14 March 2008 | Modern, Museums
If you’re interested in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European painting, you’re in luck. Current exhibitions tackle Courbet, Vlaminck, Vallotton (read here and here), women Impressionists (here and here), and the Barbizon School. Also read here about a lost Cézanne (rough English translation here).
25 February 2008 | Crime, Modern
From The Art Newspaper: Art historian and Modigliani specialist Christian Parisot is facing trial in Paris, accused of faking 77 drawings by Jeanne Hébuterne, the artist’s mistress and mother of his daughter, also called Jeanne … Mr Parisot told The Art Newspaper that … they are genuine and that they came from a clear-out of [...]
11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947. One interviewer notes that He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He [...]
14 December 2007 | Modern
The latest issue (n. 73) of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas is devoted to Brazil. Editor Nicolau Sevcenko writes that “Brazil is changing at a very fast pace … One of the best resources to face these turbulent new times and challenge their entropic trends is represented by the newly-expanded field of cultural [...]
13 December 2007 | Books, Modern
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Slavic and East European Journal, Douglas Greenfield reviews Maria Gough’s The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution, while Vlad Strukov reviews Christina Kiaer’s Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Greenfield writes: In her closely argued, challenging study, Maria Gough proposes to read Moscow Constructivism [...]
7 December 2007 | Books, Modern
Hans-Peter Riese reviews Andrei Nakov’s new four-volume study Kasimir Malewicz le peintre absolu: … On the other hand, [this book,] the result of Nakov’s decades-long research, can scarcely be overrated, and it finally moves this artist … to his rightful place among 20th-century artists, which is indisputably alongside Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian. In addition, Nakov [...]
6 December 2007 | Modern, Theory
The recently published book L’Œil-cerveau, written by Éric Alliez with the help of Jean-Clet Martin, seeks to understand modern painting in terms of “hallucination,” “a central notion for the nineteenth century that links artistic creation to ‘psychophysiological’ research”. “[Through close examination] of those works and statements constituting modern painting and the idea of modern art [...]
19 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Theory
In the most recent issue (40:5) of the provocative art-science journal Leonardo (Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology), Jan Baetens reviews Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture, edited by Patricia Johnson: This collection of essays is great reading … [it] opens new ground for the [...]
9 November 2007 | Books, Modern
Lea Vergine’s 1997 exhibition catalogue Trash, Quando i rifiuti diventano arte has been translated into English, as When Trash Becomes Art: TRASH rubbish mongo. It considers the use of trash by a wide variety of artists from Picasso, Tatlin and Marinetti to Mimmo Rotella, Louise Nevelson and Christian Boltanski. Vergine writes: … why did the [...]
7 November 2007 | Americas, Modern
In the July 2007 Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Andrea Pappas argues that, although abstract expressionism was marketed as an art of “timeless, ‘universal’ themes and subjects,” at least one of its artists had other things on his mind: The standard view of Rothko presents him as an artist who eschewed the particular, the local [...]
6 November 2007 | Books, Modern, Teaching
In CAA Reviews, Juliet Bellow has published an essay, “Surveying the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’: A Review of Art-History Textbooks in the Field,” that evaluates the following texts: 19th-Century Art by Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson (2005); 19th Century European Painting: David to Cézanne by Lorenz Eitner (2002); Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History by Stephen [...]
2 November 2007 | Modern
Yes, there is an entire journal devoted to La Celestina, the 15th century Spanish play attributed to Fernando de Rojas. It’s called Celestinesca and a recent issue (30) has an article by Carol Salus on “Some Early Celestina Drawings by Picasso.” The artist took an interest in the play at a time when it “was [...]
10 October 2007 | Asia, Modern
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India by Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin. Prasannajit de Silva writes: The idea of a second intellectual Renaissance in Europe, taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and driven by the arrival [...]
5 October 2007 | Modern
The July-August issue (no. 20) of FMR (available online) includes stunning photographs of Géricault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. The subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, the painting has also appeared recently (in one form or another) on the covers of The New Yorker and Harper’s, freshly relevant in the wake of the [...]
4 October 2007 | Books, Modern
In September 2007 Burlington Magazine, James Beechey reviews Elizabeth Cowling’s Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose: … this is a wholly engrossing book … Penrose’s private notes … reveal him at his sharpest and most sensitive: his insights into individual works are generally acute … As a tale of courtly love, as [...]
28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable? Skira [...]
26 September 2007 | Books, Modern
The top Independent Publisher Book Award in the fine arts category went to the first two volumes of the four-tome Eva Hesse, Catalog Raisonne. They were edited by Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, with Annette Spohn and Jörg Daur.
25 September 2007 | Modern, Museums
From the L.A. Times: [The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art keeps] the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S. Ruled by one of the [...]
20 September 2007 | Modern
Signandsight.com summarizes an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: For art historian Werner Spies, Cardinal Meisner’s comment on “degenerated culture” in his service Friday in the Cologne’s Cathedral (more here) merely gives voice to latent tendencies: the ignorance of the Catholic Church in face of modern art: “This attack on Gerhard Richter’s life’s work (the [...]
19 September 2007 | Modern
From the International Herald Tribune: A visit to the State Tretyakov Gallery’s newly updated permanent exhibition of 20th-century Russian art is as dizzying as the twists and turns of the country’s history and ongoing debates over post-Soviet national identity. It fills 42 halls of the museum’s Krymsky Val affiliate, a vast late Soviet-era labyrinth not [...]
