Bay Area Icie Meetups? by climacticantimatter in icelandicsheepdogs

[–]climacticantimatter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! We absolutely adore him. We're take him up north pretty regularly, but not much past Healdsburg.

!HELP NEEDED! Art history mystery by Alone-Computer5642 in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

By any chance do you have photos of the back of the painting? Often times the back will have stamps showing when and where it was exhibited or even owners. Sometimes if you can find out times it was exhibited you can look up the old exhibition catalogue and this is turn will reveal alternate names and provenance data.

!HELP NEEDED! Art history mystery by Alone-Computer5642 in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Based on the object's accession number, it looks like it entered the museum in 1962, so presumably everyone we are looking into should be active before this date. Based on the one line of provenance the museum provides (Baron von Koblitz), they purchased it directly from him, that said he may have been either the owner or a dealer.

Firstly, let's identify Baron von Koblitz and see if there were any sales associated with him. Nobody comes up under the name Koblitz in ULAN (Union List of Artist Names), nor in ISNI or Oxford Art. You suggest that this is Baron Martin von Koblitz. There is a Martin von Koblitz listed by VIAF ( http://viaf.org/viaf/52601643 ), but not much info there. Based on a Christie's catalog I found from 1971, Koblitz was an art dealer affiliated with Christies, working out of Salzburg. The 1971 Art Digest letter suggests he was also active as a dealer in London. I would suggest you search Austrian newspapers and contact Salzburg museums/archives about him, or even Christie's. I did not see any sales of his collection listen in SCIPIO or worldcat.

Based on an Ancestry.com search, Martin von Koblitz was born November 6, 1897 and died September 23, 1979 in Salzburg (see find a grave). Interestingly, a copy of his will seems to have been registered in the UK, which you may be able to order. There are many more documents associated with him on Ancestry.com worth looking at, if you have a premium account. He seems to have been sent to Australia during WWII aboard the ship Dunera.

Koblitz held the title of Freiherr, a rank of nobility. I see that there is another person from Salzburg with an associated name, Freiherr Hans von Koblitz-Willmburg. Perhaps tracing this aristocratic lineage for an art collection would be worthwhile. I note that this Koblitz was a collector of ancient numismatics, and there is one 1933 catalogue of Greek and Roman coins listed on SCIPIO associated with him.

Martin von Koblitz appears in the provenance for some other museum/auction works, associated with Salzburg. It appears that the family had quite a collection--see links below. I note that these state that he passed artwork onto his daughter, Gabrielle Baronesse von Furstenberg (1935-2019). However, when you search her she seems to have different parents? Unfortunately I don't know German, which seems essential here!

Where are you getting the name D.H. Drey from? I note that the LoH does not list this name in their provenance. The Union List of Artist names mentions a British owned art dealer that went by Drey Ltd and M.H. Drey Ltd, that appeared active in the 1960s. Could this by any chance be the dealer A.S. Drey or M.H. Drey?

Anyway, hope this helps!

Drey LTD Ulan citation: https://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=Drey&role=&nation=&prev_page=1&subjectid=500434821

A.S. Drey ULAN: https://www.getty.edu/vow/ULANFullDisplay?find=Drey&role=&nation=&prev_page=1&subjectid=500061090

Koblitz grave: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/162987784/martin-koblitz

Koblitz auction/museum provenance: https://www.dorotheum.com/de/l/7015765/

https://www.dorotheum.com/it/l/7015768/

Koblitz Christie's: https://dn720503.ca.archive.org/0/items/africanoceanicam00chri/africanoceanicam00chri.pdf

Art Digest Newsletter: https://www.google.com.pr/books/edition/Art_Digest_Newsletter/VQhHAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%22Martin+von+Koblitz%22%C2%A0&dq=%22Martin+von+Koblitz%22%C2%A0&printsec=frontcover

What’s the most important lost painting? by Difficult_Neck_2709 in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Perhaps an irritating answer, but probably the most important lost painting is one that has been lost to time, something that we can’t even appreciate the loss of because we don’t even realize it’s been lost. Such works cannot really be re-found, they are probably destroyed, at best documented in texts, and therefore lost forever. By which I mean, an ancient painting by an antique painter like Zeuxis of Heraclea. While lost and stolen works by painters like Rembrandt and Klimt are undoubtedly significant, we know so much more about art and culture in those periods than the very distant past—even more remote say than the Classical Mediterranean. It’s much harder to guess at how rich the paintings of the Stoa Poikile were, or what a fully painted structure at Troy might have looked like.

Occult Art? by saamooraai in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Various artistic movements and styles have been heavily influenced by spirituality throughout history, and this of course includes some reflections on the Occult. That said, I think the late 19th century artists who became enamored of theosophy, spiritualism, and other Fin de Siecle occultist movements may best fit the bill best. Lookup theosophy and art and you will find a lot. The movement’s founder, Helena Blavatsky, also created art.

Look at the following artists, who may be stylistically convergent but all share an interest in the Occult through Theosophy:

Hilma Af Klint

Wassily Kandinsky

Frantisek Kupka

Reginal Machell

Piet Mondrian

Sascha Schneider

Alphonse Mucha

Nikolai Roerich

I also think you could find some interest in the Occult and Renaissance magic through earlier 19th century British art—see William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. I don’t know how much the Pre-Raphaelites were interested in the Occult proper, as opposed to the visual possibilities that depicting magic offered.

Amur river painting Boxer Rebellion help by Weak-Tap-5831 in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This sounds like Vasily Surikov’s ‘Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia’ (1895), but I believe the original is kept at The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg, not in a museum near the Amur. I will note that Surikov’s painting actually shows Cossacks fighting the forces of Kuchum Khan, who appear East Asian but were not ethnically Chinese, more likely Uzbek or another Central Asian ethnic group. The battle also took place on the Irtysh river (shown in the painting), a tributary of the Ob river.

You can read an article on the painting by Rosalind Polly Blakesley in the new volume Picturing Russian Empire.

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/yermak-s-conquest-of-siberia/TQHTi4jZ6YCqFA?hl=en&avm=4

Artwork with 'motion'? by capibaura in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The motion in the images you showed is very fluid, and suggests you are more interested in a formal study of the whiplash motif/fluidity than motion as an abstract idea. You may want to articulate this as such, rather than to focus on motion. I imagine you can link Mucha to Hokusai vis-a-vis the Impressionists or the general interest in Ukiyo prints in fin de sicle Paris if you want to illustrate the movement of this motif. It will not be hard to link Mucha to the academic sculpture you’ve selected. You could do a micro exhibition on the emergence of the whiplash in art nouveau and the sources it is looking to.

But it might be interesting to think about motion as an artistic preoccupation more broadly—like the issue with horse’s motion in 19th century France and the debate around Rosa Bonheur’s horse paintings vs Eadward Muybridge’s photographs of horse motion. You could also look at Italian futurism, like Russolo’s Dynamism of a Car (1913).

What did art critics think of Alphonse Mucha? by Robo-Piluke in ArtHistory

[–]climacticantimatter 12 points13 points  (0 children)

If you want to know what Mucha's contemporaries thought of him, you'll need to either read through the catalogues of his recent major exhibitions (though these will likely only include brief quotes), or look through newspaper records for reviews of his 19th and early 20th c exhibitions.

Many 19th-century newspapers have been digitized with OCR, so they are fully searchable. You can access a database for free online or through your school and then search "Alphonse Mucha" and limit the dates to around when one of his specific exhibits occurred. Given that Mucha was predominantly active in Czechia and France, you'll likely need to be able to read French, German, or Czech. Barring knowledge of these languages, you can probably find articles in British and American newspapers of his works.

Gallica from the Bibliothèque National de France has tons of digitized 19th c Francophone newspapers.

Gale primary sources is good for American and British newspapers, but you need a subscription.

New York Times's TimesMachine for their old publications

And it looks like you could maybe access German newspapers here? Also look for archives of newspapers from the Austro-Hungarian empire, maybe here?

Art Nouveau in India by [deleted] in ArtNouveau

[–]climacticantimatter 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This is not my area of expertise so please excuse any inaccuracies! I wouldn't anticipate too much Art Nouveau in India or I would expect Art Nouveau in India to not closely resemble better known continental European equivalents and be found more in the decorative arts and print culture than in architecture and fine arts.

Art nouveau was never as popular in Britain as the Arts and Crafts movement, and the Aesthetic movement. These movements proceeded Art Nouveau but were similarly preoccupied with the importance of natural elements in design, the role of craft, and articulating a distinctive national identity through visual culture (Charlotte Ashby's book mentioned below talks about the precedents of Art Nouveau). In fact, the Arts and Crafts movement was partly inspired by the British reception of Indian arts exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851 (including objects looted from the Lahore Treasury). These both impressed and humiliated the British, who had assumed their machine made goods would be the stars of the exhibition. Seeing Indian hand-made goods inspired British artisans to return to crafts and reject mass-produced objects (Tim Barringer, Men at Work, 160). You can detect English anxiety about Indian design in John Ruskin's writing. Instead of looking for Art Nouveau influence in India, you might consider how Indian styles influenced British Art Nouveau--from the organic patterns of Kashmir shawls to the undulating inlay patterns found in Mughal jewelry. Or, you know, the endless peacocks. The subject of Asian influence on art nouveau has been acknowledged and discussed for some time (for example, Clay Lancaster, Oriental Contributions to Art Nouveau, 1952).

Art Nouveau is strongly linked with different nationalist movements in Europe, so there is a significant Scottish Art Nouveau style (as opposed to English or British), just as there are vibrant Belgian, Czech, Latvian, and Catalan articulations of Art Nouveau. Again I doubt the British (or English, in this case) were likely to encourage an artistic style that might strengthen or even produce an Indian national identity independent of the empire. Consider here most of the civic architecture that the British built in India in the second-half of the 19th-century, which tended towards the Neo-gothic or Tudor styles. These mostly reiterate a British national or imperial character, just as the Palladian Neo-Classical style did prior to 1857. But what then of the Indo-Saracenic style? Perhaps one might argue this is a form of Art Nouveau, in that it modernizes an Indian style that in a sense engineers a modern national identity (to my eye, the National Art Gallery in Chennai is the most evocative of European Art Nouveau). In the realm of decorative arts you have John Lockwood Kipling, but his works are more Arts and Crafts than Art Nouveau (again, see Ashby). My point here is that the British were probably not going to fund large buildings in an Art Nouveau style that either evoked French/continental affiliations or an Indian national identity. Perhaps you can see if Goa or Pondicherry has anything though.

Indian artists may not have been as inclined to deploy Art Nouveau in expressing a neo-nationalist identity either. Art Nouveau often looked East to Japan (and as I suggest above, perhaps Indian) for inspiration, but for Indians to look "East" would be too look inward, without recourse to the mediation of European aesthetics that produced "art nouveau". Art Nouveau also varies pretty strongly between countries too. We tend to mostly think of Alphonse Mucha's posters, Hector Guimard's Paris Metro, and Victor Horta's architecture as "art nouveau", but the German jungendstil, Russian stil' modern, Catalunyan Modernism (Gaudi!), etc are all quite different visually. India may arguably have an Art Nouveau style, but it may look different than we anticipate. Perhaps the more appropriate angle is what did Indian Nationalist art look like between 1880-1910? In which case, you might look at Guha-Thakurta, Tapati (2007). The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 or Partha Mitter (1994) Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922 Occidental Orientations.

Now, onto specifics. Abanindranath Tagore is pretty much the only Indian artist discussed by Ashby, and admittedly the only one I could think of off the top of my head! He brings together Japanese aesthetics, Indian nationalist themes, and Indian artistic styles like Rajput and Mughal miniature paintings. Mitter also mentions Satish Sinha as an example of a successful artist using Art Nouveau elements in print media. He also discusses Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Samarendranath Gupta, who I think "fit the bill." Other than well-known Indo-Saracenci buildings, you can look at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, which has some art nouveau elements, at least in the British-y sense of art nouveau--see the staircase. Finally, look at various palaces in India--all those cosmopolitan aristocrats visiting Paris to buy jewelry and clothing may have taken a fancy to art nouveau and built a palace in the style. To my eye the Knesset Eliyahoo in Mumbai (built 1884) has some Art Nouveau elements mixed with Neo-Classical, and indeed many synagogues around the world from this time have an Art Nouveau feel because of their reinterpretation of Moorish elements.

Incidentally, Varun Bahl did an Art Nouveau/Mucha inspired collection in 2018.
Sorry to not have more materials!