22 December 2008 | Uncategorized
We’ll return Friday January 2.
19 December 2008 | Books
In caa.reviews, Susan P. Casteras reviews Jason Edwards’s Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and Burne-Jones and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting: [They] exemplify newer methodological approaches in Victorian art, a blend of the intertextual and historical, and each superbly succeeds in diverse ways. Edwards’s book challenges [...]
17 December 2008 | Uncategorized
Noted: Art Historians at Work. “Ideas, tips, and ruminations about the teaching of art history. A blog instigated by the History of Art & Architecture graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh.” Various art magazines also maintain blogs we’ve never much discussed because they’re mostly concerned with who bought what for how much last night. [...]
15 December 2008 | Architecture
We belatedly take note of an interesting article published in July on Signandsight.com: The German feuilletons spent the spring debating the relationship between architecture and morality … De Meuron told an interviewer that it would be stupid and cowardly not to build for China on the grounds that it has no democracy. Albert Speer, the [...]
12 December 2008 | Career
In the Wall Street Journal, we read that according to “a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc.,” art-history majors have a median starting salary of $35,800. Ten years after graduation, their median salary is $64,900. In that respect, they beat majors in anthropology, biology, criminal justice, drama, [...]
10 December 2008 | Americas
From The New Criterion: Anyone who suspects that nineteenth-century American art has less to teach us than twentieth-century modernism should take a drive up the winding road of Route 23A, up Kaaterskill Clove in the eastern escarpment of the Catskill Mountains. Here in the town of Hunter, New York, a group of young artists is [...]
8 December 2008 | Uncategorized
There still are not many art historians blogging, but let’s note a couple worthwhile sites we’ve not yet indicated: Jonathan Janson considers all things Vermeer. An artist himself, he writes with particular sensitivity to technical aspects: Vermeer used glazing as other Dutch painters, with parsimony. They knew glazing is not an answer-all technical solution and [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he was senior curator and oversaw the department of classical art for 40 years … Although his bibliography of articles and books filled 60 printed pages, Dr. Vermeule may have been the least stuffy classicist to prowl the MFA’s halls. He was fond of draping plastic Hawaiian [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
I read in the York University newspaper that With Halifax’s vaunted ‘Golden Generation’ jettisoned out into the real world of 9 to 5, mortgages and finding school for the littl’un, it has taken the leadership of metrosexual art historian Joseph Harrison-Davis to blend the new blood of rotund-ladies man (the ladies being rotund) ‘Lundy’ with [...]
6 December 2008 | Uncategorized
The Fluxus artist just died in a retirement home in Cologne at the age of 82 years, according to this short article from the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.
3 December 2008 | Architecture, Conservation
Smithsonian Magazine writes about current attempts to restore and safeguard Hagia Sophia: “For months at a time, you don’t see anybody working,” said [Zeynep] Ahunbay, a professor of architecture at Istanbul Technical University. She had directed a partial restoration of the building’s exterior in the late 1990s and is regarded by conservators as its guardian [...]
1 December 2008 | Baroque/Neoclassical
According to ANSA, Caravaggio’s reputation for revolutionary artistic genius has received a further boost following the discovery he may have used fireflies to create primitive ”photographs”. Roberta Lapucci, conservation chief at the Florence-based SACI institute, believes the baroque artist created a firefly powder as an essential tool after converting his entire studio into a kind [...]
