Globalizing East European Art Histories

Past and Present

Beáta Hock, Anu Allas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351187176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

Part I
Challenging the National Container

From the Transnational to the Planetary

1 Uprooting Origins

Polish–Lithuanian Art and the Challenge of Pluralism

Tomasz Grusiecki

What does it mean that the art of the “other” Europe was developed with reference to the art of the West, and how did that development go on?

Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn” (2009, 7)

A bearded man looks at us from a life-size portrait at the National Arts Museum in Minsk. The inscription on the right identifies the sitter as Krzysztof Wiesiołowski, describing him in Polish as “Lord-Grand-Marshal of Lithuania, governor (starosta) of Tykocin, Suraż, Kleszczele, Mielnik and Krzyczew, steward (ekonom) of Grodno, Anno 1636.”¹ The Ogończyk coat of arms above the inscription additionally marks Wiesiołowski as a Polish–Lithuanian nobleman, while the marshal’s baton, which he holds in his right hand, is the attribute of the man’s position as Lord-Grand-Marshal of Lithuania—Wiesiołowski acquired this high office of state in 1635 (Kamieniecka 1972, 93). But, despite these cues to the sitter’s identity and status, the portrait moves between different registers of cultural belonging. On the one hand, the sitter’s full-length, confident pose, together with an all’antica architectural background, recalls portraits commissioned in western Europe in this period. Yet, simultaneously, Wiesiołowski wears clothing that is far removed from western European fashions of the day, instead appearing in thrall with contemporaneous Ottoman custom. What to make of this mix of cultural forms on view in the same painting?

For all intents and purposes, the portrait draws no line between the European and Ottomanesque traits. Rather than clashing visually, the all’antica and alla turca formal conventions remain in sync with one another. What we might perceive as a pluralism of sartorial and architectural forms is here presented as a mark of integrity: the background mixes with the foreground, producing the effect of interplay of cultural traditions. It is perhaps unsurprising for this transcultural symbiosis to feature in a painting produced in the culturally heterogeneous Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—a vast polity located at a crossroads between the lands of Western Christendom to the west, Muscovy to the east, and the Ottoman Empire to the southeast. Indeed, if the sitter’s costume dovetails with classical décor despite drawing parallels with the world of Ottoman convention, it is because by the mid-sixteenth century, Polish–Lithuanian nobility had assimilated a number of Ottoman-style sartorial forms into their ways of life (Gutkowska-Rychlewska 1968, 395; Turnau 1991a, 71).

Historians of Polish–Lithuanian costume have long considered the effects of cultural contact between the Ottoman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (Mańkowski 1947), and Wiesiołowski’s portrait is a telling case. He wears a golden silk tunic (żupan) and a black velvet, fur-fitted cloak (delia) thrown across his arms, both of which were Ottoman-inspired garments that had found their way into the Commonwealth by way of Hungary, and were adapted to the needs of Polish–Lithuanian nobility. The sitter also dons an Ottoman-style metal belt across his midsection, which acts as a holster for the sword—the hilt of which is embraced by the nobleman’s left hand. A fur hat adorned with a silver pin and feathers (szkofia) lies on the table at the right edge of the portrait, adding to the atmosphere of opulence. Completing this image of cultural entanglement, Wiesiołowski wears yellow leather heeled boots, which, in addition to associations with hunting or military pastimes, also bring up similarities with Ottoman custom.

Plate 1 Anon., portrait of Krzysztof Wiesiołowski (Крыштап Весялоўскі), 1636, oil on canvas, 205 × 132 cm

Minsk, National Arts Museum of the Republic of Belarus

Considering these simultaneous inspirations from the lands of Western Christendom and the Ottoman Empire, the image opens itself up to several scenarios regarding its formal and stylistic taxonomy. If the tradition of large-scale European portraiture is taken as a point of reference, one could read the Minsk painting as a peripheral offshoot of Western art: a provincial manifestation of European heritage. Conversely, if Ottoman material culture is deemed the stimulus, one could then see the portrait as a medium of circulating and naturalizing Ottomanesque costume in Poland-Lithuania. In both scenarios, the portrait would appear as an impression of another culture seen as a source.

This way of understanding cultural transfer follows from the conventional model of artistic influence—the old idea that artistic traditions originate in key artistic centers, from where they trickle down to other, lesser-known areas (for a critique of this model, see Kim 2014, 26–33). In this framework, while places like Poland-Lithuania are free to choose artistic solutions from the centers that are considered more dynamic, they nonetheless merely collate other traditions, even if simultaneously creating a local artistic language—a local language, one might add, that will be taken up nowhere else but in the peripheries. For, although the peripheries might be deemed creative, it is a qualified type of creativity—one that can only be appreciated locally (see Piotrowski 2008, 378). According to this logic, Polish–Lithuanian art may only approximate the rules and conventions of the best examples of western European art or Ottoman material culture and never actually replicate them (compare Bhabha 1994).

But does Wiesiołowski’s portrait simply collate other traditions into an idiosyncratic art form that had consequences only for Polish–Lithuanian cultural landscape and for local art history? This chapter will argue that the significance of the seemingly imitative artifacts becomes more relevant to wider art historical concerns when these pieces are considered not merely on their own, or even within a larger context of regional culture, but rather as part of a greater infrastructure of cultural entanglement, which transcends regions and states. By conveying a mix of cultural forms and molding them into a totem of localness, Wiesiołowski’s portrait took part—like many other images of this kind—in a continual re-formulation of Polish–Lithuanian ways of life and cultural self-identifications. Thus, the appropriation of the European style of painting and the habitation of Ottoman fashions proves to be not merely an act of assimilation, but a symptom of a gradual process of creation.

Taking the generative possibilities of adaptation as a starting point, this chapter will propose that the pluralist status of much Polish–Lithuanian art is where its radical potential for the discipline of art history comes to the fore. Located at a point of juncture between several cultural macro-regions, and thus marking a transition point between Europe and its alleged others, Poland–Lithuania was a cultural contact zone where various peoples and artifacts crossed paths regularly (see, for example, Chrzanowski 1986). I will suggest that foregrounding random connections, fault lines, and unexpected mutations, instead of pandering to the notions of cultural distinctiveness and clearly-defined origins, can productively introduce this geographically peripheral milieu into mainstream art historical narratives. I will first review the most worthwhile previous attempts to reevaluate the status of Polish–Lithuanian art in art history, and then focus on how we might rethink this milieu as an active agent of cultural entanglement, and a catalyst for disintegrating discourses that frame its geographical peripherality as a cultural marginality, and thus the domain of artistic imitation. The purpose of this chapter is then to shift the purported peripheries away from a model that tends to overemphasize hierarchies and linear causalities to one that asserts the possibility of the peripheries’ active participation in wider cultural processes.

Periphery Marginalized

Given Poland–Lithuania’s distance from the major cultural centers of Italy and northwestern Europe, the artists who worked in the Commonwealth were systematically excluded from the earliest art historical grand narratives, of which the most influential example is Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). Like Vasari, who famously used his position to promote Tuscan artists and disparage their foreign competitors (Kaufmann 2002, 71–80), other writers of artist biographies, including the Venetian Carlo Ridolfi (1594–1658), Dutchman Karel van Mander (1548–1606), and the German Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688), also favored their own respective milieus. None of these writers mentions a single Polish–Lithuanian artist when constructing canons of artistic excellence. Even if Poland–Lithuania is referenced, it figures merely as a site to which artists and artworks from artistic centers travelled, to enliven the local art scene of a distant land. For example, Ridolfi mentions the Venetian acquisitions of the Polish–Lithuanian monarch, Sigismund III (r. 1587–1632), but only as a pretext to boast the international fame of Venetian painters (Ridolfi 1648).²

When art history emerged as an academic subject in the nineteenth century, the discipline’s pioneers were largely in agreement with the earlier biographical studies as to what should be considered great art. But it was not only the reliance on older literature that perpetuated the focus of art history on the great metropolises of western Europe; the nineteenth-century scholars were also restricted in their approach by the artifacts they could see on display in the museums of Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Paris, Florence, Rome, London, New York, and a handful of other cultural centers of the day. None of these venerable institutions housed Polish–Lithuanian art. As Michael Camille observed, “whether their bias be nationalistic, formalist, or iconographic, canons are created not so much out of a series of worthy objects as out of the possibilities of their reproduction” (1996, 198). But, to insert an artifact into scholarly discourse (and thus discursively reproduce it), an art historian must believe in its significance. In the preface to the first edition of his Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples (1824), founder of modern source-based history Leopold von Ranke expresses a view that exemplifies the lack of resolve to include Polish– Lithuanian art in historical grand narratives:

Slavic, Latvian and Magyar tribes belonging to [Latin Christendom] have a peculiar and special nature which is not included here. The author remains close to home with the tribally related peoples of either purely Germanic or Germano– Latin origin, whose history is the nucleus of all recent history, and touches on what is foreign only in passing as something peripheral.

(von Ranke 2011, 85)

For Ranke, the study of the Slavic, Finno–Ugric, and Baltic past is futile since it had no impact on universal history, which is allegedly driven by the “Latin and Germanic peoples.” Places such as Poland–Lithuania were thus, from the very beginning, placed on the margins of modern academic discourse.

Art historians have long attempted to challenge the perception of so-called artistic peripheries as unworthy of serious attention. As early as 1962, in his subsequently-published lecture on “provincialism,” Kenneth Clark lamented that “the history of European art has been, to a large extent, the history of a series of centers” (1962, 3). To the traditional view that artistic peripheries—allegedly marked by provincial backwardness—could only develop by copying the art of the center (“where standards of skill are higher and patrons more exacting” (1962, 3)), Clark extols elusive “provincial virtues,” such as sharpness of vision, acceptance of fact, and a modest acceptance of the limitations of artistic medium (1962, 10). Artistic peripheries, in Clark’s account, were guarded from the center’s symptoms of over-refinement and academism. This was a defense of peripheries expressed on formalist and sentimentalist terms.

With the ascent of theoretically-inclined, critical strands of art history in the 1970s and 1980s, however, art historians began to point to the epistemological violation that the traditional model of art historical metropolitanism inflicts on non-canonical visual cultures. Enrico Castelnuovo, together with the historian Carlo Ginzburg, argued in a seminal text, “Centro e periferia” (1979), that it is owing to the eminent historiographers such as Vasari (1511–1574) and Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810) that we have dropped the notion of artistic polycentrism of early modern Italy in favor of a narrative built around a small number of powerful centers. Even more forcefully, Nicos Hadjinicolau put forward four years later (1983) that the paradigm of center and periphery is not merely a spatial construct, but an ideological infrastructure, which naturalizes the political and symbolic power of the key academic institutions from where art historical discourse is defined and disseminated.

Given Poland–Lithuania’s marginal position in the discipline’s grand narratives, historians of Polish–Lithuanian art needed to address the country’s reliance on Europe’s artistic centers if they were to enter a wider scholarly conversation. Jan Białostocki, one of Poland’s few art historians widely recognized abroad, contended that

periphery is after all not only a place where everything is delayed and simplified; that it has virtues of its own; that although situated far away and often lacking initiative, it has considerable freedom to choose and independence to combine elements and motifs adapted from the more dynamic centres.

(1986, 53)

Thus, emphasizing the periphery’s agency to choose only certain art forms and to reject others, Białostocki foregrounded active participation in lieu of passive reception. More recently, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has proposed that the largest cities in Poland–Lithuania, and within the region of east-central Europe writ large, be themselves considered key cultural centers. Kaufmann discusses three such places: Buda, Cracow, and Prague, all of which were important political and commercial sites that attracted artists working for the court and affluent burghers (Kaufmann 2004, 164–179). Coming predominantly from Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, these artists adapted the forms and designs of western European courts and urban centers to the expectations of their new patrons, triggering chains of creative replications throughout the region of east-central Europe.

Yet the question remains: could art generated in a place like Poland–Lithuania have an impact on the better-known artistic centers of western Europe? This question might sound purely hypothetical to an ear accustomed to treating the Commonwealth as a site of cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Globalizing East European Art Histories: The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski and a Conference
• Part I Challenging the National Container: From the Transnational to the Planetary
• Part II Hybridity: Identities and Forms
• Part III Global Communities and the Traffic in Ideas
• Part IV Contemporary Art Praxis and the Production of Discourses
• Index