Journal articles on the topic 'Vienna International Exhibition'

The buildings and landscaped grounds of the nineteenth-century international exhibitions were directly related to the architectural and urban design traditions of the cities in which they were built. At the same time, they possessed idealized qualities that made them innovative and distinct from other contemporary buildings. The result of collaborative planning among architects, engineers, and planning committees, the exhibitions were built to evoke ideal civic settings, their exhibition palaces, pavilions, and gardens forming exemplary complexes that synthesized both invention and tradition. The International Exhibition, the Weltausstellung, held in Vienna, Austria in 1873, was one such event (Fig. 1). Its buildings were both related to the architectural and urbanistic design traditions of nineteenth-century Vienna, and at the same time possessed idealized qualities that were inventive and progressive, marking new technological achievements.

Abstract This article examines the Austrian participation at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, focusing particularly on the display of art. Spread across two venues, the Austrian Pavilion and the Palace of Fine Arts, the display, with contributions from the Mánes Association of Fine Artists, Society of Polish Artists “Sztuka,” the Hagenbund, and the Vienna Künstlergenossenschaft illustrates the changes taking place in Cisleithanian art at the time, with the emergence and increased recognition of nationally organized art societies, whose very existence questioned the long-standing supremacy of Vienna art institutions. A further contrast is made with the Hungarian art exhibition at the same fair. Unlike the Austrian exhibit, housed in its own free-standing exhibition space, the much more modest Hungarian exhibit was divided in two. Fine arts were displayed in the Palace of Fine Arts, while decorative arts and crafts were displayed in a pavilion built inside of the exhibition hall. The author ends by contrasting the 1904 exhibition spaces with those of the 1900 Paris exhibition.

The article examines the architectural, artistic, stylistic, morphological and structural features of an old porcelain vase from a private Odessa collection. The unpainted vase was made in 1860s at Vienna Porcelain Manufactory. This vase was painted in Helena Wolfsohn’s studio in Dresden between 1864 and 1878 (?). Helena Wolfsohn lived and worked in a significant center of European civilization, culture and arts of her time. The images are painted on the vase using the technique of manual overglaze painting. Amazingly arranged bouquets of flowers are painted on the turquoise background of the oval-shaped body of the vase, and gallant scenes in the Watteau style are depicted on the white parts of the body. On the bottom of the vase base an underglaze blue mark is applied: a shield. The painting of the vase is notable for a vivid pictorial effect, a successful composition, harmony and restraint of color shades. Similar vases painted at Helena Wolfsohn’s studio were exhibited at the International Exhibition in Sydney (1879) and at the World Exhibition in Melbourne (1880). Decorative porcelain vases play an important role in creating the architectural and artistic ensemble of the interior, whose main compositional principle is architectonics.

The years immediately following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) would politically have been the best time to make Bánk bán, Ferenc Erkel’s most important opera known in Vienna, thus launching his work in the German cultural area. However, the plot of Bánk bán and Erkel’s personal attitude regarding the Compromise were probably at that time too much of a sensitive issue. In terms of cultural policy the International Exhibition of Music and Theatre at the end of the 19th century could have presented itself as an opportunity to premiere it in Vienna. Instead, Katona’s Bánk bán was presented. One could have expected that Gustav Mahler would stage Bánk bán at the Vienna Court Opera, as he did Dalibor at the beginning of his period as artistic director. Apparently Mahler did never even consider the idea of its staging which may have been connected with both his personal tastes and the unfavourable memories he had of Budapest. The success of Smetana’s Dalibor in winning a wide recognition on German stages around 1900 as opposed to Erkel’s neglect, may partly be explained by its post-Wagnerian musical language. However, since in the meantime opera houses have again been conquered by Italian belcanto and French grand opéra — the two main operatic styles from which Erkel took his inspiration — stylistic reasons clearly cannot explain why his work remains internationally unknown up to this day. One of the reasons for the lack of success may very well be the over-emphasizing by its Hungarian partisans of the opera’s national qualities instead of its inherent dramatic values.

Abstract Natural resources of North America ensured the existence of German immigrants in the late 17th century. In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, measures for forest protection and sustainable forestry were invoked at an early date. Efforts were based on inventory of the resources and controlled use. During the 18th and 19th centuries, German emigration was boosted by the scarcity of wood. Proto-industry in Germany strongly depended on wood and coal resources, causing negative effects in the forest and environment. Increasing population and developing industrialization devastated the forests. International scientific contact in forestry started during the American Revolutionary War. German influence on American forestry began in 1873, when the Austro-Hungarian government hosted an international exhibition in Vienna. German forest scientists and politicians focused on sustainable forestry and initiated a fundamental forest education system in the United States. An intensive German–American exchange on a professional basis took place until the beginning of World War II. The acquired historical knowledge on this subject demonstrates that German and North American environmental perception had interacted considerably.

Abstract In June of 1892, Smetana’s Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) was heard in Vienna for the first time as part of a guest appearance by the Czech National Theatre at the International Musical and Theatrical Exhibition. The clear success of the opera and of the performances of the National Theatre ensemble was reflected in the reviews of the Viennese critics, who were calling for German-language performances of Prodaná nevěsta on the stage of the Court Opera. On the basis of information from the archives of the Court Opera (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv), one can document the reasons why, as it turned out, the first Viennese (and German-language) stage to produce the opera was the Theater an der Wien in April 1893, and why the premiere at the Court Opera did not occur until three years later. The study also devotes attention to the first performers for both productions of Prodaná nevěsta and to the circumstances of the two Viennese premieres, which opened up the pathway to other stages around the world after a thirty-year delay.

The subject of the article is international legal aspects of economic responsibility of states. The aim of the article is to find an answer to the problematic issues of economic responsibility of states and its international legal aspects. Different concepts of economic responsibility are analyzed due to the lack of a unified approach to it both in economics and in related branches of law. It is noted that the institution of economic responsibility is designed to stabilize the relations of socio-economic development, the interests of participants in social exchange and to achieve the goals of sustainable development. From the international legal point of view of understanding economic responsibility, the state bears two types of responsibility – material (economic) and non-material (political). And international legal responsibility of the state is considered as an institution of the law of international responsibility. It is from this point of view the economic responsibility of the state is considered by international lawyers and specialists in the field of international relations. The methodology of the article is based on the fact that there are three basic mechanisms of liability – derivative of property rights, contracts, and torts. Contract law deals with breaches of duty, tort law deals with accidental or intentional injury to persons or property, and property law deals with misappropriation or interference with property rights. It is concluded that the state is the same economic entity in terms of economics as all equal economic entities. However, the applicability of the means of economic responsibility in the international legal aspect is complicated by the immunity of the state with regard to its property. Therefore, there are signs of liability not for all property, but only for that which has certain signs of applicability – use for commercial purposes, connection with the subject matter of the claim. In the aspect of economic responsibility, there is a distinction between immunity from jurisdiction and immunity from enforcement. The problem of differentiation of commercial and state property is outlined, attention is focused on the existence of certain categories of state property, the public nature of which is not in doubt and which are not considered possible for economic (property) responsibility for the conduct of diplomatic and consular activities of their missions, consulates, special missions, etc., whose immunity is enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961; military property, as well as property used for military purposes; property that is part of the cultural heritage of a foreign state or part of its archives, as well as property that is part of an exhibition of items of scientific, cultural or historical significance. It is also concluded that economic responsibility in international law is not always associated with the negative consequences of unlawful behavior, because it can also be applied as a result of lawful behavior, leading to the infliction of harm to other subjects. Thus, the economic responsibility of the state is on the verge of regulation of public and private law. This is its peculiarity and complexity of its application to the state.

In the spiritual life of a person, remembrance plays a significant role. The resurrection of the priceless past experience of one’s own and someone else’s opens the way to comprehension of the present, one’s own Self. Artists strive to reflect the amazing ability of a person to cross the border of the real and sacred worlds in memory. In the musical art of the second half of the XXth — early XXIst centuries, the theme of memory is embodied through a dialogue of compositions from different eras, traditions, concepts. In this vein, the article examines the unique composition by our compatriot and contemporary Mikhail Kollontay “Ten Words of Mussorgsky on the Death of Viktor Hartmann” for piano, cello and violin. Created in the wake of Mussorgsky’s piano cycle “Pictures at an Exhibition” and the International Competition and Festival of Arts in Vienna (1993), the trio embodies the journey of human memory along the paths of the afterlife. Reflecting the aesthetics of postmodernism and not belonging to the sphere of sacred music, the composition is devoted to the key themes of “life and death” and “salvation through repentance” for the Russian Orthodox consciousness. It intricately intertwines intra- and extramusical components (title, titles of plays, quotations from literary sources, artistic artifacts, comments in the author’s letters, etc.), which form a dialogue between the “alien” and the “own”, the past and the present, the secular and the spiritual. The analysis of the timbro-sonic side, intonation vocabulary, thematicism and its compositional and dramatic organization reveals vivid signs of the poetics of memory. They build an original concept of the trio, which demonstrates its enduring value in the Russian and, wider, world cultural space. The article is addressed to professional musicians, postgraduate students and specialists in the field of musicology.

Abstract: Textiles, Trade & Taste: Portugal and the World (TTT) is a project that aspires to bring new synergies to the field of textile studies by promoting different connections and interdisciplinary approaches involving art history, materials science, and conservation. The TTT research network is based at the Center for Humanities in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and organizes workshops, conferences, tours, and lectures in museums and research institutions. The network’s artistic and historical research has ranged from collating archival material to stylistic and iconographic studies, with the aim of placing textile objects in their historical, artistic, technological, and sociocultural contexts. Chemical analysis and characterization of dyes, textile fibers, and precious metal threads have provided important evidence for identifying the origins of raw materials and finished textiles, and for developing improved conservation treatments for their preservation for future generations. Recent research has examined the global circulation of dyes in the early modern period, especially reds, and also reconstructed the production and consumption of Indian, Chinese, and Portuguese embroideries and Islamic carpets. In 2011, TTT’s work led to the classification of three “Salting” carpets as national treasures in Portugal. The team members have collaborated with national and international museums, including Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga and Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon), as well as Abegg-Stiftung (Riggisberg), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée des Tissus, (Lyon), Museum für Islamische Kunst (Berlin), Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) (Vienna), Rietberg Museum (Zürich), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum (Washington, D.C.), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), and Victoria and Albert Museum (London). The team’s art historians contributed to the platform “Museum With No Frontiers” to develop the online exhibition Discover Carpet Art involving Portuguese museums. TTT’s scientists have strong links with the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.), University of Zaragoza (Spain), Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, Amersfoort), and the University of Amsterdam. We have been encouraged by the positive response of the international community to the results of our initial research projects.

The large-scale theatre exhibitions in Vienna (1892), Berlin (1910) and Magdeburg (1927) contained extensive displays on the history of German-language theatre. This article analyses the pedagogical and epistemological discussions about different ways of mediating theatre history that formed part of the context of the three exhibitions. Curators and scholars used the German term Anschauung to measure the transfer of knowledge in historical exhibitions, reconstruction models and historiography books. This article contributes to the recent scholarship on forms of exhibiting, collecting and archiving theatre, dance and performance. It shows that theatre became an area of focus within the culture of national and international large-scale exhibitions around 1900. This was accompanied by discussions about the appropriate medium to present the history of theatre. Informed by museum pedagogy and humanities hermeneutics, curators and scholars conceived of divergent concepts of theatre history Anschauung.

Statement of the problem. Marko Topchii (1991) is one of the famous Ukrainian guitarists who began to conquer the music world at an early age. Winning in competitions (more than 90 times), performances in the world’s most prestigious concert halls (Carnegie Hall, Corto Hall, conservatories of San Francisco, Madrid, Vienna, Bologna) are the result of immense talent and great professional work. The young guitarist is one of those who expand the guitar repertoire by creating arrangements for guitar, in particular of works by J. S. Bach, M. Ravel, M. Mussorgsky. These facts contribute to the relevance of the topic of the article and create a context for the theoretical research of M. Topchii’s performance principles. Recent research and publications. A number of works are devoted to the theme of musical / composer’s thinking (Dys, 1989; Kotlyarevskiy, 1989; Malyi, 2018), guitar thinking and style (Tkachenko, 2008, 2012; Nikolaievska, 2008), M. Topchii’s performance style (Chechenia, 2021, 2016), “musical interpretation” (Moskalenko, 2013), “performance style” (Martienssen, 1930; Katrich, 2000; Tkach, 2012). The purpose of the study is an attempt to identify the features of M. Topchii’s performance style through the context of shaping his musical thinking, communication, social and cultural paradigm and worldview. The scientific novelty is explained by the lack of study of M. Topchii’s personality in Ukrainian and world musicology. M. Topchii’s performance thinking is revealed on the example of the analysis of his own transcriptions of J. S. Bach’s Choral Prelude “Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ” and M. Mussorgsky’s suite “Pictures from the Exhibition”. The study uses such methods of contemporary cognitivism as historical and cultural (research of the evolution of guitar schools, performance, development of M. Topchii’s style and thinking) and interpretative (identification of principles of performance / interpretation of works); comparative method of analysis of M. Topchii’s style in the context of guitar performance. Results and conclusion. M. Topchii’s style is a concentrated combination of the best achievements of guitar performance schools, which originate from A. Segovia and F. Tarrega. In the context of guitar art, M. Topchii is a unique performer, which is due not only to the number of victories in international competitions and performances on the world’s most prestigious stages, but also to the fact that M. Topchii demonstrates original interpretation of musical works, depth of understanding of the composer’ idea and high technical level of playing the instrument. These qualities make up his unique performance style – emotional, monolithic, crystallized.

The Austrian Museum for Folk Culture (Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde) was established in 1895 in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Initially founded as ‘monument of a state of nations [Völkerstaat]’ it acted on and facilitated larger imperial projects of statecraft, war and international diplomacy that spanned the Empire and its displacement in the interwar period (Schmidt 1960: 29). While much of the Museum’s collection was acquired in the years before the Empire’s collapse in 1918, I argue that it was only in the Empire’s afterlife that the Museum was able to perform its memory work for an entombed ‘state of nations’. The Museum projected this site of imperial memory initially onto a post-imperial pan-European map and then, following the rise of German nationalism in Germany and Austria, onto a pan-German vision of empire and nationhood.

Abstract As one component of cultural memory, museums have the potential to co-form the remembrance of an entire society. They try to minimise the experience deficiency of their visitors and help them further to know and understand history in an interesting and vivid way. The present paper will show how and to what extent important museums in Japan, Germany and Austria try to shape the historical consciousness of their visitors. With the Yūshūkan in Tōkyō, the Heiwa Kinen Shiryōkan in Hiroshima, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna, four representative institutions will be taken as indicators of the national efforts to re-appraise the history of World War II. Analyses of the different exhibitions, together with an international comparison, will document the individual position of each museum as well as its political intention. In addition, legal and cultural backgrounds that can lead to a country-specific, ideologically biased museum-based depiction of World War II will also be taken into consideration.

Meštrović’s political activity, reflected in his sculpture and architecture, was closely tied to the idea of a political union of the South Slavs which culminated on the eve of and during the First World War. As a political idealist and a person who always emphasized that he was first and foremost an artist, Meštrović had no inclination for classic political activism which meant that he was not interested in belonging to any contemporary political faction. Since his political activism was not tied to a specific political party and since, unlike the politicians with whom he socialized, he did not have a prior political life, Meštrović cannot be defined either as a supporter Ante Starčević and an HSS man, or as a unionist Yugoslav and royalist. He was passionate about politics, especially during the time when the idea about a single South Slavic state took centre stage in politics, and he actively promoted this idea through his contacts with politicians, kings, cultural workers, and artists. He never acted as a classic politician or a political negotiator on behalf of a political party but as an artist who used his numerous local, regional and international acquaintances for the promotion of a political interest, that is, of a universal political platform of the entire Croatian nation as part of a Slavic ethno-political framework. Even within the political organization he himself founded, the Yugoslav Committee, Meštrović did not present a developed political manifesto but, being an artist and an intellectual, ‘encouraged the ideology behind the idea of unification through his activism and especially through his works’ (N. Machiedo Mladinić). The very fact that he was not a professional politician enabled him to ‘learn directly about some of the intentions of the political decision makers at informal occasions he attended as a distinguished artist, particularly in those situations when a direct involvement of political figures would have been impossible due to diplomatic concerns’ (D. Hammer Tomić). For example, he was the first to learn from the report of the French ambassador to Italy Camillo Barrera that Italy would be rewarded for joining the Entente forces by territorial expansion in Dalmatia. Equally known is Meštrović’s attitude towards the name of the committee because, unlike Trumbić and Supilo, he did not hesitate to use the word ‘Yugoslav’ in the name. He believed that a joint Yugoslav platform would render Croatian interests stronger in the international arena and that this would not happen had the committee featured ‘Croatian’ in its name and even less so if it started acting under the name of wider Serbia as Pašić suggested. Meštrović’s political disappointment in the idea of Yugoslavia went hand in hand with the distancing of Croatian and Serbian politics which followed the political unification. The increasing rift between him and the Yugoslav idea was becoming more and more obvious after the assassinations of Stjepan Radić and Aleksandar Karađorđević between the two Wars. His reserve towards the Republic of Yugoslavia, augmented by his political hatred of communism, was such that Meštrović never seriously considered going back to his native country and after his death, he did not leave his art works to the state but to the Croatian people. This article focuses on the most politicized phase in Meštrović’s work when he even changed the titles of the art works between displays at two different exhibitions: the works that bore the neutral names, such as ‘a shrine’, ‘a girl’, or ‘a hero’, at the 1910 exhibition of the Secession Group in Vienna were given the names of the heroes of the Battle of Kosovo the very next year and displayed as such in the pavilion of the Kingdom of Serbia at the exhibition in Rome. Special attention was given to the idea of the Vidovdan shrine, a secular temple to the Yugoslav idea, and the so-called Kosovo fragments intended to decorate it. The heightened controversy surrounds the sculpture and architectural projects Meštrović created during the period in which his political activism in the Yugoslav political and cultural arena was at its peak and he himself did not hide the intention to contribute to the political programme with his art works. This is why critical remarks which were expressed against or in favour of Meštrović’s sculpture during the early twentieth century are inseparable from the contrasting opinions about the political ideas from the turbulent time surrounding the First World War, and all of this, being a consequence of Meštrović’s political engagement, pulled him as a person into the political arena of the Croatian, Serbian and Yugoslav cause. The closest connection between Meštrović’s sculpture, architecture and politics occurred during his work on the Vidovdan shrine and the so-called Kosovo fragments. At the same time, there was a marked difference between Meštrović’s architecture which is eclectic and referential in its style and bears no political message, and sculpture which strongly personified the political programme based on the Battle of Kosovo and expressed in monumental athletic figures. Meštrović opposed the desire of the political establishment to depict his figures in national costumes so that they may witness ‘historical truth’ and, instead, continued with his idea of universal values and not historical and political particularism. Believing that only the passage of time could assess the historical protagonists best, he deemed that some of them would vanish while the others would remain, ‘so to speak, naked’ and acquire ‘supernatural dimensions’ (I.Meštrović). By depicting his figures as having torsos stripped of any sign of national identity, Meštrović wanted to provide them with a ‘general human meaning and not a specific one of this or that tribe’ (I.Meštrović). Aside from the Vidovdan Shrine and the Kosovo Fragments, the article discusses a number of other works onto which Meštrović grafted a political programme such as the Mausoleum of Njegoš on Mount Lovćen, the funerary chapel of Our Lady of the Angels at Cavtat, the equestrian reliefs of King Petar Karađorđević and ban Petar Berislavić, and the sculptures of the Indians at Chicago as ‘ahistorical’ pinnacles of his monumental Art Deco sculpture. The article argues that, based on the consideration of Meštrović’s ‘political’ sculpture, it can be said that the best achievements are found in the works in which political agendas and historical evocations (for example the caryatids, kings and bans, and even the portraits of Nikola Tesla and Ruđer Bošković) gave way to the naked ahistorical physis of a number of Kosovo heroes, female allegorical figures and, most of all, the pinnacle of the Art Deco equestrian sculptures of the Chicago Indians. What matters in the Chicago statues is the contraction of the muscles which accompany the movements of the Bowman and the Spearman and not the type of their weapons which are absent anyway, because this feature indicates that Meštrović focused on what he was best at: the naked human body relieved of the burden of costume, signs of civilization, and the pomp of political, ideological and historical attributes. This is why the politics of Meštrović’s sculpture is at its strongest when it is at its most general or, in other words, when it embodies an ideal and not a political pragmatism or a specific historical reality.

This paper examines the question of how the unique shoot architectural pattern of the Vitaceae, typically with leaf-opposed tendrils or inflorescences in a three-node modular repetitive pattern, can be related to the traditional concepts of monopodial and sympodial shoot development. Based on complete comparative morphological developmental studies of 13 species in six genera, supplemented with observations of 21 other taxa, we have found five shoot architectural patterns in the family. The pattern of shoot architecture is consistent within a species, but there may be more than one pattern present within a genus. Species that lack tendrils, thus exhibiting pattern 1, show sympodial growth. Taxa exhibiting patterns 2, 3, and 4, with tendrils at two of three nodes and with progressively one, two, or three axillary buds within the three-node cycle, grow monopodially, and taxa that exhibit pattern 5, with both tendrils and axillary buds at every node, achieve the pattern via either monopodial or sympodial growth, depending on the species. Although rare in the Vitaceae, pattern 1 is the only one shared with the sister family Leeaceae. We conclude that this was the original shoot architectural pattern, and that the monopodial pattern present in most species today is derived, and unique to the Vitaceae.

Abstract According to Bruno Zevi, the Italian Memorial housed at Block 21 of the Auschwitz concentration camp is among the most significant works of contemporary architecture. Recently, it has become the focus of a political and cultural conflict that is itself worthy of study. The memorial was designed as a post-war symbol of the anti-Fascist movement. It is thus heavily influenced by the politics of the Resistance, which characterized the First Republic and influenced the Italian Constitution. However, this sort of politics is incompatible with the post-Berlin-Wall narrative that the Museum of Auschwitz on the international level, along with various Italian governments on the national level, have decided to promote in the twenty-first century. Yet the Italian Memorial is an integral part of the World Heritage UNESCO site at Auschwitz, and its removal or transfer elsewhere, besides constituting a loss for Italian cultural identity, would also vitiate and downgrade the history of Auschwitz. This study looks at the memorial in terms of the discipline of conservation, applying principles elaborated by the Vienna School (Alois Riegl and Max Dvořák) to show how new exhibitions for the pavilions threaten to transform Auschwitz from a monument and historical document into a museum-style fairground, and to reveal the political motivation behind claims of the Memorial’s contemporary irrelevance.

Pushkin Museum was often ahead of its time, laying the groundwork for major changes. For example, with the opening of the Museum of Private Collections as part of the State Museum of Fine Arts, the rehabilitation of private collecting in the country took place. The December Nights festival created by Irina Antonova in collaboration with the brilliant pianist Svyatoslav Richter in 1981 became a matrix of art festivals that took place in various museums of the country during the following decades. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts was charged with promoting Western art in the USSR, of which it brilliantly took the advantage when started displaying works by Picasso, Matisse, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, masterpieces of drawing from the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Western European and American paintings from American museums and others famous exhibitions. This is the visible part of Irina Antonova’s dynamic activity. She approached academic work no less thoroughly, as well as the organization of study and cataloguing of the collection of the State Museum of Fine Arts. And, of course, much credit must go to Irina Antonova for preparing the program for the development and reconstruction of the Pushkin Museum, which has been repeatedly revised and is being finalized before our very eyes under the direction of Marina Loshak.

The article presents establishing and developing the Center for Urban History in Lviv as a part of the larger trend to promote and institutionalize urban history and urban studies in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Discussing founding ideas and program, as well as their further implementation gives an insight into academic as well as public landscapes of urban research, both locally and internationally. The Center was founded in 2004 as a private foundation in Vienna and two years later, in 2006, the office was established in Lviv to launch its program activities. Major objectives of the Center are to promote research on the history of cities and towns in Eastern and Central Europe; to advance urban history as an interdisciplinary field and a platform for international cooperation; to enhance critical understanding of urban history and heritage in cooperation with local and international institutions; to engage into contemporary cultural life in the city and thus contribute to public and open engagement with the past. Three major focuses of work of the Center were gradually shaped and now they include research, digital archiving, digital and public history.
 While initially many projects focused on Lviv, expanding geographical scope was part of the development of the institution.Therefore, presently, the interests include various urban experiences, such as of historical cities, Soviet cities, industrial and mono-industrial, multiethnic cities, as well as the cities surviving conflicts and violent transformations. Over the 10 years of its activities, the Center has become both the institution to conduct research and an instrumental actor to transform symbolic spaces of Lviv, the place for discussions and presentation of results of other studies and initiatives, a platform for informal educational practices and a laboratory to develop new ways of contextualizing, representing and using different archival media and documents. Different formats such as schools, conferences, workshops, seminars, lectures, presentations and round tables, exhibitions, interactive maps, digitalization and promotion of collections of photo and video materials, and educational programs for children and adults constitute our program activities and help engaging broader academic and non-academic audiences into a dialogue to promote participatory historical culture in Ukraine.

Pseudoperonospora cubensis (Berk. & M.A. Curtis) Rostovzev, the causal agent of cucurbit downy mildew, was observed for the first time on Cucurbita moschata Duchesne in the Czech Republic (CR) in August 2009 and repeatedly in September 2010. Recently, C. moschata has not been an economically important crop in the CR; however, related crops C. pepo and C. maxima have increased in importance. Infected plants with P. cubensis were found in two locations: in a hobby garden in north Moravia (Nový Jičín – Kojetín [49°33′48.088″N, 17°59′16.632″E], 2009 and 2010) and in a commercial field in central Moravia (Olomouc-Holice [49°34′31.95″N, 17°17′35.462″E], 2010). The pathogen caused small, angular, yellowish or pale green lesions on the upper leaf surfaces and produced sporangiophores and sporangia on the lower leaf surfaces. The lesions were delimited by leaf veins and later turned necrotic. Sporangiophores were hyaline, branched, and emerged in groups from stomata. Olive brown-to-dark brown sporangia were ellipsoidal to oblong. Our morphological observations confirmed that the pathogen was P. cubensis (2). No previous reports are available of P. cubensis on C. moschata in CR or anywhere in Central Europe. However, P. cubensis is common on C. moschata in some parts of Asia and the United States (1,2). P. cubensis exhibiting clear host specialization has been reported in different countries and geographic areas (2). A C. moschata isolate (PC 88/2009) originating from the naturally infected plants was inoculated (1 × 105 spores per ml and incubation temperature of 18/15°C during light/dark cycles) according to the methodology described by Lebeda and Urban (3) onto the abaxial surface of leaf discs of all genotypes of a differential set of cucurbits for P. cubensis pathotype determination (4). C. moschata (line Novo5, Nohel-Garden, CR) was added to this set. The isolate PC 88/2009 was highly pathogenic to all screened Cucurbita spp. genotypes (C. pepo, C. maxima, and C. moschata). However, no infection was detected on most of the Cucumis accessions; only Cucumis melo subsp. agrestis var. conomon was susceptible. Also, no infection was observed on other differentials (Citrullus, Benincasa, Luffa, and Lagenaria). The pathotype was classified as Pc 4/15/0. This pathotype had not been previously detected in CR. References: (1) D. F. Farr and A. Y. Rossman. Fungal Databases. Systematic Mycology and Microbiology Laboratory, ARS, USDA. Retrieved from http://nt.arsgrin. gov/fungaldatabases/ . December 16, 2010. (2) A. Lebeda and Y. Cohen. Eur. J. Plant Pathol. 129:157, 2011. (3) A. Lebeda and J. Urban. Page 285 in: Mass Screening Techniques for Selecting Crops Resistant to Disease. M. M. Spencer and A. Lebeda, eds. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna, Austria, 2010 (4) A. Lebeda and M. P. Widrlechner. J. Plant Dis. Protect. 110:337, 2003.

Located between Vienna and Bratislava, Carnuntum is by far the largest archaeological landscape in entire Central and South-Eastern Europe. Nearly the entire ancient Roman city once spanning 10 square kilometres is still preserved underneath the fields and vineyards of Petronell-Carnuntum and Bad Deutsch-Altenburg. The Federal State of Lower Austria not only set new international scientific standards but it also designed a model in regards to land use planning and archaeological monument conservation how to shape future concepts destined to balance history, spatial planning and economy. In the interests of the public the archaeological heritage is also exploited more economically: by restoring old excavations, with new research excavations and partial or full reconstructions, which give visitors a better approach to ancient times; furthermore, by involving the public more closely when investigations can be observed “at close hand”, and the presentation of finds in museums and special exhibitions. To this end, new presentation techniques and multimedia systems are used to communicate this information, including mobile phone application for VR.

“...children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents...” — Stephen Kline, The Making of Children’s Culture We live in a world saturated by design and through design artefacts, one can glean unique insights into a culture's values and norms. In fact, some academics, such as British media and film theorist Ben Highmore, see the two areas so inextricably intertwined as to suggest a wholesale “re-branding of the cultural sciences as design studies” (14). Too often, however, everyday objects are marginalised or overlooked as objects of scholarly attention. The field of material culture studies seeks to change that by focussing on the quotidian object and its ability to reveal much about the time, place, and culture in which it was designed and used. This article takes on one such object, a mid-century children's toy tea set, whose humble journey from 1968 Sears catalogue to 2014 thrift shop—and subsequently this author’s basement—reveals complex rhetorical messages communicated both visually and verbally. As material culture studies theorist Jules Prown notes, the field’s foundation is laid upon the understanding “that objects made ... by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged” (1-2). In this case, the objects’ material and aesthetic characteristics can be shown to reflect some of the pervasive stereotypes and gender roles of the mid-century and trace some of the prevailing tastes of the American middle class of that era, or perhaps more accurately the type of design that came to represent good taste and a modern aesthetic for that audience. A wealth of research exists on the function of toys and play in learning about the world and even the role of toy selection in early sex-typing, socialisation, and personal identity of children (Teglasi). This particular research area isn’t the focus of this article; however, one aspect that is directly relevant and will be addressed is the notion of adult role-playing among children and the role of toys in communicating certain adult practices or values to the child—what sociologist David Oswell calls “the dedifferentiation of childhood and adulthood” (200). Neither is the focus of this article the practice nor indeed the ethicality of marketing to children. Relevant to this particular example I suggest, is as a product utilising messaging aimed not at children but at adults, appealing to certain parents’ interest in nurturing within their child a perceived era and class-appropriate sense of taste. This was fuelled in large part by the curatorial pursuits of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, coupled with an interest and investment in raising their children in a design-forward household and a desire for toys that reflected that priority; in essence, parents wishing to raise modern children. Following Prown’s model of material culture analysis, the tea set is examined in three stages, through description, deduction and speculation with each stage building on the previous one. Figure 1: Porcelain Toy Tea Set. Description The tea set consists of twenty-six pieces that allows service for six. Six cups, saucers, and plates; a tall carafe with spout, handle and lid; a smaller vessel with a spout and handle; a small round bowl with a lid; a larger oval bowl with a lid, and a coordinated oval platter. The cups are just under two inches tall and two inches in diameter. The largest piece, the platter is roughly six inches by four inches. The pieces are made of a ceramic material white in colour and glossy in texture and are very lightweight. The rim or edge of each piece is decorated with a motif of three straight lines in two different shades of blue and in different thicknesses, interspersed with a set of three black wiggly lines. Figure 2: Porcelain Toy Tea Set Box. The set is packaged for retail purposes and the original box appears to be fully intact. The packaging of an object carries artefactual evidence just as important as what it contains that falls into the category of a “‘para-artefact’ … paraphernalia that accompanies the product (labels, packaging, instructions etc.), all of which contribute to a product’s discourse” (Folkmann and Jensen 83). The graphics on the box are colourful, featuring similar shades of teal blue as found on the objects, with the addition of orange and a silver sticker featuring the logo of the American retailer Sears. The cover features an illustration of the objects on an orange tabletop. The most prominent text that confirms that the toy is a “Porcelain Toy Tea Set” is in an organic, almost psychedelic style that mimics both popular graphics of this era—especially album art and concert posters—as well as the organic curves of steam that emanate from the illustrated teapot’s spout. Additional messages appear on the box, in particular “Contemporary DESIGN” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. Along the edges of the box lid, a detail of the decorative motif is reproduced somewhat abstracted from what actually appears on the ceramic objects. Figure 3: Sears’s Christmas Wishbook Catalogue, page 574 (1968). Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Sears) is well-known for its over one-hundred-year history of producing printed merchandise catalogues. The catalogue is another important para-artefact to consider in analysing the objects. The tea set first appeared in the 1968 Sears Christmas Wishbook. There is no date or copyright on the box, so only its inclusion in the catalogue allows the set to be accurately dated. It also allows us to understand how the set was originally marketed. Deduction In the deduction phase, we focus on the sensory aesthetic and functional interactive qualities of the various components of the set. In terms of its function, it is critical that we situate the objects in their original use context, play. The light weight of the objects and thinness of the ceramic material lends the objects a delicate, if not fragile, feeling which indicates that this set is not for rough use. Toy historian Lorraine May Punchard differentiates between toy tea sets “meant to be used by little girls, having parties for their friends and practising the social graces of the times” and smaller sets or doll dishes “made for little girls to have parties with their dolls, or for their dolls to have parties among themselves” (7). Similar sets sold by Sears feature images of girls using the sets with both human playmates and dolls. The quantity allowing service for six invites multiple users to join the party. The packaging makes clear that these toy tea sets were intended for imaginary play only, rendering them non-functional through an all-capitals caution declaiming “IMPORTANT: Do not use near heat”. The walls and handles of the cups are so thin one can imagine that they would quickly become dangerous if filled with a hot liquid. Nevertheless, the lid of the oval bowl has a tan stain or watermark which suggests actual use. The box is broken up by pink cardboard partitions dividing it into segments sized for each item in the set. Interestingly even the small squares of unfinished corrugated cardboard used as cushioning between each stacked plate have survived. The evidence of careful re-packing indicates that great care was taken in keeping the objects safe. It may suggest that even though the set was used, the children or perhaps the parents, considered the set as something to care for and conserve for the future. Flaws in the glaze and applique of the design motif can be found on several pieces in the set and offer some insight as to the technique used in producing these items. Errors such as the design being perfectly evenly spaced but crooked in its alignment to the rim, or pieces of the design becoming detached or accidentally folded over and overlapping itself could only be the result of a print transfer technique popularised with decorative china of the Victorian era, a technique which lends itself to mass production and lower cost when compared to hand decoration. Speculation In the speculation stage, we can consider the external evidence and begin a more rigorous investigation of the messaging, iconography, and possible meanings of the material artefact. Aspects of the set allow a number of useful observations about the role of such an object in its own time and context. Sociologists observe the role of toys as embodiments of particular types of parental messages and values (Cross 292) and note how particularly in the twentieth century “children’s play seems to become more and more a product of the educational and cultural orientation of parents” (Kline 96). Throughout history children’s toys often reflected a miniaturised version of the adult world allowing children to role-play as imagined adult-selves. Kristina Ranalli explored parallels between the practice of drinking tea and the play-acting of the child’s tea party, particularly in the nineteenth century, as a gendered ritual of gentility; a method of socialisation and education, and an opportunity for exploratory and even transgressive play by “spontaneously creating mini-societies with rules of their own” (20). Such toys and objects were available through the Sears mail-order catalogue from the very beginning at the end of the nineteenth century (McGuire). Propelled by the post-war boom of suburban development and homeownership—that generation’s manifestation of the American Dream—concern with home décor and design was elevated among the American mainstream to a degree never before seen. There was a hunger for new, streamlined, efficient, modernist living. In his essay titled “Domesticating Modernity”, historian Jeffrey L. Meikle notes that many early modernist designers found that perhaps the most potent way to “‘domesticate’ modernism and make it more familiar was to miniaturise it; for example, to shrink the skyscraper and put it into the home as furniture or tableware” (143). Dr Timothy Blade, curator of the 1985 exhibition of girls’ toys at the University of Minnesota’s Goldstein Gallery—now the Goldstein Museum of Design—described in his introduction “a miniaturised world with little props which duplicate, however rudely, the larger world of adults” (5). Noting the power of such toys to reflect adult values of their time, Blade continues: “the microcosm of the child’s world, remarkably furnished by the miniaturised props of their parents’ world, holds many direct and implied messages about the society which brought it into being” (9). In large part, the mid-century Sears catalogues capture the spirit of an era when, as collector Thomas Holland observes, “little girls were still primarily being offered only the options of glamour, beauty and parenthood as the stuff of their fantasies” (175). Holland notes that “the Wishbooks of the fifties [and, I would add, the sixties] assumed most girls would follow in their mother’s footsteps to become full-time housewives and mommies” (1). Blade grouped toys into three categories: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. A tea set could arguably be considered part of the cooking category, but closer examination of the language used in marketing this object—“little hostesses”, et cetera—suggests an emphasis not on cooking but on serving or entertaining. This particular category was not prevalent in the era examined by Blade, but the cultural shifts of the mid-twentieth century, particularly the rapid popularisation of a suburban lifestyle, may have led to the use of entertaining as an additional distinct category of role play in the process of learning to become a “proper” homemaker. Sears and other retailers offered a wide variety of styles of toy tea sets during this era. Blade and numerous other sources observe that children’s toy furniture and appliances tended to reflect the style and aesthetic qualities of their contemporary parallels in the adult world, the better to associate the child’s objects to its adult equivalent. The toy tea set’s packaging trumpets messages intended to appeal to modernist values and identity including “Contemporary Design” and “handsome, clean-line styling for modern little hostesses”. The use of this coded marketing language, aimed particularly at parents, can be traced back several decades. In 1928 a group of American industrial and textile designers established the American Designers' Gallery in New York, in part to encourage American designers to innovate and adopt new styles such as those seen in the L’ Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925) in Paris, the exposition that sparked international interest in the Art Deco or Art Moderne aesthetic. One of the gallery founders, Ilonka Karasz, a Hungarian-American industrial and textile designer who had studied in Austria and was influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, publicised her new style of nursery furnishings as “designed for the very modern American child” (Brown 80). Sears itself was no stranger to the appeal of such language. The term “contemporary design” was ubiquitous in catalogue copy of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, used to describe everything from draperies (1959) and bedspreads (1961) to spice racks (1964) and the Lady Kenmore portable dishwasher (1961). An emphasis on the role of design in one’s life and surroundings can be traced back to efforts by MoMA. The museum’s interest in modern design hearkens back almost to the institution’s inception, particularly in relation to industrial design and the aestheticisation of everyday objects (Marshall). Through exhibitions and in partnership with mass-market magazines, department stores and manufacturer showrooms, MoMA curators evangelised the importance of “good design” a term that can be found in use as early as 1942. What Is Good Design? followed the pattern of prior exhibitions such as What Is Modern Painting? and situated modern design at the centre of exhibitions that toured the United States in the first half of the nineteen-fifties. To MoMA and its partners, “good design” signified the narrow identification of proper taste in furniture, home decor and accessories; effectively, the establishment of a design canon. The viewpoints enshrined in these exhibitions and partnerships were highly influential on the nation’s perception of taste for decades to come, as the trickle-down effect reached a much broader segment of consumers than those that directly experienced the museum or its exhibitions (Lawrence.) This was evident not only at high-end shops such as Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. Even mass-market retailers sought out well-known figures of modernist design to contribute to their offerings. Sears, for example, commissioned noted modernist designer and ceramicist Russel Wright to produce a variety of serving ware and decor items exclusively for the company. Notably for this study, he was also commissioned to create a toy tea set for children. The 1957 Wishbook touts the set as “especially created to delight modern little misses”. Within its Good Design series, MoMA exhibitions celebrated numerous prominent Nordic designers who were exploring simplified forms and new material technologies. In the 1968 Wishbook, the retailer describes the Porcelain Toy Tea Set as “Danish-inspired china for young moderns”. The reference to Danish design is certainly compatible with the modernist appeal; after the explosion in popularity of Danish furniture design, the term “Danish Modern” was commonly used in the nineteen-fifties and sixties as shorthand for pan-Scandinavian or Nordic design, or more broadly for any modern furniture design regardless of origin that exhibited similar characteristics. In subsequent decades the notion of a monolithic Scandinavian-Nordic design aesthetic or movement has been debunked as primarily an economically motivated marketing ploy (Olivarez et al.; Fallan). In the United States, the term “Danish Modern” became so commonly misused that the Danish Society for Arts and Crafts called upon the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to legally restrict the use of the labels “Danish” and “Danish Modern” to companies genuinely originating in Denmark. Coincidentally the FTC ruled on this in 1968, noting “that ‘Danish Modern’ carries certain meanings, and... that consumers might prefer goods that are identified with a foreign culture” (Hansen 451). In the case of the Porcelain Toy Tea Set examined here, Sears was not claiming that the design was “Danish” but rather “Danish-inspired”. One must wonder, was this another coded marketing ploy to communicate a sense of “Good Design” to potential customers? An examination of the formal qualities of the set’s components, particularly the simplified geometric forms and the handle style of the cups, confirms that it is unlike a traditional—say, Victorian-style—tea set. Punchard observes that during this era some American tea sets were actually being modelled on coffee services rather than traditional tea services (148). A visual comparison of other sets sold by Sears in the same year reveals a variety of cup and pot shapes—with some similar to the set in question—while others exhibit more traditional teapot and cup shapes. Coffee culture was historically prominent in Nordic cultures so there is at least a passing reference to that aspect of Nordic—if not specifically Danish—influence in the design. But what of the decorative motif? Simple curved lines were certainly prominent in Danish furniture and architecture of this era, and occasionally found in combination with straight lines, but no connection back to any specific Danish motif could be found even after consultation with experts in the field from the Museum of Danish America and the Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum (personal correspondence). However, knowing that the average American consumer of this era—even the design-savvy among them—consumed Scandinavian design without distinguishing between the various nations, a possible explanation could be contained in the promotion of Finnish textiles at the time. In the decade prior to the manufacture of the tea set a major design tendency began to emerge in the United States, triggered by the geometric design motifs of the Finnish textile and apparel company Marimekko. Marimekko products were introduced to the American market in 1959 via the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based retailer Design Research (DR) and quickly exploded in popularity particularly after would-be First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy appeared in national media wearing Marimekko dresses during the 1960 presidential campaign and on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. (Thompson and Lange). The company’s styling soon came to epitomise a new youth aesthetic of the early nineteen sixties in the United States, a softer and more casual predecessor to the London “mod” influence. During this time multiple patterns were released that brought a sense of whimsy and a more human touch to classic mechanical patterns and stripes. The patterns Piccolo (1953), Helmipitsi (1959), and Varvunraita (1959), all designed by Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi offered varying motifs of parallel straight lines. Maija Isola's Silkkikuikka (1961) pattern—said to be inspired by the plumage of the Great Crested Grebe—combined parallel serpentine lines with straight and angled lines, available in a variety of colours. These and other geometrically inspired patterns quickly inundated apparel and decor markets. DR built a vastly expanded Cambridge flagship store and opened new locations in New York in 1961 and 1964, and in San Francisco in 1965 fuelled in no small part by the fact that they remained the exclusive outlet for Marimekko in the United States. It is clear that Marimekko’s approach to pattern influenced designers and manufacturers across industries. Design historian Lesley Jackson demonstrates that Marimekko designs influenced or were emulated by numerous other companies across Scandinavia and beyond (72-78). The company’s influence grew to such an extent that some described it as a “conquest of the international market” (Hedqvist and Tarschys 150). Subsequent design-forward retailers such as IKEA and Crate and Barrel continue to look to Marimekko even today for modern design inspiration. In 2016 the mass-market retailer Target formed a design partnership with Marimekko to offer an expansive limited-edition line in their stores, numbering over two hundred items. So, despite the “Danish” misnomer, it is quite conceivable that designers working for or commissioned by Sears in 1968 may have taken their aesthetic cues from Marimekko’s booming work, demonstrating a clear understanding of the contemporary high design aesthetic of the time and coding the marketing rhetoric accordingly even if incorrectly. Conclusion The Sears catalogue plays a unique role in capturing cross-sections of American culture not only as a sales tool but also in Holland’s words as “a beautifully illustrated diary of America, it’s [sic] people and the way we thought about things” (1). Applying a rhetorical and material culture analysis to the catalogue and the objects within it provides a unique glimpse into the roles these objects played in mediating relationships, transmitting values and embodying social practices, tastes and beliefs of mid-century American consumers. Adult consumers familiar with the characteristics of the culture of “Good Design” potentially could have made a connection between the simplified geometric forms of the components of the toy tea set and say the work of modernist tableware designers such as Kaj Franck, or between the set’s graphic pattern and the modernist motifs of Marimekko and its imitators. But for a much broader segment of the population with a less direct understanding of modernist aesthetics, those connections may not have been immediately apparent. The rhetorical messaging behind the objects’ packaging and marketing used class and taste signifiers such as modern, contemporary and “Danish” to reinforce this connection to effect an emotional and aspirational appeal. These messages were coded to position the set as an effective transmitter of modernist values and to target parents with the ambition to create “appropriately modern” environments for their children. 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Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, and Hans-Christian Jensen. “Subjectivity in Self-Historicization: Design and Mediation of a ‘New Danish Modern’ Living Room Set.” Design and Culture 7.1 (2015): 65–84. Hansen, Per H. “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970.” The Business History Review 80.3 (2006): 449–83. Hedqvist, Hedvig, and Rebecka Tarschys. “Thoughts on the International Reception of Marimekko.” Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashions, Architecture. Ed. Marianne Aav. Bard. 2003. 149–71. Highmore, Ben. The Design Culture Reader. Routledge, 2008. Holland, Thomas W. Girls’ Toys of the Fifties and Sixties: Memorable Catalog Pages from the Legendary Sears Christmas Wishbooks, 1950-1969. Windmill, 1997. Hucal, Sarah. "Scandi Crush Saga: How Scandinavian Design Took over the World." Curbed, 23 Mar. 2016. <http://www.curbed.com/2016/3/23/11286010/scandinavian-design-arne-jacobsen-alvar-aalto-muuto-artek>. 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While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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