CFP: Exhibitions, New Nations and the Human Factor, 1873–1939

CALL FOR PAPERS

Exhibitions, new nations and the human factor, 1873–1939

CRAACE symposium, 4–5 April 2022

Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris

 

Keynote speaker: Professor Mary Pepchinski, Technical University Dresden

It is widely recognised that new political entities that came to existence as nation states from the end of the nineteenth century sought to legitimise their identities externally through participation at world’s fairs and internally through consolidation of their national collections in museums and galleries of art and design. While the official motivations and presentations have been examined quite thoroughly, the agency of many individuals involved in different stages of exhibition design has been overlooked.

This symposium aims to explore the relations – including discrepancies – between the official narratives of exhibitions, as devised by the organisers, and the narratives by individuals whose participation helped to construct the meaning and content of the exhibits. By this, the discussion moves away from the focus on the state apparatus and official ideologies towards the people who designed the national presentations, worked in them and visited them. Our main focus is on how exhibitions were used to consolidate new political identities. The period covered by the symposium begins with the Vienna World Fair of 1873 and concludes with the outbreak of the Second World War. It saw important changes in political and geographical circumstances globally, with the creation and recreation of, for instance, Romania, Turkey, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary.

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CFP: Future Prospects for Art History in Central Europe: Questions, Methods, Topics

CALL FOR PAPERS

Future Prospects for Art History in Central Europe: Questions, Methods, Topics

A workshop organised at Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Art History

 on 17-18 June 2020

 What are the most prominent and important issues motivating art historians in east-central Europe at present? Are they methodological? Political? Thematic? Curatorial / museological? Conceptual? Or are they to do with debates relating to a particular period or geographical question?

This workshop is intended to provide a forum for considering answers to that question and for an assessment of the current state of art history in east-central Europe. Its aim, too, is to identify one or more potential projects that might give art historical practice in east-central Europe a higher profile and underpin an application for a European Research Council synergy grant (https://erc.europa.eu/funding/synergy-grants).

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CFP: Multiplying Modernity: Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde

Multiplying Modernity

Vernacular modernisms, nostalgia and the avant-garde

CRAACE workshop, 67 December 2019

East Slovak Gallery, Košice (Slovakia)

In the decades before 1918 there was a vibrant debate over the nature of ‘national art’ in Central Europe. For many this was embodied in folk art and culture. By 1914, this idea was increasingly challenged by avant-garde interests in the metropolis. After the War, however, a return to folk art and regionalism was revisited and gained increasing importance in the decades leading up the Second World War. Within a broad artistic landscape, folk art and culture was used to search for a fundamental essence of human culture, as in the case of the Hungarian painters Lajos Vajda and Dezső Korniss; to create a ‘national style’ with reinterpretations of folk art, as in 1920s Czechoslovakia; and to seek renewal outside a lost imperial capital, like in Austria.

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