Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias

Edited by Ayla Lepine, Matt Lodder, and Rosalind McKever

With contributions by

• Deborah Cherry
• Whitney Davis
• John Harvey
• Alison Hokanson
• Martin Horáček
• Phil Jacks
• Michelle Jackson
• Ayla Lepine
• Matt Lodder
• Jonathan Mekinda
• Alan Powers
• Nathaniel Walker
• Alyson Wharton

Revivalism in art, design and architecture is a foundational aspect of modernism, though it has often been overlooked. This volume seeks to investigate the diverse dimensions of revivalism, exploring its meanings and impacts across cultures and media between c.1850 and 1950. Bringing together case studies that highlight revivalism in fields as diverse as Armenian architecture, German glassware and contemporary tattooing, Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias counteracts perceptions of revivalism as a practice opposed to canonical modernism, instead highlighting its international and interdisciplinary presence. This book challenges established viewpoints on intersections between past and present, offering new perspectives on what makes revivalism a force for innovation and not a mode of conservatism. Revivalism, this collection argues, looks forward into a present and indeed a future that is built upon persistent echoes of history. The book’s 12 essays represent leading research in diverse zones of art history. Its authors’ ideas were first developed in a series of events at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012. The conference from which these essays stem – Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory held at The Courtauld in November 2012 – was a core element of The Courtauld Research Forum’s flagship project for that year. The initiative, led by Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Ayla Lepine, brought together a group of international scholars who shared their expertise on revivalism, retro, nostalgia, and historicism. The project revealed new ways of understanding how these concepts operate in art, architecture, and design worldwide from c.1800 to the present. Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias is the final outcome of this fruitful process.

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Download chapters

Front Matter [503 KB]

Foreword: The Interval of Revival [606 KB]

Whitney Davis

 Introduction
[490 KB]

Ayla Lepine, Matt Lodder, and Rosalind McKever

I. Memories

‘Nostalgia’
[490 KB]

Matt Lodder

 The Ghost Begins by Coming Back. Revenants And Returns In Maud Sulter’s Photomontages
[1.2 MB]

Deborah Cherry

 1937 and Victorian Revivalism
[3.2 MB]

Alan Powers

 The Retrieval of Revival: Recollecting and Revising the Evan Roberts Wax Cylinder
[2 MB]

John Harvey

 The Problem of Expiration of Style and the Historiography of Architecture
[1.2 MB]

Martin Horáček

II. Identities

 ‘Historicism’
[2 MB]

Ayla Lepine

 The New Old Style: Tradition, Archetype and Rhetoric in Contemporary Western Tattooing
[1.6 MB]

Matt Lodder

 Longing for Past and Future: Cultural Identity and Central European Revivalist Glassware Designs
[1.8 MB]

Michelle Jackson

 Henri De Braekeleer and Belgium’s Nineteenth-Century Revivalist Movement
[987 KB]

Alison Hokanson

 Armenian Architects and ‘Other’ Revivalism
[1.5 MB]

Alyson Wharton

III. Utopias

 ‘Anachronism’
[1.9 MB]

Rosalind McKever

 Ferro-concrete and the Search for Style in the ‘American Renaissance’
[2.2 MB]

Phil Jacks

 Echoes of Manhattan in Parliament Square: Transatlantic Medievalism for the Twentieth Century
[1.1 MB]

Ayla Lepine

 Modernism and Revivalism in Italian Architecture and Design, 1935-1955
[1.8 MB]

Jonathan Mekinda

 Babylon Electrified: Orientalist Hybridity as Futurism in Victorian Utopian Architecture
[1.6 MB]

Nathaniel Walker

 Photograph credits [44 KB]