Saint-Maurice d’Agaune, son Abbaye et son trésor
Avec son clocher roman se dressant au pied d’une imposante falaise, l’Abbaye de Saint-Maurice d’Agaune présente aux visiteurs 1500 ans d’histoire. Dès le haut Moyen Age, le souvenir du martyre de Maurice et de ses compagnons de la légion thébaine, massacrés pour avoir refusé d’obéir à un ordre contraire à leur foi, conféra au site un prestige important au sein de la chrétienté. Témoin privilégié de la ferveur du culte mauricien, le trésor de l’Abbaye constitue un ensemble unique par la qualité et la diversité de ses pièces. Ce guide interroge aussi bien l’histoire et l’iconographie que la matérialité des objets qui le composent. Grâce à des vidéos en haute définition de six œuvres médiévales emblématiques, cet ouvrage en renouvelle la vision.
Po, the Engineer - Constructivist Ideas in Paul Klee's Oeuvre
The point of departure of this study is an oil-transfer drawing with watercolour details from 1922, which Paul Klee titled on the piece of cardboard as "Po", and in his handwritten catalogue of works as "Po, the Engineer". With this work, Klee is clearly responding to the new ideas of Constructivism, which where spreading from Russia at the time. By looking at a selection of works and manuscripts form Paul Klee's "Theory of Pictorial Form and Creative Design", the aim of the study is to demonstrate how, from 1922 onwards, the artist began to critically appropriate these Russian impulses, reshaping them to fit his own purposes, and parodying them to a certain extent, too.
« ‹ Das Objektiv ist nicht objektiv ›. Kokoschkas (Selbst-)Inszenierung in der Fotografie »
This article is published in the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and the Leopold Museum: "Kokoschka. Das Ich im Brennpunkt". The exhibition displayed the best and most expressive photographs of the photographic estate of Oskar and Olda Kokoschka, which the artist's widow donated to the University of Applied Arts. The photographs were shown in the context with works of art created by Kokoschka.
Aesthetics and the Imitation of Antiquity in Early Gothic Sculpture
This article discusses the emergence of a style, known as the ‘1200 style’, one of whose principal characteristics is the evocation of antique art. Examination of the stylistic evolution of early Gothic sculpture similarly reveals a concern for realistic representation in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Sculptors, like goldsmiths, tried to create convincing figures whose proportions and anatomies are consistent with those found in nature. Related to the development of the 1200 style and its links with antique work, the objective of these sculptors was not Antiquity itself but an aesthetic of naturalism. The Latin and French texts of the same period make abundant use of the antique topos of the statue animated by the breath of life. The realistic tendencies of artistic production are here explained by a desire to give presence to divinity through sculpture with a powerful capacity for re-presentation.