Workshop // Joanna Smalcerz: Local Aggression: Art Spoliation of Bavaria in the Late Nineteenth Century
Termindetails
Wann
von 12:00 bis 13:00
Wo
Fellows and staff members of the ZI as well as visiting scientists report on ongoing work. The open format of the workshop facilitates intensive discussion.
The goal of the project is to bring attention to the historical situation in Bavaria from the 1860s to the 1910s, when the great demand and international competition of private collectors and public museums, such as the Kensington Museum, for the late Gothic wood sculpture stemming from the region’s churches and convents, along with the creation of the national collections of German art in Berlin led to successful acquisition campaigns that spoliated the region of extensive parts of its artistic patrimony. Of interest are the responses to these losses in Bavaria: from the responses of the affected communities, like the clergy and the parishes, which in most cases were custodians of the statues and altarpieces in international demand, through the reactions of local art historians and intellectuals, to the adoption of new collecting policies by the local museums, like the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, which worked to safeguard the local artistic patrimony.
The objectives are thus threefold: the research of the popular reception in Bavaria of the outflow of artworks will allow for an analysis of the balance of the economic benefit for a source area and the damage to its artistic and social ecosystem; the research of the response of the local intellectuals will expose the role of the art historical discourse in the process of formation and negotiation of the Bavarian identity, while the research of the politics of the Bavarian museums will allow for the exploration of the tensions between Bavaria and the central museums in Berlin after the Einigung in 1871. At the heart of the project is the analysis of the cultural aggression provoked by the nineteenth-century institutionalization of art history and its entanglement with the identity-building politics, aggressive musealization and predatory art market practices.
[Caption: Tillman Riemenschneider, Saint George Fighting the Dragon, around 1490/95, marked as public domain, Details Wikimedia Commons]