RIHA Journal
(ed. International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art)

Founded in 2010, RIHA Journal is the peer-reviewed and open access e-journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art (RIHA). Devoted to the full range of the history of art and visual culture, RIHA Journal seeks to share materials and knowledge issued by scholars of all nationalities, and by doing so, to make a significant contribution to dissolving the boundaries between scholarly communities.

New articles are online at www.riha-journal.org:


Katalin Marótzy and Márton Székely:
THE RESTRICTED DESIGN COMPETITION FOR THE NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY BUILDING IN BUDAPEST. A LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY INTERNATIONAL DESIGN COMPETITION IN CENTRAL EUROPE
(RIHA Journal 0198)
Rapid industrialization and urbanization in Europe and the United States introduced new building types and new methods of construction, leading to important changes in the architectural landscape of major cities. Public and corporate construction proliferated, and design competitions were called upon to identify architectural projects that best suited the needs of a particular state institution or private company. Although initially these competitions were open to all members of the architectural profession, towards the end of the nineteenth century, their format changed to be more effective, with only a restricted number of architects competing for the commission. The present paper focuses on the competition for the New York Life Palace in Budapest and sheds light on its connections with the international trends.


Jennifer Cooke:
CIHA AS THE SUBJECT OF ART THEORY. THE METHODOLOGICAL DISCOURSE IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONGRESSES OF ART HISTORY FROM POST-WAR YEARS TO THE 2000s
(RIHA Journal 0199)
The title of this article recalls a session of the 2012 CIHA congress in Nuremberg – 'CIHA as the Object of Art History' – that analysed the role the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in the development of art history as a discipline. Only a few years earlier, Heinrich Dilly had drawn an overview of the International Congresses of Art History, together with specialists of other fields. Dilly explained the lack of interest of art historiography for the import of such conferences with the fact that they were 'too big a matter', as the papers had rapidly multiplied, and also 'very large a matter', in the sense that the debate was difficult to frame and, more often than not, the choice of participants depended on a political agenda rather than scientific reasons. This article thus endeavours to tackle this very large matter as a vantage point on the methodological reflection, in the attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the theoretical discourse insofar as discussed in CIHA meetings, from the Lisbon conference in 1949 to that held in Nuremberg in 2012.


Miguel Mesquita Duarte:
(DIS)FIGURATION OF MEMORY IN, AROUND, AND BEYOND GERHARD RICHTER'S ATLAS: BETWEEN PHOTOGRAPHY, ABSTRACTION, AND THE MNEMONIC CONSTRUCTION
(RIHA Journal 0200)
Gerhard Richter’s Atlas is a collection of photographs and sketches that the artist started to assemble in 1961. This article aims to demonstrate that Holocaust imagery plays a unique and irreplaceable function in Atlas, creating paths throughout the project and pointing towards some of Richter’s most important ideas and contexts within which his pictorial work comes into being. The article places particular emphasis on the photographs assembled in panels 807 and 808 of Atlas, which are the basis for Richter’s series of abstract paintings entitled Birkenau paintings, from 2014. The article argues the importance of this series, making a case for a different interpretation of Atlas’s dynamics, and pointing out alternative ways of addressing the tensions between photography and painting – and, in particular, figuration and abstraction – that pervade Richter’s practice. The themes concerning Richter’s position on photography and the role played by the medium in the pictorial exploration of the traumatic past are thoroughly discussed in the article, generating new insights into the concept of the historical image in the work of the German artist.


Marie Arleth Skov:
THE ART OF THE ENFANTS TERRIBLES: INFANTILISM AND DILETTANTISM IN PUNK ART
(RIHA Journal 0201)
Punk was visual as much as it was musical. In recent years, art historical research of punk works of art has increased. However, a thorough analysis of punk art's themes, motifs, and methods is still lacking. This article examines infantilism and dilettantism as two key notions within punk art, as illustrated by the collage L'ecole de l'art infantile (COUM Transmissions, 1974) and the super 8 film Das Leben des Sid Vicious (Die Tödliche Doris, 1981). Analysis shows how concepts of childishness, nonconformism and anti-authoritarianism are interconnected both with punk's DIY ethos and its self-identification as a youth movement. Furthermore, the article discusses punk art's circumvention of antithetical concepts, such as failure vs. success, innocence vs. guilt, reality vs. fantasy, skill vs. incompetence.


Carina Rech:
FRIENDSHIP IN REPRESENTATION. THE COLLABORATIVE PORTRAITS BY JEANNA BAUCK AND BERTHA WEGMANN
(RIHA Journal 0202)
Over a quarter-century, the Scandinavian artists Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann painted a series of portraits and interiors in which they commented upon their shared identity as women artists while migrating between the artistic centers of Munich, Paris, and Copenhagen. Drawing from feminist and performance theory, and concentrating on three paintings in which Bauck and Wegmann imagine one another as emerging professional artists by mediated self-representation, the paper discusses the two artists’ collaborative practices. The artists’ correspondence with their mutual friend and colleague Hildegard Thorell, kept in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, is presented here for the first time and provides important insights into their artistic companionship. This case study forms part of an ongoing dissertation project on Nordic women painters’ self-representations in the late nineteenth century.


Gytis Oržikauskas:
IRRATIONAL ARTISTIC IDEAS OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY AS AN INSPIRATION FOR THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE LATER 20th AND EARLY 21st CENTURIES
(RIHA Journal 0203)
By applying the methods of categorisation, comparison and analysis of written sources, this article aims to reveal how Surrealist artistic ideas may have influenced – through the intermediary of the Postmodern movement – architectural trends up to the present time. The paper is organized into three parts, each dedicated to one of the most important Surrealist architectural concepts: the synthesis of the arts, fluidity, and formalistic superficiality and spontaneity. Each section describes how these ideas were underlined in Surrealist art and theoretical texts, compares them to some examples of Postmodern and contemporary architecture, and explains how these ideas were nurtured from the time they emerged until the time they materialized in architectural design.


As a genuine e-journal, RIHA JOURNAL publishes continously. We keep you up to date with new articles by quarterly postings. Or you may subscribe to our RSS Feed (http://www.riha-journal.org/articles-rss/RSS) or follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/RIHAJournal).

RIHA JOURNAL welcomes submissions on any topic in the history of art and throughout the year, both from members of the RIHA institutes and from any other researchers in the history of art.

If you would like to submit an article, please contact our Local Editors at the worldwide RIHA Institutes (http://www.riha-journal.org/contact) or our Managing Editor at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich:

Dr. Andrea Lermer
Managing Editor RIHA Journal
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte
Katharina-von-Bora-Str. 10
D-80333 München
Tel 0049 (0)89 289 27588
Fax 0049 (0)89 289 27607

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