In 1992, the Comite International d Histoire de l Art (CIHA) held its 28th Congress in re-unified Berlin under the theme Kunstlerischer Austausch Artistic Exchange. The subject fed a strain of idealism and optimism relating the history of art to the life of our times. Change was palpable to all the participants. A wall that had seemed everlasting had fallen, a cold war that had lasted a lifetime was now history. The shifting borders and a revised sense of periodization inspired new views of the past as well as the present, of art as well as nationhood and society. One generation later,...