Infrastructures of Trading and Transferring Art since 1900

What are the infrastructures behind the trade and transfer of artworks? On 26-28 June, KEMKI will organize a workshop on these often invisible infrastructures in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam and the Leuphana University (Germany). With more than 20 speakers from three continents, the three days of the workshop aim to reveal those institutions and networks and lay behind the commercial and non-commercial circulation of artworks. Keynote lectures will be held by Ana Magalhães (São Paulo) and Nathalie Heinich (Paris). The list of presenters also includes researchers from KEMKI.

Although art market studies as an academic field has become increasingly popular in the last decade, there has been little research that critically examines the actors, places, rules, and structures of this system. This workshop, facilitated by Gregor Langfeld, Kristóf Nagy, and Lynn Rother, aims to explore the infrastructures through which artworks have been produced and exchanged for goods, money, services, and reputation since 1900. Presentations touch on transnational perspectives, uneven exchanges, differences or systems in centres and peripheries, dynamics of innovation and “belatedness,” selection and canon formation, including aspects of gender, diversity, and discrimination. The workshop is part of the research initiative (Un)mapping Infrastructures: Transnational Perspectives on Modern Art. 

The first day of the event is open to workshop participants only. 

Program:

Thursday, June 27, 9:30–19:00

Panel I “Selling Outside of Capitalism” (9:30–11:30)

• Jakub Banasiak: Foundation in the Foksal Gallery: Foksal Gallery Foundation as an Agent of Pro-art Market Modernization during the Post-Communist Transition
• Réka Deim: Artéria Gallery: An Independent Gallery under State Socialism
• Maria Silina: Transfer of nationalized artworks in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s: infrastructures and patterns
• Xenia Schiemann: Business Relations between Kunst und Antiquitäten GmbH (1973–1990) of the GDR and Western Auction Houses

Lunch break (11:30–13:00)

Panel II “Selling during War and Conflict” (13:00–15:00)

• Gitta Ho: At the Center of Interest: Competing Access to Jewish Collections and their Transport from occupied France to Germany 1940-1944
• Sina Knopf: Art Transfer and Networks. Alternative Methods of Transferring Art from Occupied France
• Marieke Maathuis: Women Navigating the Art Market 1940–1945
• Lucie Němečková: Josef Cibulka: the Friend of the Fine Arts in Prague during World War II

Coffee break (15:00–15:30)

Panel III “Selling Across Borders” (15:30–17:30) 

• Dávid Fehér: Hungarian Artists Encountering the International Art Market in the 1960s–1970s and after the Fall of the Iron Curtain: How Did the Market Structure Artistic Career Paths?
• Luise Mahler: In War and Peace: Kahnweiler’s Picture Trade, ca. 1919–1949
• Dorotea Petrucci: To Show Beauty of Art in Trade’: Commercialising Italy’s Decorative and Industrial Arts in the Inter-War Years
• Blair Brooks: Kunst in Kalifornien: Heinz Berggruen and European Modernism in 1930s San Francisco

Break (17:30–18:00)

Evening Lecture Italian Art System and the Making of Art Museums in São Paulo in the Aftermath of World War II by Ana Magalhães (18:00–19:00)

Friday, June 28, 9.30–15:45

Panel IV “Selling Outside of the Canon” (9:30–11:30) 

• Agata Jakubowska: Women’s Art Travelling Internationally in the 1930s
• Jennifer McComas: Modern Jewish Art in Postwar America: Patronage and Production
• Francesca Stocco: The role of art market actors in the revival of fibre art in London at the beginning of the 21st century
• Nanne Buurman: The Art of Crossing Borders, or The Price of Freedom: Transhistorical Reflections of Aesthetic (Self-)Reification as a Means of Escape

Lunch break (11:30–13:00)

Panel V “Selling the Unsellable” (13:00–15:00)

• Ludovico Baldelli: The Committee Gaze: Art Committees as Infrastructures for the Production of Public Art in Mid-Century New York
• Lisa Beißwanger: Economies of Presence: Dealing with Live-Art in the 1970s
• Ellen C. Feiss: The Seventh Street Environment: state supported performance and the management of population
• Emese Kürti: The Commodification of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe

Coffee break (15:00–15:15)

Closing discussion (15:15–15:45)