Journal articles on the topic 'Polish Portrait painting'

This targeted stylistic, bibliographical, and archival investigation casts a major light on a relevant portrait of a woman by the Polish painter Olga Boznan­ska, highlighting its rich exhibition and collection. The recent appearance in a Polish auction of a similar painting by Boznanska leads to the hypothesis that the subject of the painting—whose identity still remains a mystery—is the same in both paintings.

The article is devoted to the study of the coat of arms on the portraits of the military ataman of the Don ar-my Danila Efremovich Efremov, the formation of the nobility in the southern outskirts of Russia. The first portraits of D. Efremov were painted in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and on the Don under the influence of the Polish, Malorussian and Russian artistic traditions. The painting of the coat of arms was based on the status of the military ataman D. E. Efremov, the award of the ranks of Major General and privy councilor, the acquisition of the nobility. The author characterizes the controversial issues of the origin of the portrait gallery of D. E. Efremov, and suggests a new dating of its painting based on the study of imperial grants, military and political events on the Don and in Russia. The composition and symbolism of the portraits are revealed, some anthropometric data of the military ataman are described, it is shown that the portraits of D. E. Efremov and his armorial images had a huge impact on the development of the Don ceremonial ataman and senior (starshina) portrait. It is stated and argued that the portrait from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra in 1752 was preceded by other, not preserved works, from which “freeˮ copies were made. The latter can be independent creations. The author examines the government's attitude to the Don elder, the legal framework that regulated the sta-tus of the regional elite, individuals and positions.

Before the outbreak of WW II, the works of world art collected at the Wilanów Palace were considered to be the largest private collection in the Polish territories. Just the very collection of painting featured 1.200 exhibits. Apart from them the Wilanów collection contained historic furniture, old coins, textiles, artistic craftsmanship items, drawings, and prints, pottery, glassware, silverware, bronzes, sculptures, as well as mementoes of Polish rulers. Already in the first weeks of the German occupation, assigned officials selected the most precious art works from the Wilanów collections, and included them in the Sichergestellte Kunstwerke im Generalgouvernement Catalogue. The publication presented the most precious cultural goods secured by the Germans in the territory of occupied Poland. It included 76 items: 29 paintings and 47 artistic craftsmanship objects. In 1943, the majority of the works included in the quoted Catalogue were transferred to Cracow. A year later, the most valuable exhibits from Wilanów were evacuated to Lower Silesia. What remained in Cracow was only a part of the collection relocated from Wilanów. The chaos of the last weeks preceding the fall of the Third Reich caused that many art works from the Wilanów collection are considered war losses. Among many objects, included in the above Catalogue, there are several Wilanów paintings: Portrait of a Man by Bartholomeus van der Helst, Portrait of a Married Couple by Pieter Nason, Allegory of Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture by Pompeo Batoni, Allegorical Scene in Landscape by Paris Bordone, and The Assumption of Mary by Charles Le Brun.

W zbiorach Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen w Monachium jest przechowywany portret króla Zygmunta Augusta, który po ponad pół wieku poszukiwań przez polskich historyków sztuki został niedawno odnaleziony i zidentyfikowany. Ma on ogromne znaczenie dla ikonografii ostatniego Jagiellona bowiem, jak dotąd, jest jego jedynym znanym malarskim przedstawieniem w całej postaci, powstałym za życia modela. Wizerunek pozostaje w związku z miniaturowym portretem monarchy w popiersiu, dawniej w kolekcji arcyksięcia Ferdynanda II Tyrolskiego w Ambras, obecnie w Münzenkabinett w wiedeńskim Kunsthistorisches Museum. Oba obrazy, tego samego autora, powstały na polskim dworze tuż przed połową XVI stulecia. Ich twórca był dobrze obeznany ze stosowanymi wówczas we Włoszech i cieszącymi się uznaniem kompozycjami portretowymi. Monachijski obraz trafił do bawarskich zbiorów Wittelsbachów, jak wszystko na to wskazuje, wraz z wyprawą ślubną królewny Anny Katarzyny Konstancji Wazówny, w roku 1642 wydanej za mąż za księcia neuburskiego Filipa Wilhelma. Należał do zespołu wizerunków członków rodziny Jagiellonów, zabranych do Bawarii przez Wazównę, lecz powstał w okolicznościach innych niż pozostałe portrety i jest dziełem o odmiennej genezie artystycznej. Ujawniony w zbiorach monachijskich portret nie tylko w istotny sposób wzbogaca ikonografię ostatniego Jagiellona, lecz ma również znaczenie dla wiedzy o królewskim mecenacie. Summary: The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen collection in Munich houses a portrait of King Sigismund Augustus, which was recently discovered and identified by Polish art historians following a quest lasting more than half a century. It sheds important light on the iconography of the last Jagiellonian, as it remains to date the only known representation in pictorial form of the model during his lifetime. It is related to a bust portrait miniature of the monarch, formerly found in the collection of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol in Ambras, and nowadays on show in the Münzenkabinett in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Both paintings by the same artist were produced at the Polish court just before the mid-16th century. Their creator was well acquainted with the highly regarded compositional techniques used at the time in portraiture in Italy. All the evidence suggests that the Munich painting found its way into the Bavarian Wittelsbach collections as part of the trousseau of Princess Anna Catherine Konstancja Wazówna, who in 1642 married the Neuburian prince Philip Wilhelm. It was included in the collection of portraits of members of the Jagiellonian family, that Wazówna took with her to Bavaria. However, it was painted in circumstances different from other portraits and is a work with a different artistic genesis. This portrait unearthed in the Munich collection not only greatly enriches the existing iconography of the last Jagiellonian, but it also makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of royal patronage.

Jozef Oleszkiewicz, a native of the Polish-Lithuanian lands, was a talented portrait painter who settled on the banks of the Neva at the beginning of the 19th century and was elected academician of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Oleszkiewicz was known to the Polish community of St. Petersburg not only as an artist who had his own unique painting style and gained popularity among the fair sex for his ability to create inspired portraits of women, but also as a mystic, philosopher, and inspired poet. Now Oleszkiewicz is known primarily as the hero of Adam Mickiewicz’s poem “Dziady”. Part III of the poem, completed in 1832, contains the “Oleszkiewicz” section. On the eve of the famous St. Petersburg flood of 1824, the artist uttered a prophecy that correlated with the biblical plot and marked the beginning of the formation of an apocalyptic myth about the death of the city from the Neva waters. Despite the major historical and cultural significance of Oleszkiewicz’s personality and work for Polish culture in the first quarter of the 19th century, the artist’s biography needs additional study, and there are no special research works devoted to his artistic career. The personality of the artist received a mythological interpretation in historiography; the real person disappeared into the artistic image created by Mickiewicz. It seems necessary to fill the gaps that exist in our knowledge about the life and work of this Polish-Lithuanian artist, to con-duct additional archival research, which will help not only to clarify some details of his biography, but also in the future to find and attribute his paintings. The article is devoted to Oleszkiewicz’s participation in the academic exhibition of 1814 and to establishing the names of the paintings that were exhibited by Oleszkiewicz in that year. The study was conducted on archival materials (Russian State Historical Archive).

This paper is devoted to the problem of visual aspect in literature. We study one of the aspects of the visual in a lyrical poem: the representation of painting genres in the titles of the poems, as well as the interaction between the visual and the verbal in lyrical texts. The goal of the paper is to analyze the semantics of such a title and its influence on both the unfolding of the lyrical plot and the figurative system of the poem, also on the strategy of the perception of such text by a reader. To do this, we solve several problems. First of all, we define the concept of the visual in literature; the concepts of the visuality and the visualization are delimited. Secondly, we consider the main ways of representing of the visual in a lyrical text (taking into account the specifics of the lyric as a kind of literature): lyrical plot, image, compositional forms (a description, a dream, an ekphrasis), and allusions to the genres of painting. Thirdly, the importance of analyzing the title for a lyrical poem is justified. Finally, the most representative texts are analyzed from the specified point of view: we examine how the allusion to the painting is manifested in the title.The material of the paper is the number of poems by the Russian and the Polish poets of the nineteenth – twentieth centuries. Their titles coincide with the main genres of paintings, for example, “Landscape”, “Portrait” and “Still Life (nature morte)”. But at the same time, they are not considered to be ekphrasises. That means there is no any description of a real or imaginary picture there, but there is a recreation of the visual imaginative system by the verbal means; and the poems appeal to the reader's viewing experience. In particular, we analyze the poems of A. Maikov, I. Selvinsky, Y. Levitansky, B. Akhmadulina, L. Martynov, J. Przyboś, A. Pushkin, V. Khodasevich, D. Kedrin, Y. Hartwig, I. Brodsky, A. Svershchinskoy.

On the 8th of July 2018 died Janusz Wałek, art historian, museologist, pedagogue, born in 1941 in Bobowa. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University, the history of art faculty. In 1968, he started working in the Czartoryskis’ Museum – Branch of the National Museum in Krakow, where some time after he became a head of the European Painting Department for many years. He was a lecturer at the Fine Arts Academy, the National Academy of Theatre Arts and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He wrote two books and numerous articles about art. He was also a poet, the winner of the Main Prize in the 1997 edition of the General Polish Poetry Competition. He was a student of Marek Rostworowski, they worked together on a number of publicly acclaimed exhibitions: “Romanticism and Romanticity in Polish Art of the 19th and 20th centuries”, “The Poles’ Own Portrait”, “Jews – Polish”. Many exhibitions and artistic shows were prepared by him alone, inter alia “The Vast Theatre of Stanisław Wyspiański”, presentations of artworks by great artists: Goya, Rafael, Titian, El Greco. He also created a few scenarios of permanent exhibitions from the Czartoryskis’ Collection – in Krakow and in Niepołomice – being a great expert on this collection. “Europeum” – European Culture Centre was organised according to the programme written by him. He specialised mostly, although not exclusively, in art and culture of the Renaissance. Janusz Wałek is presented herein as a museologist who was fully devoted to art, characterised by: creativity, broad perception of art and culture, unconventional approach to museum undertakings, unusual sensitivity and imagination. What the author of the article found worth emphasising is that J. Wałek talked and wrote about art not only as a scholar, but first of all as a poet, with beauty and zest of the language he used.

The year 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of Juri Lotman’s birth. On this occasion, I propose to return to one of Lotman’s concepts, namely that of frame. The term was proposed in The structure of the artistic text (1970/1977), in the traditional understanding of a limit that separates a text produced in any kind of medium from extra-textual structures (other texts) or non-text (real-life contexts). This notion of frame comes close to its understanding in literary studies, as well as the theory and philosophy of art and should not be confused with a well-known concept of frame propagated in AI Studies (Minsky 1975; Petöfi 1976) and which refers to a global cognitive pattern of storing common-sense knowledge about particular concepts and situations in memory. Lotman returned to the discussion of the textual frame in Universe of the mind (1990), mainly in application to the fine arts. He also elaborated there a more inclusive concept of boundary (proposed in Lotman 1984/2005) as a demarcation of the semiosphere and of its internal subsystems, which necessitates constant translations between particular codes and languages. Lotman dubbed transgressions of textual borders transcoding, which in contemporary parlance is a clear manifestation of transmediality. Therefore, I propose to analyse the concept of frame in relation to Intermedial Studies (cf. Elleström, 2014). Such crossings of boundaries between different media/modes/modalities are simultaneously creative and potentially confusing, in that they display a semiotic collision of artistic codes and require a heightened processing effort on the part of the addressee. My vantage point is basically semiotic, with the focus of interest going less to verbal texts and more to the issues of frame in the visual arts. Semiotic considerations on the problem of boundaries are complemented with brief phenomenologically-oriented ponderings on aesthetic and cognitive import of framing devices (Crowther, 2009) that emphasize their antithetical function as: a) devices with their own artistic value, even complementing the text vs. b) “defences against the exterior” and hindrances to creative liberty. First, I turn to two areas of interest of Lotman himself: 1) the extension of artistic media in Baroque art and 2) collages, which I treat as transmediality through surface. Lotman perceived collages as a collision of the fictitious with the real, referring to their doubly figurative nature (metonymical and metaphorical). Next, I complement this discussion with examples taken from 20th-century painting and sculpture, e.g. Spatialism, Minimalism, and Hyperrealism. Of particular interest is the situation in which the frame becomes a text commenting on its content or plays a metatextual function. Another game worthy of attention is embedding of frames. The discussion closes with the case of transmedial effects between painting and theatre, illustrated by Polish painter and stage-director Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical experiments in Cracovian Cricot 2 Theatre: a) Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita entering Kantor’s self-portraits and a photo-portrait frame in the performance Today is my birthday (1990); b) Kantor stepping out of the frame of his own self-portrait on the illusory boundary between real life, painting and theatre. The article posits to treat frame and multiple ways of transgressing it as an integrational phenomenon that opens a path for further interdisciplinary studies across the borders of artistic semiotics, Intermedial Studies, literary theorizing and the theory and philosophy of art.

Nikifor Krynicki (Epifaniusz Drowniak, 1895-1968) was one of the most popular non-academic Polish painters worldwide. To show the biblical inspiration in his creative output I chose two categories from various thematic aspects: self-portraits and landscapes with a church. There are plenty of Nikifor’s paintings showing him as a teacher, as a celebrating priest, as a bishop, or even as Christ. A pop­ular way to explain this idea of self-portraits is a psychological one: as a form of auto-therapy. This analysis is aims to show a deeper expla­nation for the biblical anthropology. Nikifor’s self-portraits as a priest celebrating the liturgy are a symbol of creative activity understood as a divine re-creation of the world. Such activity needs divine inspira­tion. Here are two paintings to recall: Potrójny autoportret (The triple self-portrait) and Autoportret w trzech postaciach (Self-portrait in three persons). The proper way to understand the self-identification with Christ needs a reference to biblical anthropology. To achieve our re­al-self we need to identify with Christ, whose death and resurrection bring about our whole humanity. The key impression we may have by showing Nikifor’s landscapes with a church is harmony. The painter used plenty of warm colors. Many of the critics are of the opinion that Nikifor created an imaginary, ideal world in his landscapes, the world he wanted to be there and not the real world. The thesis of this article is that Nikifor created not only the ideal world, but he also showed the source of the harmony – the divine order.

Basing on the use of principles of a system approach, comparative and historical, semiotic, iconographic, iconic, formal and stylistic methods it has been defined the place and the meaning of Boims’ epitaph from the chapel of the Holy Trinity and the Passion of the Lord in Lviv dealing with the topology of memorial plastics and sculptural portrait’s evolution in the modern West-Ukrainian lands at the border of the 16th and 17th centuries; the paper characterizes image-thematic and artistic peculiarities of a landmark and points out identifications of separate personalities among those who have been specified. The study stresses on the fact that the epitaph combines the features of memorial compositions of family prayer kneeling that was popular in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 1550–1575s, and the adoration of the sacred scene by spouses that is presented as iconographic type developed in the 1600–1625s as the imitation of monumental tombstones of noble families’ representatives. The author suggests that except for J. Pfister's desire to avoid usual decisions, lack of space to place sculpture and customers’ wishes to immortalize all representatives of the genus, the composition tiering has been inspired with single tiered family bourgeois epitaphs in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the sculptor's tendency to develop multi-level structures. The research demonstrates the portrait’s development in Lviv sculpture that has proved the subordination of the heraldic program to the psychological features of the depicted personalities, its shift from the reproduction as a part of the ancestral organism (the epitaph of the Sholts-Volfovychs’ family) to the creation of the family image as an emergent unity of individuals, and is a characteristic of Boim’s epitaphs. The author highlights the development of Lviv sculptural portrait presented with the visualization of psychological interconnections of Boim’s family representatives, the expression of the essential one at the moment, the depiction of individual one in the associations with generally cultural and over-timed one. The paper focuses on “a-tectonicity”, “belonging to painting”, and dynamic development of the epitaph’s form especially noticed in a group of “Pieta”. The study highlights the integrity of a composition provided with zigzag baroque rhythm, outlining imaginative triangle with prayerfully folded palms of George and Yadviga Boim and the head of the Mother of God, the contrast of white alabaster and black marble background, stressing on central axis with fragmented Crucifixion, cartouche scrolls, the figure of the blessing Christ. The author suggests the statement about the picture at the second level of the composition that is the first from the inscription, not of the son, but of Pavel Georgy Boim’s brother, and in the series as a whole is the adoration of the Pieta by the sons of the family protoplast. The author points out the deformation of the epitaph’s reception under the conditions of its probable transferring from the original surrounding.

Akmenynė, now a village in the Šalčininkai district, was known at first just as a privately-owned land, and later as an estate called Kamionka, a Polish name deriving from the name of the river Kamena. Based on iconographic materials and other relevant documents kept in the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, the present article aims to discuss the architecture of the wooden church built in 1928–1929 and its interior equipment, as well as a wooden manor that had existed in the 17th century – the early 19th century and a wooden church that had stood on its estate. In the mid-17th century, the Akmenynė estate consisted of a wooden house and farm buildings. In the 18th century, the walls of the main room of the representational house were upholstered with fabric and paper and decorated with paintings. In the second half of the 17th century, there had already been built the wooden church equipped with liturgical vessels and other attributes. It had two paintings depicting the Holy Virgin Mary and St. Bishop Stanislaus, with three more pictures, those of the Virgin Mary, Our Lord Jesus, and St. Antony of Padua. One of the authors (or the only author) of the Project of the present Church of St. Terese of the Holy Infant Jesus could have been the manager and work supervisor of the construction on this church, Anton Filipowicz-Dubowik. Most of its equipment and inventory was made and acquired in the end of the third decade and in the fourth decade of the 20th century. The painting of St. Terese of the Holy Infant Jesus is different in composition from other pictures, which were painted based on the first portrait images of the saint. Such items as the holy water font created by the stonecutter J. Szemetowicz based on a drawing by an unknown artist and the sacristy cabinet acquired by the efforts of the painter Piotr Żyngiel testify to the collaboration between the parish priest of the Akmenynė church and painters who studied at the Faculty of Art of the Vilnius Stephen Batory University. Most of the liturgical vessels were produced by Michael Newiadomski’s Vilnius workshop of liturgical supplies, and one of the reliquaries, by the Charewicz factory of liturgical vessels. It may be assumed that an unknown author who created the linocut The Stations of the Cross, as well as craftsmen of a few Vilnius workshops who produced liturgical vessels and other supplies could have used projects and drawings of Gracian Achrem-Achremowicz. Keywords: Akmenynė church on the manor estate in the 17th – early 19th century; Church of St. Terese of the Holy Infant Jesus in the early 20th century; architecture; inventory; creators.

This paper aims to set the criteria on Portrait and Flower-bird-animal paintings of Chae Yongshin(1850-1941). To establish the purpose, 33 pieces of Portrait paintings and 12 pieces of Flower-bird-animal paintings were selected and analyzed in terms of the handwritings of articles and seals. There was no significant similarity between the handwritings of selected works and Chae Yongshin’ letter. The results showed that there must be others who wrote the articles on the works instead of Chae Yongshin. Even though this study didn’t get a satisfying result, it put meaning to consider and collect the handwriting and seals as database for future usage. A follow-up research on the painting style in Flower-bird-animal paintings of Chae Yongshin will be proceeded soon.

The painting Martin Středa as defender of Brno (Moravian Gallery in Brno) is the most monumental representation of the Jesuit Martin Středa / Stredonius (1587–1649), who won fame and the eternal gratitude of the citizens of Brno for his active participation in the defence of the city during the four-month siege by the Swedish army in 1645. Older authors saw Michael Willmann as the author of the painting. However, Milan Togner attributed this work to Anton Martin Lublinský (1636–1690). As it turns out today, the author of this monumental work was Karl Dankwart († 1704) – the author of numerous fresco decorations and oil paintings and court painter to the Polish king John III Sobieski. The authorship of this Silesian artist of Swedish origin is supported both by formal analogies and the provenance of the painting from the former Jesuit conventin Brno. Dankwart's painting of Father Středa was probably a part of the gallery of full-figure portraits of the founders and benefactors of the convent. We can assume that the picture was not the only work that Dankwart produced for the Jesuits of Brno.

AbstractThe title from Rembrandt's inventory (Note 2), which was first linked with this problematical painting (Fig. I, Note I) by Smith, has hitherto never been questioned, but, broadly speaking, two different interpretations have been suggested for it. Schmidt-Degener connected it with the glorification of the illustrious past of Amsterdam in uniting with other towns to fight for the country's rights and prosperity (Note 4), an idea later amplified by Hellinga on the basis of Carel van Mander and Cesare Ripa (Note 5). The historian Cornelissen, on the other hand, saw it as a reflection of the tensions between Amsterdam and the Stadholder's court around 1640 and an illustration of the significance of Union, Religion, the Militia and Justice for the concord of the state (Note 6). Schmidt-Degener regarded the work as a sketch for a large painting, possibly a militia piece, but others have seen it as a design for a print (Notes 7 -9), on the analogy of some other oil sketches by Rembrandt which are models for etchings. A completely different suggestion made recently is that the painting is at the dead-coloured stage and thus unfinished (Note II). Since the last figure of the date is almost illegible, various dates in the 1640's have been put forward, most scholars opting for Schmidt-Degener's suggestion of 1641. Examinations in connection with the recent restoration of the painting have revealed a number of things which are presented briefly here as a new guide to possible lines of research. The restoration was necessitated by the fact that the varnish had become opaque in places and the excessive retouching had darkened (Figs. 2-4). The cradling on the back had also distorted the panel, which had been planed down to only about 3 mm. The cradling has now been removed and replaced by a lighter system of small oak blocks, which hook on to an aluminium grid (Fig. 5, Note 14). Investigation of the panel showed that the strip about 6 cm wide at the bottom, which Schmidt-Degener thought to have been added during painting, was an integral part of the original panel, with small blocks of wood let in by later hands to prevent the join from opening (Fig. 6) . A dendrochronological examination of the panel showed it to have come from the same oak tree as those of Rembrandt's River Valley with Ruins at Cassel (Br.454) and the Portrait of a Man in Polish Costume dated 1637 in Washington (Br.211). The latest date for the felling of the tree in question is 1634 ±5, so that our painting could have originated earlier than is indicated by the date under the signature. The edges of the painting appear to have been pared of when the panel was planed down, so that the last figure is probably missing altogether (there is no trace of it on the infra-red photograph, Figs. 14 and 15). A further discovery on the panel are the notches at regular intervals round the edges for securing it with pins and nails in a frame, a phenomenon known from other 17th-century panels (Note 18), although not previously encountered in any by Rembrandt. Investigation of the painting technique, produced a surprise in respect of the most recent theories on Rembrandt's technique (Note 19), viz. that alongside and underneath the highlights containing lead white there proved to exist an earlier stage in which the highlights were applied in a thin paint composed of a watery binding medium (animal glue) with chalk. These light touches, scarcely visible in the X-ray photograph (Fig. 7), are clearly part of the first laying-in of the composition, to which lightly sketched brushstrokes in a darker tone may also belong. Thus this largely monochrome painting also has a monochrome sketch underneath, which implies that what we now have is a finished picture. The meticulous detailing and local, use of colour support this theory, as does the extensive use of scratching in the wet paint to create modelling. The sketchy syle was evidently considered sufficientfor the picture's purpose. A further notable phenomenon is that a thin layer of varnish is found between some of the paint layers in those areas which Rembrandt repainted at a later stage, which could indicate that the picture was already regarded as finished before those changes were made. As the restoration proceeded, it became ever clearer that the picture was painted in various states. Strips about 6 cm wide at top and bottom proved to have been left unpainted originally (Fig. 9), for reasons that can only be guessed at. The two main stages comprised first the laying-in of the composition on a brown to pink ground in a light watery paint, with draughtsmanlike lines of brown to black and scratching in various places. The greenish-black shadows, very thick white highlights and the major part of the sky to the left of the tree also belong to this stage. At the second stage Rembrandt returned to the picture, possibly after a considerable period, and worked it up again with broad strokes of a heavier paint. This relates to the strips at top and bottom, the shadows under the battle and above the chain and the area to the right of the tree above the cavalry procession. Repentirs are found in both stages, notably the elimination of a row of escutcheons continuing the series now visible (see Figs. II and 7), while the light cloth to the left of the arms of Amsterdam and the text Soli Deo Gloria appear to be relatively late additions during the first stage. As to the date of the painting, the style alone indicates the earliest possible date in the 1640's, while the first stage could well date from before 1640. Stylistic links between it and the Landscape with the Good Samaritan of 1638 in Cracow (Br.442, Note 27) suggest that clues to the interpretation must be looked for earlier than 1640 and raise the question of a possible connection with a historical event like the entry of Maria de Medici in 1638 (Note 28). As a result of the restoration numerous details in the picture have now become more clearly legible, while the prominence of the arms of Amsterdam is even more apparent, suggesting that Schmidt-Degener's interpretation is the most likely. If the composition is regarded as an allegory on Concord, the battle in the background could be seen as Discord, so that the Concord here might be Ripa's Unione Civile (Note 29), in this case that of Amsterdam, rather than a united campaign against a historical enemy. This does not explain problematical details, such as Justice on the far left, but it might be a fruitful line to follow. While it cannot be ruled out that the picture is a study for a print, its large size, the fact that it is not on paper, like most of the sketches Rembrandt made for etchings, and its relatively rich palette point in another direction. It still seems closest to the type of modello made by Rubens, Lievens and Bol for large decorative projects (Note 30).

The Holocaust and Rebirth in the Works of Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a Painter From Łódź, 1909–2005 Sara Gliksman-Fajtlowicz, a painter, came from a well-off family of Majerowiczs, the owners of opticians’ shops in Łódź. She studied at private painting and drawing schools in Łódźand Warsaw. Before the outbreak of World War II, she was active in the Polish art milieu. In 1933, she became a member of the Trade Union of Polish Artists (Związek Zawodowy Polskich Artystów Plastyków, ZZPAP) and participated in its exhibitions in Łódź, Warsaw, Kraków,and Lviv. She painted mainly landscapes, still lifes, and—less frequently—portraits. She published her works in the union magazine Forma. In 1940, she was displaced to the Łódźghetto where she worked as a graphic artist at the Statistics Department. Thanks to this she could obtain art materials. Her clandestine activity was documenting life in the ghetto in paintings and drawings. She survived the liquidation of the ghetto and then was forced to work on cleaning that area. Liberated on 19 January 1945, she returned to her house where some of her prewar works had survived. After 1945 she continued her artistic career and exhibited with the ZZPAP, as well as with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts. In 1957, she emigrated to Israel. Gliksman died in Tel Aviv in 2005. The aim of this article is to verify and describe Sara Gliksman’s biography, to present her activities in the Polish-Jewish artistic community of postwar Poland, as well as to place her works in the context of issues concerning survivors’ memory and artistic attitudes toward the Holocaust, and art as a manifestation of hope for the rebirth of Jewish life and culture in postwar Poland in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.

The issue of the life and creative activity of the Polish exiled artist — a participant in the Polish uprising of 1863—1864 Jozef Berkman is considered. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that, despite the significant number of drawings and paintings by Y. Berkman, today the facts of his life are practically unknown both in hard labor in the Nerchinsk mining district and in a settlement in the Irkutsk province. It is noted that the information found in a number of sources regarding the life of the artist in hard labor and settlement is often unreliable. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that a reconstruction of the period of the artist’s life in 1864—1877 in the Baikal region is presented in the article. The authors have identified and introduced into scientific circulation materials from domestic and foreign archives, portraits of Polish exiles, painted by the artist in Transbaikalia and currently stored in museums in Poland. The authors reviewed the scientific literature on the topic of the study, analyzed the memoirs of Polish political exiles who served hard labor together with Y. Berkman and described his artistic activities.

The author of the article describes a trip to Spain made by Józef Czapski in 1930. This outstanding painter and essayist, witness to the Katyń massacre, co-creator of the Parisian magazine "Kultura" [Culture] and Polish intellectual life in exile, at the time of visiting Madrid and its nearby areas for nearly two months was still a young artist, looking for the painting poetics closest to his soul. The visits to the Prado brought him two great discoveries: the works of El Greco and Goya. For Czapski, El Greco is a captivating example of religious painting and simultaneously – fidelity to the vision, the way of seeing the world. Goya fascinated Czapski with the thematic and stylistic range of his art – from “official” court portraits to dramatic records of nearly surreal visions, reflecting the artist’s fundamental belief in human depravity. The trip to Spain also had another meaning for Czapski – it was in a way a journey in the footsteps of St. Teresa of Avila, broadly: a reflection on the role of mystical experience in the spiritual life of man. From these two perspectives: artistic and religious, the encounter with the Spanish culture appears to be one of the more important and fateful episodes in the biography of Józef Czapski.

Ladislaus II Jagiełło (1386–1434). Ladislaus II Jagiełło is the founder of the Jagiellonian dynasty that had ruled over Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (until 1572), Bohemia (1471–1526) and Hungary (1440–1444, 1490–1526). A Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1377, and from 1386 a king of Poland and lord of Lithuania, which he ruled jointly with his cousin Witold (Vytautas), the son of Kęstutis. Five medieval portraits of Jagiełło survive, four of which date from the period of his reign in the Polish–Lithuanian state and one was executed posthumously. The earliest image, on Jagiełło’s Great Seal, was made in connection with his coronation as king of Poland (1386). Two portraits in the Holy Trinity Chapel at the Castle of Lublin (1418) are part of a wall paintings scheme commissioned by the monarch and executed by a team of painters brought from Ruthenia. Furthermore, the sumptuous tomb (before 1430) in Cracow was commissioned by the king. Its top slab bears an effigy of Jagiełło with his suggestively rendered countenance, which undoubtedly reflects the actual facial features of the elderly monarch. An image of the king represented as one of the Three Magi in a panel of an altarpiece in the tomb chapel of Casimir IV Jagiellonian, Jagiełło’s son and his successor on the Polish throne, dates from 1470. The chapel dedicated to the Holy Cross, erected at Cracow Cathedral, was in all likelihood commissioned by Casimir himself and his consort Elizabeth of Austria.

The graphic designs proposed by Polish publishers cannot be compared neither in number, nor in diversity to those presented by Margaret C. Sullivan in Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Book Covers. Nevertheless, they are a valuable and still undiscussed source of knowledge on the Polish reception of Austen’s novels. Further information on this subject is provided in the first part of the paper by a compilation of book series in which some or all of the texts by Austen have appeared since the 1990s. The analysis of the book covers takes into consideration the relation between the design and the content of the narrative as well as the character of the artwork and its origin. The most popular were 19th century paintings (portraits, genre scenes, less frequently landscapes), film stills from the movie adaptations and floral patterns. As one of the aims of the study was to answer the question how the covers direct the reading process and place the text in the literary tradition, the remarks on the publishers’ choices were supplemented with the readers’ reviews. In the conclusion, it was suggested how the potential, new editions could be designed to stand out from the former ones.

Abstract Polish-born, trained in Germany, with a studio in Rome and a second home in Denmark following her marriage to sculptor and academician Jens Adolf Jerichau, Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1818–81) was a true nineteenth-century cosmopolite. She painted Europe’s elite and counted Princess Alexandra, Hans Christian Andersen, Ibsen, the Grimm brothers, and Dickens among her well-wishers. She was invited by Queen Victoria to Buckingham Palace, and her portrait of Alexandra remains in the Royal Collection today. Her travelogue Brogede Rejsebilleder (Motley Images of Travel; 1881) is centered around two journeys to “the Orient” (Constantinople and Smyrna), undertaken in 1869–70 and 1874–75. The present chapters, translated by David D. Possen and introduced by Julia Kuehn, are Jerichau-Baumann’s record of the first of two journeys to Constantinople, in 1869–70. The chapters are published in two parts—“Public Spaces” and “The Harem”—in consecutive numbers of the VIJ. The painter vividly describes the sites of and life in Constantinople. Jerichau-Baumann’s temporary friendship with the young Princess Nazlı Hanım would lead to a number of paintings now considered emblematic of and unique in (female) Orientalist art. Nazlı would become a well-known literary salon hostess and arts supporter in Istanbul, Paris, Cairo, and Tunis.

The kaleidoscope of pseudonyms behind which he hid himself on the pages of the Russian- Jewish weekly Rassvet is a reflection of the multifaceted personality of Zakharia Klyuchevich. Historian, archaeologist, linguist, teacher, political activist, journalist, caricaturist, painter, poet, screenwriter, biologist, it is difficult to find an area into which he did not venture. The spectrum of languages he mastered, or tried ​​as an author, is equally colorful: from his native Russian to quasi-native French, through English, Hebrew, German, Yiddish, Polish, Ancient Greek, Turkish, up to Albanian and Etruscan, two languages he tried to link by identifying the latter as a protolanguage of the former. The amount of material left behind by this polyhedric author is voluminous. Correspondence in various languages (Italian, Russian, English, and French), diaries, theater screenplays (Hebrew, English), essays (French), poetry (French, Russian, and Hebrew), authored language textbooks (French-Hebrew, Russian-Hebrew), sketches, paintings, and newspaper clippings are preserved at the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Through a thorough analysis of this material, we will try to draw the portrait of this ish eshkolot, this Renaissance type of intellectual, who has been forgotten in their treatises by historians of literature, Zionism, art and archeology, perhaps precisely because of the difficulty in tracing his movements and activities, the excessive chameleon-like nature of his occupations and cryptonyms.

SUMMARY The scientific interests of Rev. Professor Janusz Pasierb revolved mostly around questions related to Polish art, often in the perspective of European interconnections, inspirations, as well as differences. The present study has been inspired by an observation by Rev. Professor Pasierb made in reference to a sphere of human activity unrelated to art. Describing in one of his papers the figure of Bishop Konstantyn Dominik (1870–1942), Professor Pasierb employed the phrase extraordinary ordinariness17. In the present text, this term will be used to discuss an artist whose oeuvre depicts ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ in the most multi-aspected and spectacular way. Rembrandt van Rijn was at once a traditionalist and innovator, both in regard to the range of employed subjects and compositional schemes and his craftsmanship. His knowledge of the achievements of his forerunners, continuously developed, inspired his own artistic quest. Despite the fact that he was a painter in the period when elaborated allegory was universally employed, he insisted on the realism of scenes and directness of compositions in order to bring out the extra-sensual dimension, based on symbolism hidden in prosaic life. His works open spaces of universal experiences and feelings, at the same time inclining us to pose questions concerning their complex intellectual interpretation or Rembrandt’s technique. His mastery is equally palpable in his biblical compositions, landscapes or brilliant psychological portraits, while each of the genres was depicted by him both in painting and in graphic arts, which was rare in the times when most artists specialized in only one medium, or even in one genre, like portraits or landscapes, in one medium. Rembrandt is one of the artists referred to as painters-engravers (peintre-graveur), like Albrecht Dürer or Lucas van Leyden before him. In graphic arts in particular, he introduced new technical and compositional solutions, issuing works that often astound with their innovative approach and extremely individual interpretation. Rembrandt’s versatility in terms of addressing various genres is particularly visible in his prints. Certain subjects were resumed by him as he looked for ever new solutions. Several chosen examples of graphic works depicting religious themes combining in various aspects traditionalism and innovation will be discussed to illustrate Rembrandt’s iconographic, compositional and technical concepts and search.

Most of the posthumous portraits of Louis II, who died in the battle of Mohács in 1526, show him in armour. In some pictures he is wearing fictitious armour, but in other portraits he is clad in the armour which until 1939 was believed to had once been his, but actually had been made in 1533 for the Polish king Sigismund II Augustus and is currently kept in the Hungarian National Museum. The author of the study has examined the latter group of artworks. She describes the armours of Louis II, some only mentioned in archival sources or historical works. Some items that can certainly or presumably be attributed to him are kept in museums abroad. The first paintings in which Louis II is wearing the gilded ornamental armour were painted by István Dorffmeister in the mid-1780s. Since at that time the armour was on display in one of the gala rooms fitted out in Vienna’s Kaiserliches Zeughaus in the 1760s, the study discusses the history of the imperial armour and weapon collections and the conception of the arms exhibition in the Zeughaus at that time. After the demolition of the Zeughaus in 1856, the armour was transferred, together with the rest of the imperial collection of armours and weapons, to the war museum wing of the newly built Arsenal. The armour was presented by the Austrian catalogues of the museum as belonging to Louis II, and some items had illustrations added to them. The armour was introduced in Pest in 1876 at a historical exhibition for charitable purposes, and later in 1896 at the Millennial Exhibition. The Hungarian press also devoted articles to it, and several scholarly papers were written about the armour.The prototypes for some of the 19th century artworks depicting Louis II in the Viennese armour – most of them local monuments preserving the memory of the battle – were István Dorffmeister’s paintings. His battle scene showing the death of Louis II appears in a sketch of an unrealized monument, dated 1846; in the picture painted on metal that adorned the monument in Mohács in the 1860s and on the bronze relief replacing it in the late 1890s. The antecedents to another group of representations must have been the 19th century Austrian and Hungarian descriptions and illustrations of the armour attributed to Louis II. The ruler wears this armour in several book illustrations and on the statue by Ferenc Vasadi on the Danubian facade of the Hungarian Parliament building.Although these artworks presenting Louis II in Sigismund II Augustus’ armour do not satisfy the iconographic criteria of historical authenticity, they were up-to-date for their time, for instead of depicting the fictitious, often waywardly fantastic armours of earlier centuries, they presented the portrayed person in an existing armour made in his own era, that is, with a historically authentic appearance.

Background The rehabilitation of patients with chronic prosopagnosia that occurs following a stroke is a challenge for modern medicine. Dysfunction to the facial processing areas is permanent and standard rehabilitation brings only limited improvement. Therefore, therapists suggest reinforcing the compensatory strategies used by such patients such as voice, figure, and gait recognition to help with the identification of a particular person, which promotes their social functioning. New neurotechnologies, especially QEEG/ERPs, displays of functional brain impairment in prosopagnosia, may be helpful in developing an appropriate neurotherapy protocol and create the conditions for other forms of rehabilitation in such patients. The purpose of our study was twofold: 1) to evaluate QEEG/ ERPs shows of post-stroke functional impairment associated with prosopagnosia, 2) to construct a neurofeedback protocol based on these indices to sup- port the neuropsychological rehabilitation of the case study described herein. We present the case of a 23-year-old right-handed student of the Graphics Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts, with chronic associative prosopagnosia after infection with SARS-CoV-2 followed by Covid-19 and a right hemisphere stroke. He was re- ferred in April 2021 for diagnosis and therapy at the Reintegration and Training Cen- ter of the Polish Neuropsychological Society (PTNeur). Six months earlier, in October 2020, the patient had been admitted to the Infectious Disease Hospital. COVID-19 was diagnosed based on coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reverse transcrip- tion PCR (RT-PCR) on a nasopharyngeal swab. The neurological examination re- vealed muscle weakness on the left side of the body, slow and aprosodic speech, preserved comprehension, and acute left homonymous hemianopsia, as well as prosopagnosia and mirror symptom. The patient was sedated and mechanically ventilated for six days. The CT-scan showed foci in the posterior part of the superior temporal lobe and hyperintense changes in the blood supply area of the right middle cerebral artery. After 30 days of hospitalization, the patient was discharged from this hospital and referred to an outpatient rehabilitation center for five months. Ther- apy improved his general condition but did not remove the chronic prosopagnosia: a personal tragedy for the patient which prevented him from continuing his studies. He was diagnosed at the PTNeur Reintegration and Training Center within the next few weeks: (1). ophthalmologic examinations revealed no pathology; (2) neuropsy- chological testing confirmed the presence of chronic apperceptive prosopagnosia; (3) examination of event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a large delay of the N170 wave, particularly on the right side, indicating a slowing of the rate of nerve impulses in early face processing and a cause of prosopagnosia. The patient was referred for rehabilitation: he participated in 20 sessions of individually tailored anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) twice a week for ten weeks, and in parallel, for indi- vidualized Prosopagnosia Symbolic Art Therapy provided once a week for ten weeks. By the end of therapy, the patient was not only recognizing but also painting portraits of faces. He returned to college, finished and defended a master’s thesis in Artistic Drawing, in which facial presentation played an important role. Quantitative EEG (QEEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) neuromarkers helped to understand the mechanism of prosopagnosia and to choose an individualized protocol, thus the appropriate application of tDCS in our patient, which accelerated the recovery of the ability to perform complex tasks and created the conditions for Symbolic Art Therapy. Modern medicine can successfully use such a management protocol in individuals with chronic prosopagnosia.

In Rembrandt’s later years he moved progressively towards emphasizing the inner emotions of his painted characters. This inner emotion is present in perhaps one of the most mysterious paintings accredited to his oeuvre, "The Polish Rider" (c.1655). The issue of Rembrandt connoisseurship has become amplified by the mysterious qualities of this monumental painting. The debate surrounding the authorship and subject matter of this work has placed western Rembrandt scholars against their Polish counterparts. Consequently, scholars have been divided into two main groups: those who subscribe to the idea that the painting is indeed of Polish influence, and those who do not. This presentation will make serious considerations as to the Polish influences found in the identity of the rider and his costume, and his horse and harness. Moreover, it will suggest that “The Polish Rider” was indeed created as a portrait of a Polish soldier which Rembrandt’s genius was able to depict with detail and sensitivity. It is the individuality of the horse and the more subtle, outward gaze of the rider which suggest that we may never know what the painting’s function was. And yet, scholars and viewers of the painting share in the mystery.

In February 2021, during the third COVID-19 lockdown in the state of Victoria, Australia, artist Shaun Wilson used the teleconferencing platforms Teams and Skype to create a slow cinema feature length artwork titled Fading Light to demonstrate how innovative creative practice can overcome barriers of distance experienced by creative practitioners from the limitations sustained during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these production techniques offer free access to develop new methodologies through practice, the wider scope of pandemic lockdowns mediated artists with teleconferencing as a tool to interrogate the nature of life during our various global lockdowns. It thus afforded a pioneering ability for artists to manufacture artwork about lockdowns whilst in lockdown, made from the tools commonly used for virtual communication. The significance of such opportunities, as this article will argue, demonstrates a novel approach to making artwork about COVID-19 in ways that were limited prior to the start of 2020 in terms of commonality, that now are “turning us all into broadcasters, streamers and filmmakers” (Sullivan). However, as we are only just becoming familiar with the cultural innovation pioneered from the limitations brought about by the pandemic, new aesthetics are emerging that challenge normative traditions of manufacturing and thinking about creative artefacts. Teleconferencing platforms were used differently prior to 2020 when compared to the current pandemic era. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there were no global gigascale movement restrictions or medical dangers to warrant a global shutdown that would ultimately determine how a person interacts with public places. In a pre-pandemic context, the daily use of teleconferencing was a luxury. Its subsequent use in the COVID-19 era became a necessity in many parts of day-to-day life. As artists have historically been able to comment through their work on global health crises, how has contemporary art responded since 2020 in using teleconferencing within critical studio practice? To explore such an idea, this article will probe examples of practice from artists making artworks with teleconferencing about pandemics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussion will purposely not consider a wider historical scope of teleconferencing in art and scholarship as the context in this article explicitly addresses art made in and commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic using the tools of lockdown readily available through teleconferencing platforms. It will instead concentrate on three artists addressing the pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The first example will be There Is No Such Thing as Internet from Polish artists Maria Magdalena Kozlowska and Maria Tobola, “performers who identify as one artist, Maria Małpecki” (“Pogo”). The second example is New York artist Michael Mandiberg’s Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), from the series Zoom Paintings. The third example is Australian artist Shaun Wilson’s Fading Light. These works will be discussed as a means of considering teleconferencing as a contemporary art medium used in response to COVID-19 and art made as pandemic commentary through the technology that has defined its global social integration. Figure 1: Maria Małpecki, There Is No Such Thing as Internet, used with permission. There Is No Such Thing as Internet was presented as a live stream on 7 May 2020 and as an online video between 7-31 May 2020 in the “Online Cocktail Party with Maria Małpecki” at Pogo Bar, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin by Maria Małpecki and curator Tomek Pawlowski Jarmolajew (“Pogo”). The work represents a twenty-minute livestream essay created in part by a teleconferencing video call performance and appropriated video streams. This includes video chat examples from Chomsky and Žižek, compiled together through intertextual video collages which The Calvert Journal described as a work “that explore[s] identity and different modes of communication in times of isolation” (De La Torre). One of the key strengths of this work in terms of teleconferencing is how it embraces the medium as an integral part of the performative methodology. To such an extent, one might argue that if it was removed and replaced by traditional video camera shots, which do feature in the video but are not the main aesthetic driver, the Metamodernist troupe of Małpecki’s videos would not perform the same critique of the pandemic. So, for Małpecki to comment on isolation through the Internet requires video calls to be central in the artwork in order for it to hold the cultural value it embeds through the subject. The conceptual framework relies on short segments to create episodic moments reliant on philosophical laments relating to each part of the work. For example, the first act unfolds with a montage of short video clip collages reminiscent of the quick-clip YouTube browsing habit culture from the pandemic to expedite an argument that indeed, there really is no singular internet. Rather, from this, what we are experiencing is arguably something else entirely. From here we move to the second act titled “We wake up in a different room every morning. We wander in a labyrinth where most doors are already open” (Małpecki); but as Małpecki comments, “sometimes our job is to shut them”. The sequence evolves into a disorientating dual screen sequence of the artists panicking to what they are viewing on screen. What this is exactly remains unclear. It may be us as the audience or something else as Malpecki holds their webcam devices upside down to provide an unnerving menage amidst the screams and exacerbations that invites spatial disorientation as a point of engagement for the viewer. As we recognise that video call protocols during the pandemic are visually static and that normative ‘rules’ of video calls require stabilised video and clean sound, Małpecki subverts these protocols to that of an uncomfortable, anarchic performance. It's at odds with the gentility of video call aesthetics which, in the case of this artwork, is more like watching a continuous point of view shot from a participant on a roller coaster or an extreme fairground ride. As the audience moves through each of the eclectic acts, this randomness laments a continuity that, sometimes satirical and at other times sublime, infuses the silliness and obliqueness of habitual lockdown video viewing. Even the most mundane of videos we watch to pass the time have become anthems of the COVID-19 era as a mixture of boredom, stupidity, and collective grief. Małpecki’s work in this regard becomes a complex observation for a society in crisis. It eloquently uses video calls as a way to comment on what this article argues to be an important cultural artefact in contemporary art’s response to COVID-19. Just as Goya subverted the Venetian pandemic in the grim Plague Hospital, Małpecki reflects our era in the same disruptive way by using frailty as a mirror to reveal an uneasy reflection masked in satirical obscurity, layered with fragments of the Internet and its subjective “other”. Figure 2: Michael Mandiberg, Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), used with permission. Conversely, the work of New York artist Michael Mandiberg uses teleconferencing in a different way by painting the background of video calls onto stretched canvases mostly over the duration of the actual call time. Yet in doing so, the removal of people from inside the frame highlights aspects of isolation and absence in lockdown. At the Denny Dinin Gallery exhibition in New York, The Zoom Paintings “presented in the digital sphere where they were born” (Defoe). Zoom provided both the frame and the exhibition space for these works, with “one painting … on view each day [on Zoom], for a total of ten paintings” (“Zoom”). Describing the works, Mandiberg states that they are “about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is” (Mandiberg; Defoe). This defines an innovative approach to teleconferencing that engages with place in times when the same kinds of absence experienced in the images of peopleless Zoom video calls mirror the external absence of people in public places during lockdown. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24) is time stamped with the diaristic nature of the Zoom Paintings series. These works are not just a set of painting subjects interlinked through a common theme of paintings ‘about Zoom backgrounds’. They, rather, operate as a complex depiction of absence located in the pandemic, evidently capturing a powerful social commentary about what the artist experienced during these times. In doing so, it immediately prompts the viewer into tensions that conceptually frame COVID-19, whether that be the isolation of waiting out the pandemic in lockdown, the removal of characters through illness from the virus, or even a sudden death from the virus itself. The camera’s point of view illustrates an empty space where we know something is missing. At the very least the artist suggests that someone nearby once inhabited these empty spaces but they are, at present, removed from the scene or have vanished altogether. On 16 August 2020, the day that the painting was made, the New York Times estimated that 514 people in the United States died from COVID-19 (“Coronavirus”). When measured against a further death rate peaking at 5,463 people in the United States who died on 11 February 2021, the catastrophic mortality data in the United States alone statistically supports Mandiberg’s lament as to the severity of the pandemic, which serves as the context of his work. Based on this data alone, the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings intensifies a sense of isolation and loss insofar as the subjectivity embedded within the video call frame speaks to a powerful way that contemporary art is providing commentary during the pandemic (“Coronavirus”). Art in this context becomes a silent observer using teleconferencing to address both what is taken away from us and what visually remains behind. This article acknowledges the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings as a timely reminder of the socio-devastation experienced in the pandemic’s wake. Therein lies a three-folded image within an image within an image, not unlike what we see in Blade Runner when Deckard’s Esper Machine investigates the reflection in a mirror of someone else, and no more vivid than in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. From a structural point of view, we witness Mandiberg’s images during its exhibition on Zoom in much the same conceptual way. In this case though, it is a mirrored online image of an image painted from a video call interpreted online from a recorded image transmitted online through teleconferencing. Through similar transactions, Shaun Wilson’s utilisation of video calls is represented in Fading Light as a way to comment on COVID-19 through the lens of Teams and Skype. The similarities of Fading Light to There Is No Such Thing as Internet stem obviously from the study of figuration used as the driver of the works but at the same time, it also draws comparison with Mandiberg’s stillness as represented in the frozen poses of each figure. At a more complex level, there is, though, a polar opposite in the mechanics that, for Mandiberg, uses video to translate into painted subjects. Fading Light does the opposite, with paintings recontextualised into video subjects. Such an analysis of both works brings about a sense of trepidation. For Mandiberg, it is the unsettling stillness through absence. In Fading Light it is the oppressive state of the motionlessness in frame that offers the same sense of awkwardness found in Mandiberg’s distorted painted laptop angles, and that makes the same kind of uncomfortableness bearable. It is only as much as an audience affords the time to allow before the loneliness of the subject renders the Zoom paintings a memorial to what is lost. Of note in Fading Light are the characteristically uncomfortable traits of what we detect should be in the frame of the subject but isn’t, which lends a tension to the viewer who has involuntarily been deprived of what is to be expected. For a modern Internet audience, a video without movement invites a combination of tension, boredom, and annoyance, drawing parallels to Hitchcock’s premise that something has just happened but we’re not entirely sure exactly what it was or is. Likewise, Małpecki’s same juxtaposition of tension with glimpses of Chomsky and Žižek videos talking over each other is joined by the artists’ breaking the fourth wall of cinema theory. Observing the artists lose concentration while watching the other videos in the video call scenario enact the mundane activities we encounter in the same kinds of situations of watching someone else on Zoom. However, in this context, we are watching them watching someone else whom we are also watching, while watching ourselves at the same time. Figure 3: Shaun Wilson, Fading Light, used with permission. The poses in Fading Light are reconfigured from characters in German medieval paintings and low relief religious iconography created during the Black Death era. Such works hang in the Gothic St. Michael’s Church in Schwäbisch Hall in Germany originally used by Martin Luther as his Southern Germany outpost during the Reformation. Wilson documented these paintings in October 2006, which then became the ongoing source images used in the 51 Paintings Suite films. The church itself has a strong connection to pandemics where a large glass floor plate behind the altar reveals an open ossuary of people who died of plague during the Black Death. This association brings an empirical linkage to the agency in Fading Light that mediates the second handed nature of the image, initially painted during a medieval pandemic, and now juxtaposed into the video frame captured in a current pandemic. From a conceptual standpoint, the critical analysis reflected in such a framework allows the artwork to reveal itself at a multi-level perspective, operating within a Metamodernist methodology. Two separate elements oscillate in tandem with one another, yet completely independent, or in this case, impervious to each other’s affect. Fading Light’s key affordance from this oscillation consolidate Wilson’s methodology in the artwork in as much detail as what Małpecki and Mandiberg construct in their respective works, yet obviously for very different motivations. If the basis of making video art in the pandemic using teleconferencing changes the way we might think about using these platforms, which otherwise may not have previously been taken serious by the academy as a valid medium in art, then the quiet meaningfulness throughout the film transcends a structured method to ascertain a pictorial presence of the image in its facsimile state. This pays respect to the source images but also embraces and overlays the narrative of the current pandemic intertwined within the subject. Given that Fading Light allows a ubiquitous dialogue to grow from the framed image, a subjective commonality in these mentioned works provide insight into how artists have engaged innovation strategies with teleconferencing to develop artwork made and commenting about the current pandemic. Whether it be Małpecki’s subversive pandemic variety show, the loneliness of Mandiberg’s Zoom call paintings or Wilson’s refilming of Black Death era paintings, all three artists use video call platforms as a contemporary art medium capable of social commentary during histo-trauma. These works also raise the possibility of interdisciplinary Metamodernist approaches to consider the implications of non-traditional mediums in offering socio-commentary during profoundly impactful times. It remains to be seen if contemporary video call platforms will become a frequented tool in contemporary art long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. However, by these works and indeed, from the others to follow and not yet revealed, the current ossuary provides an opportunity for artists to respond to their own immediate surroundings to redefine existing boundaries in art and look to innovation in the methods they use. We are in a new era of art making, only now beginning to reveal itself. It may take years or even decades to better understand the magnitude of the significance that artists have contributed towards their own practices since the beginnings of the pandemic. This time of profound change only strengthens the need for contemporary art to preserve and enlighten humanity through the journey from crisis to hope. References Blade Runner. Dir. by Ridley Scott, Warner Brothers, 1982. “Coronavirus US Cases.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2021. 28 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html>. Defoe, Taylor. “‘It's Memorializing How Unmemorable It Is’: Artist Michael Mandiberg on Painting Melancholy Portraits on Zoom.” Artnet News 10 Nov. 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/mandiberg-zoom-paintings-1922159>. De La Torre, Lucia. “Art in the Age of Zoom: Explore the Video Art Collage Unraveling the Complexities of the Digital Age.” The Culvert Journal, 5 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11788/online-performance-art-polish-artist-maria-malpecki-digital-age>. Goya, Francisco. Plaga Hospital. Private Collection. 1800. Małpecki, Maria. There Is No Such Thing as Internet. Vimeo, 2020. <http://vimeo.com/415998383>. Mandiberg, Michael. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24). New York: Denny Dinin Gallery, 2020. “Pogo Bar: Maria Małpecki & Tomek Pawłowski Jarmołajew.” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 7 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.kw-berlin.de/en/maria-malpecki-tomek-pawlowski-jarmolajew/>. Sullivan, Eve. “Video Art during and after the Pandemic: 2020 Limestone Coast Video Art Festival.” Artlink, 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4885/video-art-during-and-after-the-pandemic-2020-limes/>. Van Eyck, Jan. Arnolfini Portrait. Canberra: National Gallery, 1434. Wilson, Shaun. Fading Light. Bakers Road Entertainment, 2021. “The Zoom Paintings.” Denny Dimin Gallery, 12 Nov. 2020. <http://dennydimingallery.com/news/virtual_exhibition/zoom-paintings/>.

The aim of the article is to reflect on the phenomenon of great art exhibitions, gathering exhibits, mainly paintings, exceptional from the perspective of national cultural heritage, which collectively represent a defined generational message. The reflection included the best‑known exhibitions of recent decades, being an expression of the historical culture of a time of great changes in the life of Polish society at the turn of the 21st century. These are two exhibitions at the National Museum in Kraków, the first exhibition ever by Marek Rostworowski, “Polish self‑portrait” (1979); the second is an exhibition of Marek Szczerski’s work entitled #dziedzictwo/heritage (2017); a jubilee exhibition organised by the National Museum in Warsaw in collaboration with the Louvre‑Lens Museum, the National Museum in Poznan and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute on the centennial of regaining independence, entitled “Poland. The power of the image” (2019‑2021). This reflection also includes the monumental exhibition organised collectively by the Royal Castle in Warsaw and the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, with the participation of the curator Anda Rottenberg, entitled “Side by side. Germany‑Poland 1000 years of history in art.” (2012).

‘Artists are replicants who have found the secret of their obsolescence.’ (Brian Massumi) The critical reception to British writer Iain Sinclair’s most recent novel Dining on Stones (or, the Middle Ground) frequently focused on the British writer’s predilection for intertextual quotation and allusion, and more specifically, on his proclivity for integrating material from his own backlist. A survey of Dining on Stones reveals the following textual duplication: an entire short story, “View from My Window”, which was published in 2003; excerpts from a 2002 collection of poetry and prose, White Goods; material from his 1999 collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein, Rodinsky’s Room; a paragraph lifted from Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A to Z, also from 1999; and scenes from 1971’s The Kodak Mantra Diaries. Moreover, the name of the narrator, Andrew Norton, is copied from an earlier Sinclair work, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Of the six aforementioned inter-texts, only Rodinsky’s Room has had wide commercial release. The remainder are small press publications, often limited edition, difficult to find and read, which leads to the charge that Sinclair is relying on the inaccessibility of earlier texts to obscure his acts of autoplagiarism in the mass market Dining on Stones. Whatever Sinclair’s motives, his textual methodology locates a point of departure for an interrogation of textual doubling within the context of late era capitalism. At first approximation, Dining on Stones appears to belong to a postmodern literature which treats a text’s confluence, or dissonance of innumerable signifiers and systems of signification as axiomatic and intra-textually draws attention to this circumstance. Thematically, the heteroglot narrative of Dining on Stones frequently returns to the duplication of textual material. The book’s primary narrator is haunted by doubles, not least because Andrew Norton periodically functions as a textual doppelganger for Sinclair. Norton’s biography constitutes a cut-up of episodes copied from Sinclair’s personal history and experience as it is presented in his non-fiction and quasi-autobiographical poetry and prose like Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital. Like his creator, Norton is ontologically troubled by a fetch, or two, who may or may not be the products of his writer’s imagination. He claims that someone is ‘stealing my material. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster.’ (218) A ‘disturbing’ encounter with ‘Grays’, an uncannily familiar short story by another writer Marina Fountain, reveals a second textual poacher copying Norton’s work. She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints… about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. … But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. (167) When ‘Grays’ is later reprinted in full in the novel (141-65), it is a renamed double of a previous Sinclair piece, ‘In Train for the Estuary’ (Sinclair, White Goods, 57-75). This doubling is replicated with another Sinclair story ‘View from My Window’ also being attributed to Fountain (313-341). Neither the style, nor the content of Sinclair’s previous works have been discarded: they have been reproduced and incorporated in Dining on Stones’ retrospective of Sinclair’s earlier work. Thus, Norton’s review of Fountain’s writing as ‘a manner of composition I’d left behind’ doubles as Sinclair’s self-conscious recognition of the text as an artefact produced from diverse inter-texts – including his own. In contrast to Sinclair’s dialogic doubling, Fountain’s double is of a monologic disposition. It is mechanical ‘echopraxis,’ a neologism coined in Dining on Stones which is defined as the ‘mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures.’ (192) Its mercenary dimension, enacted without regard for the integrity of the inter-text, is underscored with the epithet ‘slash-and-burn stylist.’ The monologic double possesses the text, drains it of its vitality. It entails necrosis, mortification. Fountain’s appropriation of Norton’s story is close to Fredric Jameson’s characterisation of pastiche which, he says, shuts down communication between texts (202). For Jameson, pastiche is the exemplary postmodern literary ‘style’. It is inert, static, a textual aporia. Jameson’s verdict is harsh: pastiche is cannibalism, text devouring text with an appetite that corresponds to the cupidity of consumer culture. Textual cannibalism vanquishes dialogism. It is the negation of the textual Other because cannibalism is only possible when the Other no longer exists. So how does Sinclair distinguish his doubling of his own text from Fountain’s monologic doubling as it is depicted in the novel’s narrative? A clue can be detected in one of the stories stolen by Fountain. ‘In Train for the Estuary’ is a re-writing of Dracula, and takes its cue from Karl Marx’s famous analogy between capitalism and vampirism: ‘capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ (342) Sinclair’s vampire doubles as an academic (or is it the other way round?) who obsessively and compulsively stalks her quarry/object of study, Joseph Conrad. First, she had learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and initiated the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled. Validated herself. Being alone in an unknown city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. She initiated correspondence with people she never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. (Sinclair, White Goods, 58) The woman’s identity is leeched from the work of Conrad. Sinclair describes unethical activity in appropriating text: lying, stealing, sucking the blood from the corpus of Conrad. A compulsive need to maintain the ‘validation’ of this poached identity emerges, manifesting itself as addiction. The addict is an extreme embodiment of the (ir)rationality of consumption: consumed by the need to consume. The woman’s lust for text is commensurate with the twin desires—blood and real estate—of her precursor, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sinclair’s narrative of addiction doubles as a meta-critique on the compulsive desire to reproduce text and image that characterizes postmodern textualities as well as the apparatuses that produce them. The textual doubling in Dining on Stones, which is published by the multinational Penguin, seems to enact a reterritorialisation of a deterritorialised minor literature. However, Sinclair’s allegorical rewriting of the vampire legend and its subsequent inclusion in the mainstream novel’s narrative, reveal that capitalism’s doubles are simulacra in the Aristotelian sense because they are copies for which there is no original. The ostensible ‘original’ is the product of different material conditions and thus cannot be duplicated by the machinery of capitalism. The capitalist reproduction of text produced within an alternative cultural economy is an uncanny double (with an infinite capacity to be doubled over and over again) whose existence, like that of Sinclair’s academic in White Goods, is parasitical. The capitalist simulacrum necessitates that the original be destroyed, or at the very least, theorised out of existence so that restrictions based on its own premise of individual property rights can be circumvented. Postmodernism’s attendant theory is an over-determined repetition of poststructuralist tenets such as the instability of texts, the polysemous signifier and the impossibility of self as empirical subject. Images and meaning are no longer anchored, and free to be reproduced. Paradoxically, this proliferation of signification has the effect of constricting the originary text, compressing it under the burden of competing meanings, so that it is almost undetectable. Writes Brian Massumi (doubling Jean Baudrillard), ‘postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them, images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination.’ The postmodern project’s effacement of the centred subject and the self has as its consequence, according to Jameson, a ‘waning of affect’ which is superseded ‘by a peculiar kind of euphoria.’ (200) The euphoria to which Jameson refers is not that of the poststructuralist textasy. Instead, it is postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, a euphoria achieved from the fusion of contradictions. Postmodernism’s doubles are a utopian attempt to synthesize antinomy and unity in a simultaneity that assimilates the fragmentation of modernity and the modern subject, with the cohesion of the commodity and its closed system of cultural logic. As such, the postmodern double is a rejection of modernist engagements with technical reproducibility. Modernism’s literary assemblages are, in Victor Shlovsky’s words, the laying bare of the device, an exposition of the seams through techniques such as collage, bricolage and montage. These linguistic (and at times visual) conjunctures of disparate elements do not attempt to elide material and thematic disjuncture. As Walter Benjamin stresses, this type of textual methodology has the potential, through the disruption of spatial and temporal logic and the creation of anachrony, to rupture the linear representations and formations of order favoured by capitalist political economies (Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’). Postmodernism, which doubles (following Jameson’s formulation) as the cultural logic of late capitalism, reiterates that texts can be undone, and then reassembled, rearticulated anew, rendered useful to a commodity culture over and over again. Consequently, postmodernism’s copies are analogous, at the level of cultural production, to capitalism’s ceaseless appropriation of discourse, practice, and production. This is the alchemical project of capitalism. It strives to transform everything that it has doubled into the gold of the commodity. The inherent dangers of unrestrained reproduction are for Jameson exemplified in the treatment of Van Gogh’s Pair of Shoes (1885): If this copiously reproduced image is not to sink to the level of sheer decoration, it requires us to reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situation—which has vanished into the past—is somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end-product, and be unable to be grasped as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production. (194) Jameson’s reading of Van Gogh’s shoes reminds us of the fate of Alberto Korda’s 1960 photograph of revolutionary Che Guevara. Appropriated by the media, inscribed on T-shirts, mugs, even door mats, Che’s portrait is an emblem of the degradation Jameson describes. Like Van Gogh’s painting, Korda’s photograph was once a ‘symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production,’ saturated with the potential and spirit of revolution. Over time, the iconic image has leaked meaning. The signifying chain that anchored it to its original significance is broken each time it is reproduced and decontextualised through the process of commodification, until Che’s image is unrecognisable, a mere ornament. Refuting Benjamin’s concerns in ‘The Work of Art in its Age of Technical Reproducibility’ postmodern theory argues that technologies enabling reproducibility have led to a democratisation of text and textual production, and by extension, have liberated the multitude from a hierarchy of value that privileges the singular. Mass reproduction and the accompanying pressure for texts to be accessible results in altered attitudes regarding the preservation of intellectual property rights and ‘fair use’. In an economy of signs where use-value has become synonymous with exchange-value, then the text which has no exchange value due to it being ‘freely’ available—‘free’ in its double sense, as something exempt from restriction, or cost—can be copied without economic or ethical restraint, without permission. The quotation marks can be scrapped. According to postmodern logic, the double is a transposition with a legitimacy equalling, even rivalling the original. Clearly, Jameson’s lament that postmodernism represents ‘the end of the distinctive individual brushstroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction)’ cannot escape an association with elitism because technical reproducibility indubitably enables greater access. However, the utility of technologies of reproduction to the capitalist empire of structures and signs cannot be underestimated. It enables the ceaseless reproduction of ideologemes inscribed with the logic of capitalism; in other words, it enables capitalism to reproduce itself relentlessly. Postmodern cultural production is self-aware; it acknowledges its role as commodity and reproduces the ideology of the commodity form in its material form. In this manner, it functions as an ideologeme. Sinclair’s doubles cannot be understood according to the schema of postmodernism because he subverts postmodernism’s political and aesthetic symbiosis with capitalism. Moreover, the double in Sinclair travels beyond rehearsing a self-conscious hyphology (Barthes, 39). He defies postmodernism’s occultation of the author through his reiteration of the author’s authority over their own work. In contrast to the reductive manner postmodern texts duplicate other texts, Sinclair’s texts propose a typology of the double which advocates a dialogic duplication. Sinclair’s doubling refuses postmodernism’s return to the idealism of Hegelian dialects, and its synthesis of contradictions in the service of its unified material and aesthetic program: the commodification of literature. Consequently, Dining on Stones’ textual doubling is a critique of the epistemic shift to the monologic double which Jameson claims typifies a large portion of contemporary textual duplication. References Barthes, Roland. “Theory of the Text.” Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. ––– . “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility.” Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938. Trans. by Edmund Jephcott. Eds. Michael W.Jennings & Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass. & London, England: Belknap Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Eds. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Massumi, Brian. “Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari.” 12 May 2005. http://www.anu.edu.au/HRC/first_and_last/works/realer.htm>. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Trans. by Ben Fowkes. Vintage Books edition. New York: Random House, 1976. Sinclair, Iain. Dark Lanthorns: Rodinsky’s A-Z. ––– . Dining on Stones. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004. ––– . Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta 1997. ––– . London Orbital. London: Granta, 2002. ––– . Rodinsky’s Room. London: Granta, 1998. ––– . View from My Window. Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003. ––– . White Goods. Uppingham: Goldmark, 2002. Sinclair, Iain, and Dave McKean. Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Seale, Kirsten. "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication." M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>. APA Style Seale, K. (Jul. 2005) "Doubling: Capitalism and Textual Duplication," M/C Journal, 8(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/08-seale.php>.

In light of an ongoing debate over the authorship of the Redfern address (was it then Prime Minister Paul Keating or his speechwriter, Don Watson, who was responsible for this historic piece?), the authors of this article consider notions of ownership, authorship, and acknowledgement as they relate to the crafting, delivery, and reception of historical political speeches. There is focus, too, on the often-remarkable partnership that evolves between speechwriters and those who deliver the work. We argue that by drawing on the expertise of an artist or—in the case of the article at hand—speechwriter, collaboration facilitates the ‘translation’ of the politician’s or patron’s vision into a delivered reality. The article therefore proposes that while a speech, perhaps like a commissioned painting or sculpture, may be understood as the product of a highly synergistic collaboration between patron and producer, the power-bearer nonetheless retains essential ‘ownership’ of the material. This, we argue, is something other than the process of authorship adumbrated above. Leaving aside, for the present, the question of ownership, the context in which a speech is written and given may well intensify questions of authorship: the more politically significant or charged the context, the greater the potential impact of a speech and the more at stake in terms of its authorship. In addition to its focus on the latter, this article therefore also reflects on the considerable cultural resonance of the speech in question and, in so doing, assesses its significant impact on Australian reconciliation discourse. In arriving at our conclusions, we employ a method assemblage approach including analogy, comparison, historical reference, and interview. Comprising a range of investigative modalities such as those employed by us, John Law argues that a “method assemblage” is essentially a triangulated form of primary and secondary research facilitating the interrogation of social phenomena that do not easily yield to more traditional modes of research (Law 7). The approach is all the more relevant to this article since through it an assessment of the speech’s historical significance may be made. In particular, this article extensively compares the collaboration between Keating and Watson to that of United States President John F. Kennedy and Special Counsel and speechwriter Ted Sorensen. As the article reveals, this collaboration produced a number of Kennedy’s historic speeches and was mutually acknowledged as a particularly important relationship. Moreover, because both Sorensen and Watson were also key advisers to the leaders of their respective nations, the comparison is doubly fertile.On 10 December 1992 then Prime Minister Paul Keating launched the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People by delivering an address now recognised as a landmark in Australian, and even global, oratory. Alan Whiticker, for instance, includes the address in his Speeches That Shaped the Modern World. Following brief instruction from Keating (who was scheduled to give two orations on 10 December), the Prime Minister’s speechwriter and adviser, Don Watson, crafted the speech over the course of one evening. The oration that ensued was history-making: Keating became the first of all who held his office to declare that non-Indigenous Australians had dispossessed Aboriginal people; an unequivocal admission in which the Prime Minister confessed: “we committed the murders” (qtd. in Whiticker 331). The impact of this cannot be overstated. A personal interview with Jennifer Beale, an Indigenous Australian who was among the audience on that historic day, reveals the enormous significance of the address:I felt the mood of the crowd changed … when Keating said “we took the traditional lands” … . “we committed [the murders]” … [pauses] … I was so amazed to be standing there hearing a Prime Minister saying that… And I felt this sort of wave go over the crowd and they started actually paying attention… I’d never in my life heard … anyone say it like that: we did this, to you… (personal communication, 15 Dec. 2016)Later in the interview, when recalling a conversation in the Channel Seven newsroom where she formerly worked, Beale recalls a senior reporter saying that, with respect to Aboriginal history, there had been a ‘conservative cover up.’ Given the broader context (her being interviewed by the present authors about the Redfern Address) Beale’s response to that exchange is particularly poignant: “…it’s very rare that I have had these experiences in my life where I have been … [pauses at length] validated… by non-Aboriginal people” (op. cit.).The speech, then, is a crucial bookend in Australian reconciliation discourse, particularly as an admission of egregious wrongdoing to be addressed (Foye). The responding historical bookend is, of course, Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’. Forming the focal point of the article at hand, the Redfern Address is significant for another reason: that is, as the source of a now historical controversy and very public (and very bitter) falling out between politician and speechwriter.Following the publication of Watson’s memoir Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, Keating denounced the former as having broken an unwritten contract that stipulates the speechwriter has the honour of ‘participating in the endeavour and the power in return for anonymity and confidentiality’ (Keating). In an opinion piece appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Keating argued that this implied contract is central to the speech-writing process:This is how political speeches are written, when the rapid business of government demands mass writing. A frequency of speeches that cannot be individually scripted by the political figure or leader giving them… After a pre-draft conference on a speech—canvassing the kind of things I thought we should say and include—unless the actual writing was off the beam, I would give the speech more or less off the printer… All of this only becomes an issue when the speechwriter steps from anonymity to claim particular speeches or words given to a leader or prime minister in the privacy of the workspace. Watson has done this. (Keating)Upon the release of After Words, a collection of Keating’s post-Prime Ministerial speeches, senior writer for The Australian, George Megalogenis opined that the book served to further Keating’s argument: “Take note, Don Watson; Keating is saying, ‘I can write’” (30). According to Phillip Adams, Keating once bluntly declared “I was in public life for twenty years without Don Watson and did pretty well” (154). On the subject of the partnership’s best-known speech, Keating claims that while Watson no doubt shared the sentiments invoked in the Redfern Address, “in the end, the vector force of the power and what to do with it could only come from me” (Keating).For his part, Watson has challenged Keating’s claim to being the rightfully acknowledged author of the Redfern Address. In an appearance on the ABC’s Q&A he asserted authorship of the material, listing other famous historical exponents of his profession who had taken credit for their place at the wheel of government: “I suppose I could say that while I was there, really I was responsible for the window boxes in Parliament House but, actually, I was writing speeches as speechwriters do; as Peggy Noonan did for Ronald Reagan; as Graham Freudenberg did for three or four Prime Ministers, and so on…” (Watson). Moreover, as Watson has suggested, a number of prominent speechwriters have gone on to take credit for their work in written memoirs. In an opinion piece in The Australian, Denis Glover observes that: “great speechwriters always write such books and have the good sense to wait until the theatre has closed, as Watson did.” A notable example of this after-the-era approach is Ted Sorensen’s Counselor in which the author nonetheless remains extraordinarily humble—observing that reticence, or ‘a passion for anonymity’, should characterise the posture of the Presidential speechwriter (131).In Counselor, Sorensen discusses his role as collaborator with Kennedy—likening the relationship between political actor and speechwriter to that between master and apprentice (130). He further observes that, like an apprentice, a speechwriter eventually learns to “[imitate] the style of the master, ultimately assisting him in the execution of the final work of art” (op. cit., 130-131). Unlike Watson’s claim to be the ‘speechwriter’—a ‘master’, of sorts—Sorensen more modestly declares that: “for eleven years, I was an apprentice” (op. cit., 131). At some length Sorensen focuses on this matter of anonymity, and the need to “minimize” his role (op. cit.). Reminiscent of the “unwritten contract” (see above) that Keating declares broken by Watson, Sorensen argues that his “reticence was [and is] the result of an implicit promise that [he] vowed never to break…” (op. cit.). In implying that the ownership of the speeches to which he contributed properly belongs to his President, Sorensen goes on to state that “Kennedy did deeply believe everything I helped write for him, because my writing came from my knowledge of his beliefs” (op. cit. 132). As Herbert Goldhamer observes in The Adviser, this knowing of a leader’s mind is central to the advisory function: “At times the adviser may facilitate the leader’s inner dialogue…” (15). The point is made again in Sorensen’s discussion of his role in the writing of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. In response to a charge that he [Sorensen] had ghost-written the book, Sorensen confessed that he might have privately boasted of having written much of it. (op. cit., 150) But he then goes on to observe that “the book’s concept was his [Kennedy’s], and that the selection of stories was his.” (op. cit.). “Like JFK’s speeches”, Sorensen continues, “Profiles in Courage was a collaboration…” (op. cit.).Later in Counselor, when discussing Kennedy’s inaugural address, it is interesting to note that Sorensen is somewhat less modest about the question of authorship. While the speech was and is ‘owned’ by Kennedy (the President requested its crafting, received it, edited the final product many times, and—with considerable aplomb—delivered it in the cold midday air of 20 January 1961), when discussing the authorship of the text Sorensen refers to the work of Thurston Clarke and Dick Tofel who independently conclude that the speech was a collaborative effort (op. cit. 227). Sorensen notes that while Clarke emphasised the President’s role and Tofel emphasised his own, the matter of who was principal craftsman will—and indeed should—remain forever clouded. To ensure that it will permanently remain so, following a discussion with Kennedy’s widow in 1965, Sorensen destroyed the preliminary manuscript. And, when pressed about the similarities between it and the final product (which he insists was revised many times by the President), he claims not to recall (op. cit. 227). Interestingly, Robert Dallek argues that while ‘suggestions of what to say came from many sources’, ‘the final version [of the speech] came from Kennedy’s hand’ (324). What history does confirm is that both Kennedy and Sorensen saw their work as fundamentally collaborative. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. records Kennedy’s words: “Ted is indispensable to me” (63). In the same volume, Schlesinger observes that the relationship between Sorensen and Kennedy was ‘special’ and that Sorensen felt himself to have a unique facility to know [Kennedy’s] mind and to ‘reproduce his idiom’ (op.cit.). Sorensen himself makes the point that his close friendship with the President made possible the success of the collaboration, and that this “could not later be replicated with someone else with whom [he] did not have that same relationship” (131). He refers, of course, to Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy’s choice of advisers (including Sorensen as Special Counsel) was, then, crucial—although he never ceded to Sorensen sole responsibility for all speechwriting. Indeed, as we shortly discuss, at critical junctures the President involved others (including Schlesinger, Richard Goodwin, and Myer Feldman) in the process of speech-craft and, on delivery day, sometimes departed from the scripts proffered.As was the case with Keating’s, creative tension characterised Kennedy’s administration. Schlesinger Jr. notes that it was an approach practiced early, in Kennedy’s strategy of keeping separate his groups of friends (71). During his Presidency, this fostering of creative tension extended to the drafting of speeches. In a special issue of Time, David von Drehle notes that the ‘Peace’ speech given 10 June 1963 was “prepared by a tight circle of advisers” (97). Still, even here, Sorensen’s role remained pivotal. One of those who worked on that speech (commonly regarded as Kennedy’s finest) was William Forster, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. As indicated by the conditional “I think” in “Ted Sorensen, I think, sat up all night…”, Forster somewhat reluctantly concedes that while a group was involved, Sorensen’s contribution was central: “[Sorensen], with his remarkable ability to polish and write, was able to send each of us and the President the final draft about six or seven in the morning…” (op. cit.).In most cases, however, it fell on Sorensen alone to craft the President’s speeches. While Sorenson’s mind surely ‘rolled in unison’ with Kennedy’s (Schlesinger Jr. 597), and while Sorensen’s words dominated the texts, the President would nonetheless annotate scripts, excising redundant material and adding sentences. In the case of less formal orations, the President was capable of all but abandoning the script (a notable example was his October 1961 oration to mark the publication of the first four volumes of the John Quincy Adams papers) but for orations of national or international significance there remained a sense of careful collaboration between Kennedy and Sorensen. Yet, even in such cases, the President’s sense of occasion sometimes encouraged him to set aside his notes. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observes, Kennedy had an instinctive feel for language and often “spoke extemporaneously” (op. cit.). The most memorable example, of course, is the 1961 speech in Berlin where Kennedy (appalled by the erection of the Berlin Wall, and angry over the East’s churlish covering of the Brandenburg Gate) went “off-script and into dangerous diplomatic waters” (Tubridy 85). But the risky departure paid off in the form of a TKO against Chairman Khrushchev. In late 1960, following two independent phone calls concerning the incarceration of Martin Luther King, Kennedy had remarked to John Galbraith that “the best strategies are always accidental”—an approach that appears to have found its way into his formal rhetoric (Schlesinger Jr. 67).Ryan Tubridy, author of JFK in Ireland, observes that “while the original draft of the Berlin Wall speech had been geared to a sense of appeasement that acknowledged the Wall’s presence as something the West might have to accept, the ad libs suggested otherwise” (85). Referencing Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s account of the delivery, Tubridy notes that the President’s aides observed the orator’s rising emotion—especially when departing from the script as written:There are some who say that Communism is the way of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin … Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.That the speech defined Kennedy’s presidency even more than did his inaugural address is widely agreed, and the President’s assertion “Ich bin ein Berliner” is one that has lived on now for over fifty years. The phrase was not part of the original script, but an addition included at the President’s request by Kennedy’s translator Robert Lochner.While this phrase and the various additional departures from the original script ‘make’ the speech, they are nonetheless part of a collaborative whole the nature of which we adumbrate above. Furthermore, it is a mark of the collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver that on Air Force One, as they flew from West Germany to Ireland, Kennedy told Sorensen: “We’ll never have another day like this as long as we live” (op. cit. 88; Dallek 625). The speech, then, was a remarkable joint enterprise—and (at least privately) was acknowledged as such.It seems unlikely that Keating will ever (even semi-publicly) acknowledge the tremendous importance of Watson to his Prime Ministership. There seems not to have been a ‘Don is indispensable to me’ moment, but according to the latter the former Prime Minister did offer such sentiment in private. In an unguarded moment, Keating allegedly said that Watson would “be able to say that [he, Watson, was] the puppet master for the biggest puppet in the land” (Watson 290). If this comment was indeed offered, then Keating, much like Kennedy, (at least once) privately acknowledged the significant role that his speechwriter played in his administration. Watson, for his part, was less reticent. On the ABC’s Q&A of 29 August 2011 he assessed the relationship as being akin to a [then] “requited” love. Of course, above and beyond private or public acknowledgement of collaboration is tangible evidence of such: minuted meetings between speechwriter and speech-giver and instructions to the speechwriter that appear, for example, in a politician’s own hand. Perhaps more importantly, the stamp of ownership on a speech can be signalled by marginalia concerning delivery and in the context of the delivery itself: the engagement of emphases, pause, and the various paralinguistic phenomena that can add so much character to—and very much define—a written text. By way of example we reference again the unique and impassioned delivery of the Berlin speech, above. And beyond this again, as also suggested, are the non-written departures from a script that further put the stamp of ownership on an oration. In the case of Kennedy, it is easy to trace such marginalia and resultant departures from scripted material but there is little evidence that Keating either extensively annotated or extemporaneously departed from the script in question. However, as Tom Clark points out, while there are very few changes to Watson’s words there are fairly numerous “annotations that mark up timing, emphasis, and phrase coherence.” Clark points out that Keating had a relatively systematic notational schema “to guide him in the speech performance” (op. cit.). In engaging a musical analogy (an assemblage device that we ourselves employ), he opines that these scorings, “suggest a powerful sense of fidelity to the manuscript as authoritative composition” (op. cit.). While this is so, we argue—and one can easily conceive Keating arguing—that they are also marks of textual ownership; the former Prime Minister’s ‘signature’ on the piece. This is a point to which we return. For now, we note that matters of stress, rhythm, intonation, gesture, and body language are crucial to the delivery of a speech and reaffirm the point that it is in its delivery that an adroitly rendered text might come to life. As Sorensen (2008) reflects:I do not dismiss the potential of the right speech on the right topic delivered by the right speaker in the right way at the right moment. It can ignite a fire, change men’s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all these ways, change the world. I know. I saw it happen. (143)We argue that it is in its delivery to (and acceptance by) the patron and in its subsequent delivery by the patron to an audience that a previously written speech (co-authored, or not) may be ‘owned’. As we have seen, with respect to questions of authorship or craftsmanship, analogies (another device of method assemblage) with the visual and musical arts are not uncommon—and we here offer another: a reference to the architectural arts. When a client briefs an architect, the architect must interpret the client’s vision. Once the blueprints are passed to the client and are approved, the client takes ownership of work that has been, in a sense, co-authored. Ownership and authorship are not the same, then, and we suggest that it is the interstices that the tensions between Keating and Watson truly lie.In crafting the Redfern address, there is little doubt that Watson’s mind rolled in unison with the Prime Minister’s: invisible, intuited ‘evidence’ of a fruitful collaboration. As the former Prime Minister puts it: “Watson and I actually write in very similar ways. He is a prettier writer than I am, but not a more pungent one. So, after a pre-draft conference on a speech—canvassing the kind of things I thought we should say and include—unless the actual writing was off the beam, I would give the speech more or less off the printer” (Keating). As one of the present authors has elsewhere observed, “Watson sensed the Prime Minister’s mood and anticipated his language and even the pattern of his voice” (Foye 19). Here, there are shades of the Kennedy/Sorensen partnership. As Schlesinger Jr. observes, Kennedy and Sorensen worked so closely together that it became impossible to know which of them “originated the device of staccato phrases … or the use of balanced sentences … their styles had fused into one” (598). Moreover, in responding to a Sunday Herald poll asking readers to name Australia’s great orators, Denise Davies remarked, “Watson wrote the way Keating thought and spoke” (qtd. in Dale 46). Despite an uncompromising, pungent, title—‘On that historic day in Redfern, the words I spoke were mine’—Keating’s SMH op-ed of 26 August 2010 nonetheless offers a number of insights vis-a-vis the collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver. To Keating’s mind (and here we might reflect on Sorensen’s observation about knowing the beliefs of the patron), the inspiration for the Prime Minister’s Redfern Address came from conversations between he and Watson.Keating relates an instance when, on a flight crossing outback Western Australia, he told Watson that “we will never really get Australia right until we come to terms with them (Keating).” “Them”, Keating explains, refers to Aborigines. Keating goes on to suggest that by “come to terms”, he meant “owning up to dispossession” (op. cit.)—which is precisely what he did, to everyone’s great surprise, in the speech itself. Keating observes: I remember well talking to Watson a number of times about stories told to me through families [he] knew, of putting “dampers” out for Aborigines. The dampers were hampers of poisoned food provided only to murder them. I used to say to Watson that this stuff had to be owned up to. And it was me who established the inquiry into the Stolen Generation that Kevin Rudd apologised to. The generation who were taken from their mothers.So, the sentiments that “we did the dispossessing … we brought the diseases, the alcohol, that we committed the murders and took the children from their mothers” were my sentiments. P.J. Keating’s sentiments. They may have been Watson’s sentiments also. But they were sentiments provided to a speechwriter as a remit, as an instruction, as guidance as to how this subject should be dealt with in a literary way. (op. cit.)While such conversations might not accurately be called “guidance” (something more consciously offered as such) or “instruction” (as Keating declares), they nonetheless offer to the speechwriter a sense of the trajectory of a leader’s thoughts and sentiments. As Keating puts it, “the sentiments of the speech, that is, the core of its authority and authorship, were mine” (op. cit.). As does Sorensen, Keating argues that that such revelation is a source of “power to the speechwriter” (op. cit.). This he buttresses with more down to earth language: conversations of this nature are “meat and drink”, “the guidance from which the authority and authorship of the speech ultimately derives” (op. cit.). Here, Keating gets close to what may be concluded: while authorship might, to a significant extent, be contingent on the kind of interaction described, ownership is absolutely contingent on authority. As Keating asserts, “in the end, the vector force of the power and what to do with it could only come from me” (op. cit.). In other words, no Prime Minister with the right sentiments and the courage to deliver them publicly (i.e. Keating), no speech.On the other hand, we also argue that Watson’s part in crafting the Redfern Address should not be downplayed, requiring (as the speech did) his unique writing style—called “prettier” by the former Prime Minister. More importantly, we argue that the speech contains a point of view that may be attributed to Watson more than Keating’s description of the speechwriting process might suggest. In particular, the Redfern Address invoked a particular interpretation of Australian history that can be attributed to Watson, whose manuscript Keating accepted. Historian Manning Clark had an undeniable impact on Watson’s thinking and thus the development of the Redfern address. Per Keating’s claim that he himself had “only read bits and pieces of Manning’s histories” (Curran 285), the basis for this link is actual and direct: Keating hired Clark devotee Watson as a major speech writer on the same day that Clark died in 1991 (McKenna 71). McKenna’s examination of Clark’s history reveals striking similarities with the rhetoric at the heart of the Redfern address. For example, in his 1988 essay The Beginning of Wisdom, Clark (in McKenna) announces:Now we are beginning to take the blinkers off our eyes. Now we are ready to face the truth about our past, to acknowledge that the coming of the British was the occasion of three great evils: the violence against the original inhabitants of the of the country, the Aborigines, the violence against the first European labour force in Australia, the convicts and the violence done to the land itself. (71)As the above quote demonstrates, echoes of Clark’s denouncement of Australia’s past are evident in the Redfern Address’ rhetoric. While Keating is correct to suggest that Watson and he shared the sentiments behind the Address, it may be said that it took Watson—steeped as he was in Clark’s understanding of history and operating closely as he did with the Prime Minister—to craft the Redfern Address. Notwithstanding the concept of ownership, Keating’s claim that the “vector force” for the speech could only come from him unreasonably diminishes Watson’s role.ConclusionThis article has considered the question of authorship surrounding the 1992 Redfern Address, particularly in view of the collaborative nature of speechwriting. The article has also drawn on the analogous relationship between President Kennedy and his Counsel, Ted Sorensen—an association that produced historic speeches. Here, the process of speechwriting has been demonstrated to be a synergistic collaboration between speechwriter and speech-giver; a working partnership in which the former translates the vision of the latter into words that, if delivered appropriately, capture audience attention and sympathy. At its best, this collaborative relationship sees the emergence of a synergy so complete that it is impossible to discern who wrote what (exactly). While the speech carries the imprimatur and original vision of the patron/public actor, this originator nonetheless requires the expertise of one (or more) who might give shape, clarity, and colour to what might amount to mere instructive gesture—informed, in the cases of Sorensen and Watson, by years of conversation. While ‘ownership’ of a speech then ultimately rests with the power-bearer (Keating requested, received, lightly edited, ‘scored’, and delivered—with some minor ad libbing, toward the end—the Redfern text), the authors of this article consider neither Keating nor Watson to be the major scribe of the Redfern Address. Indeed, it was a distinguished collaboration between these figures that produced the speech: a cooperative undertaking similar to the process of writing this article itself. Moreover, because an Australian Prime Minister brought the plight of Indigenous Australians to the attention of their non-Indigenous counterparts, the address is seminal in Australian history. It is, furthermore, an exquisitely crafted document. And it was also delivered with style. As such, the Redfern Address is memorable in ways similar to Kennedy’s inaugural, Berlin, and Peace speeches: all products of exquisite collaboration and, with respect to ownership, emblems of rare leadership.ReferencesAdams, Phillip. Backstage Politics: Fifty Years of Political Memories. London: Viking, 2010.Beale, Jennifer. Personal interview. 15 Dec. 2016.Clark, Tom. “Paul Keating’s Redfern Park Speech and Its Rhetorical Legacy.” Overland 213 (Summer 2013). <https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-213/feature-tom-clarke/ Accessed 16 January 2017>.Curran, James. The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004.Dale, Denise. “Speech Therapy – How Do You Rate the Orators.” Sun Herald, 9 Mar.2008: 48.Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963. New York: Little Brown, 2003.Foye, Jonathan. Visions and Revisions: A Media Analysis of Reconciliation Discourse, 1992-2008. Honours Thesis. 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