Livland-Estland-Ausstellung in Berlin (Königliche Akademie der Künste): early-20th-cen art and objects of the Brotherhood of the Black Heads. Photo: A. Grohs, June/July 1918 (Tallinn City Museum, TLM F 4309)
D-412
Start Date:
03.04.2025
Start Time:
16:00
End Date:
03.04.2025
How to Investigate a Propaganda Exhibition? Medieval and Contemporary Art at the Service of Politics
The seminar will focus on a hitherto almost unknown exhibition: the Livland-Estland-Ausstellung, which travelled through Germany in the summer and autumn of 1918, with evident colonial ambitions. To the surprise of many scholars today, the exhibition included, among a wealth of other material, some of the best-known artworks from the medieval, Enlightenment as well as contemporary era. Moreover, the organising team of the exhibition that was supported by German royal families, included Heinz Pirang and Wilhelm Neumann, the best-known Baltic art historians at the time. Jõekalda will present new aspects of the subject, which several years of archival work in Estonian, Latvian and German collections have brought to light, asking: How to interpret projects with such high stakes today? As an embodiment of German imperialism? As the last straw for the preservation of Baltic German superiority in the region? As a desperate outcome of the turbulent war years?