Paths – Methods – Critiques: Women Art Historians 1880–1970

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Annette Dorgerloh
• Subject Area: Art History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428261246

The network aims to reconsider the contributions of the first academically trained German-speaking women art historians to the discipline between circa 1880 and 1970. This entails analyzing their work, contextualizing it in the history of science and culture in general, and reconstructing their national and international field of agency. Beyond a mere collection of biographies, the network aims to examine the innovation potential arising from the social and institutional constraints women encountered in the early stages of the discipline. A special focus lies on the question in how far their approaches to the theorization and advancement of art are inscribed within the history and methods of the discipline, and which impulses they could give to art history today, especially in the face of the growing interest in non-European art, material culture, and architectural theory.While women art historians were not only numerous in the early 20th century but also highly successful in publishing, curating, teaching, and dealing with art, their work is almost completely unknown today. The project therefore will reinvestigate and analyze comparatively the questions these women raised, the problems they addressed, the theories and methods they developed, and the subject-matters they pioneered for art history—e. g. in regard to decorative arts, design and architecture, new media, and modern and non-European art. It will furthermore examine their agency within a decidedly international professional field. This will comprise a survey of the institutional, disciplinary, and (gender-)political mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination which, especially against the background of prosecu-tion and exile during National Socialism, contributed to their current invisibility.Far from partaking in a cult of genius and canonization, this act of ‘rediscovery’ is understood as a step towards expanding the methodological, material, and cultural diversity of the art-historical discipline. Only if we recall the manifold subject-matters treated by the first female art historians due to their specific life experiences, social backgrounds, carrier paths, networks, and knowledge systems, and only if we reconsider the methods they developed or modified, and the medial, stylistic, and aesthetic forms of communication they developed, can the history of art history—and hence of art—be perspectivally enriched and rendered more dynamic. With this project, the network hopes to contribute to a critical reevaluation of the history of the humanities.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Brigitte Sölch