A new thousand-page tome edited by political scientist Klaus von Beyme collects artist letters, journal entries, statements and manifestoes written from 1905 to 1955, an era in which Goethe’s Zappa-esque admonishment (“Bilde, Künstler! Rede nicht! Nur ein Hauch sei dein Gedicht”) was regularly ignored, writes reviewer Christoph Heinrich in Die Zeit. Artists had never been [...]
23 March 2006 | Journals, Modern
In “The Journal des Dames et des Modes: Fashioning Women in the Arts, c. 1800-1815,” which appears in the latest issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Heather Belnap Jensen asserts that contrary to received opinion “women increasingly engaged in the art world as both producers and consumers during the Napoleonic period … Women’s journals, which often [...]
22 March 2006 | Modern, Museums
Artnet reports that the Whitney Museum “has announced plans for ‘Picasso and American Art,’ Sept. 28, 2006-Jan. 28, 2007. Organized by Michael FitzGerald, a professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and coordinated by Whitney associate curator Dana Miller, the show includes nearly 40 works by Picasso and another 130 works by American artists, largely focusing [...]
Donald Kuspit is publishing his “Critical History of 20th-Century Art” entirely online (in installments). Is this because, as Doug Harvey wrote a year ago, it’s become “difficult to imagine a position more alienated from the mainstream canon of contemporary art theory [than Kuspit's]“? Kuspit’s opening lines: “‘The real problem of modernity is the problem of [...]
13 March 2006 | Conferences, Modern
“Six of the world’s pre-eminent Jackson Pollock scholars will converge at Williams College [Museum of Art] on May 13 to discuss the artist’s work in a rare symposium, the museum’s director said Wednesday. The gathering will be highly unusual, particularly in light of the recent controversy over 32 previously unknown Pollock works discovered in 2003 [...]
10 March 2006 | Modern
According to the Tate, recent x-radiography “of the full-scale sketch for View on the Stour near Dedham, painted by Constable in 1821-2, has revealed a number of significant compositional alterations including three figures in the foreground that are not visible on the surface of the work.” Conservator Sarah Cove remarks: “There has been much speculation [...]
26 February 2006 | Conferences, Modern, News
Contributor Anne Byrd reports: “At Saturday morning’s Minimalism and the Common Culture panel, Anna Chave ground her Rosalind Krauss axe, while younger scholars Mitte Gieskes, Dominic Rahtz, and Nina Murayama offered historical readings of minimalism: Gieskes’s paper was a nuanced (if, as one questioner suggested, somewhat uncritical) discussion of Carl Andre, theories of contingency such [...]
23 February 2006 | Modern
According to the AP, Ellen Landau “is convinced that 32 works found by the son of a Pollock friend were created by the artist, despite debate about their origin.” At CAA today she is unveiling “the results of more than a year of her own research.”
21 February 2006 | Books, Modern
To her surprise, Aruna D’Souza found much to like in Wayne Andersen’s “madcap” Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine (one of several books on the artist she reviews). Andersen’s idea “that there is an almost evolutionarily conditioned, instinctual ‘beauty constant’ that drives the representation of idealized femininity” allows him to conclude that “certain key images in [...]
17 February 2006 | Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Susan Fillin-Yeh, editor of Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (2001), and contributor Robert E. Moore cross swords with Christopher Reed over his 2002 review. (Why so late?) Fillin-Yeh: Reed “so misses the point that he does not even recognize the book’s subject for what it is, an expanded definition [...]
17 February 2006 | Modern, Museums
Kenneth Silver and Carol Ockman said that they felt “inhabited by Bernhardt” when they assembled the exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama” for The Jewish Museum, contributor Ross Finocchio reports. They spoke last night at NYU’s Maison Française, drawing laughs as they excitedly described Bernhardt (1844–1923) as a deft manipulator of her own [...]
17 February 2006 | Modern, Museums
“Aix’s role has often been dismissed … either ignored or reduced to the simplistic picture of a ‘self-taught’ Cézanne or the harsh diatribes of Zola, Paul Alexis, and Cézanne himself. Did Cézanne really not begin to live until he arrived in Paris in 1861?” writes Bruno Ely in the catalogue to the National Gallery’s Cézanne [...]
16 February 2006 | Modern
He’s “one of four scholars of the humanities to receive” one, “worth up to $1.5 million.” Next two books: Poussin and Picasso.
15 February 2006 | Journals, Modern
The Winter 2006 Critical Inquiry ranks the authorities most commonly cited by the journal’s authors at each stage in its 32-year history. Most popular in 1974-9: Ernst Gombrich, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes and Wayne Booth. 1999-2004: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Current editor W.J.T. Mitchell comes in [...]
15 February 2006 | Modern
In the Winter 2005 Art Journal, several Latin American critics present papers that “take an often radically different stance on the intricate relationship among modernism, modernity and modernization.” “When it comes to modernism, the United States continues to suffer from a distressing provincialism … In case you are thinking ‘beating a dead horse’ … count [...]
