This presentation addresses the history of the Berlin-based luxury periodical Pan, published in 21 issues between 1895 and 1900. The periodical was available in three different editions of increasing luxury, with differences in the types of paper used. It presented new literature, essays on art and applied arts, and reproductions of art in various techniques, as well as original prints bound into each of the periodical’s issues. Materiality, not least a self-reflexive engagement with it in its pages, was what lifted Pan above its competitors and what has complicated its status as a material object. It is not just a periodical but also a work of applied art that, in turn, mediates, very purposefully, other applied arts and their materialities.

This presentation will revisit two moments in the reception history of Pan to shed light on how the history of using digital methods in art history has affected our understanding of the materiality of art, with a particular focus on paper. The first of these moments occurred in 1970 with the publication of the first two volumes of what was planned to be a larger, computer-based project of documenting art nouveau periodicals, notoriously symbolist in their aesthetics. This first publication was dedicated entirely to Pan and, on the basis of card catalogues, presented a form of structured information in the form of catalogs and registers of the contents of the periodical. The publication’s engagement with Pan’s own materiality, however, occurs elsewhere, namely in the materiality of the publication itself.

The second (and ongoing) moment in the computer-aided reception of Pan is its digitized version available from Heidelberg University. Here, the presentation will hone in on the absences produced by digitization. A particular and jarring example the paper will address is the omission of the Japanese tissue papers that are not only crucial for Pan, but have a wider cultural significance at this moment. Their near-complete erasure from the digitized publication is a serious scientific problem, as is Pan’s status is a non-unique object, with only one of its full runs available digitally when the periodical was issued in three different editions. It is also problematic, possibly even more so, as the presence of this paper is a key indicator of the embeddedness of Pan’s production infrastructure, including its paper providers, into a larger, indeed international network stretching all the way from Berlin to Japan.

Bringing together a media reception history of an art nouveau periodical with a materialist take on the period’s aesthetics of material exuberance and effervescence provides an exemplary case study for a sustained reflection on the relationship between technical art history and digital art history.