Matthew Rampley, States of Exception: Collecting Asian Art and National Identity in Central Europe

Beginn: 18:00 Uhr
Ort: Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, A-1030 Wien, Flux 1, 3. Stock
Veranstaltung in englischer Sprache

In my notes I have tried to be impartial. Even though I am white and proud of the capacities and pre-eminence of my race, I have lived enough – for more than 15 years – amongst people of different colour who have other ways of thinking to have got rid of many prejudices. (Enrique Stanko Vráz)

With these words, the Czech traveller Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860-1932) introduced the book China (1904), an account of his travels across east Asia. Vráz was one of many individuals from the Czech lands who travelled across the globe at the turn of the century, visiting distant lands, and who collected works of art and artefacts, and then deposited them with museums in Prague and elsewhere. They ensured that museums in the current Czech Republic have rich collections of ceramics, textiles, and metalwork from China, India and the Islamic world. Their donations are much celebrated. In recent years, and in the light of debates over the restitution of museum collections, their activities have come under growing scrutiny. However, what is of increasing interest, too, is how their collecting, as one of the primary ways in which Czechs came into contact with non-European peoples, helped define a sense of national identity. Czechs imagined themselves to be different from the colonizing powers of Belgium, Britain or France, for example, and the sentiments of figures such as Vráz could be marshalled as evidence of a different kind of sensibility. This notion of ‘exceptionalism’ was not unique to the Czechs. Austrians, for example, liked to contrast themselves with the supposed rapacious Germans. This talk is thus concerned with how the encounter with non-European peoples, engaging with their art and culture, informed notions of national identity in the early 20th century. It also asks, however, how much credibility these claims had. Were Czechs, Austrians and other central Europeans really so different?

Prof. Matthew Rampley is an art historian at the Department of Art History at Masaryk University in Brno. He received his PhD in Aesthetics and History of Art from the University of St Andrews in 1993, following undergraduate studies in Classics and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. His academic career has included positions at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, Edinburgh College of Art, and Teesside University, where he served as Assistant Dean. From 2010 to 2019, he held the Chair in History of Art at the University of Birmingham, where he also served as Head of Department and later as Head of School. Since 2019, he has been Principal Investigator of an ERC-funded project on art and architecture in interwar Central Europe.

His teaching and research focus on Central European art and architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, art historiography, aesthetics, and modern and contemporary art. Among his major research projects are an ERC Advanced Grant (2018–2023), a large grant from the Leverhulme Trust (2015–2018), and the prestigious MUNI Award (2019–2023), supported with CZK 25 million.

He is the author of numerous publications, including The Vienna School of Art History (2013), The Seductions of Darwin (2017), and Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire (2020), as well as editor of Art History and Visual Studies in Europe. His scholarly work has appeared in leading journals such as the Oxford Art Journal.