vrijdag 15 maart 2024

Interuniversitaire en intermuseale studiedag XIX

Werkgroep XIX
KMSKB, zalen STU, ingang Museumplein (voormalig Paleis voor de Nationale Nijverheid)
Vrijdag 12 april 2024
Inschrijvingsdeadline: 3 april 2024








Op vrijdag 12 april 2024 vindt de jaarlijkse studiedag van de Werkgroep XIX plaats in Brussel. We ontvangen u graag vanaf 9u45 in de KMSKB (zalen STU, ingang Museumplein (voormalig Paleis voor de Nationale Nijverheid)). Het programma omvat drie interessante lezingen in de voormiddag, een gezamenlijke lunch en een geleid bezoek aan de KBR in de namiddag.

Bovenstaande vindt u het volledige programma en de praktische modaliteiten voor de inschrijving.

Om de kosten van de organisatie te dekken zijn wij verplicht een bijdrage van €35 per persoon aan te rekenen. Locatie, middagmaal e.d.m. zijn daarin inbegrepen. De rekeninggegevens voor betaling per overschrijving zijn vermeld in het programma.

Alle geïnteresseerden zijn van harte welkom. Inschrijvingen lopen tot en met woensdag 3 april.

dinsdag 20 februari 2024

CFP: Dutch Bargains and Belgian Sales: Making a Market for Art from the Low Countries in the Americas, c. 1840-1920

Dutch Bargains and Belgian Sales: Making a Market for Art from the Low Countries in the Americas, c. 1840-1920

The Hague, RKD - Netherlands Institute for Art History, 21 June 2024




In a letter written in March 1853, the Belgian art dealer Ferdinand De Braekeleer jr. asked support from the Belgian government for his recently established art gallery in New York, which specialised in the import of contemporary Belgian and Dutch art in the US: ‘The taste for arts,’ he wrote ‘which was far removed from what it is now only a couple of years ago, is increasingly showing itself; the American travels more and more often to Europe and begins to form a taste for collecting.’ De Braekeleer’s words were almost literally echoed in a notice devoted to his gallery published two years later in the Cincinatti Gazette: ‘We have but to look back a few years, to recall the period, when a valuable painting from the hands of a European artist was esteemed in New York, a great rarity. […] But now, with that rapidity of progress characteristic of Americans, New York has become an important mart for works of the most elevated order, and of the highest artistic genius in Europe.’ 

The late 1840s and early 1850s were, indeed, a most promising time for art dealers and other agents from Europe: they heralded in an age of mass-importation of European art that brought tens of thousands of work art from the so-called old world to the new one and had a lasting impact on collections in America, both public and private. Research on the Transatlantic art trade, however, has been limited in scope: most scholars have concentrated their efforts on a small number of star collections, generally focussing on the trade in famous Old Master and contemporary French art (both academic and avant-garde). The import of contemporary art from the Low Countries – Belgium and the Netherlands – has received very little attention. 

Yet it is clear from articles and notices in newspapers and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic that dealers and artists from the Low Countries quickly came to see America as the Eldorado of the rapidly internationalising art world and oriented their endeavours accordingly. Dutch and Belgian dealers and art promotors built new markets for their art and shipped hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of works to the US, Canada and Latin America; they recommended the Dutch and Belgian schools to collectors and museum officials, organized exhibitions and other temporary displays, or guided American collectors on their voyages through the Low Countries. Dutch and Belgian artists, in the meantime, also avidly eyed the American market: they networked with collectors, adapted their work to local taste, and sometimes even engaged in the mass-production of repetitive works all destined for export across the ocean. 

For this study day we would like to bring together scholars engaged in research on the art trade between the Low Countries and the Americas between ca. 1840 and 1920, the various actors involved (including artists, dealers, patrons, museum professionals, …), and the diverse sets of strategies and practices they employed in the Transatlantic promotion of contemporary Dutch and Belgian art. Please send proposals (max. 200 words) for an (informal) 20-minute paper (in Dutch, English or French; preferably delivered in person; if not digitally) to jandirk.baetens@ru.nl, devisser@rkd.nl and/or ulrike.muller@uantwerpen.be by 7 April 2024 at the latest. The convenors hope to publish (a selection of) the research presented in a special issue of a scholarly journal devoted to this topic. 

Jan Dirk Baetens (Radboud University), Evelien de Visser (RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History) and Ulrike Müller (University of Antwerp – Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium)

maandag 19 februari 2024

CONF (save the date): Interuniversitaire en intermuseale studiedag XIX

Interuniversitaire en intermuseale studiedag XIX

Werkgroep XIX

KMSKB - KBR - Kunstberg, 1000 Brussel 

Vrijdag 12 april 2024


(meer info over het dagprogramma volgt)

maandag 29 januari 2024

CFP: ESNA Conference 2024 Living apart together? The troubled and treasured relationship between nature and human beings in art 1789-1914

ESNA Conference 2024: Living apart together? The troubled and treasured relationship between nature and human beings in art 1789-1914 

Date: 23-24 May 2024 
Location: Kröller Müller Museum Otterlo
CFP deadline: 1 February 2024


Théodore Rousseau, Moord op de onschuldigen 1847, De Mesdag Collectie, Den Haag


With the growing realisation that nature and the earth’s climate are at risk of being destroyed, this conference aims to centralize the interconnectedness between nature and human beings, by analysing the depiction of their relationship in Western-European art, including the effects of colonialism, during the long nineteenth century.

Within art, the natural world was long seen as a repository of motifs and forms from which artists borrowed to fashion their representations of social reality. Landscapes, for example, have traditionally been interpreted as a fixed image, viewed from a certain distance or as a vessel for human emotions, in other words: nature for human’s sake. Centuries of anthropocentric thinking, based on influential sources such as Aristotle’s writings and the Bible, have ingrained notions that human beings have dominion over the world and its inhabitants and this was reflected in the depiction of nature in art. In addition, with the discovery of geological time in the late eighteenth century, came the realisation that the earth was eons older, and that human civilisation only occupied a fraction of a great terrestrial span. These concepts created a seemingly irreconcilable divide between humans and nature.

However, even in the long nineteenth century, such notions were questioned. Around 1800 Alexander von Humboldt had already indicated the interdependence between nature and mankind. In 1847 Théodore Rousseau painted a landscape with felled oak trees, while men are in the process of cutting down others. Rousseau later stated that he ‘wanted to arouse remorse on the part of people who unthinkingly chop down trees’. In the art dealer Boussod & Valadon’s stock books the painting was listed under the title La mort des innocents. In that same year Rousseau’s good friend the art critic Théophile Thoré attacked the French government for its mismanagement of the forest lands near Barbizon. Their actions helped lead to the Western world’s first state-established land preserves in 1853.

Some ten years later Charles Darwin corroborated Von Humboldt’s thesis that all life is essentially interconnected and dependent upon each other in his Origin of Species. Moreover, with the advent of industrialisation and the enormous growth of the global population – the so-called Anthropocene – human beings actions gained such power that the world’s ecosystem is in danger of being annihilated. This realisation increasingly questioned man’s dominant position in epistemological and ontological paradigms, in exchange for more an integrated approach which puts co-dependency of life first.

This conference centralizes the depiction of the troubled relationship between nature and humans, both around the corner as well as overseas, including the fascination for non-indigenous flora and fauna. It aims to answer questions such as: Did changing opinions on nature have effect on nineteenth-century art?  Did nineteenth-century art have effect on the changing opinions on nature? How was the relationship between nature and human beings depicted? Which role did the advent of working en plein air play in artists’ bond with nature? Which role did ecology play in the depiction of nature? How did artists and critics manage to evoke their awareness of the changing attitudes towards nature in their work? Which role did colonialism play in artists’ perception of nature?

Please send your abstract (max. 200 words) and biography (150 words) by February 1, 2024 to esnaonline@hotmail.com. The scientific committee will answer all applicants by February 19, 2024.

Organising committee:
Mayken Jonkman (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
Sara Tas (Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam)

Scientific committee:
Renske Cohen Tervaert (Kröller Müller Museum)
Eveline Deneer (University of Utrecht)
Rachel Esner (ESNA, University of Amsterdam)
Julia Kantelberg (Rijksmuseum Amsterdam)
Alice Lemaire (Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle, Paris)
Colin Sterling (University of Amsterdam)



woensdag 24 januari 2024

LECT: Lezingenprogramma Rose, Rose, Rose à mes yeux. James Ensor en het stilleven in België 1830-1930

Zondag 21 januari, 18 februari, 3 maart en 24 maart 2024, om 11:00 
Mu.ZEE 
Romestraat 11 
8400 Oostende 


James Ensor, De intrede van Christus te Brussel, met gouache gehoogde ets op papier,
248 x 355 mm, Mu.ZEE, collectie stad Oostende


 

In het kader van de tentoonstelling Rose, Rose, Rose à mes yeux. James Ensor en het stilleven in België 1830-1930 (Mu.ZEE, Oostende, 16 december 2023-14 april 2024), de openingstentoonstelling van het Ensorjaar 2024, organiseert Mu.ZEE een lezingencyclus rond James Ensor en het stilleven. Deze drie lezingen en één boekvoorstelling gaan door in Mu.ZEE op de volgende zondagen: 

 

Zondag 21 januari 2024, 11:00 

De Intrede van Ensor in Brussel 

Lezing door prof. dr. em. Bart Verschaffel 

 

Zondag 18 februari 2024, 11:00 

Boekvoorstelling: 

Henri Storck en de Oostendse schilders: Ensor, Spilliaert en Permeke, Snoeck, 2024. 

Auteur: Patrick Vanslambrouck 

 

Zondag 3 maart 2024, 11:00 

Ensor's souvenirs: objects and their meanings in the artist's late still-lifes (lezing in het Engels) 

Lezing door dr. Apolline Malevez (UGent) 


Zondag 24 maart 2024, 11:00 
Kleine schilderachtige hoekjes’: wat interieurschilderijen en stillevens ons (niet) vertellen over stijlcreatie in de Belgische burgerlijke woning (eind 19de-begin 20ste eeuw). 
Lezing door drs. Bart Nuytinck (UGent-VUB) 

 

Inschrijving is verplicht en kost € 15 (bezoek aan de tentoonstelling inbegrepen, geen korting mogelijk). De boekvoorstelling is gratis. Voor meer info en inschrijving, zie de Mu.ZEE website: 

Bart Verschaffel 

Boekvoorstelling 

Apolline Malevez 

Bart Nuytinck