'Primitive Renaissances': Northern European and Germanic Art at the Fin de Siecle to 1930s

This multi-author book sole-edited by Juliet Simpson with a 10,000-word Introduction, is the first study to explore the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fascination with Northern European Renaissance artists as so-called ‘primitives’ in a period spanning the 1850s to the early 1930s. It presents original new scholarship and perspectives on a rich, yet neglected history of Northern European Renaissance art and visual culture in the collecting, art and cultural imaginaries of the European nineteenth century to the1930s, to uncover its stories and appropriations in art, monuments, museums, texts and their reception as ‘primitive’ and in competing period constructs of national and cosmopolitan identity. In fifteen chapters by leading international scholars and curators of art history, history and comparative culture, the book shows that interest in early Renaissance Northern art and visual culture emerges as central to many of the period’s most urgent debates: about ownership of cultural patrimony and heritage, ideas of artistic ‘genius’ and inheritance; about new concepts of the modern, beauty and individual perception; feeling and expression and about art’s value in shifting and competing conceptions of ‘nation-hood’ , national and cultural identity across four closely interlinked ‘Northern’ European contexts: Britain, France, Belgium and Imperial Germany