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:
11 September 2007 | Books
Some might call it a bold move. The CAA’s online reviews journal has appointed an editor with, it would appear, little experience writing and reviewing full-length academic books. Oakley has curated shows, reviewed them, performed other museum work, taught university classes, and published scholarship. Of course, caa.reviews is not just book reviews — it also [...]
10 September 2007 | Books
It’s never too late to review an academic book. In the September 2007 Art Bulletin, Reindert L. Falkenburg considers Klaus Krüger’s 2001 Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien: It offers an intensely insightful analysis of a series of works of art that, despite the forcefulness [...]
7 September 2007 | Americas, Modern
Are they genuine? Decide for yourself, now through December 9 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. From the Boston Globe: “‘There obviously remains a mystery here,’ said Claude Cernuschi, a BC art history professor and one of the show’s curators. Still, the 178-page catalog, also released yesterday, did contain some revelations. For example, although [...]
7 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the press release: “Elizabeth Hutton Turner, senior curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., will join the faculty of the University of Virginia McIntire Department of Art … During her 18-year tenure at The Phillips Collection she directed exhibits and wrote extensively on Pierre Bonnard, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Wassily Kandinsky, [...]
6 September 2007 | Uncategorized
As we continue catching up on the movements of art historians, we note that ARHV reported the promotion of Giovanni Careri to “directeur d’études” at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), where he’s been the director of the Centre d’histoire et théorie des arts (CEHTA) since 2001. “Born in 1958 in Rome, Giovanni [...]
5 September 2007 | Uncategorized
The NYU Institute of Fine Arts director will become “Vice Chancellor of the University with a brief to establish campuses of NYU abroad.” “Intended as a new model for higher education worldwide, the first such campus is to be established in the Middle East. Other locations are under discussion.” She will “remain on the Institute [...]
4 September 2007 | Uncategorized
Earlier this summer, Williams College “announced the appointment of Marc Gotlieb as the Class of 1955 Memorial Professor of Art and director of the Graduate Program in Art History, effective July 1. He succeeds Mark Haxthausen as director of the graduate program. Gotlieb is associate professor and chair of the department of fine art at [...]
13 June 2007 | Uncategorized
We’ll resume publication Tuesday, September 4. (If you’d like to receive an email when we do, write us.)
13 June 2007 | Architecture, Journals
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
7 June 2007 | Americas, Contemporary
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
31 May 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Renaissance
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
