4 October 2010 | Books, Modern, Museums
The Hungarian-British portrait painter Philip de László (1869-1937) has been the subject of a determined revival campaign led by some of the artist’s descendents. They have been creating a catalogue raisonné, organizing the artist’s archives, and sponsoring exhibitions and publications. The effort began bearing fruit in 2004 and culminated most recently in a National Portrait [...]
28 September 2010 | Americas, Modern
On The Atlantic‘s website, William Haseltine transcribes a recent talk by Museum of Fine Arts Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramirez: The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001 [...]
18 September 2010 | Africa, Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
Recently in the papers: Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National) On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan [...]
11 September 2010 | Modern
Last March, advised by Jonathan Fineberg and Ethel Kessler, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps reproducing works by the Abstract Expressionists.
4 September 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Museums, Photography
Recently in the papers: “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE) Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB) Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian) Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at [...]
2 September 2010 | Modern, Museums
One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”: He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification [...]
18 August 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Modern, Museums
Press clippings: Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews ?ur?i? and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog) “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously [...]
23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice: As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best [...]
The book Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment, an investigation of the artist’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), by Herbert Molderings, had already appeared in German and French, and is now available in English too. The book attempts to overturn the popular of image of Duchamp as an “artist-engineer-scientist,” arguing instead that he [...]
28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video). He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript: 1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the [...]
18 June 2010 | Architecture, Modern, Museums
In the June 24, 2010, New York Review of Books, Martin Filler reviews the “remarkable concatenation of survey exhibitions, monographic retrospectives, and their accompanying publications [that] marked the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus”: [T]he Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and [...]
Modern Art Notes is recommending summer reading on art. I’d add to his list Peter Read’s Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, which has just been re-issued in paperback. (Published in 2008, the book substantially revised the author’s original 1995 French version.) Writing in the Burlington Magazine in Nov 2008, Caroline Levitt called it [...]
3 June 2010 | Modern
Classiques Garnier Numérique (formerly known as Éditions Champion Électronique) has released a new online database (subscription required), “Writings on Art from the 18th to the 20th Century“: It brings together 61,000 pages, going from 1741 to 1927, gathering 72 authors and containing 169 titles. Esthetics, philosophy, art history, texts by painters and writers, but also [...]
In a recent issue of History of Photography (34:1), Jonathan P. Eburne reviews several recent books on surrealism and dada. He’s most taken with George Baker’s The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris: Baker’s mannered yet often luminous [book] represents a major contribution to the study of avant-garde art … [...]
24 May 2010 | Modern
Kline was born May 23, 1910. As far as I know, no exhibition was held or publication released to mark his centennial. Nor does he yet have a catalogue raisonné, apparently.
21 May 2010 | Journals, Modern
The CAA’s Art Journal has a new editor, Katy Siegel. I haven’t had a chance yet to look at her first issue, which is now out and apparently focuses on artists’ projects. Siegel has said, “While preserving its integrity as an academic journal, I want to make sure that every issue of Art Journal also [...]
From the Guggenheim: Kenneth Noland, 1924–2010: A Tribute May 21–June 20, 2010 A key figure of postwar abstract painting, Kenneth Noland explored the essential qualities of color and surface throughout a career that spanned six decades. Noland was born on April 10, 1924, in Asheville, North Carolina. He attended the nearby Black Mountain College on [...]
19 May 2010 | Americas, Architecture, Awards, Books, Modern, Museums, News
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has announced that it awarded the annual Eldredge Prize to Kirk Savage for his book Monument Wars. I should disclose that I am far from impartial on this topic–Savage was my advisor in graduate school. That said, I think that his book is notable as a model for future scholarship. Rather than framing the official monuments, [...]
12 May 2010 | Books, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
I am fascinated by the systems through which art is deemed legitimate, and I taught a course on fakes and frauds this past January. The premise was that we can learn about how art is produced, controlled, and valued by focusing on taboo objects. Sometimes such scrutiny will result in a reattribution, such as the one [...]
Also in the April 2010 Art Newspaper, Christopher Riopelle considers Susan Siegfried’s Ingres: Painting Reimagined: The past 15 years or so have been something of a golden age for Ingres studies. The central role that David played a generation ago in studies of the heroic origins of modern art has faded somewhat as scholars now [...]
