ART HISTORY AS A NEW DISCIPLINE AT THE ESTONIAN UNIVERSITY IN TARTU AFTER THE LONG 19TH CENTURY

The article is the first attempt to present the beginnings of Estonianprofessional art history in the 1920s in a regional and global context.The author strives to situate the University of Tartu (Dorpat) inthe pan-European network of universities, where art history hadgradually become regarded as a new discipline during and after thelong 19th century. Art history is rooted in the Age of Enlightenment,with Johann Joachim Winckelmann retrospectively named the fatherof art history. But it was about a half century after his death that arthistory was incorporated into a general subject of aesthetics taughtat universities. It took another fifty years for art history to becomea separate discipline in the modern universities of Germany andAustria-Hungary, and another half a century to receive a separatechair at the Estonian national university in Tartu. The developmentof art history as a discipline at the University of Tartu is analysedon a very granular level, based on primary sources from Estonianand Swedish archives. During the 19th century art and its historywere used to the ends of national politics and in search of nationalidentities. In Estonia, this was hindered by the activities of anotherethnic group, the Baltic-Germans, who had been the ruling classin the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. The first professorof art history at the Estonian University of Tartu, Helge Kjellin,wanted to bridge the gap between Estonian and Baltic art history.He attempted to merge these two concepts and define the territorialconcept of Estonian art from the Middle Ages to the beginning ofthe 20th century. He also defined this as a proper field of study forEstonian art historians. However, after his departure from Estonia,art history was neglected and irrelevant for the Estonian Universityand the Estonian Republic. Science and academic professions wereregarded as a masculine field of activity until after the Second WorldWar. Only the lack of men, who had died in the war, enabled womento start seeking a more equal place in the academic world worthy oftheir intellectual ability. Despite there being many capable femalestudents among those who studied art history with Kjellin, the firstfemale professor of art history in Estonia, Krista Kodres, was electedto the Estonian Academy of Arts only in 2003