Simone Wille
Simone Wille is an art historian. She currently directs the research project
"South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Art Works between 1947 and 1989," Austrian Science Fund FWF (V 880-G), 2021-2025; she previously directed the research project "Patterns of trans-regional trails. The materiality of art works and their place in the modern era. Bombay, Paris, Prague. Lahore, ca. 1920s to early 1950s," funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (Project Nr P29536-G26) 2016-2021. She has co-organized the conferences “Collecting Asian Art in Prague: Cultural Politics and Transcontinental Networks in 20th Century Central Europe,” at the National Gallery Prague, June, 2021; "Routes of Modernism: Artistic Mobility, Protagonists, Platforms, Networks" at the Academy of fine arts and mumok, Vienna, December 2018; in December 2017, she co-organized the conference "Correlating Cultural and Ideological Positions: André Lhote, Paris, and His Former International Students" at Istanbul Technical University. She is an Elise Richter Fellow with the University of Innsbruck. She has spent many years of research in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran, Italy, France, Great Britain and the Czech Republic. Together with Zeynep Kuban she has most recently published "André Lhote and His International Students" with innsbruck university press, 2020.
"South Asia in Central Europe: The Mobility of Artists and Art Works between 1947 and 1989," Austrian Science Fund FWF (V 880-G), 2021-2025; she previously directed the research project "Patterns of trans-regional trails. The materiality of art works and their place in the modern era. Bombay, Paris, Prague. Lahore, ca. 1920s to early 1950s," funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (Project Nr P29536-G26) 2016-2021. She has co-organized the conferences “Collecting Asian Art in Prague: Cultural Politics and Transcontinental Networks in 20th Century Central Europe,” at the National Gallery Prague, June, 2021; "Routes of Modernism: Artistic Mobility, Protagonists, Platforms, Networks" at the Academy of fine arts and mumok, Vienna, December 2018; in December 2017, she co-organized the conference "Correlating Cultural and Ideological Positions: André Lhote, Paris, and His Former International Students" at Istanbul Technical University. She is an Elise Richter Fellow with the University of Innsbruck. She has spent many years of research in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Iran, Italy, France, Great Britain and the Czech Republic. Together with Zeynep Kuban she has most recently published "André Lhote and His International Students" with innsbruck university press, 2020.
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Books and edited Volumes by Simone Wille
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Rather than centring on the well-known collections in Western European and North American museums, Collecting Asian Art turn to museum collections of Asian art in Central Europe which emerged from the late 19th century onwards. Highlighting the dimensions of Central European connectedness, this volume explores how these collections evolved and changed under changing cultural and political conditions from the pre-World War I to the post-World War II periods. With a primary focus on collections of East and South Asian art in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Ljubljana, it outlines the transregional connections and networks that gradually developed.
Collecting Asian Art locates Asian art across the twentieth-century in Central Europe via discourse and ideology, and discusses key collections and the way individual collectors built their networks. It thus explores transregional connections that developed through collecting activities and strategies in the prewar, interwar and postwar eras. Contributors also examine the personal connections between a group of Indologists from postwar Prague and modernist Indian artists from the early 1950s to the 1980s and also discuss the systematic archiving of East Asian art collections in Slovenia. A concluding conversation looks at colonisation and decolonisation from a broader perspective by approaching it through recent art historical discussions on the global dimensions of modernism. By defining the region through its external relationships and its entanglements with regions across Asia rather than as a self-contained unit, the contributions in this volume outline how these transregional connections and networks evolved and changed over time, thus highlighting their singularity in comparison to developments in Western Europe. Based on recent research, Collecting Asian Art reveals neglected sources while reinterpreting well-known ones.
Conference organisation by Simone Wille
National Gallery Prague, Salm Palace
https://www.ngprague.cz/en/event/3092/collecting-asian-art-in-prague-conference
Please send your registration request to: [email protected]
Organised by the Collection of Asian Art at the National Gallery Prague and the Austrian Science Fund’s (FWF) research project “Patterns of Transregional Trails” (P29536-G26)
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This conference looks at collections of Asian art in and outside Prague from the perspective of the national cultural politics interconnected with individual encounters as well as institutional cultural and diplomatic exchange in Central Europe during the 20th century. The focus will lie on collections of Asian art – hereby used as an umbrella term for East Asian, South-East Asian, South Asian, Central Asian and West Asian art. The location includes Prague and its neighbouring cultural centres in Central Europe, thereby allowing a comparison of the mechanisms of collecting and presentation across time and place in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Rather than viewing the collection as connected to a deterministic account of cultural flows through centers and peripheries, the conference will focus on international and transcontinental networks. It will look closely at the role these networks played in establishing the grounds for collecting, displaying and narrating Asian art in Central European museums, which were used as platforms for cultural diplomacy or propaganda. By revisiting historical entanglements and relational comparisons that connect Asia and Central Europe, the conference’s framework will focus on exhibitions, diplomatic exchange, and discursive aspects on art from Asia in the context of cultural politics.
This conference marks the one-hundredth birthday of Lubor Hájek (1921–2000), founder and director of the Oriental Department (a predecessor of today’s Collection of Asian Art) at the National Gallery Prague in 1951. Hájek was head of the collection until 1986. In memory of Lubor Hájek’s one-hundredth birthday, this conference will set out to revisit the rich collection of Asian art held by the National Gallery Prague and view it in connection with other Central European collections of Asian art. The timing of the conference also coincides with the collection’s move from the Kinsky Palace in the Old Town area of Prague to the Salm Palace at Hradčanské Square. By moving depots and reinstalling the exhibits in their new premises, the history of the collection and the question of museum mediation comes to the fore again.
Article in Journals by Simone Wille
Chittaprosad can be situated within a socially responsive practice that is distinctive for one line of development characteristic of his native Bengal, notably represented by artists such as Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) and Somnath Hore (1921–2006). While these artists have produced compelling images in response to political crisis, the Bengal famine, and peasant rebellions, Chittaprosad’s recognition and fame gained in pre-partition India—unlike that of Abedin and Hore—was not carried into the post-partition era. His dissociation from the CPI in 1948, along with the general atmosphere in postcolonial India, with its concerns for signatures of national-modern art, left little room for a former party artist. This, I will argue, instigated him to build on a network beyond the national frame. The group of individuals from Prague that became aware of and interested in Chittaprosad around that time actively supported his career from this point on. This is how his work increasingly circulated within a transnational network that was marked by solidarity with a socialist outlook and paired with a curiosity for traditional and folk arts. These very personal connections exceeded his lifetime, and most of the documents, book illustrations, poems, and artworks related to this have not yet been studied or published.
This article will reflect on these connections and focus on individuals, such as the assistant to the trade commissioner of Czechoslovakia in Bombay (today Mumbai), with whose help and friendship Chittaprosad was able to establish his puppet theater in the 1950s in the suburbs of Bombay. It will delve into the collection of linocuts, acquired from the artist by the National Gallery Prague in the early 1960s, and it will reference the film made by Pavel Hobl about the artist in 1972. By assessing the contributions that Chittaprosad made to the Czech and English journals Nový Orient/New Orient Bimonthly, published by the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, this article will establish an awareness of a transnational network as conceived of spaces, platforms, and institutional and individual support. In an effort to connect with the topic of this journal, it will then elucidate to what extent the circulation and the reception in Czechoslovakia of the works and ideals of the artist Chittaprosad reverberated on his artistic subjectivity in relation to frameworks such as socially committed art, independence and freedom, modernism, and folk traditions. By gathering the multiple threads of histories that seem to have created an alternative space for Chittaprosad, I will investigate how this network and the connections with certain political and cultural geographies of the post-World War II era enabled a geography of aesthetic and emotional solidarity for the artist, and how—without Chittaprosad’s ever having left India—this dialogical field contributed to what Andreas Huyssen has called “alternative geographies of modernism” between the decolonizing and the communist world of the late 1940s up to the late 1970s. Since Chittaprosad has only recently gained attention nationally and internationally as an artist primarily dedicated to the cause of humanity under the impact of political struggle, this article points to the necessity of integrating the topics of mobility and migration in relation to the formation of his work, so that he can then be discussed from the broader framework of modernism as informed by plural sites and plural forms.
Chapters in Books by Simone Wille
The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada.
******
Rather than centring on the well-known collections in Western European and North American museums, Collecting Asian Art turn to museum collections of Asian art in Central Europe which emerged from the late 19th century onwards. Highlighting the dimensions of Central European connectedness, this volume explores how these collections evolved and changed under changing cultural and political conditions from the pre-World War I to the post-World War II periods. With a primary focus on collections of East and South Asian art in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Cracow, Budapest, and Ljubljana, it outlines the transregional connections and networks that gradually developed.
Collecting Asian Art locates Asian art across the twentieth-century in Central Europe via discourse and ideology, and discusses key collections and the way individual collectors built their networks. It thus explores transregional connections that developed through collecting activities and strategies in the prewar, interwar and postwar eras. Contributors also examine the personal connections between a group of Indologists from postwar Prague and modernist Indian artists from the early 1950s to the 1980s and also discuss the systematic archiving of East Asian art collections in Slovenia. A concluding conversation looks at colonisation and decolonisation from a broader perspective by approaching it through recent art historical discussions on the global dimensions of modernism. By defining the region through its external relationships and its entanglements with regions across Asia rather than as a self-contained unit, the contributions in this volume outline how these transregional connections and networks evolved and changed over time, thus highlighting their singularity in comparison to developments in Western Europe. Based on recent research, Collecting Asian Art reveals neglected sources while reinterpreting well-known ones.
National Gallery Prague, Salm Palace
https://www.ngprague.cz/en/event/3092/collecting-asian-art-in-prague-conference
Please send your registration request to: [email protected]
Organised by the Collection of Asian Art at the National Gallery Prague and the Austrian Science Fund’s (FWF) research project “Patterns of Transregional Trails” (P29536-G26)
*****
This conference looks at collections of Asian art in and outside Prague from the perspective of the national cultural politics interconnected with individual encounters as well as institutional cultural and diplomatic exchange in Central Europe during the 20th century. The focus will lie on collections of Asian art – hereby used as an umbrella term for East Asian, South-East Asian, South Asian, Central Asian and West Asian art. The location includes Prague and its neighbouring cultural centres in Central Europe, thereby allowing a comparison of the mechanisms of collecting and presentation across time and place in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Rather than viewing the collection as connected to a deterministic account of cultural flows through centers and peripheries, the conference will focus on international and transcontinental networks. It will look closely at the role these networks played in establishing the grounds for collecting, displaying and narrating Asian art in Central European museums, which were used as platforms for cultural diplomacy or propaganda. By revisiting historical entanglements and relational comparisons that connect Asia and Central Europe, the conference’s framework will focus on exhibitions, diplomatic exchange, and discursive aspects on art from Asia in the context of cultural politics.
This conference marks the one-hundredth birthday of Lubor Hájek (1921–2000), founder and director of the Oriental Department (a predecessor of today’s Collection of Asian Art) at the National Gallery Prague in 1951. Hájek was head of the collection until 1986. In memory of Lubor Hájek’s one-hundredth birthday, this conference will set out to revisit the rich collection of Asian art held by the National Gallery Prague and view it in connection with other Central European collections of Asian art. The timing of the conference also coincides with the collection’s move from the Kinsky Palace in the Old Town area of Prague to the Salm Palace at Hradčanské Square. By moving depots and reinstalling the exhibits in their new premises, the history of the collection and the question of museum mediation comes to the fore again.
Chittaprosad can be situated within a socially responsive practice that is distinctive for one line of development characteristic of his native Bengal, notably represented by artists such as Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) and Somnath Hore (1921–2006). While these artists have produced compelling images in response to political crisis, the Bengal famine, and peasant rebellions, Chittaprosad’s recognition and fame gained in pre-partition India—unlike that of Abedin and Hore—was not carried into the post-partition era. His dissociation from the CPI in 1948, along with the general atmosphere in postcolonial India, with its concerns for signatures of national-modern art, left little room for a former party artist. This, I will argue, instigated him to build on a network beyond the national frame. The group of individuals from Prague that became aware of and interested in Chittaprosad around that time actively supported his career from this point on. This is how his work increasingly circulated within a transnational network that was marked by solidarity with a socialist outlook and paired with a curiosity for traditional and folk arts. These very personal connections exceeded his lifetime, and most of the documents, book illustrations, poems, and artworks related to this have not yet been studied or published.
This article will reflect on these connections and focus on individuals, such as the assistant to the trade commissioner of Czechoslovakia in Bombay (today Mumbai), with whose help and friendship Chittaprosad was able to establish his puppet theater in the 1950s in the suburbs of Bombay. It will delve into the collection of linocuts, acquired from the artist by the National Gallery Prague in the early 1960s, and it will reference the film made by Pavel Hobl about the artist in 1972. By assessing the contributions that Chittaprosad made to the Czech and English journals Nový Orient/New Orient Bimonthly, published by the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, this article will establish an awareness of a transnational network as conceived of spaces, platforms, and institutional and individual support. In an effort to connect with the topic of this journal, it will then elucidate to what extent the circulation and the reception in Czechoslovakia of the works and ideals of the artist Chittaprosad reverberated on his artistic subjectivity in relation to frameworks such as socially committed art, independence and freedom, modernism, and folk traditions. By gathering the multiple threads of histories that seem to have created an alternative space for Chittaprosad, I will investigate how this network and the connections with certain political and cultural geographies of the post-World War II era enabled a geography of aesthetic and emotional solidarity for the artist, and how—without Chittaprosad’s ever having left India—this dialogical field contributed to what Andreas Huyssen has called “alternative geographies of modernism” between the decolonizing and the communist world of the late 1940s up to the late 1970s. Since Chittaprosad has only recently gained attention nationally and internationally as an artist primarily dedicated to the cause of humanity under the impact of political struggle, this article points to the necessity of integrating the topics of mobility and migration in relation to the formation of his work, so that he can then be discussed from the broader framework of modernism as informed by plural sites and plural forms.
The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada.
(UK/Europe)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Collecting-Asian-Art-Transregional-Twentieth-Century/dp/9462703787
(USA)
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9789462703780/collecting-asian-art/#bookTabs=1