Abstracts

Anna Gruetzner Robins [Monday, 2 - 3.30: panel 1]

Walter Sickert: Art and Nation

Walter Sickert (1860-1942) is the essential, perhaps even the pre-eminent, English modernist. But does Englishness adequately reflect Sickert's identity? The facts are that Sickert had a successful exhibition in Paris, attracted the attention of French critics, and makes frequent mention of French art in his own writings. There is little point in overlaying an outworn modernist paradigm that privileges French art on Sickert's career, but neither should his Englishness be the sole determinant of his identity. Englishness and Frenchness are narrow, excluding and exclusive categories reflecting the intense debates around art and nation that circulated in the artist's lifetime. Sickert's personal biography - born in Munich, family emigrated to Britain, moved to France, considered taking out French citizenship, fluent in five languages, exhibited extensively abroad - suggests a fluid set of artistic and national identities that appear to challenge an essentialist positioning of his work based on Englishness. Throughout his career Sickert was an active participant in exhibition forums in Britain and abroad. In the 1890s , British critics thought his art was tainted with a French influence. Between 1900 and 1910 when he was a significant contributor to Paris exhibition culture, French critics detected 'English' characteristics in his art. The testing ground for my analysis is the critical reception of Sickert, but the focus of the enquiry will be issues of identity. I do not propose to focus on Sickert's own shifting self-ascription but to look at the art criticism as a mirror of larger issues.These critical responses will be treated as a floating signifier, a holding space for diverse and conflicting expressions of Englishness and 'un-Englishness'.

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Grischka Petri [Monday, 2 - 3.30: panel 1]

Whistler and the Internationalisation of the Art Markets in the 1880s and 1890s

The 'Internationalism of the Arts' at the fin de siècle has its commercial aspects. The art markets underwent a process of internationalisation with American demand serving as an important catalyst. Finding himself in the middle of this process, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), an American artist then resident in London and Paris, turns out to be an interesting case study.

In the second half of the 1880s, Whistler became President of the Society of British Artists, taking efforts to give the society a more internationalist character, e.g. inviting foreign artists to exhibit. After he was dismissed as president, Whistler organised the cultural exchange from the other direction and now concentrated on exhibiting on the Continent, e.g. in Brussels, Munich, and Paris, where he was warmly received in Symbolist circles. He accumulated considerable cultural capital in France, culminating in the purchase of the portrait of the artist's mother by the French government in 1891, which also changed his image in England.

However, the 'internationalist optimism' manifested itself mainly in commercial terms. Where institutions turned out to be conservative, the international markets offered opportunities to the cosmopolitan. After the Civil War, American demand for European art (in particular for French paintings) grew rapidly. American collectors bought mainly in Paris - a fact also discussed by English artists and critics such as William Laidlay. Whistler continually showed his work in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s. He publicly compared the 'French reputation' of his work to the perceived philistinism of the English. By associating himself with 'French quality', Whistler met a particular demand from a certain type of art collectors of his home country. In short, he generated an artistic reputation in Paris which he used to sell his work in New York. He thus benefited commercially from his 'Continental' reputation.

The conference subject of 'Internationalism and the Arts' is investigated from the angle of a particular artist's response to the internationalisation of his markets, taking account of opportunities and limitations.

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Pamela Fletcher [Monday, 2 - 3.30: panel 1]

Cosmopolitan Connoisseurs: The Commercial Art Gallery and Its Publics

The institution of the modern commercial art gallery emerged in London in the mid-nineteenth century, and the gallery system rapidly became a dominant force in the exhibition and sale of contemporary art. This expansion of the late Victorian art market has generally been attributed to a new class of mercantile patrons and their commitment to the work of living British artists. Intriguingly, however, many of the earliest commercial galleries in London were premised on a cosmopolitan appeal. By the 1870s and 1880s many of London's most prestigious galleries had tied their public identities to contemporary international art, including the French Gallery, the German Gallery, the Scandinavian Gallery, and the Belgian Gallery.

In this paper, I will examine the development of these new spaces for the consumption of modern art and their accompanying rhetoric of cosmopolitan connoisseurship, arguing that their cosmopolitan appeal was central to their ability to carve out a reputable niche in the art market. While the great public exhibition venues based their appeal on the ideal of a national art, commercial galleries used multiple strategies to fashion a different kind of identity and audience. Some made explicitly political claims for their international exhibitions, arguing that art could be a unifying cultural force. Others positioned themselves more visibly within a rhetoric of competitive nationalism, locating their enterprises within a discourse of the "British School" and its Continental rivals. And still others employed a more commercial language of fashionability to entice audiences to see the "latest things from Paris." Taken together, however, it is clear that the constitution of a cosmopolitan public for contemporary art was a key strategy in the commercialization and expansion of the late Victorian art world. As the proliferating private spaces of commercial galleries fragmented the ideal of a cohesive national public for art, they worked to identify their audiences with a larger cosmopolitan community, creating elite sub-publics in imagined communion with an international audience bound by taste.

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Margaret MacDonald [Monday, 3.30 - 5: panel 2]

The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, 1898-1901

The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers (ISSPG) was established in 1897 by a group of artists led by James Guthrie, E. A. Walton and John Lavery.

Using archives of the University of Glasgow, Tate and V&A, this paper will explore the significance of an important but little known artistic movement of the fin-de-siècle. It reflects on-going research in the Centre for Whistler Studies into the history of the ISSPG from 1897-1917.

James McNeill Whistler was elected first president of the ISSPG, Auguste Rodin the second. It was cosmopolitan in its outlook - one of its original aims was 'the non-recognition of nationality in Art' - and artists from many different countries were invited to join an Honorary Council. The first exhibition was held in May 1898 at the Prince's Skating Club in Knightsbridge, with work on show from Italy, Holland, Belgium, Austria, Germany, France and America. I will focus on the first three exhibitions of the society, from 1898-1901, discussing the selection and display of works, the personalities and economics involved, and in particular, the involvement of print-makers, specifically targeted by Whistler.

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Grace Brockington [Monday, 3.30 - 5: panel 2]

Women's Art Clubs and their Internationalist Aspirations

The fin de siècle saw a massive growth in international organisations, including those which promoted cultural exchange between European countries. This paper focuses on two such bodies, both of which distinguished themselves by being for women only. One was the Women's International Art Club, the other, the Ladies' Lyceum Club. Their pairing in this paper raises various issues. One concerns the scope and limitations of internationalism. What did the international element of these societies actually consist of? To what did they aspire, and to extent did they achieve it? Another is the question of gender. Was there any connection, real or perceived, between women and internationalism at this time? A third issue concerns the specifically cultural nature of the organisations. Why create an international art club? How does the implied association between art and the international affect our understanding of aesthetic developments c. 1900?The Women's International and the Lyceum adopted different strategies for developing an international network. This paper puts their aspirations in the context of contemporary debate about global organisation, emphasising the flaws in the available models of internationalism, but also contemporary critiques of those models. It argues that while the Women's International was anglocentric in its exhibiting policy, the Lyceum deliberately decentred its administration, insisting in the autonomy of the various branches of its global network of clubs. Both contributed towards a growing international women's movement, building a European-wide support network for professional women. In the case of the Lyceum, this network also supported a belief in women's superior qualities as peace makers. The Lyceum's programme of artistic exchange followed a pacifist agenda, which constructed a clear connection between cultural internationalism, and political cooperation between countries. In the decade before 1914, such rapprochement became increasingly urgent. Though ultimately futile, the Lyceum's pre-emptive programme of cultural exchange with Germany complicates received histories of Anglo-German enmity and unrelenting nationalism.

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Rachel Sloan [Monday, 3.30 - 5: panel 2]

Lost in Translation: The French Rossetti

The reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in France has provoked steadily increasing scholarly interest over the past twenty years. However, the influence and critical fate of one of the key Pre-Raphaelites, the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on the other side of the Channel, has yet to be adequately examined. One reason for this oversight may be the fact that, unlike his compatriots Edward Burne-Jones and George Frederic Watts, Rossetti's paintings were never exhibited in France, either during his lifetime or in the two decades after his death in 1882, when the Symbolist movement was in full flower. Yet reproductive prints and photographs after his pictures appear to have been readily available (and keenly collected by avant-garde poets) in Paris by the 1890s, and several leading Symbolist poets tried their hands at translating his poems.

The adage 'traduire, c'est trahir' (to translate is to betray) acquires a particular resonance in the case of the creation of a 'French Rossetti'; the problems inherent in translating literature from one language into another were, in his case, multiplied by the translation of his vibrantly coloured canvases into black-and-white reproductions. This paper will examine the transformation of the double work that exerted the strongest fascination in French Symbolist circles, the painting and poem The Blessed Damozel. The poem was first translated into French by Emile Blémont in 1872, with different versions by Gabriel Sarrazin and Clémence Couve (the last of which featured an introduction by the founder of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, Joséphin Péladan) in 1886 and 1887, with little or no reference to the painting. Claude Debussy set a heavily edited version of Sarrazin's translation as a cantata in 1888, finally publishing the score in 1893 with a cover design by the Nabi painter Maurice Denis, thus reuniting poem and painting and fusing them with music in a new total work of art in a manner which was both wildly unfaithful to the letter of the original and, I will argue, faithful to its spirit.

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Myriam Boussahba-Bravard [Monday, 5.30 - 7: panel 3]

The International: A Review of the World's Progress, Britain 1907-1909

This monthly political periodical was launched in December 1907 in Britain, France and Germany by Dr Rudolf Broda. Throughout its chaotic life it was to have several other short-lived editions in Madrid , Prague and even for a shorter time in Russia. Examining the Documents du progrès and Dokumente des Forschritts shows what features the three main editions did and did not share. This gives some synchronic information on the construction of readership, commercial enterprise and vision of 'internationalism' in and for three different countries.

Dr Rudolf Broda (1880-1932) was a professor , jurist and sociologist who lived in Paris and lectured at the Collège libre des sciences sociales. As an Austrian German, a socialist and a trilingual person, he benefited from contacts and sympathies from the various communities to which he belonged. His personal linguistic gifts must have been essential when it came to reading periodicals, contacting the potential writers and editing their work.

The London edition is the main focus of this study while the French edition will be used to highlight common grounds and specificities between the two. In each national edition the contents, writers and hierarchy of articles draws a picture of 'internationalism' meaning in fact "Europe" and an international map based on European concerns. Whether this international geography was expected or assumed by the editors, they conveyed the resulting picture: a well-informed progressive community of academics and political actors who testified, analysed, wrote and read about social reform for the sake of their European or/and national readers. Perhaps even more interestingly, the making of both and each edition projects the definition of the sophisticated well-informed national readership as it was or as 'it should have been' according to the periodical.

The detailed study of the London edition will also be compared with contemporary British periodicals and their own definition of 'national concerns' and 'internationalism'. As the period was fraught with anxieties about certain European countries (especially Germany), with a mounting criticism of colonial practices (albeit not of imperialism as such) and with controversies about social reform within each country, this periodical documented "change" which it equated with 'progress' as the French English and German titles stated. How well and how long each national edition fared may also shed light on British perceptions of Britain versus 'a Eurocentric international' at the turn of the last century.

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Neil Stewart [Monday, 5.30 - 7: panel 3]

Modern Views. The Czech Journal Moderní revue in the Context of Fin de Siècle Internationalism

The journal Moderní revue has for a long time been regarded as no more than a marginal element of Czech modernism by literary histories, especially by those written in Communist times. Published in Prague between 1894 and 1925 and edited by Arnošt Procházka (1869-1925) and Jirí Karásek (1871-1951), Moderní revue is often characterised as the mouthpiece of a group of avowedly "decadent" eccentrics and literary amateurs, isolated from the more substantial artistic movements and trends of the time.

My suggested contribution argues that this was not the case. Not only did the internationally acclaimed symbolist poet Otokar Brezina publish his early work in Moderní revue, the journal was also an important factor for the internationalisation of Czech literature itself. Procházka, Karásek and their followers were opposed to the artistic dogmas of realism as well as to the patriotic tone prevalent in Bohemian art around 1900. At a time when the tensions between the Czech and the German population of the Habsburg empire erupted in massive street fighting in Prague, the writers around Moderní revue did not join in the general political propaganda but offered their readers a programme of literary criticism and translations designed to overcome what they saw as the main problem of Bohemian culture: its European isolation and bourgeois provincialism. Czech translations of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Verlaine, Wilde, Pater, Przybyszewski and, of course, Huysmans' A rebours appeared here for the first time, while the layout with its many illustrations was modelled on the great French and English journals of the time: "La Plume", "Mercure de France", and "The Yellow Book".

A single issue of Moderní revue worthy of special attention (and one that I will focus on my presentation) is the one dedicated to Oscar Wilde in 1895 on the occasion of his trial. It contains original translations and criticism of his work along with a defence of homosexuality by Oskar Panizza. Daringly outspoken as it is, this issue of Moderní revue may well be without parallel in the European literature of its day.

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Wolfgang Sonne [Tuesday, 9.30 - 11: panel 4]

Andersen and Hébrard's World Centre of Communication: Celebration of Internationalism and International Style

Capital city planning around 1900 was in general characterised by nationalistic separatism and hegemonial colonialism. The plan for Washington in 1902 aimed at representing the US as a world leading Republic, plans for Berlin in 1910 searched for expression of military supremecy of the German Reich, the plan for New Delhi in 1913 aimed at installing lasting British hegemony over India using urban design and architectural style as deliberate means, while at the same time the capital of the Empire underwent substantial changes towards a monumental "Imperial London".

Against this context of antagonist ambitions the World Centre of Communication forms a remarkable contrast. Its major goal was to encourage international scientific exchange to promote international peace. Already its genesis was the result of an international and interdisciplinary process: initiated by the American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen who had Norwegian origins and lived in Rome, the monumental city for 1 million inhabitants was designed by the French Beaux-Arts architect Ernest Hébrard. It was published in two monumental volumes in 1913 and 1918 with contributions by French, British and Italian scientists. Furthermore it was distributed to all major heads of states, embassies and international libraries, and it was also promoted by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine's Union des Associations Internationales.

Based on archivial sources from the Museo Andersen, this paper will explore both the ideology of internationalism which inspired this project and the artistic means which were meant to represent and enable international cultural exchange. A high-energetic symbolistic classicism for sculptures combined with exuberant Beaux-Arts classicism in architecture and large-scale geometric layout in urban design - all prepared by the series of World exhibitions - were the major artistic tools which aimed at creating an international culture as the peak of human development. Compared to its actually wide-spread dissemination, Beaux-Arts classicism can be interpreted as the first international style of the 20th century, and the World Centre as the emblematic artistic incarnation of internationalist ambitions in this era.

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Stacey Loughrey Sloboda [Tuesday, 9.30 - 11: panel 4]

Grammars of Ornament: Internationalism and Modernity in British Design

In the decades following the Great Exhibition of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in 1851, British design underwent major stylistic and theoretical transformations that brought it within the aegis of an international consciousness. Rendered mute in the face of overwhelming evidence that nearly every country in the world had a more advanced stylistic language of design, British designers sought to create an international grammar of design principles and sources. Along with a systematic program of exhibiting designs and ornaments from Europe and beyond in the metropolis, the late nineteenth century saw the publication of numerous illustrated books and design manuals of world ornament. Comprised of thousands of pictorial examples of decorative motifs, color harmonies, and patterns from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and medieval and renaissance Europe, these books were an attempt to categorize the design history of the world into an easily legible system of classification that could be readily poached by European designers interested in creating a new international language of design. These designers and authors looked to the material past of pan-European culture and to an imagined contemporary visual culture of various non-Western civilizations in order to create global artistic language. That stylistic imitations of Chinese, Indian, and African forms and patterns constituted an imaginative Western solution to the formal problems of new industrial materials testifies to the extent to which British designers formulated a new concept of internationalism in the service of artistic inspiration. These artistic gestures occurred in the context of Germanic aesthetics, most notably those of Semper and Riegl, that explored the history of art as a stylistic history of global ornament. Thus, both artists and philosophers were interested in the stylistic potential for modern art that a global (if still selective) study of the history of art could provide. Likewise, the European study and appropriation of non-Western art reveals the ambiguous nature of colonial contact in the arts. Focusing on illustrated design manuals, this paper examines the artistic, philosophical, and political implications of a self-conscience internationalism in design, forged by British designers and fueled by German-speaking critics around the turn of the century, which created a pan-European sense of artistic heritage at the same time that it attempted to secure the global character of modern design. Included among these are James Fergusson, The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855); Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Christopher Dresser, Principles of Decorative Design (1870); G.C.M. Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India (1880) and Portfolio of Indian Art (1881); John Sedding, Art and Handicraft (1894); F. Edward Hulme, The Birth and Development of Ornament (1894), Walter Crane, The Bases of Design (1898). 2 Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (1860-63); Alois Riegl, Ältere orientalische Teppiche (1891), and Stilfragen (1893).

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Judy Neiswander [Tuesday, 9.30 - 11: panel 4]

Cosmopolitan Design and the British Home, 1870-1914

For most of the twentieth century, popular media on the subject of interior design has been both hermetic and self-referential - the latest colours, the best new products, the 'ultimate' kitchen re-do are the only topics addressed in reference to the home. Television make-over programs and the army of 'shelter' magazines discuss the domestic interior exclusively in terms of formal values, divorced from the kind of life that is lived there. At the end of the 19th century this was not the case. Indeed, in the popular literature written about interior decoration - handbooks for 'those about to furnish,' articles in ladies magazines, in journals for the architectural profession and the decorating trades - the optimal interior, as a setting for the Good Life, was a subject of heated debate.

In the run-up to World War I, two vigorously defended points of view emerged. One group felt strongly that 'the British child should be raised by the British hearth' and that furnishings based upon the best of historic English traditions would provide the proper environment for nurturing the next generation of citizens. Others felt equally strongly that 'cosmopolitan' design, which distilled the best of all cultures, was superior. This illustrated paper will explore the issue of 'Cosmopolitan design' as it was articulated in the literature on interior decoration written between 1870 and the First World War - what was it? Who embraced it? Did it prevail in the interiors advocated? It will also set this concept within the context of the international Arts & Crafts movement and its manifestations in Britain and on the continent.

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Andrzej Szczerski [Tuesday, 11.30 - 1: panel 5]

"The Arts & Crafts Movement and Central Europe - between 'national' and 'international' "

In my paper I would like to look at the cultural contacts between Great Britain and Central Europe (including Austria-Hungary and former lands of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) at the turn of the last century. In particular I shall look at the reception of the British Arts & Crafts Movement in design and architecture. The key point is the crucial role the A&C played in the foundation of national styles in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Slovakia. In those countries the British example inspired artists to discover the vernacular and folk art, which were perceived as the sources of national culture. The social message of the A&C played essential role in the national style ideology, too. In the same time the references to British art helped to frame the idea of 'national style' in the international context and present it as the European phenomenon.

But the exchange was twofold. Some British protagonist of the Arts & Crafts Movement, as well as British periodical 'The Studio', were aware of and acknowledged the design revival in Central Europe. Yet they mainly focused on the discovery of true handicraft on the 'fringes' of Europe, which inspired Central European national styles. Walter Crane and Charles R. Ashbee traveled in Bohemia and Hungary to experience, what Crane called, "Ruskinian" utopia - forgotten villages, where the pace of life has not changed since the Middle Ages. Thus e.g. Transylvanian peasant communities could become an inspiration for the contemporary British society and the developed world. The 'provincial' was elevated to the status of the 'universal'.

The British-Central European exchange demonstrates various relations between 'national' and 'international' c. 1900. It also helps to understand the current idea of art as the common and unifying factor in the life of individuals and nations.

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Alba Irollo [Tuesday, 11.30 - 1: panel 5]

"Walter Crane's Bible, "an artistic compendium" of the Fin de Siècle"

At the turn of the last century, Britain lead the way in the field of publishing, mostly of illustrated books. The Kelmscott Press, created by William Morris, left its mark, and after Morris's death in 1896, Walter Crane became the most eminent book illustrator in Europe. There was enormous demand for his work, and thanks to translations, his essays enjoyed a wide circulation. In 1895, he became involved in the ambitious project of creating an illustrated Bible. Starting in the Netherlands, but conceived as an international collaboration, it was co-ordinated by a Limited Society composed of artists, editors and art merchants and forming a network all over Europe. 26 artists from all over Europe and America, some of world importance, contributed the 100 plates to illustrate the Bible, while Crane made all the typographic decorations. The resulting Bible appears as a beautiful book in Modern Style / Art Nouveau, the style of the Fin de Siècle. It was shown for the first time in London in 1901 and promoted by "The Illustrated London News".

The Limited Society of the Illustrated Bible worked for fifteen years (1895-1911) as a bridge between Great Britain, the homeland of illustrated books, and the rest of Europe. The Bible had several editions: it was published in Dutch, English, Latin, German, Italian and American (each has the same plates, only the text changes), but today it is unknown. This presentation draws on original archival material to uncover its history, and establish its importance as an international collaboration in publishing and illustration.

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Rosalind P. Blakesley [Tuesday, 11.30 - 1: panel 5]

"The Pre-Raphaelites in Russia"

There has of late been much scholarly interest in the reception of the work of the Pre-Raphaelites outside Britain, and in the role which the ideas and practice of figures such as Gabriel Dante Rossetti played within that expansion. Russia, though, has received relatively little attention, largely because of the linguistic and logistical obstacles which Western scholars working in Russia face. This paper aims to address the imbalance by focusing on the way in which some of the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites were introduced into Russia, and appropriated or paralleled in Russian art. One must be cautious in assessing the Russian reception of the Pre-Raphaelites, for in Russia the term has been used far more loosely than in Britain, stretching to encompass artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and even J. W. M. Turner. Here, the focus will be on members of the 'second generation' of Pre-Raphaelites, namely Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane. By tracing conduits of their ideas into Russia through the activities of specific artists, critics and publications at the turn of the century, the paper will shed new light on a rich and influential aspect of British-Russian artistic exchange.

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Drew Milne [Tuesday, 2 - 3.30: panel 6]

Nijinsky's Faune and the International Modernism of the Ballets Russes in Paris and London

This paper considers the reception of Nijinsky's L'Après-Midi d'un Faune and the challenges posed by Nijinsky's dancing and choreography to academic ballet tradition and perceptions of performance culture. Against the view which sees Faune's break with ballet's classicism as a key moment in European modernism, the argument explores awkwardnesses in understanding the Ballets Russes as a modernist institution. The Diaghilev formula for a late symbolist theatre, a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk comes into crisis in Nijinsky's Faune. There are strains between different elements: Mallarmé's poetic analogue; Debussy's music; Bakst's costumes and scenic design; Nijinsky's choreography and dancing; Baron de Meyer's photographic bookwork. How far does Nijinksy's Faune establish the autonomy of its choreographed forms to suggest a performance event resistant to assimilation within performance history? Ballet, like silent cinema, is perhaps less dependent on language for its reception across international and inter-cultural contexts, and thus more easily translated into an international phenomenon. Nijinsky's Faune generated public controversy when it was performed in Paris, and to a lesser degree when it was performed in London. Different contexts offer an intriguing case study for accounts of the reception of late nineteenth century poetics and aesthetics. This discussion suggests ways in which currents across different art forms are collaboratively bound up with performance culture, and that this performance culture should be more central to understandings of modernism.

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Katherine Cockin [Tuesday, 2 - 3.30: panel 6]

Art Theatre, Englishness and International Exchange: Edith Craig, J. T. Grein and The Pioneer Players 1911-25

The Pioneer Players theatre society, noted for its support of the women's suffrage movement and its challenges to the restrictive powers of the Lord Chamberlain, was also responsible for the production in London of numerous significant plays in translation. From 1915 the Pioneer Players attempted to establish itself as an 'art theatre' and with a fraction of the membership and funds of the Stage Society, it succeeded in bringing challenging dramatic experiments to London during the First World War. The Pioneer Players brought to the English stage the work of dramatists from Russia, France, Spain, Italy and Holland, such as plays by Nikolai Evreinov, Leonid Andreiev, Paul Claudel, Jose Echegeray, Salvatore di Giacomo, Gerolamo Rovetta, and Herman Heijermanns. Reviewed in the national press and by such critics as Desmond McCarthy and Virginia Woolf, the work of the Pioneer Players is that of London's forgotten art theatre. In 1914, Christopher St John's translation of Paphnutius was performed by the Pioneer Players in the first modern production of a play by the tenth-century nun, Hrotsvit, said to the be first female dramatist. The significance of this act of scholarship and recovery is clear unlike the performance context: the other challenging and topical plays about prostitution in the society's programme. Other plays produced during the First World War engaged with the cultural panic about female sexuality, exemplified by a dramatisation of Pierre Louys' 'The Girl and The Puppet'. This paper will explore the range of plays produced in translation by the Pioneer Players theatre society, establishing some of the political, diplomatic and cultural networks arising from this activity. Edith Craig's role in the society as its director will be considered in the context of art theatre as it was developing outside England and, in some cases, with the involvement of her brother, Edward Gordon Craig.

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Tore Rem [Tuesday, 3.30 - 5: panel 7]

Ibsenism, insularity and internationalism

The early British reception of Ibsen is characterised by massive hostility, but also by considerable openness. Years before the first breakthrough of the Ibsen campaign - the production of A Doll's House in 1889 - the struggle for Ibsen involved a number of people and groups who were later to become influential in British literary life. Ibsen became a cause, and his works, and the appropriations of his works, challenged not just the status quo, but also British attitudes towards the North, the Continent, and foreignness more generally. Implicitly, Ibsen therefore helped mobilise various notions of Englishness.

Even if a more general understanding of the early reception of Ibsen in Britain, and his international status, will inform this paper, it will focus on a particular relationship which was brought up in the Ibsen debate. This is the use of Shakespeare as comparison and contrast. Several central participants in these debates compared the great, canonical and English playwright with the radical, uncanonised and Norwegian dramatist. Related to such a comparison was an understanding of Northernness, Europeanism, and internationalism, and a discussion of the allegedly suburban and provincial traits in Ibsen.

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James Mansell [Tuesday, 3.30 - 5: panel 7]

'John Foulds: Manchester Modernist'

Born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a Hallé orchestra bassoonist, John Foulds grew up during the 'English Musical Renaissance,' that proliferation of nationalist composing from Stanford and Parry to Elgar and Vaughan Williams which established a distinctly English-sounding music at a time when composers all over Europe were turning to national folk idioms for inspiration. Although neglected in his lifetime and largely forgotten today, Foulds stands out for his rejection of this trend: 'Real music is not national - not even international,' he argues, '- but supranational'. By the time he had himself joined the Hallé as a cellist in 1900, Foulds had already begun to develop his unique compositional voice. His early attempts at experimentation show a deep affiliation with the late Romantic European masters, but include very early use of quarter tones (usually associated with the inter-war avant-garde), which he used alongside ancient and oriental modes (as Debussy was doing in France) to pursue an expansion of late Romantic style unlike any other in Britain at this time. This paper will consider the contexts of both the genesis of this musical modernism and Foulds' internationalism, which eventually led him to work for several years in Paris, before moving to Calcutta to work for the All-India Radio. These will include Foulds' musical upbringing in Manchester, his work with composers and musicians from across Europe while a member of the Hallé, and his interest in Eastern mysticism. It will also examine several musical examples in detail in order to demonstrate how music can be used as a source in cultural history, and more specifically, the relationship between musical and non-musical ideas in the fin-de-siècle climate of political and cultural upheaval.

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Daniel Laqua [Wednesday, 9.30-11.00: panel 8]

'Small-Nations Internationalism' and the Totality of Knowledge: the Work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine

This presentation examines the work of two key protagonists of Belgian internationalism, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, who - in addition to many other activities - founded the International Institute of Bibliography (1895) and the Union of International Associations (1910). As part of these projects, they campaigned for international bibliographic standards and developed the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), whilst also promoting closer cooperation among international non-governmental organisations and demanding the establishment of an 'intellectual League of Nations' after World War I. In discussing the efforts of Otlet and La Fontaine, I will highlight how 'internationalism' could nourish a comprehensive view of the world, combining sciences, the arts and politics. Their plans for a Cité Mondiale - elaborated from 1912 onwards - built upon this wide-ranging interpretation of internationalism.

Fitting such universal aspirations, Otlet's and La Fontaine's bibliographic work was meant to classify and represent the 'totality of human knowledge'. The work of the International Institute of Bibliography was markedly different from a contemporary British undertaking, the Royal Society's International Catalogue of Scientific Literature. Whilst some may therefore emphasise the ambitious or quasi-utopian nature of Otlet's and La Fontaine's undertakings, their projects highlight that political, professional, academic and artistic internationalism were deeply intertwined. In dealing with this specific manifestation of fin-de-siècle internationalism, I will also consider the interplay between national and international frameworks of action. Small nations such as Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands were important centres of internationalism, and national networks could be used for internationalist purposes, as the work of Otlet and La Fontaine demonstrates.

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Anne Leonard [Wednesday, 9.30-11.00: panel 8]

Internationalist in spite of themselves: Britain and Belgium at the fin-de-siècle

Why Britain and Belgium? Between 1870 and 1914 Britain served as a valued buffer, first culturally between France and Belgium, later militarily between Germany and Belgium. Especially notable in the cultural realm were the ties between Britain and Les XX, the avant-garde art movement based in Brussels from 1883 to 1893. Two members of Les XX, James Ensor and Willy Finch, had English parents; the foreign artists invited to exhibit at the group's annual salons included Walter Crane, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris; and abundant evidence attests to the profound influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on Fernand Khnopff, among other examples.

All the same, this paper will argue that some of the artistic initiatives which appeared internationalist at face value actually reinforced nationalist rivalries. Khnopff's contributions as the special Brussels correspondent to the London-based periodical The Studio are frequently cited as an example of cross-Channel cultural outreach, for instance, yet as I will show, Belgian chauvinism is hardly absent from his articles.

Conversely, internationalism in the given context often emerged as an unintended by-product of impulses that were nationalistic in origin. For example, the founding articles of Les XX embodied strongly nationalist principles: no non-Belgian was to be allowed membership in the group. (Only three exceptions were made throughout Les XX's ten years of existence.) Still, Les XX embraced the British Arts and Crafts movement, with the result that Belgium did more than any other Continental country to promulgate it. International attention and prestige ensued, paradoxically for a reformist movement rooted in local craft tradition.

Perhaps the greatest irony involves the militant rhetoric used by Les XX to mobilize their avant-garde campaign. This vocabulary of combat, appropriated from Richard Wagner's revolutionary activities in 1848, served nonetheless to unite avant-gardists, Wagnerists, and socialists across national boundaries, including in Britain.

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Marysa Demoor [Wednesday, 9.30-11.00: panel 8]

The British-Belgian cultural connection at the turn of the century: Laurence Binyon as a middleman

In this paper I want to look at the poet and orientalist Laurence Binyon (1869 -1943) as a crucial link between the Flemish artistic scene and British art at the fin de siècle. His contacts with Flemish and Belgian authors, artists and art connoisseurs proves there to have been an intensive exchange of ideas between Flanders and Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century.

So far, there has been comparatively little interest in the Flemish influence on British art among British and American art and literary historians. But the Belgian turn-of-the-century artistic production was well-known in Britain. At the end of the nineteenth century it was especially figures like Félicien Rops, Fernand Khnoppf, Maurice Maeterlinck and Constantin Meunier who were known and admired in Britain. Their impact on the British cultural scene at the beginning of the twentieth century is not to be underestimated.

This paper proposes to start from the unedited correspondence of Laurence Binyon so as to allow a reconstruction of the networks in which Binyon played such an important part. The correspondence contains letters to and from eminent artists and writers in Flanders and Great Britain. Binyon was a prominent figure in pre-war Britain. He also loved Flanders and visited it repeatedly, staying with his numerous Belgian friends. Binyon wrote about Flanders, its art and its medieval inheritance (Western Flanders 1898) but he also knew the contemporary artistic scene very well as a result of his intense friendships with Olivier Destrée, Emile Verhaeren, Constantin Meunier and Raphael Petrucci.

Binyon's contacts did not only secure a better distribution of Flemish and Belgian art (both medieval/Renaissance and contemporary art) in Britain, they also allowed for that artistic production to influence the British field of cultural production at the beginning of the twentieth century. This, at least, is what I hope to demonstrate.

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Hannes Schweiger [Wednesday, 11.30 - 1: panel 9]

Between the lines. George Bernard Shaw as cultural and political mediator

In my paper I will explore George Bernard Shaw's efforts to strengthen cultural as well as political links between Britain on the one hand and Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire on the other hand in order to counter the growing antagonism between these countries in the wake of World War I. In his writings Shaw emphasised that Britain and the German-speaking world had close relationships and were mutually indebted to each other. Shaw thus tried to act as a mediating voice and to surpass the narrow boundaries of nationalist ideologies. Not only did he participate in political, economical and cultural debates in Britain, but he made himself heard in the German-speaking world as well and commented on the significance of Wagner for British culture, on the differences between German and British socialism and on the misleading arguments by Max Nordau on so-called decadent art, to name only very few of the topics which he discussed in his articles in German and Austrian newspapers and magazines. In 1906 Shaw and Harry Graf Kessler tried to strengthen the British-German ties by publishing letters in British and German newspapers which protested against the rising antagonism between the two countries and which were to be signed by eminent writers and intellectuals. The English letter was drafted by Shaw, who used the opportunity for a harsh critique of English foreign policy. With his writings he moved between the lines and at times was attacked from both sides. My paper will highlight Shaw's role as a mediator between Britain and the German-speaking world at the backdrop of the cultural and political relationship between Britain and the German-speaking world at the fin de siècle.

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John Trygve Has-Ellison [Wednesday, 11.30 - 1: panel 9]

German Nobles and the Reception of Artistic Modernism

The modern history of the European nobility has recently developed into an exciting field of enquiry, but rarely if ever has their been acknowledgement of the noble contribution to Europe's modernist artistic heritage. Historically, nobles far more than the bourgeoisie could be considered part of an international and cosmopolitan cultural milieu. The artistic internationalism of the Central European nobility was based on both early modern supranational affinities within the greater European order, and a nineteenth century accommodation with the bourgeois ideal of self-cultivation. These attachments led many nobles to reject parochial and volkisch tendencies in the arts, and embrace a common European cultural identity, whether conservative, juste milieu, or avant-garde. This paper is meant to partially address the aforementioned scholarly gap by examining the relationship of German nobles to European trends in the visual, theatrical, and written arts. Whether a traditional courtier (Nicholas Count Seebach), mediators between old and new (Alexander Baron Gleichen-Russwurm, Hugo Baron Habermann, Eberhard Baron Bodenhausen), or the avant-garde (Götz Baron Seckendorff, Otto Baron Taube, Harry Count Kessler), these men were both noble cosmopolitans and artistic internationalists. As part of a two-way exchange between German-speaking Europe and the western European nations, they acted as innovators, mediators, and interpreters of cosmopolitan modernist culture. Drawing on both the new noble history and cultural histories of the fin-de-siècle, this essay demonstrates that nobles not only participated in the modernist artistic culture of fin-de-siècle Europe, but were instrumental in mediating its reception in the sometimes hostile environment of Imperial Germany.

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Petra Rau [Wednesday, 2 - 3.30: panel 10]

'German Swords and English Backbone': The Cosmopolitan Argument in Forster's Howards End

The fin de siècle witnesses a remarkable shift in attitudes in Anglo-German relations, from the amicable mid-Victorian cousinship - epitomised in Queen Victoria's marriage and foreign policy - to post-Bismarckian tension. In the course of this political and cultural development, 'the German cousin' metamorphoses into 'the beastly Hun', a rapacious and belligerent imperial and economic rival. The rhetorical sabre rattling between the King and the Kaiser in the first decade of the twentieth century is maybe also aggravated by a post-Victorian crisis of national identity: G.B. Shaw railed in John Bull's Other Island (1907) against "the modern hybrids that now monopolise England: hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, [and] cosmopolitan riffraff", and C.F.G. Masterman pronounceed grave ills in The Condition of England (1909). Amidst all this gloom and doom E. M. Forster published his remarkably optimistic novel Howards End (1910).

Howards End is probably the last novel to argue for an Anglo-German rapprochement before the stream of propaganda fiction pours out of Wellington House from 1915 onwards. Predictably, Forster's unconventional Schlegel sisters, of German provenance, are denounced by the pragmatic Wilcox family as 'cosmopolitans', but the novel's key scenes and its closure demonstrate that these foreigners are actually necessary for England to survive and maintain at least some of its most cherished traditions. Forster also reminds the reader of the cultural and intellectual gain the encounter with the continent has brought England: German music and philosophy as well as Italian painting and architecture. As in his earlier Italian novels, the encounter with a cultural other serves partly as an investigation of Englishness. In Howards End, Forster projects the stereotypically pejorative Teutonic traits (ruthless technological progress, imperial exploitation, bullying chauvinism, vulgarity and lack of humour) onto the 'quintessentially' English Wilcoxes in order to examine the extent of this alleged otherness.

Peter Widdowson famously read Howards End as a socially limited condition-of-England novel; in this paper I argue that Forster offers a narrative that defines Englishness as a product of benign assimilation and cultural hybridity and therefore as necessarily -- and traditionally -- cosmopolitan. Viewed thus, the perceived crises of Englishness have their root maybe not in some foreign threat or the advance of globalised modernity but in the fact that that foreign influences are increasingly resisted and spurned.

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Matthew Potter [Wednesday, 2 - 3.30: panel 10]

Art and Internationalism: Cambridge University and the intellectual bridge to Germany

Focusing on a time when British artists, critics and theorists were finding new ways (armed with Symbolist, Post-Impressionist and other 'avant-garde' theories) to reinvigorate an already long-established reliance upon the French school, my paper will offer an alternative survey of the rich and varied forms of Germanist enthusiasm that were vibrant and promising but now largely forgotten.

The relationships which existed in the fin-de-siècle between the British art elites and Germany were many, but one area of especial interest given the parameters of the conference, is that of the British liberal academia of the 1890s. The work of Charles Waldstein (1856-1927), a Cambridge Professor in Classics and Slade Professor of Art in 1895 and 1904, offers an intriguing case of internationalism and the arts. His progressive theories on art education, the need for a return to a Concert of Europe style of international politics (with the League of Nations), and his belief in the existence of a pan-European Anglo-Saxon brotherhood combine to make Waldstein a prime representative of the peculiarities of his age.

The breadth of such a cultural phenomenon as I am describing can be measured by the examples of other key Germanist figures also at the University at the end of the nineteenth century. Sidney Colvin (1845-1927) for example, a prior incumbent of the Cambridge Slade chair of Art in 1873, was perhaps instrumental in paving the way to Waldstein's influential term of office. Colvin was responsible for an education programme couched in the idealism of German philosophy. My paper will explore ways of understanding the lectures and writings of men such as Waldstein, and Colvin before him, and suggest that they contributed to and were simultaneously products of the cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle environment they worked in, nurtured by the internationalist and inclusive intellectualism of the age.

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