31 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
Also in the Spring 2007 Biography is an essay by Susan Bruce on author Siegfried Sassoon’s autobiographical writings: [I] advance the argument that the advent of photography changes our perception of ourselves in time … its most fundamental and melancholy legacy. The advent of photography ushers in an age in which we are at once [...]
30 October 2007 | Books, Theory
In the Spring 2007 issue of Biography, Udi E. Greenberg writes on biographies of Walter Benjamin: Since it is Benjamin’s eccentric personality and the figure of Benjamin himself, not just his thoughts and ideas, which stand at the center of [academia's] attention, it is hardly surprising that his private life has given birth to a [...]
29 October 2007 | Ancient, Books
If you don’t specialize in the art of the Ancient Near East, but need to teach it in surveys, you know how hard it is to find good general histories of the period. In a recent issue of East and West (55:1-4), Nicola Laneri reviews Marc van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near [...]
26 October 2007 | Asia, Contemporary
In a recent issue of Art India, Beth Citron reports on “Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in Asia,” a three-day seminar held in Delhi in March “to motivate dialogue on a potential Delhi Biennale”: Introductions by Parul Dave Mukherji and Geeta Kapur reflected on Edward Said’s Orientalism, with Mukherji emphasizing the need to critically [...]
25 October 2007 | Teaching
In a recent issue (15:1) of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, Camille Paglia writes: For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural [...]
24 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary
More interesting items on contemporary African art. A recent issue (n. 69) of Africultures is entitled “Les cultures africaines sont-elles à vendre? Richesses artistiques et développement économique.” Its contents are drawn largely from the proceedings of an October 2006 symposium “Maintenant l’Afrique!” held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In “Diffusion et marché: l’art africain [...]
23 October 2007 | Americas
The latest issue (52: 1) of Amerikastudien / American Studies is devoted to “Transatlantic Perspectives on American Visual Culture.” In their introduction, editors Astrid Böger and Christof Decker write that because American Studies is a relatively new discipline, that may have helped it become a particularly hospitable place for emerging and hitherto marginalized research agendas. [...]
22 October 2007 | Renaissance
Catching up on an older bit of news we missed … From the Times of London: A £30 million Leonardo da Vinci painting stolen from a castle four years ago is believed to have been recovered by detectives. Although the painting has yet to be formally identified, officers from four crime enforcement agencies are confident [...]
19 October 2007 | Uncategorized
In the September 2007 Renaissance Studies, Lucia Dacome has contributed an article on “Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’” on the surprisingly fascinating topic of eighteenth-century anatomical waxworks created by women in Europe. (If you have access to Renaissance Studies online, be sure to view the article’s stunning illustrations.) … As the [...]
18 October 2007 | Photography
Soon to appear: two new journals devoted to the study of photography: Photography and Culture and Photographies. It’s hard to learn much about Photographies from its vaguely written press release [pdf here], except that it’s edited by David Bate, Sarah Kember, Martin Lister, and Liz Wells. Photography and Culture, according to its press release, aims [...]
17 October 2007 | Asia
In the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Collections (XIX, 1), J.E. Hoare reviews Jane Portal’s Art under Control in North Korea, The only permanent display of North Korean art in the West is at the British Museum, and it is fitting that Jane Portal, the curator who started this collection, has [...]
16 October 2007 | Books
In the Spring-Summer 2007 issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts, Bernard Jacqué reviews Christine Velut’s book Décors de papier: Production, commerce et usages des papiers peints à Paris, 1750-1820: A book about wallpaper that is not a general history retailing old clichés is always an event, given that studies on this type of decoration [...]
15 October 2007 | Books
Reviewing Michael Levey’s book Sir Thomas Lawrence in the latest British Art Journal (VII, 3), David Platzer writes that Levey is undoubtedly our most distinguished and accessible living writer on art … A man of generous and wide sympathies, he is fiercely opinionated and rarely if ever lukewarm in his likes and dislikes … Moreover, [...]
12 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the Autumn 2007 issue of History of Photography, editor Peggy Ann Kusnerz writes: This issue of History of Photography brings together an assortment of essays about individual photographers and their work. These essays are not ‘histories’ in the tradition of Scottish political philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). His type of writing, called ‘Great Man History’, [...]
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture by Annemarie Schimmel. Gregory Minnisale writes: Professor Annemarie Schimmel passed away in Bonn, Germany, on 26 January 2003 at the age of eighty. One of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic culture, history and thought, her [...]
10 October 2007 | Asia, Modern
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India by Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin. Prasannajit de Silva writes: The idea of a second intellectual Renaissance in Europe, taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and driven by the arrival [...]
9 October 2007 | Books, Theory
Opening the latest Art History (April 2007), we see that their book reviews are no longer edited by the inimitable Liz James, yet they seem to be every bit as excellent this issue under new editor Cordelia Warr. (If only the section were larger, and the books reviewed closer to their publication date.) In this [...]
8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but [...]
5 October 2007 | Modern
The July-August issue (no. 20) of FMR (available online) includes stunning photographs of Géricault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. The subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, the painting has also appeared recently (in one form or another) on the covers of The New Yorker and Harper’s, freshly relevant in the wake of the [...]
4 October 2007 | Books, Modern
In September 2007 Burlington Magazine, James Beechey reviews Elizabeth Cowling’s Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose: … this is a wholly engrossing book … Penrose’s private notes … reveal him at his sharpest and most sensitive: his insights into individual works are generally acute … As a tale of courtly love, as [...]
