Frictions and friendships. Cultural encounters in the nineteenth century

The exhibition "The Dutch in Paris", which was on show in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and in the Petit Palais, Paris during the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018 respectively, aimed to visualize the artistic exchange between Dutch and French artists between 1789 and 1914. As part of a larger research project, set up by the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, the exhibition generated so much response that ESNA, in collaboration with the RKD and NWO, decided to organize an international conference on the subject, focusing specifically on international as well as national and local points of encounter and how they facilitated artistic exchange.

Vincent van Gogh wrote in 1883: ‘I would certainly very much like to spend some time in Paris, because I believe I would get the friction [in Dutch: ‘wrijving’] with artists that I’ll have to have at some point’. Van Gogh used the word ‘friction’ in a positive sense, as an encounter in which he could learn and develop his ideas and his art. Peter Burke defined encounters as information and objects that flow in different directions, even if unequally. He noted that ‘Ideas, information, artefacts and practices are not simply adopted but on the contrary, are adapted to their new cultural environment. They are first decontextualized and then recontextualized, domesticated or localized. In short, they are translated’.

Burke, however, does not address the strategy and process of encounters. In his quest for friction, Van Gogh sought the utopia of a shared workspace but ended up with broken friendships. Frictions and encounters can abrade and chafe but can nevertheless lead to artistic exchange. The various processes involved in the realization of artistic exchange might have friendship at their base but can just as easily be born out of more antagonistic points of view. This paradox, which can be tested through, for example, theories of friendship, hospitality, solidarity, communication, and productive conflict, among others, is what we want to explore during the conference.

PROGRAMME

Day 1 – Wednesday 19 June

10.00: REGISTRATION / COFFEE & TEA

10.30: Welcome by Mayken Jonkman (RKD)

11.00: SESSION 1. Locations

“The Alsen Villa Colony outside of Berlin and the exclusiveness of an upper-class cultural exchange”
– Sabrina Flörke (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg)

“All About Vacations: The Feverishly Lazy Sociability of Tourists and Artists in Nice/Nice during the Long Nineteenth Century”
– Sergio Pace (Politecnico di Torino)

“Old Faces in New Places: Leopold Carl Müller and Friends in Cairo”
– Marsha Morton (Pratt Institute)

12.30: LUNCH

13.30: KEYNOTE LECTURE – Agostina Segatori and the immigrant Italian models of Paris – Susan Waller

14.15: SESSION 2. Artistic encounters

“Carl Steffeck and the Painter’s studio – A place of friendship or rivalry?”
– Stéphanie Baumewerd (Technische Universität Berlin)

“The female model-artist collaboration: Julia Margaret Cameron’s and Mary Ryan’s “friendship” in the Victorian Art world”
– Tamar Hagar (Tel Hai College)

“The Making of “Spanish” Painting in Manet’s Paris”
– Daniel Ralston (Columbia University)

“The Naked Soul: Munch-Przybyszewski-Weiss”
– Irena Kossowska (Nicolaus Copernicus University)

16.00: COFFEE & TEA BREAK

16.30: KEYNOTE LECTURE – Ways to success: Exhibition Strategies of Foreign Artists in Paris (1884-1914) – Maite van Dijk (Van Gogh Museum)

17.15: DRINKS

Day 2 – Thursday 20 June

9.30: Introduction on day 2

9.45: KEYNOTE LECTURE – Lost in translation. The significance of productive frictions and misunderstanding for the arts – France Nerlich (INHA)

10.30: SESSION 3. Mythe versus Reality

“From Printmaking to Portraiture: The Negotiation of Dutch Golden Age Heritage in the Work of Félicien Rops”
– Hannah Rose Blakeley (Princeton University)

“In the wake of the old masters: Anglo-Dutch encounters in Romantic Britain”
– Quirine van der Meer Mohr (Dordrechts Museum)

““Adieu la Grèce où j’ai éprouvé tant de déceptions” – Pierre-Jean David d’Angers’ encounter of Greece in 1852”
– Ekaterini Kepetzis (University of Cologne)

“Points of Encounter: Ivan Kramskoi between Petersburg and Paris in the 1870s”
– Allison Leigh (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

12.15: LUNCH

13.30: Intermezzo

14.00: SESSION 4. Exhibitions, part I

“Hosting the Avant-garde in Barcelona in the 1910s”
– Isabel Valverde (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

“Ask the people! Exhibitions on public works in Ghent during the first half of the 19th century”
– Pieter-Jan Cierkens (Ghent University)

15.00: COFFEE & TEA BREAK

15.30: SESSION 4. Exhibitions, part II

““For the Boers with heart and soul”: a strategy of encounter and its effects at the World’s Fair in St. Louis of 1904”
– Julia Krikke (University of Amsterdam)

“‘Durch das Andere zum Eigenen’ The receptivity to contemporary art from Western Europe in Vienna around 1900”
– Lisa Smit (Van Gogh Museum)

16.30: Discussion and closing remarks

17.00: END