Sektion 4: Formierung – Aktivierung. Formbezug in der Kunst der Moderne
Samstag, 26. März 2022, 14:45–15:15 Uhr, K2, Hörsaal 17.01
Julie Ramos, Straßburg
“I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”. William Blake’s Indian Forms
Compared to orientalist painters, little is known about the discovery and use of religious images and objects from (or about) South Asia by modernist artists at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet it raises the question of the formal invention and power of non-Western arts, at a time when Orientalism (as discourse) tends to reduce them to the role of “antiques”, “worship objects” or “idols”. Such is the case of William Blake’s use of images from the collection of Edward Moor’s “The Hindu Pantheon” to draw and engrave his book “Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion” (1804–1820). His interest in Indian forms is certainly part of his emancipation from the mimetic tradition of the West and therefore not devoid of any ideology. But can we stick to Frances S. Connelly’s interpretation of a link between artistic modernism and primitivism and state that by reinterpreting “the nonclassical as anticlassical and [by turning] the periphery as a weapon against the centre” Blake would only “underst[and] ‘primitive’ art in exactly the same ways as [his] contemporaries, but inverted the value ascribed to its characteristics” (Connelly 1995)?
Based on an in-depth analysis of some of Jerusalem’s plates, of their process and context of creation, the paper aims to contribute to the renewal of transcultural studies in art history and to bring to light a pattern of “trans-modernism”, in which dialogue is played out between forms as much as between form, theory and institutions.
Kurzbiografie Julie Ramos
2000 PhD at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (“‘Tout le visible tient a l’invisible…’. Paysage et musique dans le romantisme allemand. Philipp Otto Runge et Caspar David Friedrich”)
2001–2020 Associate Professor in Art History at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
2009–2013 Scientific Advisor (Conseillère scientifique) at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, for the research field “L’art par-delà les beaux-arts”
2016–2017 Visiting Lecturer at the Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaft, Philosophie und Theologie, Universität Bielefeld
2019 Habilitation à diriger des recherches (“Pour une histoire des interférences du romantisme. Pratiques artistiques, intermédialité, transculturalité”)
since 2020 Professor in Art History at the University of Strasbourg
Forschungs- bzw. Arbeitsschwerpunkte
Art, Art Theory and Art History of the 19th Century
Publikationsauswahl
- Nostalgie de l’unité. Paysage et musique dans la peinture de P. O. Runge et C. D. Friedrich, Rennes 2008.
- (Hg.) Renoncer à l’art. Figures du romantisme et des années 1970, Paris 2013.
- (Hg. mit Boris Roman Gibhardt) Marcel Proust et les arts décoratifs. Poétique, matérialité, histoire, Paris 2013.
- (Hg.) Le tableau vivant ou l’image performée, Paris 2014.
- (Hg. mit Neil McWilliam und Catherine Méneux) L’art social en France, de la Révolution à la Grande Guerre, Paris 2014.