Introduction

The chapters in this volume investigate the periodizations that structure the art historical discourses produced in Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. They critically address how art historians writing about the region interacted with established Western periodizations, but also developed their own more sympathetic frameworks that refined, ignored or hybridized Western models. Such frameworks often constituted attempts to overcome the centre–periphery paradigm, which equated distance from the centre with temporal belatedness and artistic backwardness. At the heart of many of these writings lay the ideological project of nation-building. Thus, discourses around periodization, such as the mythicizing of certain periods, the invention of historical continuity and the assertion of national specificity, contributed strongly to identity construction.