In the short story Ein Bild by the writer Friedrich Brunhold, which appeared in the magazine Gartenlaube in 1863, a young woman from a poor family is given “a magnificent Murillo album” for Christmas. The gift from an admirer is thought to be a product of the Photographisches Kunst- und Verlags-Institut Gustav Schauer. At the time, the company was publishing an “Kunsthistorischer Cyclus”, whose albums on “Rafael, Murillo, da Vinci and Correggio” were advertised as “Christmas gifts” in the Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel as early as 1860.¹

On December 24, 1897, the art historian Ernst Steinmann surprised the First Secretary of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, Eugen Petersen, with a photograph by Domenico Anderson. The picture shows Michelangelo’s Moses. His wife, Ina Petersen, receives a large photograph of Raphael’s Parnassus. The reproductions are chosen with care and are initially geared towards the supposed preferences of the addressees, but the Moses can also be related to the very intimate relationship that Steinmann tried to maintain with Eugen Petersen in those years.²

In his autobiographical text Beim Häuten der Zwiebel, published in 2006, Günter Grass begins by describing his childhood passion for art-historical collectible pictures from cigarette packets. Even before the Second World War, they reproduced the masterpieces of European painting in color, from which Grass “learned to mispronounce the names of the artists Giorgione, Mantegna, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Caravaggio”. The albums in which the pictures were to be glued came from the Hamburg-Bahrenfeld cigarette picture service and were, Grass assumes, “Christmas or birthday presents”.³

Through significant case studies, the planned conference wants to examine practices of a form of popular art communication that has received little attention to date. It is based on the assumption that art historical content around and after 1900 could only become the object of a rapidly establishing gift culture among broad sections of the population thanks to the technical developments of the reproduction and printing industry. This refers to reproductions of all kinds, such as those offered in individual pictures, in gallery and portfolio works, but also to those marketed in heavily illustrated introductory or overview art historical works. Of particular interest are the marketing strategies of the relevant publishing houses (Bruckmann, Seemann, etc.), but also the contexts in which attempts are made to justify the popularization and proliferation of images for the many and to defend them against criticism (direct contemplation, empathy, enjoyment of art, etc.).

Behind the obvious educational values, however, there are the strong commercial interests of the various protagonists, whether publishing houses or the museums themselves. The many products offered in today’s museum stores also reflect the revaluation of the reproduction as mass product in relation to the original work of art. Yet the practice of giving away art historical content seems to be determined by social dynamics, as indicated in the examples mentioned above. These should not only be analyzed in each individual case but should also be questioned with regard to their cultural, social, genderspecific, economic and political dimensions.

¹ Friedrich Brunhold (i. e. August Ferdinand Meyer) (1863): „Ein Bild. Novelle“, in: Gartenlaube, pp. 321–324, pp. 337–340, here p. 323.

² MGP-Archiv III. Abteilung Rep. 63 Nr. 35 (16. Juni 1894 – 5. Dezember 1909), 25r.

³ Günter Grass: Beim Häuten der Zwiebel. Göttingen: Steidl Verlag 2006, p. 11 and p. 13.