Conference | Rethinking British and European Romanticisms

Posted in conferences (to attend), on site by Editor on March 4, 2023

From ArtHist.net and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena:

Rethinking British and European Romanticisms in Transnational Dimensions
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Rosensäle, 28–30 March 2023

Organized by Elisabeth Ansel, Johannes Grave, Richard Johns, Christin Neubauer, and Elizabeth Prettejohn

Watercolor with a steamboat painted in the lower left-hand corner, and a blue storm moving across the center of the sheet toward the right.

J.M.W. Turner, A Paddle-steamer in a Storm, ca. 1841, watercolor, graphite, and scratching out on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1977.14.4717).

The workshop is a first-time cooperation between the History of Art Departments of the University of York and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Considering the institution’s main research areas, the event aims to discuss the different concepts of Europe present in the art and culture of Romanticism.

In recent years, national tendencies have challenged the European idea, exemplified by the wake of Brexit and its aftermath. In this context, the question arises to what extent European and national identity concepts can be reconciled. Today’s debate between Britain and Europe still roots in the divergent notions of national identity that manifested in several European countries in the 1800s. This workshop, therefore, addresses the relationship between visual images and constructions of nationality and questions how European Romanticism can be understood. In contrast to literary studies, investigating transnational transfer processes of Romantic movements has been a desideratum in art historical research. Considering transcultural methods, the participants will reflect national patterns of thought and Romantic identities not as fixed but as processual and hybrid phenomena within the framework of the binational exchange. Based on individual case studies, the event aims to reevaluate the complex interplay of alterity and reciprocity of the relations between cultural spaces. For questions or more information, please contact, europaeischeromantik@uni-jena.de.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)

T U E S D A Y , 2 8 M A R C H 2 0 2 3

9.00 Welcome and Introduction — Elisabeth Ansel and Christin Neubauer

9.30 Introductory Lecture
• Johannes Grave (Jena) — Romantic Temporalities

10.15 Early Romantic Relations
• Johannes Rößler (Jena) — Towards a Modern Theory of Illustration: August Wilhelm Schlegel on John Flaxman
• Tilman Schreiber (Jena) — Gavin Hamilton and the Aesthetics of Dilettantism

12.15 Transcultural Romanticism and Peripheries
• Helena Cox (York) — Bohemian Romanticism

13.00 Lunch

14.30 Transcultural Romanticism and Peripheries, continued
• Elisabeth Ansel (Jena) — Visual Ossianism: Artistic Circulations, Transculturality, and Romanticism
• Rhian Addison (York) — George Morland’s ‘Emblematic Palette’: The Afterlives of Self-Fashioning Landscape Artist
• Lars Zieke (Jena) — Becoming Watteau: Artistic Self-Definition and Painted Art Theory in Turner’s Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rules

17.15 Evening Lecture
• Richard Johns (York) — Art of the Living Dead

20.00 Dinner

W E D N E S D A Y , 2 9 M A R C H 2 0 2 3

9.15 Greeting

9.30 Aesthetic Discourses and Translation Processes
• Sonja Scherbaum (Jena) — ‘Great Beyond All Comparison’: The Sublime as a Comparative Aesthetic Experience
• Miguel Gaete Caceres (York) — The German Picturesque: Between a (British) Landscape Aesthetic Category, a Scientific Method, and a Racial Label

11.00 Coffee

11.30 Origins and Afterlives
• David Grube-Palzer (Jena) — Copy and Self-Repetition in the Age of Genius: Using the Example of Caspar David Friedrich
• Sammi Lukic-Scott (York) — Images into Objects: Reproductions and Translations

13.00 Lunch

14.30 Romanticism in the Context of New Turns
• Marte Stinis (York) — Depicting Romantic Music-Making
• Mira Claire Zadrozny (Jena) — European Romantic Ruins? The ‘Architectural Uncanny’ in Nineteenth-Century French and British Landscape Painting
• Caitlin Doley (York) — Venerable Vulnerability? Violence against Animals in Romantic Artwork

18.30 Reception at Schillers Gartenhaus, home of the poet, ca. 1800

T H U R S D A Y , 3 0 M A R C H 2 0 2 3

9.15 Greeting

9.30 The Late Romantics
• Nicholas Dunn-McAfee (York) — Breath, Flesh, Warmth: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s Immortal Keats
• Kayleigh Williams (York) — Picturing John Keats
• Christin Neubauer (Jena) — The Romantic Embodiment in Pre-Raphaelite Visual Art

12.15 Concluding Discussion

Afternoon Field Trip to Weimar

14.30 Graphische Sammlung, Vulpius-Galerie, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

18.00 Goethes Wohnhaus, Goethe’s home from 1782 until his death in 1832

20.00 End of Workshop

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View into the oval hall of the Anna Amalia Library.

Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, Rokokosaal (Photo by Maik Schuck).

The Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar was named in 1991 for Anna Amalia who in the 1760s moved the ducal book collection to the newly constructed Rococo library—famous since then for its oval hall—within the Grünes Schloss (‘Green Palace’). The Vulpius Gallery honors Goethe’s wife, Christiane Vulpius, and brother-in-law, Christian August Vulpius, the latter having worked at the library from 1797 to 1826. Much of the library was destroyed by fire in 2004; it reopened in October 2007 following an $18million restoration. –CH