The Art History Newsletter

On Vacation

1 June 2009 | Uncategorized

We’ll return Tuesday, September 8, 2009.


The Art Book ‘Crisis’

28 May 2009 | Books

Thames & Hudson managing director Jamie Camplin writes in The Art Newspaper:

Is there a crisis in art book publishing? … The challenges are real and substantial, but they are only obliquely connected with the economic downturn … The first is the obvious one of reaching consumers. The growth in public interest in art during the past two decades has not been underpinned by an effective retail infrastructure. Many museums now offer a smaller range of books, in preference to non-book merchandise, which is a dereliction of their duty as custodians of cultural education. The dominant book chains around the world ignore the evident public enthusiasm for art and succeed only in proving that if you do not display art books, you do not sell them. The independents suffer from price competition and the dominant power of Amazon in driving prices down to unrealistic levels … There’s a fourth challenge … if the only thing to distinguish “art” from “life” is that you find it in an art gallery, the discourse about it—the articles and books people write—is in trouble. One reaction is to enter a philosophical cul-de-sac, a dead end of theory and obscurantism. Another is to appropriate art for contemporary society’s great mass-market fuel: celebrity. Neither of these help the art-book publisher’s first duty, which is to encourage people to look at art and help them understand it …

Art has a very strong hand to play in the 21st century. In an era in which technology makes most products more uniform but in which printing technology can show art’s strengths as never before, in which fragmenting marketplaces and marketing platforms need all the help they can get, and in which the power of the visual to sway emotions has never been stronger, art’s distinctiveness, creativity and originality give any art-book programme a strong start.

(See also this 2006 report.)

1 Comment

  1. Anonymous said on 29 May 2009 at 1:30 am:

    One other factor is that art books, even if they are popular, have the additional burden of higher overhead costs. Even if they sell as well or better than,say,the latest Dan Brown farrago of nonsense, they may not be as protfitable because of the higher overhead


‘Why Photography Matters’

28 May 2009 | Books, Contemporary, Photography

In caa.reviews, Matthew Biro considers a new book by Michael Fried:

Two related projects are combined in Michael Fried’s well-observed, conceptually ambitious, and beautifully written new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. First, the text presents a formal and theoretical justification of tableau photography since the late 1970s … Second, Fried puts forward an important reevaluation of his own critical and historical account of modernism, demonstrating its relevance for a time—and a medium—seemingly far removed from his modernist concerns …

For Fried, the importance of contemporary tableau photography—defined as large-scale photographs intended to be hung on walls and viewed as paintings—can only be revealed in light of the development, breakdown, and eventual (modernist) transformation of the antitheatrical tradition in painting. This new type of photograph—which, in comparison to traditional photographs, claimed the viewer’s attention in a new way, and which simultaneously emphasized its artificiality or staged character—revived the absorptive ideal while at the same time acknowledging the various crises with which it had to contend. In addition, it responded to the development of Minimalist and Postminimalist practices as well as the supposed rout of “modernist absorption” (a formulation that Fried does not use in “Art and Objecthood”), i.e., the failure of the values of “presentness” and “instantaneousness” to hold the field in the 1960s and 1970s …

The great importance of Fried’s book lies in the fact that he presents a radically different understanding of the significant characteristics and concerns of art photography than has previously been offered. Not only does he articulate a convincing alternative to the account of the artistic use of the medium developed by postmodern thought, but he also offers an important corrective to the naïve realism that mars certain forms of social-historical photographic analysis. The main flaw in Fried’s study is its lack of concrete non-art-or-photography-related historical analysis, a deficiency that is most strikingly felt in his readings of Wall, Delahaye, Gursky, and Demand, in whose work the social and the political loom so large … Also missing from Fried’s important book is a thorough reflection on how photography still distinguishes itself from painting.


‘Forgery, Replica, Fiction’

27 May 2009 | Books, Renaissance

In caa.reviews, Susan Donahue Kuretsky considers Christopher S. Wood’s Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art:

Wood’s study attempts in part to redress limitations in traditional formulations of the Renaissance (familiarly defined in relationship to Italy) as a myth of rebirth, repetition, and revival of classical antiquity in art following a dark period of disintegration … He argues that Germans did not conceive of Antiquity as distantly separated from their own present by a dark Middle Age, since they saw themselves as the direct imperial continuation, through the Holy Roman Empire, of both the grandeur and technical ingenuity of Rome … Wood’s larger project continues and expands his hypothesis [that] pre-modern productions of all kinds of artifacts, including architecture, were not considered in terms of individual authorship, or the circumstances or historical moment of their actual production, but rather as they related typologically to—and could substitute for—links in a chain of earlier artifacts of a similar sort …

Wood’s study ranges widely over sculpture, architecture, prints, paintings, and various other forms of visual expression, both documentary and aesthetic. His erudition is extraordinary, as is his command of language, though it must be said that he regularly casts the reader into some heavy seas of abstruse and convoluted terminology. (“The possibility of escape from the secularization model is the hypothesis that images and artifacts, to the extent that they made referential claims, worked not by semiosis but by the mechanisms of labeling and through the myth of a replica chain structured on type-token ratios” (83).) This is a study that requires as much re-rereading as reading, but the rewards are many … Wood’s selections of examples often act as springboards for consideration of larger categories of images or artifacts, giving his text application well beyond its focus on a particular place and period. His extensive discussion of the evolution of alphabets and the complex, shifting relationships between the new print typography and earlier calligraphy is in itself worth the price of the book. Interspersed throughout this long, densely written study are startling shafts of verbal elegance and wit that light up the page and carry the reader on, such as: “This sense of woundedness was the precondition for the Italian sense of historical distance from antiquity”


‘Changing the Art on the White House Walls’

26 May 2009 | Uncategorized

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Obamas are sending ripples through the art world as they put the call out to museums, galleries and private collectors that they’d like to borrow modern art by African-American, Asian, Hispanic and female artists for the White House. In a sharp departure from the 19th-century still lifes, pastorals and portraits that dominate the White House’s public rooms, they are choosing bold, abstract art works …

Their choices also, inevitably, have political implications, and could serve as a savvy tool to drive the ongoing message of a more inclusive administration. The Clintons received political praise after they selected Simmie Knox, an African-American artist from Alabama, to paint their official portraits. The Bush administration garnered approval for acquiring “The Builders,” a painting by African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, but also some criticism for the picture, which depicts black men doing menial labor …

The National Gallery of Art has loaned the family at least five works this year, including “Numerals, 0 through 9,” a lead relief sculpture by Jasper Johns, “Berkeley No. 52,” a splashy large-scale painting by Richard Diebenkorn, and a blood-red Edward Ruscha canvas featuring the words, “I think maybe I’ll…,” fitting for a president known for lengthy bouts of contemplation.


‘Reshaping the Art Museum’

21 May 2009 | Museums

In the June 2009 ARTnews, executive editor Robin Cembalest writes that although museum attendance remains good for now, numerous directors are focusing greater energies on luring visitors, be it with esthetic coat checks, Facebook pages, yoga, or belly-dancing demonstrations:

… some have begun reaching out to scientists, futurists, game designers, and other specialists outside the art world. If these leaders succeed, the art museum of the future will offer the customer service of an Apple store, the comforts of a Barnes & Noble, and the dynamism of a town square. It will have areas where visitors can plug in or tune out, where they can immerse themselves in virtual-reality games or speak to live curators in the galleries, and where they can comment on the art they see—or make their own. This trend represents a sea change from a decade ago, when Arnold Lehman was ridiculed by many colleagues for staging dance parties and offering shows like “Hip-Hop Nation” to lure new audiences into the Brooklyn Museum … When the [Walker Art Center's] new installation opens in November, says chief curator Darsie Alexander, curators will hold in-gallery office hours … But for all the talk of accessibility, the cost of admission remains an elephant in the room … [Museum of Modern Art director Glenn Lowry also] adds a cautionary note to the talk of outreach … “Museums should be accessible to all. But that doesn’t mean everyone needs to or should enjoy the benefits of a museum. Not everyone enjoys football or Sartre.”


the ‘lived experience’ of art

21 May 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical

In caa.reviews, David Wilkins considers Altarpieces and Their Viewers in the Churches of Rome from Caravaggio to Guido Reni, by Pamela M. Jones:

Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its creation and in history. These are big goals, of course, and—as with any such endeavor—there are frustrations. Many of the objects that at first seem to speak the loudest begin to whisper when we start researching or set out to communicate our ideas through teaching and writing. We want evidence to support or challenge our response to and our understanding of each work. What constellation of factors and personalities explain the creation of a work, and how was each work received and interpreted? History can be reticent and, at times, unyielding.

Not, however, for Pamela M. Jones in her brave new book on five Roman altarpieces from the period around 1600. Her goal was to understand how these works were part of “the lived experience of early modern Catholicism” (5; emphasis in original), a promise she fulfills in a most impressive fashion. Rather than exploring the intentionality that has been the focus of most art-historical effort in the early modern period, she shifts her attention to the now-popular question of reception.


Cuts at CAA

21 May 2009 | Uncategorized

CAA executive director Linda Downs writes:

Like most universities, art museums, and learned societies, CAA has been significantly affected by the global economic downturn … Beginning July 2009, CAA News will only be distributed online … The Art Bulletin and Art Journal will continue to be published. Illustrations, however, will be limited to black and white for 2009–10, except where editorial and budget decisions may allow the insertion of color … Two programs in CAA’s grant-making arm will be suspended for 2009–10: the Professional Development Fellowship Program for graduate students and the Millard Meiss Publication Fund.

Also, the next CAA conference will be one day shorter than usual.


art history: ‘rich in adjectives, poor in provable statements’

19 May 2009 | Uncategorized

From a recently lauded commencement address given by former Getty director John Walsh:

Make yourself clear. This is risky. To say clearly what you think is to risk being more clearly wrong. To fudge what you think – to qualify it, complicate it, overload it – is usually a defensive move. It’s a strategy for getting partial credit: you figure you may be wrong but at least you’re clever, you’re eloquent… and maybe not that far wrong.

I work in a field – art history – that is rich in adjectives, poor in provable statements, just right for somebody who hides from clarity behind vivid, entertaining language. The best antidote I ever heard prescribed to writers came from the art historian Howard Hibbard, who told us students what to do when we’d written a sentence: “Take your favorite word and strike it out.” Hibbard meant that often we put the word there not for clarity but for vanity …

During the past generation, art history has been preoccupied with questions of art theory and the social and economic and political contexts of art, which can be answered from illustrations in books. This has made the field richer intellectually, but it’s excused faculty members and graduate students from going to real works of art in the original and dealing with them, looking hard and long, trying to grasp their peculiar way of communicating, enjoying their pleasures, appreciating how they elude simple classification and undermine theories.

Hibbard’s advice is of course at least as old as Samuel Johnson’s day:

I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: “Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”

2 Comments

  1. JP said on 20 May 2009 at 10:38 pm:

    I love a writer who expresses clarity through vivid, entertaining language.

  2. Mary said on 21 May 2009 at 12:16 am:

    antidote or anecdote?


‘The Mythology of Blogs’

18 May 2009 | Uncategorized

UC-Irvine historian Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom writes on “The Mythology of Blogs”:

Misconception 3: Blogging is a fad that is bound to go away soon, so we can just ignore the phenomenon and wait the trend out. No one really knows how long any form of communication will stay popular or significant. It seems doubtful, though, that blogging will disappear soon. And lately blogs have become an increasingly unavoidable part of the intellectual as well as political landscape …

Misconception 8: The academics and other intellectuals who turn to blogging are attention-seeking people who have trouble getting published in more traditional venues. Surely this is true at times. But Mary Beard maintains an active blog and also publishes essays and books at a prodigious rate. And in terms of attention-seeking, sometimes one motivation for blogging is to get attention for print publications …

Misconception 9: Academic blogging is an indulgence best reserved for the tenured. There are dangers involved in blogging, especially if you don’t have tenure. You can spend so much time blogging that you fail to do things you should, or you can slip into posting intemperate comments in cyberspace that come back to haunt you at tenure time. Those of us who teach graduate students or mentor junior faculty should point out these risks to those we advise. This said, I don’t think we should necessarily encourage those we advise not to blog. Many sorts of textual exercise, after all, can improve someone’s writing muscles. And, pragmatically, good things sometimes come to those who blog—if they do it well …


‘Trust Theory’

15 May 2009 | Conferences, Theory

Patrick Harrison reports on the recent conference, “On the Idea of Communism,” in n+1:

… Nearly the entire emerging canon of (mostly male) contemporary Continental philosophers—including Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, [Terry] Eagleton, and Antonio Negri, [Michael] Hardt’s mentor and collaborator … joined Hardt at the conference … [Hardt's] intellectual performance came straight out of the ramshackle, pleasantly inconclusive manner of American literary studies seminars, where discourse proceeds by dialogue, constructive criticism, and synthesis of a diversity of possible “readings” rather than by the militant “line struggle” favored by the Badiouvians with whom he shared the stage …

The premise of “On the Idea of Communism,” which was hosted March 13-15 by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, was to explore the possible positive meanings of the word “communism” for philosophical thinking. The conference would proceed neither by historical analysis of the past failure of “actually existing communism,” nor by speculation on the practicalities of establishing communism in our time, but by a series of philosophical meditations on what Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis,” that is, the hypothesis of an “eternal Idea” of radical egalitarianism that haunts every social order …

Underlying the general good feelings at the conference, however, were uglier traces of elitism and smug passivity. The audience was made up almost entirely of middle class, white academics (or academics-to-be), and if it was well balanced in terms of gender, a certain boys’ club mentality of macho one-upmanship still prevailed … All of the speakers were white European men, with the exceptions of Hardt (white and male but American) and poetry scholar Judith Balso (white and European but female). No history other than that of the French Revolution and Marxist communism was looked to for inspiration in testing “the communist hypothesis” …

Philosophy can’t complete politics, but it can reinvigorate and expand politics, and with this in mind Žižek’s “call to thought” is salutary. For this lesson and for the essential gesture of proposing a single banner under which all those committed to struggling for universal human equality can unite, the Birkbeck conference, for all its sins, represents a step in the right direction.

2 Comments

  1. Einhard Frank said on 15 May 2009 at 6:43 pm:

    Someday, if not already, these people will be seen as the equivalent of the angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin debaters.

  2. Pare said on 18 May 2009 at 12:34 pm:

    The sad part of this is that the project is worthwhile and should be welcomed. It’s the approach (and the nature of the discourse itself) that’s flawed.


New Directions for the Catalogue Essay

14 May 2009 | Books

In Art in America (which finally went online a couple months ago), Sarah Hromack reviews Manon — a Person:

Part photo essay, [it] presents a comprehensive survey of a career that began during the 1960’s in Zurich, where the Berne-born Rosmarie Küng (her given name) began a modeling stint that soon segued into experiments in fashion, photography, installation, and performance … While the modestly produced book lacks the sensual qualities one might expect given Manon’s own lavish tastes, 134 color plates more than compensate for its physical plainness. (So does Jean-Christophe Ammann’s entry, which consists largely of a long, erotic passage cribbed from a novel by Hansjörg Schertenleib, in which an anonymous submissive details his desires to the dominatrix hired to fulfill them.)


Artistic Webbys

13 May 2009 | Teaching

Smarthistory, created by Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker out of discontent with “the large expensive art history textbook,” now with 157 videos, has won a 2009 Webby award for best education website. The Guggenheim Museum won in the category of “cultural institutions.” Dreamgrove won the “netart” category. Keith Tyson won in “art.”


Beyond ‘Research’

12 May 2009 | Uncategorized

John Armstrong, a philosopher specialising in aesthetics and vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, wrote recently:

The [humanities'] core problem can be expressed in the language of economics: the humanities are geared to supply, particularly to supply research. They ignore demand … Research needs to be redefined to embrace a wider range of cognitive virtues [than just] accuracy of reference and care in drawing conclusions. These are valuable because they counteract our normal sloppy thinking. However, there are many more qualities of thinking: grace, charisma, intimacy, spontaneity, wit, depth, simplicity, grandeur, warmth, openness, drama, intensity and generosity … Intellectual ambitions need to be raised. There is a tendency in research to pursue problems in increasing detail; it is a natural consequence of specialisation … Intellectual ambition has been miscast in terms of the pursuit of ever more detail. It is really the pursuit of ever great value … The humanities have often cast themselves as critics of society. It would be better to be cast as friends. A friend doesn’t have to admire everything you do but they do have your trust. Criticism comes, if it does, from kindness; it aims to help, not to humiliate.


Medieval & Renaissance Shows

11 May 2009 | Medieval, Museums, Renaissance

Recently arrived in our inbox:

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE EXHIBITIONS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA, SUMMER 2009

An incomplete list, compiled by Nick Herman [Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University]

Belgium

Charles the Bold
Groeninge Museum, Bruges, 27 March-21 July

Canada

From Raphael to Caracci: The Art of Papal Rome
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 29 May-7 September, 2009

Paolo Veronese and the Petrobelli Altarpiece
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 29 May-7 September, 2009

England

Henry VIII: Man and Monarch
London, The British Library, London, April 23-September 6, 2009.

France

L’héritage artistique de Simone Martini / XIVe – XVe siècles
Avignon, Musée du Petit Palais, 20 June-31 October, 2009

Fabriquer la beauté: cosmétiques et soins du corps à la Renaissance
Écouen, Musée National de la Renaissance, 20 May-21 September, 2009

Filippo et Filippino Lippi: la renaissance à Prato
Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 25 March-2 August, 2009

Les Primitifs italiens – Splendeurs du Musée d’Altenbourg
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, 11 March-21 June, 2009

Les premiers retables (XIIe-début du XVe siècle) – Une mise en scène du sacré
Paris, Musée du Louvre, April 10-July 6, 2009

Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551) (Dessins)
Paris, Musée du Louvre, 25 June-2 November, 2009

Mantegna, le prédelle de San Zeno de vérone 1457-1459
Tours, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 4 April-22 June, 2009

Le beau XVIe siècle, chefs d’œuvre de la sculpture en Champagne
Troyes, Église Saint-Jean-au-marché

Les trésors des icônes bulgares
Vincennes, Château, 13 May-30 August, 2009


Germany

The Master of Flémalle and Rogier van der Weyden
Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 20 March-21 June, 2009

Michelangelo. Zeichnungen und Zuschreibungen
Frankfurt, Städelmuseum, 6 March-7 June, 2009

Fokus auf Andrea Mantegna: Der Evangelist Markus, um 1450
Frankfurt, Städelmuseum, 9 April-6 September, 2009

Italy

Benedetto da Maiano a San Gimignano, La Riscoperta di un Crocifisso
San Gimignano, Museo del Conservatorio di Santa Chiara, to 21 June, 2009

Pietro Candido, un Pittore del Cinquecento tra Volterra e Monaco
Volterra, Palazzo dei Priori, 31 May-8 November, 2009

Giotto e il trecento
Rome, Complesso Vittoriano, 6 March-29 June, 2009

Fra Angelico
Rome, Musei Capitolini, 8 April-5 July, 2009

Raffaello e Urbino
Urbino, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, 14 April-12 July, 2009

I della Robbia: Il dialogo tra le Arti nel Rinascimento
Arezzo, Museo Statale d’Arte Medievale e Moderno, 21 February-7 June, 2009

The Netherlands

Masterly Manuscripts. The Middle Ages in gold and ink
Utrecht, Catharijneconvent,16 May-23 August 2009

Scorel’s Glory:
How a Utrecht-based painter brought the Renaissance to the North

Utrecht, Centraalmuseum, 20 March-28 June, 2009


Russia

The Blue and the Gold of Limoges. The Enamels of the XII – XIV Centuries
Saint-Petersburg, Hermitage Museum, 19 June-20 September, 2009

United States

Prayers in Code: Books of Hours and artistic patronage at the court of King Francis I (1494-1547)
Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, 25 April-19 July, 2009

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 15 March-16 August, 2009

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy
Forth Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 15 March-14 June, 2009

Temptation and Salvation: The Psalms of King David
Los Angeles, Getty Center, June 9–August 16, 2009

Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 2–August 23, 2009

Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan
New York, The Morgan Library & Museum, June 19-September 13, 2009

Heaven on Earth: Manuscript Illuminations from the National Gallery of Art
Washington, National Gallery of Art, March 1-August 2, 2009

1 Comment

  1. MM Curator said on 20 May 2009 at 9:33 pm:

    I’m a little late to this post, but I just wanted to say that the exhibitions on cosmetics in France sound amazing.


‘The Power of Art, The Endurance of Sexism’

8 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums

From Le Monde:

The second edition of the exhibition, “The Power of Art,” has opened its doors. This triennial event, organized by the minister of culture and communication, the Centre national des arts plastiques and the Réunion des musées nationaux, comprises three sections … Among the 42 “resident” artists, just 7 women are presented … In this exhibition that aims to represent the French artistic scene, women thus constitute 16% … How can “The Power of Art” which pretends to be a “great encounter with creation in France” and “up-to-date with the French scene”, so fully ignore the depth, diversity, professionalism, and engagement of an entire part of that artistic scene? … Recall that today 60% of art-school graduates in France are women …

The Musée national d’art moderne itself takes note of these sad statistics in its preamble to its next exhibition, “Elles@centrepompidou”, with this slogan: “At the Centre Pompidou, women represent 17.7% of the artists in the museum’s collections. This new presentation of the collections is 100% devoted to them.” This new hanging, which will last one year, belongs to a tradition of thematic presentations, “Le mouvement des images” (2006-2007) and “Big Bang” (2005-2006) … and surely has the laudable goal of righting the ship and of (temporarily) re-equilibrating and apologising. But it’s exactly the temporary and apologetic nature of the endeavor that reveals the crucial problem. The exhibition “Elles@centrepompidou”, with its so “typically feminine” sponsor Yves Rocher, “your beauty partner” (because they’re so worth it?), perfectly symbolizes the place assigned to women artists at the highest levels of French institutions — precarious, peripheral, isolated, always in the role of exception; women artists are furthermore systematically referred to the supposed specificity of their gender.

2 Comments

  1. Charlotte said on 11 May 2009 at 5:23 am:

    Wow. That is shocking. It’s as if the Guerrila Girls never happened. I’m so angry!

  2. David said on 20 May 2009 at 5:20 pm:

    Do you really think the Guerilla girls accomplished any real change? If so, you missed the point of their work… Male supremacy still rules the art world, even when women are in charge.


‘Damn the Originals’

7 May 2009 | Uncategorized

Former Met director Thomas Hoving is publishing a memoir serially on Artnet:

Despite my successes, I found that first year [of graduate school] to be exceedingly boring and unfulfilling. I was especially annoyed that all I ever looked at were photographs of originals. No one suggested field trips to the great museums in New York or Philadelphia. And I was particularly vexed with a stray comment the ruling star of art history had muttered in a seminar. The star was Erwin Panofsky … “Pan” had hefted into the seminar room what was called an “Elephant Folio,” a rare book over three-and-a-half-feet tall, with original [Raimondi] engravings.

Towards the end of the session, “Pan” slammed shut the pages of the priceless folio and turned away. I smelled something burning and noticed that the cigarette formerly in the professor’s mouth was gone. I opened the rare folio and extracted a glowing cigarette stub and said nothing about the charred section of the priceless engraving.

It was at the same seminar that Panofsky gave his opinion about original art that so vexed me, “Damn the originals. You can learn so much more about iconography from black and white photographs.”

2 Comments

  1. Dizzy said on 7 May 2009 at 12:26 pm:

    lol, wow. I never knew Erwin Panofsky was such a jerk.

  2. Pare said on 8 May 2009 at 12:47 am:

    Panofsky aside, a prudent reader might think twice before taking anything that escapes from Thomas Hoving’s mouth at face value.


Rodchenko and Popova at Tate Modern

7 May 2009 | Modern, Museums

At Tate Modern through May 17, Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism has received several interested reviews.

(more…)


Art fictions

6 May 2009 | Uncategorized

Art is perenially awash in stories of fakes, fakers, and fakery. According to the AFP,

The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin. Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin’s Altes Museum was made at the order of German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt by an artist named Gerardt Marks … on December 6, 1912, the copy was admired as an original work by a German prince and the archaeologist “couldn’t sum up the courage to ridicule” his guest, Stierlin said.

According to Time,

… rumors have swirled for years that many treasured originals by Vietnamese artists like [Nguyen Trong] Niet have been either lost or sold off, and reproductions have taken their place. The copies aren’t exactly forgeries. During the Vietnam War, the museum’s own restoration department was a virtual copy factory — a fact that museum officials past and present freely admit … Ironically, Vietnam’s practice of reproducing noteworthy works was originally carried out to rescue the country’s artistic heritage during wartime … “It was a national imperative to keep the museum open.” So the staff — and in some cases, the artists themselves — started to make copies. The reproductions stayed in Hanoi while the originals were spirited away and hidden in caves. The artworks were supposed to return home after the war. Not all did. Records, if they ever existed, were lost.

A new book by Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans conjectures that Gauguin and Van Gogh may concocted the story of the latter slicing off his own ear, in order to conceal Gauguin’s culpability:

Kaufmann told the Guardian: “Near the brothel, about 300 metres from the Yellow House, there was a final encounter between them: Vincent might have attacked him, Gauguin wanted to defend himself and to get rid of this ‘madman’. He drew his weapon, made some movement in the direction of Vincent and by that cut off his left ear.” Kaufmann said it was not clear if it was an accident or an aimed hit. While curators at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam stand by the theory of self-mutilation, Kaufmann argues that Van Gogh dropped hints in letters to his brother, Theo, once commenting : “Luckily Gauguin … is not yet armed with machine guns and other dangerous war weapons.”

The notion attracted a swift rebuttal from Martin Gayford:

This is not the first time it has been suggested that Gauguin might have been the aggressor in this odd art couple. The psychological motive for the suspicion is, I suspect, that many people don’t like Gauguin, and identify with the suffering Van Gogh … A local newspaper reported that at 11:30 on Dec. 23, 1888, Van Gogh handed in his severed ear at a local brothel; the recipient of the grisly parcel, a certain Rachel, was understandably upset. This story was substantiated by the policeman who investigated the incident. Otherwise, all the first-hand information comes from Gauguin who wasn’t, admittedly, an ideal witness … The evidence, such as it is, points to Vincent. Presenting a severed ear to a local prostitute then scampering off into the night is erratic behavior, to say the least.

1 Comment

  1. M said on 6 May 2009 at 8:51 pm:

    The authenticity of the Nefertiti bust has been questioned for a long time, although some have thought it to date from the Hitler era (not 1912). Recently, some CT scans were performed on the bust. Some have argued that these scans prove that the bust is “not a fake.” See here for one such article:

    http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/266036,nefertitis-hidden-face-proves-berlin-bust-is-not-hitlers-fake.html


Crimp on ‘Pictures’

5 May 2009 | Contemporary, Museums

Lee Rosenbaum attended the press preview for Pictures Generation, “the Metropolitan Museum’s much discussed, uncharacteristically risk-taking theme show.” The preview was convened by Douglas Eklund, the Met’s associate curator for photography, but she found herself more interested in the thoughts of Douglas Crimp, also in attendance, whose 1977 “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space “provided the seed from which the Met’s show grew … [with its] display of five artists—Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith.” Crimp tells Rosenbaum, among other things, that

[Eklund] gave a certain amount of attention to the importance of women and I think that has to be really emphasized. In his first wall text, he mentions feminism but then he goes on to define the influence of feminism as something like, “It doesn’t matter what the gender of the artist is.” [The wall text stated that feminism "made it possible for woman artists to define themselves as artists who happened to be women."]

I think that’s NOT the lesson of feminism. The lesson of feminism is in the kind of art that’s being made and the kinds or propositions that were being made through the art—the critique of originality, for example, which is something I already argued for early on with respect to Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. I think that’s a feminist perspective and that is a crucial aspect of this formation of artists. I didn’t recognize that at the time.

I don’t think that the work of Louise Lawler—probably the artist I feel closest to, in relation to my subsequent work—can be understood without taking account of second-wave feminism.