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1. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
Art History and Visual Studies
in Europe
Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks
Edited by
Matthew Rampley
Thierry Lenain
Hubert Locher
Andrea Pinotti
Charlotte Schoell-Glass
Kitty Zijlmans
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2012

2. © 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ........................................................................................ ix
Preface and Acknowledgements ................................................................ xv
Thierry Lenain, Hubert Locher, Andrea Pinotti, Charlotte
Schoell-Glass, Matthew Rampley and Kitty Zijlmans
Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1
Matthew Rampley
PART ONE
METHODS, DEBATES AND PARADIGMS
Art History, Aesthetics and Art Criticism ............................................... 17
Antonio Somaini
The Idea of the Canon and Canon Formation in Art History .......... 29
Hubert Locher
European Heritage: Unity in Diversity? ................................................... 41
Brian Graham
Contemporary Art and the Concept of Art History: Influence,
Dependency and Challenge .................................................................... 59
Peter J. Schneemann
Formalism and the History of Style .......................................................... 75
Andrea Pinotti
Visual Culture and Visual Studies .............................................................. 91
Jan Baetens
Theories of the Image in France: Between Art History and
Visual Anthropology ................................................................................. 107
Ralph Dekoninck

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Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the Image in German-Language
Scholarship ................................................................................................... 119
Matthew Rampley
Computerization, Digitization and the Internet ................................... 135
Antonella Sbrilli
Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and
Science .......................................................................................................... 151
Erma Hermens
Dimensions of Dialogue: Art History and the Discourse of
Economics .................................................................................................... 167
Victor Ginsburgh and François Mairesse
Sociologies of Art: With and against Art History .................................. 185
Nathalie Heinich
Museums and Museologies .......................................................................... 197
Dominique Poulot
Art History in a Global Frame: World Art Studies ............................... 217
Wilfried van Damme and Kitty Zijlmans
The Construction of National Art Histories and the
‘New’ Europe ............................................................................................... 231
Matthew Rampley
PART TWO
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE DISCIPLINE
Cultures of Interruptions. Art History in the Baltic States: Estonia,
Latvia and Lithuania ................................................................................. 249
Krista Kodres, Giedrė Mickūnaitė and Stella Pelše
In Search of a Synthesis: Art History in Belgium .................................. 275
Raphaël Pirenne

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Art History in Bulgaria: Institutional Frameworks, Research
Directions and Individual Scholars ...................................................... 287
Elka Bakalova
Art History in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Institutional
Frameworks, Topics and Loyalties ....................................................... 305
Milena Bartlová
Art History in France: A Conflict of Traditions ..................................... 315
Ralph Dekoninck and Joël Roucloux
Art History in German-Speaking Countries: Austria, Germany
and Switzerland .......................................................................................... 335
Charlotte Schoell-Glass
Art History and Visual Studies in Great Britain and Ireland ............ 355
Griselda Pollock
Born of a ‘Peripheral’ Modernism: Art History in Greece and
Cyprus ............................................................................................................ 379
Areti Adamopoulou
Art History in Italy: Connoisseurship, Academic Scholarship
and the Protection of Cultural Heritage ............................................. 393
Laura Iamurri
Art History in the Netherlands: The Past and Present of the
Discipline ...................................................................................................... 407
Marga van Mechelen and Kitty Zijlmans
Art History in the Nordic Countries ......................................................... 421
Dan Karlholm, Hans Dam Christensen and Matthew Rampley
A Marginalised Tradition? Polish Art History ........................................ 439
Wojciech Bałus
In Search of National Traditions: Art History in Romania ................ 451
Corina Teacă

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Art History in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia .............. 461
Nenad Makuljević
Art History in Spain: A Generational History ........................................ 473
Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis
Art History and the Founding of the Modern Turkish State ............ 485
Burcu Dogramaci
Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 493
Dennis Janzen
Index ................................................................................................................... 543

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INTRODUCTION
Matthew Rampley
This book, and the project out of which it grew, was initially planned as
a critical study of the contemporary practices of art history and visual
studies. Funded by the European Science Foundation, particular emphasis
was to be given to Europe as a geographical frame. From one perspective,
the idea of a speciijically European set of practices and ideas can be seen
as a curious and outmoded approach, for art history and visual studies
have long operated as sites of transnational intellectual exchange. There
have been numerous umbrella organizations facilitating their growth as
international enterprises; as early as 1873 the ijirst international confer-
ence in art history was staged in Vienna, and while it was dominated by
German and Austrian scholars, there were participants from Moscow,
Florence, Helsinki, Madrid and Zurich. CIHA, the international commit-
tee for art history has since become a signiijicant body, and its conferences
major international events. In addition to CIHA one might also mention
ICOMOS, the international organization for the preservation of cultural
heritage, which likewise addresses the critical evaluation and analysis of
art and architecture on an international level. The work of such bodies has
been strengthened by governmental initiatives, which have increasingly
sought to promote the sense of a shared heritage and culture across politi-
cal borders.1 The spread of digital media of communication over the past
twenty years has only enhanced and accelerated the process of interna-
tional collaboration and exchange of ideas, and many of the contributions
to the book, such as the meaning of artistic heritage, the value of ‘style’
as an historiographic concept, the challenge of contemporary art, or the
impact of globalism, only strengthen this impression.
Yet, against expectation perhaps, the research project Discourses of the
Visible threw up a competing image of the landscape of scholarship, in
which such border crossings have to contend with the continuing domi-
nance of the national paradigm and with the fact that most scholarship
1 See, for example, the Council of Europe-sponsored publication edited by Raymond
Weber, Forward Planning: The Function of Cultural Heritage in a Changing Europe (Stras-
bourg, 2005).

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on the history of architecture, art and visual culture continues to be con-
ducted within the framework of the nation state. This observation, which
will be elaborated on shortly, led to the conclusion that when producing
a publication that would distil many of the issues explored within the
project, it was vital to address this phenomenon in greater depth.
Hence, this volume is comprised of two parts; the ijirst consists of
analyses of a wide array of critical issues framing the present-day prac-
tice and understanding of art history and the study of the image. It has
intentionally avoided approaching this in the form of a critical survey
of methods; there is already a surfeit of such publications that present a
familiar list of art-historical methods and approaches.2 Rather, it consid-
ers the role of a range of operational concepts, contexts and bodies of
knowledge in the current practice of art history and visual studies. While
some contributions examine debates and ideas that have arisen within
speciijic socio-political contexts—the differing inflections of image theory
in anglophone, German-language and francophone scholarship provide a
clear example—many others are less geographically speciijic and bear tes-
timony to the transnational exchange of ideas within Europe and beyond,
a prominent feature being the influential role played by scholars based in
North American institutions.
In contrast, the second part addresses the speciijic national political,
ideological, social and cultural frames within which art history emerged
across a large number of European states, and which have underpinned
the continued existence of speciijic traditions of art-historical knowledge
that are nationally determined. This part sought to include accounts both
of the major centres of art-historical scholarship—Britain, Germany,
France, Italy—as well as ‘peripheral’ zones such as the Baltic States, the
Czech and Slovak Republics, Serbia or Poland, which, if only for reasons
of linguistic ignorance on the part of art historians elsewhere, have main-
tained a frequently isolated presence on the landscape of art history in
Europe.
2 See, for example, Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and its Methods: A Critical Anthology
(London, 1995); Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History. A Critical Introduction to Its
Methods (Manchester, 2006); Hans Belting, Heinrich Dilly, Wolfgang Kemp, Willibald Sau-
erländer, and Martin Warnke, eds., Kunstgeschichte. Eine Einführung (Berlin, 1993); Jacques
Thuillier, Théorie générale de l’histoire de l’art (Paris, 2003); Gonzalo M Borrás Gualis, Cómo
y qué investigar en historia del arte (Barcelona, 2001); Gianni Sciolla, Studiare l’arte. Metodo,
analisi e interpretazione delle opere e degli artisti (Turin, 2006).

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Conceptual Frameworks
In order to think through the place of the national paradigm within the
map of art history it is helpful, perhaps, to have recourse to a number
of different conceptual models, starting with the work of Thomas Kuhn.
As James Elkins has suggested, Kuhn’s distinction between ‘normal’ sci-
ence and the innovative inquiry that results in shifts of epistemological
paradigm, can also be applied to understanding art-historical practice.3
For Elkins ‘normal’ art history consists of practices such as ‘iconography,
social history, style analysis, archaeological reporting [and] archival docu-
mentation’, which is to be contrasted with ‘twilight genres’ such as the
history of art history, highly theorized reflection, or reception history.
Elkins’s concern is primarily with methodological issues, but one can map
the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘heterodox’ art history onto the ques-
tion of the national framing of the discipline. As many of the contributors
to this volume indicate, much, if not most ‘normal’ everyday art-historical
research continues to be conducted within the paradigm of the modern
nation state and national art.
This norm was established in the nineteenth century; an early product
was the development of the genre of ‘Art Topography’, the systematic doc-
umentation of artistic and architectural monuments within the boundar-
ies of the national state. As contributors to this volume indicate, a key
phase in the evolution of art history across Europe in states, from Spain,
Romania, and Poland to France and Italy, was the production of inven-
tories of artworks and the identiijication of the national artistic heritage.
The construction of the history of the national art was seen as a duty and
moral imperative by many art historians, and is still a work in progress.
Hence, the reputation of the putative ‘father’ of modern Italian art history,
Adolfo Venturi, for example, rests on his work as the author of the mas-
sive History of Italian Art (Storia dell’arte italiana), and the greater part of
Italian art-historical writing is still concerned almost exclusively with Ital-
ian art.4 Similar practices can be observed elsewhere; as Ralph Dekoninck
and Joël Roucloux suggest, a dominant concern of French art historians in
recent decades has been a recognition of their own isolation from innova-
tions taking place elsewhere, coupled with an anxiety to ‘legitimate’ the
3 James Elkins, Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts. Art History as Writing (London,
2000) 11 ff. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiijic Revolutions (Chicago, IL, 1964).
4 Adolfo Venturi, Storia dell’Arte Italiana (Milan, 1901–1940).

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post-war French avant-garde in the face of its marginalization by Ameri-
can modernism.5 It is notable, too, that many of the most internationally
known francophone writers on art, such as Georges Didi-Huberman, Louis
Marin or Thierry de Duve, stand outside the mainstream of art history in
their own countries.
There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern; while some of the most
notorious nationalist art historians, such as Wilhelm Pinder, Dagobert
Frey or Georg Dehio were Germans and Austrians, a characteristic feature
of the discipline in Germany and Austria was its decisive contribution
to the study of the wider ijield of European art, beginning with Winckel-
mann’s history of classical art.6 Despite such exceptions, and one might
add Britain in this context, such a characterization nevertheless captures
the broad contours of art-historical practice across Europe, in spite of the
fact that world histories of art have also been a central feature of the dis-
cipline, from Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History (Handbuch der Kun-
stgeschichte) of 1842, to more recent enterprises attempting to promote
an anti-Eurocentric globalist outlook.7 It is important nevertheless to be
careful when applying such a notion of ‘normal’ art history, for it implies
an evaluative hierarchy that masks the fact that much art-historical writ-
ing within the national paradigm can be highly innovative while, con-
versely, a signiijicant proportion of internationally influential scholarship
can be, in methodological terms, often orthodox and content to remain
ijirmly within existing disciplinary norms.
An alternative approach to the question might also be attempted by
drawing on Jan Białostocki’s notion of the dual economy of art. Discussing
Mannerism in Poland, Białostocki suggested that one should distinguish
between art and architecture that was embedded in the international cir-
cuit of European art, sustained by the patronage of successive Polish mon-
archs and nobles who exploited the seemingly limitless supply of Italian
5 See Ralph Dekoninck and Joël Roucloux, ‘Art History in France. A Conflict of Tradi-
tions’ (315–333) in this volume.
6 Nationalism and art history in Germany and Austria is most often discussed in rela-
tion to the Nazi period. See Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister, and Michael H. Sprenger,
eds., Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft
zwischen 1930 und 1950 (Weimar, 2005); see Charlotte Schoell-Glass, ‘Art History in Ger-
man-speaking Countries: Germany, Austria and Switzerland’ (335–353 in this volume).
7 Franz Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1842); John Onians, ed.,
Atlas of World Art (London, 2004); David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and
the Rise of Western Modernism (London, 2003); Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Christa Sütter-
lin, Weltsprache Kunst: Zur Natur- und Kunstgeschichte bildlicher Kommunikation (Vienna,
2007).

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artists and architects, and the traditions of vernacular art that operated
on a very different cycle.8 The major architectural monuments of cities
such as Cracow, Gdansk or Vilnius (as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth), attested to the impact of this international art. In contrast,
vernacular forms were produced in response to local or regional impulses,
often characterized by their dependence on locally available materials.
Białostocki was also, of course, pointing to the fact that the ‘national-
ity’ of artists was, until the nineteenth century, usually a matter of lit-
tle concern, but his notion of a multi-layered artistic production can be
employed to describe the economy of art-historical scholarship. For, in
spite of the massive growth of international collaboration and exchange,
the national paradigm frequently remains dominant. An insight into
this can be gleaned from consideration of the landscape of art-historical
journals. On the one hand, many journals, such as Art History, Artibus
et Historiae, the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, the Konsthistorisk Tidskrift
or Revue de l’art have an international reach, addressing a wide range of
topics written by an international array of art historians. Yet these are far
outnumbered by journals such as Umění, the Revue Roumaine d’Histoire
de l’Art, Paragone, Oud-Holland, Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi or Mākslas,
which are resolutely tied to the discussion of national art.9
Given that art history was a key institution in the formation of modern
European nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this is
hardly surprising; the discipline also emerged in response to the require-
ments of different audiences, from amateur local enthusiasts to regional
and national governments, and also international networks of scholars
and supranational organizations. However, despite the substantial quan-
tity of research on the history of the discipline in its wider political and
8 See Jan Białostocki, ‘Mannerism and Vernacular in Polish Art’, in Walter Friedlaender
zum 90. Geburtstag. Eine Festgabe seiner europäischen Schüler, Freunde und Verehrer, ed.
Georg Kauffmann and Willibald Sauerländer (Berlin, 1967) 69–74.
9 Umění is the major Czech journal of art history and has been published continuously
since 1918, although with an interruption between 1946 and 1953; the Revue Roumaine
d’Histoire de l’Art was ijirst published in 1964 by the Georges Oprescu Institute of Art His-
tory, Bucharest. Paragone, the journal founded by Roberto Longhi in 1950, is published in
Florence; established as a journal of visual and verbal inquiry, its focus remains primarily
Italian, although the 2009 issue included an article on Vincent Price and the French actress
Françoise Dorléac. Oud-Holland, founded in 1883 and published in The Hague, retains its
focus on pre-nineteenth-century Dutch art. Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi (Studies in Art His-
tory and Theory) is the major journal of art history in Estonia and has been published
since 1991. Mākslas has been published by the Latvian Institute of Art History in Riga since
2001.

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social context, in which the role of the university and the museum as state
institutions has been foregrounded, this still remains a little explored
aspect of contemporary art history.10 The historiographic focus has thus
been largely on those writers whose work, exceptionally, achieved an
international prominence, in many cases because they focused on topics
of international interest and also because they were writing in the major
international languages of scholarship.
The dominance of the national paradigm has cast a long shadow over
present-day practices; a striking illustration of this can be seen in the con-
tours of current-day visual studies and image theory. Referred to in terms
of the ‘iconic turn’, visual studies emerged in France, Britain (and the
United States) and Germany in the 1990s as a powerful challenge to many
assumptions sustaining art-historical discourse. While some commonali-
ties are clearly discernible in this trend, with the work of certain writers,
such as Hans Belting, Régis Debray, W.J.T. Mitchell or Nicholas Mirzoeff,
being widely translated and having a major international impact, there
are also distinctive discursive trajectories that map onto national discur-
sive communities. Thus, Anglo-American visual studies, emerging out
of cultural studies, in which a concern with the politics of visual repre-
sentation and popular culture has been uppermost, has a quite different
centre of gravity from ‘Bildwissenschaft’, the term used to describe the
wide range of image theories prominent in Germany. The latter, draw-
ing on discourses from aesthetics, communication theory, anthropology
and theories of social memory, has in general kept aloof from questions
of political engagement.11 Moreover, while some exponents of ‘Bildwis-
senschaft’ have emphasized its links to art history, visual studies has, in
contrast, aggressively distanced itself from the historical analysis of the
image. Not only has its primary object been the function of visual repre-
sentation within the postmodern society of the mass image, in addition,
authors such as Irit Rogoff have argued that visual studies is deijined by its
very opposition to any historical, diachronic paradigm.12
10 See, for example, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory and Politics
(London, 1995); Hubert Locher, ‘Die Kunst der Nation’, in Locher, Kunstgeschichte als his-
torische Theorie der Kunst (Munich, 2nd edn., 2010); Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s
Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis, MN, 2003).
11 Prominent authors have included, Gottfried Böhm, Hans Belting, Klaus Sachs-
Hombach and Horst Bredekamp. See Matthew Rampley, ‘Bildwissenschaft: Theories of the
Image in German-Language Scholarship’ (119–134 in this volume).
12 Rogoff’s critique emphasizes the difference not only between visual studies and art
history, but also its opposition to the history of ijilm, photography or other mass media. See
Irit Rogoff, Terra Inijirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London, 2000).

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Although writers based in France such as Roland Barthes, Michel Fou-
cault, Jacques Rancière or Julia Kristeva have had a global impact on think-
ing about the image, it is nevertheless also possible, as Ralph Dekoninck
argues in this volume, to identify a distinctive body of thought in France, a
historical poetics of the image, which differs from Anglo-American visual
studies and German ‘Bildwissenschaft’, and which owes its origins to spe-
ciijic institutional and discursive contexts in France. In its concern with
articulating the problematics of the hermeneutics of the historical artwork,
it has greater afijinities to German Bildwissenschaft, but in its adoption of
a modernist visual poetics (central to which is a mobilization of Freudian
psychoanalysis) it also displays a distinctive intellectual trajectory.
In preparing this volume we therefore felt it was necessary not sim-
ply to acknowledge the extent to which discourses on art and the visual
image are still nationally framed. The persistence of this phenomenon has
hardly been analysed; where it has been examined, it has been dismissed
in terms of a recidivist lapse into nationalism, recalling the nationalist his-
toriographies of the earlier part of the twentieth century.13 The aim of this
project is not, however, to rehabilitate the national; as the more detailed
discussion of national art and national art histories in this book indicates,
the idea of a national art is rent with contradictions which globalized net-
works of communication and exchange render all the more visible. What
it does aim for, however, is recognition of the multiple narratives that
should comprise the historical reflection on the discipline.
Beyond the Austro-German Tradition
Analysis of the practice of art history (and its history) has in many ways
relied on a partial vision, distorted by the dominance of the tradition of
Austrian and German writing. With few exceptions, this has ensured that
much attention has been given to the writings of thinkers working within
that tradition, from Alois Riegl and Max Dvořák to Aby Warburg, Erwin
Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich.14 Moreover, the critique of the intellectual
13 One exception is Michael Zimmermann, ed., The Art Historian: National Traditions
and Institutional Practices (London and New Haven, CT, 2003) although it is rather limited
in scope.
14 As might be expected, this has been most prominent in Germany. See, for example,
Heinrich Dilly, ed., Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte: Kunstgeschichte zur Einführung
(Berlin, 1999); Regine Prange, Die Geburt der Kunstgeschichte: Philosophische Ästhetik
und empirische Wissenschaft (Cologne, 2004); Ulrich Pijisterer, ed., Klassiker der Kunstge-
schichte. 1: Von Winckelmann bis Warburg (Munich, 2007) and 2: Von Panofsky bis Greenberg

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and ideological presuppositions of humanist art history that has emerged
in the past thirty or so years, ijirst in the name of a ‘radical’ or ‘new’ art
history, subsequently in the guise of ‘visual studies’, has essentially been a
critique of this Austro-German tradition. Thus Georges Didi-Huberman’s
attempt to reframe art history, for example, consists of an extended med-
itation on Panofsky, to whom he counterpoises Warburg as the model
of an alternative iconographic practice.15 Likewise, Norman Bryson’s
espousal of a semiological art history in the 1980s was driven by the cri-
tique of Gombrich (as well as a deep engagement with the thought of
Louis Althusser and Jean-François Lyotard).16 The sense of the importance
of this tradition has been particularly heightened given the impact of the
large-scale migration of German and Austrian art historians to the United
States from 1933 onwards.17 However, as the contributions to this volume
suggest, the ijield of art history has always been much more dispersed and
complex, even if Austro-German discourses and practices have played an
undeniably leading and signiijicant role.
We therefore saw the need to map the different histories of the dis-
cipline across various nation states; in the post-1989 era of re-emerging
states (the ‘Baltic’ states are a case in point), there has been visible a
desire to emphasize their singularity, their own, individual cultural iden-
tity. This has given an enormous incentive both to the writing of a local
(i.e. national) art history (which has, in many cases, involved a revisiting
of native intellectual traditions) and also to the foundation of museums
of art.
(Munich, 2008). In anglophone scholarship an important role was played by Michael
Podro’s The Critical Historians of Art (London and New Haven, CT, 1982) and Michael Ann
Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Princeton, NJ, 1985), both viewing the
attempts to deal with the philosophical legacy of Kant as forming the conceptual back-
bone of the discipline. See, too, Edouard Pommier, Histoire et théories de l’art: De Winckel-
mann à Panofsky (Paris, 1994). A more even-handed approach is evident in Germain Bazin,
Histoire de l’histoire de l’art de Vasari à nos jours (Paris, 1986), Udo Kultermann, Geschichte
der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft (Berlin, 1966) and Gianni Sciolla, La critica
d’arte del Novecento (Turin, 1995) although these mostly provide a brief positivistic docu-
mentation rather than any clear critical interpretation.
15 Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps: Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images
(Paris, 2000) and L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby War-
burg (Paris, 2002).
16 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London, 1983).
17 This emphasis is clearly visible, for example, in the on-line Dictionary of Art Histori-
ans, based in the United States, in which a signiijicant majority of entries are devoted to
Austrian, German, British and American art historians.

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In one sense, therefore, this book comprises an attempt to open up
the ijield of historiographic reflection; it attempts to recognize the crucial
work of authors who are barely known outside of their original home ter-
ritories. Such ignorance is partly a function of linguistic (in)competence.
Anyone writing in a language beyond the major European international
languages of art history (English, French, German) encounters incompre-
hension, and in this regard the recent launch of the journal Art in Trans-
lation represents an overdue and valuable step towards addressing this
situation, albeit a one-way process of translation into English. In addition,
however, this phenomenon mirrors the more generally skewed landscape
of historiographic reflection and its alignment with wider geopolitical
factors.18
This is the ijirst attempt to undertake such a broad critical overview of
the state of art history across Europe, but this is not at the expense of the
recognition of the wider contexts in which it is situated. North America,
in particular, the United States, has come to exert a dominant influence
on European art history, on a number of levels. The emigration during
the 1930s of scholars such as Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Richard Krautheimer,
Ernst Kris, or Richard Ettinghausen to the United States was an intellec-
tual transfer that reflected the wider re-distribution and accumulation of
cultural, intellectual and political capital during the Second World War
and the post-war period.19 In many respects this paralleled the transfer
of the avant-garde and the art market from Paris to New York, initially
celebrated in triumphalist vein by American commentators.20 This pro-
cess has accelerated over the past decades; institutions such as the Getty
Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art, or the American Academy in Rome, coupled with
well-endowed research universities such as Yale, Harvard or Princeton,
have exercised a major influence on the shape of art-historical research.
18 Arguably the work of even Italian art historians is little known beyond Italy and
specialists in Italian art history. The recently established journal Art in Translation, funded
by the Getty and published by Berg since 2009, is an effort to address the broader deijicit
through translation of texts from a wide range of languages.
19 See Karen Michels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Deutschsprachige Kunstge-
schichte im amerikanischen Exil (Berlin, 1999).
20 See, for example, Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting. A History of
Abstract Expressionism (New York and San Francisco, 1976); Serge Guilbaut, How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago,
IL, 1983).

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This dominance has been secured not only through the funding of
large-scale research projects and publications by scholars in the United
States, but also through well-intentioned projects of academic exchange,
which have often been closer to a one-sided cultural transfer than to a
genuinely mutual sharing of concerns. The Summer Institutes held at the
University of Rochester in the late 1990s and funded by the Getty Research
Institute, exempliijied this process very clearly. Laying particular stress on
the involvement of scholars from Central and Eastern Europe (who con-
stituted some two thirds of the participants), they were in effect exercises
in the promotion of the then ‘new’ art history and visual studies. Speak-
ers such as Kaja Silverman, Norman Bryson, Keith Moxey and Stephen
Melville addressed contemporary issues in aesthetics, visual theory and
art history, as if assisting colleagues from across the former Iron Curtain
overcome a theoretical and methodological ‘deijicit’ accrued during the
decades of post-war Communist-imposed academic semi-isolation.21 The
United States has also been a crucial mediator of intra-European aca-
demic exchanges; awareness amongst British scholars of much signiijicant
contemporary and historical scholarship in continental Europe has often
been dependent on translations sponsored by research institutions such
as the Getty, or the willingness of American presses to publish transla-
tions into English, rather than on direct ijirst-hand experience.22
Europe in/and the World
We were aware that the focus on Europe might leave the project open to
the criticism of parochialism at a time when increasing attention is being
paid to the practice of art history as a global set of discourses. Many have
highlighted the counter-discourses that have challenged the assumed
21 One striking instance of the impact of the Institutes is Margaret Dikovitskaya’s Visual
Culture: The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA, 2006). A paean to
the advent of ‘new’ art history and visual studies, the book includes extensive interviews
with, for example, Nicholas Mirzoeff, William J.T. Mitchell, Martin Jay, and Douglas Crimp,
who were also leading ijigures at the Summer Institute.
22 The Getty Research Institute and Zone Press have played a vital role in this regard.
The Texts and Documents series has been vital in making available texts by Gottfried
Semper, Siegfried Giedion, Alois Riegl, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Karel Teige, Aby
Warburg or Robert Vischer, for example, to anglophone audiences. Zone has published
translations of works by Henri Focillon, Erwin Panofsky, Georges Bataille, Philippe-Alain
Michaud on Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl and other authors of the Vienna School.

16. introduction 11
© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
hegemony of Euro-American art-historical scholarship.23 As Tapati Guha-
Thakurta has demonstrated, for example, colonial India produced a sig-
niijicant body of art-historical writing, starting with the work of Ram Raz
(1790–1830) and Rajendralal Mitra (1823/4–1891), which contested British
narratives of Indian visual culture and its place within the universal hier-
archy of ‘civilizations.’24 The scope and development of ‘other’ art histories
has become a major theme that has led not merely to a global expansion
of art history but to a disruption of its claim to be a unitary ijield.25 As
James Elkins has suggested, however, the European model of art history
is not easily evaded; for a discourse to be recognizably art-historical it
requires conformity to a recognized set of protocols that can trace their
origins to the discipline in Europe.26 If a practice diverges noticeably from
these, and Elkins cites examples from early Persia and India—to which
could be added the enormous corpus of pre-modern writing in China on
the arts—its character as art history becomes difijicult to recognize, and it
functions more as theology, aesthetic meditation or genealogical chronicle.
Conversely, in an echo of the wider dilemmas of the post-colonial critic,
the many authors who have contributed to the globalizing of art history,
such as Olu Oguibe, Okwui Enwezor, Gilane Tawadros, Kobena Mercer,
Partha Mitter or Geeta Kapur, have done so within the clear parameters
of European and American art history and cultural criticism.
In Provincializing Europe Dipesh Chakrabarty stressed the need to
decentre Europe and the historicist construction of modernity that placed
23 James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (London, 2006).
24 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial
and Postcolonial India (New Delhi, 2004) and Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’
Art (Cambridge, MA, 1992). Key nineteenth-century texts were: Ram Raz, Essay on the
Architecture of the Hindus (London, 1834), and Rajendralal Mitra, The Antiquities of Orissa
(Calcutta, 1875). Shyama Charan Srimani, Suksha Shilper Utpatti o Arya Jatir Shilpa Chaturi
(Fine Arts of India, With a Short Sketch of the Origins of Art) (Calcutta, 1874) was the ijirst
work of art history in Bengali, and gave rise to a signiijicant body of art criticism in Bengali
connected to the anti-colonial independence movement.
25 See, for example, Gerardo Mosquera, ed., Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art
Criticism from Latin America (London, 1995); Vishakha N. Desai, ed., Asian Art History in the
Twenty-First Century (New Haven, CT, 2007); John Onians, ed., Compression vs. Expression:
Containing the World’s Art (New Haven, CT, 2007). See too the series edited by Kobena
Mercer, Annotating Art’s Histories (London, 2004–7), which addresses twentieth-century
art on a global, post-colonial basis.
26 James Elkins, Stories of Art (London, 2003). See, too, Elkins, ‘Writing about Modern-
ist Painting outside Western Europe and North America’, in Onians, ed., Compression vs.
Expression, 188–214.

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© 2012 Koninklijke Brill NV 978 90 04 21877 2
it as the privileged subject of all histories.27 The focus of this volume on
European art history does not imply granting Europe a particular privi-
lege in this sense; indeed, the attention to the multiple narratives of art-
historical practice, its institutional and political contexts, aims to produce
an image of Europe itself as polycentric and dispersed. At the same time,
as the contributions to this volume suggest, consideration of the paral-
lel histories of the emergence, growth and present state of the discipline
throw up numerous parallels and commonalities. It is these that afford a
coherence which a global analysis of art history would never be able to
attain.
Some Words on Method
It is also important to pass a few comments on our approach, since the
second part of the volume contains a series of contributions outlining
art-historical practices in a range of European states. We did not seek
encyclopaedic comprehensiveness, and thus there are omissions, such as
Portugal, Hungary or Russia, and while the underlying premise was the
role of the process of state formation in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as a crucial frame governing art history, our contributors inter-
preted the task of accounting for their own local situation in different
ways. Most chose to provide a historical genealogy of the present, but
otherwise there was considerable variation in their approach to the text.
For some the development of art history could be seen in terms of suc-
cessive generations, in which relations between students and teachers, a
paternalistic professional tradition, provided the impetus for the develop-
ment of the discipline. Others saw art history as directly and intimately
involved in wider historical and ideological contexts, whether it was the
impact of Nazism, the founding of political states (from Ottoman Turkey
after the First World War to the Baltic countries in 1991).
A major issue presented by the contributions to the second part of the
volume was the question of the order of presentation. In keeping with
the general tenor of this book, we were concerned to avoid traditional
hierarchies, and beginning with Italy, German-speaking countries, France
or Britain would have provided structural support to such inequalities.
On the other hand, alternative systems of ordering would have created
27 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Dif-
ference (Princeton, NJ, 2000).

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other difijiculties. A geographical division of Europe would have produced
strange anomalies, suggesting that we held to the notion of regional unities
where none existed. ‘Northern’ Europe, for example, would have included
the Baltic States and the Nordic states, yet in many respects the former
have more in common with Poland and other post-Soviet states, while the
Nordic states have the strongest afijinities to Germany and Britain. Britain,
while geographically closest to Belgium, France and the Netherlands, nev-
ertheless owes the greatest intellectual debt to Germany and Austria, due
to the influx of art historians to Britain in the 1930s.
We therefore opted to present the contributions in alphabetical order.
Aware that this is a somewhat arbitrary decision, we were nevertheless
conscious of the fact that other orderings would raise more fundamental
questions and thus saw this as the least problematic option.