Art And The Nation State

Art and the Nation State is a wide-ranging study of the reception and critical debate on modernist art from the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the end of the modernist era in the 1970s. Drawing on art works, media coverage, reviews, writings and the private papers of key Irish and international artists, critics and commentators including Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Clement Greenberg, James Johnson Sweeney, Herbert Read and Brian O'Doherty, the study explores the significant contribution of Irish modernist art to post-independence cultural debate and diverging notions of national Irish identity. Through an analysis of major controversies, the book examines how the reputations of major Irish artists was moulded by the prevailing demands of national identity, modernization and the dynamics of the international art world. Debate about the relevance of the work of leading international modernists such as the Irish-American sculptor, Andrew O'Connor, the French expressionist painter, Georges Rouault, the British sculptor Henry Moore and the Irish born, but ostensibly British, artist Francis Bacon to Irish cultural life is also analysed, as is the equally problematic positioning of Northern Irish artists.

Art Crossing Borders offers a thought-provoking analysis of the internationalisation of the art market during the long nineteenth century. Twelve experts, dealing with a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and commercial contexts, explore how the gradual integration of art markets structurally depended on the simultaneous rise of nationalist modes of thinking, in unexpected and ambiguous ways. By presenting a radically international research perspective Art Crossing Borders offers a crucial contribution to the field of art market studies.

While the nation-state gave rise to the advent of museums, its influence in times of transculturality and post-/decolonial studies appears to have vanished. But is this really the case? With case studies from various geo- and sociopolitical contexts from around the globe, the contributors investigate which roles the nation-state continues to play in museums, collections, and heritage. They answer the question to which degree the nation-state still determines practices of collection and circulation and its amount of power to shape contemporary narratives. The volume thus examines the contradictions at play when the necessary claim for transculturality meets the institutions of the nation-state. With contributions by Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Natasha Ginwala, Monica Hanna, Rajkamal Kahlon, Suzana Milevska, Mirjam Shatanawi, Kavita Singh, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Witcomb.

Focusing on Latvia, (between 1905 and 1940), Suzanne Pourchier-Plasseraud, has chosen a nation without an ancient state history of its own, to illustrate the evolution of the concept of national identity into a claim for independence, with the help of art and artists.

Are Nation-states obsolete? Are multination states viable? Can we really create powerful supranational institutions? These are the questions that celebrated authors and specialists attempt to answer in this important collection of articles. The work contains theoretical essays and case studies by philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and governmental analysts that provide state of the art analyses of the situation of the nation-state as it is developing all over the world in the new millennium. There are different concepts of nationhood and different forms of national consciousness: ethnic, civic, cultural, socio-political and diasporic. There are also different ways for nations to be present on any given territory; as immigrant groups, as extensions of neighbouring national majorities, as minority nations or as majority nations. There are also different policies adopted toward different groups: bilingualism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, collective rights, etc. Finally, there are different sorts of political arrangements: nation-state, multination state, confederation of sovereign states, multinational federation, federation of nation-states, supranational institutions, etc. The enormous complexity of these issues explain why nations, nationalism and nation-states have been so difficult to understand. The theoretical essays contained in this volume are sensitive to all those issues. The authors examine the foundations of nationalist thinking and the justifications behind the nation-state model. They also reflect upon the nation building policies, politics of recognition and issues related to globalization. The case studies investigate countries or regions such as Ireland, Scotland, Catalonia, the Balkans, Russia, USA, Finland, India, Indonesia, the European Union and Canada.

This book examines politics through the lens of art and literature. Through discussion on great works of visual art, literature, and cultural representations of political thought in the medieval, early modern, and American eras, it explores the relevance of the nation-state to human freedom and flourishing, as well as the concept of citizenship and statesmanship that it implies, in contrast to that of the ‘global community’. The essays in this volume focus on shifting notions of various core political concepts like citizenship, republicanism, and nationalism from antiquity to the present-day to provide a systematic understanding of their evolving histories through Western Art and literature. It highlights works such as the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twain’s Joan of Arc and Hermann’s Nichts als Gespenster, among several other canonical works of political interest. Further, it questions if we should now look beyond the nation-state to some form of tans-national, global community to pursue the human freedom desired by progressives, or look at smaller forms of community resembling the polis to pursue the friendship and nobility valued by the ancients. The volume will be invaluable to students and teachers of political science, especially political theory and philosophy, visual arts, and world literature.

Presentations of National Cultures. Fifty-one texts illustrate the evolution of modernism in the east-European region. Essays, articles, poems, or excerpts from longer works offer new opportunities of possible comparisons of the respective national cultures, from the different ideological approaches and finessing projects of how to create the modern state liberal, conservative, socialist and others to the literary and scientific attempts at squaring the circle of individual and collective identities.