Books by Catherine Dossin
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015
World art history has gained much attention in recent years, opening many new possibilities for t... more World art history has gained much attention in recent years, opening many new possibilities for the discussion of the history of art in general. There are myriad ways to approach envisaging a history that is truly global, also meaning universal or comprehensive, an Enlightenment project that may perhaps no longer seem so utopian. This book suggests how a revival of attention to circulations can renew the practice of art history and contribute to the discussion of world, global art history. It proposes that following the transnational circulations of artists, artworks, and styles provides a means not only to escape from the national narratives in which previous approaches had been enmeshed, but also to write a global history of art for a globalized world. We still employ the word "art," although we recognize that the concept of art may be relativized, that for instance it might be conceived differently in one place than in another, that its meaning changes in time, and that this concept might not even be expressed in certain times and places. We do not mean, however, to fall into the trap of an ahistorical culturalism, associating a place with a "culture" as if "different arts" in "different spaces" would imply the existence of "different cultures." Anthropologists have long pointed out how distinctions surrounding notions of art, space, and culture themselves run the danger of creating notions of essential cultural differences. 1 Hence we might even propose using the more general notion of "artifact" rather than "art." We advocate an approach to transnational, global history through the study of circulations for several reasons. In the first place, and most important, CIRCULATIONS IN THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF ART.indb 1 2/6/2015 10:06:04 AM circulations in the global history of art 2 global history as we understand it has to include the entire world, and not be the history of oneself and of "others." Approaches toward the comprehension of circulations appear to us to be the only ones that have so far succeeded in taking into account "others" without shutting them inside the prison of the notion of alterity or dismissing them as peripheral. Attention to the constant operation of circulations indicates that what are usually designated "cultures" in effect result from the ceaseless transformation of the circulations and adaptations of ideas, objects, and images originating elsewhere, notably including regions that a point of view governed by a paradigm of centerperiphery relations would deem "peripheral." Hence, only an understanding of history as a result of the continuing circulation of materials, people, and ideas can escape from the hypostasis of cultural entities such as "Western and non-Western," which derive from a priori essentialist definitions, and which also supply grist to the mill of politicized interests, themselves perhaps not even consciously articulated. Historians have long worked outside national parameters, and artistic circulations have been an important research topic for the past forty years among art historians as well. In most cases scholars have studied the circulations of images, styles, and aesthetics, in order to trace influences and diffusions, and their questions have followed predetermined ideas of cultural hierarchies. In response, some scholars (for example Rudolf Wittkower) reversed this approach and examined the influence of non-European art on Western art. 2 In both cases, however, discussion remained at the level of a diffusionist quest for influences, and so did not escape the model of vertical art history. A noted current diffusionist and hierarchical narrative of modern art history, for example, continues to rest on an understanding of the visual arts in which art equals images, or styles, or texts (but not material objects), where the best artistic production emerges in a center before spreading to peripheries. 3 This idealist (in the sense of non-material) representation of artistic production has resulted in a narrative that a circulatory approach aims to counter. Another long-lasting response to the trends of methodological nationalism in art history stimulated the formulation of tools and methods in the study of the circulation of persons, ideas, and artifacts, not just images or styles. This tendency has remained marginal in the discipline of art history, however. Those scholars who have promoted it have in the main not been trained in art history, and have moreover often found inspiration in what were already marginal reactions against mainstream methods of other disciplines such as history, anthropology, sociology, and comparative literature. A historical perspective allows us to see how the question of artistic circulations has, however, recently conjoined various trends, and led to the construction of a strong, internationally animated, if not yet widespread, direction for research.
Geopolitics provides a model for studying power relations within the art world of the nineteenth ... more Geopolitics provides a model for studying power relations within the art world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,7 when the concept of national identities strongly influenced the history of art.8 The geopolitical approach, as we define it, follows the three levels of analysis Fernand Braudel distinguished in his Mediterranean: the longue duree of history and geography, the cycle of socio-economical fluxes and transnational circulations, and the finer scale of events, crisis, and artworks.9 Within those three levels, the geopolitical method understands as object what Pierre Bourdieu would call the international field of arts; that is to say, the social, transnational space polarized and regulated by values and institutions accepted or contested within the field,10 as well as the discourses—in the Foucauldian sense—that populate and define it. In the international field of modern art, people, objects, and ideas from various origins circulate, engage in dialogue, and compete, c...
In Boland, Lynn, Catherine Dossin, and Louise Blair. Louise Blair Daura: A Virginian in Paris. (... more In Boland, Lynn, Catherine Dossin, and Louise Blair. Louise Blair Daura: A Virginian in Paris. (Athens: University of Georgia Museum, 2017), 26-55.
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Stories of the Western artworld, 1936--1986: From the "fall of Paris" to the "invasion of New York". ...
For those interested in global art history, eager to expand their methodological approaches and t... more For those interested in global art history, eager to expand their methodological approaches and to engage in a lively exchange of ideas Circulations in the Global History of Art is a must read. Edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, the volume consists of ten chapters, a useful introduction and an afterward that is both engaged in the arguments and skeptical of the basic premise. As the editors write in their introduction, ‘Our ambition is to tackle the difficult subject of “interculturalization” or “métissage” in a satisfactory, horizontal way that does not try to assign artistic superiority to any agents of the encounter, either the “center” or the “periphery”’.1 They focus on cultural relations that both transform and integrate ‘encounters and confrontations’. They observe Circulations has origins more in historical methodology than in the nineteenth-century formations of Art History in geographically bounded cultures of Europe, particula...
Reflections on World Art History
Introduction: Reintroducing Circulations: Historiography and the Project of Global Art History
Papers by Catherine Dossin
The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s
Contents: Introduction: from the 'Fall of Paris' to the 'Invasion of New York' &#... more Contents: Introduction: from the 'Fall of Paris' to the 'Invasion of New York' 'Art ... a language that should unite': the diversity of the postwar art worlds Vehemences Confrontees: the limits of postwar artistic exchanges 'We will always have Paris': the domination of Paris in the 1950s 'The future is in New York': the strength of the US art worlds in the late 1950s This Is Tomorrow: the triumph of the American way in the 1960s I like America and America likes me: the European domination of American art in the 1970s A New Spirit in Painting: the European comeback of the 1980s Epilogue: consequences of the European comeback Index.
Critique d’art, 2019
Groupement d'intérêt scientifique (GIS) Archives de la critique d'art
Pop begeistert
American Art, Sep 1, 2011
Volume 25, Number 3 © 2011 Smithsonian Institution In the early 1970s the American press started ... more Volume 25, Number 3 © 2011 Smithsonian Institution In the early 1970s the American press started to discuss what was seen as a surprising new phenomenon, the German craze for American pop art. In November 1970 the New York Times printed the headline “American Pop Really Turns on German Art-Lovers,” referring to recent purchases by German dealers and collectors. The author, David Shirey, reported with awe how Rudolf Zwirner, a dealer from Cologne, had recently bought Roy Lichtenstein’s Big Painting (mistakenly referred to as Brushstroke ; fig. 1) for $75,000—“as much as has ever been paid at an auction for the work of a living American artist.”1 The same month, Artforum devoted a feature article to West German collectors; to investigate German art collecting, Phyllis Tuchman traveled to West Germany, where she visited exceptional art collections, in particular those of Peter Ludwig and Karl Ströher. According to her estimation, these collections presented the best of recent American art: “the art is so well-chosen that the pleasure of experiencing art is even more rewarding than in New York.” As Tuchman described the German enthusiasm for American art, she also lamented how many American masterpieces were leaving their home country. These exports were occurring at such a rate, she wrote, that “To see work by contemporary masters, it is not necessary to have access to a private collector’s home; to see the most recent paintings and sculptures, it is not necessary to visit an art gallery or even an artist’s studio. American art—whether we recognize it or not—is now to be seen in museums in Germany.” Illustrations of an array of U.S. artists’ works then in West German collections accompanied the article, adding a sense of urgency to Tuchman’s comments.2 If the success of American pop art in Germany is an indisputable fact—a walk through the rooms of any German modern art museum would convince most skeptics—the reasons behind such partiality require further exploration. Essays devoted to German collectors usually gloss over this question, regarding German interest in pop art as the logical result of American art’s greatness. An exception is found in the critical writings of cultural historian Andreas Huyssen, who offers an explanation. According to Huyssen, German infatuation with pop art came about from a complete misunderstanding of the new style. Appearing in Germany in the late 1960s, at the time of the student movement and the revival of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist theory, American pop art was often interpreted as a sardonic critique of consumer society and the capitalist system. When Huyssen encountered works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein at documenta 4 in 1968, for example, he, “like many others, believed that Pop art could be the beginning of a far reaching democratization of art and art appreciation. This reaction was as spontaneous as Catherine Dossin New Perspective
This paper considers the so-called triumph of American art from the perspective of what Western E... more 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.
Artl S Bulletin, 2014
for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding mod... more for additional information. This is an Open Access journal. This means that it uses a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. Readers may freely read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles. This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license.
Art in transfer in the Era of Pop. Curatorial Practices and Transnational Strategies, edited by Annika Öhrner and Charlotte Bydler. Stockholm: Södertörn University, 2016.
Contents; Piotr Piotrowski-Why Were There No Great Pop Art Curatorial Projects in Eastern Europe ... more Contents; Piotr Piotrowski-Why Were There No Great Pop Art Curatorial Projects in Eastern Europe in the 1960s? Mathilde Arnoux- Contemporary Polish Art Seen Through the Lens of French Art Critics Invited to the AICA Con- gress in Warsaw and Cracow in 1960
, Catherine Dossin - “Be Young and Shut Up” Understanding France’s Response to the 1964 Venice Biennale in its Cultural and Curatorial Context, Hiroko Ikegami - The “New York Connection”
Pontus Hultén’s Curatorial Agenda in the 1960s, Annika Öhrner- On the Construction of Pop Art
. When American Pop Arrived in Stockholm in 1964, Hannah Abdullah-Pop Art at the Frontline of the Cold War
René Block’s “Capitalist Realism” in 1960s West Berlin, Sophie Cras- Öyvind Fahlström’s Impure Pop
in a World of Impure Cold War Politics Oscar Svanelid - AnthroPOPhagous
Political Uses of Pop Art in the Aftermath of the Brazilian Military Coup d’État of 1964, Agata Jakubowska- Personalising the Global History of Pop Art Alina Szapocznikow And Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Katarina Wadstein MacLeod- The Domestic Paradox, Håkan Nilsson - Collective Modernism Synthesising the Arts, Engaging in Society, Tania Ørum- Terminology in the Making Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s, Dávid Fehér Pop Beyond Pop
. Some Exhibitions of the Hungarian “Iparterv-Circle”, ISBN 978-91-87843-64-8. publications@sh.se.
MODOS, 2017
Taking on Roy Lichtenstein’s European rise to fame, my paper describes how his work arrived in We... more Taking on Roy Lichtenstein’s European rise to fame, my paper describes how his work arrived in Western Europe during the 1963 Crisis of , when Europeans were turning their attention to Realism anew. It then explains that they appreciated his engagement with contemporary reality. Moreover, Lichtenstein’s popular imagery, colorful palette, and mechanized style appealed to them as a reflection of US-American civilization, whose influence was then at its pinnacle in Europe. They regarded him as a modern, American Courbet. His success was thus less “the triumph of American art” than the triumph of a European idea of the United States.
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Books by Catherine Dossin
Papers by Catherine Dossin