The Implications of Analytic Philosophy of History for the Practicing Historian

An article by John O'Hagan and Elish Kelly in 2005 (see Historical Methods 38:118-25) discussed collecting information on visual artists that would allow a broad historical ranking based on "prominence." O'Hagan and Kelly collected these data to examine prominent artists' birth locations, work locations, and their consequential patterns of labor movement during several long periods. In this article, the authors examine artists' migration for four periods (based on their date of birth): Renaissance Italy, Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the Western world in general for the periods 1850-99 and 1900-49. The data show that important artists clustered in all periods at a remarkably high level. Florence and Rome dominated in Renaissance Italy, with significant clustering because of the artists' birthplaces and domestic migration. Paris and London witnessed a marked clustering of artists born in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Paris continuing to dominate among artists born in the second half of the nineteenth century. Artists born in the first half of the twentieth century clustered in New York City, with all prominent American artists clustering there.     

The Question of Identity vis-à-vis Exoticism in Contemporary Iranian Art

This essay explores two primary concerns in the art and artistic practice of contemporary Iran, namely “identity” (i.e. local, historical, imagined and collective identity and also self-identity) and “exoticism” (which appears inevitably related to the first), both of which (identity and exoticism) involve challenges relating to the “self” and “other” and the issue of “expectation”. It suggests that these issues see broader contextual socio-political parallels. The first apprehension relates to the concept of identity which addresses how artists have interpreted contemporary aesthetics in the light of national and indigenous ideology. The second refers to the ever-present obsession with cultural and frequently social concern with which Iranian artists are engaged within the country. The two concerns are integrated, in the way that the second is seen to be the outcome of the first. Some critiques are based on the issues of cultural commodification, anti-canonical West, cultural formulation, and also the stereotypes rooted in the preference and interest of the market.     

Determining the Accuracy of Historical Landscape Paintings

Historical landscape paintings are widely used to reconstruct past environments. However, artists did not necessarily fully depict reality, many exercising license to relocate and remould features. This paper applies photogrammetric techniques to the problem of determining the accuracy of artistic depictions of landscapes. Four 19th century paintings of Hobart, Tasmania, Australia by different artists were used to test the methods. The artists varied in their accuracy, with Frankland, the surveyor, being the most accurate, and Glover, the romantic professional artist, being the least accurate. This variation suggests that the use of paintings for historical reconstructions and measurements of historic features should be preceded by an accuracy assessment.     

The Image of the Sámi in Finnish Visual Arts before the Second World War

Abstract

This article examines how Finnish artists depicted the Sámi people in their paintings from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the first paintings that represented the Sámi, the attitude was very romantic and artists were not interested in knowing the Sámi culture or even in encountering the Sámi people. In the nineteenth century, nationalism required building an image of the Finns, thus most Finnish artists were not interested in the Sámi. The French philosopher Hippolyte Taine's writings influenced the young artist Juho Kyyhkynen, who started to depict the Sámi culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, Sámi were thought to be primitive or Mongolian, so Finnish artists painted relatively few portraits of Sámi. All this time it was only Finnish painters who depicted the Sámi, as the voice and ideas of the Sámi themselves did not become prominent in Finland until the 1970s.     

明代宫廷画家职官状况述略

明代宫廷画家的官职、称谓不一,任职混杂,史料记载零散、简略,给宫廷画家身份的辨认造成一定的困难。从宫廷内部管理状况来看,画家的官职多样且分散,涉及多个职官体系,官职中有相当一部分为虚职,在具体管理方面权归内廷太监。本文力图从明代职官体系和内廷隶属等方面切入,区分辨别宫廷画家的官职与称谓,从而进一步认识明代宫廷画家的身份定位,了解明代宫廷绘画创作的运作状况。     

西风吹拂下的晚清民国艺术

晚清民国,中国艺术处于前所未有的历史转型时期。这一时期的艺术是西风吹拂下的艺术,是中西杂陈、新旧交并的艺术,西方艺术的写实主义被引入作为革新旧艺术的利器。20世纪中叶由于社会原因,中国艺术又从写实主义过渡到现实主义。处于这一时期的艺术家,关注社会,心系国家,把艺术革新跟社会革新、跟国家的命运紧密联系起来。而这一切,都是因为"内外交困",这一切也都是因为"内外交合"。     

改革开放以来农村改革的历程与经验

实行农村经济体制改革,是我们党在新的时代条件下坚持以马克思主义为指导、结合中国不断发展变化的实际进行的理论创新和新的伟大革命。实践证明,农村实行以家庭联产承包责任制为基础的双层经营体制,是我们党在改革的实践中寻找到的既符合客观规律又符合中国国情的发展之路。为此,梳理、分析我国农村改革与发展的历程,探索和研究其历史经验,把握其发展规律,这对于推进中国特色社会主义事业和全面实现小康目标具有十分重要的理论和实践意义。     

Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

ABSTRACT

In pursuit of a novel perspective on legacies of empire in the present, this introduction addresses prominent debates related to post-imperialism, collective memory, and the construction of historical knowledge, while also reviewing recent trends in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman studies. First, I examine the insights and limitations of ‘memory studies,’ ultimately proposing a more capacious model of post-imperial ‘ambivalence.’ I then recapitulate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to historical knowledge in order to anchor the signal conceptual contribution of the volume, ‘textured historicity.’ This discussion is followed by a meditation on the role of metaphors in conceptualizing post-imperial legacies and a roster of the most common metaphors for post-imperial legacies. Finally, the introduction briefly summarizes the volume’s constituent essays and the rubrics that unite them.     

Recent archaeological research in the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada

The Northeast is comprised of interior and coastal areas that were historically occupied by Iroquoians and Algonquians respectively. This brief review sets aside most Euroamerican historical archaeology and developments prior to A.D. 900 to concentrate on recent research that has dominated regional attention and is most likely to be of interest to archaeologists working elsewhere. The review argues that while Iroquoian archaeologists often work with or against broad controlling models of long standing, archaeologists in the Maritimes and New England more often focus on technical problems that are relevant to shared interests in broad topical issues. The contrast relates to both differences in the their databases and differences in how archaeological research is conceived.     

Biogeographical Regionalization,its Stages and Criteria

A historical approach to biogeographical regionalization is proposed. The approach is based on the assumption that the highest ranking hierarchical units in such a regionalization represent the oldest biogeographical regions, with the more detailed taxonomic units formed in subsequent historical periods. The regionalization process involves three stages: (a) faunistic-floristic investigation of the study area; (b) the identification of habitats of species that more or less coincide; (c) a determination whether the distribution of these characteristic species displays a cause-and-effect relationship with the geographical environment. The historical criterion is emphasized throughout, the regions are viewed as the product of the historical differentiation of a physical-geographic territory.     

Female artistic identity in place: the studio

In this paper I examine the role of the studio as a central site of artistic identity construction and maintenance. Using ten case studies drawn from interviews with contemporary women visual artists from Toronto, Canada, I argue that women artists value studio space because it powerfully reinforces their sense of commitment and belonging to a predominantly male‐dominated profession. I consider how women cope with the demands of artistic practice when they are unable to establish a spatially separate workspace by addressing the experiences of artists who are parents. I demonstrate how women artists who are primary care‐givers are rarely adequately protected from the interruptions of daily life and have grown accustomed to working in fragments of time and space. While these women may appear willing to concede space to others, when space is crucial to their artistic practice, they have a remarkably strong influence on the form of their creative environment. I maintain, then, that the studio as a fixed physical space continues to be a very real necessity for women artists in all stages of their careers.     

Why are artists getting poorer? About the reproduction of low income among artists

In the period 2006 to 2013, Norway has experienced a substantial increase in public subsidies to culture as well as a substantial increase in real income growth in general. This paper discusses different explanations for why Norwegian artists’ real artistic income has declined between 2006 and 2013, despite the positive economic development in Norway. We have based the study in particular on two comparable studies on the income and work situation of Norwegian artists in 2006 and 2013. We analyse and discuss why the artists’ real artistic income has declined during this period. We do not find a single, general, explanation for this, but the income decline does not primarily seem to be due to either an increasing number of artists or a decline in public scholarships to artists. Our two most striking findings are: (i) A substantial decline in most artists’ artistic working hours and a corresponding increase in artistically related and non-artistic working hours, and (ii) a tendency for artists to derive less of their income from the market, together with an apparent decrease in cultural consumption (spending) among Norwegians. These two factors – especially the latter – seem to be the major factors behind the decline in artistic income.     

Communism and Museums in Bulgaria

Despite the growing interest in Eastern European countries since the fall of the communist regimes in the late 1980s, they still remain obscure to Western Europeans. Media information on Eastern Europe focuses mainly on politics or the attractions of holiday resorts and, consequently, the history and local customs of the countries, their cultural affairs and different cultural institutions are little known. This paper describes the way Bulgarian museums developed during the governance of the Bulgarian Communist Party (1946–1989). It is hoped that revealing information on their operations within a broad historical and social context will lead to a better understanding of the country’s cultural affairs at a time when Bulgaria has become the latest member of the European Union. The findings are a result of PhD research.     

Scenarios of Poiesis: Italian New Media (1994–2004)

This essay attempts to read a number of interventions in Italian new media over the last decade as both a response to and an implicit critique of posthumanism. After a brief discussion of the principal terms in question—new media, interaction, and posthumanism—and a survey of the most important contributors to the discourse of posthumanism in Italy, the essay maps the principal features of Italian media as embodied by the works of three contemporary new media artists. These characteristics include the privileging of a prosthetic model for understanding interaction and more generally the staging of interaction as moments of poiesis. They also include more recently the cancellation of the boundaries between ‘scientific’ and cultural images. The essay insists that by foregrounding the primacy of Italian cultural patterns for determining how meaning is generated in new media, Italian new media artists implicitly critique a reifying tendency among posthuman observers in Italy. The essay concludes with a broad assessment of the importance of poiesis for an Italian technological imaginary.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

北朝佛传雕刻所见佛教美术的东方化过程——以诞生前后的场面为中心

本稿着眼于北朝佛传雕刻的托胎灵梦、树下诞生、七步、灌水四个场面,论述了佛传图由西北印度经新疆,向中原北方传播期间呈现的东方化过程。北魏中期的佛传图以吸收西方因素为特征,诸佛传场面的表现大体可以在犍陀罗雕刻中找到祖形,克孜尔石窟壁画反映了佛传图在新疆初步东方化,传播到中原北方以后东方化程度加深。北魏晚期及其以降,佛传图在北魏中期基础上适应汉文化环境进一步东方化。     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.     

政治与法律的良性互动——英国法治道路成功的根本原因

政治和法律既相辅相成,又相反相克。二者关系结构的不同,直接影响着甚至决定着一个国家的法治文明进程。英国的法治道路是一条较为顺畅的成功之路,其成功的根本原因在于政治与法律之间建立和保持了一种良性互动关系。16世纪以前,适度强大的政治权威促成了英国法治传统的生成以及自治型、制度化普通法体系的建立和衡平法的产生。16～17世纪,借助于普通法制度积极有效的制衡作用,英国有幸绕过了绝对专制统治的历史弯路,先于其他各国跨入了现代法治社会。认真总结英国法治经验,对于当前我国的法治建设事业无疑是大有裨益的。