Geography of Art

Une histoire globale des avant-gardes picturales se doit d’expliquer pourquoi celles-ci apparurent en certains endroits et pas en d’autres, comment elles circulaient entre les pays et les capitales, ce qui les portait et si elles rompaient réellement avec leur temps, sachant que la plupart finirent par connaître une véritable canonisation.
Les avant-gardes lièrent leur sort au développement des journaux et des revues, c’est-à-dire à celui des techniques d’impression et de reproduction en série. Elles profitèrent également d’un vaste mouvement de circulation des idées, des hommes et des objets avec le développement des réseaux ferrés et des transports maritimes.
Dans le même temps se forgeaient les identités nationales, férues de tradition et de préservation des cultures. L’approche géopolitique met au jour ce processus par lequel les plasticiens novateurs recoururent à la référence étrangère pour s’opposer aux institutions nationales, travaillèrent à internationaliser leurs réputations pour mieux s’imposer contre le refus de l’innovation porté par le nationalisme, ou, au contraire, se laisser récupérer par des partis nationalistes et révolutionnaires.
Mais à côté des stratégies, réseaux et marchés, place est faite à l’analyse du contexte culturel et moral, économique et politique, matériel et social, affectif et spirituel des artistes des avant-gardes à partir de 1848. Jusqu’à la rupture de 1920, quand ces avant-gardes deviennent politiques, plaçant l’avenir de l’art dans celui de la Révolution.

This text explores some aspects of the controversial relationship between geography and art looking for possible points of convergence. The focus is mainly on three themes: a) the spatial patterns that we use in the writing of our histories of art (the center/periphery pattern or the network one?); b) the relationship between cartography and figurative culture, that is historically complex and articulate, and examined in detail as far as the Italian Renaissance and Dutch painting are concerned; c) and the possibility of interpreting the artistic heritage as a resource for collective projects of local development. In this work geography means the territorial form of social action.

RESUMO:

A pintura de paisagem de Benedito Calixto propõe questões, além das acuradas descrições iconográficas dos locais representados. Aqui, propõe-se analisar e discutir suas paisagens históricas enquanto resultados de pesquisas histórico-geográficas realizadas pelo artista historiador, que pinta uma expressiva quantidade de obras tendo por tema a paisagem e a reconstrução geográfico-histórica de São Paulo. Assim, almeja-se problematizar o sentido de fronteira historiográfica e artística que suas paisagens possuem, como forma de debate que surge através dos recuos e transformações propostos pela construção da narrativa histórica e geográfica, expondo, dessa maneira a tênue fronteira entre a Historiografia da Arte brasileira e europeia. 

Palavras-chave: 1) Benedito Calixto; 2) pintura de paisagem; 3) pesquisa histórico-geográfica


ABSTRACT:

Benedito Calixto’s landscape painting proposes issues beyond the accurate iconographic descriptions of the depicted sites. Here, his historical landscapes will be both discussed and analyzed as results of historic-geographical researches performed by the artist historian, who paints an expressive quantity of works that hold the landscape and the geographic-historical reconstruction of Sao Paulo as theme. Thus, this article aims at problematizing the sense of historiographical and artistic frontier his landscapes have, as form of debate that arises through retreats and transformations proposed by the construction of the historic and geographical narrative, therefore, exposing the tenuous frontier between Brazilian Art Historiography and the European one.

Key Words: 1) Benedito Calixto; 2) landscape painting; 3) Historic-Geographical research

Este estudo estabelece de forma inédita uma leitura crítica e transversal da importância da arte no contexto das missões católicas na Índia, na China e no Japão e em torno dos processos sistemáticos de relação da imagem sagrada com as estruturas antropológicas das civilizações asiáticas como resultado do encontro de culturas entre a Europa e a Ásia. O eixo arte e alteridade esquematiza e sintetiza a metodologia de investigação que observa os objectos artísticos resultantes de uma relação de interdependência com as artes dos outros povos, de uma conveniência, similitude, proximidade, analogia e mediação da arte europeia com os modelos e esquemas de representação das artes asiáticas. A miscigenação artística ou o hibridismo criativo decorrente deste encontro de culturas e do diálogo entre religiões é resultado de uma consciência mútua sobre o outro e da identificação espontânea da diferença e da semelhança, sobre as quais se estabelece o diálogo artístico. Desta relação de interdependência surge uma nova identidade artística que se caracteriza, de forma transversal, por uma sistematização, combinação, substituição e miscigenação de símbolos e elementos iconográficos das diferentes realidades artísticas.
Numa primeira parte do estudo são apresentados e analisados os três momentos da presença do cristianismo e da iconografia cristã na China que anteciparam a chegada dos portugueses ao Mar da China. A partir da análise iconográfica da estela de Xi’an, das pinturas encontradas nas grutas de Dunhuang que representam temas cristãos e das estelas funerárias que têm sido amplamente encontradas na cidade portuária de Quanzhou e em outros locais do Sul da China observam-se os processos de confluência artística que se expressam na assimilação, substituição e apropriação de elementos iconográficos especialmente do budismo, do taoismo e do islão.
Já a partir do século XVI estudam-se as dinâmicas de construção da imagem partindo da ideia inerente às diferentes categorias de função da arte fundamentada pela Igreja Católica e reafirmada pela Contra-Reforma. Se, por um lado, a arte cristã tinha o objectivo fundamental de preservar a fé e a pureza espiritual do clero através da representação de temas edificantes e de glorificação da Igreja, de que é exemplo uma parte substancial das obras importadas e ainda as edificações elevadas à semelhança das grandes igrejas europeias, por outro lado, as imagens têm uma função pedagógica, normativa e de instrução moral das comunidades, muitas vezes iletradas, e que, por isso, carecem da construção de imagens simplificadas e com referenciais iconográficos e simbólicos apropriados aos códigos simbólicos da arte religiosa na Índia, na China e no Japão. Neste contexto, a inexistência de oficinas organizadas e constituídas por artistas europeus capazes de dar resposta às exigências do exercício das missões foi colmatada pela produção local de artistas e artífices que funcionavam de forma autónoma e que, por essa razão,  daí resultou uma confluência artística fundamentada nas analogias formais e conceptuais que os modelos originais da arte cristã tinham com a herança cultural, religiosa e artística dos artistas asiáticos.
Finalmente, ao longo do estudo estabelece-se uma relação entre os diversos graus de permeabilidade cultural e artística e as condições de hegemonia cultural europeia em Goa e Macau e as oscilações de tolerância e perseguição religiosa na Índia Mogol, na China Imperial e no Japão, onde a eloquência das imagens cristãs foi colocada ao serviço da propaganda da soberania local.

The artistic culture and art of the 18th century of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth have earned due recognition and been subject to first systematic studies only in the past 30 years. Considering the preliminary nature of the study, focus has been placed on the most important issues. The summary discusses the share of local deposits and workshops in the materials and masonry market of Central and Eastern Europe. The 18th century was clearly marked by the cosmopolitan movement, promoted in the circles of the royal courts of the Wettins and
Stanislaus II August Poniatowski, based on the French and Italian models of Versailles and Rome, respectively, whose principal sculptural medium was marmo bianco from Carrara. Due to the pressure exerted by that elitist centre in the capital city of Warsaw, local artists sought to imitate the material, which was expensive and difficult to access due to sea freight costs, in more affordable stones covered with a valorizing layer of lime or stucco mortar. As in the 17th century, the Baltic ports continued to be the outposts of West European influence, and local artists primarily used a wide
range of decorative rock, which was imported from Italia, France and Spain, both parts of the Netherlands, the Reich and England, as well as the Baltic isles. The influence of those centres reached as far as the central part of the Greater Poland Province, Kuyavia, and Mazovia. In Lesser Poland, Crown Rus’ and Podolia, there were numerous quarries of decorative rock and building stone, which thanks to favourable economic circumstances, project cooperation with professional architects, promotion methods developed in the 4th quarter of the 17th century, as well as a convenient transportation network (rafting down the Vistula in the Crown with connections to Rus’ and Lithuania), have preserved their autonomy until the 1780s, successfully competing with artists from the capital city and the Baltic centres mentioned above. A major stage in the professionalization of the quarrying and masonry markets was the establishment of the Royal Marble Factory in Dębnik and Chęciny in 1787. In the 18th century, domestic centres lost their position as exporters of sculptural materials and works. Apart from the import of luxurious marble from Italia and Western Europe, there was a substantial rise in regional purchases of Lower Silesian marbles and sandstones to Greater Poland, which was cut off from the main transportation
system due to the fact that the Vistula and the Warta basins were not connected.

Art geography currently has a hard time in German art historiography. Its methodological assumption of a spatial style made it superficially common with the National Socialist spatial fantasies. This perhorrescence, which has persisted to the present day, fails to recognise that the notion of an interplay of landscape essence and of a moral and artistic event emerging from it, the notion of a “Daseinsursprünglichkeit überindividueller Zusammenhänge [originality of existence of supra-individual contexts]” (Thomas Mann), goes back to antiquity and has persisted into modernity. Above all, Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology proves the German art geography research of the 1920s and 30s (Dagobert Frey, Paul Pieper, Hans Erich Kubach and many others) to be a phenomenological-hermeneutic science concerned with revealing a “Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen [simultaneity of the non-simultaneous]” (Wilhelm Pinder) in art events that is expressed in the works of art.

Inaugural dissertation for the award of the doctorate of the Faculty of Philosophy of the Westfälische Wilhelms University of Münster presented by Ralf Bormann in 2010, awarded the distinction summa cum laude.

The chapter is about the history and memory of a building located on 27, Sherif Street (initially Madabegh) in downtown Cairo, that witnessed many (long-forgotten) episodes of the blossoming Egyptian art scene since the 1890s. The initial patronage  of the place (by the French art collector Alphone Delort de Gléon) and its successive occupants  offer new insights on  the geography of art and its actors in pre-Nassetian times.

The Elector of Saxony’s wire drawing bench is an extremely complicated piece of art and technology which is relatively unknown outside France and Germany. It deserves to be more widely known not only amongst the general public, but also art and cultural historians too due to its unique straddling of the Renaissance art and scientific world. Given the lack of Anglophone materials, I present a full and original description of its marquetry images to fill this gap in the literature and I explore aspects of their iconography using a re-emerging art historical theory called the geography of art.

To make full sense of the bench using this method, the word ‘geography’ needs to be interpreted in its broadest sense, from physical to social. In my survey, I touch on the vast areas of contemporary European religious sectarianism and the increasing awareness of a German national identity. At a local level, I take into account the seasonal courtly pastime of hunting techniques, local flora and fauna, and the importance of the resource rich natural environment around Dresden.

This seemingly disparate collection of topics is brought together by the Elector’s unique bench which ultimately reflects his Saxony. When he was within his Kunstkammer perfecting the manufacture of silver wire, he was positioning himself actively at the centre of his known, manageable, and mastered world.

This chapter was published in a wonderful collection dealing with the conceptual history of European meso-regions, such as Scandinavia, the Balkans and Central Europe, and deals with the question: Does Art Belong to Tribes, Nations, Regions, Races or Civilizations? It provides an overview of the role of European regions and boundaries in the discipline of art history from the late eighteenth century until the present.
Although true beauty does not know boundaries, art is generally defined along national lines. However, this way of classifying art only began during the Enlightenment. Regarding the role of geographical borders in the history of art, three more tendencies can be distinguished. A second trend that came to the fore around 1890 and was highly influential until 1945 was characterized by a nationalistic search for origins, which paradoxically led to a rapidly growing interest in all kind of sub-state and meso-regions. A third, formalist, cosmopolitan and modernist narrative had its origins around 1900, but only became dominant after 1945, while it reinforced the role of methodological nationalism. This in turn was replaced around the 1980s by the last trend, which could be defined as postmodern diversity, while showing a renewed interest in the geography of art.

Félix Ziem (1821–1911) was one of the wealthiest artists in nineteenth-century France. Recognized as the “painter of Venice,” he made his reputation in the 1850s by displaying his landscapes at the Paris Salon. In 1910, thanks to a bequest of Alfred Chauchard that included a number of his paintings, he became the first artist whose works entered the Louvre Museum during his lifetime. To what did the artist owe his fame and fortune? The key to understanding his reputation and, especially, his monetary success, is his account book, which he kept meticulously for more than thirty years, from 1850 to 1883. The aim of this article is to open this “black box” in order to understand both his economic success and the social networks at its core.

This paper takes place in a research program on the historical geography of the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia which purpose is to bring to light the history of different regions as centers and not only as peripheries to be dominated or to be conquered. The Lāstā, which statute toward the central royal authority is reversed between the 13th to the 17th century, seems to be an emblematic zone for this study. During the 17th and 18th centuries, Lāstā has asserted itself as the bastion of a political and religious opposition to the centralizing royal authority of Gondar and has an autonomy which has to be defined. The production of manuscripts and paintings is one way to study this area not by the prism of the documents elaborated by the government of Gondar but in the documents produced in this area. Replacing these items in their context, considering their patrons and the different artistic tendencies which can be observed either in link with the painting created in the capital or in a style definitely distinct, we will try to determine what we can know about Lāstā’s political organization at that time and which part the images take in the construction of its identity. Thus, we will try to better understand the relationships between central and regional authorities and to bring a new light on the structure of the Ethiopian Kingdom.

Keywords: Ground Hornbill artist, Baselyos.

In this article we focus upon the spatiality of the artistic circle Les XX, in Belgium and in Europe. We study the installation of the circle’s members in both Brussels and the context of the city’s local artistic geography. One zone seems to have been a focus of the group’s creative and social life: the suburb of Ixelles, in particular, the neighborhood around the rue de l’Abbaye. This area was home to many artists, including Anna Boch, whose villa became a sort of second home to Les XX. Through cartographic analysis and the description of this environment, we bring into the question the possible existence of an artistic neighborhood in Brussels at the turn of the 20th century.

In the Victorian period, Venice was linked to an iconography devoid of any references to the Dolomite Mountains. The connection between the city and its Alpine horizon remained concealed under a veil of haziness. This paper seeks to unravel the conditions under which this haze was lifted. In a context in which classical aesthetic trends and nostalgic codes of travel reminiscent of the Venetian Grand Tour still held sway, Victorian travellers ventured along alternative routes into the wild and rocky Highlands of Venice, pioneering new travel styles that satisfied the desire of experiencing nature in landscape. Josiah Gilbert's 1869 travel-cum-art book, Cadore, or Titian's Country, typified this changing trend. In tracing a Petit Tour, off the beaten track, Gilbert transformed the Dolomites into a zone of prestige centred on Pieve di Cadore, the birthplace of Titian. Despite their uncharted and isolated topography, the Dolomites emerged progressively as a cultural landscape intimately connected to the cosmopolitan aura of Venice and the artistic legacy left in Titian's mountainous backgrounds. Configuring the real Dolomite landscape as if Titian had painted it faithfully, Victorian travellers to Titian Country enacted a ‘cult geography’ through which his paintings could be traced on foot.

Art galleries occupy little yet significant place in works on gentrification and economic redevelopment of cities through culture. Because of their complex nature, aimed to sell symbolic goods, those places raise many issues about retail dynamics and urban transformations. In this paper, we aim to study the geography of art galleries in Brussels: despite the buzz recently observed about the city (‘new Berlin’ for artists and galleries ; success of the fair Art Brussels), art galleries have never been studied before in a geographical perspective.
Do they follow common trends of (luxury) retail? Are they indicators of gentrification or artists’ presence? Do they contribute to the visibility and spatial permanence of art districts?
Based on historical and contemporary data on art galleries (from the 1950’s,  with a focus on the last 30 years), we analyze the geography of this retail activity and its factors (access to market, needs regarding space, real estate opportunities, etc.), before questioning the results with regards to wider trade dynamics and urban renewal processes. If 3 main historical clusters existed for decades, it is worth investigating at the margins of those spaces. Establishing a typology of art galleries based on their specialization in art and longevity, we will distinguish specific location patterns, looking for permanence and changes.
Empirical material used includes statistical data, arts-related sources and field work, in order to draw up the geography of an object that offers original insight on recent urban dynamics.

The plain factory civilization, which had been formed by the beginning of the twentieth century in the central industrial region of the Russian Empire and was a stable cultural model characterized by the dominance of the textile industry, is looked upon as an aesthetic phenomenon. The structure of the cultural and industrial heritage of artistic and aesthetic value is presented in this article. This encompasses an industrial landscape, diverse architectural objects included in the spatial environment of cities and villages, as well as fabrics and collections of manufacturers.

Cet article analyse une partie de la production artistique d’un groupe de peintres français ayant vécu au Brésil au cours du XIXe siècle. Ces artistes ont documenté visuellement, les aspects sociaux, culturels et économiques de la colonie brésilienne et la diffusion de leur œuvre a contribué à la construction de l’identité coloniale brésilienne de par le regard de l’étranger. À travers l’étude de quelques peintures de ces artistes voyageurs, l’article propose d’analyser les relations entre les images produites et transmises, et la charge de la domination coloniale présente dans les pratiques artistiques.

A spatiotemporal vision of modernism has been accepted not only by artists, but also by art history: what was “new” and needed to be written into history is supposed to have emerged from a unique and superior center — Paris before the Second World War, New York after that time — so that all other
(peripheral) geographic positions are condemned to being considered backward-looking artistically.
This paper explains how the definition of a spatiotemporal model of modern art has been the stake of individual and collective power games since the 19th century. It argues that canonic art history is its uncritical result. Yet, in the wake of postcolonial theories, geocentric periodizations are being questioned. While encouraging us to take into account
neglected regions, traditionally dismissed and understudied, it pushes us to consider several kinds of modernism, born from polycentric geographies, the periodizations of which cannot be reduced to the usual chronology of the modernist canon. New
strategies to convey this decentered modern art history
in a coherent way must still be proposed.

Mein Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, inwiefern die künstlerische Produktion entlang der unteren Donau im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert mit jener West- und Mitteleuropas im Barockzeitalter sinnvoll in Verbindung gebracht werden kann. Das soll anhand von Baudenkmälern erläutert werden, die sich in den drei östlichen Anrainerstaaten der Donau befinden - in Bulgarien, Rumänien und der Ukraine. Im ersten Teil möchte ich die Strukturen künstlerischer Produktion in diesem Gebiet besprechen, vor allem um dabei hervorzuheben, wie sehr sich die unterschiedlichen Machtverhältnisse am Nord- und Südufer auf das Kunstschaffen auswirkten. Darauf lasse ich zwei Fallstudien von Baudenkmälern folgen, einer Klosterkirche im Donaufürstentum Moldau und einer Moschee im osmanischen Nordbulgarien. (Ich darf vorwegnehmen, dass beide Charakteristika aufweisen, die ihre Erwähnung im Kontext eines Diskurses über das Phänomen Barock im Donauraum sinnvoll erscheinen lassen.) Zwischen beide Fallstudien wird sich ein Exkurs nach Galizien schieben, der mit Vermutungen über Ursprung und Ausbreitung der maßgeblich vom Barock beeinflussten orthodoxen Ikonostase am spätosmanischen Balkan schließt. Abschließend will ich versuchen, das Erfasste in einen Zusammenhang mit dem Kongressthema zu bringen und eine vorläufige Antwort auf die eingangs erwähnte Forschungsfrage zu geben.

The tabernacle altar from Vojnany, today in the collections of the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, belongs to a small group of altarpieces preserved from the 13th Century. Mostly, they have survived only in fragments (dominantely in form of sculptures - Madonnas and Saints), geographically concentrated in Italy and Scandinavian Lands. In contrast to that, the Madonna (sedes sapientiae) of this Central European piece does not exist any more. However, its whole structure - baldaquin shrine and wings with relief figures of saints is still preserved.
The paper discusses the technological structure, reconstruct the iconography, programme and use of such early altarpieces, as well as questions the place of origin of the Vojnany Tabernacle in particular.
The article is an expanded version of a paper at the conference organised by Otto Pächt Archiv at the University of Vienna in 2017. The whole volume is available at:
https://services.e-book.fwf.ac.at/api/object/o:1485/diss/Content/get

Cette these est consacree a l’evolution de l’inscription spatiale des artistes plasticiens dans la ville : elle entend questionner le caractere pionnier de celle-ci en relation avec les transformations du tissu urbain ainsi que le role prescripteur des artistes aupres d’autres groupes sociaux, tels qu’ils se trouvent decrits dans la litterature. L’originalite du travail reside dans le traitement empirique de la question posee, prenant comme cas d’etude le territoire de l’actuelle Region bruxelloise. En etendant l’interrogation de la position pionniere des artistes sur le plan temporel et spatial et en realisant un travail de cartographie, j’envisage sous un jour nouveau les logiques spatiales (role de precurseurs) mais aussi culturelles (role de prescripteurs) dans lesquelles les artistes s’inscrivent, dans le cadre des dynamiques urbaines actuelles et passees. Ce faisant, je realise une cartographie originale et inedite de la creation artistique a Bruxelles, presentee dans le premi...

À travers la trajectoire professionnelle et les mobilités artistiques de Peterson Kamwathi, artiste formé et vivant à Nairobi, il s’agit de cerner la position et le rôle d’une grande ville du Sud dans l’expansion du champ de l’art contemporain. Au début des années 2000, le marché domestique constituait son seul horizon d’évaluation en même temps que son seul débouché commercial. Prenant appui sur des institutions artistiques locales, il travaille aujourd’hui à l’international, où il expose, se forme et constitue des réseaux. Ce basculement d’un véhicule de l’art à d’autres permet de lire les branchements métropolitains et leurs effets sur les dispositifs locaux, les reconfigurations socio-spatiales et les pratiques mobilitaires.

What is the position and role of large cities in the Global South in the expansion of the field of contemporary art? In this paper we look at the professional trajectory and the artistic mobility of Peterson Kamwathi, an artist living and working in Nairobi. In the early 2000’s, the domestic market was his only appraiser as well as his only commercial outlet. Making the most of the opportunities given by local art institutions, he now travels internationally to exhibit, to train and to create networks. The shift between these art vehicles sheds light on the metropolitan connections and the effects they have had on the local art world, its social and spatial reconfigurations and mobility practices.

Roue de Bicyclette, Pharmacie and Porte-bouteilles from 1913 to 1914, were Marcel Duchamp’s first three readymades. Although the term came later, the works were fundamental to his new esthetic. In light of the artist’s scientific and cartographic project as expressed in his notebooks at this time, it is likely that these works were offered in contrast to the imaginary geography, the position in the media and the scientific pretentions of a prominent painter of the European avantgarde: Robert Delaunay. Duchamp, much less established than his colleague between Paris, Munich, Berlin and New York, developed his project of pictorial nominalism in isolation. It is possible that Duchamp was jealous. But, much more can be perceived in his action: a plastic, visual, gestural, and spatial meditation, as well as a philosophical and geopolitical reflection on the array of European avant-gardes around 1914.