10)

Call For Papers:

Association of Art Historians Conference 2010
University of Glasgow
15 - 17 APRIL 2010

Charlotte Ashby, Birkbeck College, University of London
Sabine Wieber, Roehampton University, London

Re-Assessing National Romanticism

"Until this powerful movement is recognized and demystified, we
will not fully understand the intellectual and cultural climate of
turn-of-the-century Europe."
Michelle Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish
Art of the 1890s, Berkley and Los Angeles, 1998, 2-3.

Although linked to the re-evaluation of the legacy of Art Nouveau
in the 1960s and 1970s, the term National Romanticism came into
wider art historical use in the 1980s and 1990s in relation to
growing interest in the cultures of the so-called 'peripheral'
nations of Europe; first in the Nordic region and then the
post-Eastern Bloc countries. In this context, National Romanticism
facilitated the integration of these new regions into the sphere of
Western art history, but its continued currency can now be seen to
limit the scope of understanding of these cultures in a larger
pan-European context. This session intends to provide an
international platform for a critical re-assessment of National
Romanticism that challenges some of the art historical assumptions
and expectations called up by this term. At the turn of the last
century, artists and designers crossed boundaries between
disciplines and between social, political and aesthetic concerns,
making it difficult to maintain ideological and formal categories
and posing a real challenge to the historian of this period. And
yet, the works and objects understood as National Romantic and
their relationship to the wider culture of the period offer an
intriguing challenge to the lingering influence of a Modernist
emphasis on a linear, progressive reading of history.

Deadline for proposals, with a copy to both convenors:
9 November 2009

Further details of the conference can be found at www.aah.org.uk