Problematizing Periodization 193 others, such as Oprescu and the French art historian Henri Focillon (1881-1943), it was part of a broader interwar effort to build bridges between cultures by recognizing folk art as 'rooted in something universally human, common to all'. 4 Problems of Periodization in South-Eastern Europe As Anca Oroveanu, citing Gombrich, has pointed out, Western art is amenable to periodization, while non-Western art is not. 5 South-Eastern European art, shaped by a medley of

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... Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian, Georgian, Armenian and Russian influences and their interaction with a strong folk tradition, does not map comfortably onto Western hegemonic ideas of linear time (what Mary Roberts calls the West's 'disabling temporal logic') where the value of art is measured by its chronological novelty and time is historicized through stylistic change. 6 Yet (as Cosmin Minea discusses in Chapter 3 in this volume) for the early scholars who formulated the core art histories of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trying to interpret the local art in alignment with Western criteria was not only the result of their training in the main Western centres of art historical thought but also initially part of a wider political drive to demonstrate the Europeanization of the region and its ability to share in the modernist project. Carmen Popescu argues that as soon as the Balkans entered modernity and tried to integrate with the so-called civilized world, they had to negotiate Hegelian 'universal history', as well as respond to the expectations of the Occidental gaze. For 'half-awakened' peoples, 'entering history demanded an entire readjustment of local coordinates in keeping with Western values'. 7 This inevitably led to aspirational, if somewhat contorted, discussions of periodization and style. Tzigara-Samurcaş, for example, wrote in 1924 that Romania 'is the only country where not only all the great periods of European art are represented, sometimes even by examples which are unique within their genre, but where even the most opposing styles merge to give birth to new schools'. 8 Hegel's development of the Herderian concept of Volksgeist to imply that only 'welldefined' people could aspire to a place in 'universal history' meant that the question of national styles became a pressing one. 9 One of the biggest challenges local scholars faced in their quest for a convincing national art narrative was the problem of how to bridge the temporal and cultural caesura between a largely uninterrupted tradition of Byzantine and folk art and the accelerated arrival of Western art forms, institutions and intellectual frameworks in the nineteenth century. Their solution lay in a positive re-evaluation of the atemporal nature of regional traditions, which were seen as existing outside the rhythm of historicized time and preserving a native simţ artistic (artistic feeling) that transcended the shift to Western forms in the work of modern Romanian artists. Ideas of atemporality, longevity and authenticity thus not only became valuable tools in dealing with the challenges of periodization but also dismantled the Western distinction between fine art object and ethnographic artefact. As Tzigara-Samurcaş (founder of the Museum of National [Folk] Art in Bucharest), wrote in 1927: [F]olk art has maintained the superior value of continuity, in comparison to the art of the ruling classes. The latter is very sporadic: manifesting itself only when supported by rulers, in their absence it endures entire periods of stagnation. Another inferiority is the way it varies according to whoever commissions it . . . while folk art remains eternally unchanged. 10