Calls to globalize 19th-century art history tend to
articulate notions of alterity, heterochronia and the need for greater
inclusivity against the foil of a hegemonic European modernism.
Yet such projects all too often treat that modernism as a monolithic and
unified phenomenon. How tenable is this notion (and its unchallenged
dominance) once we shed our French-avantgarde blinders, rethink the Academy not
just as an obstacle to, but a forum of innovation, and apply the insights and
lessons of global art history to the study of European art itself? Hardly
tenable at all. For one, the power and allure of Paris as an epicenter of
19th-century culture has tended, with the exception of a thriving exploration
of the British Empire, to cast great swathes of European artistic activity into
neglect. At the same time, where global art history readily recognizes the
power of religion, 19th-century European art history has been resistant to the
revisionist pressures from other fields in the humanities to acknowledge the
persistence of religion in Western culture, thus instinctively affirming an
Enlightenment narrative in which western modernity is exhaustively defined by
the struggle and eventual triumph of secularism over religion and superstition.
Inspired by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s dictum to provincialize Europe, this paper
explores what happens if we “glocalize” its 19th-century art, understand
European peripheries and borderlands through the lens of a globalized art
history, and develop an inclusive system of “multiple modernities” and
“heterochronous chronologies,” which—in turn—might allow us to theorize several
layers of geographical, political, aesthetic, and spiritual distance and
distancing. Proposing to break down the binary of thinking in or outside of
the box, this talk asks how the lessons of such a revisionist narrative of
19th-century art could be applied to other eras and arenas as well, and the
talk explores to this end interpretative approaches to art produced in and for
the Third Reich (by both artists seeking accommodation with the Nazi regime and
artists exhibited in the so-called Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937).
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