‘Caricature, Salon criticism, laughter and modernity’. Review of: Julia Langbein, Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France, London: Bloomsbury 2022, pp. 245, 43 col. plates and 46 b. & w. ills, ISBN 9781350186859, £ 85

The book examines the genre of Salon caricatural, a special kind of Salon criticism which, made of rows of ‘pocket cartoons’ that poke fun on the art works on display, was a common feature of French satirical journals from the 1840s onwards. Looking closely at prints by Pelez, Daumier, Cham, and Bertall, while reading Baudelaire and other contemporary critics, the book examines its rise on the pages of Le Charivari until the end of the Salon in 1881. If French political caricature is characterised by violence and resistance against power, Salon caricature was never primarily oppositional, the book argues. Produced by caricaturists who shared training and pictorial references with Salon artists, it was aiming for laughter, generated by the very act of the translation of the medium of paint into drawing and print. Shifting reproductive technologies were part and parcel of the mechanisms of ‘repicturing’. As insiders’ views on practices of imaging, as well as social and cultural norms of the time, Salon caricatures share their approach with modern art

The place of Modernism in Central European art’. Review of: Discussion about Matthew Rampley, ‘Networks, horizons, centres and hierarchies: on the challenges of writing on modernism in Central Europe’, special issue of Umění: Journal of The Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, 69:2, 2021, edited by Steven Mansbach, pp. 142-215, 19 col. plates and 6 b. & w. illus., 99 CZK, ISSN 00495123

Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal art history was first formulated in his article ‘On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history’, published in Umění in 2008. Devised for East Central Europe, it derived its impetus from critical geography, which offered him tools for negotiating both the pitfalls of western art history marginalising the peripheries, as well as the conceptual framework provided by postcolonial theory. The precepts of the horizontal art history, widely discussed and used both within and outside the region, have been recently re-examined by Matthew Rampley who submitted to Umění a provocative article, assessing its aims and impact, as well proposing a new set of insights on methods and practices of studies on modern art of the region. This text is a review of the debate which, stimulated in turn by Rampley’s contribution, was published in the same issue of Umění in 2021. Guest edited by Steven Mansbach, the issue includes texts by Beáta Hock, Marie Rakušanová, Milena Bartlova, Magdalena Radomska, Jeremy Howard, Raino Isto, Claire Farago, Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács

Mapping Eastern Europe: Cartography and Art History

This paper compares maps of Eastern Europe, beginning from the map of Slavic lands by Josef Pavol Šafárik of 1842, and it claims that cartographic imagery has played a significant role in the legitimisation of the region’s collective identity. It argues that the adoption the map as a tool of art history, in order to spatialise and quantify the understanding of art, cannot bypass the postmodern critique of the map. It reflects on the overlap between the approaches and methods of critical cartography and critical art history, as well as on the mutual benefits of the visual turn in cartography and of the spatial turn in art history

Imaging and mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to post-communist bloc

Book synopsis: Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe’s east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers’ reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European ‘iconosphere’ leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies

Masterpieces and the critical museum

New Museology does not pay attention to masterpieces. 1 One could spend hours searching for this term in the tables of contents and indexes in the ever-increasing pile of museum studies books and readers. All in vain. The celebrities in museums’ collections, the warrants of the museums’ popularity among the widest public, have not been included among the issues to be tackled by critical museology. Clearly, this reluctance to approach the phenomenon of the masterpiece stems from the disciplinary aims of the New Museology which is concerned with social hierarchies and exclusions rather than with the objects themselves and which must be, programmatically, distrustful of any old claims to the universality of aesthetic values and transcendence. Not writing about masterpieces is thus tantamount to adopting a critical approach, to silence those claims. The notable absence of masterpieces in critical museum studies is more than compensated for by their excessive presence everywhere else. It is hardly worth noting that any search for the term ‘masterpiece’ in online library catalogues, online bookshops—not to mention the search engines—is totally unproductive, as thousands of hits appear instantly. Indeed, the word ‘masterpiece’ has been adopted widely and indiscriminately as a measure of perfection in all spheres of human activity, so much so that its ubiquity renders it invalid, relegating the notion from the highest realm of art to the more popular strata of culture industry. It is difficult not to notice, instead, that a significant number of ‘masterpiece’ books have been, and still are, produced by museums. The term features prominently not just in amply illustrated publications with the most celebrated objects from museums’ collections, addressing the widest public, but also in catalogues of the major international exhibitions, aimed at professionals. Masterpieces are not given but are constructed by the museum and academic art history textbooks and, to a large extent, by the shifting demands of popular opinion. When discussing the concept of the critical museum, the hegemony of the masterpiece in the museum world, then and now, presents one of the issues to be considered rather than bypassed. Book synopsis: Curating Art provides insight into some of the most socially and politically impactful curating of historical and contemporary art since the late 1990s. It offers up a museological framework for understanding watershed developments of curating in art museums. Representing the plurality of theory and practice around the expanded field of relational curating, the book focuses on curating that prioritises the quality of relationships between people and objects, between institutions and people and among people. It has wide international breadth, with particularly strong representation in East and Southeast Asia, including four papers never before translated into English. This Asian cluster illuminates the globalisation of the field and challenges dichotomies of East and West while acknowledging distinctions within specific, but often transnational, cultural spheres. The compelling philosophical perspectives and case studies included within Curating Art will be of interest to students and researchers studying curating, exhibition development and art museums. The book will also inspire current and emerging curators to pose challenging but important questions about their own practice and the relationships that this work sustains