To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art

This paper considers the so-called triumph of American art from the perspective of what Western Europeans could actually see and know of American art at the time. Relying on a database of exhibitions, purchases, and publications of American art in Western Europe from 1945 to 1970 created in the framework of Artl@s, it reconstructs the precise chain of events and circulations that marked the dissemination and reception of American art in Europe. It consequently draws a more refined and complex understanding of postwar artistic exchanges out of the entangled historical perspectives of the European peripheries, which challenges the retrospectively dominating position of American Abstract Expressionism

The New World Debate and the 18th-Century Images of America that Brought Europe Together

The New World Debate offers a privileged site to reconstruct and study Europe’s self-image in the 18th century. Taking on Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes, Voltaire’s Alzire et les Americains, and De Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, this paper traces the process through which Europe elaborated a Eurocentric view of the world organization through a paternalistic, usually benevolent but always contemptuous, relation to America that would come to define Europe’s colonial expansion of the 19th century and make colonialism an essential, yet uncomfortable, dimension of Europe’s modern identity

Mapping the Reception of American Art in Postwar Western Europe

This article presents a project launched by a multidisciplinary team based at Purdue University in part-nership with ARTL@S. The ambition is to map the diffusion of American art in postwar Western Europe by recov-ering exhibitions that took place be-tween 1945 and 1970 and that fea-tured works by American Abstract Expressionist and American Pop art-ists. The results of this research will be featured on an interactive web ap-plication that will allow users to view the maps, zoom in on them, select art-ists or artworks, scroll through dates, and even create their own maps. It will thus be a great tool for scholars, students, and museums professionals, who will be able to use it as a starting point for their own investigations

Towards a Spatial (Digital) Art History

Among the numerous possibilities offered by the Digital Humanities, digital mapping is certainly among the most promising for art history. It is a rather simple yet efficient way to explore the large amount of data and databases which are available to the discipline but that are often underutilized. New mapping technologies allow us to work with art history’s big data serially and spatially, and to diffuse the result of our research through attractive and compelling visualizations

The Transatlantic Triangle of Artistic Circulation

The international circulation of art has today become a rapidly expanding field of study, yet transcontinental circulations have thus far received less attention. In much the same way, a great deal of research has been conducted into bilateral artistic and cultural exchanges, yet scholarship around triangular systems is still somewhat lacking. This latter term refers to instances in which artistic circulation – whether in the form of artworks, artists, aesthetics or styles – involves at least three cultural reference points, and wherein effects of transformation, adaptation and readaptation are all the more complex. Despite the focus on bilateral exchanges, even a relatively cursory investigation of cultural transfers reveals that the majority are in fact triangular. By bringing together in this volume the twin questions of transcontinental circulation and of triangular artistic and cultural transfers, we hope to broach a third and largely unexplored question: that of “South-North-South” circulations

Le triangle des circulations artistiques transnationales

L\u27étude des circulations artistiques à l’échelle mondiale est désormais un champ en pleine expansion ; mais celle des circulations transcontinentales reste un domaine plus réduit. De même, alors que les études de transferts artistiques et culturels bilatéraux sont désormais chose courante, il est plus difficile de trouver des études dans lesquelles un système triangulaire est mis en évidence – où la circulation artistique, qu’il s’agisse d’œuvres, d’artistes, d’esthétiques ou de styles, fait intervenir un nombre au moins ternaire de référentiels culturels, et où les effets de transformation, d’adaptation et de réadaptation sont donc particulièrement complexes. Or, avec un peu d’observation, on doit constater que la plupart des transferts culturels sont triangulaires et non pas bilatéraux. Croisant ces deux questions – circulations transcontinentales d’une part, transferts artistiques et culturels triangulaires de l’autre -, nous avons désiré, pour ce volume, ajouter à la question une dimension géopolitique inhabituelle, celle des circulations « Sud-Nord-Sud »

A geopolítica dos mundos da arte ocidental: reflexão e metodologia

Reflecting on the origins and methodology of her book, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 19840s-1980s: A Geopolitics of the Western Art Worlds (2015), the author replaces her work in the context of a growing awareness to the multiple stories of art and a need to face this methodological challenge. She then discusses geopolitics as a useful model to think through the complicated historiography of postwar art, tackle the polyphony of art discourses during that period, and study the power dynamics and historiographical mechanisms that give some stories the status of history.Em uma reflexão sobre as origens e a metodologia do seu livro The Rise and Fall of American Art, 19840s-1980s: A Geopolitics of the Western Art Worlds (2015), Catherine Dossin reposiciona seu trabalho em um contexto de crescente atenção às múltiplas histórias da arte, no qual se faz necessário confrontar tal desafio metodológico. A autora então discute a geopolítica como um modelo útil para se pensar a complexa historiografia da arte do pós-guerra, abordar a polifonia de discursos desse período e analisar as dinâmicas de poder e os mecanismos históricos que garantem a alguns de seus capítulos o estatuto de história.En una reflexión de los orígenes y de la metodología de su libro The Rise and Fall of American Art, 19840s-1980s: A Geopolitics of the Western Art Worlds (2015), Catherine Dossin reposiciona su trabajo en un contexto de creciente atención a las múltiples historias del arte en lo cual se hace necesario confrontar ese desafío metodológico. La autora, entonces, discute la geopolítica como un modelo provechoso para se pensar la compleja historiografía del arte de la postguerra, abordar la polifonía de discursos de ese período y analizar las dinámicas de poder y los mecanismos históricos que garanten a algunos de sus capítulos el estatuto de historia

Stories of the Western artworld, 1936-1986 : from the "fall of Paris" to the "invasion of New York"

textAs we all know, there are multiple stories of art. But even in the West, each country has its own story, especially when it comes to the visual arts in the second part of the twentieth century. The stories told by the French, the German, the Italian, and the American textbooks and museums differ greatly. Yet, the American story is usually regarded as the standard account: the common Western story against which we mentally contrast the Non-Western stories. Without aiming at writing the true story of contemporary Western art, this dissertation tries to uncover alternative stories, interpret the differences, and explain how one particular view came to prevail as the story. Concretely, it examines four contentious issues on which the standard account is particularly challenged by other stories, namely the fracture of the Second World War, the shift of the artworld’s center from Paris to New York, the domination of American art in the 1970s, and finally the European comeback of the 1980s. Analyzing the different national interpretations of these events and confronting them with empirical data (place, date, participant, etc.), the dissertation uncloaks enduring myths and reductive explanations. It highlights above all the role of dealers, collectors, curators, critics, and government officials in the way art is produced, received, and remembered. It also demonstrates how the shifting historical, economic, and institutional contexts continuously reshaped the story, the canon, and the viewers, so that what art historians have traditionally seen as stylistic shifts and artistic leadership appears rather as the result of forces that extend beyond the artistic creation. Stories with less international recognition should not be dismissed in favor of an official story that would erode all differences and present us with a single -- and thus deficient -- perspective. Only through the consideration and analysis of multiple cultural and national perspectives can we understand the complexity of the artworld’s dynamics. Ultimately, I propose a comprehensive yet critical art historical approach rooted in cultural history that would offer a solution to writing art history in an age of globalization that purports to eschew previous assumptions of nationalism and creative genius.Art Histor