20 April 2006 | Awards
Four this year go to art historians: “Joseph Leo Koerner, Professor in the History of Art, Courtauld Institute of Art: Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, and the painting of everyday life. Carol Lawton, Professor of Art History, and Chair, Department of Art and Art History, Lawrence University: Popular Greek religion and the votive reliefs from the [...]
In Germany in the years after 1968, junior scholars forced a fresh reckoning with the discipline’s Nazi-era record; so again today, writes Daniela Stöppel in reviewing a new essay collection edited by Nicola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger. Especially valuable for reviewer Ines Katenhusen is the attention given to activities outside the academy, [...]
19 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
From Artinfo.com: “It’s the newest acquisition of the Clark Art Institute, an oil painting by Eugene Delacroix dating to the late 1820s that until now has never been publicly displayed … Since the artist’s death in 1863, it has been in the private collection of a single family that bought it at auction … Museum [...]
19 April 2006 | Conferences, Contemporary
From the intriguingly themed group blog, “Medical Humanities: A conversation about the intersection between medicine and the arts,” comes this illustrated post on the AAH conference: “Last week I spent three happy days in Leeds at the Association of Art Historians annual conference. On the last day I co-convened the student session and was pleased [...]
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports: “At NYU Friday night, Oxford philospher John Hyman refuted the claims of ‘neuroaesthetics’ researchers V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki (last seen at the Columbia ‘Forum on Art and the New Biology of Mind‘). Hyman first challenged Ramachandran’s notion that ‘all art is caricature,’ in that it exaggerates the depicted’s essential [...]
18 April 2006 | Modern
Regarding the figure of Aline Charigot in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (part of the “The Renoir Returns: A Celebration of Masterworks” show at the recently reopened Philips Collection), Glenn McNatt of the Baltimore Sun writes: “It doesn’t take an art historian … to recognize instantly that Aline Charigot was a hottie.”
18 April 2006 | Americas, Museums
From the Washington Post: “David Sellin, 75, an art historian who lectured widely and was curator in the Office of the Architect of the Capitol from 1976 to 1980, died April 11 at Washington Hospital Center. He had lymphatic cancer. Dr. Sellin settled in the Washington area in 1971 after teaching jobs at Colgate and [...]
17 April 2006 | Ancient
The Chronicle also reports additional details surrounding the recent $200 million Leon Levy Foundation gift to NYU to create an institute for the study of antiquity: “The controversy, first reported in Science magazine, extends beyond NYU. The University of Cincinnati and Bryn Mawr College now have policies against accepting gifts from the Leon Levy Foundation [...]
17 April 2006 | Americas
The Marion Greenwood mural owned by the University of Tennessee at Knoxville may well survive its controversy, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The painting is under wraps again to protect it from a leaky ceiling, but Jan F. Simek, executive assistant to the chancellor, says administrators hope to put it on permanent display in [...]
In honor of Wayne Dynes’s recent apologia for German art-history scholarship, today we feature a 100% Germanocentric set of posts. [By the way, we're always looking for more foreign correspondents -- email us if you're interested.] For starters, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Peter Geimer has returned to the question of iconoclasm. First tackling the [...]
14 April 2006 | Architecture, Books
Two new books afford a comparison of the architectural tastes of two very different rulers. Hans-Joachim Giersberg recounts how Frederick the Great’s 18th-century Schloss Sanssouci (photos here and here) tried to integrate nature and culture under the theme of Wine, with a marble hall opening right out onto the vineyard, against the architect’s advice. Two [...]
The Juvenal of painting, James Gillray (Tate; NYPL) had no qualms about rendering the prime minister as a snub-nosed broomstick. In her new book on the artist, Claudia Oberstebrink argues that the poetics of Gillray’s caricature depended on the overinflation of the sublime into the mock-sublime and the dismantling of the heroic into mock-heroic. For [...]
13 April 2006 | Renaissance
According to ANSA, “A huge fresco of the Last Supper has been found in an old convent in Siena. The fresco covers some 60 square metres of a wall in the refectory of the Santa Marta convent. It was discovered under thick plaster during restoration work on the building. The face and bust of Christ [...]
13 April 2006 | Teaching
Blogger and retired professor Wayne Dynes writes: “To my students I would continue to administer a bitter pill: learn German. German thought continues to be important in many fields. These include art history. Wolfgang Sauerländer is the world’s leading medievalist, and many of his works have not been translated. Two other major figures are Hans [...]
13 April 2006 | Uncategorized
A former art history student writes: “what kills me is that I wasn’t even snapping the [Sistine Chapel] ceiling when I got caught — I was getting a painting that most people probably just brush past but what was once on a slide exam and I knew I’d never forget it. I’m allowed to photograph [...]
12 April 2006 | Conferences
The UK’s Association of Art Historians just had its annual conference. University of London PhD student Charlotte Frost blogged it: “In my own session, ‘Does Art History Have a Future?’: the paper ‘Is There Life in Art History?’ by Gavin Butt … proposed the idea that many of the forms scholarly art historical endeavour takes [...]
12 April 2006 | Architecture
Writing on Juergen Schulz’s The New Palaces of Medieval Venice, Debra Pincus concludes that his “varied and rich career has been capped by a book that can only be termed revolutionary. Venetian scholarship has clung to the idea that the Venetian palace is a Byzantine import … Instead, Schulz proposes that the early palaces of [...]
11 April 2006 | Modern
Horst Bredekamp’s latest study in Bildwissenschaft analyzes Darwin’s sketches and concludes that the scientist thought more in terms of a coral of life than a tree of life (Wilhelm Trapp, Die Zeit). Corals had since antiquity represented the signature of the artist Nature. Darwin saw in them an alternative to the struggle of each kind [...]
11 April 2006 | Museums
“Leading up to its highly anticipated October opening, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University has named Catharina Manchanda curator. She replaces Sabine Eckmann, who became the museum’s director in 2005 … German-born, she holds bachelor’s degrees in art history, English and German from the University of Stuttgart and a master’s degree in [...]
10 April 2006 | Modern, Museums
As ArtsJournal notes, the Observer has an interesting article on the V&A’s new modernism show: “Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for ‘more human misery than anything else in history.’ Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? ‘The [...]
