31 July 2006 | Books
In the Independent of London, Tom Lubbock reviews The Sight of Death: an Experiment in Art Writing, “in which the British art historian TJ Clark records looking at two landscapes by Nicolas Poussin over several months. The book is in diary form, and records about 50 separate viewings, with their unfolding observations. I don’t know [...]
28 July 2006 | Career
A reader writes in regarding Wednesday’s post: “Goss’s main goal is to aquire the estates of artists. He does this by luring in art history undergrads, promising them cutting-edge research, and uses their position (as ‘art historians’) to provide a link between relatives of dead artist and the gallery. Although unpaid internships are the norm [...]
27 July 2006 | Books
According to The New Criterion’s James Panero, they are “The journals of Eugene Delacroix, as translated by Walter Pach. Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, the first volume of the Matisse biography by Hilary Spurling … Julius Meier-Graefe on Vincent Van Gogh, and of course Vasari.”
26 July 2006 | Uncategorized
From The Santa Barbara Independent: “[Californian gallerist Frank] Goss gestures toward a large area where he plans to create what he jokingly refers to as ‘a sweatshop for art historians.’ He says that here is where the 12 seniors and graduate students from UCSB and Westmont who comprise his research team will have their library [...]
25 July 2006 | Museums
From The Art Newspaper: “The Singapore government has announced a new museum examining the relationship between science and art that will be part of a resort complex … [The Las Vegas] Sands Corporation are investing over $3.2 billion in the scheme designed by Boston-based architect Moshe Safdie … [Safdie] convened an advisory group that included [...]
24 July 2006 | Renaissance
From ANSA: “New research into a work by Andrea Mantegna suggests that the Renaissance master was born earlier than art historians previously thought. The discovery came during preliminary studies for the restoration of one of the artist’s most famous pieces, the San Zeno altarpiece in Verona. These studies, carried out by Milan University using infrared [...]
21 July 2006 | Uncategorized
Has a German academic even been as successful in France as the art historian Thomas Gaehtgens? He has held a chair at the Collège de France, is the founder of the German Forum for Art History in Paris, a bi-national research center, has been inducted into the Legion of Honor, and is at home in [...]
20 July 2006 | Contemporary
Nine years on from his untimely death, Martin Kippenberger had a retrospective recently at Tate Modern that’s now in Düsseldorf (“Happy End of Franz Kafka’s America” is the centerpiece) and he’s doing well at auction too. How would the artist, whose car of choice was the homely Ford Capri, react? “I can’t cut off an [...]
19 July 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
More commemoration of Rembrandt’s 400th birthday: Ekkehard Mai compares Rembrandt’s fate to that of Rubens: both renewers of thematic and pictorial conventions. Urs Fitze places his artistic interests and lavish lifestyle in the context of Amsterdam’s golden age as a world metropolis, full of strange products from around the globe. And The Chicago Blog summarizes [...]
18 July 2006 | Modern, Museums
Picasso has taken Madrid for the third time, writes Gérard Dupuy. In 1936, the Republican government made him honorary director of the Louvre; in 1981, Guernica settled there; and now he straddles the Prado and the Reina Sofia in the blockbuster exhibition Picasso: Tradition and Avant-Garde. Their rich holdings allow for poignant juxtapositions, such as [...]
17 July 2006 | Renaissance
Why did Cellini reveal so many trade secrets? To build up his reputation for authority and expertise, according to a new book. Cellini’s treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture are out in a new German edition with editing and commentary by Erhard Brepohl, himself a goldsmithing master. His intimate knowledge of the field pays off (writes [...]
14 July 2006 | Journals, Modern
The latest Yale French Studies considers the affection of the surrealists for the “many ‘others’ outside of the official group with whom they shared their passions: Marxists, visual artists, filmmakers, psychiatrists and ethnographers.” In his essay, Jonathan P. Eburne considers “the ties between surrealism’s politics and the problem of terrorist violence,” jumping off from an [...]
13 July 2006 | Uncategorized
In a new essay collection devoted to filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail, “Marc Weis structures his essay around the director’s friendship with art historian and Piero della Francesca scholar, Roberto Longhi. From 1939 to 1943 Pasolini studied under Longhi while at the University of Bologna, completing a thesis on the city’s [...]
12 July 2006 | Modern, Museums
In the land of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, the synaesthetic trailblazer of pure abstraction gets a thorough look at decades-long last. At the Tate Modern, Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction shows 74 works. Picking up ten years after the artist’s 1895 epiphany in front of a Monet haystack, the show climaxes around 1914, before [...]
11 July 2006 | Ancient
From the AP: “A 2,000-year-old marble statue of a goddess has been discovered among dozens of broken columns and inscriptions during excavation at an ancient theater in central Greece, archaeologists said on Monday. The headless statue of hunting goddess Artemis dates from the middle of the first century B.C., archaeologist Athanassios Tziafalias said.” From the [...]
11 July 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical
The 400th-anniversary Amsterdam exhibition Rembrandt – Quest of a Genius addresses serious scholarly questions, writes Manfred Schwarz in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. How to explain the Night Watch, so different from the meditative, sentimental pictures of its era? (Peter Greenaway’s film Nightwatching appropriately compares it to corrupt, greasy 1920s-Chicago, though the analogy only goes so [...]
10 July 2006 | Renaissance
In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Jutta Held discusses Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, in particular the tension between its iconography and its pictorial syntax. She reevaluates Jaromir Neumann’s Panofskian 1962 monograph on the picture, which posited a neo-Platonic scheme of three-layered meaning (allegory of art, transformation and salvation of the soul), noting that the book also [...]
7 July 2006 | Medieval
From the Times of London: “A painting that was hailed as a 14th-century masterpiece when it was bought last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a reported $50 million is a 19th-century fake in the view of a leading American scholar. James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University [...]
6 July 2006 | Conferences
We just discovered CAA’s “Boston Conference Press and Blog Roundup.” Be sure to click on Artforum’s Diary entry in particular if you haven’t read it already (“Why … were ‘dull as dishwater’ and ‘stale’ among the mordant first takes on this year’s session offerings? One veteran reminisced about the ’70s and ’80s, when ‘everyone knew [...]
5 July 2006 | Journals
As Brian Sholis notes in his excellent “In Search of the Miraculous” blog, “The Spring 2006 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, contains a strong, readable essay on the development of art history in America by Thomas Crow.” It begins at the beginning and “runs up to Clement [...]
