Abstract: Approaches and challenges to a global art history Review of: Circulations in the Global History of Art, edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Studies in Art Historiography, Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 247pp., 00 col. plates, 16 b. & w. illus., 4 b. & w. tables, 1 chart, 8 maps, $109.95, ISBN 978-1-47245456-0 hdbk, ISBN 978-1-4724-5737-0 ebk-PDF, ISBN 978-1-4724-5738-7 ebkePUBFor those interested in global art history, eager to expand their methodological approaches and to engage in a lively exchange of ideas Circulations in the Global History of Art is a must read. Edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Beatrice Joyeux-Prunel, the volume consists of ten chapters, a useful introduction and an afterward that is both engaged in the arguments and skeptical of the basic premise. As the editors write in their introduction, 'Our ambition is to tackle the difficult subject of interculturalization or metissage in a satisfactory, horizontal way that does not try to assign artistic superiority to any agents of the encounter, either the center or the periphery'.1 They focus on cultural relations that both transform and integrate 'encounters and confrontations'.They observe Circulations has origins more in historical methodology than in the nineteenth-century formations of Art History in geographically bounded cultures of Europe, particularly among German-speaking scholars. Two exceptions were the work of Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) and especially his pupil Aby Warburg (1866-1929), whose impact on scholarship of the last decade is noteworthy.2 Underlying much of the discussion in these essays, however are the nineteenthcentury 'antinationalistic intellectual milieus' and particularly the ideas of the Annales School. These twentieth-century French historians focused on social, economic and eventually cultural history and their ideas found expression in the periodical Annales d'histoire economique et sociale founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956).The editors also note that methodology has been impacted by cultural and political changes at the end of the twentieth century including civil rights, gender issues, and postcolonial studies. More recently, 'statistical, digital, and cartographic tools to retrace precisely circulations of artworks, artists, and important mediators of artistic internationalization' have inspired scholars such as those who have created ARTL@s, and indeed, there is a close connection between this Paris-based group and both the editors and many authors represented here.3 The challenges are enormous to simultaneously use a number of different methodological approaches including 'cultural transfer, comparison, iconology, anthropology, semiotics, sociology'. The goal of the editors has been to encourage discussion and exchange of ideas in order to 'allow us to rethink the usual frames of the (art) historical narrative.. ..not to universalize such terms as the eye or the image, but rather to examine how in different times and places the same object or idea could be seen differently, and to realize the extent to which the issue of cultural differentiation and variation of the gaze mattered to artists, their patrons, and audiences'.4Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins chapter one with reflections on the need for more global art history sought by scholars in the last decade and then turns to a series of theoretical objections raised by broad trends of scholarship in the humanities.5 He then addresses some of the central concerns raised by scholars attempting to move beyond what is often described as the Eurocentrism of art historical writing and to some of their critics.His solution underlying much of this volume is to use a 'geohistory of art' as a tool that also 'must be aligned with economic and commodity theories that help explain the distribution and circulation of objects'. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
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