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:
27 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Collaboration, among artists as well as between artists and audiences, has interested numerous artists and art historians in recent years. In the February 2006 Artforum article, “Social Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Claire Bishop wrote: Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration … There [...]
26 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Seventy of van Gogh’s landscapes from the late 1880s are on view through September in Basel’s Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition billing itself as “the most important European art event in 2009″ and expecting a half-million visitors…
25 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Wrestling with the towering yet ambiguous figure of Rodin, sculptors tried for a newly austere, concise synthesis in the years leading up to the Great War — the subject of a thoughtful exhibition by Catherine Chevillot at the Musée d’Orsay. Reviews are by Philippe Dagen in Le Monde (“Picasso is missing…Lehmbruck is the leading figure”), [...]
24 April 2009 | Books, Photography
In Slate, Barron H. Lerner reviews Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930: The photographs in the remarkable new book Dissection shocked me, even though I spent a year in anatomy class during medical school. Dissection includes dozens of images of late-19th- and early-20th-century medical students posing, often in comedic manners, [...]
23 April 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
For a few years in the 1620s, Utrecht (among other places) saw the flourishing of painting in the manner of Caravaggio. The Utrecht Caravaggisti, including Hendrick Terbruggen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, who used the style for scenes of earthy Dutch tavern life, are the subject of a show organized by Jochen Sander [...]
22 April 2009 | Books, Conservation
We belatedly note the 2007 translation by conservator Helen Glanville of Alessandro Conti’s History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art (which Conti first published in Italian in 1973 at the age of 26 or 27, then re-issued in an expanded and revised edition in 1988). In her introduction, Glanville writes: There never [...]
21 April 2009 | Islamic
In caa.reviews, Bernard O’Kane considers Jonathan M. Bloom’s Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt: Jonathan Bloom can rightfully be considered the foremost authority on Fatimid art and architecture, having produced a steady stream of articles on the subject over the past twenty-five years. He is thus [...]
20 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Pierre Bonnard’s late interiors, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, attracted a number of approving reviews…
19 April 2009 | Medieval, Museums
At the Guardian, Jonathan Jones encounters Konrad Witz’s 15th-century Saint Christopher in Basel, and offers an appreciation: Witz must surely be responding imaginatively to the inward-looking religious movements of the later middle ages, finding a visual equivalent for new mysticisms that stressed the soul’s quest for God. The poetic solitude of this painting is as [...]
17 April 2009 | Museums
In the November 2008 Third Text (pp. 794-96), Amna Malik reviews the Tate Britain exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting”: The return to orientalism as a curatorial strategy at Tate Britain appears somewhat puzzling, if not completely insensitive … Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, seems all the more pressing now, after [...]
16 April 2009 | Contemporary
In the Brooklyn Rail, Irving Sandler interviews critic Roberta Smith: I was born in New York City. My father was finishing his PhD in geography at Columbia University. By the time I was five weeks old, we had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he had a job teaching at the University of Kansas … I [...]
15 April 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
On view in Arezzo: “The Della Robbia Family: The Dialogue Among the Arts In the Renaissance.” Three generations of the family were known for raising the status of glazed terracotta to a par with painting and sculpture; Alberti credited patriarch Luca with “inventing” the technique. The show has been reviewed by Goffredo Silvestri (“The most [...]
15 April 2009 | Books
The Times of London excerpts a new book, The Lost Mona Lisa: Picasso and poet Appollinaire were prime suspects when Leonardo da Vinci’s best known painting was stolen from the Louvre … In the seven years from 1905 to 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume [...]
15 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Dave Hickey’s indispensable essay collection The Invisible Dragon is finally back in print. From the press release: The Invisible Dragon, originally published in 1993, is often regarded as art critic Dave Hickey’s seminal work. Hailed by artists, the book made a forceful case for beauty in a time when the notion was completely dismissed by [...]
14 April 2009 | Africa, Americas, Conferences
Later this week the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art turns 20: The 2009 Porter Colloquium presents new research, new interpretations, and new subjectivities that inform scholarly practice and promote fresh ways of thinking and writing about African American art and other art in the African Diaspora. This year’s theme, Trajectories … The [...]
14 April 2009 | Books
We recently discovered the annual Bookfinder.com Report, which exists to “track demand trends for a wide range of out-print titles.” Examining the last report, in the category of “Arts and Music,” the third-most-searched-for book was a work of art history, Paul Smith’s Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720. Last we searched, the cheapest available copy on Amazon.com [...]
13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure [...]
13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic: Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic [...]
A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and [...]
10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline: Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and [...]
