Art history at the Technical University of Darmstadt looks back on a 150-year history. This anniversary was the starting point for a research project and a symposium, the results of which are presented in this volume.

A special feature of art history in Darmstadt is, that it is not located at one institute, but is represented by two professorships in the departments of architecture and humanities. This volume puts this unusual constellation into historical perspective and argues that it is precisely the status as an art historical “enclave” that has led to intensive networking.

Automimesis or the idea that “every painter paints himself” was a notion that was frequently voiced in art literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was initially thought to be an artistic flaw which threatened the faithful imitation of nature. The corporeal or spiritual similarity between an artist and his work, however, was soon to become a facet that was regarded as positive. Considering biographies of artists, art treatises, and artworks, this book explores the reasons for this paradigmatic shift and shows how ideas from the early modern period continue to shape our modern understanding of the autonomy of the arts.

20 years ago, prometheus was launched as a distributed digital image archive for art history and image-based disciplines, marking a fundamental step for the digital transformation in the respective subjects. Since then, the contours of a future digitally supported science have become clearer. The Digital Humanities are expanding the methodological field of the humanities, interdisciplinary collaboration to answer research questions is increasingly gaining acceptance, and the establishment of a National Research Data Infrastructure is laying the foundations for a science system in transition.
The 2021 anniversary conference discussed the transformation of the sciences under four perspectives (4D) and deliberately went beyond the subject boundaries of art history.

In this publication, the contributions appear successively. They are edited, have the final layout and are included unchanged in the full volume. Each early-view article receives a persistent DOI and is thus fully citable; only no pages can be given yet. Only when all articles are available will they be given page numbers. Please use the citation recommendation given in the PDF for the Early View. In addition to the e-book (PDF), a print edition will also be published.

Thanks to financial support from the German Lost Art Foundation, since 2020 the Liebermann-Villa in Berlin has been able to conduct a provenance research project into its permanent collection, with a particular focus on cultural objects displaced as a result of National Socialist persecution. This volume results from the 2021 conference “Provenance Research, Max Liebermann and his Network. Reports from the Field” staged in collaboration with the Technische Universität Berlin. The book is published on the occasion of the exhibition “When Pictures Speak. Provenance Research in the Collection of the Liebermann-Villa” (Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee, October 2022 to March 2023). The volume explores, among other themes, provenance research into Max Liebermann and his network in archives, on the art market, in museums and in academia.

Media diversity, an expanded notion of the artwork and a changed understanding of creativity have shaped art since the modern era. This creates new challenges for the reception and preservation of a work as well as for the concept of authorship and the idea of authenticity. The separation of design and implementation in contemporary art also establishes a new form of art production based on the division of labour with manifold implications. The contributions in this volume show that such developments require innovative, interdisciplinary approaches at the interface of the history of technology, conservation science and art history.

Digital processes have become substantially more important in relation to the production, presentation and reception of art since the digital revolution. The omnipresence of social media in our everyday lives means that the practices of contemporary artists are also shaped by the lifestyles and forms of communication presented online, as well as their specific aesthetics, which they themselves help to shape. Ismene Wyss focuses on artworks with a decided inclusion of social media in the process of artistic creation. It analyses (especially those) contemporary positions that use social media in a performative way: the "social media performance". This book is based on the thesis that the specific performative use of social media is a contemporary artistic strategy that reflects and questions digitalised societies. Based on the artistic positions of Amalia Ulman, Molly Soda, Arvida Bytröm and Leah Schrager, the book analyses how social media have found their way into artistic practice since 2010 and discusses the consequences of such art production for contemporary art history.

Funded by the SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation)

Under the premise of good form, everyday objects in the post-war period were awarded various design prizes or shown in exhibitions to raise awareness of good design. Drinking glasses from this period are the focus here. What is a good glass? The author explores this question using guidelines written at the time and award-winning glasses. In addition, she lays out the development of the digital tools that were used to research and compare the objects. This includes typification of drinking glasses as well as accurate shape attribution.
This design-historical examination shows what contemporary research on a specific subject area in museums might look like.

Between 1966 and 1975 Jan Dibbets, Adrian Piper, Daniel Buren and Eleanor Antin created high-circulation printed advertisements and exhibition announcements. These ephemera - simultaneously works of art, advertising instruments and documentations for artistic actions - are exemplary for the communication-based, flexible and mobile practice of conceptual art.
With a focus on the economic development of the time, the book shows how artists exemplarily anticipated forms of immaterial work. The ephemera are witnesses of a complex relationship between the criticism of hierarchical organizational structures and the demand for authenticity and individuality. In this context, artistic aspirations for autonomy and institutional critique are not in contrast to economic innovation. They are a condition of a postfordist present.

Funded by the SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation)

Wie inszenieren Texte, Bilder und musikalische Kompositionen das Verhältnis von ›Altem‹ und ›Neuem‹ in Zeiten, in denen sich mit den Gattungsordnungen auch die ästhetischen Sicherheiten auflösen? Wie setzen sie ›Novationen‹ in anderen diskursiven Ordnungen, etwa religiösen oder gesellschaftlich-politischen, ins Werk und machen damit auch epistemischen Wandel sichtbar? Und wie lassen sich diese Prozesse historisch angemessen beschreiben, ohne auf moderne Fortschritts-teleologien zurückzugreifen?
Diesen Grundfragen der historisch ausgerichteten Literatur-, Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft geht der vorliegende Sammelband nach. Er untersucht mit Schwerpunkt auf dem italienischen 17. Jahrhundert mit Ausblicken auf Shakespeares Sommernachtstraum sowie den englischen Antiquarismus systematische Verschränkungen von Traditionen und Novationen und deren mediale Modellierungen. Im Fokus steht die ›neue‹ Bildsprache der sich naturalistisch inszenierenden, emphatisch mit der Tradition brechenden, de facto aber neue ausbildenden Malweise der Caravaggio-Nachfolge. Im Bereich der Literatur entsteht eine ›neue‹ Dichtungstheorie und -praxis, welche mit einem Autor wie Giovan Battista Marino zwar einerseits ausdrücklich an Regel- und Wertesysteme des Humanismus anschließt, diese aber andererseits im spielerischen Rückbezug auf die Tradition gleichsam in die Leere laufen lässt und durch einen barocken ›Subjektivismus‹ ersetzt. Für die Musik ist die unerhörte Experimentierfreude von Claudio Monteverdi beispielhaft, der in seinen Madrigalen alte und neue Kompositions- und Musizierpraktiken hybridisiert und Third Spaces barocker Polyvalenz eröffnet.
Als überwölbendes Merkmal der barocken Neuerungsphänomene erweist sich das Prinzip der Gattungsmischung. Die Möglichkeiten reichen dabei von Hybridisierungen, in denen das Spannungspotential des Verschiedenen sichtbar ausgestellt wird, bis zu Amalgamierungen, in denen die Differenzqualität der unterschiedlichen Bezugssysteme zugunsten neuer ästhetischer Harmonie bis zur Unkenntlichkeit überspielt wird.

There is no doubt that in few European countries has the monument as a medium of memory culture been so acutely and virulently negotiated as in Germany and Austria after 1945. The debates range from the indispensable remembrance of the Shoah to questions about the use of National Socialist and Stalinist remains to the most recent reconstruction projects and are an expression of our ethical as well as political relationship to history. So what do monuments, their design, re-erection or destruction say and how do they shape our future? With the help of various case studies, this conference volume searches for a contemporary concept of monuments beyond its national roots.

Il existe peu de pays en Europe où la question du monument comme medium de la mémoire historique se soit posée de manière aussi aiguë et virulente qu’en Allemagne et en Autriche après 1945. Expressions de notre rapport éthique et politique à l’histoire, les débats interrogent la nécessité de la mémoire de la Shoah, l’usage possible des résidus encombrants du national-socialisme et du stalinisme ou encore de récents projets de reconstruction. Qu’est-ce qu’un monument « dit » ou « ne dit pas », et en quoi sa création, sa modification ou sa destruction engagent-elles notre avenir ? Les études de cas allemands et autrichiens rassemblées ici tentent une définition actuelle du monument, au-delà de son enracinement national.

Collection Histories. Islamic Art at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (1873–1915) looks at the paths taken by works from West and Central Asia into the museum. Eleven studies illuminate the interests of the MK&G founding director Justus Brinckmann, trace his acquisitions, and look at the biographies of individual objects – including a Quran manuscript or tiles from a mausoleum in Bukhara. The focus lies on the relations of local and global networks with the history of the art market.

David Hockney's joiner photographs are images between single image and sequence, which in their interplay create a spatial and temporal impression of what is to be seen. The picture ensembles are at the same time monoscenic and polychronic, they show spatiotemporal breaks and let relations turn unstable. Individual photographs are thus combined into complex pictorial structures that open up new semantic fields and invite narrativization. The author reads the joiners with Deleuze's theories of the movement-image and time-image and discusses the extent to which narrative is inherent in them.

This volume brings together the contributions to the symposium of the same name hosted by the DZ BANK Art Collection, now the DZ BANK Art Foundation, on October 8 and 9, 2020. Artists, curators, and scholars from the fields of art and cultural studies as well as philosophy address the question of the future of photographic forms of expression. In their essays, they illuminate from different perspectives current trends that inhabit the taut relationship between the immateriality of the digital image and a recurring emphasis on materiality/substantiality. In the process, conceptual issues such as the dissolution of traditional genre boundaries are also explored.

The former Swiss textile factory “Hanro” produced knitted fabrics, underwear and outerwear in the 20th century. Seamlessness as a concrete textile technique as well as a design ideal was an important factor within the internal production processes. The author examines the textile design process in the context of changing fashion cycles and serial production. She provides new insights into the conditions of emergence of today’s globalized industry.

Funded by the SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation)

With the aim of further developing his painting technique and improving the durability of his paintings, the Swiss painter Hans Emmenegger (1866-1940) meticulously documented his working processes, materials and techniques between 1901 and 1905. His ‘painting technique notebook’ was evaluated at the Swiss Institute of Art Research in Zurich and linked to the results of technological painting analyses. This volume presents the results of this research. Emmenegger's search for subjects, the function of studies, the painting process, his struggle for pictorial colour, his technical experiments and much more are explained.

The guidelines offer a practical introduction into provenance research on human remains from colonial contexts. Though focussed on German institutions, they also give a glance at the situation in Austria. They apply to collections of human remains kept in universities and museums, mostly in the fields of anthropology, anatomy and medical history. The interdisciplinary approach combines several research methods. The guidelines provide extensive guidance for historical, anthropological and natural sciences methods of provenance research. They also explain the cross-cultural and transnational dimensions of provenance research and discuss how to document the results of the research.

In the early modern period drawing was one of the main working practices of artists. Since the 16th century more and more dilettanti showed interest for learn drawing. For the first time Nanobashvili opposes learning techniques of artists and dilettanti, by which she can shed new light on drawing practices and theoretical questions. This approach allows a new understanding of Alessandro Alloris Ragionamenti delle regole del disegno, the Carracci-academy in Bologna, as well as the life drawing by examining an informal circle of venetian artist Filippo Esengren.

Volume 2 of the LIDO Handbook is dedicated to painting and sculpture. It describes a specific application profile of the internationally established metadata standard LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) and serves as a guide for the coherent structuring of information in local collection management systems. Each data field contains a definition, tips for data entry, examples as well as instructions for exporting data based on the LIDO XML schema. All recommendations support the objective of preparing data from different sources in ways that enable comprehensive and precise search results and open opportunities for further cross-linking and integration of information.

The conference proceedings outline the contributions presented at the online conference of the same name organised by the Bomann Museum in Celle and held on 1 March 2021. Locating sources for provenance research into the regional art trade is often difficult as business records or auction and sales catalogues have not been preserved in most cases. Therefore the central question at the conference was how to achieve the best possible provenance research nevertheless. Individual contributions provide examples from various museums and research projects in northern Germany how this can be accomplished.

With his multifaceted work as an art historian, medieval and building archaeologist, Matthias Untermann has made a particular contribution to the study of medieval architecture and its semantics. Not only the objects of his research are frequently characterized by changes of plans, but also his own career: In 2000, Matthias Untermann became a professor of art history at Heidelberg University after having worked as a monument conservator for 15 years. For his 65th birthday, friends, colleagues and companions honour him with this collection of 55 essays, which reflect this change of plans by means of interdisciplinary collaboration.