DOCUMENTO / INTRODUCCIÓN
AN INTRODUCTION TO
NICOS HADJINICOLAOU’S “ART CENTERS
AND PERIPHERAL ART” (1982)
terrY smith
Nicos Hadjinicolaou’s “Art Centers and Peripheral Art” (1982) is an
important but underrecognized contribution to debates within the
discipline of art history about how to characterize the relationships
between the art of major cities and that made in places peripheral to
a ellos, as well as between the art produced in the metropolitan centers
of empires and the art of their colonial outposts or cultural provinces.1
This question has shaped the discipline—from its outer edges inward,
as it were—since Giorgio Vasari evoked the developments distant in
time if not in space that led up to, in his own time, the crowning
achievements of Michelangelo. The question was central to modern
art history as it developed in Germany during the later 19th and early
20th centuries. The issue has returned in recent decades, as the mod
ernist monopoly has been stretched on the rack between, on the one
mano, globalization’s drive toward totality and, on the other, decoloniza
tion’s drive toward independent contemporaneity. Presented as a lec
ture in Hamburg in 1982, “Art Centers and Peripheral Art” was written
on the cusp of this return, mapping some of its outlines and articulat
1
First published as “Kunstzentren und periphere Kunst” in Kritische Berichte 11, No. 4 (1983):
36–56. I thank Professor Hadjinicolaou and the editors of Kritische Berichte for agreeing to
both the translation of this essay and publication in this journal. The translation was done
by Dieter Wältermann, reviewed by my University of Pittsburgh colleague Barbara
McCloskey, and approved by Professor Hadjinicolaou. I also thank Ilhan Ozan for
assiduous research assistance.
112
© 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00266
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ing several of its tensions, while manifesting its author’s commitment
to what was by then a mature, selfcritical Marxist art history, dentro
which he had become a major contributor.
Born in Thessaloniki in 1938 and schooled in Athens, Hadjini
colaou studied art history, German literature, and philosophy at the
Universities of West Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich between 1959 y
1965. Throughout the tumultuous late 1960s he was in Paris, active
as president of the Association of Greek Students (Association des
Étudiants Hellènes de Paris) de 1966 a 1971. He was a member
of the Greek Eurocommunist Party (not the proSoviet Greek Com
munist Party) and participated in the efforts to inform French student
groups about the situation in Greece after the military coup of 1967.2
Effectively in exile from Greece during the “Regime of the Colonels”
(1967–1974), he pursued his dissertation La Lutte des classes en France
dans la production d’images de 1829/1831 at the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales, under the guidance of Pierre Vilar. His doctorate
was granted in June 1980, but the book Histoire de l’art et lutte des
classes (Art History and Class Struggle) had already been published by
Maspero in Paris in 1973. It subsequently appeared in several lan
guages and in multiple editions, including in English in 1978.
Hadjinicolaou was well versed in the classics of Marxist art history.
For example, he developed a bibliography of the writings of Frederick
Antal, as well as brought to publication in Italian, Alemán, and Spanish
Antal’s manuscripts on Renaissance and Mannerist painting in Italy.3
Art History and Class Struggle broke new ground in its systematic appli
cation to art and art historical thought of Louis Althusser’s theories of
how ideology functions as both the essential shaper of personal and
social imaginaries and a disguise of its own operations.4 Hadjinicolaou
was in no doubt as to the object of art history as a discipline: "El
science of art history is a particular branch of historical materialism
2
3
4
See Kostis Kornetis, Children of the Dictatorship: Student Resistance, Politics and the
“Long 1960s” in Greece (New York: Berghan, 2013), 64. See also Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “Ο
δικός μας Μάης του ’68 (Our Own May ’68),” Αρχειοτάξιο, No. 10 (Junio 2008): 92–100; y
Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “Greek Art Critics and Historians in Paris, 1945–1975: A Personal
Testimony,” Ιστορία της Τέχνης 5 (Verano 2016): 117–29. Hadjinicolaou’s website is http://
nicoshadjinicolaou.com.
Nicos Hadjinicolaou and Anna Wessely, “Frederick Antal Bibliography,” Kritische Berichte 2,
No. 3 (1976): 35–37; Frederick Antal, Italian Painting from Classicism to Mannerism (italiano
ed. 1977, German ed. 1980, Spanish ed. 1988).
Hadjinicolaou acknowledges the importance of both Althusser and his disciple Nicos Poulan
tzas to his own thinking; see Art History and Class Struggle [1973] (Londres: Pluto, 1978), 8.
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113
concerned with a sphere of the ideological level which enjoys relative
autonomy”—that is, in his italics, “the analysis and explanation of the
visual ideologies which have appeared in history.”5 What is a visual ideol
ogia? It is “a specific combination of the formal and thematic elements
of a picture through which people express the way they relate their lives
to the conditions of their existence, a combination which constitutes a
particular form of the overall ideology of a social class.”6 Although he
acknowledged that the making of art—or what he preferred to call “the
production of images”—was in certain ways a practice distinguishable
from the economic, social, and political forces that shaped it, and that
art history as a discipline was distinct from other disciplines, estos
autonomies were, he and Althusser believed, always relative. De este modo, para
art historians (again in his italics), “The principle on which time is divided
into periods is always external to the history of the production of images,
because of the constant determination of this field by other spheres of the ide-
ological level (Por ejemplo, the sphere of political or religious ideology) y,
in a direct or indirect manner, the determination of the ideological level in
its entirety by the economic or sometimes the political level.”7
Art History and Class Struggle stands out among New Left recon
siderations not only for its noholdsbarred title, but also for its struc
turalist schematism. In this, it parallels another text from the time to
which he continues to attach “some importance”: el 1978 essay “On
the Ideology of AvantGardism,” which is a similar attempt to set out
a comprehensive schema for a major art historical topic.8 This pair of
works might be illuminatingly compared, and significantly contrasted,
to another set of breakthrough texts written in Paris at around the
same time and in similar circumstances: t. j. Clark’s two books of
1973, The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People.9
I recall being absolutely riveted by the two writers’ approaches,
while also seeking a conceptual framework that could encompass their
contradictions. Alrededor 1980 I composed a dissertation project that
would pursue, in a close reading of the artworks and the responses to
5
6
7
8
9
Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle, 184.
Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle, 96–97.
Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle, 190.
See Histoire et Critique des arts, No. 6 (Julio 1978): 49–76; in English in Praxis, No. 6 (1982):
37–70.
t. j. clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic 1848–1851
and The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 (Londres: Thames &
Hudson, 1973).
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a ellos, an account of the aesthetic ideologies of each of the avantgarde
art movements as they appeared throughout the world during the 20th
century—an account that would show, I hoped, how those ideologies
had related to other ideological operations, y, in the first and last
instancias, to the economic “level” of each society and the interactions
between the different places. My advisers, wisely, suggested that I
begin in the United States, as its art had been, at the time, least studied
from such a viewpoint. Over a decade later, the outcome was Making
the Modern: Industria, Art and Design in America.10 The larger project,
suitably deconstructed and encompassing contemporary conditions,
drives me to this day.
“Art Centers and Peripheral Art,” presented as a lecture at the
University of Hamburg on October 15, 1982, where Hadjinicolaou had
previously been a visiting professor, is a forthright attempt to radicalize
modern art history’s interest in the geography of art—one that had
long been peripheral, we might say, to its primarily nationalistic focus.
Within the institutionalized profession, “geography” came up when the
differences and connections between artistic cultures seemed striking,
and when art made elsewhere, at a distance from what was taken to be
the center, came into view—in a colony, for example, or as spoils of
war.11 The transcript is presented here in its slide lecture format, el
text unchanged but the images reduced to eight. Hadjinicolaou begins
by proposing that it is in the unequal power relationship between cen
ters and peripheries that historians in general, and art historians in
particular, must seek answers to the “most important, most compli
cated question” that they face: “how and why does form change?” He
breaks this question down into several components: the “inundating
and overpowering [de] the art production of the periphery” by the art
production of the center; “the resistance and/or accommodation of art
production in the periphery to art production of the powerful center”;
peripheral art and culture being seen from the center as relatively
insignificant, secondrate, “a peripheral art, in the derogatory sense”;
the “EuroAmerican centrism” [Euro-Americano-Zentrismus] that views
art made elsewhere as inferior (he illustrates this very early use of the
term by citing Kenneth Clark’s views as typical of “upper middleclass
10
11
Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industria, Art and Design in America (chicago: Universidad
of Chicago Press, 1993).
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann references Hadjinicolaou’s essay in his survey Toward a
Geography of Art (University of Chicago Press, 2004), norte. 144.
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115
contempt of the provincial”); y, finalmente, the need for reception the
ory—which, he suggests, will play “a groundbreaking role in the future
for the development of art history as a discipline.” We continue to dis
cuss these issues today, although with a stronger sense of the past
agency of provinces and the current vitality of the peripheries, in what
is now a radically decentering world.
Nicos Hadjinicolaou subsequently focused most of his attention on
the reception of works of art at their time of production and since. It is
the art of El Greco, the Cretan painter who effectively spent his life
away from his home, first in Italy and then in Spain, that has primarily
occupied Hadjinicolaou since the 1980s. A critical denunciation of the
nationalist responses (Griego, Español, italiano) to the Cretan’s work
dates from 1987.12 Hadjinicolaou highlights the registration of El
Greco’s “modernity” as a constant theme in the reception of his art—
for example, in the essay “He Is, En efecto, a Prophet of the Moderns,"
a contribution to the catalog of the exhibition at the Museo de Santa
Cruz, Toledo, El Greco of Toledo: Painter of the Visible and the Invisible,
a key event of the “Greco Year 2014.”13 Around 1980, Hadjinicolaou
was a visiting professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico,
and three times a visiting professor in the Department of Art History
at the University of California, Los Angeles. In June 1985 he became
Professor of European Art History at the University of Crete, a position
he maintained until his retirement in August 2005. At that university
he held many senior positions, including Dean of the Faculty of Letters
(1990–94), and was appointed by the Minister of Education to several
positions, including the boards of the National Research Advisory
Council and the National Library of Greece. Desde 1991 he has been
responsible for the El Greco Centre at the Institute for Mediterranean
Estudios, Rethymno, Crete. During this period he organized several
major exhibitions, including El Greco in Italy and Italian Art (1995),
The Death of Che Guevara (2002), and later, Valias Semertzidis (2012).
I conclude by highlighting one of Hadjinicolaou’s footnotes from
“Art Centers and Peripheral Art,” as it expresses, albeit with some
restraint, a viewpoint to which he might still subscribe:
12 Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “Greco’s Transformations between 1838 and 1912,” Ο Πολίτης
13
(The Citizen) (Noviembre 1987): 62–69.
Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “He Is, En efecto, a Prophet of the Moderns,” in El Greco of Toledo:
Painter of the Visible and the Invisible, ed. Fernando Marías (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso,
2014), 89–113.
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The history of art is created from (among other factors) el
(unequal) interrelationship of periphery and center. Just as mis
leading as it is to want to understand a history of art only from
the point of view of the center (even if it is done with a cultivated
impassiveness), it would be exactly as misleading to understand the
history of art as a static juxtaposition of center and periphery. How
alguna vez, what is being pleaded for here is that we will one day (until
the desired larger syntheses become possible) change the perspec
tive and will also observe historical developments from the point of
view of the periphery. One could, of course, pose the question of
whether it makes any sense at all to demand of institutions or insti
tutionalized art history of the center that they will abandon the
point of view of the center. . . . One could plead for it nevertheless
and convince at least a few individual researchers of the fruitful
ness of such a change in perspective.
We can say, hoy, that more than a few researchers have made that
change in perspective, and that a generation of researchers are now
among us who have taken up Hadjinicolaou’s call for a “political art
geography,” even as Marxist art history in its 20thcentury modes
attracts fewer followers.14 “Art Centers and Peripheral Art” was drawn
to my attention by one member of that generation, the late Foteini
Vlachou, a graduate student of Hadjinicolaou’s who specialized in the
arts of the Portuguese empire and its postimperial phase. She located
the essay in a sequence that included Kenneth Clark’s published lecture
Provincialism (1962), Ljubo Karaman’s book On the Impact of Place in the
Art of Croatian Regions (1963), my essay “The Provincialism Problem”
(1974), and Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg’s “Symbolic
Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art History” (1979).15
It is notable that all of these analyses (including Clark’s) were offered
14
15
Yet see Andrew Hemingway, ed., Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the
New Left (Londres: Pluto, 2006), and Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Swartz,
editores., ReNew Marxist Art History (Londres: Art/Books, 2014), as well as recurrent essays such
as Laura FairSchulz, “Writing Marxism Out of Art History,” Red Wedge, posted May 1, 2019,
at http://www.redwedgemagazine.com/onlineissue/writingmarxismoutofarthistory.
Respectively, Kenneth Clark, Provincialism (Londres: The English Association, 1962); Ljubo
Karaman, O djelovanju doma´ce sredine u umjetnosti hrvatskih krajeva (On the Impact of Place
in the Art of Croatian Regions) (Zagreb, 1963); Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem,"
Artforum XII, No. 1 (Septiembre 1974): 54–59; and Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg,
“Symbolic Domination and Artistic Geography in Italian Art History” [1979], Art in
Translation 1, No. 1 (2009): 5–48.
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117
from a peripheralist perspective that was specific to the circumstances
of their authors. For her own part, Vlachou was an astute theorist of the
pitfalls but also the potentials of peripherality: “The periphery has the
potential to subvert categories that have dominated (arte) historical think
ing since its inception (center, canon, nación), while bringing to the
fore the fundamentally unequal power configurations that have charac
terized the discipline and its various practices.”16 Vlachou’s 2016 essay
“Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery,” from which I am quoting,
might well join “Art Centers and Peripheral Art” on the list just cited
as essential texts within these debates. The project of making Hadji
nicolaou’s essay available in English, with all the attendant ironies of its
entry into what the world is currently obliged to accept as its language,
is dedicated to her.
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16
Foteini Vlachou, “Why Spatial? Time and the Periphery,” Visual Resources 32, No. 1 (March–
Junio 2016): 10, reprinted in Foteini Vlachou, The Disappointed Writer, ed. Mariana Pinto dos
Santos and Rui Miguel Ribeiro (Lisbon: Ediçõs do saguão, 2019), 311.
