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This paper describes the different ways of commemorating the fallen of World War I in Italy between 1918 and 1940. From the collection of examples emerges that there was no homogeneity in the forms of remembrance during these two decades. Rather, we find both a continuous renewal and overlapping of different kinds of commemorative forms. Right after the end of World War I, a spread of spontaneous local monuments is discernible, though the many small war cemeteries rising near the former battlefield areas were already beginning to be perceived as a problem. Shortly before World War II, the construction of huge ossuaries and, later, war memorials was fostered by the Fascist Regime which availed itself of the fallen for ideological and political purposes. Between these two extremes, also other forms of commemoration such as parks or avenues of remembrance were realized. This paper tries not to force coincidences between history and the history of architecture; nevertheless, it understands monuments, parks of remembrance, ossuaries, and war memorials as a kind of seismograph sensitive to the period’s shifts and jolts, and to Fascist policies in particular.

This paper examines the material memorialization of the World Wars in India by looking at the India Gate, the archway located at the center of the Indian national capital, New Delhi. Although dedicated to soldiers who lost their lives in World War I, the India Gate has become a symbolic commemorative monument that represents the sacrifices of all the Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the battles fought by the modern Indian state. Focusing on the multi-textured renderings of history, this paper illustrates how old memories and histories are repurposed and refashioned at the India Gate.

This paper focuses on Italy’s Fascist ossuaries of the First World War. It is intended to show how a methodology that uses images and texts can expose the political purposes that underpinned the creation of the ossuaries, to contribute to the literature on the commemoration of fallen soldiers, and to advance the study of war monuments as expressions of political forces. The paper also represents an attempt to bridge between different approaches to the study of war monuments that have emerged in history and in visual studies. It examines Italian ossuaries of the Great War as both objects and symbols, or as aesthetic configurations and carriers of political meanings. Physical characteristics, such as those associated with context, space and style, are shown to express elements of Fascist ideology relating, for instance, to hierarchy, victory and power.

This paper discusses the impact of the ideological trends of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne which took place in Paris, in 1937, on Greece's national participation in the exhibition. The modern artworks it showcased will serve as a case study to investigate notions of regionalism. The paper considers the conception and realisation of the Greek pavilion in association with the Exposition's affirmed focus on regionalism and examines the relation between nationalism and regionalism at that time. The Greek pavilion and its artists will also be discussed in regard to the local ideologies they expressed or contributed to generate. The aim of this paper is to highlight how, on the occasion of the 1937 exhibition, the Greek quest for a new form of national art – an authentic expression of "Greekness" able to overturn the European perception, which identified the "Greek" with the "classical" – converged or diverged from European regionalist and nationalist discourses as expressed by the exhibition's commissioner, as well as to draw attention to the paradoxes of this connection.

The subject of this paper is the supposed affinity between painting and poetry as theorised by the linguist Roman Jakobson who played a crucial role for the Russian avant-garde and its close association of painting and poetry. The paper focuses on Jakobson's relation to the two 1913 manifestos "The Word as Such" and "The Letter as Such", written by the poets Chlebnikov and Kruchenyck, and on Jakobson's own (lost) reply. It calls into question the accuracy of Jakobson's claim of having influcenced the poets' manifestos, and describes what Jakobson considered to be the shared 'core elements' of the visual and literary arts. According to him, they share a visuality, not on the level of the written sign or grapheme, but on a deeper level, visible only to the mind's eye.

The paper analyses the key aspects of George Grosz's influence on Croatian art between the two World Wars. A number of artists, especially the members of the association Zemlja, considered Grosz to be an author of similar ideological belief, who advocated an active role of art in society. Grosz's standpoints thus indirectly influenced the formation of the overall cultural atmosphere, marked by the polarization of the entire artistic scene. The artist became one of the key reference points and a figure cited by those who exerted a crucial influence on the formation of Croatian artistic scene between the two World Wars – the writer and one of the most prominent intellectuals Miroslav Krleža and visual artists Krsto Hegedušić and Ljubo Babić. The paper also addresses the circumstances regarding the organization of Grosz's solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1932, along with an analysis of the reception of his work among Croatian art critics.

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily revealed when consideration is given to two carefully devised interpretative filters that Matisse created. The first, a circus theme embodied in its original title Cirque, and the second, the intricate captions that Matisse accorded to each image. Enhancing the visual quality of his handwritten text with his richly drawn arabesques, he created a new text-image dynamic which gave primacy to the image. The paper reveals a congruency between the text in Jazz, which he declared had no relationship to the image, and the essay he wrote at the same time, "How I made my books”, where he articulated a principle he adopted for his other books, the rapport between the image and the literary character of the text.

Instead of stabilising the poles of stasis and non-stasis, and narrative and non-narrative, in the 1970s, Julião Sarmento plays within a concomitant scheme: photography and painting, photography and film, stasis and narrative are merged. What is at stake is the possibility of challenging the modernist tenets of photography canonically defined in opposition to painting and cinema. The perversity is not only in the content of some works but also in the very logic underlying the approach to the medium in Sarmento's œuvre, whether through a perversion of the boundaries between the media or by the assertion of the medium itself as perversion. This paper presents a case study that reflects upon the replacement of a structural and negative system with an unsystematic difference (in the sense less of expansion than of the medium's deconstruction). New dimensions concerning the issues of contamination and hybridisation in contemporary art are also brought into play.

By applying the methods of categorisation, comparison and analysis of written sources, this article aims to reveal how Surrealist artistic ideas may have influenced – through the intermediary of the Postmodern movement – architectural trends up to the present time. The paper is organized into three parts, each dedicated to one of the most important Surrealist architectural concepts: the synthesis of the arts, fluidity, and formalistic superficiality and spontaneity. Each section describes how these ideas were underlined in Surrealist art and theoretical texts, compares them to some examples of Postmodern and contemporary architecture, and explains how these ideas were nurtured from the time they emerged until the time they materialized in architectural design.

Over a quarter-century, the Scandinavian artists Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann painted a series of portraits and interiors in which they commented upon their shared identity as women artists while migrating between the artistic centers of Munich, Paris, and Copenhagen. Drawing from feminist and performance theory, and concentrating on three paintings in which Bauck and Wegmann imagine one another as emerging professional artists by mediated self-representation, the paper discusses the two artists’ collaborative practices. The artists’ correspondence with their mutual friend and colleague Hildegard Thorell, kept in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, is presented here for the first time and provides important insights into their artistic companionship. This case study forms part of an ongoing dissertation project on Nordic women painters’ self-representations in the late nineteenth century.

The title of this article recalls a session of the 2012 CIHA congress in Nuremberg – 'CIHA as the Object of Art History' – that analysed the role the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in the development of art history as a discipline. Only a few years earlier, Heinrich Dilly had drawn an overview of the International Congresses of Art History, together with specialists of other fields. Dilly explained the lack of interest of art historiography for the import of such conferences with the fact that they were 'too big a matter', as the papers had rapidly multiplied, and also 'very large a matter', in the sense that the debate was difficult to frame and, more often than not, the choice of participants depended on a political agenda rather than scientific reasons. This article thus endeavours to tackle this very large matter as a vantage point on the methodological reflection, in the attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the theoretical discourse insofar as discussed in CIHA meetings, from the Lisbon conference in 1949 to that held in Nuremberg in 2012.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization in Europe and the United States introduced new building types and new methods of construction, leading to important changes in the architectural landscape of major cities. Public and corporate construction proliferated, and design competitions were called upon to identify architectural projects that best suited the needs of a particular state institution or private company. Although initially these competitions were open to all members of the architectural profession, towards the end of the nineteenth century, their format changed to be more effective, with only a restricted number of architects competing for the commission. The present paper focuses on the competition for the New York Life Palace in Budapest and sheds light on its connections with the international trends.

This special issue compiles papers presented at the 2015 “Gottfried Lindauer – Painting New Zealand” conference organized by the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Nationalgalerie Berlin. Both the issue and the conference itself constitute an extension of the acclaimed exhibition “Gottfried Lindauer – The Māori Portraits”, shown between 20 November 2014 and 12 April 2015 in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, and present an array of scholarly and theoretical perspectives. The essays reflect in microcosm current larger research and archival work and are thus able to place the work of the artist, hitherto discussed mostly in an ethnographic context, into an already globalized framework shaped by transcultural contacts.

This article gives an overview of the very early collections of Māori artefacts in Berlin. These encompass the collections assembled by Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster and others on the famous voyages of James Cook to the South Seas at the end of the eighteenth century, but also objects collected by the North American captain Hadlock at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Later a wide range of German visitors reported from their tours through New Zealand and brought back artefacts and photographs. This paper points out the provenances of the core areas of the Māori collection in Berlin and retraces some shifts in the collecting practices as well as in the museum installations. It will be shown how the perception and evaluation of these objects changed and how they became symbols of identity in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

This paper surveys ‘representations’ of Māori in connection with museums and international exhibitions from 1873-1925, in particular through works of art by painters such as Lindauer and taonga (treasures) made by Māori people themselves. It questions the postmodern analysis of objects and public display in terms of representation, along with the politics of identity that go with it, arguing instead that using a framework of visual culture, actor-network theory and indigenous agency illuminates these objects in a different, and altogether more complex way. In particular it draws on historical Māori accounts of their critical but enthusiastic engagement with western cultures of collection and display, and explores how this evidence might underpin new methods of analysis both in the study of colonial art and its histories and contemporary museum practice.

Recent publications on the historiography of modern Spanish architecture have once again made C. Flores' major work, Arquitectura Española Contemporánea (1961), the focus of their scholarly attention. Flores' text is portrayed as an important contribution to the Modern Movement in the context of the Franco regime. However, the significance of W. Gropius and the Bauhaus was not mentioned. This omission becomes all the more peculiar when considering Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941), with which Flores was well acquainted through the 1955 Spanish translation. This paper analyzes Flores' genealogy of modern architecture at the textual level. In addition, it addresses the visual level of his book, for the first time uncovering a narration that contradicts a straightforward illustration, yet reveals Flores' stance vis-à-vis modern architecture and the Bauhaus.

This paper examines the ways Mies van der Rohe has dealt with the phenomenon of mechanization of all areas of human life, that ever since the mid-twenties was becoming an increasingly controversial political issue. Building on a number of philosophical essays on the role of modern large-scale technology, especially those by Friedrich Dessauer, Mies advanced a strategy that can be described as the aesthetic transcendence of industrially-produced technical items. By positioning his architecture in this manner, he warded off all accusations of purely economically-motivated rationalism. What Mies considered to be a “spiritual” approach to architecture has also defined the program of the Werkbund that he presided at that time and has laid the foundation for his postwar work.

Jerusalem sites representing the Passion of Christ shape the landscape of Catholic Central Europe. Several architectural evocations of Jerusalem commemorate contemporary agony, namely local victims of the World Wars. Placing soldiers within the narrative of Christ’s Way of the Cross serves a political-ideological agenda as well as a psychological need of local populations, giving meaning to the soldiers' deaths and placing them in a salvific context. In this paper two case studies, the Calvary of Klagenfurt and the Way of the Cross in Syców (Groß-Wartenberg), are presented to highlight this phenomenon.

This paper sheds light on the history and the design of military cemeteries for the Jewish victims of the First World War in Germany. Many Jews welcomed the beginning of the World War as a good opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism, proving that Jewish Germans were part of German society. During the Weimar Republic, anti-Semitism increased, and since 1933, it was part of the national socialist governance policy. Under these circumstances the commemoration of Jewish war victims did not only fulfill the basic desire for mourning, but was a political task emphasizing the Jewish contribution to the war. The erection of monuments and memorial tablets in Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and other institutions had started as early as in 1916. After the end of the war, the design of such monuments became an important task for Jewish architects. In the Jewish cemeteries of many bigger cities, special areas for soldiers were established with standardized tombstones and memorials. Their design and iconography rely on both the general traditions of war remembrance emphasizing the "sacrifice" for the country and the tradition of Jewish religion, culture, and community.

This article describes the conditions and working processes of the Department of Military Cemeteries established at the Headquarters of the Imperial and Royal Army of Austria in Cracow, 1916-1918. Particular attention is paid to the designs prepared by the architect Dušan Jurkovič (1868-1947). The domain of commemorative architecture represented a novel task to the architect, formerly renowned for his emphatic style synthesizing vernacular architecture and Art Nouveau. Leaning on his close acquaintance with the traditions of Carpathian wooden architecture, he thoroughly studied the language of classical monumental architecture and developed a distinctive and poetic style for his sepulchral ensembles. This paper elucidates the architect’s development, his considerations, and the typology of his cemeteries and monuments, explaining also the significance of Jurkovič’s Galician experience for his later career.

This article addresses the commemorative practices in Flanders from World War I through World War II. In particular, the paper investigates the challenges faced by the primary belligerent countries after WWI: How to commemorate the dead soldiers that lay along trench lines from Belgium into France? Flemish and Belgian nationalist concerns affected the implementation of postwar national cemeteries. The article examines both the material embodiment of World War I – for instance the heldenhuldezerken – and the meanings attributed to commemoration and remembrance of the war dead.

The paper explores the history of the restoration of Bratislava Castle, the typical symbol of Slovakia's capital. It concentrates on the extensive reconstruction of the castle carried out in the late 1950s and 1960s under the former Czechoslovak communist regime. The story of Bratislava Castle is peculiar not so much because of the way in which the past was violated and history used for the transient goals of political leaders, but because of the way in which the castle was nationalised through a historicising reconstruction. The final utilitarian act of all the previous ideological manipulations of the castle was the erection of a new building within the castle walls. It was built after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 to serve the needs of the new independent Slovak parliament. Nationalistic illusionism had again joined forces with utilitarianism, this time to produce an architectural language known as commercial Baroque.

By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.

Rafael Barradas' Vibrationism is often recognised, together with Planism and Ultraism, as one of the first avant-garde movements to emerge in Spain. However, little attention has been paid to its intellectual roots and its Catalan and European context. This paper will examine the birth of Vibrationism as the Uruguayan painter's response to his contact both with the European avant-garde, in particular Futurism and Simultaneism, and especially with the Catalan context in which it appeared. The brief story of the movement shows us how some of the more consistent answers to the pictorial issues raised by the European avant-garde of the 1910s were to be found in what has traditionally been understood as its periphery.

This paper aims to contrast the particular uses of the modern categories of ingenuousness and primitivism both in José de Almada Negreiros and Ernesto de Sousa within their broader presence in twentieth century art. In so doing it seeks to contextualize multiple ways of understanding modernity and its legitimation through discursive practices. Ernesto de Sousa reinterpreted an idea of modernity that followed up on Almada Negreiros' modern experience. The concept of "voluntary ingenuousness" was developed by Almada after the 1920s, but it had its roots in the futurist proposals he embraced in the first decades of the twentieth century. Primitivism and ingenuousness were the fundamental terms for Almada Negreiros and Ernesto de Sousa through which they reinvented themselves as well as modernity and forged liberty within a dictatorship regime.

The institutionalisation of Slovenian art history began in 1913, when France Stele (1886-1972), a student of Max Dvořak (1874-1921), was appointed the conservator of the province of Carniola. It became fully established in 1919, when, after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the University of Ljubljana was founded. The paper analyses the activities of three art historians, in addition to France Stele also Izidor Cankar (1886-1958) and Vojeslav Mole (1886-1973), who shaped Slovenian art history between the two world wars. After the end of World War II, all aspects of life were completely subordinated to the Soviet system of the one-party communist state. Ideological suitability was the only standard of acceptability, also at the university. In the immediate post-war period, the older generation of art historians, who were educated in the Western European tradition, mostly in Vienna, were placed in a completely new ideological-political context, which has highly influenced the development and methodology of the discipline until the present day.

Research on the European success of Venetian art during the 18th century has above all examined the activity of the painters. This paper analyzes the works of Venetian sculptors through some important case studies. Attention is given to several commissions of sculpture from Russia (among them works ordered by Peter the Great from 1719 to 1723), German states (Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria), Sweden and England. The analysis also concerns Venetian intellectuals who played the roles of mediators, such as Anton Maria Zanetti and Francesco Algarotti. The comparative study of these commissions allows us to formulate hypotheses about who were the most praised sculptors and whether there was a taste for specific artistic tendencies. It seems, for example, that British clients mainly appreciated classical sculptors like Antonio Gai and Giovanni Marchiori, in contrast to other countries, where also baroque artists were valued. The article also notes the case of Antonio Corradini, who operated for several years abroad, in Vienna and Dresden. There is finally also the attempt to outline some ideas and starting points for further research on this topic; among them an enquiry about taste for Venetian baroque sculptures in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This paper attempts to bring the world of mid-eighteenth-century British design into fruitful conversation with contemporary art theory and practice. Taking the neighbourhood and milieu of the St Martin's Lane area in London as a starting point, I investigate connections between British "rococo" design and William Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty in terms of shared formal values and contemporary implications of "modernity". I argue for a mutual indebtedness rather than "art" directing "design".

In the middle of the 14th century, the chapel Maria am Gestadeat the edge of the medieval city of Vienna was extended by a three-bay chancel with a double narthex and portal. Construction of the tower on a heptogonal groundplan was started at the same time. Besides stylistic and organizational connections with St. Stephan's Cathedral, the innovation of the choir can be seen in the reduction of the mural volume in favor of an enormous increase of the window size. The present paper combines the analysis of written sources with stylistic comparisons including the examination of the stonemarks. A final conclusion is made on the founder's intentions as well as on medieval use of the chancel.

Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari's Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero's work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari's account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero's reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter's death (by April 1393).

This paper deals with a case study of the collaboration between sculptors and painters in the context of the construction of altarpieces in 17th-century Spain. It analyses a drawing by Francisco Rizi (Madrid, 1614-Escorial, 1685) in the British Museum depicting a sculptural group and fragments of an architectural framework, and relates it to two other drawings by the same artist in the National Library of Spain. They are identified as fragments of the design drawing of the former altarpiece of the Expectant Virgin in the church of the Calced Trinitarians in Madrid.

The essay's goal is to interpret Jacek Malczewski's picture Adam Asnyk with Muse (1894-1897) as a symbolic work. The main argument is that the painting does not depict a scene with a poet being inspired by a muse. The starting point of the analysis is the conclusion that the Muse is not playing the lyre she is holding and that the wings of Hermes are attached only to one leg. The role of the instrument is crucial for the interpretation of the painting not only because it is not used in accordance with its function but also because of the planimetric as well as semantic relationships with other elements of the picture, above all with one of the sheets of paper on the table and the scythe held by a warrior in the spectral pageant. The Muse presses the sheet with the lyre, lifting it and directing its sharp point towards Asnyk's head. The sheet is made similar in its form to the scythe above it, directed towards the manacled young men above the poet. The comparison between the figures introduced in this way suggests that the real nature of the inspiration is destructive for the poet. A comprehensive interpretation of the relationship thus constituted leads to the conclusion that the symbolic meaning of the painting is based on the opposition between the conventional iconography of a poet and the idea of creation conceived as a liberation of the artist from traditional and ossified symbolism (music, the wings of Hermes).

Similarly with the progressive turn from magic to sciences, architecture underwent a slow transformation starting with the last decades of the 17thcentury. Inevitably, the increase in rationality provoked the loss of the mythical component that still infused the Early Modern architectural theory. Carlo Lodoli's thought plays an important part in this process, as it carries forth the questioning of the authority of ancient knowledge, practice and aesthetics, while emphasizing the ethical function of architecture. This paper is an attempt to see Lodoli's theory through the lens of the coeval scientific achievements, while presenting him as an actor of the architectural crisis at the end of classical modernity.

Though the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett was properly established only in 1720, the electoral Saxon Kunstkammer and library in Dresden included a collection of prints and drawings from their very beginnings in the mid-16th century. The article focuses on this early, and rarely discussed, history of the collection. From the Dresden holdings and hitherto unexamined sources, exemplary insights can be gained into scope, structure, aims, and accessibility of an early modern collection of art on paper. This throws light on issues in the history of science and of collecting art, on courtly representation, as well as on early modern discourses on art and order. In particular, it can be shown that the foundation of the Kupferstich-Kabinett in the early 18th century was the result of long and complex processes and developments, manifesting ever-evolving and constantly changing scientific taxonomies. Comparison of the Dresden collection with those in Munich, Ambras, Prag, and Paris, underscores the unparalleled continuity of its history.

The paper considers the singular situation of reception occasioned by a painting shielded with a reflective pane of glass. The reflections in the glass dramatically break the cohesion of the painting and bring about distracting – although sometimes intriguing – surprises. The glass is an iconoclastic intrusion, an infection of the artistic order by an invading disorder and transient immediacy, which however can be very attractive visually. The accidental obliterates the significant. "The truth of art" is confronted here with a delusive phantom. Not only two entirely different visual effects are mixed here, but also different ontological and axiological spheres.