Panel 5
The Pasts of the Past
Panel Chair - Dr. Gauvin Bailey, Queen’s University
Saturday, February 10, 2024
11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. EST
Material Reconstruction: Ecologies of Metal in a Photograph of Disabled Union Veterans
Colton Klein, History of Art, Yale University
In September 1887, eighteen disabled Union veterans of the American Civil War posed for a studio photograph in St. Louis, Missouri. A caption beneath the resulting albumen silver print identifies each sitter including Ernst Timme, who lost his left arm nearly twenty-five years earlier at the Battle of Chickamauga in southeastern Tennessee. By conceiving of this photograph first as an object and then as an image, this paper follows the medium’s matter-flow to reveal the submerged perspectives of its materials. An attentiveness to the photograph’s underpinning in the silver mining industry points to related ecological networks of extraction embodied in the bronze badges worn by these Union veterans. Recast from Confederate cannons captured at the Battle of Chickamauga, these badges are composed of extracted copper forged by enslaved labor into the weapons that disabled Union soldiers like Timme. Building on recent studies in the environmental humanities, this paper applies intersectional ecologies of metal to mine the photograph’s shadow histories of extractive and racialized labor, human and nonhuman violence, and disability. What did the matter-flow of these materials communicate for those pictured? Did they serve as tangible symbols of the southern landscapes and natural resources implicated in their disability? Did they idealistically anticipate the yet-to-be-achieved political union between North and South in the post-Reconstruction era? This paper argues for the timeliness of such ecologies of metal in response to contemporary ‘events of liquidation,’ such as the recasting of Charlottesville’s 1924 bronze monument to Robert E. Lee on October 21, 2023.
Colton Klein is a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow in the Environmental Humanities at Yale University, where he studies the visual culture of the United States. He previously worked as a curatorial assistant in prewar art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
New History Painting: Georges Braque’s Still Lifes and French Historical Culture, 1815-1914
Melanie Buteau-Delatolla, Art History, Queen’s University
My research explores the meaning of Georges Braque’s Cubist still life paintings in the context of nineteenth and early twentieth century French historical culture. As leaders of what Friedrich Nietzsche claimed was the “mighty historical age,” French intellectuals and historians during this period were instrumental in evolving Europe’s sweeping historicist tradition into a major historical revolution. As culturally significant as the French revolution itself, the French historical revolution transformed historical consciousness by democratizing history. Referred to as new history, or in contemporary terms, social history, this revolutionary historical practice was a direct challenge to traditional history and sought to topple antiquated notions of historical providence, great men and grand narratives by reconstructing the past from the “bottom up” rather than the “top down.” In contrast to traditional history, new history was deeply skeptical towards notions of progress, and rejected politics as its subject matter. Moreover, it repudiated the use of official, institutional records as sources of history. Instead, new history proposed that history was relative, accidental, and should centre on uncovering and analyzing social forces, problems, structures and psychologies through the use of common historical sources related to everyday life and experiences. In its most extreme form, new history served as an absolute inversion of traditional history, replacing the role of a central figure, or figures, in a political narrative with not just a populist history of everyday life, but a populist history for everyday life.
By situating Georges Braque’s still lifes within the cultural context of the French historical revolution, I aim to ask if Cubist still life, and more broadly French modernist still life, came to represent a new mode of history painting adhering to French new history? In asking this question, I aim to explore if, in response to French historical culture, French still life painters eroded dogmatic hierarchical delineations between painting genres and collapsed the academic order? And if so, did they follow French historical revolutionaries in trying to democratize history painting by representing history through the genre of still life, which was better suited to represent populist, “bottom up” historical practices? In line with these inquiries, I also aim to challenge the assumption that history painting disappeared due to the advent of modernism. On the contrary, I will argue that history painting re-emerged as Cubist and French modernist still life and is central to understanding modernism itself.
Melanie Buteau-Delatolla is a PhD candidate in art history at Queen’s University. Her area of interest is French modernism and nineteenth and early twentieth century French historical culture. She is currently completing a dissertation on Georges Braque’s Cubist still lifes and the French historical revolution. Her work proposes that Braque’s still lifes express historical thoughts and practices attributable to the new history that emerged in France between 1815-1914.
Notions of Present and Past in Giambattista Tiepolo’s Renaissance-Revival
Torsten Korte, Art and Architectural History, FHNW Basel / University of Bern
Giambattista Tiepolo was one of the most successful painters in 18th-century Europe, his works serving the political representation of the elites in Venice, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. His paintings express ideas of history in which clothing plays a special role in the visualisation of temporality. The painterly depiction of elaborate costumes and luxurious fabrics is an essential part of his aesthetics. On the one hand, Tiepolo drew on iconographic traditions when he depicted antique subjects that had found their way into the canon of European painting since the Renaissance. On the other hand, Tiepolo also characterised a new view of recent history by evoking the period of the 16th and early 17th centuries in history paintings.
Renaissance fashions, which Tiepolo copied in detail from older sources and subtly adapted to the taste of the 18th century, served him as a vehicle for visualising a glorious Venetian past, which was to be placed on an equal footing with Roman antiquity. In this way, the Cleopatra frescoes of the Palazzo Labia in Venice serve the mythologization of a distinct Venetian identity by combining a nostalgic view of the Renaissance with elements of Venetian Orientalism. For his German patrons, Tiepolo used painted Renaissance fashions to combine local patriotic claims to identity with colonial European world views. In the frescoes of the Würzburg Residence, ideas of civilisation are negotiated with the help of depictions, which are representative of an early modern understanding of clothing as a cultural achievement and an expression of historical progress. In Tiepolo’s pictorial worlds, various historical references to antiquity, the early modern period and the present of the 18th century are superimposed, so that they represent complex interpretations and appropriations of history for contemporary political strategies of representation.
Drawing on central works by Tiepolo, the paper will conclude with theoretical reflections on the function and significance of depictions of clothing in visual media, which will also include a critical examination of the current art historical perspective on depictions of history.
Torsten Korte is a research assistant at the FHNW Basel and a lecturer in art and architectural history at the University of Bern. He received his doctorate in 2021 with a thesis on Giambattista Tiepolo's depictions of dress and historical constructions at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was a scholarship holder of the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the Centro tedesco di studi veneziani in Venice. Torsten has held teaching positions at the Ruhr University Bochum, AMD Hamburg and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, his research focusses on early modern dress history, the history of architecture and art in Italy and Venice, and the architectural history of Switzerland.