5 October 2006 | Museums
The up-and-coming Max Hollein, now director of the august Städel in Frankfurt, recently discussed his efforts to accommodate today’s broad museum-going public. His institution now offers seven different audio tours: a guide to the highlights, a children’s tour, and tours focused on religious, technical and cultural-history topics. He also dismisses the idea that a modern-art [...]
5 October 2006 | Journals
The August 2006 Journal of Visual Culture is themed “Disability-Visuality” and explores “the extent to which visuality is both determined by and determining of our understanding of disability. And how disability can bend our existing conceptions of visuality out of shape.” Fiona Candlin examines historical attitudes towards the sense of touch, particularly the ways in [...]
4 October 2006 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Museums
From the AP: “The Baroque-era painter Annibale Carracci – underpaid during his lifetime and under-appreciated for centuries after his death – is enjoying a posthumous renaissance in his native Italy. What is described as his first solo show opened [recently] at Bologna’s Civic Archaeological Museum. Entitled simply ‘Annibale Carracci,’ the show works to dispel the [...]
4 October 2006 | Modern
A conversation with leading Colombian art critic Eduardo Serrano appears in L’Humanité. He names the mid-twentieth century as the moment when Colombian art started to “singularize and acquire a certain personality.” He nominates Botero, Andrès de Santa Maria, Alejandro Obregon, Enrique Graù, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, and Edgar Negret for the artistic canon of Colombia, “a [...]
4 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
Alfred Barr’s torpedo (illustration here) continues to make waves. El Pais asks Serge Guilbaut for thoughts on MoMA’s future, in the wake of William Rubin’s death. He calls for democracy, debate, and dialogue. Also in El Pais, Ángela Molina reviews “Doppler Effect,” the 48-room permanent installation at the Tate Modern directed by Vicente Todolí, within [...]
3 October 2006 | Renaissance
Philippe Dagen reports in Le Monde on the recent Raphael exhibit: The Galleria Borghese, already full of grand marbles and bronzes from antiquity to the Renaissance, may be the least likely place in Rome to accommodate temporary exhibitions, but Anna Coliva, curator of “Raffaello da Firenze a Roma,” was not dissuaded. In the assembled 50+ [...]
3 October 2006 | Modern, Museums
Arno Breker, the sculptor known for having been highly honored by Hitler, is the subject of a recent, controversial solo exhibition, the first such. An interview with curator Rudolf Conrades is in Die Welt. Conrades had the idea upon learning that Breker was also esteemed by Jean Cocteau, who commissioned his gravestone from Breker. The [...]
3 October 2006 | Modern
One hundred years ago, a 30-year-old Paula Modersohn-Becker painted what may be the first female nude self-portrait, writes Rainer Stamm, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, at a moment when she was in Paris, having resolved to leave her husband Otto in favor of her career. Though Picasso, Schiele and Kokoschka were currently all going topless in [...]
2 October 2006 | Journals, Medieval, Modern
A recent issue of Perspective (2006-1) featured a debate on “Meyer Schapiro and Roman Sculpture, Questions of Non-Reception in France” that covered diverse terrain. Enrico Castelnuovo, Roland Recht and Robert A. Maxwell tried to articulate his legacy for medieval art history, the relationship between his medieval and modern writings, and the reasons for his poor [...]
2 October 2006 | Books, Renaissance
Roland H. Wiegenstein reviews Hans Körner’s Botticelli biography (discussed earlier here). The painter’s career is seen in the context of the new demand for and “mass production” of images of Mary owing to the Devotio Moderna (the Virgin being an important mediator between divine and human), and the status of the Medici as against the [...]
2 October 2006 | Ancient, Books
Often perceived today as childish pablum, ancient animal stories were in fact deeply strange and serious, argue two books, one new, the other re-released. Harald Mielsch surveys ancient Greek animal stories represented in mosaics, reliefs, miniature books, carpets and frescoes. Heinz Mode’s classic on fabulous creatures (the centaur, the elephant god Ganesh, etc.) is out [...]
