9 February 2012 | Modern, News
The Courtauld Institute has announced the sudden and entirely unexpected death yesterday, at the age of 66, of John House, Emeritus Professor of the Institute. One of the pre-eminent scholars of nineteenth-century French art of his generation, John served The Courtauld with great distinction from his appointment in 1980 up until his retirement as the [...]
26 April 2011 | Contemporary, Museums, News, Outsider
Following the Né dans la rue show in 2009 at the Fondation Cartier, MOCA is presenting the first major US museum survey of street art, Art in the Streets. You might be familiar with the show via the controversy surrounding Blu’s mural but, scandal aside, it is an extensive, wide-ranging exhibition and should significantly contribute [...]
A new initiative from Mellon is supporting the publication of emerging scholars’ first illustrated art history texts. Designed to streamline procedures and reduce costs for first-time authors, the program will encourage collaboration amongst four presses – Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University, and The University of Washington – to publish 40 books throughout [...]
22 October 2010 | Conferences, News
“A man stood up from the audience and said, ‘I’m Mary Jane Jacob and I’d like permission to speak.’ ” The audience at this conference session had just been introduced to the session’s panelists and informed that one scheduled participant, the curator Mary Jane Jacob, wouldn’t be able to make it. So who then was [...]
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, [...]
19 April 2010 | News
The shaky future of the Bibliography of the History of Art. In the meantime, since April 1, the Getty has announced it would offer free public access to the bibliography through its website.
17 March 2010 | News
Art historians appear to be embracing Twitter with all of the unenthusiastic hesitation and hand-wringing with which they greeted the once-novel technology of blogging. Nonetheless, a few have taken the plunge. Tweeting art historians include modernist August Jordan Davis, photography historian William Allen, Roman art scholar Francesca Tronchin, art/garden historian S.E. Gordon-Salway, and Renaissance specialist [...]
27 February 2009 | Conferences, News, Renaissance
Our contributor Allyson Drucker writes: The topic of this morning’s session “Renaissance and/or Early Modern: Naming and/or Knowing the Past” promised to travel some well-rehearsed territory for scholars of the field who remain dissatisfied with the term early modern as a substitute for “renaissance” and its troubling connotations. And while the session as a whole [...]
Of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, 95 are women. That’s 69%. For comparison, about 75% of art-history PhDs produced this decade have been women. It’s hard to say much about the hiring patterns of individual schools, given the small numbers involved. The most significant examples we could find were these: all six of [...]
Are there professors whose students fare especially well on the job market? Here the data starts to run thin. Few professors advise large numbers of dissertations at a time. That said, we tried to see what we could find. We tracked down advisors for 121 of the 137 assistant professors in our survey, and present [...]
How does the hiring data break down by subfield? Who’s getting the most jobs for modernists? For medievalists? Getting answers here is complicated by the fact that there’s no one accepted way to subdivide the field, nor do all art historians fit neatly into one category. We took our best shot. We also found it [...]
To put our survey findings better in context, it helps to compare departments’ placement numbers with the number of PhDs they award each year. Relatively good data is available via Dissertation Abstracts. We counted up doctorates for each department having more than one top placement in our survey. Art-history Dept. (PhDs granted per year, ’99-’05) [...]
Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs? “Top jobs” are hard to [...]
17 February 2007 | Conferences, Medieval, News
Perhaps not surprisingly, a good seventy people show up for “Sex Acts: Performance and Perversion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Chair Allison Levy characterizing the session as trying to move “beyond a discourse of desire to one of action,” a consideration of bodies that “act out” or “act up.” Robert Mills presents “Gay [...]
17 February 2007 | Architecture, Conferences, News, Theory
The line at Starbucks seemed longer than ever this morning, but apparently it did not include very many lovers of architecture dragging and drugging themselves out of bed this Saturday morning to make it to this session, “Detecting Architecture: Questions of Evidence in Architectural History.” There are twenty attendees here at best. Or perhaps it’s [...]
16 February 2007 | Asia, Conferences, News
About fifty people attend “The Middle Path? Between Style and Cultural History in Chinese Painting Scholarship.” Is “theory” applicable to Chinese art? Can westerners understand Chinese art at all? Do Chinese observers necessarily do better? How important is it to study Chinese texts? These questions have long bedeviled Chinese art history, as the redoubtable Julia [...]
16 February 2007 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Museums, News
Just two of the five scheduled speakers showed for this panel! “Contemporary African Art: Moving Forward, Looking Back; Investigating the Currency of Contemporary African Art” nonetheless proved quite lively. Barbara Pollack in particular provided fireworks. A very rough and selective transcript of her talk: “I’m not an expert on Chinese art or African art. I [...]
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, News
“What then is time? If no one asks me I know; if I wish to explain to one who asks me, I know not,” Saint Augustine wrote. A new interest in time developed in the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries. Hence this well-attended panel on “The Presence of History, the Persistence of Time” [...]
16 February 2007 | Conferences, News
Some 500 people pour into the session honoring Linda Nochlin and then break out in sustained applause at the first mention of her name. Distinguished panelists present talks directly or indirectly related to her work. Chair Tamar Garb begins on a personal note, by observing that when she began studying art history in the 1970s, [...]
