Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany and Her Circle

Darielle Mason, ed., Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Xiaoneng Yang, ed., Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-Century China

I have all three books in hand and hope to write something on each in short order. First up: “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,” published last year by Yale. “Mrs. Delany” is Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700-1788), who “embarked upon a series of nearly a thousand botanical collages … that would prove to be the crowning achievement of her rich creative life.” Although I find Delany’s art remarkable, I was frankly amazed that the curators marshaled and found the funds to publish a full eleven authors on this subject, including prominent figures such as Amanda Vickery — considering that Delany had more or less fallen off the map after receiving a flurry of interest in the 1980s. Apparently, “workshops, symposia, and archival visits undertaken in pursuing research for the exhibition” helped drum up the contributors. Biographical notes on them would have been a welcome addition to the catalogue; one has to go to Clarissa Campbell Orr’s website to discover that she is writing a Delany biography for Yale. This is a handsome, sumptuously illustrated and seemingly scrupulously produced catalogue (although I did find trivial goofs — for example, one entry in the bibliography is followed by “Delete? Not found”; after another one finds “CK-include?”). Most importantly, it appears that all of the contributors have done original research of interest to specialists and laypeople alike.

Lisa L. Moore reviewed the catalogue and its exhibition for Eighteenth-Century Studies:

The exhibition catalogue as a whole is an indispensable reference … Eighteenth-centuryists in particular, however, will appreciate the meticulous attributions, index, and bibliography that allow the book to be used as a kind of who’s who of Delany’s slice of eighteenth-century court culture. The fourteen essays collected here, including a valuable introduction by each of the curators, report expert research on many facets of Delany’s achievements, from fashion to natural history and painting to zoology. Unfortunately nothing was included about her biting, satirical literary voice sustained over decades … Of particular interest to scholarship are two appendices, a concordance identifying Delany’s botanical illustrations by the modern scientific names of the plants and the first-ever publication of Delany’s manuscript novel Marianna. Indeed, it was for purposes of this exhibition that the British Museum finally put all 976 of Delany’s collages online.

Although Delany naturally takes center stage in the catalogue, feminism’s general role in contemporary art history also surfaces as a topic of discussion. Weisberg-Roberts writes in her introduction:

The artistic dimension of Mrs. Delany’s work has also been obscured by the value judgment prevalent in much art-historical writing, which tends to undervalue women artists, amateurs, and the so-called minor arts … Traditional art history has focused on the work of (predominantly male) professional artists and on works in privileged media (such as painting and sculpture) … [even in] many progressive approaches that have championed the relevance of social-historical and gender-based analyses to the history of eighteenth-century art.

Vickery notes in her essay, “The Theory & Practice of Female Accomplishment,” a wide-ranging and deep meditation on the decorative arts:

Feminist art historians have been ambivalent … uncertain whether “in embracing activities like flower painting or quilt making as women’s separate but equal artistic heritage, we risk reinforcing the hierarchy of values in art history and art practice that has worked to marginalize these activities as craft” … Be warned, sniffs Germaine Greer, if you insist on viewing Delany’s paper mosaics at the British Museum, as “you could end up profoundly depressed by yet more evidence that, for centuries, women have been kept busy wasting their time” … Nevertheless, their decorative craftwork deserves more serious consideration … Men valued women’s productions highly enough to pay for them to be framed expensively in mahogany, suggesting that gentlemen appreciated ladies’ work far more than modern historians have done.

Hans Hubach considers the exhibition catalogue to Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor:

Following the great success of his Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), Thomas Campbell has once again succeeded in satisfying the high level of aspiration and great expectations of the professional world … Campbell was able to enlist the most renowned international experts … [The] texts represented the current state of research, and even partly defined research in a new way … [This is] an excellent example of how public appeal and a high academic standard need not be mutually exclusive.

Nello Forti Grazzini considers Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court:

The book under review, excellent for its content and sumptuous graphics, represents a mature synthesis and, for the moment, a provision conclusion to an extremely fruitful period of research … The result is extraordinary, and Campbell’s book, which is among the most beautiful ever written on the subject of antique tapestries, ends by offering much more than its title promises.

When The New Yorker‘s Rebecca Mead asked Campbell last year if he’d miss doing scholarship, he replied, “I’ll get back to it eventually.”

Born in Trier, Germany, Rosenthal came to the College in 1997. She was an expert on 18th and 19th century art and culture and “British art within a global perspective” … She also specialized in cultural history, studying gender and feminism in art … Rosenthal wrote two books and a number of essays about Angelica Kauffman, a Swiss-born artist who is viewed as one of the most prominent painters of the 18th century … She also authored a book about English-born artist William Hogarth and studied the portrayal of slaves in art … Rosenthal attended Trier University, where she received her PhD, and the University of London.

Reviewing Rosenthal’s 2006 “gorgeously illustrated and well-researched book,” Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility for caa.reviews, Meredith Martin wrote:

Rosenthal significantly advances the current scholarship on Kauffman by offering new approaches to analyzing the artist’s relationship with her patrons, with other artists, and even with herself—the last of these as evidenced in the numerous and protean self-portraits Kauffman painted throughout her career. The author makes perhaps her strongest contribution in chapter 1, where she examines Kauffman’s series of history paintings based on Homer’s Odyssey. As the first scholar to interpret these more than a dozen scenes as a group, Rosenthal elucidates their differences from the prevailing conventions of Neoclassical history painting … In Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility Rosenthal has made an important contribution to the scholarship of an artist who has only in recent decades had her reputation justly restored. Rosenthal has rendered Kauffman’s life and work as complex and contradictory as the times in which she lived. By making Kauffman’s oeuvre even “richer and stranger” than we once had thought, Rosenthal fulfills a criteria to which all good feminist writing should aspire.

[W]ho built this myth and what strategies have been generated to keep it going down through the centuries, through many different regimes, ideologies and governments? This exhibition … is a meticulous examination of the relation between the Hispanic myth and its principal survival strategy: the baroque … The show [examines] these questions from the viewpoint of contemporary creation, one of the principal heirs to this myth-making narrative. Using cinema, videos, documentaries, animation and installations, the exhibition presents visitors with some alternatives in the debate on the relations between art and power in societies submerged in conflicts of historical memory. The show is the product of six years of research in Spain, Mexico, Peru and Chile, countries of great cultural and socio-political diversity and complexity that have helped by their example to dilute the myth of Hispanic homogenization.

Exhibits address the Prado’s 1990 exhibition of the painter Diego Velázquez; “the great diversity of opinions found in Spain and Latin America surrounding themes such as education, Spanish diplomacy, the tourist market and the myths of religion, language and festival”; the Museo del Pueblo, “an initiative dating from 1931-1936 … to familiarize the people with the works of the great painters in the form of a travelling exhibition”; and “images of the Euro 2008 [soccer] final between Germany and Spain, and reactions in the press all over the country, a literary storm of patriotism and progress once the “curse” of the quarter-finals was a thing of the past.”

CCCB director Josep Ramoneda writes in his catalogue preface (pdf):

[T]he success of the baroque lies in its capacity to penetrate the different strata of the cultures of the conquered America, to create a degree of complicity around it that has made credible the idea of an art for everyone: colonisers and colonised. It could be said that the baroque was an artistic ideology of the State that had the good fortune to be recycled by the people who had been colonized and who made it their own, thereby becoming a shared aesthetic space, above and beyond dysfunctions and different viewpoints …

Of course, the curators’ task involved dealing with an inevitable question: why have we always avoided making a critical reassessment of this issue? The baroque has enabled us to keep certain political myths alive, myths that all parties considered beneficial. It has even resulted in erroneous interpretations that have made the popular traditions of conquered countries the driving force behind this style.

• In the Economist, reviews of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate, and Bronzino at the Palazzo Strossi.
• In the FT, Jackie Wullschlager on four books on Caravaggio (Strinati, Fried, Graham-Dixon, Schütze).
• At the NYRBlog, a teaser of Willibald Sauerländer’s article on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.
• In the Guardian, Rosemary Hill on the pre-Raphaelites and Italy at the Ashmolean, and Alan Hollinghurst on Gauguin at Tate Modern.
• James Elkins debuts a column at the Huffington Post, with an installment on Mondrian.*
• In the NYT, Janet Maslin reviews R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf).
• At BadAtSports, a podcast with Elkins on “Beyond the Aesthetic and Anti-Aesthetic.”
• At SpiegelOnline, a review of Thorsten Klapsch’s book on Berlin’s Palast der Republik.

* This is the single best use of the internet public sphere to communicate disciplinary expertise that I have seen. The HP is a general-interest publication, but the topic of this column isn’t simply criticism, still less auction price/scandal/etc. Rather, it is a (brief) piece of serious, detailed analysis with excellent illustrations. I hope HP readers will be tempted to click away from the slide shows on Bristol Palin, Miley Cyrus and Minka Kelly, and over to Elkins.

• 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 Jones and slide show (The Guardian); Mark Hudson (Financial Times); Rachel Campbell-Johnston (The Times); Waldemar Januszczak (Sunday Times); London press roundup
• On Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel at the V&A: Souren Melikian (New York Times); Jonathan Jones (Guardian); Martin Gayford (Telegraph)
• PD Smith on Mark Hudson, Titian: The Last Days (The Guardian); Keith Miller (The Times), Serena Davies (The Telegraph)
• James Hall on Salvator Rosa at Dulwich Picture Gallery (The Guardian)
• Jed Perl on Susan Lake, Willem de Kooning: The Artist’s Materials (The New Republic)
• Martin Herbert on Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (The Telegraph); cf. Gayford on Freud’s Bacon (Bloomberg)
• The Economist on Damien Hirst
• On Umberto Eco on beauty: Arthur Krystal (Harper’s/Powell’s); Mike Phillips (The Guardian); cf. Nicola Copping on Roger Scruton, Geoffrey Jones, and Carol Dyhouse (Financial Times)

I cannot say that I knew what it was at first glance, but I knew that it was worth puzzling out. In the parlance of curators and art dealers, the work was by someone; it was attributable. Not only was it a work of great quality, but the painting was so confidently executed that it seemed to bear the signature style of a particular artist … [O]ne day, as I stood in front of the painting, it all fell into place in an instant. I distinctly remember the moment and my thoughts: “Wait. No. I know exactly what this is! This is early Velázquez! This is just like the Tavern Scene at the Hermitage, the picture in Edinburgh, the Saint Thomas in Orléans, and the group in London. This is just like everything in the Velázquez in Seville exhibition catalogue.” Everything was familiar: the drapery arranged in heavy folds, the naturalism of the figures and still-life elements, the way the figures emerged from the dark, the color palette. Even some of the faces seemed to be those of the models used for other paintings. I immediately told myself I was insane … Research adds support to the hypothesis that the work is by Velázquez, but there is not—nor should we expect there to be—a paper trail that connects the Yale canvas to a contract signed by the painter. The final judgment about the Yale painting requires a leap of connoisseurial faith … [T]he attribution will only be decided over time, as scholars have a chance to study the painting and give it their own long consideration.

• “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 the National Gallery (WSJ)
• Bill Brubaker, “In Haiti, the Art of Resilience” (Smithsonian); also, “Art After the Quake,” a slideshow of works by Haitian artists (New Yorker)
• Hilton Als, Angus Cook and Peter Doig, “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master,” (NYRB)
• Edmund White reviews Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery (NYRB), and Richard B. Woodward reviews Dennis Hopper: Double Standard at L.A. MoCA (WSJ)
• Daniel Siedell on Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Books & Culture)
• George Johnson reviews Craig Childs, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession (NYT)
• Michael Dirda reviews Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss (WP), on a particularly poignant netsuke collection

• 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 at NYU and reviewed by John Noble Wilford (NYT)
• Mark Brown, “National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence,” The Guardian
• Blake Gopnik, “At National Gallery, Edvard Munch’s ‘Prints’ reveal artist’s methodical process,” Washington Post
• Jed Perl, “Individualism: Getting Matisse weirdly wrong, and getting Renoir weirdly right,” The New Republic ($)

And Ingrid Rowland in the March 11 issue, who argues for the art of eighteenth-century Venice, which she suggests is superior to that of Venice’s “arrogant heyday.” On the subject, she recommends the recently published “Tiepolo Pink,” by Roberto Calasso, “in which history and erudition lend their piquant spice to the sheer pleasure of being alive.”

(Back in April, Ben Lima rounded up Tiepolo Pink reviews.)