Matthew Rampley. The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. 281, illus
Austrian History Yearbook, 2015
diplomats, the consuls were the true players in the field. They dealt with the everyday problems ... more diplomats, the consuls were the true players in the field. They dealt with the everyday problems of their constituents in a foreign country, and their work reflected the ideological changes and differences in the concepts of race and identity, citizenship, and nationality. Phelps is at her best when she relates the changes in ideology and high politics to the actions of the consuls in the field and their results. While the American representatives in the Habsburg lands dealt primarily with a small number of returnees and the legal problems caused by their dual identity as Austrian or Hungarian subjects and their newly acquired U.S. citizenship, the problems faced by the representatives of Austria (and after 1867 of Austria-Hungary) in the United States were far more complex. Not only were the sheer numbers of people they represented much higher; they also had to deal with a dual set of problems. There was the increasingly difficult aspect of national and racial identity. American consuls in Vienna, Prague, or Budapest dealt with former Austrian or Hungarian citizens who had become Americans. Their supposedly different national identities as Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and so on were of no concern to the authorities involved. This was not so easy for the representatives of the Dual Monarchy in the United States. Here, the concept of race as an identifying and differentiating factor was applied and accepted in the state and federal bureaucracies, and contradicted the concept of citizenship. But these ideological aspects were not the only problems they faced. While their American counterparts in Austria and Hungary dealt with a modern and more or less centralized state with an established bureaucratic structure and a clear hierarchy, this was not the case in the United States, where the federal institutions were weak and had only limited influence on the state and local authorities. The president in Washington was not the prime minister of the United States, and the State Department had little interest and power to influence state governments and their institutions. Therefore, the European model of diplomatic and consular life only worked to a limited extent. Although Phelps’s book is an excellent study of international history, it still has its minor flaws. The reader of an academic monograph should expect a bibliography as a source of reference for further reading. In this book, one has to excerpt this information rather strenuously from the footnotes. Aside from this technical aspect, the reviewer, having a strong interest in biography, would have liked to learn more about the personal backgrounds of the players involved. Who were the consuls, both the professionals and their honorary colleagues? For example, John Reymershoffer, long-time honorary consul (meaning he received an honorarium for his services but not a fixed salary) in Galveston, was the grandson of a Czech member of the Austrian parliament of 1848 who emigrated to Texas in the 1850s, whereas his colleague in San Francisco, Francis (František) Korbel, was a pioneer in the Californian wine industry. Both Czechs or Czech-Americans in the “modern” nationalistic concept of race, they served the AustroHungarian government loyally with all its implications. Nonetheless, the book is a prime example of an innovative study in international history, one that, it is hoped, sets the stage for more original, archival-based research in the field of Austria’s and Austria-Hungary’s foreign relations.
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Books by Michael Yonan
Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century.
Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Mapping Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds
Stacey Sloboda (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA) and Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, USA)
2. Flowering Stone: The Aesthetics and Politics of Islamic Jades at the Qing Court
Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, USA)
3. The Market for 'Western' Paintings in Eighteenth-Century East Asia: A View from the Liulichang Market in Beijing
Michele Matteini (New York University, USA)
4. Floating Pictures: The European Dimension to Japanese Art During the Eighteenth Century
Timon Screech (SOAS, University of London, UK)
5. A Chinese Canton? Painting the Local in Export Art
Yeewan Koon (University of Hong Kong)
6. Pedro Cambón's Asian Objects: A Transpacific Approach to Eighteenth- Century California
J. M. Mancini (Maynooth University, Ireland)
7. Making it Ours: Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Spanish American Newspapers
Kelly Donahue-Wallace (University of North Texas, USA)
8. Tortoiseshell and the Edge of Empire: Artistic Materials and Imperial Politics in Spain and France
Mari-Tere Álvarez (J. Paul Getty Museum, USA) and Charlene Villaseñor Black (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
9. Other Antiquities: Ancients, Moderns, and the Challenge of China in Eighteenth-Century France
Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
10. Drifting through the Louvre: A Local Guide to the French Academy
Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University, UK)
11. The Art World of the European Grand Tour
Carole Paul (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
12. The Imaginative Geographies of Angelo Soliman
Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, USA)
13. Toward an Itinerant Art History: The Swahili Coast of Eastern Africa
Prita Meier (New York University, USA)
14. St. Martin's Lane in London, Philadelphia, and Vizagapatam
Stacey Sloboda (University of Massachusetts Boston, USA)
German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783)
known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human
heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing
strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have
struggled over the years to explain these works of art. Some
said that Messerschmidt was insane. Some said that he was
trying to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael
Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously
explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the
aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.
Papers by Michael Yonan