29 October 2006 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Monday, November 6.
27 October 2006 | Uncategorized
From Artnet: “Duke University has received a $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to sponsor a “visual studies initiative,” an interdisciplinary program designed to explore ‘visual literacy.’ ‘The visual can have its own logic that can’t be expressed in text,’ said Hans van Miegroet, chair of Duke’s dept. of art, art history [...]
26 October 2006 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times: “Thomas Crow, a respected art historian who has been the director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles since 2000, has been named the Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Mr. Crow is replacing Robert Storr, who left the Art Institute [...]
25 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
“Ten years ago, when I spoke of a Girodet exhibition project, everyone confused him with Géricault,” said Sylvaine Bellenger, who organized “Girodet, Romantic Rebel.” Last week, the survey was in Montreal for the last stop on its tour. Today, the bizarrerie for which David’s student was once penalized now works in his favor. The Montreal [...]
24 October 2006 | Awards, Medieval
Kristin Marek has received the 5,000-Euro Hertha and Werner Krauße Prize for her dissertation, Three Bodies of the King: The Visual Culture of the Effigy. Marek argues that in the Middle Ages there was a sacred body alongside the body politic and the body natural, as distinguished by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz. For example, kings [...]
23 October 2006 | Museums, Renaissance
Titian’s portraits of the powerful are up at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris (catalog from Skira). Titien, le pouvoir en face is “a magnificent introduction” to Titian’s work, in spite of its odd title, writes Gérard-Georges Lemaire. In one picture, Charles Quint, “no beauty,” is “literally sublimated by Titian.” Lemaire also praises the je-ne-sais-quoi [...]
20 October 2006 | Uncategorized
From “Annie,” an American student in Barcelona: “I started my classes at Universitat Pompeu Fabra the next week. I’m taking Arte y Artistas, a class about avant-garde Spanish art, with a concentration on the work of Picasso, Dali, Tapies and Miro. We’ve got the prototypical art history professor: a wiry, overly emphatic man prone to [...]
19 October 2006 | Books, Modern, Museums
Goya’s Caprichos are currently on view in Milan’s Galleria Bellinzona (through Oct. 28). Three hundred copies of the 80-part series of etchings and aquatints were printed in February 1799. At CAA Reviews, Tara Zanardi recently reviewed Andrew Schulz’s book, Goya’s Caprichos: Aesthetics, Perception, and the Body. She credits Schulz with showing the significance of the [...]
18 October 2006 | Modern
Paul Cézanne, whom Picasso called “the father of us all,” died one hundred years ago next week. Deutschland radio interviews two art historians, Robert Kudielka and Gottfried Boehm, on his significance for modern painting. Boehm discusses Cézanne’s investigations into the logic of visual perception itself (as opposed to that of the objects we perceive), and [...]
17 October 2006 | Books, Theory
In CAA Reviews, Jill H. Casid reviews The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski: “Sensitive to charges that visual culture studies is an amorphous and ever-expanding field without either a clearly defined object of study or rigorous research and analytical methods, the first section of the reader on [...]
16 October 2006 | Uncategorized
From The Australian: “Australian National University art historian Nigel Lendon and law professor Tim Bonyhady were given almost $250,000 last year to study the Afghan war rug as part of research funded through a new national security stream of research grants … Mr Lendon said … he wanted to study whether there were secret messages [...]
13 October 2006 | Architecture
In a recent issue of the Oxford Art Journal, Helen Hills reviews Evonne Levy’s Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque: “Fascinated by apparent connections between Nazi propaganda and Jesuit architecture, Levy asks whether we might usefully think of early modern Jesuit architecture in terms of propaganda. Conversely, she suggests that National Socialist architecture was indebted to [...]
12 October 2006 | Museums
From Artnet: “The Museum of Modern Art has established a new curatorial department, Media, and has named Klaus Biesenbach as its head, making him chief curator of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and chief curator of the Department of Media. Longtime MoMA video curator Barbara London is associate curator of the new department. MoMA’s film department, [...]
11 October 2006 | Books
Professor Jean Kempf, director of the Presses Universitaires de Lyon, reviews Roland Recht’s much-talked-about À quoi sert l’histoire de l’art? in ARHV: “This is a real publishing scandal – and I weigh my words carefully – but also an immense disappointment, as big as Recht’s reputation … At a moment when humanities publishing is in [...]
10 October 2006 | Ancient
From Bloomberg News: Beginning Oct. 13, “Visitors to the Vatican will be able to view its museums’ latest addition: a 2,000-year-old pagan burial ground filled with mausoleums, scattered bones and headstones, including one that belonged to one of Nero’s slaves. The cemetery almost never saw the light of day in modern times. The Vatican announced [...]
10 October 2006 | Conservation
Robert G. Calkins, emeritus professor at Cornell, writes in The Wall Street Journal: “A controversial project is currently under way to restore the Mont, now almost reunited to the mainland by accumulated silt, to its island status. This is ironic: The Mont originally was not an island at all, but merely a granite outcropping, rising [...]
9 October 2006 | Uncategorized
Via Brian Sholis, an interview with Courtauld professor Joseph Leo Koerner published by ReadySteadyBook: “Michael Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany remains a model of historical exposition. Michael Fried’s has been personally important to me, and I feel especially in tune with his new book on Menzel. I studied with Svetlana Alpers, and I [...]
6 October 2006 | Contemporary
For Art Basel, James Rosenquist showed a big mural in homage to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In an interview with El Pais, he looks back on his North Dakota childhood, F-111, the Cold War, the limits of the term “pop art.” He also praises Dalí.
6 October 2006 | Ancient, Architecture, Journals
The June 2006 Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology features an article by Yuval Yekutieli entitled, “Is Somebody Watching You? Ancient Surveillance Systems in the Southern Judean Desert”: “The Panoptic model of surveillance, which enables a small number of observers to control large numbers of people, is usually considered a modern (18th century AD) invention and a [...]
5 October 2006 | Contemporary
Whatever happened to the Neuen Wilden, 1981’s bad boys of painting? In Die Welt (English version at signandsight.com), Cornelius Tittel visits surviving members, such as Rainer Fetting, who is shown gazing upon an opening for the young star Matthias Weischer like a ghost of Christmas past.
