[1] Sound and Silence: Soundscapes, Noise, Music, and Quiet Pauses in Dutch & Flemish Art.

From: Ashley West
Date: Jul 24, 2023
Deadline: Sep 29, 2023

Co-Chairs: Ashley D. West, Temple University; Jessica Sternbach, PhD candidate, Temple University

As Niall Atkinson has reminded us, sound is a social structure that can illuminate the presence or fluidity of boundaries among genders, social classes, belief systems, spaces for labor and leisure. Certainly, music and noise were fundamental to the organization of daily life in the early modern period. Streets were filled with the sounds of daily life and casual performance, which faced increasing scrutiny as urbanization intensified. Music, in particular, occupied a complicated place in a predominantly Dutch Calvinist society, where certain kinds of music could be viewed as indulgences in the vita voluptuosa. Yet musical education was widely accepted in upper middle-class society, and moralizing and scriptural mottoes were often inscribed on musical instruments and within painted music scenes prevalent in the second half of the 17th century.

We seek papers that consider the ways in which the visual realm invoked the auditory, not simply through music, but through other sounds, noises, and soundscapes across Dutch and Flemish media and culture. Recently, innovative exhibitions, such as “Fleeting—Scents in Colour” at the Mauritshuis and “Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure” at the National Gallery, have explored more deeply the intersensorial possibilities of Dutch paintings relating to the invocation of smells and sounds. This conference session proposes a focused examination of sonic aspects of Dutch and Flemish paintings, prints, and other media to recognize these intersensorial and affective qualities. How do ‘representations’ of sound stimulate different affective or embodied responses in the viewer, and for what claims to art? In the case of accessibility scholarship, how might people with disabilities have responded to, or even created, representations of aural sensations or sensory perceptions? What is the role of gender identity and gendered spaces in various sound imagery? We also seek contributions that consider the work done by the absence of sound and the poignancy of silences in visual representation, responding to Hanneke Grootenboer’s notion of “the pensive image” as an introspective framework for an intersensorial approach.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and 1-page abbreviated CV to Ashley D. West (ashley.westtemple.edu) and Jessica Sternbach (jessica.sara.sternbachtemple.edu) by September 29, 2023, for consideration. Contributors must be members in good standing of HNA.

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[2] The 'inventions' of early Netherlandish painting: thirty years since Hans Belting and Christiane Kruse's Die Erfindung des Gemaeldes: Das erste Jahrhundert der niederlaendischen Malerei (1994)

From: Niko Munz
Date: Jul 26, 2023
Deadline: Sep 29, 2023

Session organizers: Niko Munz (Freie Universität Berlin); Sumihiro Oki (University of Amsterdam); Virginia Girard (Columbia University)

Art history lost a great mind this year with the death of Hans Belting. Our session is dedicated to Die Erfindung des Gemäldes, his landmark study on early Netherlandish painting (Belting contributed the essays; Kruse compiled the catalogue). At its publication, the book opened Northern Renaissance studies to numerous concerns: reception theory, phenomenology, the history of social autonomy, and mediology. The session will reflect on the diverse significances the book held for the field and the discipline at large – 2024 marking thirty years since publication.

A 'phenomenology of the Gemälde', Die Erfindung formed a pivotal moment in Belting’s theory of images, mid-way between Bild und Kult (1990) and Bild-Anthropologie (2001). Early Netherlandish painting, the book claims, invented the modern ‘picture’ as we know it. The new medium’s representational flexibilities mirrored an ever-increasing array of possible subjectivities brought by contemporary viewers. The collectible tableau went on, says Belting, to ‘invent’ our modern concept of art.

We call for papers broadly centred around the topic of early Netherlandish painting and its powers of ‘invention’ – Die Erfindung’s central thesis. Regarding these innovations, the book contains three main areas of interpretative focus, all still vital to the discipline today. First, intersubjective aspects: the early Netherlandish tableau’s inventive forms of relational address enabled new kinds of self-reflection for viewers. Belting’s sensitivities regarding artworks’ locations and original viewing conditions continue to encourage more phenomenological analyses. Second, his revision of the social significance of early Netherlandish painting: elaborating on previous work in this area, Belting understood the advanced ‘realisms’ of early Netherlandish painting in terms of class struggles. The physiognomic portrait, for instance, was a novel form of self-representation shaped by direct competition with traditional aristocratic-heraldic modes. The early modern picture functioned as a mirror of society only once patrons and artists admitted the visible world into their commissions. Third, mediology: the modern tableau emerged from a cross-media paragone extending well beyond standard artforms – from metalwork and sculpture to windows and mirrors – and providing a 'painted anthropology of the gaze'. Belting’s hypotheses eventually shaped Bild-Anthropologie’s central chapter, which understood the early painted portrait as a kind of 'second body'. This idea continues to have a profound impact across visual culture scholarship.

We also seek papers that call the book’s conclusions about ‘invention’ into question, or offer alternative views. Perhaps Die Erfindung overlooked the importance of Italian painting for the tableau’s development. Some of its class-based arguments have also been supplemented by more sociologically nuanced interpretations of so-called ‘bourgeois realism’. And the rise of technical art history has introduced new perspectives.

But Belting and Kruse’s book is notable from a historiographic viewpoint too. Curiously, it may have had more impact outside the early Netherlandish field than within it. Today, the early Netherlandish scholarly centre of gravity is weighted towards exhibitions and traditional museum-style catalogues. Die Erfindung was possibly the last attempt to provide a synthetic account of ‘early Netherlandish painting’ as a single phenomenon. No one has since taken up that particular challenge. And so, where next for early Netherlandish studies?

Please send an abstract of max. 500 words and a one-page CV to beltingsinventionsgmail.com by 29 September 2023. All speakers are expected to be members of HNA by the time of the conference.

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[3] What is Anglo-Dutchness?

From: Ulrike Kern
Date: 27.07.2023
Eingabeschluss: 29.09.2023

Organiser: Ulrike Kern

A category of an ‘Anglo-Dutch school’ was introduced in the 1920s as a classifying help to describe artists of Dutch origin or training who were active in Britain. This includes artists known by name and unknown artists. Especially with regard to unknown artists the label ‘Anglo-Dutch school’ has been used as an auxiliary term to make an unspecific attribution on the grounds of stylistic or technical indications, mainly of early modern paintings. Because of the immigration movements of Netherlandish artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Britain has a considerable amount of artists who have received this labelling which is singular in European art history.

Each of the phrase’s components, of course, has to be questioned and has been questioned: ‘English’ for being exclusive of any other part of Britain, ‘Dutch’ for not including the southern provinces which were part of the Netherlands in early modern times, and ‘school’ for being related to nebulous ideas of artistic influence. In this session, the concept is to be understood in terms of a ‘historical turn’, with an awareness of the historical authenticity of what has been called ‘constructed equivalences’. What exactly the concept helped to construct seems to vary, given that the first British collection of artists’ biographies in the eighteenth century considered artists with Netherlandish roots as ‘English’, while in the early twentieth century Charles Henry Collins Baker made an attempt to separate an English and a Dutch ‘school’, as well as Scottish characteristics, with the help of establishing more or less doubtful indicators of style, technique and national temperament. Horst Gerson’s attempt to trace the impact of Dutch and Flemish painters in England is a different way to separate and merge styles, techniques and places.

This session aims to engage in issues of cultural identity between Britain and the Netherlands and what has been characterised as a way towards a ‘geography of art’ by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. What is so English (or British) and what so Dutch (or Netherlandish) about Anglo-Dutchness? Are these categories reflective of the exchanges of artistic ideas, traditions and materials? Proposals may include, but are not limited to:

- movements of painters and/or their works between Britain and the Netherlands
- critical engagement with questions of artistic identity, including ‘cultural’, ‘national’, ‘regional’, or ‘ethnic identity’
- discourse of artistic regions
- techniques, media and material
- dissemination of artistic forms, styles and ideas
- impacts of patronage
- painterly genres and their places
- associations of art works/art forms and particular regions or cities
- urban and local factors
- effects of British-Netherlandish exchanges in the British Isles, continental Europe, or the colonies
- issues of identity and gender
- comparative cases

Please provide a proposal (about 500 words), and a CV (one page) by Friday September 29th to: kernkunst.uni-frankfurt.de

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[4] Visual Sovereignty in Early Modern Indigenous and Dutch Histories

From: Caroline Fowler
Date: Jul 28, 2023
Deadline: Sep 15, 2023

The first Two Row Wampum Treaty, also known as the Tawagonshi Agreement of 1613, was between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch government. It is the basis on which all later treaties between Europeans and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy are based. Although the original treaty no longer exists, the oral history and the continuing production of Two Row Wampum Treaties convey two lines running parallel to one another, representing the agreement between the two nations as “separate but equal,” and assuring mutual freedom of movement. On the 400th anniversary of the treaty in 2013, representatives from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy travelled to Manhattan to meet with the Dutch Consul after thirteen days of journeying along the Hudson River to raise awareness around land rights. The Dutch Consul General and members of the Haudenosaunee each held an end of a Two Row Wampum Treaty to demonstrate their solidarity in seeking not only Indigenous land rights but also environmental awareness around pollution of the Hudson River.

Despite its historical and visual importance in histories of Indigenous and North American art and its ongoing relevance to contemporary society, the Two Row Wampum Treaty as an example of seventeenth-century visual culture is rarely taught in surveys of Dutch art. This is not surprising as it is central to histories of North America, and the impact and influence of the Dutch in North America remains contested in terms of its visual history. There was no Frans Post documenting the landscape, and Dutch visual production is often traced to resonances in architecture, urban design, furniture, and maps, fugitive sites of the Dutch presence in North America that are not easily incorporated into histories of Dutch art. Yet as the Two Row Wampum Treaty suggests, there is a long and enduring history of the Dutch in North America, and particularly within visual sources and histories that have historically been overlooked in art history. This panel seeks to interrogate the visual legacies of interactions between North American Indigenous histories and Dutch visual production. Although the Two Row Wampum Treaty is a particularly visible example, there are many artefacts and works in the archives of Dutch and Indigenous art that testify to an ongoing complicated relationship between Indigenous Nations in North America and the Dutch Republic. Although the Dutch famously sold Manhattan to the English, the impact of their policies, trade, wars, and exhibition practice are central to histories of North America, land dispossession, and genocide. This panel seeks to grapple with the visual legacy of the Dutch in North America, particularly around questions of land use, dispossession, and Indigenous history.

Please send a 500-word abstract and one-page to cfowlerclarkart.edu