In the world emerging at the aftermath of the Second World War, new nations were created, and old ones radically invented themselves anew. Artistic and cultural heritage was a crucial component of such new identities in a world marked by what is now known as the Cold War. The status of early modern European art, traditionally considered a canonical and universal legacy in a world extensively colonized by European nation states, could not emerge unscathed from a global cataclysm originating in Europe. In particular, new political entities, sometimes experimenting with unprecedented political systems, had to formulate their own ways of coming to terms with that artistic heritage, according to their specific political needs and values.
The research project Postwar Renaissance: Studying, Exhibiting, Teaching and Appropriating Early Modern European Art in Four “New Nations”, 1950-1990 investigates the reception of Renaissance and Baroque art in four sites hitherto little studied in this context, all possessing important collections of early modern artworks and an academic tradition dedicated to studying this corpus: two dictatorships on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and Franco-era Spain; the State of Israel in the first four decades of its existence; and Québec from the Révolution tranquille onwards. The project seeks to politically and socially contextualize the theories and the praxis (teaching, research, display) of early modern art historiography in these locations, where the postwar decades were a period of nation-building and identitarian consolidation, and to point to patterns of conformity, but also to sites of resistance to national norms and expectations regarding art historical knowledge production.
The lecture will offer a general introduction to the project and present a few case studies emerging from initial findings of documentary research.
Itay Sapir is Professor of art history at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. PhD from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the EHESS, Paris, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, and a Humboldt Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Prof. Sapir has published widely (both academically and for broader audiences) on 16th- and 17th-century European painting and its philosophical, political, scientific and theoretical contexts. His forthcoming book, Painting the Instant of Death in Early Modern Europe, will be published by Routledge in 2026.
Organised by Dr Felix Jäger, Lecturer in Early Modern Art and Material Cultures, The Courtauld.
