, Sergei M. (1820 – 1879)  175 Šolta,Vladimír (1924 – 1977)  79 Šourek, Karel (1909 – 1950)  127, 137 Špála, Václav (1885 – 1946)  88 St. Ladislas I. (c. 1040 – 1095)  128 – 133, 135, 136, 298 Stalin, Joseph (Dzhugashvili, Iosif V.) (1878 – 1953)  17, 53, 75, 149, 245, 246, 258, 272, 297 Starov, Ivan Ye. (1745 – 1808)  167 Starzyński, Juliusz (1906 – 1974)  209, 260, 262, 263, 273, 274 Stasov, Vladimir V. (1824 – 1906)  165 Stejskal, Karel (1931 – 2014)  23, 123, 125 – 132, 134, 135, 136, 137 Sterne, Lawrence (1713 – 1768)  183 Stiaßny, Melanie (1876 – 1960)  22 Stojkov, Atanas (1919 – 1988)  60, 61, 72, 75 Štoll, Ladislav (1902 – 1981)  79, 124, 137 Strauss, Gerhard (1908 – 1984)  61, 101, 102, 105, 109, 111, 112, 189 Strzygowski, Josef (1862 – 1941)  10, 21, 32 Stravinsky, Igor (1882 – 1971)  130 Stuck, Franz von (1863 – 1928)  156 Surikov, Vasili I. (1848 – 1916)  155, 156, 160, 177 Szabó, Pál Zoltán (1901 – 1965)  145 – 147 Szuman, Stefan (1889 – 1972)  268, 269, 274 T Tamayo, Rufino del Carmen Arellanes (1899 – 1991)  284 Tarantino, Quentin (b. 1963)  35 Timár, Katalin (b. 1962)  42, 43, 49, 51 Timur (Tamerlan) (1403 – 1404)  200, 201, 298 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (1488/1490 – 576)  151 Tito, Josip Broz (1892 – 1980)  40

311

312

|  Index of Persons

Tiurin, Vladimir A. (1933 – 2015)  202, 204 – 206, 209, 214 Tolnay, Charles de (Tolnay, Károly von) (1899 – 1981)  232, 235 Tolz, Vera (b. 1959)  198, 219 Tönnies, Ferdinand (1855 – 1936)  267 Travolta, John (b. 1954)  35 Tretyakov, Pavel M. (1832 – 1898)  150 Tretyakov, Sergei M. (1834 – 1892)  150 Troebst, Stefan (b. 1955)  15, 31 Tutundjian, Léon Arthur (1905 – 1968)  143 U Ullmann, Ernst (1928 – 2008)  101, 106, 109, 111 Umarov, Sultan (1908 – 1964)  201 V Vaculík, Karol (1921 – 1992)  86, 87, 95 – 97 Vajda, Júlia (1913 – 1982)  145 Vajda, Lajos (1908 – 1941)  145 Vasold, Georg (b. 1969)  9, 10, 21, 22, 27, 32 Vassileva, Maria (b. 1961)  35, 51 Vayer, Lajos (1913 – 2001)  19 – 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 102, 111, 115, 221 – 239, 295 Vázquez, Alonso (1654 – 1608)  284 Velázquez, Diego (1599 – 1660)  59, 66, 72, 73 Venetsianov, Alexei G. (1780 – 1847)  156 Venturi, Adolfo (1856 – 1941)  232 Venturi, Lionello (1885 – 1961)  62, 76, 232 Venus (mythological character)  45, 129 Veronese, Paolo (1528 – 1588)  151, 156 Veselý, Aleš (1935 – 2015)  88 Villegas, Víctor Manuel (b. 1913)  279 Vinogradov, Viktor V. (1895 – 1969)  183, 187 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène (1814 – 1879)  164 Vipper, Boris R. (1880 – 1967)  59, 64, 74, 76 Volavka, Zdenka (Skořepová-Volavková, Zdenka) (1929 – 1990)  21 Vožniak, Jaroslav (1933 – 2005)  88 Vrubel, Mikhail A. (1856 – 1910)  155, 156

W Wallis, Brian (b. 1953)  87, 97 Warburg, Aby (1866 – 1929)  23, 122, 134 – 137, 231, 291 Warnke, Martin (1937 – 2019)  25, 26, 32 Weber, Max (1864 – 1920)  267 Weidhaas, Hermann (1903 – 1977)  61, 101, 105, 109, 112 Wilde, Johannes (1888 – 1945)  232 Wittkower, Rudolf (1901 – 1971)  282 Witz, Ignacy (1919 – 1971)  261, 269, 274 Worringer, Wilhelm (1881 – 1965)  99 – 101, 109, 112, 113, 262, 269 Wrangel, Nikolai N. (1880 – 1915)  167 Y Yakulov, George B. (1884 – 1928)  153, 299 Yamshchikov, Saveli V. (1938 – 2009)  152, 161 Z Zabelin Ivan.Ye. (1820 – 1908)  164 Zanoziński, Jerzy  264 Zaske, Nikolaus (1926 – 2014)  100, 103, 112 Zemplényi, Magda (1899 – 1966)  146 Zhdanov, Andrei A. (1896 – 1948)  78 Zhemchugova, Praskovia (Praskovia Sheremeteva; Praskovia Kovaleva) (1768 – 1803)  152 Zijlmans, Kitty (b. 1955)  9, 10, 31, 32, 195, 219, 220 Zille, Heinrich (1858 – 1929)  59, 60, 73, 298 Zinicheva, Elena  154 Zrzavý, Jan (1890 – 1977)  88

Index |

Index of Place Names A Acolmán Amsterdam  31, 32, 139, 143, 220 – Stedelijk Museum  139 B Baku 12 Belgrade (Serb.: Beograd / Београд)  37, 47, 49, 61 – Academy of Sciences Press  61 Berlin  12, 21, 27, 55, 58, 61, 62, 71, 99, 100 – 102, 106, 197, 234, 236, 301 – German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (AdW) 113 – Henschelverlag  61, 74, 75 – Humboldt University  13, 14, 17, 22, 100, 101, 105, 113 – Institute of Art History (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Kunstgeschichte)  105, 113 Birmingham 195 Bitterfeld  66, 67, 70 Bologna  9, 21, 168 Bonn  234, 292 Bratislava  81, 83 – 85, 301 – Slovak National Gallery (Slovak: Slovenská národná galéria)  83, 85 – 87 Brno 124 – Institute for Scientific Atheism of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Czech: Ústav pro výzkum společenského vědomí a vědeckého ateismu Československé akademie věd)  124 Brussels  88, 139 Buchenwald 59 Budapest  19, 24, 43, 60, 66, 93, 102, 115, 143, 151, 231 – 233, 235 – 237, 240 – 247, 249, 252, 255 – Buda Castle Museums  236 – Hungarian National Museum (Hung.: Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum)  231

– University of Budapest (Hung: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, ELTE)  231 Bydgoszcz 260 C Cambridge (Mass.) – Harvard University  300 Cholula 278 Cluj (Germ. Klausenburg / Hung. Kolozsvár)  227 Constantinople 179 Copenhagen (København)  139, 209 Cracow (Kraków)  18, 107, 151, 260, 261 – Palace of Art. (Pol.: Pałac Sztuki)  262 – Jagiellonian University (Pol: Uniwersytet Jagielloński)  264, 268 Cuzco 284 D Danzig (Pol. Gdańsk / Germ. Danzig)  102 Dresden  100, 101 – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen  151 – Verlag der Kunst  63 Dushanbe (Tadj. / Russ. Душанбе) 208 E Eisenach 107 F Florence (Firenze) – Pallazzo Pitti  90 Freiberg 103 G Genoa (Genova)  223 Gniezno 100 Graz 10 Greifswald  100, 101, 302 Guadalupe 282 – Capilla del Pocito (Chapell El Pocito)  282

313

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|  Index of Place Names

H Halle  99, 101, 113 – Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg  102, 113 Hanoi  81, 83 – 85, 94 Havana (La Habana)  83, 94 – Havana Biennial (Span.: Bienal de La Habana) 9 J Jena  101, 106 K Kaluga (Калуга) 159 Kielce 283 Kizhi (Russ.: Кижи) 210 Kostroma (Кострома) 152 Kraskovo  129, 131 Königsberg (Russ. Калининград)  99 – 101 L Leipzig  11, 14, 27, 100, 101 – Deutsche Nationalbibliothek  56 – Leibniz Institute for the History and Cul­ ture of Eastern Europe (GWZO)  13, 27 – Museum of Fine Arts (Museum der bildenden Künste)  101 – Seemann Verlag  105, 106 – Völkerkunde Museum, today GrassiMuseum  11, 21 Leningrad (St. Petersburg) (Russ.: Ленинград / Санкт Петербург)  58, 65, 81, 87, 149 – 152, 159, 181, 198, 200, 201, 234, 235 – State Hermitage Museum (Russ.: Государственный Эрмитаж)  58, 61, 87, 149 – 152, 160, 299 Lima  275, 283, 290, 297 Ljubliana 93 – Biennials  11, 12, 38 Lodz (Łódź)  260 London  25, 77, 88, 142, 300, 301 – Hayward Gallery  9 – Tate Gallery of Modern Art  88 Lublin 283

M Malbork Castle (Pol.: Zamek w Malborku / Ordensburg Marienburg)  107 Malmö (Malmø)  209 Mexico City  276, 278, 280, 282, 293, 294 – Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Span.: Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe) 282 – Casa de los Azulejos  278 – Casa de los Condes de Santiago de Calimaya 278 – Casa de Mascarones  282 – Chapel Most Holy Sacrament (Span.: El Sagrario Metropolitano)  280 – Church of the Holy Trinity (Span.: Templo y Antiguo Hospital de la Santisíma Trinidad) 280 – Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola Vizcaínas  282, 293 – Convent of La Merced (Span.: Nuestra Señora de La Merced)  276, 277 – Biblioteca y Pinacoteca del Virreinato  284 – National Museum of Anthropology (Span.: The Museo Nacional de Antropología) 284 – Royal Chapel (Span.: Capilla de la Emperatriz) 279 Minsk (Belar.: Мiнск / Russ.: Минск) 204 Mohács  145 – 147 Moscow (Russ.: Москва)  12, 13, 52, 53, 55, 67, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 92, 94, 99, 100, 150, 151, 155, 157, 158, 198, 200, 201, 203, 234, 235, 240, 254 – A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Russ.: Государственный музей изобразительных искусств им. А.С.Пушкина)  24, 58, 87, 149 – 154, 157, 159 – Institute of Art History (Russ.: Государственный институт искусствознания) 58 – Institute of Art Theory and History at the USSR Academy of Arts (Russ.: Институт теории и истории изобразительного искусства при АХ СССР) 59

Index |

– Institute of Oriental Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences (IVAN) (Russ.: Институт востоковедения АН (ИВАН)) 58 – Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies at the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow (Russ.: Институт славяноведения и балканистики АН СССР) 206 – Lomonosov Moscow State University, Department of Art History (Russ: Государственный университет им. М.И.Ломоносова, отделение истории искусств)  19, 149, 154, 155, 188 – Museum-estate Kuskovo (Russ.: Музейусадьба «Кусково») 152 – Publishing house Iskusstvo (Russ.: Издательство «Искусство»)  55, 56, 59, 62, 169 – Publishing House Progress (Russ.: Издательство «Прогресс») 59 – Russian State Library, former Lenin State Library (Russ.: Российская государственная библиотека / Библиотека им. В.И.Ленина) 59 – Tretyakov Gallery (Russ.: Государственная Третьяковская галерея)  150, 153, 154, 160 Munich (Germ. München)  67, 100, 121, 138 – Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus  121 N New Delhi  9, 25, 199 New York  24, 35, 37, 91, 94, 234, 292 – Museum of Modern Art  90, 197 – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum  90 Niedica 275 Novgorod (Russ.: Новгород) 176 O Oaxaca 277 – Church and former monastery of Santo Domingo de Guzmán (Span.: Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán)  277, 278 – Rosary Chapel (Span.: Capilla del Rosario) 277

– Soledad church (Span.: La Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad)  279 Ocotlán /The pilgrim church of Our Lady (Span.: Basilica de la Nuestra Senora de Ocotlán) 281 Odessa 12 P Paris  37, 47, 86 – 88, 92, 94, 138, 142, 144 – 146, 150, 157, 158, 260 – Centre Pompidou (Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou)  9 – Grand Palais  87 – Les Editions Cercle d’Art  61 – Musée d´Art Moderne de la ville de Paris  88, 142 – Musée des Arts Décoratifs  85 – Musée de Louvre  85 Poznan (Pol. Poznań)  260, 270 – Adam Mickiewicz University (Pol.: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza) 264 – National Museum (Pol.: Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu)  264 Prague (Praha)  36, 78, 81, 82, 87, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102, 107, 115, 125, 127, 133, 143, 227, 236 – Artia Publishing House  61, 66 – St. George's Convent (Czech: Klášter Svatého Jiří)  125 – Institute of Art History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (Czech: Ústav dějin Umění Akademie věd České republiky (IAH CAS))  123, 130 – National Gallery (Národní galerie v Praze)  85, 88 – 91, 151 Puebla  278, 281 – Dominican church (Span.: Templo de San Domingo Guzmán)  277, 279 – Cathedral in Puebla (Span.: La Catedral Basílica de Puebla)  277

315

316

|  Index of Place Names

R Riga (Rīga)  223 Rila 61 Rimavská Baňa  131 Rome (Roma)  179, 207, 232 – Collegium Hungaricum / Accademia d’Ungheria 231 – San Clemente, Capella del S. Sacramento  234 Rostock 100 S Samarqand (Samarkand) (Uzbek: Samarqand / Tajik: Самарқанд)  199, 208, 211 – 213 – Gūr-I Amīr, mausoleum of Timur  200 Shakhrisabz – Ak-Saray Palace  201 San Francisco  9, 25 Seville 279 Sofia (София)  9, 25, 209 – Academy of Sciences Press  61 Sopot 260 Split 235 St. Petersburg  (see Leningrad) Stockholm  107, 260 Strasbourg – Cathedral (Straßburger Münster)  107 Szczecin 260 T Tallinn 27 – Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonian: Eesti Kunstakadeemia, EKA)  13, 302 – Estonian National Library (Estonian: Eesti Rahvusraamatukogu), former F. R. Kreutzwald Estonian SSR National Library / Estonian SSR State Library)  55, 56 – State Institute of Cultural Heritage  56 Tartu – State University (Estonian: Tartu Ülikool / Latin: Universitas Tartuensis, former Universität Dorpat)  56 Taxco 281

– Church of St. Prisca and St Sebastian  280, 281 Tehran (Tehrān)  200 Tlacolula (Tlacolula de Matamoros) – Capilla de los Martires  277 Tlaxcala (Tlaxcala de Xicoténcatl) – Our Lady of the Assumption Cathedral (Span.: Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción)  281, 284 Tokyo 199 Toshkent (Tashkent)  201 Tula (Тула) 159 V Valladolid – Catedral de San Servasio  277 Vel’ká Lomnica  130, 131 – Church of St. Catherine  130 Venice (Venezia) – Biennale  37, 233, 260 Veszprem 234 Vienna (Wien)  10, 62, 229, 231 Vítkovce  132, 133 W Warsaw (Warszawa)  18, 52, 53, 60, 61, 67, 98, 99, 141, 260, 262, 264 – Institute of Art History (Pol.: Instytut Historii Sztuki)  291 – Institute of the Propaganda of Art (Pol.: Instytut Propagandy Sztuki)  260 – National Museum (Pol.: Muzeum Narodowe)  263, 264, 291 – University of Warsaw (Pol.: Uniwersytet Warszawski)  260, 291 – Warsaw National Gallery of Art, Zachęta (Pol.: Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki)  262 Washington 294 Willemstad (Curaçao)  283 Wroclaw (Wrocław)  260, 261 – Silesian Museum (Pol.: Muzeum Śląskiego we Wrocławiu, since  1970: Muzeum Narodowe) 262

Index |

X Xochicalco 281 Y Yalta  35, 138, 141

Z Zurich (Zürich) – Galérie des Eaux Vives  146

317