16 August 2006 | Books
Fabula is a good resource for those looking to keep up with French research, especially in literature. It recently took note of the new essay collection L’art a-t-il besoin du numérique? and a new edition of J.-K. Huysmans’ writings on art.
4 August 2006 | Books
From blogger Bostonianne: “A couple of years ago while on vacation in Florida with my parents, I was, naturally, watching television in the hotel room. They had taken me to Disney World for my twentieth birthday, an extraordinarily sweet gesture that was somewhat complicated by the fact that my parents positively loathe amusement parks … [...]
1 August 2006 | Books
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that’s the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work … ‘It’s not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 [to supplement [...]
31 July 2006 | Books
In the Independent of London, Tom Lubbock reviews The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing, “in which the British art historian TJ Clark records looking at two landscapes by Nicolas Poussin over several months. The book is in diary form, and records about 50 separate viewings, with their unfolding observations. I don’t know [...]
27 July 2006 | Books
According to The New Criterion’s James Panero, they are “The journals of Eugene Delacroix, as translated by Walter Pach. Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, the first volume of the Matisse biography by Hilary Spurling … Julius Meier-Graefe on Vincent Van Gogh, and of course Vasari.”
30 June 2006 | Books
From the Economist: “For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look like … As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise [Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth], pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time [...]
The latest Art Bulletin includes eight reviews of the recently published textbook, Art Since 1900, by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. Several of the reviewers find that the book is possibly too advanced for undergraduates. Many of them also suggest that the Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh have created a new, [...]
26 June 2006 | Books, Teaching
John Paoletti’s February CAA talk on textbooks is now available online: “I would like to propose a moratorium on all publication of general textbooks in the history of art … we don’t seem to be willing to let the textbooks catch up with our innovations in teaching. Classrooms without a textbook would demand both a [...]
Reviewing Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art, 650–1100, “the first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars,” David Carrier writes in CAA Reviews: “One reason this volume is important is that it reprints major scholarly essays. Another is that it responds in a scholarly way to immediately pressing [...]
23 June 2006 | Books
From the Guardian: “As the writing of professional art history has become ever more narrow in focus, concentrating on the detailed interpretation of imagery and the circumstances of its production, so a market has opened up for more general books about the lives of artists, approaching the subject of art not through the work itself, [...]
20 June 2006 | Books
From the Guardian: “next March Perennial will release Belinda Rathbone’s The Guynd, which traces the true story of how an American art historian fell in love with an eccentric Scottish laird.”
26 May 2006 | Architecture, Books
Reviewers say the new Louis Kahn tome from Phaidon by Robert McCarter does justice to the architectural achievements Estonia-born undercover polygamist. Dean Hawkes likes the book’s “clear objectivity” and “straightforward way,” while Benjamin Schwarz observes that there hasn’t been a treatment this full since Vincent Scully’s “characteristically woolly 1962 assessment,” perhaps because of Kahn’s distance [...]
Color, rhythm, and symbolism are the foci of Lorenz Dittmann’s new Cézanne study. Reviewer Christian Lenz praises the author’s precision and the refinement of his formal analysis. Lenz even pays him a somewhat double-edged complement: the book, like Cézanne’s painting, rewards laborious effort with a payoff of great lucidity.
From the L.A. Times: “In 1959, Mark Rothko proclaimed, ‘I hate and distrust all art historians, experts and critics. They are a bunch of parasites, feeding on the body of art. Their work not only is useless, it is misleading. They can say nothing worth listening to about art or the artist, aside from personal [...]
22 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Reviewing Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s for CAA Reviews, Christopher Bedford writes: “the limitation of the project for me is that Lee does not reflect explicitly enough on the tightly interwoven fabric of art and criticism that emerges so vividly in her coverage of the ’60s … It might [...]
19 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
From the MIT Press blog: “We’re very pleased to introduce a new collaboration with Afterall Publishing … Afterall came about in 1998, when the artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis and the curator and writer Charles Esche conceived a journal called Afterall, with the goal of foregrounding the work of contemporary artists … Afterall is now [...]
19 May 2006 | Books, Islamic, Theory
Reviewing Making Cairo Medieval, edited by Nezar Alsayyad, Irene A. Bierman, and Nasser Rabbat, Mohammad al-Asad writes: “The dependence of a good number of the essays on the critique of Orientalism is a liability. A significant part of this critique of the Orientalist discourse has become repetitive, predictable, and consequently tired. It is time to [...]
17 May 2006 | Books
Will eight volumes suffice for a history of visual art in Germany? Prestel Verlag hopes so. Its first volume, Klassik und Romantik (covering 1750-1850), has just appeared, edited by Andreas Beyer. (The projected completion date is 2009.) Reviewer Sebastian Preuss notes that the contributors are more often younger scholars than lions of the field.
17 May 2006 | Books
From the University of Chicago Press blog: “Museum News has praised Susan M. Bielstein’s Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property. From the review: “[Bielstein] gives life to what could be the driest subject ever with chapters such as ‘Permissions: A Love Story,’ ‘Privacy Woes and the Duchess of York,’ and [...]
Is anyone writing good art history for a popular audience? Ross King lately had a go at Paris in the 1860s, comparing Manet and Meissonier in The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. Charles Darwent, in The Independent, finds it a “brilliant book… a good read, and good history,” and [...]
