CHASS Professors Jeanette Kohl and Johannes Endres Close the World Art History Institute’s Distinguished Lecture Series in Shanghai

The lecture series on Renaissance art and culture brought together 12 scholars, featuring workshops and presentations
By Alejandra Prado, Writer/CHASS Marketing and Communications | 

 

Jeanette Kohl and Johannes Endres in China for the WAI Lecture SeriesUC Riverside’s Jeanette Kohl, associate professor of art history, concluded the 2023-24 World Art History Institute’s (WAI) Distinguished Lecture Series on Renaissance Art and Culture during a September trip to China. As a distinguished visiting professor, Kohl delivered the closing lecture at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), following a series of presentations and a two-day workshop that explored new perspectives of art history and culture during a two-week visit spanning three cities.

“It was a particular honor to give the closing lecture for a year-long series with such esteemed international scholars,” Kohl said. Kohl, who also serves as co-director for UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society (CIS), was invited by Chinese art historian LaoZhu, the founder of WAI.

This year’s series, “Dialogues with Distinguished Scholars of World Art History,” brought together 12 experts in European Renaissance art from the U.S. and Europe for monthly lectures to foster dialogue between Eastern and Western perspectives on art history. Kohl was also accompanied by her husband and UCR colleague, Johannes Endres, professor of art history and comparative literature, who also delivered a keynote and co-led a workshop with Kohl at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts (LAFA) in Shenyang, China.

Closing the lecture series, Kohl presented her keynote lecture, “A Murder, a Mummy, and a Bust – Forensics of a Renaissance Portrait Sculpture,” at SISU. The lecture highlighted Kohl’s approach to Renaissance art, using the bust of Simon of Trent – an object closely linked to anti-Semitic persecution during the late 15th century – as an example.

“I presented new conservatory and iconographic evidence for the object as a key work in the ferocious, anti-Semitic propaganda around the Trent blood libel of 1475,” she said. “The unusual object is a particularly suited object to talk about the role of visual and conservatory observation, knowledge of historical contexts, and questions of methodology in Renaissance art history.”

Prior to her lecture at SISU, Kohl also spoke at the School of Arts at Peking University in Beijing, the third-ranked university in China, in a hybrid presentation with both in-person and virtual audiences. Kohl’s lecture, “Thinking with Busts: Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer,” amassed a virtual attendance of 12,000 viewers on Zoom. 

“This lecture was a unique experience and left a big impression on me,” she said. “Probably the largest audience I will ever reach with a single presentation.”

Kohl’s lecture at Peking University was based on the last chapter of her latest book, “The Life of Bust,” currently in press with Brepols Publishers.

“I spoke about the artistic and ‘phenomenological’ significance of sculpted portraits as a key medium of remembrance that touches humans in unique intellectual and sensory ways,” she said, examining Rembrandt’s famous painting depicting Aristotle as he contemplates a bust of Homer.

Kohl and Endres engaged with 16 students who presented their papers on Western art traditions in a two-day, “student-centered” workshop at the LAFA. Proposed by Endres, the workshop’s topic, “The Concept of Style: Epistemologies in Art and Science,” is closely related to his research on 19th-century European art and literature.

“The workshop was a great success,” Endres said. “I was thrilled to see how interested our hosts and their students were in our research, and especially in the Western disciplinary methodologies of our common field of art history.”

“I was positively surprised by the students’ open-mindedness, excellent preparation of their papers, their dedication to their topics, and the huge interest in European academic traditions – quite different from the U.S.,” Kohl said. “There was a completely open intellectual exchange, both with colleagues and students, about what is going well and what is going not so well on U.S. campuses and in China.”

For Kohl and Endres, the workshop was eye-opening in the differences between academia in the U.S. and China, even down to student approaches to resources used for study. Both were impressed by the students’ dedication to understanding foreign texts and their proficiency in various languages. 

“Interest in primary textual and visual sources is strong, and we were absolutely taken with the tremendous generosity and hospitality in all three locations, but especially in Shenyang,” Kohl said.

“Their enthusiasm for learning from us was contagious and amazed my wife and me wherever we went on our trip and whatever we did and saw,” Endres said. “In return, they brought us into their country and their academic lives and took us on exciting excursions into the great history of their art and culture.”

At the LAFA workshop, Endres was also invited to speak in a keynote address on “Style in an Interdisciplinary Perspective,” aimed at exploring the evolution of style as a concept across art, science, and other fields. Endres, who has researched the concept of “style” at length, has traced how style has grown from a term used in art and literary criticism about the cultural shaping of work to a broader intellectual framework on discourse in reasoning in different disciplines. 

“In my talk, I was therefore interested in exploring new ways of looking at the relationships between cultural and scientific knowledge formations and their disciplinary production in different fields and objects, such as works of art, literary texts, music, and scientific epistemologies,” he said. 

Speaking and co-leading the workshop at LAFA left Endres with new perspectives and questions for his research. “I learned a great deal from their questions and presentations and from their different cultural backgrounds, as they shared a common interest in questions of style and form in art,” he said.

“There is much to be gained, not least on the academic level, from meeting each other at eye level and cultivating an interest in our respective histories and values,” he said. 

For Endres and Kohl, it was also an opportunity to represent UCR, as both members of the University of California and scholars of European art and culture. 

“Visits and conversations like these are invaluable,” Kohl said. “We need to leave our own academic and national bubbles and actually talk to colleagues in other cultures, connect with their traditions, respect them, and bring an open mind to learn from them and their histories.”

According to Kohl, their two weeks in China were not merely an academic visit but a full cultural immersion. Outside of lectures and presentations, the visit offered Kohl and Endres opportunities to explore local cuisine, museums, and historic sites with tour guides by their side.

“It is such a modern and forward-pushing society, in many ways, and the state of digitization, the cutting-edge technology, and the pride of their own long cultural traditions was palpable everywhere,” Kohl said.

Following their trip, Kohl is motivated to continue working with her colleagues in China by collaborating with them on her new project, “Global Faces,” which examines the various styles of portraiture across cultures during the Renaissance period.

Kohl and Endres hope their visit will strengthen much-needed international academic ties for students and colleagues.

Read more…

Desert Distortion and Elemental Immediacy

Dr. Celina Osuna
University of Texas, El Paso

Tuesday, February 6, 2024, 4:00-5:00pm
INTS 1154 or via Zoom

 

Dr. Osuna will discuss desert distortion, a technique rooted in experimentation and play. The theoretical work of desert distortion is to provide an inexhaustive set of lenses for engaging with histories, boundaries, bodies, cultures, and languages that reveal the abundance and value of desert places.

Osuna’s research offers distortion as a generative mode of engaging desert agency to unsettle old understandings of them as alien or static and allow for experiencing dynamic deserts anew. This is an invitation to inhabit the deserts of literature and other cultural productions in order to create new collaborations of thought and practice in times of ecological emergency.

Dr Celina Osuna is an artist and assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research examines indigenous and Latinx environmentalisms and aesthetics in desert literature.

Join in person or via Zoom.
https://ucr.zoom.us/j/98268998684

Sponsored by the Department of Media and Cultural Studies and the Being Human Initiative at the Center for Ideas and Society.

Laura / Aura. Tête-à-tête with a Renaissance Bust

Lecture by Jeanette Kohl at Freie Universität Berlin, April 25, 2023.

Tête-à-tête with a Renaissance bustThe lecture is dedicated to an attempt at a “phenomenology” of female bust portraits of the Quattrocento. The focus is on the enigmatic bust of an unknown woman by Francesco Laurana in the Viennese Kunstkammer, which is characterized by its unusual polychrome. In the context of a comparative object analysis and against the cultural-historical background of a Petrarchan topic, the question of how this and other female busts ‘communicate’ with the viewer and what significance their fragmentary object character has will be pursued. Although not primarily motivated by the art-historical “passion for identifying” (Didi-Huberman), the considerations ultimately lead to a proposed new identification.

 
Read more (in German) at https://tinyurl.com/ydakhk66
 
Dr. Kohl’s presentation will be streamed live via WebEx. To register, email italzen@zedat.fu-berlin.de
 
 

 

Vision, Touch, and Memory. Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer.

Lecture by Jeanette Kohl as part of the exhibition Idols & Rivals at the Kunsthorisches Museum in Vienna.

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, 1653

A contextualized interpretation of Rembrandt’s famous Portrait of Aristotle with the Bust of Homer (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), this lecture discusses the importance of sculpture as a key medium of memory. A detailed analysis will show how Rembrandt transformed established thought patterns of competition (among the arts, among artists, with antiquity) and traditional art-historical dichotomies (seeing vs. feeling, materiality vs. intellect, presence vs. impermanence) into a remarkably complex play across genres creating a painted philosophy of touch.

 
Read more (in German) at https://tinyurl.com/2fhyw3jw
 
View Dr. Kohl’s entire presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=FaZPtIEOwX4

 

Professor Johannes Endres recieves fellowship at the IAS (Institute for Advanced Study) at Van Mildert College, University of Durham, January-March 2023

 
At Durham, Professor Endres will work on his current book project on “Style” as an interdisciplinary category of the study of texts, images and music. As part of his project, he will be in close collaboration with Professor Jonathan Long from Durham’s School of Modern Languages & Cultures. Professor Long is also the co-director of the Center for Visual Arts and Culture at Durham. The collaboration is based on their mutual research interest in German Literature, literary theory, and the study of visual culture in relation to literary artefacts.
 
 

Art History Doctoral Candidate, Cambra Sklarz, presented at the Getty Graduate Symposium on February 3, 2023

etty Graduate Symposium2023The Getty Research Institute hosted the fifth annual Getty Graduate Symposium, which showcased the work of emerging scholars from art history graduate programs across California. Organized into three sessions, the symposium included nine individual presentations, panel discussions moderated by faculty mentors, and Q&A sessions with the audience. 

Congratulations to Cambra Sklarz for being recognized for her outstanding work.

Cambra’s presentations, The Artist and the Ecosystem: Strategies for the Use and Reuse of Materials in Early America can be viewed online via the Getty Research Institute’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdcw4RhcVX8s4hcliEh_DUburxDcBvo6Q

The full program can be found here.