Summary This article follows the afterlife of two fragmented late medieval altarpieces in Norway, whose original function was for a long time obscured after years of private ownership. The study takes an object biography approach, where sections of documentary evidence are pieced together with technical findings and historical context to explore the altarpieces’ shifting functions during long, eventful

Published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2022)

Published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2022)

Published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2022)

Summary The following article seeks to analyze the biopolitical interconnections between cultural policy and the arts during the Swedish 1900s. Of special relevance is the concept of “aesthetic engineering”, denoting the attempt to vitalise and activate the population through manipulation of the sensuous environment. In this context, the significance of the individual artwork can only be understood

(2022). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 91, Fakes and forgeries, pp. i-i.

(2022). Editorial Board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 91, Fakes and forgeries, pp. ii-ii.

(2022). Toc. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 91, Fakes and forgeries, pp. iii-iii.

(2022). Fakes matter – as a matter of fakes. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 91, Fakes and forgeries, pp. 1-6.

Summary In 1565, the collector and art adviser Girolamo Garimberto congratulated Cesare Gonzaga on the recent acquisition of a series of ancient heads. In Garimberto’s words, what made this purchase so extraordinary was the “presence of an emperor [Geta] so rare, with his wife and two children, that, to tell the truth, this is an extremely rare and impossible occurrence, difficult to be arranged in

Summary This study examines painted copies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to gain a richer understanding of the phenomenon of copies and of copying as a common artistic practice. The study findings suggest that copies painted in Sweden in the seventeenth century were, in general, free copies. In that century, the Swedish economy was booming, and a semi-regulated art market had developed

Summary The English language contains a plethora of words denoting and connoting material production – designations of Man as maker: Making, creating, fashioning, forging, fabricating, producing, generating, manufacturing, and so on. This catalogue of relative synonyms has, however, radical historical and internal differences of valence and meaning and surrounds the Early Modern nomenclature of “making”

Summary This paper examines how representations of the Sámi emerge in the art of two contemporary Nordic artists, Mattias Olofsson and Jorma Puranen. It compares Olofsson’s performances of Stor-Stina (1999-present) with Puranen’s Imaginary Homecoming (1991-97), showing how their projects convey and simultaneously attempt to dismantle a settler mentality. Through the comparison, the paper argues for

Published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2022)

(2021). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 4, pp. (i)-(i).

(2021). Editorial Board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 4, pp. (ii)-(ii).

(2021). ToC. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 4, pp. (iii)-(iii).

Summary In the 1840s, Sweden and Finland were hit by a minor craze for living pictures or tableaux vivants as commercial entertainment. For the price of a ticket, the public could experience the staging, by live actors, of work of arts from antiquity and contemporary sculptors such as Canova and Thorvaldsen. Making strong claims of artistic value, based on the aesthetic theory of Winckelmann and the

Summary Over the past decade humanities researchers have increasingly come to embrace digital methods. Art historians, however, have often resisted engaging with these developments. In this article, we explore the driving factors behind art history's reticence toward the digital turn in the humanities. Reflecting on the historiographic trajectory of the emerging field of digital art history (DAH) versus

(2021). Framträdanden: performativitetsteoretiska tolkningar av Tadeusz Kantors konstnärskap. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. i-i.

(2021). Editorial Board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. ii-ii.

(2021). ToC. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. iii-iii.

Summary This article argues that Tudor politics influenced the devotional iconography on display in the Magnificat window in Great Malvern Priory church in Worcestershire, England from 1501. The window proclaims Henry VII’s final victory over Yorkist pretenders to the throne in the years after Bosworth and communicates its position through images of the Virgin Mary. The article discusses how collective

Published in Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Vol. 91, No. 2, 2022)

Summary The history of art has been engaged with mobility for centuries. The study of movement, its limits and potential, is a fundamental principle of the discipline. A fascination with, and rejection of movement lies at the core of much of its narrative. However, recent art historical analysis, which is concerned primarily with the travels of artists (as described, for example, in biographical accounts)

Summary How was Henry VII Tudor and his genealogical lines depicted in contemporary chronicle rolls? What determines the underlying functions realising the changing oppositional arguments in visual rhetoric? Does visual migration of familiar iconography based on collective memory make it possible to use the same images to propagate two opposite truths? In this article I examine two genealogical chronicle

Summary In 1986, Dan Graham participated in Chambres d’Amis in Ghent, Belgium, curated by Jan Hoet as an art exhibition outside of the museum, in individual houses. With the help of a local architect, Graham constructed a glass and steel pavilion in a private garden. The resulting work, Children’s Pavilion, is largely forgotten, but it is a pivotal work within the evolution of his oeuvre. Many of Graham’s

(2021). Correction. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 3, pp. i-i.

(2021). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, Scenography and Art History, pp. i-i.

(2021). Editorial board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, Scenography and Art History, pp. ii-ii.

(2021). Contents. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, Scenography and Art History, pp. iii-iii.

(2021). Why Scenography and Art History? Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, Scenography and Art History, pp. 65-71.

In this article, I look at the meaning of scent as art, as exhibited artefact, and as an experience-heightening scenographic agent to create a multisensory whole in the museum. I discuss olfactory art, perfume exhibitions, and scented scenographics using fragrance as communication tools and highlighting the sense of smell as a key factor in the sensory and bodily communication of scented events. In

The concept of expanded scenography is applied to the analysis of the design and public interaction with the multisensory digital art installation Zelige Door on Golborne Road. This is an attempt to re-think visual and live art practices with communities and the creation of immersive digital environments in terms of a “scenographic ecology of relations.” The analysis aims to reconceptualise the field

Though predominantly known for her Surrealist painting, Leonor Fini (1907–1996) was also a prolific designer of sets and costumes and produced scenographic work over a period of 28 years from 1944 to 1972. Having lain in the shadow of her male contemporaries, in recent years she has come to greater and greater prominence, but her work as a designer remains relatively unknown. This may well be due to

Summary There are several professional competences involved in the creation of a museum exhibition. This article investigates the collaboration between the artist/scenographer and the museum. Further, it seeks to contribute to a historical understanding of such collaborations by exploring the work created by the Swedish artist/scenographer Lennart Mörk in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the arguments

Summary When the Second World War broke out states, even neutral ones such as Sweden, sought to protect parts of their cultural property from destruction. This article deals with why and how some treasures belonging to the Church of Sweden were identified and selected for protection against air raids in the Second World War. On his own suggestion the art historian Johnny Roosval was given the task

(2021). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. i-i.

(2021). Editorial board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. ii-ii.

(2021). Contents. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. iii-iii.

Summary This article chronicles the French critic Pierre Restany and his 1967 exhibition Superlund at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden. Throughout his life and work Restany travelled the globe and engaged in local art scenes, often described as peripheries. But when did Lund, a town in southern Sweden, become the periphery, and with reference to which centre? When Restany engaged with the so-called peripheries

Summary This essay proposes that Haarlem genre artist Jan Miense Molenaer created two paintings, only known today from photographs in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD). The pictures depict peasants; two are playing cards, others are observers. Molenaer plausibly used print prototypes after the designs of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, adding observations from life of his present day

Summary Recent scholarship on the nunneries of the Late Middle Ages has demonstrated that within these houses, textile work served as important devotional tools which might accompany prayer, meditation and worship. This shows that the production of woven and embroidered textiles in nunneries does not easily compare to any modern-day notion of artistic practice, and it is argued that art historians

(2020). Cover-title page. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. (i)-(i).

(2020). Editorial board. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. (ii)-(ii).

(2020). ToC. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History: Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. (iii)-(iii).

Summary On May 15, 1897, the Stockholm Exhibition of Arts and Industry opened in conjunction with the silver jubilee celebration of King Oscar II (r. 1872-1907). The Hall of Arts, designed by Ferdinand Boberg and organized by Prince Eugen, Sweden’s “painting prince”, not only celebrated the art of Scandinavia, but also advanced the country’s cosmopolitan ambitions by exhibiting foreign art throughout

In order to reframe the conventional bimedial (textual and pictorial) concept of illustration, this study examines illustrations and their textual and pictorial elements from the point of view of the medium of reproduction – which includes present-day digital photography as well as nineteenth-century xylography. The study investigates two nineteenth-century illustrated texts, the Swedish literary review

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), also known as The Large Glass, is one of Marcel Duchamp's most complex works and has elicited a wealth of scholarly suggestions as to its meaning and sources of inspiration. Nevertheless, although it is recognized that Duchamp’s early practice as a maker of cartoons paved the way for an oeuvre replete in wit and wordplay, the inspiration Duchamp

Summary Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) has traditionally been praised as a pioneering Hellenist whose important studies on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture influenced generations of students in various academic fields, ranging from classical philology to archaeology and the history of art. From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, Winckelmann’s important books on ancient

Linked to the thirteenth century devotional text Meditationes Vitae Christi, visual representations of the Resurrected Christ Appearing to His Mother appear in Italian manuscripts, either of the Meditationes itself or in other devotional treatises around 1300. The epitome of the motif, however, is probably the depiction in the right panel of the Miraflores Triptych, painted by Rogier van der Weyden

This article will examine how the practice of critique is made vivid in the early performances of Andrea Fraser, the artist associated most conspicuously with Institutional Critique (IC), an umbrella term for a variety of critical artistic practices that developed out of the conceptual art movement of the 1960s. It traces the convoluted position of critique in contemporary art history, as distinct

Arguably, the great lesson of the avant-garde is the irrelevance of beauty and, by all accounts, the central figure in the lesson is Marcel Duchamp. This essay will argue that the Duchampian readymade offered artists a second, far less readily identifiable legacy, in which the lesson to be learned was not the irrelevance of beauty but rather its ubiquity. The main champion of this antithetical legacy

Have we witnessed the return of critique in the U.S. art world? Taking the decentralization of art institutions as a tactic of critique, this paper identifies waves of critique in the contemporary art world, with particular attention to New York City in the late 1960s-early 1970s, and the 2010s. Though certain critical aims and strategies have persisted, this period spans an impassable divide: the

Looking at both critique and postcritique in relation to art history, in general, and art historiography, in particular, this article suggests that art history’s critical heritage runs longer and deeper than a “hermeneutics of suspicion” signals, and that this state of affairs is therefore a deeper and wider problem than how to overcome and replace critique. The latter term, for art history, is of

Summary The postcritical movement in academia has served to highlight the rhetorical strategies and attitudes of critique that have become so habitual in the humanities that they tend to be confused with political participation. In this article, I examine one critical strategy that have become just as habitual in art practices, namely the attempt at negating aesthetic distancing. By contrasting two

The article positions the exhibition Vitalitá nell’arte (1959–60) as a significant event in the postwar art world. It proposes the hypothesis that the development of the curated exhibition of contemporary art should be seen as a key concern of the 1945–1968 art world and that this new medium emerged in a complex alliance between new institutions, artistic aims and personal contacts. This is exemplified