SESSION: Reforms, revivals and returns revisited

Reforms, revivals and returns in the visual arts have taken many avenues and have had many departure and end points. By seeking an alternative path, they often promised a distinctive departure from the powers of capitalism. For instance, calls for reforms of housing led over the last century to attempts of creating new, self-reliant communities that live in so-called garden cities according to Ebenezer Howard, or in King Charles’s new urban developments of Poundbury and similar projects. Likewise, revivals of crafts once related to pre-industrial self-sufficiency aim at recovering skills that rely on local materials, knowledge and community. Initiatives promoting homemade clothes, needlework or upcycling have been linked to a wide spectrum of political actors from sustainable craftivists to tradwives.

Common to these revivals are concepts like tradition, community, and authenticity. Yet do they run the danger of becoming conservative, normative and exclusive, whether in terms of gender, race or class? This panel seeks papers that critically examine ideas of authentic, socially engaged architecture, craft and design, exploring their political scale and social impact.

Focusing on the period since 1900, we ask the following questions:

Can the reform movements from the past provoke a genuine reform in the future?
What values can be promoted through reforms, revivals and returns of traditions, however invented?
How were the “Western” reform movements transferred, translated and adopted in different global geographies?
What are the political motivations and intentions of such activities?
Whose traditions, values and authenticity are revived and constructed?

Session Convenor:

Marta Filipová, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic

Vendula Hnídková, Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences

Speakers:

Amy Gillette, Woodmere Art Museum

Genealogies of Revivalism at the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia

Woodmere Art Museum’s newly opened Maguire Hall—a restored Victorian mansion-turned-convent—features interwoven genealogies of revivalist architecture and art that draw on Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, and West African traditions. This paper examines how successive generations of Philadelphia architects and artists whose works are displayed at Maguire Hall have turned to premodern forms as vehicles for cultural re-enchantment and social renewal. Each iteration demonstrates that revival is translation rather than repetition.

The paper traces three such genealogies. First, it analyzes early twentieth-century Arts and Crafts revivalism—medievalizing stained glass by Nicola D’Ascenzo, Tudor-style architecture by Cope & Stewardson, and Violet Oakley’s universalist reimagining of classical iconography—as efforts toward moral reform in response to industrial modernity. Second, it examines contemporary artists including Judith Schaechter, Thomas Chimes, and Twins Seven Seven, practitioners who have extended this lineage by reworking sacred idioms from medieval, Byzantine, and West African art to address bodily, racial, and ecological concerns.

Third, the paper argues that Woodmere itself performs revival through curatorial practice, framing these revivalisms as a series of evolving conversations. Through this “meta-revival,” Woodmere transforms exhibition into renewal, demonstrating that revivalism remains a vital practice of reimagining futures through reawakened pasts and generating inclusive narratives about art, belief, and belonging in twenty-first-century Philadelphia.

Valéria Bláha, Masaryk University Brno

Folk Craft Revival in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

This paper examines the revived interest in folk art and its impact on the local folk craft production during the Second World War (1939-1945) in the territory of the Czech Lands, at the time under the “protectorate” of Nazi Germany.

After the Munich Agreement of 1918 and the subsequent occupation of Bohemia and Moravia by German forces, folk craft production became a frequent topic for discussions in the official circles. State and German authorities explicitly called for the revival, but also for the modernisation of traditional local folk art, which was to be achieved by streamlining its production, effective distribution of work, and enhancing marketability through updated design. This advancement was to result in the strengthening of the position of craftspeople in the social system and new opportunities in export markets and folklore tourism.

This encouraged many radical local folk artisans who sympathised with the German administration to harness these supporting tendencies to materialise their own visions of folk craft production, with which they wanted to enter both local and international markets. They established a network of cooperatives, set up workshops, trained new artisans and designers in craft schools, and exported goods such as hand-painted Easter eggs, traditional embroidered blouses, and folk costumes worldwide.

This paper explores the dynamics between revival and modernisation of folk craft production within an undemocratic political system by asking how local radical artisans leveraged official support and how they envisioned the role of folk craft in a potentially new world order.

Eira H. Booth, University of Essex

New Objectivity and the Architecture of Reform: Resistance, Ethics, and Revival

This paper revisits the architectural wing of the modernist New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, which emerged as an ideological act of reform in early twentieth-century Europe. Responding to urgent social demands for dignified domestic environments, New Building (Neues Bauer) advanced a disciplined spatial logic and adopted modern fabrication techniques to reimagine how people could inhabit shared urban futures. Its functional realism and internal tensions also reflected broader cultural anxieties at the time, although this remains largely underexplored in current design debates. Whilst New Building is historically confined to its European origins, its ethical realism invites reconsideration across geographies where architectural reform and ideological framing intersect. In light of today’s housing crisis, for instance, reviving its design ethos may inform contemporary approaches to socially-engaged architecture and collective living. Yet, despite its historical commitment to ethical and communal habitation, New Building’s socially responsive approach has not undergone significant revival.

Through analysis of built environments, planning documents, and contemporary discourse, this paper argues that New Building offers a still-unclaimed model for reform that resists aesthetic commodification. Moreover, the movement can foster renewed critical engagement with tradition, community, and authenticity in contemporary design practise. Building on this analysis, revisiting New Building’s legacy can create space to re-engage suppressed ethical and aesthetic values in architectural practise today. In doing so, this paper contributes to ongoing conversations about the ways in which design movements are framed, politicised, and revived. It also underscores how their ethical foundations have the potential to inform socially-engaged responses to contemporary crises.

Clara Shaw, The Courtauld Institute of Art

Between Tradition and Modernity: The Revival of Artistic Lithography in Britain

In 1913, a group of eight artists produced as many lithographic posters for the London Underground. Contrary to the colourful advertisements travellers were accustomed to, these were largely monochromatic, as freely drawn as sketches, and depicted not stylised landscapes but views of urban life. The seminal project was a collaboration between leaders of the revival of artistic lithography, notably Francis Ernest Jackson, and Frank Pick, Commercial Manager for The Underground Group. The posters’ uniqueness reflected both the revival’s rhetoric of authenticity and Pick’s investment in William Morris’ credo: art for all. Examining the Underground project, this paper will examine how the revival combatted its stigma of commercialisation by adapting its very processes.

The revival of artistic lithography in Britain – c. 1910-1920 – sought to reverse the decline in practice and the negative critical reception the print medium incurred as a result of its heavy industrialisation in the nineteenth century. Examining the Underground commission, I discuss how the artists reclaimed their direct involvement with the lithographic medium from planning to printing. Looking at the posters themselves, I trace the emphasis on the artist’s hand — which created an individuality seemingly at odds with mass production. Finally, I consider how these lithographs not only depicted contemporary life but addressed the British public.

With its calculated play between the worlds of fine art and the public sphere, a study of the revival of artistic lithography offers a new lens to understand early-twentieth century Britain’s own crisis of identity caught between tradition and modernity.