The History and Role of the Institute of Art History Photo Archive in the 100 years of Art History Research and Education in Poznan

General characteristics and the result of preliminary research

Abstrakt

The photo archive at the Art History Department is aunique collection. It constituted avisual, didactic body of work since the moment of foundation of the first academic art history in Poznan at the German royal Academy (1903–1918), then the art history seminar at the Polish Poznań University (1919–1939), the art history department at the German Reich University (1940–1945) and nally the Polish Institute at Adam Mickiewicz University after World War II. The oldest photographic set is a collection that remains unordered. It consist of graphics and photos (about 3,800 items) and glass slides (about 6,000 items). The origins of these materials range from 1903 (when the German royal Academy was founded) until 1975 (when the slides collection in today’s Institute was founded). Each of these institutions created their own collection for teaching art history, while also adopting and assimilating the collections of their predecessors. As aresult, today’s collection reveals the complicated story of Poznan’s art history. In this paper, I aim to characterise the history of the photo archive and indicate the main research problems that this collection presents, such as: the history and state of the photographic collection, selections of photographs for education by Polish and German art historians; reproductions of local art from the Greater Poland region used in teaching, the attitude of Polish and German art historians to the art of the region, and finally the issue of politics and propaganda in the construction of an archive intended for teaching.