30 June 2006 | Books
From the Economist: “For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look like … As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise [Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth], pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time [...]
30 June 2006 | Uncategorized
“‘Her and, like, five old dudes in New York rule the roost in pizza,’ said the young waitress at Nizza La Bella restaurant here, about her boss, Evelyne Slomon. A few of those dudes died a while ago, so Slomon, who is one of the on-camera experts in the premiere episode of the History Channel [...]
29 June 2006 | Museums
From the Washington Times: “Spectacular artifacts from two lost cities of ancient Egypt, rescued from the sea after more than 1,300 years, have taken the breath away from more than 1 million visitors to the Martin-Gropius Building in Berlin. They have even ignited religious debate — nonviolent so far — in Egypt … Sheik Ali [...]
29 June 2006 | Uncategorized
From the blog of Jesús Garza: “Would I come back to Oaxaca again? I’d rather not. I told my wife, lets opt for less culture and more beach next time. But, alas, my requests often fall on deaf ears. You see, my wife is an art historian…”
The latest Art Bulletin includes eight reviews of the recently published textbook, Art Since 1900, by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. Several of the reviewers find that the book is possibly too advanced for undergraduates. Many of them also suggest that the Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh have created a new, [...]
27 June 2006 | Museums
According to the Lincoln [Nebraska] Journal Star, in the newly reinstalled European galleries at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “Paintings share wall space with clocks. Silverwork and sculptures are on pedestals strategically placed in the same room with the paintings. Complimentary works on paper are in the nearby hallway. All of the works in each [...]
27 June 2006 | Uncategorized
Has the art-history lifestyle left you flabby? Elizabeth Howard Schmidt does water tai chi.
26 June 2006 | Books, Teaching
John Paoletti’s February CAA talk on textbooks is now available online: “I would like to propose a moratorium on all publication of general textbooks in the history of art … we don’t seem to be willing to let the textbooks catch up with our innovations in teaching. Classrooms without a textbook would demand both a [...]
Reviewing Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art, 650–1100, “the first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars,” David Carrier writes in CAA Reviews: “One reason this volume is important is that it reprints major scholarly essays. Another is that it responds in a scholarly way to immediately pressing [...]
23 June 2006 | Renaissance
From the Times of London: “A mystery that has tantalised art scholars for centuries moved closer to resolution today when part of a scandalous Renaissance fresco came to light after almost 400 years. The fresco, painted by the early Renaissance artist Pinturicchio (1454-1513) for the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, showed the Borgia Pope Alexander [...]
23 June 2006 | Renaissance
From the Wall Street Journal: “Santa Maria delle Grazie, already home to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper,’ may provide a second reason to visit if a recently discovered fragment of a fresco in an infrequently visited room turns out to be another work by the Renaissance master. The as-yet unnamed fragment, a meter wide [...]
23 June 2006 | Books
From the Guardian: “As the writing of professional art history has become ever more narrow in focus, concentrating on the detailed interpretation of imagery and the circumstances of its production, so a market has opened up for more general books about the lives of artists, approaching the subject of art not through the work itself, [...]
22 June 2006 | Ancient
From Ansa: “In Italy’s most sensational archaeological find in years, an Etruscan tomb near Rome has yielded the oldest examples of painting in Western civilisation. Experts could barely contain their excitement as they showed reporters five roaring lions and a flock of waterbirds that have emerged from the ground at the buried Etruscan city of [...]
22 June 2006 | Architecture, Museums
From the New York Times: “Ending seven months of speculation, the Museum of Modern Art is to announce its new chief curator of architecture and design today: he is Barry Bergdoll, chairman of Columbia University’s art history department, who will begin work in January … ‘I’ve always thought of myself as working on modern architecture,’ [...]
22 June 2006 | Conservation, Modern
From The Independent: “The sweeping panorama of foreboding skies and the bustling life of Brighton’s grand seafront is a tour de force that took John Constable months of careful refining. Yet after he had finished, Britain’s greatest landscape painter stood back, admired his work, and took a knife to it. New research has revealed for [...]
21 June 2006 | Ancient, Museums
An exhibition review from Richard Dorment in The Telegraph: “The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity is about the persistence of the classical tradition. Its thesis is simple: that classical art, which originated with the Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and is always said to have ended with the fall of [...]
21 June 2006 | Journals
Leo Steinberg’s notable 2002 CAA talk has been reprinted in the Brooklyn Rail: “… back to that walking seminar in Rome, 1957 … I remember [Wolfgang Lotz] as a marvelous teacher, with one welcome flaw in his nature: a touch of laziness, which made him reluctant to read student papers during a summer jaunt. To [...]
21 June 2006 | Uncategorized
From the New Republic: “Divorcing Gumilyov, [Anna Akhmatova] married an irascible Babylonian scholar named Vladimir Shileiko, who was considerably older than she was, and when she tired of his bullying and his jealousy, she moved on to the noted art historian Nikolai Punin. Punin was in many ways the love of her life, but he, [...]
20 June 2006 | Uncategorized
Wick Sloane writes in Inside Higher Ed: “My heroes of the century past are Jonas Salk and Norman Borlaug. Borlaug’s work still feeds millions by putting more grains of wheat on shorter stalks. The rest of us aren’t creating human conditions that can accept these advances at enough scale. What, with our metaphors, would transform [...]
20 June 2006 | Uncategorized
…if you want to keep making art. Nicholas Serota joins the ranks of those who “was deeply interested in art when I was at school, and of course, like everyone else, I drew at that time. But then, when I became an art historian, I think I recognized my own limitations. So from the age [...]
