7 September 2007 | Americas, Modern
Are they genuine? Decide for yourself, now through December 9 at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art. From the Boston Globe: “‘There obviously remains a mystery here,’ said Claude Cernuschi, a BC art history professor and one of the show’s curators. Still, the 178-page catalog, also released yesterday, did contain some revelations. For example, although [...]
1 June 2007 | Modern
In the most recent issue of The Polish Review (LII: 1), Bozena Shallcross reviews Marek Bartelik’s Early Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity. Shallcross notes that at least three recent books “research the same area of Polish culture in its historical formation during the [1920s and 30s], focusing on its fascinating field of visual arts [...]
25 May 2007 | Modern
In the January 2007 Modern Language Review, Martina Lauster argues that Walter “Benjamin’s idea of the flaneur is not only of limited value for an understanding of the nineteenth-century urban experience, but can be seen positively to hamper it. This detrimental effect results from Benjamin’s dogmatic application of a high-modernist, aesthetic concept of self-loss, derived [...]
In the most recent Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne (n. 98), Véronique Goudinoux reviews Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art by Charles Harrison: “Can we agree that the question of sexual difference has played a role in the development of modern art since Manet, and if so, what role? … This [...]
The January 2007 issue of French Studies is devoted to “The Nineteenth-Century Art Novel.” In his introduction, guest editor Paul Smith writes that such novels often treated “the social and economic position of the artist, and the nature and gendering of creativity. The topoi of the genius and the raté also recur throughout. Several texts [...]
24 April 2007 | Modern
From the Barnes Foundation website: “The Board of Trustees of the Barnes Foundation has announced the award of a $5 million challenge grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation … [to] establish a permanent endowment to support scholarly activities … Among the initiatives that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded at the Barnes Foundation [...]
21 March 2007 | Modern, Museums
From The Virginian-Pilot: “‘It’s an understudied period,’ [curator Jeff Harrison] said, grinning because the Chrysler Museum of Art is able to exhibit what few Americans have seen: 19th century and early 20th century Spanish paintings. The show, which opened last week, contains about 65 works from the collection of New York City’s Hispanic Society of [...]
19 March 2007 | Modern
In the latest Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Patricia Mainardi discusses the invention of comics: “While the Swiss schoolmaster Rodolphe Töpffer is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the comic strip, no one has yet analyzed the development of the visual language of comics. This essay traces many of the signs, symbols, visual conventions and narrative strategies [...]
8 March 2007 | Ancient, Books, Modern, Theory
Numerous engaging book reviews can be found in the November 2006 issue of Art History (reviews editor Liz James). On John Henderson’s The Triumph of Art at Thorvaldsens Museum: ‘Løve’ in Copenhagen, writes: “Which of us, nowadays, would dare to declare our love for a monument as the motive for a scholarly study? John Henderson [...]
22 February 2007 | Modern, Museums
The controversial paintings that some attribute to Jackson Pollock have again been scheduled for exhibition, this time at the Boston College McMullen Museum of Art, in September of this year, according to the Boston Globe.
16 February 2007 | Conferences, Modern, News
“Now Really: Art and Theory of Realist Art in the 19th Century” has drawn about 150 people to another overstuffed room. Sura Levine sets about “redefining realism from a Belgian perspective.” Realism was coined to describe Courbet’s art, nonetheless it’s instructive to examine Belgium. Courbet called Belgium “my country,” befriended numerous individuals. Realism was a [...]
16 February 2007 | Conferences, Modern
In CAA’s blog, Benjamin Lima reports on the “Art History and Nazi Germany” panel: “In Germany, the National Socialist period lasted from 1933 to 1945. But to bracket Naziism within these years, and close the book there, would be all too easy an abdication of responsibility. This is the message that I took from the [...]
15 February 2007 | Conferences, Modern, News
In an over-stuffed Madison Suite (eighty people in about as many square feet), five papers are to be shoehorned into ninety minutes. According to Temma Balducci, Paris street life was dominated not by flaneurs, but by beggars, who were frequently lamented in the popular press and often depicted in paintings seen at the Salon. Beggars [...]
15 February 2007 | Modern, Museums
From the BBC: “A painting by the French artist Paul Cezanne that was lost for more than 60 years is to go on show in Italy. The picture disappeared after its last exhibition in 1945, before being found recently in a private collection by art historian Francesca Bardazzi. It will be shown from 2 March [...]
14 February 2007 | Conferences, Contemporary, Modern, News
About 120 people are here for the “Reframing Modernism” panel in the Hilton’s rather unmodern Trianon Ballroom, where bad lighting is making the slides near-impossible to see. One speaker, Jenny Anger, considers it still necessary to contest Michael Fried’s concept of “theatricality.” Among other things, she believes that there is a fascist element in modernism [...]
13 February 2007 | Modern, Museums
“Richard Brettell, the highly respected art historian at the University of Texas, Dallas … realized in conversations with French colleagues that Monet’s roots in Normandy, the coastal region through which the River Seine flows west of Paris, had never been deeply explored in an exhibition … in a key head-slapping revelation, Brettell was reminded by [...]
7 February 2007 | Journals, Modern
In the Winter 2007 October, Sarah K. Rich resurrects and analyzes a singular chapter in 1950s art criticism that saw various writers bitterly lament Jean Dubuffet’s use of butterfly wings in collage: “Why does he massacre butterflies to evoke effects he would better achieve with paint and brushes?” “[He] uselessly massacred hundreds of butterflies with [...]
4 February 2007 | Modern
Or not? Yawn, some say. But not headline writers: “Peering Into Pollock” “Owner sees red as Pollocks doubted” “Doubts Splatter 3 Pollocks” “Critics canvass Pollock doubts” “Purported Pollock Paintings: Still a Pickle” “The case of the zombie Pollocks” “Pollocks or bollocks?”
31 January 2007 | Modern, Museums
Cassandra Albinson reviews the Géricault show that appeared at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon last summer: “Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, [...]
14 December 2006 | Modern
From the AP: “A portrait by German expressionist Emil Nolde worth about €500,000 has been discovered more than 25 years after it went missing, a spokesman for Baden-Wuerttemberg state police said Friday. The oil painting ‘Nadja’ was discovered by an art historian who said he stumbled across it when cleaning out his attic and realized [...]
