Art Research Articles

Art in Tights: Tableaux Vivants as Commercial Entertainment in Sweden and Finland, 1840–1860

In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the artis...
2 years ago

Temple, Huygens and ‘sharawadgi’: tempering the passions to achieve tranquillity

Sir William Temple (1628–1699), the eminent English ambassador to the Dutch Republic and a widely read essayist,1 famously used the term ‘sharawadgi’ (beauty without an apparent order)2 to describe the layout of Chinese gardens in his essay ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’:Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly, in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformit...
2 years ago

Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s Disasters of War

Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, whichhe preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, and ‘demonstrations’, thus blurring the boundary between art and life while affiliating artistic p...
2 years ago

Man in the Middle: Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin at the Salon of 1833 and the Problem of the Juste Milieu

In a corner of room 60 on the second floor of the Louvre’s Sully Wing, Ingres’s Portrait of Louis-Franc¸ois Bertin hangs adjacent to his study for Angelica saved by Ruggiero (1819) (Fig. 1).1 In the absence of Ruggiero, Angelica seems to look over her right shoulder, not at the hippogriff-riding knight who despatches a sea monster prior to rescuing her, but at a plump male figure resolutely o...
2 years ago

Virtual connectedness in times of crisis: Chinese online art exhibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic

When Chinese museums had to close their doors due to the outbreak of COVID-19, several online art exhibitions were created that were able to still create a sense of connectedness among their audience members during the pandemic. This article details three online exhibitions – by Chronus Art Center, by M WOODS, and by independent curator Yu Minhong – and explores how they communicate ‘being-...
2 years ago

IMAGES FOR INSTRUCTION: A MULTILINGUAL ILLUSTRATED DICTIONARY IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SULTANATE INDIA

When I began studying the Miftāḥ al-Fużalāʾ (Key of the Learned), Robert Skelton, the doyen of the art of the book in India, challenged me to imagine the many other manuscripts that would have been available to the artists who made this book. Attributed to the central Indian sultanate of Malwa, the Miftāḥ is the only known illustrated Persian dictionary (farhang) in the Islamicate manuscr...
2 years ago

CAMERA, CANVAS, AND QIBLA: LATE OTTOMAN MOBILITIES AND THE FATIH MOSQUE PAINTING

As with many cultures around the globe, in the nineteenth century the Ottoman empire witnessed a fluidity of media, styles, objects, technologies, and themes in visual culture. Sultans’ portraits migrated across canvases, ivory, manuscripts, photographs, prints, and porcelain; curtain motifs featured in tents, wall paintings, and architectural decorations; new and “neo” architectural styles ...
2 years ago

Feeling Fit for Function: Haptic Touch and Aesthetic Experience

Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which ...
2 years ago

Dreaming A Public Poem

The Public Poem is a form I invented in 1967 and have performed in many European cities over the decades. For the last six years in Spain, I had been making “concrete” poems, seeing the sheet of paper as a two-dimensional surface which the typewriter could occupy spatially, then placing Letraset letters on superimposed plexiglass sheets that provide a third dimension of depth. One day, looking...
2 years ago

John Møller’s ‘Photographic Memory’ – Professional Photography of Greenlandic Inuit and Danish Administrators at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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2 years ago

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