Decorating Up a Few Acres of the Rocky Mountains

In this chapter, the authors explore the development of a partnership between undergraduate art history students at an art and design college and educators at a historic house museum in Denver, CO. From this partnership, the museum team created authentic opportunities for student voice in three different art history survey courses. In these classes, students engaged in practical applications of art historical research and created original objects of art, while the college provided resources and audience to support museum programming and development. Here, the authors discuss how these projects developed into a lasting and mutually beneficial partnership for continued socially engaged art history and design opportunities for students.

Buddhist Art and Architecture in Mongolia

Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture were largely unknown in Western academic literature before the opening of Mongolia and Russia in 1990 and of China in the 1980s, followed by the organization of exhibitions of their arts abroad. This article maps out major resources on Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture, here understood as the art and architecture of the Mongolian populations, who live not only in Mongolia (known as “Outer Mongolia” before 1911, also referred to as Northern, or Khalkha Mongolia) itself but also in China (mostly in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, or southern Mongolia) and in Russia (Republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia). The study of Mongolian Buddhist art and architecture is still at an incipient stage and reflects the compartmentalization between the Mongols of China and those of Mongolia and Russia, though exchanges between researchers are developing. Comparatively few artifacts have survived the migrations, nomadizations, and above all the destructions after the fall of the Mongol empire in the late 14th century and the religious persecution and destruction of material culture of the 20th-century Communist regimes of Russia, Mongolia (1936–1938), and China (during the Cultural Revolution, 1966–1976). Old photographs and textual descriptions of buildings and artifacts are therefore important to complement our knowledge of this field. Mongolian culture has been qualified as “osmotic,” receiving, borrowing, absorbing, and acculturating foreign influences with a great receptivity. But Mongols did not borrow randomly: they were eclectic in their choices, according to their own cultural norms and aspirations. This is obvious when dealing with art and architecture, where borrowings are sometimes so well integrated that they were forgotten, and nationalists now claim Mongols are themselves at the origin of some forms and motifs. Since the 1990s, the interest for the Mongolian material heritage led to the development of projects of cooperation between Mongolia and foreign partners in the fields of archeology, art history, survey and restoration of monasteries, and creation of new museums. The volume of publications, especially of catalogues of private and public collections of Mongolian art have recently increased, but large collections such as those kept in Russia have not been published yet, and many Buddhist statues and paintings still labeled as “Sino-Tibetan” in Western museums should probably be attributed to Mongolia.

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov'sThis article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys.