Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek / Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art, vol. 77, 2027.

Drawing Matters: The Lives of Netherlandish Works on Paper

CALL FOR PAPERS

Drawings were at the center of artistic education and production in the Low Countries. As they were important tools for artistic training, artists developed preparatory designs for works of art in a range of media such as paintings, stained glass, tapestry series, and prints. With the burgeoning market for drawings in the sixteenth century, drawings could also be expressions of the imagination and creative authorship: Northern artists invented new compositions on paper and created stand-alone works intended to rival paintings for a new audience of collectors and connoisseurs. The patronage, collecting, and afterlife of drawings are rarely documented in the early modern period, but surviving examples offer insights into the broader social and cultural significance of drawings beyond the artist’s workshop. From the seventeenth century on, collections of drawings became increasingly common, ranging from the comprehensive collections of Eberhard Jabach and the Parisian dealer Pierre-Jean Mariette to smaller middle-class collectors of the nineteenth century. While Frits Lugt’s pioneering research into the history of collectors’ marks and sales was instrumental in the historical study of drawings collections, Belgian artists of the same era explored new practices of drawing as a foundation for symbolist and surrealist art. Drawing is often nested within multimedia or multidisciplinary practices in the work of contemporary artists such as Luc Tuymans, Carlijn Kingma, Marlene Dumas, and Iris Kensmil.

For the traveling artist, the portability and promptness of drawing offered a means to record, process, and often re-imagine new visual stimuli, whether drawing Rome’s antiquities, in the case of painters such as Maarten van Heemskerck, or as a means to mediate encounters with places and cultures beyond Europe’s borders, as preserved in objects like the sketchbooks of Albert Eckhout and Frans Post. In certain theoretical writings, Netherlandish drawing practice thus emerged in contradistinction to Italian conceptions of disegno, which encompassed both drawing and creative design. In seventeenth-century Netherlandish artistic theory, the rhetorical immediacy of drawing practices brought them into meaningful dialogue with a category of image produced naar het leven, or from life. This foundational association with seeming spontaneity as well as study and training shaped approaches to the medium throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawings produced inside and outside of newly founded applied arts schools helped Nieuwe Kunst designs reach across media, while in contemporary artistic practice drawing is primarily identified as praxis rather than fixed in form.

This volume seeks contributions that will advance our understanding of drawings from the Low Countries (present-day Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands), dating from the earliest examples made around 1430 to the present day. The field of drawings studies has changed considerably since 1987, when the NKJ published 40 detailed studies of Netherlandish drawing practices in honor of drawing scholar E.K.J. Reznicek (NKJ 38). Building on the recent critical mass of exhibitions, catalogs, workshops, and research projects dedicated to Netherlandish drawings, we are seeking contributions from across a wide range of methodologies and case studies that consider how and why drawings were made, how they were used and viewed by their contemporaries, and how they were collected, researched, and valued in the intervening centuries. Despite the continued popularity of exhibitions focused on drawings, there have been few dedicated scholarly volumes on drawings outside of exhibition catalogs and monographic studies of singular artists. Proposed contributions can address individual artists or specific case studies, or materials and techniques of drawing, especially how certain techniques intersect with function and use, or the relationship between drawings and other media. We encourage collaborations between curators, art historians, technical art historians, scientists, and conservators and welcome jointly authored essays.

The NKJ is dedicated to a particular theme each year and promotes innovative scholarship and articles that employ a diversity of approaches to the study of Netherlandish art in its wider context.
For more information, see: https://brill.com/view/serial/NKJ.
Contributions to the NKJ are limited to a maximum of 7,500 words, excluding notes and bibliography. Following a peer review process and receipt of the complete text, the editorial board will make a final decision on the acceptance of a paper.

Please send a 500-word proposal and a short CV to all volume editors by 20 January 2025:
Olenka Horbatsch, ohorbatschbritishmuseum.org
Stephanie Porras, sporrastulane.edu
Edward Wouk, edward.woukmanchester.ac.uk

Schedule:
20 January 2025: Deadline for submission of abstracts
February 2025: Notifications about abstracts
1 November 2025: Submission of full articles for peer review
January 2026: Decision on acceptance based on peer reviews
1 July 2026: Deadline revised articles
1 September 2026: Final articles, including illustrations & copyrights
Early 2027: Publication