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:
7 May 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the April 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper, Sylvia Ferino reviews Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-life Painting: Since the most recent exhibitions devoted to Arcimboldo, in Paris and Vienna in 2007-8, his composite heads of “The Four Seasons” series, 1573, in the Louvre are said to have become [...]
6 May 2010 | Conservation
Vasari’s “Last Supper” and the Ghent Altarpiece prepare to enter the conservation studio (thanks to the Getty) as the St Korbinian Altarpiece makes its exit.
6 May 2010 | Architecture, Medieval
A recent Bulletin Monumental (167-4) carries an obituary of Anne Prache (b. 1931), who died May 1, 2009. “A great figure in the history of art,” she was educated at the Ecole du Louvre and the Sorbonne, authored numerous books and articles, and eventually returned to the Sorbonne as professor of medieval art. She completed [...]
4 May 2010 | Contemporary, Journals
In a recent issue of Grey Room (n. 37), T.J. Demos writes …. In the journal October, art historian and critic David Joselit raises the seeming contradiction of discovering art that is critical toward consumerism in the very site of the commercial art gallery … [However] the potential of the gallery as a site of [...]
3 May 2010 | Uncategorized
From the Jerusalem Post: [The artist Avigdor] Arikha was also an art historian and published books on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and on the art of painting (Peinture et regard, 1991, On depiction, 1995). He also acted as curator for several exhibitions, including exhibitions of Nicolas Poussin and Ingres at the Louvre in Paris. Also among his [...]
30 April 2010 | Books
Using Amazon’s advanced books search, you can get something of a sense for which recent art books are selling best. For books published since January, it seems to be: 1. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century 2. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline 3. Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 4. Otto Dix 5. Alice Neel [...]
30 April 2010 | Conferences, Theory
From Idearte: The third annual Glasgow Colloquium on Art Historiography will be held in the Institute for Art History of the University of Glasgow 25th – 27th November 2010. Papers lasting 20 minutes are invited on formative moments, movements, institutions and individuals in accordance with the mission statement of the Journal of Art Historiography.
30 April 2010 | Uncategorized
The Winter 2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin is given over to a wonderful, amply illustrated article by Elena Phipps, “Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color.” As Met director Thomas Campbell notes in his foreword, “Cultures the world over and throughout history have valued the color red,” and much of the world’s red [...]
28 April 2010 | Ancient, Conferences
From Brown University: Brown University will host the Theoretical Archaeology Group from Friday, April 30 through Sunday, May 2, 2010. [This conference will address] the question of the place of archaeology – literally and figuratively. We have invited renowned scholars [Homi K. Bhabha, for example] from around the world to join with Brown faculty and [...]
28 April 2010 | Awards
Last month, Harvard art historian Joseph Leo Koerner was one of three scholars to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. “Intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life, the awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, honor scholars who have made significant contributions to [...]
27 April 2010 | Uncategorized
Apparently no one’s going to report on the recent art-bibliography conference in New York, alas. The L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight has asserted that the Getty shouldn’t be expected to shoulder the BHA alone: “Outside LA, art folks commonly (& mistakenly) assume the Getty can & should pick up the tab for everything. Get [...]
27 April 2010 | Journals
Apollo‘s new editor, Oscar Humphries, is profiled in The Telegraph: Humphries follows a long line of qualified art historian editors, such as Denys Sutton, Anna Somers Cocks, David Ekserdjian and, most recently, Michael Hall. His background, however, is more in the field of the art trade … and journalism … As such, he is probably [...]
It doesn’t get much more multicultural than this: an English-language book titled Travelling in a Palimpsest: Finnish Nineteenth-Century Painters’ Encounters with Spanish Art and Culture. It’s by Marie-Sofie Lundström and Clara Marcellán reviews it (in Spanish) in the Jan-Mar 2010 issue of Goya (“una exhaustiva reconstrucción”).
22 April 2010 | Books
In the January 2010 Burlington Magazine, Erika Langmuir reviewed the new edition of Bernardo De Dominici’s 1742 Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani edited by Fiorella Sricchia Santoro and Andrea Zezza: This is a heroic editorial enterprise, that restores to Bernardo De Dominici’s ambitious oeuvre … the dignity it deserves without, however, minimising those [...]
21 April 2010 | Americas, Modern
A catalogue raisonné will appear this fall for the early American abstract artist Manierre Dawson. According to its author, Randy Ploog, Dawson had never traveled further than Michigan, had no contact with progressive artists in Europe, New York or even his native Chicago … What prompted this young civil engineer to produce these groundbreaking paintings [...]
21 April 2010 | Ancient, Journals
As editor Naomi Norman explains in the January 2010 issue, the American Journal of Archaeology has added much more color to its pages and it has moved all of its book reviews online, where they can be read free of charge. Also online: exhibition reviews and a limited selection of journal content. (Off topic: It [...]
20 April 2010 | Africa
A recent issue of African Arts (Winter 2009) carries an obituary of Rosalinde Gregor Wilcox, a scholar of African art who earned her PhD from UCLA in 1994, at the age of 58, after studying with Arnold Rubin, Herbert Cole, and Doran Ross: She was critically aware but cautious in her writing. The canoe prows [...]
16 April 2010 | Awards
Numerous individuals who write on art received 2010 Guggenheim fellowships, an improvement from last year: Mr. Joshua Brown, Executive Director, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, CUNY: The visual culture of the American Civil War. Ms. Sharon E. J. Gerstel, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, University of California, Los [...]
16 April 2010 | Books
In Ingeborg Reichle’s Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer, 2009) — a revised and expanded English edition of her PhD thesis, which was published in German in 2004 — she asks, “Is science the new art?” In the same vein, the writer of her preface, [...]
15 April 2010 | Books
According to The Forward, in a new book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses Stephen H. Norwood describes the “utter destruction of the academic career of art historian Jerome Klein, one of the most popular teachers at Columbia, for publicly protesting Nazi crimes,” at the hands of Columbia [...]
