30 July 2010 | Uncategorized
An article in The New York Times reports that the Mount Sinai medical school admits a certain number of students each year who don’t have the traditional credentials (high MCAT scores and extensive coursework in biology, chemistry, and physics). This hampers the school’s U.S. News ranking, and a small percentage of these students subsequently drop [...]
28 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The Art Newspaper editor Anna Somers Cocks writes: [In 1944 London University agreed to] “maintain and preserve the Warburg Library in perpetuity, provide it with a suitable building near the university centre and keep it adequately equipped and staffed” … So why is the Warburg fighting for its life against London University? … There are [...]
19 July 2010 | Uncategorized
More on the history of American collectors from the L.A. Times: With names like Morgan, Getty and Huntington attached to impressive collections available for public view, the history of art collecting in America has acquired a new level of scholarly scrutiny … Art historians tend to concentrate on connoisseurship and aesthetics. That’s beginning to change. [...]
18 July 2010 | Uncategorized
Recently in the press: The Education of the Virgin (c. 1617), in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, has been reattributed by curator John Marciari to Velázquez. See Marciari’s article in Ars Magazine (full text not online); The Guardian; Los Angeles Times; El Pais. “Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings” at the [...]
1 July 2010 | Uncategorized
The 63-year-old actor Peter Weller, known best as RoboCop, recently completed Syracuse University’s MA program in Renaissance art (two-thirds of which is conducted in Italy) and he is now at work on a PhD at UCLA. He recently discussed his life in a commencement address at the City University of New York: I was inspired [...]
30 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From SMU: Following an international search, the Department of Art History at SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts today announced the appointment of Dr. Roberto Tejada as the new Distinguished Endowed Chair in Art History, effective August 1. The new endowed senior position was made possible by a generous anonymous gift of $2 million, intended [...]
29 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Economist: It was bad enough that an art exhibition attracted the attention of Russia’s criminal-justice authorities. It was worse that the exhibition was in Moscow’s Sakharov centre and museum, one of the few institutions in Russia that stands squarely behind the tradition of human rights, exemplified by the saintly physicist and dissident for [...]
28 June 2010 | Uncategorized
From Variety: Sam Waterston and Brian Murray will play an art historian and an art dealer, respectively, in the American preem of Simon Gray’s 2004 play “The Old Masters.” Production runs Jan. 19-Feb. 13 at New Haven’s Long Wharf theater … Script revolves around a 1937 meeting between Bernard Berenson (Waterston) and Joseph Duveen (Murray) [...]
24 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA reports on an agreement between the Getty Research Institute and ProQuest, a database service that also publishes ARTbibliographies Modern, Design and Applied Arts Index, and the International Index to Music Periodicals, to take over indexing of the International Bibliography of Art (IBA, the successor to BHA). ProQuest will distribute IBA content created by GRI—covering the years [...]
22 June 2010 | Uncategorized
Sir Adam Roberts of the British Academy has issued a report titled Past, Present and Future: The Public Value of the Humanities and Social Sciences that is sure to be useful for art historians wishing to bolster the credibility of our discipline. As was discussed in Art History Today, the report emphasizes “public” rather than [...]
20 June 2010 | Uncategorized
The Economist alerts its readers to the enduring Portuguese tradition of azulejos, “glazed ceramic tiles that were fashioned into narrative scenes.”
8 June 2010 | Uncategorized
CAA managing editor Christopher Howard reports on the recent art bibliography summit: With internet research ever increasing, especially among undergraduate students, the popularity-driven results of search engines must be countered with reliable sources of knowledge, said Elizabeth Mansfield of New York University … Since BHA covered only Western art—the founding editor Michael Rinehart noted that [...]
7 June 2010 | Uncategorized
In a recent issue of the journal of visual culture (8:2), “The Obama Issue,” the editors posed six questions to various contributors: Is Barack Obama the most “visible” U.S. president? What role did visual media play in the 2008 election? Why do commodities with Obama-inspired imagery sell so well? How did racial tropes influence depictions [...]
2 June 2010 | Uncategorized
British art historians are concerned that proposed changes to the system by which their universities are classified and evaluated could diminish the reputation of art history there. Incidentally, the 2008 evaluations are available online (scroll to page 97). The quality of these rankings and their methodology are of course up for debate. That said, see [...]
30 May 2010 | Uncategorized
Can art history be published, reported on, or otherwise communicated through the medium of the podcast? In logging many hours of commuting time, I have had reason to ponder this question.
20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
From Las Vegas Weekly: They were adored, fawned over, hated, respected, energizing and revered. They brought hope, insulted the city and loved the city. They were negative, positive, cherished and polarizing. And now they are leaving. Love or hate them, there is no arguing that Dave Hickey, famous art critic and genius-grant recipient, and Libby [...]
20 May 2010 | Uncategorized
On the lighter side, the Santa Barbara Independent reports that a recent debate at UCSB asked the audience to imagine that a zombie outbreak has taken society to the brink of extinction and UCSB, the only remaining safe house, has room to admit only one more member. Seven professors [from the departments of Education, Philosophy, [...]
18 May 2010 | Uncategorized
A recent issue of Master Drawings (XLVII: 4) notes the passing of Carlos van Hasselt: Carlos van Hasselt died on 19 July 2009 in Paris … [He retired] as director of the Fondation Custodia in 1994 [after] twenty-four years. Carlos was born on 7 April 1929 in Bergen-op-Zoom in Brabant, The Netherlands … [and studied] [...]
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 | 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 [...]
