Browsing by Author "Van Miegroet, Hans J"

This dissertation is a historical examination of the broad and multifaceted role of appropriation in twentieth and twenty-first century American art. It argues for the complementarity of research in legal and art theory with respect to the origins, significance, and future of appropriation and contends that the historical development of appropriation art is indissolubly interconnected with changes in intellectual property laws. This dissertation proposes that a history of contemporary appropriation requires an interdisciplinary approach, employing art historical, legal, and economic theory to examine interrelations between appropriation art, postmodern theory, and the legal doctrine of fair use. Special attention is paid to the development of terms used to describe and define appropriation art. The art historical definition of appropriation is traced through a review of academic criticism and museum exhibitions. The legal understanding of appropriation, which has a direct impact on the creation and dissemination of art that builds on prior works, is explored and clarified. Economic claims about artistic property rights and art markets are also considered and differentiated. Throughout, I question established understandings of appropriation and identify unresolved issues in the scholarly treatment of appropriation art. I draw distinctions between ethical and legal guidelines for reuse of images and suggest that further development of ethical guidelines is more important than further clarification of legal rules. Ultimately, I conclude that transformative use is a valuable framework for understanding appropriation, but conclude that judges cannot be expected to determine whether or not a work is transformative without expert guidance, preferably from artists themselves, and recommend that artists participate actively in the development of an ethical fair use.

During the 1550s, a warehouse was constructed in Antwerp with funds from both the city government and a private investor. This building, the Tapissierspand, became the global center for selling and distributing tapestries of extraordinary beauty, exquisite craftsmanship, and exorbitant cost. The construction of the building indicates that the very nature of how tapestries were made and purchased was changing in the 1550s. Although Antwerp's fairs had long been convenient locations for agents to find luxury items that might please their wealthy clients, like with many luxury trades, tapestry sales were shifting from strictly commissioned sales to include on spec sales. The Tapissierspand was the ideal place for a dealer to purchase multiple already-made tapestries and load them onto the waiting ships in Antwerp's busy harbor for export and resale abroad. The city's export registers document that thousands of yards of tapestry were shipped this way.

The regulatory environment in Antwerp was much less strict than in other cities and this permitted freer interactions within guilds and across industries. The city was for this reason a desirable location for craftsmen to work and sell. But because the strict royal ordinances delivered throughout the 1530s and 1540s were frequently uninforced, workers in the industry were forced to find other ways to manage the large risk inherent in the tapestry trade. The development of the Tapissierspand in Antwerp was an effort on the part of merchants and the city to abate risk. The city could continue to entice merchants if it could provide the right opportunities and environment. However, by the sixteenth century, the constant hyper-vigilance the city had experienced throughout the fifteenth century during frequent times of war and financial difficulty shaped the way the city and its occupants viewed business. In a large sense, everything came down to risk, and how to manage it and minimize it.

At a time of upheaval and mismanagement, survival and financial success through the reduction of risk became of primary importance. Tapestry weaving carried inherent--and large--risks. Raw materials were expensive, and workshops often did not have the capital needed for on spec weaving. The purchase of on spec tapestries without any guarantees of quality or origin was risky for buyers. Thus the Tapissierspand's story is one of people seeking to maximize economic advantage and minimize risk. The Tapissierspand allowed buyers and sellers to minimize risk by facilitating exchange of knowledge, assessment of quality, negotiation of prices and commissions, and extension of credit.

This dissertation will examine the historical precedents in Antwerp that allowed the Tapissierspand to develop, and the ways in which the Pand functioned to expand trade while reducing risk for both buyers and sellers by reducing the risks inherent in the industry.

Marinus Van Reymerswaele's painting of 1542, The Lawyer's Office, was a completely new type of image in the history of art. It shows a lawyer and his assistant behind a desk strewn with briefs, wax seals and money. A complex set of historical circumstances at the interface of art, economics, and legal history in sixteenth century Antwerp explain this painting's appearance and significance. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp became a locus of unprecedented artistic production caused by the dramatic growth of its mercantile population, its highly organized commercial infrastructure, and its competitive business atmosphere. These developments stimulated a new sophistication in the art market and an energetic approach to acquiring and collecting, supported by publicly-funded venues to mass-market paintings. Over the course of the sixteenth century, artists invented new subjects to meet public demand. Many of these were radically new. One of these artists, Marinus Van Reymerswaele (c. 1490-1546) made distinctive paintings of lawyers, bankers, and moneychangers which relate to fundamental changes in the legal and commercial infrastructure in the sixteenth century. In just one generation, the Habsburg authority centralized the political and legal landscape in the Netherlands. As the prized economic and cultural center of Habsburg territories, Antwerp was transformed.

This dissertation links the development of consumption practices and the rise of new pictorial subjects introduced in Antwerp with the changing business and legal climate of the city during the sixteenth century. Through an investigation of unpublished home inventories recorded between 1528 and 1588, it clarifies the acquisition preferences of the Antwerp public at large, considering both changing preferences for panel and linen paintings as well as for novel and traditional images alike. This reassessment of painting consumption reveals a starkly more conservative approach to buying images than previously assumed, underscoring the rarity of everyday life subjects in Antwerp domestic spaces. As a painter operating within this market, Marinus van Reymerswaele invented a new brand of painting -- the new old master painting -- that not only addressed broad social concerns sparked by Habsburg political, mercantile, and legal reforms, but also built on long-established Netherlandish visual traditions. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, his paintings became more desired by collectors but lost their topicality as memories of Antwerp's political anxieties faded into the past.

This dissertation focuses on the large-scale distribution of imagery from the Southern Netherlands across Europe and the Americas, particularly on the large number of paintings exported from Antwerp-Mechelen to Spain and the Americas during the seventeenth century. To analyze this profitable long-distance art trade and the artistic implications of the exchanges that took place through market mechanisms, this research relies on the archival and visual sources left by one of the most successful seventeenth-century Antwerp international art dealers with Spain and the Americas, Guilliam Forchondt (1608-1678). He established a productive painting workshop and a successful commercial firm that concentrated on Spanish Habsburg territories. This dissertation examines his workshop practices, the type of paintings he directed to Spain and the Americas, and the mechanisms he established for artistic and information exchanges between Flemish, Spanish and colonial Spanish contemporaries because Forchondt dealt in the transatlantic trade through a commercial network of merchants and agents in Europe and the New World. This research also investigates local conditions and responses in Spain, Mexico and Peru to the imported Flemish paintings.