24 January 2011 | Awards, Books, Modern
In an age of immersive video games, 3-D television, and “reality adventures,” a re-evaulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk seems apt. Nominated for The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, Modernism after Wagner by Juliet Koss is a “critical history of Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art,” from the mid-nineteenth-century to the 1930s. It [...]
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 [...]
19 January 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books
Having reviewed the nominees (1,2,3) for the Alfred Barr, Jr., Award for museum catalogues, I move on now to The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which “honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2009, and August 31, 2010.” The shortlist: Molly Emma Aitken, The Intelligence [...]
14 January 2011 | Americas, Books
Does the traditional encyclopedia — printed on paper, written and edited exclusively by experts — still have a role to play in the age of Wikipedia? The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, just published in five hefty volumes, has enormous strengths. It builds on the excellent Grove Encyclopedia of Art (1996), revising and supplementing its [...]
11 January 2011 | Asia, Awards, Books, Museums
On to the third and final nominee for the Alfred Barr, Jr., Award: The exhibition catalogue Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in Twentieth-Century China, edited by Xiaoneng Yang, is another doorstop of a volume, 450 pages on heavy paper, on which feature a variety of gorgeous and painstakingly assembled illustrations. “All [...]
6 January 2011 | Awards, Books, Museums
CAA announced its twelve Awards for Distinction, including one for Kantha, saying that the book constitutes a model of how to make a catalogue about specific collections that far outreaches the task of honoring the collectors in question. Offering acute insights into an important region and an understudied medium, Kantha not only celebrates a lively [...]
5 January 2011 | Asia, Books, Museums
The College Art Association today announces the winner of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for best exhibition catalogue. I’m in the midst of reviewing the shortlist, selected this year by: Anna Chave, Graduate Center, CUNY (chair) Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art Virginia Fields, LACMA Erica Hirshler, MFA Boston Anne Woollett, J. Paul Getty [...]
22 December 2010 | Books, Conservation
A new book put out by the Harvard Art Museum explores the Fogg’s role as the first museum to have a scientifically based research department – conceived by Edward Waldo Forbes, director from 1909 to 1944, as a “laboratory for the fine arts”. Forbes was heavily influenced by John Ruskin, and his arguments for the [...]
21 December 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Museums
The College Art Association has announced the shortlist for this year’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship: 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 [...]
17 December 2010 | Books, Islamic, Modern, Museums
Qatar has just opened Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. Before its opening Meris Lutz wrote in The Los Angeles Times: It will also serve as a research center, an exciting prospect for the regional arts community … The inaugural exhibition, titled, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art,” will include works culled from Mathaf’s [...]
15 December 2010 | Books, Museums
A current exhibition at LACMA is challenging the notion of “hybridity” in the Indian city of Lucknow. Lucknow was a courtly city of great wealth between the declining Mughal power and the rising British Colonial one. At its height in the mid-nineteenth century, two-thirds of its population were artisans, leaving a vast cultural legacy. Commonly [...]
9 December 2010 | Ancient, Books
The fascinating new book Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashunasirpal: A Cultural Biography re-evaluates Assyrian art and describes its reception in the Middle East and abroad over three millennia. A well-illustrated set of symposium proceedings edited by Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas, it pays less attention to the best known images, of warring [...]
7 December 2010 | Africa, Books, Conferences, Journals
The latest issue of The International Review of African American Art (23:2) is one of the most visually provocative magazine issues I’ve perused in years. It also includes a good mix of writing, including coverage of the most recent Porter Colloquium on African American Art. Summarizing a talk by Jacqueline Francis, Teresia Bush writes: Critical [...]
6 December 2010 | Books
In The New York Times Book Review, designer Steven Heller considers new books on typography. In the latest Journal of the Printing Historical Society (n. 15), Paul Shaw reviews several recent books on Jan Tschichold: The most important and controversial typographer of the twentieth century was Jan Tschichold. He has been championed both by typographic [...]
24 November 2010 | Books
In the November Artforum, David Rimanelli handily dismantles Berkeley Art Museum director Lawrence Rinder’s roman à clef Revenge of the Decorated Pigs : … [Rinder’s] astonishing success would seem to be lost, however, on Rinder, who is apparently still mired, almost a decade later, in a sedulously manured soil of anger, hurt feelings, spite, and [...]
22 November 2010 | Books
In the latest issue of Revue de l’art (n. 169), Marianne Jakobi lauds Cannibalismes disciplinaires. Quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontrent, a collection of conference proceedings, for its “ample documentation, rigorous analysis, [and] critical distance.” (Available online: Many of the papers, plus an English translation of the introduction.) In another review in this [...]
19 November 2010 | Books
The recent book Obelisk: A History is an unusual collaboration written by four quite different scholars including the renowned historian Anthony Grafton and published by The Burndy Library, an eccentric collection founded in 1941 in “extra space at the factory of the Burndy Corporation, a manufacturer of electrical connectors,” by Bern Dibner, an obelisk specialist [...]
16 November 2010 | Africa, Books
Monica Blackmun Visonà, co-author of the celebrated survey A History of Art in Africa, has published a new book, Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire, “an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa,” an attempt “to situate local and regional artistic practices in the [...]
15 November 2010 | Books, Medieval
Roland Recht’s 1999 book Believing and seeing. The art of Gothic cathedrals has finally been published in English, in a translation by the late Mary Writtall. In the July 2010 issue of Metascience Ellen M. Shortell writes: Studies in medieval religion, science, literature, and art, particularly in the past two decades, have focused a great [...]
11 November 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the Summer 2010 Representations Christopher Pye writes: In their introduction to the recent volume Renaissance Florence: A Social History, the editors offer a reflection on their own methodological moment … We are poised at an exciting moment in the history of our disciplines when we can with profit consider the ways in which the [...]
