Underskog

GUEST LECTURE WITH LIDIA GLUCHOWSKA

WEDNESDAY MARCH 21, 16:00, ROOM 207, GEORG MORGENSTJERNES HUS, BLINDERN

European Cultural Transfer in Word and Image. Edvard Munch, Gustav Vigeland and their “impresario” Stanislaw Przybyszewski.

As an eminent mediator in the transnational European cultural field, the Polish-German author and art critic Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927) had a substantial impact on the cultural transfer between Norway and Central Europe. He is known as a fervent supporter of Gustav Vigeland and Edvard Munch, but his interest in Scandinavian artists, writers and composers also extended to Christian Krohg, Hans Jæger, Jappe Nilssen, Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Tryggve Andersen, Gabriel Finne, Mons Lie, Nils Kjær, Hjalmar Christensen, Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun.
Written in German and Polish, and translated into nine languages, his books and essays on the work of these artists (published among others in the art magazines Pan in Berlin, Moderní Revue in Prague and Życie in Cracow) promoted the myth of the powerful Nordic nature and culture as a whole. They also popularized the misogynic myth of Nordic woman as satanic forces and contributed to the wider recognition and appropriation of the artistic proposals by Munch and Vigeland in Central and Eastern Europe.
The lecture concentrates not only on questions of aesthetics but also discusses the structural premises of cultural exchange across genre and media. What contributed to Przybyszewski’ s success as an impresario? What were the main components of his strategy of cultural promotion? What was his opinion about Norway, and how was he perceived by the Norwegians?

Lidia Gluchowska is Adjunct Assistant Professor and Head of the Section for Art Theory at the Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Zielona Góra and a lecturer at the University of Bamberg. An Yggdrasil guest researcher at IFIKK, she is preparing her postdoctoral thesis Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Edvard Munch und Gustav Vigeland. Transmedial cultural Exchange from Scandinavia to the Balcans at the Turn of the 19th und 20th Centuries. She has curated several exhibitions on the Polish-German Avant-Garde in Krzyżowa, Wrocław and Berlin and her book publications Stanislaw Kubicki – Kunst und Theorie (Berlin 2001, 2003) and Avantgarde und Liebe. Margarete und Stanislaw Kubicki 1910-1945 (Berlin 2007) were awarded with prizes from the Association of Polish Art Historians. Currently she is also co-editor of the special issue of the art magazine Centropa devoted to Berlin as an exchange center of the European Avant-Garde and of the anthology “Internationalism and Internationality in the European Avant-Garde 1890-1930” (forthcoming in 2012).