Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Reassessing National Romanticism
Session Convenors:
Charlotte Ashby, Royal College of Art, charlotte.ashby@rca.ac.uk
Sabine Wieber, Roehampton University, S.Wieber@roehampton.ac.uk
‘Until this powerful movement is recognized and demystified, we will not fully understand the intellectual and cultural climate of turn-of-the-century Europe.’
Michelle Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s (Berkley and Los Angeles: 1998), 2-3.
National Romanticism is a term that has been used most widely to label the ‘national awakening’ movements of Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. It has been useful in integrating these regions into the canon of Western art history, but its continued currency can now be seen to limit the scope of understanding of the complexities of this period.
This session intends to provide an international platform for a critical re-assessment of National Romanticism that challenges some of the art historical assumptions and expectations called up by this term. At the turn of the last century, artists and designers crossed boundaries between disciplines and between social, political and aesthetic concerns, making it difficult to maintain ideological and formal categories and posing a real challenge to the historian of this period. And yet, the works and objects understood as National Romantic and their relationship to the wider culture of the period offer an intriguing challenge to the lingering influence of a Modernist emphasis on a linear, progressive reading of history.
Speakers:
Charlotte Ashby (Birkbeck, University of London)
National Romanticism and European Modernisms: Reconciling Different Narratives of Progress
Robyne Calvert-Miles (University of Glasgow)
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh: National Romantics?
Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia)
Bavarianism
Thor Mednick (Indiana University)
Skagen: Art and National Romanticism in Nineteenth-Century Denmark
Janis Krastins (Riga Technical University)
Latvian National Romanticism
Marta Filipova (Newcastle University)
The Belated Romanticism of Alfons Mucha
Michelle Facos (Indiana University)
Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination
Sabine Wieber (University of Glasgow)
Roundtable discussion: Rethinking National Romanticism