13 April 2009 | Uncategorized
From the L.A. Times: David W. Scott, an artist and art historian who served as founding director of the National Museum of American Art, played a key role in expanding the National Gallery of Art and shepherded the Corcoran Gallery of Art through a difficult time after a controversial exhibit, died of multiple organ failure [...]
13 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
The Tate Britain has reconstructed William Blake’s famously unheralded 1809 exhibition (it attracted only one review and no sales). Laura Cumming in the Observer is struck by Blake’s aesthetic: Here are the streaming bodies – word made flesh – the long robes, loose hair, thunderclaps and starbursts. Here are the weightless figures in their graphic [...]
A second edition has just been published of Donald Preziosi’s The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 1998. The new edition compensates for its slightly slimmer profile with more densely packed type. The price has risen from $18.95 (in 1998) to $27.95. The sections on “Modernity and its Discontents” and [...]
10 April 2009 | Uncategorized
(Belated) News from a sister discipline: Unlike almost all other academic groups, the American Philosophical Association, headquartered at the University of Delaware in Newark, holds three meetings a year, one each for its Eastern, Central and Pacific Divisions … The Eastern Division meeting is by far the largest, taking place every December between Christmas and [...]
9 April 2009 | Awards
Down from six last year, two art historians this year won Guggenheims: Francesca Fiorani, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Virginia: Leonardo da Vinci’s shadows. Jaime Lara, Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music: Flying Francis: a new iconography in the Andes. This year a total of 180 were [...]
We belatedly take note of a post by Gary Schwartz: … a research institute in Paris and Houston, Texas, known as The Image of the Black in Western Art … was put in place by the oil millionaire Dominique de Menil (1908-97), a formidable figure in 20th-century patronage of minority politics as well as art. [...]
8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Thomas W. Gaehtgens notes that Willibald Sauerländer’s 85th birthday was recently celebrated in Munich and Princeton, which held a two-day conference in his honor. Sauerländer recently lectured on David’s painting of Marat. Oskar Bätschmann remembers art historian Hans A. Lüthy, who died recently. Once the director of the Schweizerischen Instituts für Kunstwissenschaft, Lüthy published on [...]
8 April 2009 | Uncategorized
Here at The Art History Newsletter, we’re contemplating making more changes. You asked for the ability to post comments — done. What else would you like to see? What other blogs (academic or otherwise) do you enjoy and wish this one more resembled? And what do you think of these ideas?: We could give anyone [...]
7 April 2009 | Books
From the recently published book Meyer Schapiro Abroad: Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks, edited by Daniel Esterman: Barcelona, 21 July 1927 … I know that after 1000 monographs have exhausted a million details, their blurred image will make a fine picture for the few people who are taken by such things. May they be [...]
In the March 2009 issue of the Burlington Magazine, Elisa de Halleux reviews Georges Didi-Huberman’s new essay collection L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels: Didi-Huberman takes representations of the body and the flesh as a means to dwell on the spectator’s intimate relationship with the image, and to describe the nature of [...]
In the March/April ’09 ArtAsiaPacific, Don J. Cohn reviews three recent books: … Melissa Chiu, museum director at Asia Society in New York, and the author/editor of several catalogs for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art (herein Chicona, AAP’s, not Chiu’s, neologism), has written a brief, intimidatingly titled book that offers an elementary “paint by the [...]
2 April 2009 | Theory
In the Jan/Feb ‘09 Architectural Design, guest editor Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi writes on and interviews Yves Michaud: In 2003, Yves Michaud wrote a book that met with considerable success in France. In L’art à l’état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique he claims that it is now almost impossible to identify a demaracation line [...]
1 April 2009 | Books
Also in the February 2009 Burlington Magazine, Richard Ormond reviews Diana Donald’s Picturing Animals in Britain: Diana Donald has written a challenging and densely argued book … to bring animals “centre stage in historical research,” and establish the boundaries of a new discipline. She is an evangelist of her subject and of the animal kingdom [...]
