1 May 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
Martin Warnke’s new book on Velázquez elaborates his conception of the artist as a paragon of artistic freedom. A riposte to Carl Justi’s and José López-Rey’s version of biographical art history, this book takes multiple approaches, tackling the economic decline of the Spanish court; jester and dwarf depiction as an anti-courtly impulse and a lesson [...]
28 April 2006 | Books
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Virginia A. Kuhn, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, was having dissertation trouble. Nothing unusual about that. But it wasn’t that Ms. Kuhn was struggling to finish her thesis. The trouble was that officials at the institution could not figure out whether to accept it. [...]
In Frieze, Kodwo Eshun reviews Cosmopolitan Modernisms, edited by Kobena Mercer, “the first volume in a new series titled ‘Annotating Art’s Histories’. In his acutely incisive introduction Mercer notes the unintended consequences of visual culture’s ‘tendency to roam across the cultural sphere at large’. Such swaggering interdisciplinarity, he points out, inadvertently ends up reinforcing existing [...]
26 April 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Professor Vicky Clark and Warhol Museum director Tom Sokolowski led a discussion on artistic censorship last Friday at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “An instance Clark used was when she was working on a book, ‘Comic Release,’ in which artists were using well-known cartoon characters for their own interpretative art pieces. It soon became an [...]
26 April 2006 | Books
Buttressing the idea that creative types are often utopianists, a new book edited by Ulrich Raulff considers seven instances in which they idealistically attempted political change, usually via their patrons. Goethe held several government positions in his lifetime, advancing the ideal of the poet-prince as a reconciliation of the two roles. Reviewer Christine Tauber is [...]
25 April 2006 | Books
Despite Heinrich Wölfflin’s famous call for an art history without names, authors continue to crank out biographies of artists. In a new book, Karin Hellwig reviews developments in the genre from Vasari onwards, and comes out in favor of a scientific approach .
25 April 2006 | Books
Following a five-year, €3,000,000 effort, the 20,000-page, 175,000-entry, 14-volume, Bénézit Dictionary of Artists is now available in English. €980 for pre-orders, €1,190 beginning June 1.
24 April 2006 | Books, Renaissance
There’s no consensus yet on whether the original German version of Frank Zöllner’s Botticelli book is as dry as the English translation seems to be. In reviewer Martin Warnke’s comparison with Pater (“What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which [Botticelli's] work has the property of exciting in us, and [...]
24 April 2006 | Books
Marta Braun reviews L’Utopie Photographique, published on the 150th anniversary of the second oldest photographic society in the world, the Société française de photographie. Not only does it tell the institution’s story for the first time, it forms “an important contribution to a neglected history of that fragile moment when art and science came together [...]
The project on Franco-German art relations led by Thomas Gaehtgens continues to bear fruit. First, Alexandre Kostka and François Lucberts edited a volume covering 1870-1945 that reached two surprising conclusions: that textual discourse played the most important role in shaping the reception of art during this period (Marc Schalenberg, H-Arthist), and that the German art [...]
20 April 2006 | Asia, Books, Teaching
Leeds University lecturer Ashley Thompson reviews Helen Ibbitson Jessup’s Art & Architecture of Cambodia in the April issue of Orientations: “a thorough and nuanced presentation … an invaluable contribution to the field of Khmer studies in particular, as well as to the broader study of Asian art … the first of its kind in the [...]
In Germany in the years after 1968, junior scholars forced a fresh reckoning with the discipline’s Nazi-era record; so again today, writes Daniela Stöppel in reviewing a new essay collection edited by Nicola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger. Especially valuable for reviewer Ines Katenhusen is the attention given to activities outside the academy, [...]
In honor of Wayne Dynes’s recent apologia for German art-history scholarship, today we feature a 100% Germanocentric set of posts. [By the way, we're always looking for more foreign correspondents -- email us if you're interested.] For starters, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Peter Geimer has returned to the question of iconoclasm. First tackling the [...]
14 April 2006 | Architecture, Books
Two new books afford a comparison of the architectural tastes of two very different rulers. Hans-Joachim Giersberg recounts how Frederick the Great’s 18th-century Schloss Sanssouci (photos here and here) tried to integrate nature and culture under the theme of Wine, with a marble hall opening right out onto the vineyard, against the architect’s advice. Two [...]
The Juvenal of painting, James Gillray (Tate; NYPL) had no qualms about rendering the prime minister as a snub-nosed broomstick. In her new book on the artist, Claudia Oberstebrink argues that the poetics of Gillray’s caricature depended on the overinflation of the sublime into the mock-sublime and the dismantling of the heroic into mock-heroic. For [...]
5 April 2006 | Books, Renaissance
In his new Michelangelo biography, expert restorator Antonio Forcellino reports a couple of modestly sensational discoveries — for instance, that the marble flame held by the Caritas figure on Pope Julius II’s grave would have been understood by the artist’s reform-minded circle as a symbol of salvation through faith — but its strength lies in [...]
4 April 2006 | Architecture, Books
G. Ulrich Großmann’s overview of castles in Europe betrays a fascinating subject with dry, uninspiring and didactic prose, finds the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
In the latest Third Text, Stephen Shapiro reviews Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique: “The reward and challenge for a reader … is the treasure of encountering a critical practice fundamentally motivated by a Left experience of political community and self-critical commentary absent from many who position themselves within the academic field of postcolonial [...]
27 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In his new, intimately detailed Bernini biography, Arne Karsten evokes the artist’s role in the history of Baroque Rome, writes reviewer Dirk Schümer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. He describes how the Piazza Navona fountain, for instance, symbolized papal world domination (showing the Rio de la Plata, Danube, Nile, and Ganges) just as the Peace of [...]
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 [...]
