Towards a Public Art History? The “Curated Afterlife” of Artworks during Salonica’s WW1 Allied Occupation.

Taking as a case study the exhibition “Into the Vortex of the Great War: Thessaloniki of the Armée d’Orient, 1915-1918” (Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, 2017-2018), the paper examines the curator’s role in shaping the exhibition narrative. Sought to celebrate the centenary anniversary of the end of WWI, the exhibition presented art and photography made by Allied soldiers (mostly French and British) stationed in Salonica. Drawing upon researchers’ recent tendency to acknowledge the WWI Allied presence in Salonica as a forced occupation, the exhibition subverted the official historical narrative, fostering an alternative reading for the soldiers’ artworks. Historicized within the power relations shaped by colonialism, the picturesque and exotic cityscapes and the ethnographic everyday scenes were revealed as part of a dominant crypto-colonial discourse. Although never a colony, Greece is among what Michael Herzfeld calls “buffer zones between the colonized lands and those as yet untamed,” regions that acquired their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence. In this paper, I argue that the “curated afterlife” of the artworks was affected by the neocolonial historical situation Greece was experiencing, exemplified by the economic crisis and the EU closure of the Balkan route for thousands of refugees. Through this, I reflect on the responsibility of art historians, introducing the concept of “public art history” as a discipline that inspires public engagement with art history, putting it to work for real-world issues.