14 April 2011 | Modern, Renaissance
The great art historian and critic Leo Steinberg died in New York City on March 13, 2011. Steinberg, more than any other historian of Renaissance art, believed in the power of pictorial structure to generate meaning. On Steinberg’s life and work see the New York Times obituary and the entry in the online Dictionary of [...]
7 April 2011 | Conferences, Modern, Museums
It’s going to be a summer of Spanish expatriates in the bay area; Balenciaga and Spain is currently on view at the De Young, followed shortly by Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso Paris, while SFMoMA has organized The Steins Collect: Matisee, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde beginning next month. Together this looks to [...]
28 February 2011 | Architecture, Modern
Architectural historian Loretta Lorance died Feb. 26, of breast cancer, according to an email sent to the CAA Student Members list-serv. She obtained her PhD from CUNY, taught at various universities, and published the 2009 book Becoming Bucky Fuller with MIT Press. Felicity D. Scott reviewed the book in the September 2010 Journal of the [...]
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 [...]
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 | Modern
Museums all over have come under fire in recent weeks for their handling of gay/lesbian subject matter — for their responses (or non-responses) to the controversy over David Wojnarowicz, but also for their general timidity in addressing queerness, for example in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Art historians too have work to [...]
2 December 2010 | Americas, Current Events, Film, Modern, Museums
The National Portrait Gallery’s innovative exhibition of images of and by queer people in America, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, is becoming controversial. The exhibit was altered by pulling a video by David Wojnarowicz and it may close before the scheduled date. The story has been picked up by The Washington Post as well [...]
8 November 2010 | Modern, Museums
Brett Zongker of the Associated Press writes on “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery: “There’s been an entire history hiding in plain sight,” said Portrait Gallery historian and curator David C. Ward. “Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like [...]
5 November 2010 | Books, Modern
Will John Richardson finish his multi-volume biography of Picasso? According to a 2008 Artinfo piece, he “freely admits that he may have trouble” but “shows no signs of slowing down.” For a fresh sign of his undiminished fighting spirit and a clue to his thoughts on late Picasso, one might look to his just-published article [...]
14 October 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Photography, Renaissance
Recently in the papers: In the Economist, reviews of Eadweard Muybridge at the Tate, and Bronzino at the Palazzo Strossi. In the FT, Jackie Wullschlager on four books on Caravaggio (Strinati, Fried, Graham-Dixon, Schütze). At the NYRBlog, a teaser of Willibald Sauerländer’s article on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. In the Guardian, Rosemary Hill on the pre-Raphaelites [...]
4 October 2010 | Books, Modern, Museums
The Hungarian-British portrait painter Philip de László (1869-1937) has been the subject of a determined revival campaign led by some of the artist’s descendents. They have been creating a catalogue raisonné, organizing the artist’s archives, and sponsoring exhibitions and publications. The effort began bearing fruit in 2004 and culminated most recently in a National Portrait [...]
28 September 2010 | Americas, Modern
On The Atlantic‘s website, William Haseltine transcribes a recent talk by Museum of Fine Arts Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramirez: The International Center for Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston is a unique resource center for the study of 20th Century Latin American and Latino Art. Established in 2001 [...]
18 September 2010 | Africa, Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Modern, Renaissance, Theory
Recently in the papers: Kaelen Wilson Goldie on Routes d’Arabie at the Louvre (The National) On Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art from Ancient Nigeria, previously in Santander, Madrid and London, now in Houston, and later in Indianapolis, Richmond and New York: Douglas Britt (Houston Chronicle); The Economist; Itziar Reyero (ABC.es); Richard Dorment (The Telegraph); Jonathan [...]
11 September 2010 | Modern
Last March, advised by Jonathan Fineberg and Ethel Kessler, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps reproducing works by the Abstract Expressionists.
4 September 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Modern, Museums, Photography
Recently in the papers: “Art and its mediums,” a set of links from Bookforum Alex Danchev reviews Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (THE) Jeffrey Hamburger and Anthony Grafton, “Save the Warburg Library!” (NYRB) Rebecca Solnit and Peter Conrad on Eadweard Muybridge at Tate Britain (The Guardian) Tom L. Freudenheim on German Master Drawings at [...]
2 September 2010 | Modern, Museums
One hundred years ago today painter Henri Rousseau died. This past spring the Fondation Beyeler marked the occasion with an exhibition of 40 of his works. In Le Monde, Thierry Savatier called it a “très belle exposition” and its 120-page catalogue “très beau”: He’s presented often as the greatest of naive painters, but this qualification [...]
18 August 2010 | Ancient, Baroque/Neoclassical, Medieval, Modern, Museums
Press clippings: Sarah Williams Goldhagen reviews Ćurčić and Hadjitryphonos, Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art in The New Republic (exhibition and catalog) “The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley 5,000-3,500 B.C.” at the Ashmolean Museum, reviewed by Neal Ascherson (LRB), and noted by Jonathan Jones (Guardian) and Paul Levy (WSJ); previously [...]
23 July 2010 | Contemporary, Modern, Museums
In the Financial Times, Rachel Spence praises the little known exhibition “Russias! Memory, Mystification and the Imaginary,” now in its final days in Venice: As the 1930s unrolled in a psychotic rollercoaster of purges and famines, Stalin bullied artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians into making work that supported the fantasy that this was the best [...]
The book Duchamp and the Aesthetics of Chance: Art as Experiment, an investigation of the artist’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14), by Herbert Molderings, had already appeared in German and French, and is now available in English too. The book attempts to overturn the popular of image of Duchamp as an “artist-engineer-scientist,” arguing instead that he [...]
28 June 2010 | Modern, Museums
MoMA director Glenn Lowry recently delivered the keynote address at “Museums of the 21st Century” at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (video). He laid out six issues for museums of modern art. My rough and abridged transcript: 1. The moment a museum of modern or contemporary art is predictable is the [...]
