24 May 2010 | Books
Pace Gallery president Marc Glimcher has founded Artifex Press, “the first publishing company dedicated to the creation of comprehensive, publicly accessible, online catalogues raisonnés”: Artifex Press has been named publisher of the digital catalogues raisonnés of the estates of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin along with contemporary artists Chuck Close, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg and [...]
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, [...]
13 May 2010 | Books, Conferences
In a recent issue of Art Documentation (28:2), Maureen Whalen warns that Many studies have been conducted about the ill effects of being on the ‘wrong’ side of the digital divide. In the field of art history, it appears that the fetish for the printed book and a reluctance to incorporate digital technologies into the [...]
12 May 2010 | Books, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
I am fascinated by the systems through which art is deemed legitimate, and I taught a course on fakes and frauds this past January. The premise was that we can learn about how art is produced, controlled, and valued by focusing on taboo objects. Sometimes such scrutiny will result in a reattribution, such as the one [...]
Also in the April 2010 Art Newspaper, Christopher Riopelle considers Susan Siegfried’s Ingres: Painting Reimagined: The past 15 years or so have been something of a golden age for Ingres studies. The central role that David played a generation ago in studies of the heroic origins of modern art has faded somewhat as scholars now [...]
9 May 2010 | Ancient, Books, Modern
Recently in the papers: Stuart Ferguson reviews Ravenna in Late Antiquity, by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis Ingrid D. Rowland, “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio” [$] Julian Barnes on a new, 2,520-page edition of Delacroix’s Journal (“un document étonnamment complexe, hybride, chaotique, labyrinthique”)* Dalia Judovitz on her book Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company
7 May 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the April 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper, Sylvia Ferino reviews Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-life Painting: Since the most recent exhibitions devoted to Arcimboldo, in Paris and Vienna in 2007-8, his composite heads of “The Four Seasons” series, 1573, in the Louvre are said to have become [...]
30 April 2010 | Books
Using Amazon’s advanced books search, you can get something of a sense for which recent art books are selling best. For books published since January, it seems to be: 1. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century 2. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline 3. Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 4. Otto Dix 5. Alice Neel [...]
It doesn’t get much more multicultural than this: an English-language book titled Travelling in a Palimpsest: Finnish Nineteenth-Century Painters’ Encounters with Spanish Art and Culture. It’s by Marie-Sofie Lundström and Clara Marcellán reviews it (in Spanish) in the Jan-Mar 2010 issue of Goya (“una exhaustiva reconstrucción”).
22 April 2010 | Books
In the January 2010 Burlington Magazine, Erika Langmuir reviewed the new edition of Bernardo De Dominici’s 1742 Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani edited by Fiorella Sricchia Santoro and Andrea Zezza: This is a heroic editorial enterprise, that restores to Bernardo De Dominici’s ambitious oeuvre … the dignity it deserves without, however, minimising those [...]
21 April 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Prompted by the opening of Les Promesses du Passé at the Centre Pompidou, some recent work on post-Wall “Eastern European” art (one of the tenets of the exhibition is to demonstrate the irrelevance of this term in light of the polyphony of voices; the exhibition layout is designed to be discontinuous, accordingly): Transitland is a [...]
20 April 2010 | Books
Amongst the many topics covered in The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590-1635 (2009), the second volume of seminar papers from the Centre for Advanced Research in the Visual Arts (CASVA), are the following: the function of notaries within the Accademia, the relationship between philosophy, painting and academic theory, and [...]
18 April 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
Roberto Calasso’s book, Tiepolo Pink (translated by Alastair McEwen for Knopf), which proposes the 23 etchings of the Scherzi di fantasia as an interpretive key, has elicited mixed reactions from a number of reviewers.
16 April 2010 | Books
In Ingeborg Reichle’s Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer, 2009) — a revised and expanded English edition of her PhD thesis, which was published in German in 2004 — she asks, “Is science the new art?” In the same vein, the writer of her preface, [...]
16 April 2010 | Books
Although not a recent publication (2003), Richard Polsky’s I Bought Andy Warhol is worth a read. As someone who normally focuses more on the museum side of the art world, I enjoyed this insider’s take of the contemporary art market. While his chief pursuit centers on the prolific work of Warhol, Polsky enlightens us “outsiders” [...]
15 April 2010 | Books
According to The Forward, in a new book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses Stephen H. Norwood describes the “utter destruction of the academic career of art historian Jerome Klein, one of the most popular teachers at Columbia, for publicly protesting Nazi crimes,” at the hands of Columbia [...]
9 April 2010 | Asia, Books, Islamic, Theory
From the introduction of Finbarr Barry Flood’s recently published book Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, 2009): … I am aware of the paradox inherent in adopting linguistic models for a book that champions the value of material culture. I am also aware that, in doing so, I am to some [...]
26 March 2010 | Awards, Books, Photography
Historian Linda Gordon has been awarded a Bancroft Prize (her second) for her book on the photographer Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. The prize is “awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia [University] to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy.” In this [...]
In caa.reviews, Kjell Wangensteen considers Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, a new book by David Summers: In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, [...]
We recently discovered the scholarly book review Metapsychology which covers a fair number of art-related books. Recently reviewed: Art/Porn, A History of Seeing and Touching, by Kelly Dennis. “This is an unusual book, far removed from the writings of conventional art historians whom the author dubs ‘patriarchal’. She is anxious to make clear that hers [...]
