Crossing history of media and art history. The profile and path of art writer-journalist René Lyr as seen through the Artpresse corpus

After three years of digitization – resulting in more than 600,000 digitized pages of interwar magazines published on BelgicaPeriodicals –, the Artpresse project* now aims at studying the reception of Belgian art in these textual and visual sources which represent an important and yet understudied part of the history of media. Using this digital platform, the full-text research has made it possible to “track” the contributions of influential Belgian journalist-writers into the illustrated weekly press of the interbellum, shedding new light on their professional careers and social networks at the intersection of the literary, artistic and journalistic fields.
In this regard we would like to present René Lyr/Vanderhaeghe (1887-1957) who was also poet, art critic and speaker, recorded in the Artpresse corpus as director of Ons Land (1928-1932?), journalist for AZ (1933-1936) and radio columnist for Hebdo (1934-1938), among other activities. We would like to illustrate through this case study that magazines described as “middlebrow” and “popular”, “unusual” in art history, crossed and completed with other historical sources (essays, letters, daily newspapers, specialized magazines), enlighten different methods of (mass) diffusion of art and formation of public taste, in order to show the interdisciplinary and intermedial potential of this extensive corpus.
*Funded by the Federal Science Policy of Belgium within the framework of its BRAIN-be 2.0 program, Artpresse is a research and digitization project led by the Digitization Department of the Royal Library of Belgium in collaboration with the Department of Literary Theory and Cultural Studies of the University of Leuven and the Service d'Histoire de l'Art de l'Époque contemporaine of the University of Liège. For more information, see the website: https://www.artpresse-researchproject.com/