Full Description
While today we are experiencing a revival of world art and the so-called global turn of art history, encounters between art historians and anthropologists remain rare. Even after a century and a half of interactions between these epistemologies, a sceptical distance prevails with respect to the disciplinary other. This volume is a timely exploration of the roots of this complex dialogue, as it emerged worldwide in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, between 1870 and 1970.
Exploring case studies from Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, and the United States, this volume addresses connections and rejections between art historians and anthropologists—often in the contested arena of "primitive art." It presents better- and lesser-known actors, from the art historian-anthropologist Aby Warburg to the modernist Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral, and from curators-museum directors such as Alfred Barr and René d'Harnoncourt to the curator-impresario Leo Frobenius. Entering the current debates on decolonizing the past, this collection will prompt reflection on future relations between these two fields.
Contents
Introduction - Peter Probst
The Allure of Architectural Ornament: Ethnographic Art and the
"Shortcomings" of Inka Stonemasonry - Carolyn Dean
Anatomy of a Chronological Hallucination: The Category of Primitive Art
and Élie Faure's L'art medieval - John Warne Monroe
Ethnology at the Margins of "General Art History": The Case of Alois Hein -
Priyanka Basu
What Happens When Natives Draw? Theodor Koch-Grünberg and the
Beginnings of World Art History - Claudia Mattos Avolese
Boas and Semper: From the Biology of Images to Primitive Art - Carlo Severi
Empathy with the Unknown: Reproducing "World Art" after 1900 - Joseph
Imorde
Fatal Attraction: Carl Einstein's "Ethnological" Turn - Charles W.
Haxthausen
Pathos and Paideuma: Aby Warburg, Leo Frobenius, and the Demons of
Culture - Peter Probst
Ernst Vatter: A Forgotten Pioneer of Art Ethnology - Karl-Heinz Kohl
The Anthropologist as Critic: Claude Lévi-Strauss - Boris Wiseman
René d'Harnoncourt, Twentieth-Century Cultural Broker: Bridging Art
History and Anthropology through the Display of Indigenous Art - Nancy
Lutkehaus
Outside and Inside Art History: Anthropologists, Art Historians, Curators,
and the Recognition of Aboriginal Art - Howard Morphy
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index
