30 May 2006 | Uncategorized
The Art History Newsletter will resume publishing Monday June 19. See you then!
26 May 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
Perspective, sure, but other interests also occupied the early Quattrocento. The exhibition “Gentile da Fabriano and the Other Renaissance,” on view in Fabriano through July, explores Gentile’s courtly elegance, his luxurious use of gold and other materials, his portrait-physiognomical sensitivity, and his expert treatment of atmosphere. Works by other painters from the Marches provide context. [...]
26 May 2006 | Architecture, Books
Reviewers say the new Louis Kahn tome from Phaidon by Robert McCarter does justice to the architectural achievements Estonia-born undercover polygamist. Dean Hawkes likes the book’s “clear objectivity” and “straightforward way,” while Benjamin Schwarz observes that there hasn’t been a treatment this full since Vincent Scully’s “characteristically woolly 1962 assessment,” perhaps because of Kahn’s distance [...]
Color, rhythm, and symbolism are the foci of Lorenz Dittmann’s new Cézanne study. Reviewer Christian Lenz praises the author’s precision and the refinement of his formal analysis. Lenz even pays him a somewhat double-edged complement: the book, like Cézanne’s painting, rewards laborious effort with a payoff of great lucidity.
From the L.A. Times: “In 1959, Mark Rothko proclaimed, ‘I hate and distrust all art historians, experts and critics. They are a bunch of parasites, feeding on the body of art. Their work not only is useless, it is misleading. They can say nothing worth listening to about art or the artist, aside from personal [...]
25 May 2006 | Theory
What’s the latest with Bildwissenschaft? Christiane Kruse reviews several recent books on the subject and credits W. J. T. Mitchell’s 1994 Picture Theory with inspiring many of them. In What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell’s latest, he explores the counterintuitive idea that pictures themselves have life and power and “do things to us that we don’t [...]
25 May 2006 | Uncategorized
From the Athens Banner-Herald: “If you’re headed to college, take some time to sample courses in a wide variety of disciplines. Contrary to what you might believe today, you have no idea about what there is in this world that might truly spark your imagination. But if you choose to follow this advice, a note [...]
24 May 2006 | Theory
From the “mission” of Purdue University art history professor Elizabeth K. Mix (Menon): “I am proud of the fact that most people, when they first learn I’m an art historian, say ‘You don’t look like an art historian.’ I always say ‘Thank-you’ … What is the difference between someone in academia who invents jargon and [...]
24 May 2006 | Journals
New York cleans up: CUNY, NYU and Columbia take three of the top five spots in the list of universities responsible for the greatest number of the 5,250 art and architecture papers published between 2001 and 2005 and indexed by Thomson Scientific. Of course, art-historical activity is too widely dispersed for any one city to [...]
24 May 2006 | Islamic, Renaissance
The “Bellini and the East” exhibition, which examines artistic exchange between Venice and the Ottomans, is getting a lot of attention at the National Gallery in London. (It was recently at the Gardner Museum in Boston; catalog by Yale UP.) Most critics try to draw a lesson for today’s relations between Islam and the West. [...]
The V&A’s summer show of modernism in design, organized by Christopher Wilk (PDF bio), looks back at the “new world” of 1914-1939. Dominic Bradbury credits the show with integrating such things as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet costume designs, but finds that modernist architecture has been “treated rather shabbily.” Deyan Sudjic notes that Wilk unashamedly puts [...]
23 May 2006 | Teaching
How does art historian Wanda Corn win teaching awards? With experiential teaching: “For her course Transatlantic Modernism: Paris and New York in the Early 20th Century, Corn pulls out all the stops. She dresses like Gertrude Stein and invites her students and their guests to come in costume for an evening ‘Chez Stein,’ with a [...]
23 May 2006 | Uncategorized
Regarding Chromophobia, directed by Martha Fiennes, Spiked notes, “Hints of paedophilia come from art-historian godfather, Stephen (Ralph Fiennes).”
22 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
Reviewing Pamela M. Lee’s Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s for CAA Reviews, Christopher Bedford writes: “the limitation of the project for me is that Lee does not reflect explicitly enough on the tightly interwoven fabric of art and criticism that emerges so vividly in her coverage of the ’60s … It might [...]
22 May 2006 | Ancient
From the Guardian: “It was the most famous archaeological find of all time, but still it holds secrets that have yet to be unravelled. Now Oxford scholars are preparing to post the notes, diaries, drawings and photographs from the 1922 excavation of the tomb of King Tutankhamun on the internet in an attempt to study [...]
22 May 2006 | Uncategorized
Hero or cautionary tale? Artists’ attitudes toward Alexander the Great, from antiquity through Altdorfer and Warhol, are surveyed in this new book by Thomas Noll. Depending on the times, Alexander’s ambition and greatness suggested parallels to Lucifer in pride, to Elijah, and even to Christ in dramatic heavenly ascension. Reviewer Sabine Müller finds it satisfactory.
19 May 2006 | Books, Contemporary
From the MIT Press blog: “We’re very pleased to introduce a new collaboration with Afterall Publishing … Afterall came about in 1998, when the artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis and the curator and writer Charles Esche conceived a journal called Afterall, with the goal of foregrounding the work of contemporary artists … Afterall is now [...]
19 May 2006 | Contemporary
In the catalogue to the Lorna Simpson exhibition, Okwui Enwezor writes: “the black image is a troubled image; it perturbs the conscience, unsettles the tranquility of settled canons of beauty … it is foremost a political image before it could ever become a vessel for probing the epistemological fundaments of artistic tradition … Therein lies [...]
19 May 2006 | Books, Islamic, Theory
Reviewing Making Cairo Medieval, edited by Nezar Alsayyad, Irene A. Bierman, and Nasser Rabbat, Mohammad al-Asad writes: “The dependence of a good number of the essays on the critique of Orientalism is a liability. A significant part of this critique of the Orientalist discourse has become repetitive, predictable, and consequently tired. It is time to [...]
18 May 2006 | Renaissance
In a Wall Street Journal article titled “An Art History Mystery Solved?”, Francis P. De Stefano writes: “No great work of art has mystified art historians and critics more than Giorgione’s ‘La Tempesta’ … It is only the depiction of the man and the woman that has deterred experts from recognizing this painting as the [...]
