18 May 2006 | Pre-Columbian
From the New York Times: “On the sacred walls and inside the dark passageways of ancient ruins in Guatemala, archaeologists are making discoveries that open expanded vistas of the vibrant Maya civilization in its formative period, a time reaching back more than 1,000 years before its celebrated Classic epoch. The intriguing finds, including art masterpieces [...]
18 May 2006 | Uncategorized
According to the Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, “The woman who took the Figge Art Museum from a dream to an internationally recognized part of Davenport’s skyline is leaving for an executive post in New York City. Linda Downs, who has been executive director of the Figge and its predecessor, the Davenport Museum of Art, [...]
17 May 2006 | Career, Conferences
From blogger mister mutt: “initially i had a dissertation topic. which was very theoretical. i wrote about 400-500 words on it, to get my thoughts together, and realized it fit a certain conference, so i impulsively sent my little paragraphs off as a conference abstract, as a sort of exercise in practicing good job habits. [...]
17 May 2006 | Books
Will eight volumes suffice for a history of visual art in Germany? Prestel Verlag hopes so. Its first volume, Klassik und Romantik (covering 1750-1850), has just appeared, edited by Andreas Beyer. (The projected completion date is 2009.) Reviewer Sebastian Preuss notes that the contributors are more often younger scholars than lions of the field.
17 May 2006 | Books
From the University of Chicago Press blog: “Museum News has praised Susan M. Bielstein’s Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property. From the review: “[Bielstein] gives life to what could be the driest subject ever with chapters such as ‘Permissions: A Love Story,’ ‘Privacy Woes and the Duchess of York,’ and [...]
16 May 2006 | Contemporary
In the catalogue to the exhibition Ed Ruscha: Photographer, Margit Rowell writes “Ruscha has always claimed to be a painter who made photographs … ‘what I was after was no-style or a non-statement with a no-style.’ Observations like these imply that Ruscha’s primary aim was to make nonaesthetic documentary photographs. Yet the work and its [...]
Is anyone writing good art history for a popular audience? Ross King lately had a go at Paris in the 1860s, comparing Manet and Meissonier in The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. Charles Darwent, in The Independent, finds it a “brilliant book… a good read, and good history,” and [...]
16 May 2006 | Museums
The Tate Modern is replacing its earlier thematic hang with a new one. The London Times’ Tim Teeman finds that it successfully balances “the popular and the esoteric.” “More than 40 per cent of the works have never have been seen before, while 20 per cent are newly acquired … Gone are the old themes [...]
15 May 2006 | Modern
In the catalogue to the Getty Museum exhibition Courbet and the Modern Landscape, Mary Morton writes that “despite the fact that landscape constitutes more than two-thirds of his oeuvre, Courbet’s landscape painting has yet to achieve a stable position in the scholarly canon. This is due to several factors, from the difficulty of dating the [...]
15 May 2006 | Renaissance
Tom Henry and Francesco Federico Mancini tackled the controversial topic of Raphael’s early career for an exhibition in Città di Castello. Mancini discusses the show in a lengthy interview in La Repubblica.
15 May 2006 | Museums
With “Russian Avant-Gardes” in Madrid, “¡Rusia!” in Bilbao, and “Malèvitx” in Barcelona, Spain is the place to go right now for Russian art, writes Lothar Schmidt in his survey of the three exhibitions.
12 May 2006 | Museums
“The museum should effect a rupture with the street, the banal. The public looks to the museum for an alternative.” In an interview in Le Monde, Suzanne Pagé, director of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, reflects on museums’ ever greater openness to society, their anti-amnesiac function, the “enterprise museum” (increasingly ambitious [...]
12 May 2006 | Architecture, Baroque/Neoclassical
Michelangelo, fine, but amid all the St. Peter’s anniversary hubbub let’s not neglect Carlo Maderno, writes Axel Christoph Gampp. The much-maligned architect hasn’t received much attention since Howard Hibbard’s 1972 study, but Gampp takes up the cudgels for him.
12 May 2006 | Americas, Modern
The National Gallery’s Sheeler exhibition features a catalogue by Charles Brock. While “exhibitions have been devoted respectively to his photographs, paintings, and drawings, the relationships across media in his work have been relatively neglected. The root cause of this [is that] Sheeler and his dealer, Edith Halpert, consciously emphasized the distinctions between his painting and [...]
11 May 2006 | Museums
From an op-ed by Dore Ashton in the Brooklyn Rail: “…There is something a lot more serious going on and it is not at all those Trimalchian banquets in Miami, Basel, Venice and New York at the many bazaars called art fairs. Curators have powers to erode the confidence of serious viewers, as they are [...]
11 May 2006 | Conservation, Contemporary
Insurer AXA Art “announced its third conservation research award to Tate in London.” The €225,000 award benefits “an international collaborative research in preventive and practical conservation of acrylic works … Acrylic paints and primers have been widely used by artists since the early 1960s. They account for approximately 50% of paint sales over the last [...]
11 May 2006 | Architecture, Islamic
“During the past couple of years, a number of historic monuments have been re-opened after lying for years under layers of rubble and scaffolding. There are still several hundred either in the process of being conserved and restored or on the waiting list to undergo conservation and restoration … In 2001, Caroline Williams, a well-known [...]
10 May 2006 | Contemporary, Museums
From the Korea Times: “The government of [South Korea's] Kyonggi Province and Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation kicked off the construction of the Nam June Paik Museum in Yong-in, south of Seoul, on Tuesday, aimed at commemorating the Korean-born late video artist Paik Nam-june … officially announcing the start of the 28.9 billion won ($31 million) project [...]
10 May 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
From the L.A. Times: It’s the “Andromeda Chained to the Rock, credited for more than 150 years to the Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck. The Ahmanson Foundation acquired it in 1985 as a 20th birthday present to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which put it up right away. ‘It sends chills up and [...]
10 May 2006 | Uncategorized
From blogger foozini: “For those that are considering a useless degree like art history…. ‘Where the consumers do not value what is being produced, the investment should not pay off. When people insist on specializing in a field for which there is little demand, their investment has been a waste of scarce resources that could [...]
