@article{THESIS,
      recid = {1768},
      author = {Rossner, Rachel Kathryn},
      title = {GREAT EXPECTATIONS: THE SOUTH SLAVS IN THE PARIS SALON  CANVASES OF VLAHO BUKOVAC AND JAROSLAV ČERMÁK},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2016-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {450},
      abstract = {This dissertation explores how the notion of anticipation,  broadly considered, informed a host of discourses,  practices and institutions related to visual production in  the nineteenth–century Croatian lands. Focusing on the  South Slavic–themed Salon paintings of two painters who  worked in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth  century—Vlaho Bukovac (1855–1922, born in then–Austrian  Dalmatia) and Jaroslav Čermák (1831–1878, born in  then–Austrian Bohemia)—the project explores how an art on  the verge of becoming seemed to hold the power to breathe  life and credibility into a people on the verge of  becoming. In other parts of Europe, a preoccupation with  unattainable ideals was linked to the belief that the  ancients had succeeded in getting closer to ideal art than  could ever be managed in the present–day world. Quite  differently, the standard in Croatia for idealist  aesthetics was not the ancient past, but a truly fictive  future that had no existence outside the minds of those who  dreamt about it. Calling for art, rather than dealing with  actual art, kept a vision of seductive clarity intact. 

A  sustained anticipation of native art and belief that an  indigenous and important South Slavic visual art would  emerge, notwithstanding its presence, lasted nearly the  entire duration of the long nineteenth century in Croatia.  The imaginary future art was a powerful utopian vision that  satisfied a feeling of lack and offered a positive  alternative to a geopolitical reality of fragmentation. The  idea of art came to be invested with incredible hopes—the  most extreme of which was autonomy or independence from the  Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Art could both show the South  Slavs what they would look like in the future and  retroactively manufacture a common history and tradition.  To protect this schema, every native work of art was cast  as a first step. No work, no artist, could possibly satisfy  the great expectations of a public that preferred dreaming.  If they tried, the punishment was unusually severe.

Over  the course of the second half of the nineteenth century,  the South Slavs attained a visually recognizable form as a  people at the Paris Salon through the conventions of  conservative French painting belonging broadly to academic  and Orientalist traditions. They entered into history  through history painting. This people, “new” to the French,  were “new” to themselves in a sense. The South Slavs were  in the process of becoming in their nineteenth–century  permutation. As identities shifted, morphed, melded, broke  apart and were contested, various parties projected their  desires into painting in order to imagine the kind of  national body and national art (Dalmatian, Croatian or  Yugoslavian) they hoped would emerge at some future time  when the South Slavs freed themselves from the imperial  powers that ruled the Western Balkans. 

Centering on  Jaroslav Čermák’s Raid by Bashi–Bazouks on a Christian  Village in Herzegovina (Turkey) (1861), Chapter I  foregrounds cultural exchange between the Slavic minorities  of the Habsburg Empire and France. It focuses, in  particular, on how the Czech artist’s painting mapped onto  French matrices of history painting, new knowledge about  the Balkans, and fashionable Orientalism, as well as the  South Slavic imagination of the Paris Salon as a kind of  world stage. Chapter II, “Great Expectations,” explores the  notion of potentiality both as a way of interpreting the  formal qualities of Vlaho Bukovac’s Episode from the War of  Montenegro (1878), and to introduce what I argue is a  fundamental characteristic of Croatian art discourse in the  nineteenth century. Chapter III highlights the  transnational character of the narrative in which Bukovac  was cast by commentators in Croatia as an heir in gestation  to Čermák, who had died just prior to the opening of the  1878 Paris Salon. By picturing the romantically heroicized  Montenegro—the “Sparta” of the Slavic South—cultural actors  like Bukovac were seen as helping a perpetually budding  Croatia blossom into a modern–day “Athens.” Chapter IV  considers poetic interpretations of both Bukovac and  Čermák’s oeuvres. In their verses, poets consistently  expressed a belief that painting was uniquely positioned to  fuse together a nation in potentia. Poetry, however, not  only interpreted painting, it sought to control and guide  what was considered an infant art. Chapter V charts how  nascency permeated the institutions of art, craft and art  history that began to spring up in the 1870s and 1880s in  Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb. Modeled closely on  Vienna, Zagreb’s new institutions ushered in a new age of  “scientific” art history and criticism following the lead  of Rudolf von Eitelberger (1814–1885), Austria’s first  professor of art history. Musing on the disappearance of  Vlaho Bukovac’s Episode from the War of Montenegro (1878),  Chapter VI reflects on the impossibility that any artist  could satisfy the deeply entrenched discourse of desire in  nineteenth–century Croatia. The nineteenth–century  commentators who wrote at length about the role of art for  an emerging people and paintings by Vlaho Bukovac and  Jaroslav Čermák placed great stakes in their written  accounts of images. I saw it as my job to take their  earnest accounts seriously while at the same time  attempting to loosen the grip of both their words and mine  over the pictures. In the coda to this dissertation, a  painting is allowed, finally, to make an appearance on  something like its own terms.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1768},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1768},
}