History and Theory of Art
In tracing the complex circulation of Bauhaus principles and approaches to design in Australia throughout the 1940s and 1950s, this dissertation establishes the various exchanges between the Australian artists Dahl and Geoffrey Collings and Alistair Morrison, the British artist Richard Haughton James, and Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes in London during the period from 1935 to 1937.
Through various case studies, visual analysis, and by drawing on the critique of unidirectional notions of agency and influence, I demonstrate how certain practices of collaboration and experimentation used at the Bauhaus were applied and advocated by the Collingses, Morrison, and James in Australia throughout their wide-ranging artistic practices, which included photography, film, design, and painting. Furthermore, I demonstrate how this group of designers promoted the Bauhaus and its associated collaborative and experimental principles in their lectures, writings, and exhibitions and through their involvement in professional art and design organizations. I argue that this group of designers all subsequently played crucial roles in introducing Australia to the Bauhaus and improving art and design standards in Sydney and Melbourne during the post-war period, enriching Australia’s art and culture for decades.
The Hamburg native Hein Semke (1899-1995) travelled to Portugal for the first time in 1929. Inspired by his stay, he decided to study arts. In 1932, he returned to Lisbon, where he started his career as an artist and developed into a solid parameter in the country’s art scene: as Expressionist sculptor and ceramic artist, he participated in almost all important art exhibitions until 1975.
Concurrently with Semke’s relocation, major changes in both countries were taking place and, in each case, the situation of Modern Art was precarious. In Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) established the corporatist authoritarian right-wing regime of Estado Novo. Artists revolted after years of suffering from declining sales figures due to the severe financial crisis affecting the country. In Germany, Adolf Hitler's (1889-945) Nazi Party gained power, and, since 1933, the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste restricted artistic freedom by implementing an ideological selection. Despite this situation, Semke was included into a major project: the design of a Commemorative Courtyard at the newly built German Protestant Church in Lisbon. When the influence of the recently elected German authorities reached out for the German community of Portugal, Semke lost the support of his patrons and found his work in a bitter controversy, resulting in the removal of one of his sculptures.
In my Ph.D. thesis, I examine the life and career of the Hein Semke, with a main focus on the years between 1899 and 1960. The difficulties the artist had to face in the early years of Estado Novo are evaluated in detail, as well as the legal situation for foreigners in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, the in-depth analysis of the controversy around Semke’s artistic work for the German Protestant Church in Lisbon, the artist’s selfconcept and his self-created image stand in the center of attention of this examination and offer a multi-layered discussion reflecting the zeitgeist of the era.
From the beginning of his artistic career, American artist Jasper Johns (b. 1930) has used various repetitive means in his paintings. Their significance in his work has not been sufficiently discussed; hence this thesis is an exploration of the role and the nature of repetition in Johns’s paintings, which is essential to better understand his artistic production.
Following a thorough review of his paintings, it is possible to broadly classify his use of repetition into three types: repeating images and gestures, using the logic of printing, and quoting and returning to past artists. I examine each of these in relation to three major art theory elements: abstraction, autonomy, and originality. When Johns repeats images and gestures, he also reconsiders abstraction in painting; using the logic of printing enables him to follow the logic of another medium and to challenge the autonomy of painting; by quoting other artists, Johns is reexamining originality in painting. These types of repetition are distinct in their features but complementary in their mission to expand the boundaries of painting. The proposed classification system enables a better understanding of the role and the nature of repetition in the specific case of Johns’s paintings, and it enriches our understanding of the use of repetition and its perception in art in general.
The Representation of American Visual Art in the USSR during the Cold War (1950s to the late 1960s)
(2016)
During the first two decades of the Cold War, Soviet institutions hosted dozens of exhibitions of American art. These exhibitions introduced works of a variety of styles, from figurative to abstract, to millions of Soviet citizens. Based on unique original materials from American and Russian archives, my thesis examines this extensive showcasing of American art. In my thesis, I argue that American visual art in the Soviet Union was subject to two distinct approaches to representation. The first approach was epitomized by Soviet-organized exhibitions of American leftist figurative artists such as Rockwell Kent. When promoting Kent, hardly a leading artist in the postwar United States, Soviet propaganda maintained that Kent’s art was underappreciated in America because of the artist’s sympathies for socialism and adherence to figurativeness. Soviet propaganda further argued that American bourgeois society preferred abstract art and was unable to appreciate genuine realist art. Ultimately, by representing Kent as a marginalized artist suffering under capitalism, the Soviet Union accused America's capitalist society of suppressing Kent—a genuine and genius artist from the Soviet point of view. As a result, Soviet discussions of Kent became intertwined with criticism of the United States and served as anti-American propaganda. The intersection of the Soviet discourse on American art with Soviet anti-Americanism was not limited to the case of Kent but was also relevant to other figurative and abstract artists, among them Anton Refregier, Emmy Lou Packard, Jackson Pollock and many others, whom I examine in my thesis.
The second approach was that of American institutions such as the United States Information Agency (USIA) which organized exhibitions showcasing contemporary American art, from figurative painting such as those by William Glackens to abstract expressionist painting such as by Willem de Kooning. (For the complete abstract, please see the thesis.)
Since the internet developed into a medium used for a worldwide retrieval of information and communication, it also became an important platform for the promotion and self-presentation of cultural institutions. The web presence of cultural institutions like museums means an additional visual experience for the customers. This additional visual experience differs profoundly from its on-site counterpart, as it is determined by the structure of hypermedia, which is multilayered and based on multimedia. Closely intertwined with new visual experiences online are new visual challenges for the institutions as the providers of the said experiences.
This thesis’ purpose has been to assemble new visual challenges for the online provision of collections of modern and contemporary art museums, specifically of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate (UK), and the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt a.M.). To gain insight about these new challenges, interviews have been conducted with persons in charge of the museums’ online collections. Furthermore, selected webpages of the online collections have been examined closely.
The results of the interview and webpage analysis are used to draw conclusions regarding the primary new visual challenges in this specific field of art presentation.
The present investigation traces the theoretical and productive interrelations between the Latin-American writers-artists Xul Solar (1887 – 1963), Vicente Huidobro (1893 - 1948) and Joaquín Torres-García (1874 -1949). This work demonstrates the existence of a Creative- Creationist aesthetic shared by the three authors based on a) the recuperation of the rational elements found in Pre-Colombian art, b) a common theory of inter-artistic translatability, c) the fusion of the processes of creation and construction and d) a transformation of the concept of writing derived from interartistic exploration in the fields of painting and poetry.
By exploring elements that have been left unattended in previous works concerned with the Latin-American Avant-Garde, this investigation proposes an alternative to the mapping of the continent as divided in open and closed regions, offering a less antagonistic panorama of the cultural and artistic interchanges that took place in the region during the first half of the twentieth century. The programs of social and spiritual transformation, as well as the structured and anti-colonialist recuperation of Mesoamerican and South-American cosmology found in the work of these authors, provide a renewed and more comprehensive image of the formal, programmatic and spiritual direction taken by Latin-American Avant-Garde.
Furthermore, by a close comparative reading of key works which had not been interpreted with the adequate tools of analysis until now, such as San Signos and Grafias from Xul Solar, the Poèmes Peints of Vicente Huidobro and the rustic illustrated books of Torres- García and his constructive ink drawings, it will be demonstrated that the Creative-Constructive aesthetic is a revaluation of articulated and visual languages, embracing new systems of writing which anticipate conceptualism and post-structural theory.
This study has developed on the premise that neuroscience has a significant impact on contemporary art, and on the observation that, from the dialogue with neuroscience, a new artistic tendency has been emerging. The aim of this research was therefore to investigate the roots, the emergence, and development of what I generically call neuro art. The main objective of the research was to initiate the history of neuro art.
This history of neuro art investigates, for the first time, the relationship between neuroscience and contemporary practice of the visual arts by identifying and examining those artworks that rely on knowledge of the brain and the nervous system. The study begins with a broad analysis of the role neuroscience plays in contemporary culture. The analysis situates neuro art within the larger context of cultural interactions with neuroscience, defines neuro art, and frames the history of neuro art in relation with two other disciplines: neuroaesthetics and neuroarthistory.
The core of the research addresses in detail the history of art objects about the brain and the nervous system. Setting the scene, the thesis first describes the earlier manifestations of neuro art and identifies its conceptual and historical roots. It further addresses the exhibitions of neuro art and it evaluates their role in the overall history of this phenomenon. The last, and most consistent part of this research is a detailed thematic analysis of the actual works of neuro art.
The thesis concludes by providing explicit answers to the questions that have guided this research, and by confronting its initial assumptions with actual findings about neuro art.
Despite Leonid Brezhnev's efforts to undo the consequences of his predecessor's more tolerant cultural policies, many trends in art, literature, social and political thought that had begun during Nikita Khrushchev's 'Thaw' continued into Brezhnev's 'Stagnation.' And not only did they, according to Stephen Lowell and Rosalind Marsh, continue, but they intensified, following the bifurcation of the Soviet cultural realm into official and unofficial spheres. Despite what the dichotomy of official/unofficial suggests, the two realms were not completely separate from each other. The official artists, who were both familiar with and sympathetic towards the ideas, themes and forms explored in the unofficial realm of Soviet culture, could not ignore these if they wanted their work to possess some cultural relevance. Working under the conditions of censorship, however, they could not express their creative ideas as openly as the unofficial artists; therefore, they had to develop strategies and devices that would allow them to preserve their personal integrity and artistic reputation and, at the same time, avoid confrontation with the Soviet censorship apparatus. This project is about such strategies and devices, the people who resorted to using them and, consequently, the people whose job it was to not be fooled by them. In the first three chapters I explore the historical context within which anti-censorship practices developed; the fourth chapter deals with the notion of subversion and the reasons for theorizing anti-censorship practices as subversive. In the final chapter, using a method of Aesopian analysis developed from Lev Loseff's model of Aesopian language, I analyze Andrei Khrzhanovsky's trilogy about the famous Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and argue that the films, which appear to be biographical essays, are as much about life and work of Pushkin as they are about the conflict between the creative intelligentsia and the Brezhnev's regime.
