17 February 2006 | Modern, Museums
Kenneth Silver and Carol Ockman said that they felt “inhabited by Bernhardt” when they assembled the exhibition “Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama” for The Jewish Museum, contributor Ross Finocchio reports. They spoke last night at NYU’s Maison Française, drawing laughs as they excitedly described Bernhardt (1844–1923) as a deft manipulator of her own [...]
17 February 2006 | Modern, Museums
“Aix’s role has often been dismissed … either ignored or reduced to the simplistic picture of a ‘self-taught’ Cézanne or the harsh diatribes of Zola, Paul Alexis, and Cézanne himself. Did Cézanne really not begin to live until he arrived in Paris in 1861?” writes Bruno Ely in the catalogue to the National Gallery’s Cézanne [...]
16 February 2006 | Books
“We’re all told that if you’re an art historian, be an art historian.” Lawrence Weschler discusses his new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, “a series of essays on the visual rhymes and eerie resonances of everyday life,” with The American Prospect.
16 February 2006 | Modern
He’s “one of four scholars of the humanities to receive” one, “worth up to $1.5 million.” Next two books: Poussin and Picasso.
15 February 2006 | Books, Renaissance
In the January-March 2006 Word & Image, Louisa Waldman belatedly reviews Michel Jeanneret’s “groundbreaking, learned, and eminently readable” 1997 Perpetuum mobile, published in English in 2001 as Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, which “sets out to revise the idea … of the sixteenth century as an age dominated [...]
15 February 2006 | Books, Contemporary
The Winter 2006 October features questions posed by Hal Foster to the authors of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2005), together with their responses. “Has the state truly come ‘to live and die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images?’”
15 February 2006 | Museums, Photography
Sotheby’s New York is offering important photographs deaccessioned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including works by Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz (including prints of “The Steerage” and “The Flat-Iron”), Walker Evans (“Tenant Farmer Wife: Allie Mae Burroughs”), and Margaret Bourke-White (“Gargoyle, Chrysler Building, New York”).
15 February 2006 | Journals, Modern
The Winter 2006 Critical Inquiry ranks the authorities most commonly cited by the journal’s authors at each stage in its 32-year history. Most popular in 1974-9: Ernst Gombrich, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes and Wayne Booth. 1999-2004: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Current editor W.J.T. Mitchell comes in [...]
15 February 2006 | Africa
“Are we witnessing an attack of fleeting guilty conscience, or a harbinger of readjustment?” Philippe Dagen asks in the Autumn 2005 Critique d’art. “African art, of the living variety, is currently attracting attention in the West which has hitherto been refused it.” Of a recent essay by Jean-Loup Amselle: “Is Africa ‘a warren with fantasies’? [...]
15 February 2006 | Museums
The January 2006 Burlington Magazine editorial: “As the senior staff in most museums concentrate their attention on planning new buildings and devising money-spinning loan exhibitions,” at MoMA for example, “the truly stimulating ideas will perhaps be found in the imaginative pragmatism of curators who are allowed to rearrange the permanent collections,” as happened recently at [...]
15 February 2006 | Modern
In the Winter 2005 Art Journal, several Latin American critics present papers that “take an often radically different stance on the intricate relationship among modernism, modernity and modernization.” “When it comes to modernism, the United States continues to suffer from a distressing provincialism … In case you are thinking ‘beating a dead horse’ … count [...]
