North Street Review: Arts and Visual Culture (ceased publication)
The North Street Review is a peer-reviewed publication for original and innovative postgraduate scholarship in the field of art history. Founded as Inferno in 1994, and published as the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies from 2009-2013, the North Street Review publishes essays representing the diverse approaches to all facets of art history both within the University of St. Andrews, the United Kingdom, and abroad.
School of Art History, University of St Andrews
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As a result of his highly imaginative perspectival illustrations, late sixteenth-century Dutch architect Hans Vredeman de Vries remained at the pivot point of transferring perspectival developments from Italy to a northern European setting. He brought about a revolution in the genre of the architectural city-view, stood as a giant of that artistic category, and initiated a widespread architectural following that could be felt in buildings from every province of his home country to as far away as regional towns in Peru. This essay introduces the use of geometry in Vredeman’s illustrations from his 1604 treatise Perspective and gives an account of the meanings behind vantage points, picture planes, and the viewing subject in those representations. A commentary on the notion of repetition in perspectival vistas and an explanation of the significance surrounding the placement of the centric point in his engravings is also dealt with. The centric points of Vredeman’s plates are seldom placed on a blank architectural surface. Instead, we encounter deliberate openings that allow us to travel beyond the pictorial plane and that remind us of the artificial nature of the environment being shown. Someone might theoretically be looking back at us, configuring the world before us, and thereby reinforcing the arbitrariness of our point of view. Overall, this paper aims to look anew at the symbolic significance of the perspective engravings of Vredeman de Vries. The writing ends with a summary on what it might mean to transcend a perspective.
Copyright (c) 2015 Olaf Recktenwald https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Tommaso Salini Revisited: Two New Attributions
Tommaso Salini (c.1575–1625) is a frequently forgotten Baroque artist that fell under Caravaggio’s spell, despite having a tempestuous relationship with the great painter. Salini, also known as Mao, was a friend of Giovanni Baglione, the Italian art biographer, who included Salini in his Le vite de’ pittori (1642). Salini is better remembered for his role in the Baglione libel trial of 1603 than he is for his oil paintings, which sit between Caravaggio’s innovative way of painting and Baglione’s mediocre Mannerism. Art historians have often shied away from exploring Salini’s career because the canvases that have carried his name seem stylistically dissimilar. The recent tendency has been to attribute these works to the anonymous ‘Pseudo-Salini’ painters, but this should form the topic of a separate article. The twentieth century saw art historians generously attribute an excessive amount of work to Salini, and many of these pictures were probably done decades after his death. In order for Salini’s oeuvre to be presented with accuracy, connoisseurs have had to inspect the original works that Baglione mentions being by Salini’s hand, as well as the pictures that have been successfully attributed to him. Bearing in mind what Baglione wrote, Salini can be revealed as an innovate artist and still life specialist. This article includes a newly attributed still life (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) as a forgotten Salini, as well as a refreshed attribution of the masterful Piping Shepherd Boy (Foundling Museum, London). These works add weight to Salini being a more famous and better-known painter in his own time than scholarship has shown.
Copyright (c) 2015 Aaron James Thom https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Development of Social Structures within a changing Museum Frame
This paper looks at how social and epistemological structures have developed within museums. It focuses on the definitions of Michel Foucault´s discourses and Niklas Luhmann’s definitions of social systems and seeks to identify how the work of these to theorists can shape new structures under which museums themselves can form new social frames of future development. As museums experience greater responsibilities and the curator's role especially is under significant change, the historical, cultural and epistemological development of museums are under debate too. This calls for new ways of understanding social structures and systems within changing frames of museum theory and practice. As the works of Foucault and Luhmann have rarely been put together they can form new ways of looking at the development and shape of already existing structures within museums. Interestingly, their works suggest that museums themselves, as social systems, have the best opportunities to define future development structures of social inclusion and definition.
Copyright (c) 2015 Jane K Nielsen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
"An Urge To Take Off From The Earth": How Malevich Embodies The Role Of 'Shamanic Artist' In His Early Career
The article submitted will bear the following title: “An Urge To Take Off From The Earth”: How Malevich Embodies The Role of ‘Shamanic Artist’ In His Early Career. Its main arguments can be summarized as follows: Firstly it will examine how Malevich appears to undergo an experience which parallels both the ecstatic and the didactic initiation process of a neophyte shaman. It will do this by looking at Malevich’s writings, his pedagogical role as a teacher of his own artistic school, and indeed his teaching methods, and how these aspects are allegorical to the shamanic initiatory experience. Then it will consider how Malevich, through the metaphorical implications of Uspensky’s higher cosmic reality, defined by the fourth dimension, and indeed in the heightened status of art and his embodiment of the Nietzschean ‘super-artist’, is able to embark on a shamanic ‘soul-journey’, transcending earthly reality, and consequently, is able to philanthropically transform the world through the ideology of his Suprematist vision, for the attainment of cosmic equilibrium. This article will make a significant contribution to Art-Historical scholarship for it is an aspect of Malevich’s paradigmatic oeuvre that has yet to be examined, despite the presence of some compelling evidence, and indeed provides grounds for undertaking more extensive research into the connection between Malevich’s radical modern aesthetic and the shamanic phenomenon.
Copyright (c) 2015 Charlotte Lucy Gill https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Price and Gilpin in the Cottage Garden: Reading the Picturesque in Late Victorian Watercolors
In his book American Picturesque, John Conron asserts that the picturesque “leads a nineteenth-century life very much distinguishable from its eighteenth century predecessors.” How was the nineteenth century life of the picturesque different as seen through such cottage scene pictures? What was uniquely picturesque about the Victorian cottage garden and its depiction by artists, especially those working with watercolors? How do the characters populating these pictures correspond with the favored picturesque figures found in Price? By addressing the taste for cottage garden pictures, and the work of artists like Helen Allingham and Thomas James Lloyd, one may perhaps uniquely access the Victorian life of the picturesque ideal.
Copyright (c) 2015 Lauren Palmor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Tools of War and Industry: The Erasure of the Family in Käthe Kollwitz's Der Krieg
Käthe Kollwitz is unquestionably one of the most significant artists of the modern period. As seen through her 275 prints, Kollwitz’s visual language is both poignant and universal, allowing for lasting international acclaim. Traditionally, her work has been overshadowed by readings of her subject matter as a nearly fanatical obsession with the tragedies of life. Indeed, her persona has become entangled in a myth of self-torment and oppression. This article argues for the existence of a polarity within her work which has rarely been explored before. This polarity is revealed in several of her works including one of her most celebrated series, Der Krieg. I evaluate Kollwitz’s work beyond the simple answer of human emotions, in the process revealing a complexity beyond just tragedy. Kollwitz was always a political artist and her work is saturated with radical ideas concerning women, the role of the family, and the public sphere. Apart of a larger work, this article tries to examine the series, Der Krieg as a predecessor to the concepts often linked with modern feminist thought. I argue that Der Krieg challenges the stability of the nuclear family by highlighting the necessity of the community. This challenge aimed to free women from their domestic chains, thereby adding domestic life to Germany’s national reforms following World War I. Kollwitz once stated that she wanted “to cultivate the seed that was placed [within her] until the last small twig had grown.” Her artworks, spanning four decades, have continued to serve as the seeds for other’s ideas and implanted within many viewers ideas for a better future.
Copyright (c) 2015 Elizabeth Kajs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Park Fiction - a participatory artistic park project
The extraordinary green recreational area Park Fiction was proposed, planned, and established by a group of artists, residents, and local institutions in Hamburg from 1994 until 2005. The project was financially supported with public funds from the programme Art in Public Spaces sponsored by the Hamburg Department of Culture. The special combination of art and social work of the group has been seen as an important one and was honoured with an invitation to present Park Fiction at the documenta 11 in 2002. The basic conditions and the main phases of the eleven year history of the project are outlined in the text. Difficulties and helpful conditions are analysed. Special regard is given to the combination of social work and art in the project. The significance of the project for the careers of the project members is also taken into account. At the end, the subtle instrumentalisation of the park within the gentrification process of Hamburg is considered.
Copyright (c) 2015 Viola Rühse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Year of the Visual Arts 96: local initiatives, national and global trends
This paper looks at the process that led to the organisation of VAUK 96, examining the relation between the aims of the organisers, in particular, of Northern Arts who developed the project, including both its clients and the providers of public funding: the state through the Arts Council.
Copyright (c) 2011 Gabriel Gee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The lesser of two evils: Pius II, international diplomacy and the College of Cardinals
[The full text of this article is not available online.]
Copyright (c) 2011 Carol M. Richardson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Sound advice: a changing role for music museums in the age of the Three Tenors
Copyright (c) 2011 Joanna Archibald https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Marcel Broodthaers - case study: 'La Tour Visuelle'
Copyright (c) 2011 Deborah Schultz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
'...and there was nothing wrong with Utility furniture': furniture history and oral history
Copyright (c) 2011 Stephen Jackson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
'Le Coq d'Or': folk traditions and the making of high culture
Copyright (c) 2011 Cheryl A. Kramer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
'A sagacious policy': the artist & the press in the Victorian art world
Copyright (c) 2011 Patricia de Montfort https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Imprisoned princesses: Princess Tarakanova and the Regent Tsarevna Sof'ya
Copyright (c) 2011 Marianne McLeod Gilchrist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
A recently discovered account for plasterwork at Arniston House, Midlothian
Copyright (c) 2011 Patricia Wigston https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Book of Kells: a new look at an old manuscript
Copyright (c) 2011 Heather Pulliam https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2011 Patricia de Montfort, Cheryl A. Kramer, Carol Richardson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
'A lie which is in part a truth': a discussion on the media and photographic integrity
Copyright (c) 2011 Bruce F. Pert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Recording Scotland: the art collections of the University of St Andrews
Copyright (c) 2011 Claire Payne https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Neo-classical avant-garde: L'vov's cathedral of St. Joseph, Mogilev, Belorussia
Copyright (c) 2011 Alexei V. Makhrov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
George Sandeman: an eighteenth-century wright from Perth
Copyright (c) 2011 L.W.S. Petznick https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
David Martin, (1737-1797), portrait painter: revealed
Copyright (c) 2011 Lucy Dixon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
From the statue court to the statue gallery: placing the Cesi antiquarium in an historical context
Copyright (c) 2011 Cara Brandi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Quiet, silence and solitude: the Carthusian order, the Certosa of Florence and Jacopo Pontormo's Passion cycle
Copyright (c) 2011 Julia A. Delancey https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Opus Anglicanum: copes as liturgical show-pieces
Copyright (c) 2011 Christine Linell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Copyright (c) 2011 L.S.W. Petznick https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Strathspey and reel: photography and the Cairngorms
Copyright (c) 2011 Robert A. Lambert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Engraving and photography in nineteenth-century Scotland: Thomas Annan's position in the debate over the 'art' of photography
Copyright (c) 2011 Maranne McDade https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Alexander Edward: the education of an architect
﻿﻿[The full text of this article is not available online.]
Copyright (c) 2011 John Lowrey https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0