He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification smacks of cliché and his naiveté was only superficial. The artist explored an entirely personal, baroque, and strange universe where the seen, the felt, the familiar, the strange, and even the incongruous intermingled. By transgressing norms, he heralded the arrival of the twentieth century as much as Cézanne did, though very differently … What finally characterizes Henri Rousseau is the oneiric quality of his canvases … [I]t was a source of inspiration for Max Ernst and Magritte, because these paintings were nothing less than the “photographs of dreams” that André Breton said defined surrealist painting.

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art has announced the appointments of members for 2010–2011. They include Joseph J. Rishel, Philadelphia Museum of Art, as Samuel H. Kress Professor; Carmen C. Bambach, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as Andrew W. Mellon Professor; and Victor I. Stoichita, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, as Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor for spring 2011. Mary Beard of the University of Cambridge has been named the 60th A. W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts for spring 2011.

CASVA also announced the appointment of seven senior and four visiting senior fellows, two postdoctoral fellows, 18 predoctoral fellows, and three predoctoral fellowships for historians of American art to travel abroad.

Other fellows and their projects:

Elizabeth Sears
Warburg Circles: Toward a Cultural-Historical History of Art, 1929–1964

Daniela Bohde
Disarray on Calvary: Passion Scenes in Early Sixteenth-Century German Art

Cammy Brothers
Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome

Laura Weigert
Images in Action: The Theatricality of Franco-Flemish Art in the Late Middle Ages

Sarah Betzer
Surface and Depth: Antiquity and the Body after Archaeology

Rachel Kousser
Ancient Iconoclasm: Destroying the Power of Images in Greece, 480–31 BC

John-Paul Stonard
Against Henry Moore

Heather McPherson
The Artist’s Studio and the Image of the Artist in Nineteenth-Century France

Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi
The Emblematic Garden

Fredrika H. Jacobs
Dialogues of Devotion: Votive Panel Paintings in Renaissance Italy, c. 1450–1610

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
The London Square, 1580 to the Present

Megan E. O’Neil
The Lives of Ancient Maya Sculptures

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-Fashioning at the End of the Republic

Priyanka Basu
Kunstwissenschaft and the “Primitive”: Excursions in the History of Art History, 1880–1925

Shira Brisman
The Handwritten Letter and the Work of Art in the Age of the Printing Press, 1490–1530

Christina Ferando
Staging Canova: Sculpture, Connoisseurship, and Display, 1780–1822

Dipti Khera
Picturing India’s “Land of Princes” between the Mughal and British Empires:
Topographical Imaginings of Udaipur and Its Environs

Beatrice Kitzinger
Crucifix and Crucifixion in Ninth- and Tenth-Century Breton Gospel Books: The Early Medieval Liturgical Cross and Its Representations

Jason David LaFountain
The Puritan Art World

Lisa Lee
Sculpture’s Condition/Conditions of Publicness: Isa Genzken and Thomas Hirschhorn

Benjamin Anderson
World Image after World Empire: The Ptolemaic Cosmos in the Early Middle Ages

Dana E. Byrd
Reconstructions: The Visual and Material Cultures of the Plantation, 1861–1877

Jason Di Resta
“Crudeliter accentuando eructant”: Rethinking Center and Periphery in the Art of Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone

Razan Francis
Secrets of the Arts: Enlightenment Spain’s Contested Islamic Craft Heritage

Meredith Gamer
Criminal and Martyr: Art and Religion in Britain’s Early Modern Eighteenth Century

Nathaniel B. Jones
Nobilibus pinacothecae sunt faciundae: The Inception of the Fictive Picture Gallery in Augustan Rome

Di Yin Lu
Reassigning Civilization: Cultural Property Law Enforcement in Shanghai, 1949–1978

Kate Nesin
Twombly’s Things: The Sculptures of Cy Twombly

Anna Lise Seastrand
Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Mural Paintings, 1500–1800

Jennifer M. S. Stager
The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art

Miya Tokumitsu
“Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine”: The Sculpture of Leonhard Kern (1588–1662)

A lot of people can’t understand how art of any kind conveys meaning … At the same time, many are terribly intimidated by art—especially modern and contemporary art … The stock and trade of academics is words, not images … [And] they rarely ever try their hands at creative work … In sum, even though almost everyone reacts to works of art almost instantaneously, and even though most people, either consciously or unconsciously, ascribe to the principle that all judgments about art are by nature equal, almost everyone is insecure about their art judgments.

I attempt to demonstrate the powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist. My approach goes against the grain of art history as an academic discipline, which, emerging in the nineteenth century, sought to follow a scientific model and detach itself from imaginative writing about art and artists. Although that way of thinking may now seem somewhat ingenuous, art historians nevertheless still resist thinking about the origins of their craft in poetry.

I hope to have more to say about Barolsky soon. On this topic I’m looking forward to attending the upcoming Clark Art Institute conference, “Fictions of Art History,” whose speakers include Barolsky, Thomas Crow, Alexander Nemerov, Joanna Scott, Edward Snow, Gregory Crewdson, Michael Hatt, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, Ralph Lieberman, Maria H. Loh, Hélène Bonafous-Murat, Allan Sekula, Cole Swensen, Marianna Torgovnick and Marina Warner. The conference’s goal “is to address the complex relationship between art history and fiction, a relationship that will be investigated in art historians’ need to tell stories, their viewing practices, their rhetoric, their writing, and in the interest of art historical work beyond the academy.”

His irreverent review, published in Artforum and titled “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” (variously a Hoagy Carmichael tune and a jump-rope rhyme), garnered an ad hominem response supposedly researched jointly by 35 MoMA staff members and signed by curator William Rubin, which was very poorly received. McEvilley’s text caused much soul-searching among art historians — one asked, “where were you when you read it?”

McEvilley has a new book out, on Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay, which Croak calls “an engaging read, with a narrative that is more like that of a novel than an academic treatise.”

But how would you say your work has contributed to the the global discourse in art and in changing the general feeling about African art before you came into the scene?

I think it’s up to evaluators of what I have done to address this question … I know that I came of age as a curator [in New York] at a time of radical transitions on the global sphere … [T]he transitions were of movement, migration, the intersection of many different subjectivities; national imagination, social temporalities and so on … At this particular point, it was almost unimaginable to see the work of an African artist … So, what really set my work apart was that within this small village of New York, there were not that many young curators like myself who were thinking Africa in this particular way. It does not mean there were no African things happening …

How do you see the relationship between African artists based abroad and at home, and how do you work with them?

We do not travel as a band; there are differences in our projects. As it should be, we do not all head one direct[ion] like a delegation … I work with all artists. I understand and I am somewhat sympathetic to current debates that we have; and these debates are not new. We had it in 2002. We are repeating it now; and I see it as part of an anxiety. I am somewhat sympathetic too … [O]ne way to confront this anxiety is to create a situation in which we are not only answering to the hosts somewhere but that we also become host … I have not visited Nigeria for long. But I keep abreast of what people are doing. I would then say that there is a crisis of content production in contemporary Nigerian art … In a place like Lagos, artists here should put their heads together and, through the arts, make Lagos a place that people want to come to. Everybody wants to run to Dakar (Senegal) for example, every two years, because it is a meeting place.

Enwezor says that he plans to “come back for a comprehensive visit of Nigeria, in terms of the arts. That visit would not stop at Lagos or Nsukka. I can certainly tell you that my next visit to Nigeria will be in less than a year.”

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews Ćurčić and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog)
• “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously at NYU and reviewed by John Noble Wilford (NYT)
• Mark Brown, “National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence,” The Guardian
• Blake Gopnik, “At National Gallery, Edvard Munch’s ‘Prints’ reveal artist’s methodical process,” Washington Post
• Jed Perl, “Individualism: Getting Matisse weirdly wrong, and getting Renoir weirdly right,” The New Republic ($)

Emily McVarish is one of a handful of artists whose primary artistic output takes the form of books, books that she writes, designs, and prints—artists’ books. The publication of The Square offers the opportunity to experience a new work by this artist, a product of her long-running and deep engagement with the book as an artistic vehicle. The Square is typographically sophisticated and superbly well-produced, but its objective is not a celebration of craft, nor is it intended to be a luxury product for high-end consumption. It is an original, inventive, and transformative work of art that offers a nuanced performance of texts, an exploration of ideas about public space, rhythm, and the everyday, explored through McVarish’s poetic use of language and the typographic manipulation possible within a book.

Jennifer Tobias reviews a book by William E. Jones titled Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton, “an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture.” The book reflects “a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media.”

NYU’s Lucy Oakley is the current editor of caa.reviews. Tony White, of Indiana University, is the field editor for caa.reviews specializing in “Artists’ Books and Books for Artists.”

The money is one thing, but when you start to calculate just how long it takes to find a picture that you are allowed (for fee or not) to reprint, at the right level of resolution, and showing more or less what you want it to show — well, my estimate is that you are looking at one day per image … [T]he editorial rules, as usual, expressly forbid just scanning one from another book; and almost anything on the web already does have enough DPI … You start to love those electronic archives that offer free, publishable out of copyright images; and you look especially keenly at old out of copyright books with clear plans and line drawings. But even that is not hassle-free … The next thing I write is going to have NO pictures.

The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true … He channels into the volume a lifetime of in-depth studies of Italian Renaissance architecture, and presents an account that is stunning in its amassment of fact and fact-based interpretations and proposed solutions … The volume provides a much-awaited bridge between continental and European or Europe-based research on the inner principles and particular dynamics producing the variegated forms of Italian Renaissance edifices … Frommel’s work is impressive, stunning, overwhelming, yes, but also non-definitive, limited, and technical in the sense of being less than open to the evidence of the exchanges between architecture and other arts and artists working alongside architects in Early Modern Italy. This avoidance is deliberate. For Frommel does not mince his words; his is a full-frontal attack on the architectural historians who have focused on historical and cultural contexts in their approaches … According to Frommel, “architecture does not narrate”