| 1. |
- Brändén, Irina
(författare)
-
Bilder och berättelser om Sankt Nikolaus : Några vitaikoner studerade mot bakgrund av text och liturgi
- 2018
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation concerns the pictorial language and communicative aspects of the vita icons of S Nicholas. The starting point is three vita icons of the saint of Russian origin in Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, dated to the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century. Studies of the textual vitas of S Nicholas and texts of the services on the saint’s feast days leads to an understanding of the selection, sequence and location of episodes from the saint’s life in icons. The narrative and structural strategies of a number of S Nicholas vita icons are studied in comparison with vita icons of other saints (bishops, martyrs and monastic persons). These analyses reveal common narrative strategies and paradigmatic relations. Furthermore, attention is put on the spatial and semantic interactions between scenes within the cycle of S Nicholas vita icons, and their interplay with elements in the central part of the icons. The dissertation also discusses the possible connections between the pictorial language of S Nicholas vita icons, the structure and pictorial program of an iconostasis and some elements in the flow of liturgy. General patterns are noticed concerning the location of different themes in the narrative cycle of vita icons. The results show how the themes, colours and elements in the environment can link scenes together and help the viewers gaze through the pictorial landscape. A number of paradigmatic relationships between liturgy and vita icons of S Nicholas are identified, notably the scene with the translation of the saint’s relics, where the coffin is carried through or toward a passage. Central to the liturgy is carrying of the Gospel Book and the Holy Gifts through passages in the iconostasis. Rectangularity unites the coffin of the saint, the altar and the Gospel Book, in the vita icon, and in the church. Thus, various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of icons, texts and liturgical context have resulted in a more nuanced understanding of the pictorial narrative program of S Nicholas vita icons.
|
|
| 2. |
- Granath Lagercrantz, Mari, 1966-
(författare)
-
Terrakottaföremål från Ghana på British Museum : Materiella och immateriella assemblage
- 2018
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of the thesis is to identify, describe and interpret two series of terracotta objects from southern Ghana originally donated by Robert P. Wild to the British Museum in London between 1933 and 1936. The dissertation does not seek to answer questions of origin, intention and meaning, but seeks instead to show how phenomena such as production, distribution and consumption may better be understood as processes and situations that the object passes several times in its “social life”. The terracotta items donated by Wild to the British Museum can be related to what is commonly referred to as “Akan terracottas”, “Memorial terracottas” or “Terracotta funerary sculptures” in art- and cultural history-literature. These names identify a group of terracotta objects (mainly sculpture heads but also vessels) from southern and central Ghana, which have come to hold iconic positions in global cultural history, but also in the international art trade. As many researchers have shown, such terracotta objects are likely to be linked to some kind of funeral tradition, but they may also have had a number of other functions throughout their history. The dissertation is based on the study of a variety of materials relating to the institutional practices at the British Museum, and analyzes both material impressions left on the objects and also intangible aspects of them. By examining and analyzing the museal ethnographic object, the study highlights and discusses how such concepts as time, geographical space and institutional space have been materialized throughout history. In the study, the aim is related to Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts about assemblage, rhizom and agency, which also assume that each body or object is a combination of different materials, ideas, and their abilities to connect to other bodies, objects, categories and concepts. The investigation also turns to the contemporary artist El Anatsui. The aim here is to show how El Anatsui’s work allows for a new interpretation of the terracotta objects. In the dissertation, it is shown that the circulation of the terracotta objects leaves its marks on them, transforming them, and that it is this ongoing process which creates the objects over and over again.
|
|
| 3. |
- Jones, Mark Ian
(författare)
-
Vicke Lindstrand On the Periphery : Mid-Twentieth Century Design and the Reception of Vicke Lindstrand
- 2016. - 1
-
Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Vicke Lindstrand On The Periphery is the first English language publication to examine the life and work of the Swedish artist and designer Vicke Lindstrand and his place in Swedish and Scandinavian design history. The richly illustrated text focusses on English language discourse on Swedish and Scandinavian Design during the 1950s and the reception and profile of Vicke Lindstrand. It reconstructs the context in which narratives and rhetoric emerged and analyses its effect on Lindstrand, between 1950–1970. Swedish and Scandinavian design are described in terms of a pared-down, clichéd aesthetic associated with 1950s ‘Scandinavian Design’, now held as a ‘construct’, continuously emphasising the same preeminent exemplars. Informed by extensive field study in Sweden, detailed archival research, informant interviews, object and text analysis, the book is divided into two parts. Part I investigates the disproportional impact of a small actor-network associated with twentieth century English language discourse on Swedish and Scandinavian design. The author argues that this demonstrates the pervasive influence of the construction of a national ideal (Swedish design) that was loosely translated to fit a regional ideal (Scandinavian Design) by the formation of an exclusive filter that determined the fit of what was included in the promotion of a cohesive identity. This filter emphasised an ideology that shaped perceptions and has influenced the subsequent reception and visibility of individual designers. Not all designers were treated equally. Nationalist, regionalist and internationalist influences had an impact upon the critical reception of their work further complicated by past associations. The actor-network operated at the level of selective solidarity, which was exclusive rather than inclusive. Part II examines the consequences of this fit through an analysis of the position and reception of Lindstrand. Preeminent exemplars, familial influences and the agency of an actor-network were profoundly influential in shaping perceptions and determining taste in 1950s Sweden, presenting a filtered view of design from the region. Lindstrand was strongly affected by the activities of this network. An interesting outcome of this study was the realisation that our understanding of Swedish design is incomplete, and that there is another more pluralist aesthetic concealed behind that officially promoted and exhibited during the 1950s. This investigation brings unique and unprecedented readings of a peripheral individual in the context of English language representation, and of the Scandinavian milieu.
|
|
| 4. |
- Lundén, Rolf
(författare)
-
Man Triumphant. : The Divided Life of David Edstrom
- 2014
-
Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A hundred years ago regarded, together with Carl Milles, as the hope of Swedish sculpture, David Edstrom is today more or less forgotten. Man Triumphant. The Divided Life of David Edstrom tells the fascinating rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story of the young boy who grew up in Småland, Sweden, emigrated to Iowa, U.S.A., and hoboed his way back in 1894 to get his education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. After twenty-one years in Europe—in Stockholm, Florence, Paris, and Berlin—he returned to the United States and settled in Hollywood. As a person of two cultures he found himself betwixt and between, divided in his allegiance equally to his mother country and his adopted one.A stubborn, uncompromising man Edstrom managed to produce sculpture qualitatively well above what the average artist of the time could accomplish. He received acclaim from the best of the contemporary critics of Italy, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden. And yet, gradually he was disregarded and finally ousted from the canon of art. Over the years he came to know a number of the key figures of the period—Giovanni Papini (and some of the Italian Futurists-to-be), Gertrude Stein, who wrote two portraits of him, and her brother Leo, Henri Matisse, Frederik van Eeden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf and his wife Margaret, Ellen Key, Ernest Thiel, Harry Chandler, Robert A. Millikan, Gloria Swanson, and Charlie Chaplin of Los Angeles. This book thus presents, from Edstrom’s point of view, the turbulent period of early modernism in Europe and the vibrancy of Southern California culture of the 1920s.Rolf Lundén is professor emeritus of American literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has written extensively on not only American literature but also other aspects of American Studies, such as the American influence in Sweden, literature and film, and business and religion in the United States.
|
|
