Globalizing early modern central and eastern European art : a discussion forum

In recent years, global approaches to the study of art and material culture have gained momentum, particularly in Anglo-American academia. An increasing number of scholars of Central and Eastern Europe are embracing this newly expanded purview by integrating comparative and transcultural methods into their research and teaching. The new approach is nonetheless still awaiting wider recognition from the incipient field of Central and Eastern European Art History, particularly for histories of the early modern period. Elsewhere, the global turn led to new transgeographical perspectives which have begun to challenge the once-dominant national paradigm in various art-historical traditions. The question remains, however, how to meaningfully include Central and Eastern Europe in the discipline’s ongoing explorations of cultural heterogeneity and global circulations of artefacts, and—more importantly—whether other scholars have anything new to learn about these processes from the study of the region. Of equal concern are the repercussions of this transcultural inquiry into Central and Eastern Europe’s past on the region’s more recent history, often read through the prism of modern ethno-nationalism and cultural uniformity.

To probe the ways historians of early modern Central and Eastern European art might productively engage with the global turn and increase the visibility of the region’s diverse material and visual cultures in the English-language academe, a group of pioneers of this emerging field, Robert Born (BKGE Oldenburg), Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University), Suzanna Ivanič (University of Kent), Ruth Sargent Noyes (National Museum of Denmark), Olenka Pevny (University of Cambridge), and Robyn Radway (Central European University), met on 23 July 2021 to share their views on the challenges and opportunities associated with tracing and popularizing Central and Eastern Europe’s global and transcultural histories. What follows is an edited version of this conversation. The questions were posed, recorded, and redacted by Grusiecki and Radway.