To understand why fine art exhibitions played such an important role in nationalist movements, it is helpful to use Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political community – imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1991 [1983]: 6). Anderson regarded nationalism as a sentimental belief in a shared past, present and future, and argued that imagined unity could only be reinforced through symbolic means, such as the invention of nationalist symbols like national flags and anthems.20 The fine arts was one of the fields in which powerful nationalist symbols were produced. Numerous contemporary painters, sculptors and graphic artists, whose work was included in the exhibitions in the national galleries, used their art as a political medium to create national consciousness. In Europe, the participation of visual artists in nationalist discourse reached its apex in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Neo-classical and Romantic artists respectively, sought to express ‘the beliefs, hopes, fears of [their] own time and country’ (Honour 1979: 16).

(Maruška Svašek "Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production")