Jon Lackman is a PhD student at NYU. His dissertation (in progress) is “Invective in Mid-1800s French Art Criticism.” He has written for Slate, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. He sometimes tweets.
Lackman's Posts:
29 January 2010 | Americas, Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Kate Morris considers Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 by Bill Anthes: [Anthes] asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he [...]
22 January 2010 | Modern
According to The Art Newspaper, “Joan Banach is suing to be reinstated onto the board of the Dedalus Foundation [devoted to Robert Motherwell],” a board including Jack Flam, Dore Ashton, John Elderfield and David Rosand: Before he died in 1991, Motherwell signed a letter guaranteeing Banach “lifetime employment” at the foundation, she claims. She alleges [...]
22 January 2010 | Modern
From the University of Virginia: Lydia Gasman, a retired art history professor at the University of Virginia, died Jan. 15 in Charlottesville. She was 84. Gasman, who grew up in Romania, was on the U.Va. faculty from 1981 to 2001. She was an expert on symbolism in Pablo Picasso’s artwork. “She contributed as much to [...]
20 January 2010 | Uncategorized
According to CAA News (pdf), “Barbara Nesin, the department chair of art foundations at the Art Institute of Atlanta, has been elected president of CAA’s Board of Directors for a two-year term, beginning May 2010.” Nesin, the first artist to head CAA, is interviewed in this issue by outgoing president Paul B. Jaskot: As president, [...]
19 January 2010 | Uncategorized
From the Times of Trenton: … Right now Bois’ largest task — and he has basically declined all other work until its completion — is a catalogue pacing out the work and influence of American painter Ellsworth Kelly, who lives in upstate New York. Bois hopes to be finished in under two years, although his [...]
17 January 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Gary Schwartz exposes some of the sausage-making that goes into Rembrandt attribution: In June 2009 a grand conclave of Rembrandt specialists took place at a castle in Sussex … Given the circumstances – notably that none of the more than 50 scholars in the room had at one time or other not been pilloried in [...]
14 January 2010 | Museums
Apparently some museum has a new director. Passing comparisons have been made to another dealer-turned-director: Walter Hopps. This 2005 essay by Ken Allen describes Hopps’ difficulties balancing art and commerce and navigating between the cultures of New York and L.A.: … Edward Kienholz’s 1959 piece, Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps, is a cunning assemblage portrait of [...]
11 January 2010 | Journals
In its December 2009 issue, The Art Bulletin uses the word “hip-hop” for the first time, in an article by Krista Thompson on “The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop,” which centers on two contemporary artists, Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert. Elsewhere in the issue, Guy Delmarcel reviews [...]
8 January 2010 | Ancient, Conservation
From the January 2010 issue of Chemistry World ($): Art conservators have long been armed with analytical techniques to explore the chemical make-up of paints and dyes but in the past five years a method called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has started to attract their attention. Experts predict that in the next five years it [...]
7 January 2010 | Journals, Theory
We welcome the launch of a new publication, the Journal of Art Historiography, whose first issue is devoted to Viennese and German art historiography. From its mission statement: There is a double danger that contemporary scholarship will forget its earlier legacy and that it will neglect the urgency and rigour with which those early debates [...]
7 January 2010 | Uncategorized
I recently played around with Google Trends, a tool that allows you to see how often a word or phrase has been searched over the last few years. Alas, “art history” has apparently experienced a steady decline since 2004. Likewise for “history of art”, “art,” “painting,” “sculpture,” “architecture,” and most individual artists I tried such [...]
6 January 2010 | Modern
Speculation boileth over concerning who sliced van Gogh’s ear and why. Most recently: a book from Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans, a lengthy article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, and a new hypothesis out now from Martin Bailey. According to published accounts, Bailey “devised his theory after meticulous detective work” and Kaufmann and [...]
4 January 2010 | Books, Theory
Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor have recently published a new edited volume Rediscovering Aesthetics that brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines. Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic [...]
22 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Our next post will be on Monday, January 4. “Citing its high cost in a time of severe budget constraints, the University of Illinois will phase out an art history program headquartered in the nation’s capital. Interim Chancellor Robert Easter decided this week to close the ‘Illinois at the Phillips’ program, created in 2006 with [...]
22 December 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
According to ArtDaily, an Italian exhibition that brings together reputed Giorgiones has aroused controversy among scholars and art historians … [Castelfranco Veneto] is staging a wide-ranging exhibition … from December 12 [2009] to April 11, 2010 … The exhibition, a challenge both from the scientific and the organizational points of view … is curated by [...]
20 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Once in a while, an art-history dissertation will land you a job and a spouse: Jessica Maier and Nick M. Camerlenghi were married Saturday evening at the Memorial Church at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. … She is an art history instructor at Tulane University. She graduated from Brown and received a Ph.D. in art [...]
19 December 2009 | Modern
The German abstract painter Rupprecht Geiger, known for his explorations of the color red, has died, aged 101. Nicola Kuhn’s obituary in Die Zeit credits him with inventing the shaped canvas (“before the Americans”) and inspiring later artists including Anselm Reyle, Katharina Grosse, and Anish Kapoor. In 1949, along with Fritz Winter, Willi Baumeister, and [...]
17 December 2009 | Books, Modern
From The Economist For all the books written about artists’ muses and patrons, relatively few explore the role of mentors, perhaps because the presence of a teacher threatens to deprive the artist of his or her status as a self-made genius. In “Tom and Jack”, Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western [...]
16 December 2009 | Museums
Two surprisingly good private collections have recently garnered attention. The New York Times writes about a long-hidden Romanian collection on view in Paris that includes a Massacre of the Innocents, “painted sometime in the late 1580s in the studio of Pieter Breughel the Elder, after his death. Cruel and violent, but painted with extraordinary verve [...]
14 December 2009 | Modern
Novelist, screenwriter and art-world hoaxer William Boyd discusses a new play about Mark Rothko: Like many celebrated artists of his generation – the postwar American abstract expressionists, the so-called New York School – Rothko was at best a mediocre painter, and would have been judged as one, until he found his magic formula. Among his [...]
