This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

About the Author

Beata Hock is a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig.

Anu Allas is an art historian and curator in the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.

Reviews

"This volume comes out as a rewarding, rich, and important contribution and academic reader, and the editors while collecting work dealing with art from a wide historical scope have been able to pursue fundamental and unsettling theoretical questions of the writing of art history outside the nationalist paradigm."

--Baltic Worlds

"The book is both an essen-tial compendium and a resourceful reference text, sustained by a solid and up-to-date theoretical discourse and empirical inquiry. It represents a critical contribution to area studies such as East European studies, opening up to a plethora of transnational histories in a strong comparative approach..."

--Europa Orientali

"Hock's East European 'histories' make for an original contribution to cross-cultural, transnational and global perspectives on the production and reception of contemporary art, from which that region has been unaccountably relegated to the margins."

--Critique d'art

"Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present is both theoretically very stimulating and, with its case studies, opens and develops new research optics in terms of the ongoing transnationalism research agenda in art history and cultural studies."

--Connections

"The editors make a case for incorporating a transnational perspective in the methodologies and categories of new art histories. Such a perspective is just as vital for comprehending the cross-border entanglements in East-Central European art as it is for practicing world art history or global art studies as particular study fields of art history at large."

--BUKSZ: Budapest Review of Books

"This volume comes out as a rewarding, rich, and important contribution and academic reader, and the editors while collecting work dealing with art from a wide historical scope have been able to pursue fundamental and unsettling theoretical questions of the writing of art history outside the nationalist paradigm."

--Baltic Worlds

"The book is both an essen-tial compendium and a resourceful reference text, sustained by a solid and up-to-date theoretical discourse and empirical inquiry. It represents a critical contribution to area studies such as East European studies, opening up to a plethora of transnational histories in a strong comparative approach..."

--Europa Orientalis

"Hock's East European 'histories' make for an original contribution to cross-cultural, transnational and global perspectives on the production and reception of contemporary art, from which that region has been unaccountably relegated to the margins."

--Critique d'art

"Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present is both theoretically very stimulating and, with its case studies, opens and develops new research optics in terms of the ongoing transnationalism research agenda in art history and cultural studies."

--Connections

"The editors make a case for incorporating a transnational perspective in the methodologies and categories of new art histories. Such a perspective is just as vital for comprehending the cross-border entanglements in East-Central European art as it is for practicing world art history or global art studies as particular study fields of art history at large."

--BUKSZ: Budapest Review of Books

Book Information
ISBN 9780367516130
Author Beata Hock
Format Paperback
Page Count 220
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g