Justine Price, associate professor of art history at Canisius College, died unexpectedly of natural causes on October 24, 2011 in Buffalo, New York. She recently had been tenured and named director of the college’s art history program. Price’s knowledge and love of art were limitless, and her professional accomplishments extended beyond academia to the worlds of publishing and museums.

Beginning her art history studies at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.’92), Price earned a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Her dissertation, supervised by Richard Shiff, was titled, “Abstraction, Expression, Kitsch: American Painting in a Critical Context, 1936-1951.” Her work on American artists was published in edited volumes and catalogues. New scholarly directions focused on contemporary Polish photography, including recent collaborations with the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and a 2009 exhibition of Polish contemporary photography at Canisius College.

Before joining the faculty at Canisius College in 2005, Price had been engaged in curatorial and publishing pursuits. From 2001 to 2008, Price was a tireless researcher for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in New York, contributing to the catalogue raisonné under the direction of Jack Cowart, director of the Foundation. She also contributed to an exhibition on Roy Lichtenstein’s American Indian Paintings, and worked as an editor and director of photography for Bill Smith Studio in New York.

Price’s death at such an early stage in her career is an incalculable loss. A much beloved teacher at Canisius College, Price supervised dozens of undergraduate theses and internships. Students flocked to her classes and her reputation as a teacher led many on the college’s ice hockey team, the Golden Griffins, to enroll in her courses. She, in turn, found time to attend their games as one of their most devoted fans. At her memorial service at Canisius College, one of the team’s members remarked that since Price had not known much about hockey and the hockey team had not known much about art, “it proved to be a good relationship.” In the summer of 2011, Price led a group of Canisius students on a service mission to an orphanage in Zmiaca, Poland, where she made many new friends among the children.

Price leaves behind her mother, father, stepmother and younger sister as well as friends around the world who were nourished by her vitality, humor, and warmth. She also leaves a legacy and a challenge: a life well lived, in service to the things and people we love.

Matisse. Paires et séries eschews dense texts in favor of subtle installation techniques to activate the works’ mysteries. The walls provide just a short chronology, two quotations from the artist, and three explanatory panels, with no interpretation of individual works. The works seduce the eye, while their careful juxtaposition encourages thought. The viewer is invited to participate in the task Matisse set for himself early on—to merge sensation and cognition. “What I am after, above all, is expression. … Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings,” Matisse wrote in his 1908 “Notes of a Painter” (Translation Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, 1973).

In the first rooms, paintings treating the same subject are hung in two and threes. The paintings’ labels, which indicate studio locations and months or seasons, suggest that Matisse worked on these groups simultaneously or in rapid succession. The variety within themes is striking and instructive. The busy detail in both facture and narrative of the gray Pont Saint-Michel, Paris, Effect of Snow (c. 1900, Stiftung Sammlung E.G. Bührle, Zurich) seems downright Impressionistic compared to the roughly scumbled azure and turquoise sky that dissipates to gessoed canvas in the right edge of Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1900, Centre Pompidou, Paris) or the geometric planes of vivid color in Pont Saint-Michel (c. 1901, Santa Barbara Museum of Art). Clearly, something more than a simple recording of the changing seasons is at play here.

Matisse’s paintings, particularly their colors, lose much in reproduction. Seeing both versions of Le Luxe (1907; version I: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version II: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) illustrates his power to use color to express divergent visions of the same composition, as do the two versions of Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” (1912; version I: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; version II: Pushkin Museum, Moscow). Other pairings demonstrate how deeply Matisse engaged the issue of pictorial depth. The Cubist-inspired geometry and insistent flatness of Goldfish and Palette (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York) complicates the seemingly comfortable perspective of Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (1914, Centre Pompidou, Paris), and vice versa. Witness the way Matisse scratched away paint with a wood brush-handle in the New York picture, revealing a literal and illusionistic depth in its multiple layers.

Many of these paintings were never exhibited as pendants, but as Matisse. Paires et séries unfolds, it provides evidence that at least by the end of his career, Matisse wanted to reveal his creative process. The exhibition next turns to drawings that Matisse expressly created in series and published in the 1943 book Dessins: Thèmes et Variations. It reproduced seventeen series—eleven of women, six of still lifes—that Matisse made in the Hotel Régina in Nice during 1941 and 1942. The drawings are complete works of art in their own right, lyrical meditations on a theme. In series F, Matisse depicts a reclining woman from multiple angles across ten drawings, alternately zooming in and pulling back, even depicting her twice in one drawing. From the spare lines of the initial charcoal drawing, the artist adds detail in his arabesque-like pen and ink variations, before returning to an economical but energetic line in the final pencil drawings.

Matisse. Paires et séries presents the original drawings from series F, H, and M. They benefit greatly from their display on the gallery walls, uninterrupted by the act of turning the page or the need to rotate the large folio as the drawings’ orientations change. (A photograph reproduced in mural scale in the exhibition tellingly shows the original drawings tacked in neat rows and columns filling the walls of Matisse’s studio-apartment.) Seen here, the drawings seem much closer to the non-linear experience that Matisse must have had as he was creating them. The result suggests an artist constantly moving around his motif, responding to it differently, and changing his mind about how he sees and feels it. These suites of drawings read as poetic explorations of the world in all of its variations rather than strict progressions toward an ideal.

In the 1930s, Matisse began employing photographers to document the unfolding of his paintings. In December 1945 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, in addition to drawings and sculptures, Matisse exhibited six paintings, each surrounded by framed photographs of the various ‘states’. It seems certain that Matisse wanted to grant his audience a glimpse of his artistic process.

Matisse. Paires et séries reunites four of the Galerie Maeght paintings and reproduces the documentary photographs in a format that I found frustrating at first. Postcard-sized and displayed in a glass-topped table, they are difficult to see when the gallery is crowded. Worse, only two of the completed canvases are exhibited in the same gallery as the photographs. Yet the close looking borne of this situation ultimately led to discovery. Forced to rely on my memory to make comparisons, I examined the preparatory photographs carefully, marveling at the variety they divulged. The fourteen photographs chronicling Matisse’s process of painting The Romanian Blouse (Centre Pompidou, Paris), from 11 December 1939 to 23 April 1940, show a fascinating trajectory. It began as a representational, floridly detailed portrait in contours, until Matisse added and subtracted detail en route to the elegantly spare final version. When I finally looked at the completed canvas in the subsequent gallery, the experience was intense. It looked less like a static resolution than a pulsing, almost living entity. I could no longer see the earlier layers (although in other canvases, pentimenti do exist), but my memories of them indelibly infused its current incarnation. The constant balancing act Matisse waged between sensation, cognition, and expression—between seeing, thinking, and feeling—was palpable. The artist’s desire to “reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting,” suddenly made thrilling sense.

Matisse. Paires et séries concludes with a series of gouache cut-outs, Blue Nude I-IV (1952, version I: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel; versions II and III: Centre Pompidou, Paris; version IV, Musée Matisse, Nice). No label need tell you that the “fourth” version was made first: the flurry of partially erased charcoal lines on its support, as well as the many fragments of cut and layered paper composing the figure, betray a complex distillation of a motif, which is then subtly adapted in the other three variations. This final moment in the exhibition is both visually and intellectually powerful. It suggests that for Matisse, artmaking was not just teleology, a series of steps toward a beautiful picture, but also a deeply personal coming to terms with a world in flux. In his words, “I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.” By inviting us to look carefully at Matisse’s art, and to reflect on the personal quest it conveys, Matisse. Paires et séries gently encourages us to open our eyes and minds to new perspectives on our own experience.

Matisse. Paires et séries is on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through June 18, 2012. It will travel to Copenhagen’s Statens Museum for Kunst (July 14-October 28, 2012) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 2, 2012-March 17, 2013). A richly illustrated, 288-page French-language catalogue accompanies the exhibition in Paris. Edited by exhibition curator Cécile Debray, it includes short essays by scholars including Yve-Alain Bois, Éric de Chassey, Anne Coron, John Elderfield, Jack Flam, and Rémi Labrusse, as well as two conservation notes, on Le Luxe I and II and Nasturtiums with the Painting “Dance” I and II. An official iPad application devoted to the exhibition is also available for download.

Expect long lines and crowds. I recommend buying and printing tickets online in advance, and the evening viewing hours—it’s open until 10:50 p.m. Thursday to Monday. What better time to emerge from this exhibition than on a weekend night, when after-images of Matisse’s bright canvases will illuminate your dark walk home?

Art is neither created nor viewed in a vacuum. It is this notion perhaps that helped to inspire Vincent Bouvet and Gérard Durozoi in the organization of their recent book Paris Between the Wars 1919-1939: Art, Life and Culture. Bouvet and Durozoi’s effectively chosen subtitle prepares the reader to view the arts of the period in a set of wider contexts. With chapters discussing daily life in Paris, the history and experiences of this city, and the influential position held by the decorative arts, the authors subtly and effectively reframe their view of artistic life in this often-studied time and place. Tellingly, painting and sculpture are addressed together in the fifth chapter of the book, preceded by the chapters described above as well as “The World of Fashion.” With following chapters that discuss photography, film, advertising, literature, and music, readers are left with a strong understating of the cross-pollination endemic of artistic production in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

Nonetheless there are moments when the purpose of this inclusiveness is not entirely clear. Bouvet’s chapter “The City of Light” provides an overview of major infrastructure and civic development projects undertaken in Paris in the years after World War I. Each of these projects is treated briefly, as one might expect given the scope this book. Unfortunately what they meant for the development of the arts in Paris remains unclear. For example, Bouvet’s analysis of public transport in Paris discusses new motorways, the availability of air travel, and the development of Paris’ tram system. How did this mobility affect the production, display, or sale of art? Did it serve as a subject for art, or alter the consciousness of artists, or their sense of modernity? Certainly this new public mobility had effects on the lives of artists. Here, as in other areas, Bouvet and Durozoi have suggested areas of potential influence on the arts that may be further explored in more focused studies.

The second guiding principle of the book is to include an abundance of relevant, high quality images. Far from making the study into a picture-book, the images reproduced throughout the text serve to frame, inform, and illustrate the text quite effectively. For example, two color photographs of the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriel Modernes are displayed on pages 106 and 107. The photograph on page 106 shows the Porte d’Orsay entrance to the Exposition on what appears to be a quiet day. A few blurry figures stand near the entrance, while the sharply angled lighting and scattered leaves suggest early autumn. The entrance gate is overshadowed by a large decorative panel that is about 60 feet tall and decorated in a Cubist style. The image in this panel is composed of six figures arranged vertically, each representing one of the modes of art on display in the Exposition. The impressive scale of this entrance helps to underscore the powerful role that the 1925 Exposition has played in the development of both decorative and fine arts. Printed on page 107 is a color photograph showing two of the department store pavilions from the Exposition.  The distinctively Art Deco architecture and signage is familiarized by the green of the grass, blue tones in the sky, and sharp red fence demarcating space in the left background. That color photographs of high descriptive value survive at all from the 1925 Expo is remarkable. In the context of Bouvet’s chapter on the decorative arts, they help to bring the artistic experience described by the author closer to reality.

One of the great joys of studying history is the thrill of imagining living and operating in a different time and place. Though not often discussed by historians, this imaginary process is a great reward of deep archival and scholarly research. In the hands of Bouvet and Durozoi the reader’s imaginary experience is quite strong, supported by the numerous and descriptive images, and the ambiance of the everyday. Rich in quality images, thoughtfully organized, and lucidly written, Bouvet and Durozoi’s addition to the vast literature on Les Années folles is directed primarily at readers who are fairly new to its subject. Nonetheless I suspect that those who have studied the arts of the period will benefit from this text, and find its carefully selected images and broad overview of the experience of artistic Paris in the 1920s and 1930s rewarding.

Rooted in the discovery of thousands of snapshots in Edouard Vuillard’s family archive, the exhibition shows Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Henri Rivière Félix Vallotton as well as Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner and Belgian Henri Evenepoel to have been swept up in the craze for handheld cameras that seized the United States and Europe after the invention of the Kodak by George Eastman in 1888. By pairing over 200 of these photographs with 70 paintings, prints and drawings, “Snapshot” forces us to see the work of these artists through their respective engagements with photography.

Though visually exhausting, the sheer number of photos in the show conveys the explosion of images brought by the Kodak, and makes palpable the atmosphere of technological novelty. Aimed at cultivating a mass amateur market, Kodak cameras became a phenomenon in the 1890s by making everyday life a subject for photography. Marketed with the slogan “you press the button, we do the rest”, the Kodak freed consumers of the need for technical or aesthetic aptitude. Within reach of the middle-class consumer, the box cameras came loaded with a 100-exposure roll, and could be sent to a processing facility where the negatives were developed, the camera reloaded and mailed back to the owner. Indeed these devices seemed designed to prevent deliberate composition: held at the waist, the operator could only approximate the frame and focus through a distant viewfinder. As Clément Chéroux argues in the catalogue, the Nabis were not among the amateurs of the fin de siècle who formed photo-clubs and considered photography a hobby. Rather, these were photo-dilettantes who engaged in visual notetaking of daily life and social gatherings, comparable to today’s Facebook mobile uploads.

This artlessness would seem to place the snapshot at an almost inconceivable distance from the virtuosic manipulation of pigment and surface texture that, giving rise to indeterminate spatial and psychological scenarios, creates an almost synaesthetic effect in the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard. However by highlighting the snapshot’s contingencies of space, cropping, shadow and depth of field, as well as the intimate subject matter brought into view, we are given the sense that around century’s end photography had permeated these painters’ visual awareness in subtle and elusive ways. For instance Nude in an Interior (c. 1935) is a shimmering image of Marthe at her bath that displays Bonnard’s anguishing ability to emanate light from within his paintings. It bears a resemblance to the photograph of Marthe in a similar pose and setting hanging next to it, and we think that we have arrived at the source. However the snapshot, Marthe in the Bathtub, Vernouillet, was taken in 1910, and predates the painting by twenty-five years. In the case of Bonnard, who lost interest in photography in 1916, the snapshot seems to have been a brief preoccupation with questionable authority over the chromatic and spatial investigations that he sustained into the middle of the last century.

Relationships between painted and photographic images are conjured and troubled throughout the exhibition. Vuillard’s Child Playing: Annette in Front of a Wooden Chair (1900) is emblematic of his signature conflation of the subject’s absorptive experience with a patterned interior. Its relation to the strikingly similar snapshot hanging next to it of a boy sitting in a room draped with correspondingly decorative arabesques seems clear, but the photograph was taken by Evenopoel – the Belgian who was included in the exhibition because of his thematic and stylistic convergence with the Nabis.

The final room presents the highlight of the exhibition: a suite of paintings by Vuillard paired with snapshots from the cache discovered in his family archive. Even here, the relationship between his camerawork and painted interiors is mostly a matter of conjecture. In a series of lively snapshots Misia Natanson – wife of Revue blanche editor Thalée Natanson– mugs for and returns Vuillard’s plainly infatuated gaze. However, in the corresponding painting, In Front of the Tapestry: Misia and Thalée Natanson, Rue St. Florentin (1899), her face is obscured and turned away from view. Thalée’s hand likewise covers his face, and the two figures merge into a muted decorative scheme that belies the emotionally fraught scenario. The famous Interior with Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) creates a spatial and psychological claustrophobia that is echoed in the surrounding snapshots of Vuillard’s family apartment, yet the painting predates Vuillard’s engagement with photography by two years. Can it be argued that photography affected Vuillard’s painting before he owned a camera?

The Nabis are often associated with a hermetic retreat from the disruptions of modern life into an aesthetics of bourgeois interiority. Recently, T.J. Clark has held up this aestheticism as an alternative to the 20th century’s legacy of avant-garde negation. By conjuring “a sense of what the aesthetic existence keeps at bay”, Clark writes “Bonnard’s art, in its privacy and privation, internalizes the disaster of the twentieth century in a way that all forms of ‘modern’ fellow-travelling – even the noblest and most well-meaning – to my mind fail to do. Retreat and dream, in other words, are a necessary moment of the art of the last hundred years.” However the comparison that “Snapshot” solicits with the circulation of images in present-day forms of social media suggests that, beginning with the Kodak, this aestheticist retreat was becoming less and less possible, and that one could not return to a form of painting that was unaware of photography. The snapshot, as Douglas Nickel writes, changed “the way people regarded their own histories…the way lives were lived became entangled in the way lives were represented. A modern society of the spectacle was taking shape.”

Could these artists have been aware of the historical implications of this vast expansion of image production at the end of the 19th century? The tension in “Snapshot” between handmade and mechanical images gives a sense that the stakes for art were becoming clear. Though they thrilled to the snapshot in life, the ambivalence of the Nabis’ painted response anticipates Walter Benjamin’s judgment of 1931: “the amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure than the hunter who comes back with quantities of game that is useless to anyone but the merchant. And the day does indeed seem to be at hand when there will be more illustrated magazines than game merchants. So much for the snapshot.”

Wednesday, February 22

I took a flight from JFK at the crack of dawn, to arrive in time for “The Challenge of Nazi Art.” This was the only panel, other than my own, that I attended from start to finish. The opening remarks by Christian Fuhrmeister made it clear that the organizers wanted to open a dialogue about something that art historians have found it almost impossible to discuss, something I have also struggled with as a scholar of Weimar-era photography and exhibition culture. I was particularly drawn in by Despina Stratigakos’s visual evidence of how domestic design was pitched to young Nazi couples, and that what we think of “modernism” still seeped into much of that design, eliminating an easy bifurcation. Former CAA president Paul Jaskot, a great, natural speaker, spoke about the concept of “banality” and the need for art historical analysis of the era’s cultural products. More provocative questioners may have been intimidated by the largeness of the (double) room, but all in all it was a highly thought-provoking panel.

Thursday, February 23

Packed day. I spoke first thing in the morning, about “Radical Photo Spaces” at a session called “The Other Histories of Photography: The First 100 Years.” I thought our turnout was impressive, considering the time and that we were unfortunately competing with another session on photography (“Photographic Practices in Latin America”) and a video/film themed session that I was pining for (“Mobile Spectatorship”). I enjoyed going last: I think it’s a law of physics that you get the most questions—when I spoke in Chicago two years ago I went second-to-last and got zero questions! But the crowd was clearly interested in one of the main points of the session as a whole, which was how to bring attention to alternative photo practices that have been left out of the canon, and whether that can directly impact how photography is shown in museums now. Consensus seemed to be: yes, but it still doesn’t happen often enough. It’s always invigorating when the historical feels relevant to the audience.

After lunch I finally got to “curate” a time slot for myself, 2:30-5. I started at the standing-room-only Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Rosalind Krauss. Bois did an affectionate opening, and I stayed for Harry Cooper, which I loved, to hear how a practicing curator was influenced by her scholarship, particularly on sculpture. Then I exited to support a former peer of mine from the CUNY Graduate Center, Cary Levine, who was speaking about Pettibon and hardcore punk in a session called “Towards a Rock and Roll History of Contemporary Art” which sounded almost too cool, but Cary did a great job of integrating Pettibon’s subversive Zine imagery with the music of California punkers Black Flag. It brought back memories of my childhood in San Diego in the 1980s when more sophisticated kids were wearing those T-shirts in seventh grade while I still thought “punk” was a playground slur. Although pretty beat, I finished at the HGCEA session (Historians of German and Central European Art) to show fealty, as a member to an organization co-founded by my dissertation advisor, Rose-Carol Washton Long. And speaking of HGCEA, there was a super-cool dinner for members that same evening on the top floor of a downtown theater space, a space so raw that it looked like someone had just torn down some scenery from the walls. Very hip for HGCEA!

Friday, February 24

The morning session was another case of me bopping around. I went to “Live Forever: Performance Art in the Changing Museum Culture” and watched Pablo Helguera, the first speaker, upend the normal mode of speaking from the podium, which was mesmerizing. He engaged with an historical topic (why a preponderance of creative minds all came from a particular small town in Mexico) but turned all the lights off, put a spotlight on himself, and spoke in the middle of the room— a performance-paper hybrid. Kudos to him for thinking outside the box (throughout the conference he also took part in graduate-seminar style gatherings that were open to the public, another very cool way to push for feedback through new models of learning). I made brief stops at “The Modern Gesamtkunstwerk” and the Radical Art Caucus session, before moving on to my shift at the Book Fair table of the Women’s Art Caucus, to try to sell copies of my now-in-paperback The New Woman International, co-edited with Elizabeth Otto. People were not in heavy-duty buying mode, but many flyers and review copies were distributed, which is always a good thing, and these tables become places to discourse with long-lost friends. Once our shift was over at 1pm, I noticed another publication table giving away free food and drink, and ran into grad school classmates who had scattered across the country. That evening my husband, daughter and I met up with my cousin JD Walsh who is now a television actor and director, so we really had the whole breadth of the LA experience, not least of which was staying at the Biltmore, the most glamorous convention hotel ever.

Saturday, February 25

I only attended morning sessions so that we could take my daughter to Disneyland. I was particularly enthused by Kim Sichel’s paper in Jordana Mendelson’s session, “The 1930s,” where she focused on Brassaï’s book Paris de nuit. All forms of alternative (meaning outside canonical museum presentation) photography circulation fascinate me at the moment, including those in books, and Sichel showed Brassaï’s images as they appeared in the original publication, with full bleeds, even spilling over onto the steel spirals—gorgeous. In keeping with my attempt to see as many diverse photo-based papers as possible, I made a last minute dip-in to “Pop and Politics, Part II” to hear Martin Berger talk about Warhol’s Race Riots. This session proved to me that yes, going to CAA can be important to reinvigorate old talking points in lectures to our students. I use Race Riots routinely in my history of photo lectures but I had never closely contemplated the contemporaneous meaning of the word “Riot” before: that although Warhol seems sympathetic to the protesters in his images, the use of the word “Riot” was actually considered quite incendiary and helpful to the anti-protester position. So the images are, at best, ambivalent. Thank you Martin Berger!

All in all, I would say it was a most stimulating CAA, although I have heard some differ. Maybe I got into it because, as a colleague said to me, it was “a great CAA for Germanists.” But mostly I think it fulfilled what we should expect from these gatherings: new ideas, old friends, and a reminder of why we do what we do.

The first paper, presented by Allan Doyle, explored the tensions inherent in Xavier Sigalon’s copy of Michaelangelo’s “Last Judgment” and examined some of the post-Enlightenment controversies over the role of creativity versus academic instruction. Demonstrating that originality and copying were not always mutually exclusive, Doyle shed light on a widespread, too often-ignored nineteenth-century phenomenon that formed an integral part of that century’s artistic practice and vision. This paper was followed by Jeremy Melius’s eloquent analysis of John Ruskin’s “Ariadne Florentina” lectures delivered in 1873-76 during his Slade Professorship at Oxford. Melius convincingly argued that even on the level of language, Ruskin’s analysis of a set of Florentine prints (erroneously attributed to Botticelli at the time) betrayed his deep investment in historicity and his conception of art as a living embodiment of the past that self-consciously allegorizes its own relationship to history. Lastly, Sarah Schaefer’s fascinating discussion of Gustave Doré’s Biblical illustrations touched on the often-neglected topic of the fate of religious imagery in Modernity. Arguing that Doré’s illustrations aspired to create a “transnational” and “pandenominational” Modern Judeo-Christian visual vocabulary through the incorporation of new media and new modes of representation, Schaefer claimed that Doré attempted to forge a new sense of piety and spirituality in the face of Modernity’s constant flux and fragmentation.

Taken together, these three papers persuasively staged Modernity’s “other” side by raising questions of past artistic heritage, restoration, revivalism, historicity, spirituality and the fate of religious imagery – subjects that are typically left out of nineteenth-century art historical narratives. As with last year’s session, the 2012 “Future Directions in Nineteenth-Century Art History” panel demonstrated the continuing and very welcome thematic and geographic expansion of the field beyond the standard Franco-centric accounts of the ascension of the avant-garde.

The scope of the panel was wide, but was thematically organized around various interpretations of the ‘spiritual.’  First up was Linda Dalrymple Henderson who pointed out how pervasively the scientific understanding of the early 20^th century, along with various occult themes, informed Kandinsky’s writing on art.  Even after Einstein’s special theory of relativity had made the whole conceptual apparatus of the ether vacuous, Kandinsky seems to have relied heavily on the notion as means and a medium for expressing spirituality.  This also helps explain how Kandinsky could liken the effects of color on the human consciousness to musical vibrations.

Sarah Warren discussed some of the political consequences of the ‘spiritual’ in her presentation, which is an avenue not often pursued in Kandinsky scholarship.  In the main, Warren did a fantastic job of connecting Kandinsky’s sense of the new spiritualism in modern art to his interest in medieval icons.  For many early modernists, Kandinsky among them, primitive folk art could serve as a transitional bridge to modernism.  This was politically problematic, however, insofar as Russia’s Nicholas II attempted to turn such icons to his political advantage by using them as a means of aligning himself more closely with the people.  But theosophy, which Kandinsky was influenced by, had been suppressed by the Russian state.  In so doing, Nicholas II had also revealed the falseness with which he identified himself with icon imagery.  Both theosophy and icon art shared the common tenet that there is a hidden, spiritual meaning to be discovered in reality, and a rejection of the former amounted to a rejection of the latter.

The next panelist was yours truly.  The scope of my presentation was part historical, part philosophical.  One of the essential tensions that runs through Kandinsky’s text is between materialism and spiritualism, which I describe as the problem of positivism and the problem of life respectively.  In broad terms it is a statement about the sort of epistemological claims that science and art are capable of making.  Part of Kandinsky’s rejection of materialism can be seen, at least in part, as a rejection of the positivistic epistemology that undergirds some forms of the scientific endeavor—especially when that epistemological standard is used as a means of addressing the question of the value of life (which was a thoroughly spiritual, and thus artistic affair for Kandinsky).  It is also pertinent to note the degree that this tension permeated the intellectual atmosphere of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, especially in the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

Todd Cronan was the final panelist, but was unfortunately not able to attend.  His paper was read by Charles Palermo.  Cronan focused on what he terms the ‘affective formalism’ in Kandinsky’s work.  This doctrine asserts, roughly speaking, that a work of art is not a vessel in which the artist inserts his or her internal feelings.  Rather, Kandinsky believed that the artist and the artwork should serve as a conduit for expressing a ‘sense of the world’ which would become manifested in the painting.  Thus the viewer, as a receiver of this sense of the world, was an essential component in this equation.  And even though Kandinsky was committed to the interpretation of the beholder as being more-or-less equivalent to the art work’s meaning, he seems to contradict himself by also simultaneously holding the opposite position—namely, that the artist should give no consideration to the response of the viewer.

This session was well attended; approximately 75-100 people were in the audience.  Perhaps this is a signal that the question of the spiritual in art (which has been somewhat lacking in postmodernism) is due for a reawakening.

the sudden and entirely unexpected death yesterday, at the age of 66, of John House, Emeritus Professor of the Institute. One of the pre-eminent scholars of nineteenth-century French art of his generation, John served The Courtauld with great distinction from his appointment in 1980 up until his retirement as the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in 2010.

(Read our coverage of the other CAA Barr Award finalists: Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance and Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250–1500.)