The Art Bulletin

One of the most famous—and notorious—instances of iconoclasm in the Classical world is the Persian sack of the Athenian Acropolis in 480 BCE. While the Athenians responded immediately by commemorating the event with ruins, relics, and the ritual burial of damaged sculptures, the Periklean response was radically different. In the course of rebuilding the Parthenon, elements of the previous structure were integrated into the new. In its sculptural decoration, the connection to the past was thoroughly transformed, as history was retold through myth, emphasizing the “Oriental violence” inflicted by the Persians, in an effort to memorialize collective experience.

The princely space in the turrets of St. Sophia in Kiev, the grandest Orthodox church of the eleventh century, is decorated with an image of the hippodrome, the primary public space for the display of imperial power in Constantinople. It formed a necessary link in a chain of Kievan grandeur, which aggrandized its prince and branded the city the preeminent political and cultural capital for a fledgling Rus’ principality. It served as a backdrop for courtly show, communicated messages of sophisticated connoisseurship to visiting dignitaries, and affirmed Rus’ membership among the exalted group of the established kings.

Rubens’s Michielsen Triptych draws on the Netherlandish past not simply in its format but also in its structuring of the spaces of the triptych. Like many Early Netherlandish triptychs, Rubens’s work creates ambiguous relations between center and wings, establishing “miraculous thresholds” between zones that appear to be simultaneously connected and disconnected. The miraculous thresholds of Rubens’s triptych negotiate relations between the donors and God and between the meanings inhering in Christ’s life and metaphysical status—even as they convey Rubens’s awareness of the connection between the triptych’s traditions and the early modern interrogation of the spaces between art and reality.

Fernand Khnopff created some of the most enigmatic and allusive works in the Symbolist idiom. The images of the feminine—both positive and negative—and the androgyne dominate his paintings, yet their connection with the artist’s intellectual and philosophical milieu are seldom pinpointed. Understood in terms of the dualist Idealist metaphysics of Schopenhauer, these works can be approached from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings through these figures, particularly in Avec Verhaeren: Un ange (1889) and Art, or the Caresses (1896).

Why did Negro Renaissance painters Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden, artists who sought to complicate and transform visual articulations of black Americans, create figures that recall racial caricatures? Art criticism of the period, examinations of racial stereotype, examples of humor and stereotype in Western art, and statements by the artists furnish the context in which they made their aesthetic choices. An analysis of key works reveals that their formal devices were considerably more complex and layered than often assumed. Nonetheless, their work demonstrates the difficulty and perhaps impossibility of constructing a completely “New” Negro detached from popular tropes of blackness.