Conference - Primitive Renaissances (2014)

‘Primitive Renaissances’: Northern European and Germanic Art at the Fin de Siècle to the 1930s was a two-day conference convened by Professor Juliet Simpson (Buckinghamshire New University), in collaboration with Dr Jeanne Nuechterlein (University of York) and Dr Susan Foister (National Gallery). The conference was held on 11 and 12 April 2014 at the National Gallery in association with the exhibition Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance.

Speakers gathered from universities across the world. Dr Nuechterlein, co-curator of the Strange Beauty exhibition, gave a paper on “The picture does not please me”: Cranach’s critical fortunes in Britain.

View the full programme. 

The conference also launched the international network Reinventing Northern European Art and Visual Culture from the 1830s to the 1930s: Nation, the ‘Primitive’ and Cultural Identity and was the first in a trilogy of international conferences with related publications and academic and international museum collaborations. The second was Visions of the North: Reinventing the Germanic “North” in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture in Britain and the Low Countries held at Compton Verney; and the third, on Gothic Modernisms, will be held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, in June 2017.