13 March 2006 | Americas, Museums
From the Washington Post: “a museum official and art historian who was a leading authority on 19th-century American painting, died Feb. 22 … Mr. Hoopes had a particular interest in watercolor painting and coined the term ‘the American medium’ to describe the attraction of U.S. artists to watercolors, particularly in the 19th century. He wrote [...]
13 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to S.A. Mansbach, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new Painterly Enlightenment: The Art of Franz Anton Maulbertsch, 1724–1796 “is a monumental book … one of the most carefully considered methodological assessments, historical [analyses], and art historical interpretations of eighteenth-century Central European culture to have appeared in the last half-century … equally impressive is the author’s literary [...]
13 March 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to the Mumbai Mirror, restorers at the Prince of Wales Museum recently attributed an eighteenth-century Sword of Damocles to Antoine Dubost (1769-1825), whose work has been attracting renewed interest and higher auction prices in recent years. “A saga of jealousy that could rival a soap opera lies behind it,” remarked conservator Abraham Joel. Dubost’s [...]
13 March 2006 | Conferences, Modern
“Six of the world’s pre-eminent Jackson Pollock scholars will converge at Williams College [Museum of Art] on May 13 to discuss the artist’s work in a rare symposium, the museum’s director said Wednesday. The gathering will be highly unusual, particularly in light of the recent controversy over 32 previously unknown Pollock works discovered in 2003 [...]
10 March 2006 | Modern
According to the Tate, recent x-radiography “of the full-scale sketch for View on the Stour near Dedham, painted by Constable in 1821-2, has revealed a number of significant compositional alterations including three figures in the foreground that are not visible on the surface of the work.” Conservator Sarah Cove remarks: “There has been much speculation [...]
10 March 2006 | Conferences
Suzaan Boettger delivers her CAA wrap-up on Artnet: “The singsong tenor of Danto’s grandfatherly voice reminded me of Daniel Dennett’s Philosophical Lexicon definition for ‘arthurdantist, n. One who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas, viz., “Little Friedrich used to say the most wonderful things before we took him to the arthurdantist!” — Frau Nietzsche.’ Danto’s [...]
10 March 2006 | Renaissance
Robert Schoen “is convinced Michelangelo created the Marcialla fresco after his return from Bologna in December 1495, inspired by Giotto’s Deposition fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel.” He “has pored through Michelangelo studies and found corroborating views expressed by a well-known Italian cultural critic, Roberto Weiss, in 1949.” Lynn Catterson finds it “extremely interesting.”
10 March 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary
ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest reports for Nextbook on a recent panel devoted to “neosincerity,” the contemporary artistic and literary tendency that is “grounded in irony but allow[s] for the expression of sentiment and emotion, thanks to black humor, pratfalls, buffoonery, and other comic devices.” Cembalest reprints generous portions of the piquant conversation: “‘It’s really terrible [...]
In the March Oxford Art Journal Dan Karlholm takes the measure of Donald Preziosi’s 2003 Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity: “The book was intended as a sequel to his department-shattering or, at least, consensus-challenging Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science [1989] but it became a ‘rethinking [...]
9 March 2006 | Pre-Columbian
According to AFP, “Chilean and French scientists announced they have discovered for the first time elaborate pre-Columbian cave paintings by indigenous Alacaluf people on an isolated island in Patagonia … The Alacaluf, a nomadic and seafaring people indigenous to the area, were not previously known to have produced such art … The paintings, in mostly [...]
Thomas Hoving, who was director of the Met when it purchased the Euphronios Krater, talks to Time Out: “the Getty Museum in Los Angeles has 40,000 antiquities. Of that, I’d say 35,000 are suspect [provenance-wise] … Museums have too much shit anyway! All these pompous museum directors say, ‘We’re the showplace for civilization.’ Bullshit! They [...]
In the February Art History, art historian Peter Vergo laments the disappearance of the traditional exhibition catalogue: “Twenty or thirty years ago, large international exhibitions were usually marked by catalogues, in which items on display were not only reproduced but also discussed at length and in detail. That was partly because, in that more leisurely [...]
8 March 2006 | Books, Teaching
Another choice bit from the Times story on the new Janson: “‘I can see the reasons, artistically, for dropping Whistler’s mother,’ said [instructor] Mickey McConnell … ‘But it’s become so well known, such a part of the culture. What if there’s a cartoon in The New Yorker that uses it as a reference? Younger students [...]
8 March 2006 | Teaching
According to the Guardian, fewer students are applying to study art history in Britain. They’re choosing “courses that will be more useful to their careers, the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said.” University applications generally are down, following new £3,000-a-year fees.
8 March 2006 | Ancient, Museums
From the Chicago Tribune: “The increasingly fractious dispute between [Yale] and Peru, involving at least 250 artifacts, is one among many in a recent upsurge of ownership controversies between U.S. museums and foreign governments.” As a result, museums are “devoting more staff and money to researching the objects in their collections with uncertain provenance, or [...]
8 March 2006 | Awards
The Max Planck Research Award “is awarded this year to Harvard Art History and Architecture Professor Alina Payne and Professor Horst Bredekamp at Humboldt University in Berlin. The award comes with a 1.5 million euro grant and each year recognises one German, and one non-German researcher, both of whom show outstanding work involving international co-operation.” [...]
8 March 2006 | Conferences
Quattrocento Architecture (Miami Mar 07) Exposed Memory: Family Pictures (Budapest Nov 06) Passions – Early Modern Netherlands (Ontario Nov 06) Masterpiece – Meisterstueck (Frankfurt Nov 06) Utopia and Architecture (Arc et Senans 25-27 Oct 06) Protest Aesthetics (Zurich Mar 07) (via H-Arthist)
8 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
In this week’s New Yorker, Calvin Tomkins writes: “Having devoted itself for 75 years to nurturing and celebrating American art, [the Whitney Museum] is now willing — or almost willing to concede that there is no such thing. Belief in a native American aesthetic has steadily eroded over the past three decades, as art has [...]
7 March 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
Should Britain regulate the export of contemporary art? Peter Aspden writes that currently “works have to be at least 50 years old for Waverley [rules] to apply. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers: their work sidles silently across the border, and there is nothing we can do about it. Good riddance, I hear many [...]
7 March 2006 | Renaissance
“Mona Lisa probably wasn’t a man, and it’s even more unlikely that the famous artist who painted the famous painting used himself as the model. So conclude University of Illinois researchers, who created a buzz last year when their facial-recognition software was used to analyze the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. (Conclusion: The model was happy, [...]
