My talk examines the world-configuring function of art history at the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as it sought to produce authoritative knowledge about nations, cultures and the world. While participating in and even constitutive of processes of nation building, narratives about art were conceived of as a path to understand and account for the particularities of “national cultures”. My talk engages with these epistemic foundations and early histories of the discipline at a profoundly global conjuncture, as it negotiated a dialectic of crossing and redefining boundaries. From the strivings of early “world art histories” to encompass a new and ever-increasing diversity of objects that had made their way from regions of the world to Europe and had confronted museums, curators, publics and not least a discipline fixated on Classical Antiquity with fresh challenges, I look at the way concepts of modernist art history get appropriated, re-configured and also reaffirmed as the discipline migrates beyond Europe to colonies and young post-colonial nations.
Mon 12 Jun 2017
