Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2008, Art History

Little magazines, literary and/or artistic periodicals that were self-consciously branded as avant-garde, proliferated in late-nineteenth-century Europe and were crucial in circulating concepts of modernism. This dissertation focuses on two little magazines, Krakow's Life (1897-1900) and Warsaw's Chimera (1901-1907), and their editors' promotion of Polish artists as integral participants of an international artworld.Both periodicals were published during a period in which Poland, having been partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the late eighteenth century, did not exist. These partitions fueled a nationalist discourse in which art functioned as a tool for patriotic expression. However, the members of the artistic and literary movement of Young Poland challenged the notion of an instructive art. They strove instead to redefine national art by arguing that patriotism should be internalized rather than didactically conveyed and, furthermore, insisted that Polish art had to become modern to thrive internationally. Life and Chimera reinforced these goals through a deliberate visual and rhetorical program that underscored the supremacy of modernism. This dissertation examines the chief polemical essays and visual programs of both journals to demonstrate their editors' efforts to frame modernism in Poland and legitimize Polish art within the international artworld. Ludwik Szczepanski and Artur Gorski, Life's first two editors, maintained that art could be both modern and national and configured the journal's visual program around various national, and simultaneously universalist, tropes. Life's last editor, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, however, argued that national identity did not belong in conversations about art since only pure, subjective expression should occupy artists. He structured Life around various artistic and literary "personalities," whose inclusion in the journal reflected his elevation of artistic identity. Like Przybyszewski, Chimera's Zenon Prze (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Anne Helmreich (Committee Chair); Ellen Landau (Committee Member); Miriam Levin (Committee Member); Lisa Bernd (Committee Member); Anna Brzyski (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; Slavic Literature