The panel will discuss what Weimar culture has contributed to the discipline of art history, one hundred years after the Republic’s formation.
Speakers will explore where art-historical research on Weimar might be heading and what, if any, the continued resonances of art made during this era might be, well beyond the immediacy of its origins in the 1920s and early 30s Germany. In light of the new scholarship featured in this special issue of Art History, which foregrounds critical race, material cultural analysis, gender, queer and disability studies, we examine how a focus on art–historical margins – what we refer to as Weimar’s ‘others’ – may either change our thinking about what the Republic was, or perhaps confirm the dominant narratives of decadent excess, moral decay and imminent political danger that have so long defined this period.
Dr Shulamith Behr is Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art. She specializes in German Expressionism and has published widely on issues of cultural identity, politics and gender. She was the curator and contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression, 1906-1917, held at The Courtauld Gallery (23 June – 11 September 2005), and is finalising an in-depth study of Women Expressionists and the Public Sphere: From Empire to Emancipation. Her most recent publication on art and exile can be found in the chapter, “Ludwig Meidner’s cycle Leiden der Juden in Polen (1942-45) and Holocaust Knowledge: Towards a Methodology” in Ludwig Meidner: Expressionismus, Ekstase, Exil(Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2018).
Dr Nina Lübbren is a Principal Lecturer in the Creative School of Creative Industries at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She is the author of Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe, 1870-1910(Manchester University Press, 2001); and the co-editor of Visual Culture and Tourism (Berg, 2003) and Painting and Narrative in France (Ashgate/ Routledge, 2016). She is also the author of articles and chapters on German sculpture (the ‘Weimar’s Others’ issue of Art History, 2019; The Art of War, eds D. Ascher Barnstone and B. McCloskey, Peter Lang, 2017); Art and Resistance in Germany, eds D. Ascher Barnstone and E. Otto, Bloomsbury, 2018; Sculpture and the Decorative, eds I. Hart and C. Jones, 2019; Art History, Sept. 2019). She is currently completing two books: one on German sculpture, 1910-1945, and the other on visual narrative in nineteenth-century European painting.
Professor Dorothy Price is Editor of Art History the journal of the Association for Art History and lectures in the History of Art Department at the University of Bristol. She specialises in German art, in particular Expressionism and Weimar visual culture, Black British Art, feminism, gender and critical race art history. She is author and editor of numerous books, articles and exhibition essays including the monographs Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (2003) and After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde (2013). She has also curated a number of exhibitions including most recently Chantal Joffe: Personal Feeling is the Maing Thing at The Lowry, Salford in 2018. Amongst other things, she is currently working with the artist Sonia Boyce MBE RA on a special issue of Art History arising from Boyce’s AHRC-funded Black Artists and Modernism project.
Dr. Camilla Smith is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Birmingham, where she specialises in early twentieth-century German art and visual culture. Her articles on Weimar culture have appeared in the journals Art History, Oxford Art Journal, New German Critique and The German Quarterly. She has contributed essays in catalogues for exhibitions held in Berlin, London, Vienna and Würzburg. Forthcoming essays appear in conjunction with the exhibitions ‘Wolfgang Gurlitt Zauberprinz Kunsthändler – Sammler’ (4 October 2019 – 19 January 2020) held at the Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz and ‘Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art’ (4 October 2019 – 19 January 2020) organised by the Barbican Art Gallery, London. She has been awarded fellowships in Germany and the United States to undertake research. Her monograph on the artist Jeanne Mammen is forthcoming. She is currently working on a book-length project on German erotic visual cultures.
Organised by Dr Robin Schuldenfrei (The Courtauld)