End of my first month in Poland

My first month in Poland is almost at an end. I have made progress on my projects, but also made significant contacts to use when I return to the country for another month of study in the fall.

St. Mary's Basilica, Wyspiański worked with Jan Matejko on the redesign of the interior spaces in the late 1880s before being tapped to redesign the interior spaces of the Franciscan Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in the 1890s.

I had great meetings with faculty and curators at Jagiellonian University and the National Museum in Kraków, and we explored both my dissertation project and another outside project I am working on.

When I return in the fall, I plan on spending a significant amount of time seeing how Stanisław Wyspiański’s work can enter into conversation with Alfons Mucha’s. While the two artists knew of each other and were in the same circles in Paris, they did not speak of each other in their writings. Perhaps there was some “sibling rivalry” at play as non-Austrian artists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I am excited to see what future study brings to light.

I also made significant progress on my article on Maurycy Gottlieb’s genre-defying self-portraits for the Belvedere Research Journal.

The highlight of my month in Poland was a short trip to Poznań to meet with Magdalena Radomska at the Piotr Piotrowski Center for Research on East-Central European Art. Professor Piotrowski was the art historian who conceptualized the methodology of horizontal art history that I am using in my dissertation, and it was a pleasure to talk to Professor Radomska about my project and the ideas of horizontal art history.

I also had the chance to see some great works of art by Polish modern artists, such as Jacek Malczewski, Józef Mehoffer, Witkacy (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz), and Zofia Stryjeńska in Poznań at the National Museum in Poznań.

When I return to Poland in the fall, I anticipate spending much of the month in Poznań to work with the Center, honing how I see myself utilizing Professor Piotrowski’s methodologies for my project.

A month in Krakow

After spending most of my time since September in Brno, with occasional research trips to other cities/countries, I have begun one of my longer research travel excursions. For the month of April, I have made the move to Krakow. While I am here, I am working on the Polish side of my dissertation project.

While the majority of my dissertation focuses on the Czech artist Alfons Mucha, in order to properly map out a multi-national network of late Habsburg artists, it is important to look to other centers of the former empire for artists to connect with Mucha.

The city of Krakow is an easy place to look for these connections. Many Polish artists spent time in Paris when Mucha was there, so it is clear that Mucha would have known many of them, especially Stanisław Wyspiański.

While I am here, Wyspiański will be the focus of much of my research. There are numerous buildings that he contributed designs to, such as the interior redesign of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, his unrealized stained-glass cartoons for Wawel Cathedral (which were finally made into glass and installed in the Wyspiański Pavilion in the early 2000s), and the Meeting Room & Stairwell at the Medical Society House.

Palace of Art, Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts

I will also look into the work of Jan Matejko, Wyspiański, as well as the artist Maurycy Gottlieb, who, while not in my dissertation, is another focus of my larger research. Matejko, viewed as the father of Polish art, was recognized with a bust on the side of the Palace of Fine Arts of the Kraków Society of Friends of Fine Arts (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie). While Mucha most likely never met Matejko, he is still a key figure in the Empire’s art scene and Mucha would have been familiar with him.

My Fulbright-Hays project proposal called for two months in Poland. In addition to the research into Wyspiański and Matejko, there are a few sites that I hope to visit, either this month or when I return to Poland in the fall for my second month in residence. The first place I plan to visit is Zakopane, home to a national style of architecture from the early 1900s, created by Stanisław Witkiewicz and drawing heavily on the use of wood paneling in the design of folk motifs. Second, I plan to travel to Poznań to visit the Piotr Piotrowski Center For Research on East-Central European Art. Piotrowski is known, in part, for his development of the method of horizontal art history, which aims to find alternative ways of reading art history that are not bound by Western European notions of artistic development. I look forward to seeing how the Center can help me develop my understanding of his methods and how I can apply them to my own project.

In addition to continued work on my dissertation, I have also been working on other projects.

The chapter I discussed in my last post has finally been published! Feel free to check out the chapter if you are interested.

I am also working on two additional publications.

First, I have another chapter that builds off of the work in the above publication. In it, I look more closely at the Hungarian/Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s allegorical depictions of rootlessness and her desire to root herself to a place to call home. This chapter will be published sometime next year in a volume edited by Elana Shapira and Anne-Katrin Rossbergm titled Women's Art of Crossing Borders: Central European Women in Modern and Contemporary Art and Design.

Second, I am working on a short piece introducing my conception of a Polish/Jewish bi-nationalism. Using Maurycy Gottlieb’s genre-defying self-portraits, I look at how his portraits and ever-changing self-identity challenge our understanding of nationalism. The Belvedere Research Journal has accepted this article and should be out sometime this year.

Continuing on

It has been some time since my last post.

Not long after my last post, I heard that I was named a Principal Candidate for the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award, which will allow me to stay in the Czech Republic and Poland for the entirety of 2025. This has been great news but changed the nature of my immediate work this past fall.

Secession Building, Vienna

Instead of going to archives and visiting different sites every week, I had to stay a bit more localized to work on practical matters to ensure I could stay here, such as applying for residency in the Czech Republic.

I have still conducted a few amazing site visits. I traveled to Vienna to see some wonderful museums and meet with a professor I am excited to work with during my time here. I also traveled to Budapest and had some great meetings that further solidified my dissertation research and shed light on how I will effectively conduct research and write over the next 12 months.

Dohány Street Synagogue, Budapest

Dohány Street Synagogue (detail), Budapest

Buda Castle at night from across the Danube River.

I have also worked on some smaller projects that I am excited to share. First, I finalized my chapter “Ugly and Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Irrational in Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory” for the upcoming The Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History. This is a project that I have been working on for the past few years, and I am so excited for the book to come out in February. The chapter looks at Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory and how his melding of Marxism and Jewish Mysticism defies the rational. I use the Hungarian/Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil to explore the hold that the “rational” has on art further. I also reviewed Irina Shevelenko’s Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic for the Journal Art East/Central (it should be published on the website soon), published by the Department of Art History here at Masaryk University.

Finally, I was invited to expand my study into Sher-Gil in an edited volume that studies the transnationalism of Central European female artists and designers. I will work on this chapter this month before my time as a Fulbright-Hays scholar starts on February 1. I expect to make another trip to Budapest and perhaps elsewhere in the region this month to conduct research for this text, and I look forward to sharing that experience with you all!

My first trip to the archive

This past week was quite a busy one. I spent the first half of the week in Prague at the Prague City Archive. They have quite the collection of materials pertaining to the construction of the Municipal House, one of the central buildings in my dissertation.

Even in the face of dire financial concerns, Prague’s city representatives gave their approval, on January 5, 1903, to a grand undertaking: construction of a new building that would offer a monument to Czech culture and serve as a “memorial for the nation.” Nine years later the Municipal House opened its doors to the public. My interest centers around the building’s puzzling contradictions:  the primary commission for a building understood as a Czech response to the perceived encroachment of Germanic art and culture in Prague would have gone to an artist with distinctly transnational interests. Equally puzzling, the construction of the Municipal House, which began in 1905, was sold to the public as a fierce demonstration of Czech national identity, yet the architects designed a building with all the earmarks of a luxurious cosmopolitan Art-Nouveau villa.

In the archive, I was searching for materials related to Alfons Mucha’s role in the building, especially given the story that is believed to be commonplace: that Mucha was originally tapped to design the entirety of the building, and in the face of an outcry amongst other Czech artists, his contribution to the building was cut back to only a single room: The Lord Mayor’s Hall (which is under the central dome in the photo above).

Upon arrival at the archive, I found a very interesting lack of materials that mentioned Mucha. This was quite interesting, given the story surrounding Mucha’s supposed involvement. The materials that I read were mostly commission meeting minutes and they began in 1902, but there was no mention of Mucha until 1909, when his name was only briefly mentioned. There were also a number of artist contracts, but none for Mucha, which does fit the part of the story that the mayor hand-selected him, and as such his contribution would not have been a standard commission.

This is not to say that I found my time in the archive unproductive, it was a great experience! Even with the lack of material on Mucha, I still found that it told a very interesting story and I look forward to seeing what other materials I consult later tell me about the project. For instance, I did see a very interesting fact about the roofing tiles they used for the Municipal House. One of the references stated that they used polychrome tiles. This fact adds a very interesting lens to the question of nationalism in the region. Ödön Lechner in Hungary used Polychrome tiles for the roof of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts, as well as other “nationalist” buildings. Scholars such as Dragan Damjanović have also discussed the role that Polychrome tiles have played in the development of national Styles in the region.

I look forward to later archival visits, such as my work with the Mucha Foundation that will occur later in the year. I do not view the lack of materials on Mucha in the Prague City Archive as a setback, these materials just tell a different story.

Next week, I will be traveling to Liberec in Northern Bohemia (a few hours north of Prague) to see the design for a carpet that Mucha designed for the 1900s Exposition Universelle.

The start of a semester of travel and research

Yesterday, I arrived in Prague and spent the day there before taking the 2.5-hour train ride to the Southern Moravian town of Brno where I will be based this semester as a Freemover PhD student at Masaryk University. During my time here, I will be traveling all over the region in order to visit archives, museums, and architectural sites. I look forward to sharing what I see with everyone here. Currently, my plans for the semester have me visiting 4 cities in the Czech Republic (Prague, Brno, Liberec, and Moravský Krumlov) and 5 countries (Poland, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia) that made up much of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire!

I have been here for just over a day and I have already seen one of the spaces that will play a role in my dissertation. In the Nové Město (New Town) district, the Jubilejní synagoga (Jubilee Synagogue)—also known as the Jeruzalémská synagoga (Jerusalem Synagogue) for its location along Jeruzalémská Street—features a fascinating mix of Moorish Revival architecture meant to distinguish Jews in the empire as non-European and Habsburg Jew’s positive views of Emperor Franz Joseph I.

I am excited for what this semester will bring and thankful to the UIC Art History Department for their support.