The two-day conference will focus on the (global) legacies, histories and contested identities of Northern European Gothic/early-modern visual cultures in modernity and, in particular, on identities of modernism, including avant-gardes. It explores the pivotal, yet still understudied, reception, construction and invention of Gothic and early-modern art in institutions and museums as well as in art, art historiographies and in broader visual-cultural contexts in the period spanning the 1880s to the 1950s. The conference will develop both a broad perspective in relation to gothic modernisms and a deepening of the issues—methodological, theoretical, aesthetic, archival—pertinent to this subject.

The conference will offer a keynote lecture, fourteen papers from renowned international scholars in art history, museum and heritage studies, cultural history and literary and visual cultures, a round-table with experts, ample room for discussion and a private visit to the exhibition Small Wonders: Gothic Miniatures.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University, US)

Programme

Thursday 29th June 2017

9.00-9.30am: Registration

9.30am: Welcome - Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum

9.40am: Juliet Simpson - Opening Words

9.50-11.10am

Panel 1: Gothic ‘Revivals’ – Politics/Poetry of Buildings, ‘Play and Panic’

  • Matthew Reeve (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada/Royal Society of Antiquaries, London): ‘Politics of Bodies, Politics of Buildings: from “play” to “panic” in the Gothic architecture of the long eighteenth century’
  • Jozefin Feynaerts (Ghent University): ‘Le choix du style: neo-tudor prison gatehouses in 19th-century Belgium’
  • Ole Fischer (Utah University, US): ‘The birth of modernity from the spirit of Gothic? – Henry van de Velde and the figure of the iron Cathedral’

11.30-12.45pm

Panel 2: Belgian Gothic Modern Interiors/Uncanny Spaces

  • Dominique Bauer (KULeuven): I: ‘Enclosures, windows and mirrors. The Gothic interior in the work of Georges Rodenbach and Xavier Mellery’
  • Aude Campmas (University of Southampton): II: ‘Gothic passion and interiority in J.-K. Huysmans’s St. Lydwine of Schiedam’
  • Claire Moran (Queen’s University, Belfast): III: ‘Moody Princesses at home in Maeterlinck, Rodenbach and Khnopff’

2.00-3.45pm

Panel 3: Gothic Alterities at the Fin de Siècle

  • Laura Morowitz (Wagner College, NY): ‘Alt-Deutsch and Avant-Garde: The prints of Joseph Sattler’
  • Stefan Huygenbaert (Ghent University): ‘The Image of Gothic Law in (Anti-)Modernist Art’
  • Graça Correa (Lisbon University): ‘Landscapes of the Gothic Uncanny in Symbolist Theatre’
  • Marja Lahelma (University of Edinburgh/University of Helsinki): ‘Gothic Elements in Nordic Fin-de-Siècle Art’

4.05-5.00pm: Plenary and Q&A ? Professor Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University, US)

5.00-6.00pm: Visit to ‘Small Wonders’ Exhibition – Guided Tours (open for Conference guests only) by Ingmar Reesing (UvA) & Frits Scholten (Rijksmuseum)

Friday 30th June 2017

9.00-9.20am: Registration

9.20am: Tessel Bauduin - Opening Words

9.30-11.15am

Panel 4: Gothic Modern Cathedrals - Politics and Potencies of Buildings beyond the ‘Gothic’

  • Maria Männig (Karlsruhe University of Design): ‘From Schlegel to Le Corbusier: Modern Concepts in Hans Sedlmayr’s “Cathedral”’
  • John Kirk Irwin (Birkbeck College, University of London): ‘Medieval and Modernist Space’
  • Robert S. Nelson (Yale University): ‘Modernism and Colonialism in the Neo-Gothic of Southeast Asia’
  • Matthew Mullane (Princeton University): ‘The Cathedral and the Pagoda: It? Ch?ta’s Gothic World’

11:15-1:15pm

Panel 5: Reimagining Gothic Nationalisms and Avant-Gardes

  • Leena Elina Valkeapää (University of Jyväskylä): ‘Gothic Modern discovered: the process of the art historical expeditions in Finland, 1871–1902’
  • Stephanie Glaser (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): ‘The Gothic Spirit: Cultural Nationalisms on the Eve of World War I’
  • Marjan Groot (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam): ‘Gothic Modernism and Expressionism in the 1920s in the Netherlands’

2.30-4.15pm

Panel 6: Contested German Gothic Identities: Legacies, Ideologies, Museums

  • Willem Diebold (Reed College, US): ‘The Magdeburg and Bamberg Riders on Display in Modern Germany’
  • Gitta Ho (Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art): ‘George Grosz and the Art of Late Gothic’
  • Leone Beiersdorf (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg): ‘Art history’s Anthropological turn and its Support of Gothic Modernisms’

4.45-5.30pm: Round Table/Closing remarks - Dr Tessel Bauduin and Prof. Juliet Simpson

5.30pm: Close of conference