The 10 most-cited articles in Artium Quaestiones, 2019

The five or eight years leading up to the failed “Prague Spring” represent the most important period of Czech humanities tradition during the Communist Party dictatorship. Art history did not directly participate in either of the most prominent period discourses, but it was able to develop its own specific methodologies following the Czech continuation of the Vienna School legacy. The contribution analyzes the discourse of Marxist Iconology, developed by J. Neumann and R. Chadraba, and presents the case of F. Šmejkal and his concept of Imaginative Art, which was, interestingly, the sole case during the whole 40 years of the Communist Party rule when the highest Party officials became directly involved in Czech art historical practice. From the point of view of art historical practice, the most important feature of the brief period 1963–1969 was the new possibility of contacts with foreign art historians and of traveling abroad.

Portuguese art history experienced remarkable development after World War II, especially with the work of José-Augusto França, who was responsible for establishing a historiographic canon for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese art that still endures. José-Augusto França developed a narrative that held Paris up as an artistic and cultural role model in relation to which he diagnosed a permanent delay in Portuguese art. This essay analyses França’s idea of belatedness in the context of Portuguese art historiography and political history and how it is part of a genealogy of intellectual thought produced in an imperial context, revisiting previous art historians and important authors, such as Antero de Quental and António Sérgio. Moreover, it aims to address how the concept of belatedness was associated with the idea of “civilisation” and the idea of “art as civilisation.” Belatedness also has implications in the constraints and specificities of writing a master narrative in a peripheral country – a need particularly felt in the second half of the twentieth century, to mark a…

The paper focuses on the ways of visualizing political and economic transformation in the works of artists from post-communist Europe mainly in the 1990s. Those works, which today, in a wide geographical context, may be interpreted as problematizing the idea of transformation, were often originally appropriated by such discourses of the post-transformation decade as the art of the new media and technology (Estonia), performance (Russia), feminism (Lithuania), body art (Hungary), and critical art (Poland), which marginalized the problem of transformation. Analyses of the works of artists from Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia make it possible to determine and problematize the poles of transformation in a number of ways, pointing at the inadequacy of those poles which traditionally spread from the end of totalitarian communism to democracy identified with free market economy. By the same token, they allow one to question their apparent antithetical character which connects the transformation process to the binary structures of meaning established in the period of the…

The lecture concerns the Berlin Palace (Stadtschloss) and presents a view of its long history, starting with its construction in the Baroque style by an artist of the Polish origin, Andreas Schlüter, up to its contemporary reconstruction with a new institutional function (Humboldt Forum). The ten sections of the text not only present architectural and artistic history of this residence but also pivotal historical events and contexts which affected the dimensions and meaning of its functioning. The Palace, entangled into German history but also reflecting it, especially as regards the 19th and 20th centuries, becomes both a starting point for an evaluation of this history and posing questions about the future. Along with the ferociously debated, present-day reconstruction and its museum function, it also seems to be a psychogram of diverse stages of the condition of German spirit.

The author argues that the significance of the year 1989 for Polish art was not determined by political changes, but by the rise of postmodernism. Until that moment, the term “modernism” usually referred in academic art history to Polish art at the turn of the 20th century. The concept of postmodernism brought to the Polish language a new meaning of modernism as simply modern art, and more precisely, as modern art defined by Clement Greenberg. That change made it necessary to draw a new map of concepts referring to modern Polish art, most often defined before by the concept of the avant-garde. In Mieczysław Porębski’s essay “Two Programs” [Dwa programy] (1949), and then, since the late 1960s, in Andrzej Turowski’s publications, the concept of the avant-garde was acknowledged as basic for understanding twentieth-century Polish art. The significance of the concept of the avant-garde in reference to the art of the past century in Poland changed after the publication of Piotr Piotrowski’s book of 1999, Meanings of Modernism [Znaczenia modernizmu]. Piotrowski challenged in it the key…

The article presents the theory of naïve art of the Croatian art historian Grgo Gamulin (1910–1997), which he developed in a number of texts written from early 1960s. In his theory, Gamulin tried to explain the phenomenon of naïve art on the basis of the modernist paradigm by applying the type of argumentation that is characteristic for the discourse of high-modernity. Gamulin’s postulates on the naïve can be summarised with a few basic lines of speculation. First of all, Gamulin claims that the phenomenon of the naïve was epistemologically possible only in the context of modernism, and that it should therefore be considered an equally valuable movement of contemporary art. However, in order to defend its authenticity, he began adhering to the ab ovo theory, the notion that naïve art does not arise as a cumulative result of the historical development of art, but that it ontologically precedes that development. The naïve artist, according to Gamulin, always starts from the beginning, independent of events in the art world, and immune to influences. A naïve artist is therefore…

The present essay includes the author’s memories of his university studies and the intellectual formation that he received as a student of art history at the University of Poznań in 1949-1954. His first professor who opened to him the door to art history and exerted on him a strong intellectual influence, was Szczęsny Dettloff, a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich and Max Dvořák in Vienna. Dettloff taught his students that the foundation of studying art in history is the study of the form of an individual artwork He believed that without a proper analysis of form it is impossible to construct appropriate series of the works of art and specify their position in the culture of the times of their origin. Similar sensitivity to form and the understanding of its significance for the art historian’s work were represented by two other professors important for the author, both educated by Dettloff already before World War II: Gwido Chmarzyński and Zdzisław Kępiński. When in 1957–1968 the author was a postgraduate student in the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale at…

The paper is a monograph of the churches founded by the Doliwita Rozdrażewski family, which make a significant percent of the total number of churches built in the region of Wielkopolska at the turn of the 17thcentury. Those churches, constructed under the supervision of Hieronim, Archbishop of Włocławek, and the Poznań Chamberlain Jan, have not been analyzed by scholars, and some of them have not been even mentioned in scholarly publications. The analysis presented in the paper allows one to consider the churches founded by the Rozdrażewski family in the context of the architecture of the region, Poland, and the neighboring countries. The features of the period, as well as a religious controversy among the family members, made it possible to approach a number of problems connected to contemporary artistic changes, such as the so-called “gothic style around 1600,” relations between Protestant and Roman Catholic architecture, and claims about the purposeful “archaism” of the architecture of the period, emulating the Romanesque or the Gothic style. Responding to the research…

A standard belief as regards the conservation of architectural monuments in the 19thcentury is that the very idea of conservation was commonly accepted, while the monuments of the past were used to promote national identity. On the other hand, photography is also commonly considered a technology that was naturally predisposed to popularize those monuments and/or appropriate them as symbols. For those reasons, the photogrammetric documentation of some buildings from the region of Poznań, made by Albrecht Meydenbauer commissioned to do it by the Prussian government, could be classified as combination of conservation and nationalism, “typical” of the late 19thcentury. However, the author proposes another interpretation and claims that such events were not necessarily “realizations” of “widespread” ideas of identity building. Referring to the generative model of identity building developed by Friedrik Barth, she analyzes how specific situations and meanings were gradually generated through the interaction of actors who attempted to reach their goals and values by available means. The…

The paper addresses a problem which traditional art history has thus far ignored, i.e. the examination of items listed in inventories of property. Art historians usually approach concrete works of art to textualize them, while they are helpless confronting items “hidden” behind a text. In the context of the “materiality turn,” inventories reveal their paradoxical character since they include “personal” information about individual objects. If one assumes that the inventory is an instrument used to examine the objects listed in it, one must also realize a basic paradox of approaching them via their purely textual representation. A growing interest of art historians in publishing historical sources, in particular inventories, should result in more reflection on the role assigned to texts and things by historiography. To answer the question how items listed in inventories are available to their readers, the author has made references to cognitive linguistics and epistemology, critiques of historical narrativism, and poststructuralism. Such a comprehensive frame of reference made it…