Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2019)
The modification of meaning: Cézanne, Hildebrand, Meier-Graefe and the problems of cultural transfer
Abstract
Can concepts or artistic practices be transferred from one culture, one region, one land to another; and how much can another cultural context modify the meaning and function of a given artistic language, in the present case a language of painters? We can move nearer to an understanding of the problem if we bear in mind that cultural transfer differs essentially from comparison since it builds on the premise that there are no national cultures that have developed in an autochthonous way. These cultures have formed in the wake of influences, co-habitation, and motif adoption of many different kinds. Investigation of cultural transfers, then, emphasises similarities existing in social memory and not on differences. The art history of the time around 1900 has been recorded by way of the narrative of progressivism, in the paradigm of the centre and the periphery. The model itself is historical. We can and should remark upon on the material of past in its capacity as such and we may emphasise different aspects of it. Nevertheless, the material of the past is malleable only up to a certain limit. The historical marker of the art of the era under discussion is progressivism: we would be ahistorical were we to divest it of this tag. This paper presents the problems of cultural transfer on the example of Hungarian and French fauvism, involving the reception of renowned art historians and thinkers such as Adolf Hildebrand, Julius Meier-Graefe or Georg Lukacs.
