Organized by Mischa Gabowitsch and Jan Kusber, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, with generous funding from the Georg Forster Forum
All over the world, militaries have long acted as patrons of the arts. Individual generals have struck up friendships with painters, sculptors, and architects. Sketch artists and photographers have accompanied soldiers as embedded visual artists. Armies have created artistic programs and institutions such as the Grekov Studio in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, the Wehrmacht’s Squadron of Visual Artists, or the U.S. Army Combat Artists Program. Military patronage of the arts has resulted in a wide array of artistic products, ranging from drawings and paintings via small war memorials and soldiers‘ cemeteries to battlefield panoramas, equestrian statues, and military cathedrals. Militaries have also funded and produced music and dance performances as well as films and TV programs.
Continuing a workshop that took place in Vienna in June 2024, this interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the structure and effects of military patronage of the arts across all times and places. It seeks to go beyond the time-honored theme of “the artist in uniform” to ask how relationships between militaries and artists are formed and how they influence artistic styles, themes, and tastes. What kind of art do militaries like? What modes of valuation are applied to military art, and how are they translated between different social spheres? What are its audiences? And how is art commissioned by militaries viewed by the art world at large and the general public? These are some of the questions this conference seeks to address, combining perspectives from history, sociology, and the history of art and resulting in an edited volume along with contributions from the Vienna workshop.
The conference will take place in Mainz, Germany, on February 12-15, 2025. The working language is English.
