We’re On Hiatus For The Summer
13 June 2007 | Uncategorized
We’ll resume publication Tuesday, September 4. (If you’d like to receive an email when we do, write us.)
Jacobs v. Moses
13 June 2007 | Journals, Architecture
Another angle of the ongoing Robert Moses re-evaluation can be considered in the March 2007 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Christopher Klemek writes: “a Manichean narrative depicting an epic clash of the titans — [Jane] Jacobs the Defender versus Moses the Destroyer — has become a popular trope about the salvation of New York (especially Greenwich Village and SoHo), if not all American cities … But in truth, the battle for succession was much messier, and upon closer inspection, the legacy less straightforward. After the publication of [Jacobs’s] Death and Life in 1961, Jacobs’s greatest battles were not even with Moses, but rather his immediate successors … [whose positions had] some striking similarities to Jacobs’s own … If we seek a dramatic trope about the fate of ‘great American cities,’ instead of Jacobs successfully warding off the villain Moses, we should rather envision Jacobs and these other adversaries in mortal combat, going over the falls together.”
Experimental Narratives of Art History
12 June 2007 | Uncategorized
A few art historians are starting a discussion, over email, of new ways to write art history. (To join, write us.) The catalyst:
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education described an unusual attempt by a doctoral student to revise Robert Caro’s 1974 portrait of “master builder” Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which still dominates discussion today despite many recent attempts to update it:
“Emanuel Moses is up in the hotel again. It’s a problem this time because it’s been on fire for nearly fifty minutes.”
So begins Chapter 3 of Timothy M. Mennel’s Everything Must Go: A Novel of Robert Moses’s New York, an unpublished book that comprises 1,096 manuscript pages — with 1,456 footnotes.
For Everything Must Go is not simply a novel. It’s also Mr. Mennel’s dissertation in urban geography, which he successfully defended this month at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. The novel traces several generations of a fictitious African-American family as they interact with the life and works of the legendary city planner Robert Moses.
Mennel says that as far as he knows, this is the first geography dissertation in the form of a novel. How many academics at all have attempted to present their scholarship in unusual genres? In art history, a few examples come to mind, for example Linda Nochlin’s essay in the 1988 Courbet Reconsidered catalogue; Eunice Lipton’s 1992 book Alias Olympia: a woman’s search for Manet’s notorious model & her own desire; Rosalind Krauss’ 1993 book The Optical Unconscious; Molly Nesbit’s 2000 book Their Common Sense, and the 2004 book Irrational modernism: a neurasthenic history of New York Dada, by Amelia Jones.
All the above except Nesbit interject quite a bit of personal narrative, “memoir” if you like, largely for feminist reasons, many add. Some include fictional or poetic passages: Lipton narrates events from the perspective of Manet model Victorine Meurent, Jones sometimes assumes the voice of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Nesbit follows a fictional protagonist “Emile.” Jones and Nesbit interweave prose and poetry. With Jones, it’s mostly a question of alternating the two; Nesbit’s text is a nearly undefinable hybrid, one that Art Bulletin reviewer Joachim Pissarro dubbed a revival of the Enlightenment-era “didactic poem.” Krauss’ book may be the hardest to define. Her editor wrote on the back cover that it is “art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction.” (See also Joseph Leo Koerner’s short experimentation with the second-person voice in the 1990 Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape.)
Krauss noted in a December 1994 Art Bulletin article that
The desire to exchange the historian’s traditional voice, with its presumed objectivity and detachment, for a type of speech that would have the “subjective” written all over it, was a natural outcome of what could be called the “paraliterary” developments of poststructuralism in the 1970s … [Barthes crossed] theoretical writing with other literary genres: the novelistic, the autobiographical, the semoipsychoanalytic. And there were Derrida’s paraliterary declarations, as well, as in “polylogues” or his exchanges of postcards with “S.A.”
On the flip side, novelists have long incorporated history and art history into their fictions, sometimes with a scholar’s attention to detail. (See the 2001 essay collection Novel history for examples.)
Some would argue that all fiction has an element of history, and vice versa. (See, e.g., Hayden White’s 1978 book Tropics of Discourse.) Nonetheless, scholars such as Nochlin, Lipton, Krauss, Jones, Nesbit, and Mennel continue to try to distinguish their facts from their fictions in their published writings. Is that the de minimis requirement for literary scholarship to still qualify as scholarship? Is it practicable?
Have these experiments been successful? Influential? Do some or all of them present a radical challenge to the more common modes of presenting scholarship? What other hybrid forms are possible? If you’d like to join the group that is discussing these and other questions over email, write us.
Malraux Rehabilitated
11 June 2007 | Books
In the most recent issue of Revue André Malraux Review (v. 34), Michel Lantelme reviews a 2006 essay collection edited by Jeanyves Guérin and Julien Dieudonné. Its goal, Lantelme writes, is to “rehabilitate Malraux’s art writings”:
Knowing he would be read the wrong way, Malraux himself underscored that ‘La Métamorphose des dieux is in no way a history of art.’ Nonetheless his writings are still misunderstood today …
Malraux’s art writings succeed, Dieudonné writes, insofar as they make the reader share in his experiences of the mysterious power of art, and sensitize the reader to the enigma of creation … They rely on poetic means — aphorisms, unexpected juxtapositions, ellipses …
The studies reunited here demonstrate that discussion of Malraux’s art writings is more productive than ever. Guérin and Dieudonné’s gamble succeeds because it offers not just an original and systematic re-evaluation of Malraux’s writings, but also new avenues [for research]. It’s the indispensable complement to the recent re-edition of his writings published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Obit: James Beck
8 June 2007 | Renaissance
We read that art historian James Beck died recently, at the age of 77. In a festschrift devoted to Beck published last year by Mark Zucker and Lynn Catterson, titled Watching Art, they argued that “Beck should be remembered first and foremost as a great teacher,” in the larger sense of the word. They note that his many books have been translated into Italian, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Hungarian, and Korean. They discuss “his well-known articles casting doubt on attributions to Raphael (the Portrait of Pope Julius II in London) and Michelangelo (the London Entombment and the notorious ‘Fifth Avenue Cupid’)” as well as a then-forthcoming de-attribution of “the so-called Madonna of the Pinks, acquired as a Raphael by the London National Gallery for what is probably the highest price ever paid for a painting when calculated by the square inch.” The festschrift’s articles mostly cover Italian Renaissance topics; its contributors include Wayne Andersen, Hans Belting, David Rosand, and Craig Hugh Smyth. Laurie Schneider writes on “Restoration: Image, Text, Barthes, Freud and the Death of the Artist”; Donald Martin Reynolds contributes “A Remembrancer for the Victims and the Tragedy of 9/11/01.”
See also CultureGrrl, Art History Today, and the The New York Times: “James Beck, a Columbia University art historian who became well known as a critic of what he viewed as the ruinous conservation of world masterpieces, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, died on Saturday in Manhattan … An Italian Renaissance specialist, Mr. Beck produced 13 books, including three on Raphael and one about the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia, the subject of his doctoral dissertation … And in 2005, he declared a ‘Madonna and Child’ by the early Renaissance master Duccio, a tiny panel that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had purchased for an estimated $45 million, to be not a Duccio at all … Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., Mr. Beck had early aspirations as a painter and sculptor and studied in Florence. But after working in a factory to support his wife and two children, he turned to art history. He received his Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in 1963 and taught there for four decades … In 1992 he and the British journalist and artist Michael Daley founded ArtWatch International, a nonprofit advocacy organization to monitor the restoration, attribution and international shipment of works of art.”
Emory Douglas
7 June 2007 | Contemporary, American
We recently received the book Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, edited by artist Sam Durant, with contributions from Danny Glover, Amiri Baraka, Kathleen Cleaver, St. Clair Bourne, Colette Gaiter, and Greg Morozumi. Durant writes in his introduction, “Many of the images in this book may shock viewers coming to them for the first time … They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world … [they were] not intended to incite violence or to urge people to literally go out and kill the police, but to provoke a new consciousness in the community … The visual history of the Black Liberation Movements in America has often been confined to attributed and unattributed photographic documentation and anthologies of political graphics. This book constitutes a first: a monographic study of a single artist from this period of revolutionary political struggle in the United States.” (Some images of Douglas’s work can be seen online here.)
The Virtual Museum
6 June 2007 | Museums
The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden has created a digital facsimile of its Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. The copy resides in Second Life, which is a popular “3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.” More from the press release:
… all 750 masterpieces in the exhibition are on display. The doors are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Visitors can view the art, chat with each other, access information about the works of art, participate in art education events, note their impressions in the guestbook or browse in the shop - all in real time … It took six designers three weeks to reproduce this unique architectural ensemble in cyberspace. The whole of the gallery building is on view: the foyer, the staircases, all 54 halls and cabinets, and every one of the paintings, pastels and tapestries. No previous reproductive medium has so far succeeded in providing such an effective spatial impression of a museum visit in real time, even though the history of museums has always been intimately bound up with the history of reproductive media … but that doesn’t make a virtual visit a substitute for the real thing. The virtual Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is intended to arouse curiosity and encourage people to visit the museum in real life.
Unknown Rembrandt
5 June 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Need a dissertation topic? In the Spring 2007 Renaissance Quarterly, Ann Jensen Adams welcomes two recent books on Rembrandt’s portraits, but finds that still more work needs to be done. In particular, the long-beloved late “half-length introspective figures created in broad strokes brown and ochre … raise important and as yet unanswered questions about contemporaneous reception and taste. Hovering between portraiture and history painting, the intended associations of these diverse figures remain a puzzle.” In her conclusion, she underscores how “unknown this period remains for scholars, and how moving it remains for viewers.”
‘African Aesthetics’
Academic journals often fall comically behind in their publication schedule. For example, we recently received the latest issue of Présence Africaine, by no means the worst offender, dated “1er semestre 2005.” A good read all the same, this issue is devoted to “African Aesthetics and Philosophical Discourses.” Jean-Luc Aka-Evy contributes an article on “the resistance of traditional black African arts to museumification.” Quoting J. Laude, he notes in his final paragraph that “In the space of the museum, masks and objects are inevitably presented ‘reduced to a single piece of sculpted wood and hence they’re perceived as immobile and inert reliefs by a gaze that drags them into the misleading abstractions of the art world.’” In truth, they belong to ‘complex ensembles where they are associated with music … dance, mythological storytelling, and other social activities.’” Fortunately, “black Africans, despite certain differences arising from their particular situations, have developed and circulated [their own] esthetic concepts, with the concept of beauty being perpetually created in accordance with the fundmental rhythms of life itself.”
‘Early Polish Modern Art’
1 June 2007 | Modern
In the most recent issue of The Polish Review (LII: 1), Bozena Shallcross reviews Marek Bartelik’s Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity. Shallcross notes that at least three recent books “research the same area of Polish culture in its historical formation during the [1920s and 30s], focusing on its fascinating field of visual arts and literature crossing with emerging body politic of ethnic minorities/nationalities.” Bartelik’s book “belongs to the category of valuable and informative books, which help to modify standard art history’s focus on the West European canon of art … meticulously placing the works of art in an organic continuity with wider societal forces … the author does not find much use for philosophical and theoretical thought. While this approach, when faithfully practiced, is the polar opposite of what this reviewer adheres to, it is at the same time an approach she respects.”
‘The Ugly Woman’
31 May 2007 | Renaissance, Medieval, Baroque/Neoclassical
In the February 2007 Renaissance Studies, Victoria Kirkham reviews Patrizia Bettella’s The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque. One chapter “devotes generous space to the ‘guardian,’ since whatever her incarnation — as duenna, chaperone, governess — her function is to ‘guard’ and ‘regard,’ that is, to protect the young woman under her care with a watchful eye. Misogynistic attacks on the old guardian, Bettela finds, express male fear of women in power. She actively ‘looks,’ whereas women are supposed to be the object of the gaze and lower their eyes.”
“Bettela asserts in conclusion, ‘We as women must come to terms with the onus to comply and conform with existing rules of bodily proportion, youth, blondness, and perfection or otherwise be called ugly old hags.’ Here, as throughout, one senses her wish to take her texts personally rather than as play, lusus in a long rhetorical tradition. Do Poliziano’s poems about an aging prostitute, and another on the anus, express his true psychological fears and anxieties? … Prose is replete with uncritical generalizations: ‘female ugliness is purely and unequivocally an expression of negativity, male fear, and misogyny.’ Style is repetitive, a problem for which Toronto press holds ultimate responsibility.”
“It is a pity when pressure today on young scholars to vacuum in theory helter-skelter and rush to print for tenure mar a project with as much potential merit as this.”
Van Dyck Catalogue Raisonné
30 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical
In the latest issue of Seventeenth-Century News (64:3&4), Maureen E. Mulvihill reviews the Van Dyck catalogue raisonné edited by Susan J. Barnes, Nora De Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey. Only recently, she writes, “have art historians been in place to confidently compile a ‘complete’ catalogue raisonné of Van Dyck’s paintings. This handsomely produced catalogue, flawlessly printed in Singapore and assembled in a stunning large-format volume for the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press by an international team of four distinguished art historians, is a monumental achievement on the life and career of a famous, international artist, second only in mastery and reputation to Peter Paul Rubens … The new Van Dyck catalogue is a dazzling achievement.”
Expos and Empire
29 May 2007 | Asia
In the latest issue of Late Imperial China (27:2), Susan R. Fernsebner writes on the Nanyang Exposition of 1910, “China’s first nation-wide exposition”: “expo organizers pursued not only an inventory of empire and a systematic evaluation of its material components (objects, artwork, products, and technologies), but also intended, through the use of both material pedagogy and spectacle to help transform subjects into citizens.” Elites turned to the arts (and technology) to further the cause of nation building, seeing in the expo “a vision of mass spectacle rhetorically and materially associated with production and consumption, inextricably tied to the intertwined logic of nation and market.” “While … the major fairs held in Europe and the United States presented a vision of a strict colonialist hierarchy … expositions such as that held by the Qing dynasty in Nanjing suggested a much more open field of competition.” In the eyes of one observer, it achieved “through that assembly of objects and studious citizens a material modernity that transcended the West.” (Factoid: Oz creator L. Frank Baum “published the first known book on the decoration of shop windows.”)
Faux Flaneurs
25 May 2007 | Modern
In the January 2007 Modern Language Review, Martina Lauster argues that Walter “Benjamin’s idea of the flaneur is not only of limited value for an understanding of the nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively to hamper it. This detrimental effect results from Benjamin’s dogmatic application of a high-modernist, aesthetic concept of self-loss, derived from a (flawed) reading of Baudelaire and Poe, to the interpretation of earlier, journalistic sources conceptualizing the flaneur.” In her conclusion, she writes: “streets are definitely not turned into interiors by the social observers of the 1830s and 1840s. Although the flaneur is portrayed as someone who has abandoned his private space, this does not mean that exteriors are experienced as ‘familiar’ instead.” There was more of “turning inside out, i.e. a defamiliarization, of private, internal spaces, rather than a turning outside in, i.e. familiarization, of public, external space.”
Chicana Collections
24 May 2007 | Museums, American
In the spring 2007 issue of Latino Studies, Karen Mary Davalos writes on “the meaning of Chicana art collections”: “private collectors fill the vacancy left by local and federal museums and establish a public repository of Chicana art and culture … [like] feminist activists who generate movements for social change … [enacting] a poetics of love and rescue for Mexican-origin communities in the United States.” She also argues that scholars of collecting have “yet to systematically question the social construction of whiteness through private collections, particularly those that become the property of public museums.”
Potemkin Rio
23 May 2007 | Architecture, American
Diane Brand writes on “Sets and Extras: Ephemeral Architecture and Urban Ceremony in Rio de Janeiro (1808-1821)” in the latest Journal of Latin American Studies (15:3). In the early 19th century, the Prince Regent of Portugal fled to Rio ahead of Napoleon’s anticipated arrival. There, “the royal family indulged in a combination of ephemeral architecture and military pomp … [creating] triumphal arches, false building frontages and an elaborate choreographing of clergy, troops and courtiers … Temporary urban embellishments of this kind had a long history in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Portugal and France.” Not always entirely successful, those in Rio included one faux arch a contemporary called an “architectonic abortion.” Even at their best, their inevitable dismantling “alerted the citizenry to the potentiality of the modifications and their associated political augmentations.”
The New ‘Janson’
In the January 2007 Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Jeffrey Weidman reviews the recently released 7th edition of Janson, titled Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition, placing it within the context of “the lineage of English-language art history surveys in America.” The editor of the new edition, Sarah Touborg, abandoned “the stylistic/formalist approach, which had sustained it for over forty years, in favour of a contextual approach,” “hiring six respected art historians to re-conceptualize and rewrite the text of the 2004 edition.” Touborg claimed in The New York Times that just one-quarter of the text was rewritten. “One can only assume that [this] statement … was intended as damage control.” This “recent edition is a good book. But the publishers’ decision to align it with and market it as the most recent edition of Janson not only does a disservice to the Jansons but undercuts and devalues the considerable work of the six authors whose book this really is.”
Wilmerding Retires, Reveals
21 May 2007 | Museums, Conferences, American
Has anyone written about the phenomenon of art scholars and curators who also collect? According to Princeton University, John Wilmerding “revealed May 4 at a reception and dinner in honor of his retirement that he is the previously anonymous donor of a major gift of Pop art to the Princeton University Art Museum.” Also, “a gift of $1 million, along with a challenge grant of $750,000, has been made for a new endowed museum curatorship,” in his name, “to publish the collection, carrying on the work begun by Wilmerding and Laura Giles.” “In 2004, Wilmerding donated a significant collection of 51 paintings and drawings dating from the mid- to late-19th century by such artists as Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Martin Johnson Heade and George Caleb Bingham to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.” A symposium in his honor May 5 drew Rachel Z. DeLue, Michael Gaudio, Franklin Kelly, H. Daniel Peck, Hal Foster, Mark Stevens, Cecile Whiting, Jennifer Roberts, Hendrik Hartog, and Michael Kammen.
No Renaissance/Baroque, We’re Oxford
19 May 2007 | Renaissance, Baroque/Neoclassical
David Packwood laments the installation of Craig Clunas as chair of History of Art at Oxford University: “Nobody is better qualified than Clunas to bring a fresh perspective onto the programmes at Oxford University; he has written trenchant books and articles on Chinese art and culture and is admirably suited to ‘join up the dots’, by which he means link Chinese art with artistic developments in Europe in order to see that continent and its culture in new ways […] but, like the Art Newspaper who make much of the fact that this appointment marks the end of a Renaissance/Baroque presence at Oxford, I wonder what it suggests about the feeling towards Renaissance studies in this country.”
The Art Newspaper notes that “the faculty of art history at Oxford is small — it only started teaching undergraduates three years ago because previously the academic consensus was that it was more appropriate as a postgraduate course.”
Faux Photos
18 May 2007 | Photography
In a recent article by master’s journalism student John Mitchell, philosopher Robert Sokolowski muses on photography:
What is a photograph, anyway? At a time when Adobe Photoshop allows designers to cut, crop, rotate, resize, recolor, and reconstitute any image they please, it’s not always so easy to tell. Sokolowski says the difference between a photograph and a painting is rooted in the reason photographs can be used as evidence in a court of law and paintings cannot: “A photograph is a piece of proof because it’s an effect. It’s a natural effect of nature impressing on a photographic plate certain light rays that come from the fact that those people were there. It’s like a footprint. Now, a painting does something else. It might bring out some truth about a person, but it’s really the artist whose insight is operating there, and not nature.” […] “A painting is one image,” [Sokolowski] writes, “just as an argument or a sentence is one statement, but the painting also contains parts, which in turn also are pictures, and the parts are placed by the artist into an ordered whole.” With the introduction of Photoshop, the same has become true of photos. Editors can now break a photo of a football player into its individual parts and place them where they please. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does require a greater sensitivity to the photo’s original meaning […] Sokolowski sees a philosophical problem in journalistic photo illustrations becoming works of art. “The philosophical question is, to what extent are photographs really photographs anymore?” he said. “A photo illustration is living off a photograph because, until now, people have assumed a photograph is a real trace of a thing, but in fact it’s not. Now, it’s almost as though this situation is only going to last about ten years or so, because sooner or later people won’t trust photographs anymore. They’re going to figure no matter what they see is a composite.”
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