The aim of this conference is to develop new scholarly insights into the neglected transmission of Netherlandish and German art and thought in nineteenth-century British art and visual culture. It builds on new scholarship generated by an earlier conference, ‘Primitive Renaissances’, at The National Gallery, London (2014), which explored interest in Northern medieval and early Renaissance art and visual culture in later nineteenth-century Europe – in art, writings, collections and in identities of cultural heritage – potently symbolized in the expression of the so-called Northern artist ‘primitive’. ‘Visions of the North’ will develop and complement this first initiative. It will focus on specific ways in which nineteenth-century British art and visual culture, in dialogue with the Low Countries, especially Belgium, engaged with early Netherlandish and German art in shaping modern reinventions and perceptions of their ‘Northern’ identities.
Panels
· Collecting, Staging, Exhibiting the North: Reception, Display and Inventing Netherlandish and Germanic ‘primitives’
· Northern Transpositions: British-Belgian Artistic Dialogues – Recreating Visions of ‘Northern’ Art
· Reframing/Contesting Germanic Art: ‘National’ Collections and Identities of German Art –Nineteenth-Century Britain
· Art, Literature and the Northern Genius at the Fin de Siècle: Celtic, Germanic, Nordic – A Plural North
See https://visionsofthenorthconference.wordpress.com for the program and registration.