30 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Lopez reviews the new book “The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” by Nicholas Fox Weber: Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Weber’s text … offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s … Weber’s tendency to stint [...]
30 October 2009 | Renaissance
Didier Rykner reads the Italian newspapers and wonders how it could be true that Giorgio Vasari’s archives, held in his native city of Arezzo and belonging to the Museo Casa Vasari, a private museum whose owner, Count Giovanni Festari, passed away a few days ago, could have been sold for the extravagant sum of 150 [...]
29 October 2009 | Contemporary, Photography
From The New York Times: Roy DeCarava, the child of a single mother in Harlem who turned that neighborhood into his canvas and became one of the most important photographers of his generation by chronicling its people and its jazz giants, has died. He was 89. His death was announced by Sherry Turner DeCarava, his [...]
28 October 2009 | Contemporary, Museums
From The New York Observer: Ever since he got his start in the art world as an editor at the influential bimonthly magazine Flash Art in Milan, [Massimiliano] Gioni has enjoyed an extraordinarily swift rise as a curator … Some of the more outlandish stunts Mr. Gioni has overseen … include sending a 90-foot helium [...]
27 October 2009 | Photography
Two recent posts by French photo historian André Gunthert have generated considerable discussion. In one post, Gunthert discusses elites who protest that one of their own is being “lynched,” an expression whose power lies in part in its ability to evoke a potent image, an expression that is also too easily abused. In the other [...]
26 October 2009 | Books, Teaching
Also in caa.reviews, David A. Levine considers Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies edited by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette, and Andrea Pappas. A collection of essays by authors of diverse academic backgrounds, the book … should prove useful to teachers just starting out as well as to veterans eager to [...]
26 October 2009 | Books
In caa.reviews, Terry Smith considers David Carrier’s 2008 book A World Art History and Its Objects: “Creating a world history of art is very difficult. But finding some way to understand all visual cultures is the most urgent task now facing art historians” … [Carrier] sets out to ask if such a world history is [...]
20 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Artist Nancy Spero has died. As has longtime Architectural Design (AD) editor Monica Pidgeon. Theorist Peter Weibel and art historian Hans Belting have won prizes. According to ARTINFO, “a fire destroyed 90 percent of the estate of Brazilian neoconcretist Helio Oiticica.” And according to NPR, “The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal” to the [...]
16 October 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
According to Christiane Tauber, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer‘s new biography of Caravaggio successfully portrays the artist as more strategic and professional, and less scandalous and out-of-control, than previously thought.
15 October 2009 | Theory
We belatedly take note of a new online journal, Republics of Letters, a “peer-reviewed, open-access publication [that] is dedicated to the study of knowledge, politics, and the arts, from Antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the early modern period … sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) of Stanford University.” [...]
14 October 2009 | Ancient
In a public announcement, NYU Institute of Fine Arts director Patricia Rubin states: The Institute of Fine Arts of New York University notes with deep sadness the death yesterday of our valued colleague, Dietrich von Bothmer, Distinguished Research Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to his long [...]
13 October 2009 | Renaissance
A small portrait, the object of considerable controversy over recent years, is increasingly attributed to Leonardo, reports the Guardian: The small picture of a young woman in profile was previously believed to be a German work from the early 19th century and has changed hands in recent years for around £12,000. But a growing number [...]
13 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From The New York Times: Robert M. Murdock, an art historian and curator of 20th-century and contemporary art who organized some notable exhibitions, died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 67 … his exhibitions included the first one-person museum show of Richard Tuttle’s work (1971); “Poets of the City: New York and [...]
12 October 2009 | Books, Modern
Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) and Yve-Alain Bois’s Painting as Model (1991) have just received Portuguese translations. A reviewer for the Brazilian newspaper Estadao takes them to be representative of two opposing views of American modernism.
12 October 2009 | Modern
The Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute have released a new online edition of van Gogh’s letters: The edition, based on fifteen years of research, was edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker … For each of the 902 letters the edition gives a transcription of the original Dutch or French text, [...]
6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
Tonight at the Metropolitan Museum, Salman Rushdie in conversation with curator Carmen Bambach, curator Navina Haidar Haykel, and Harvard professor David Roxburgh: Salman Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence brings together Renaissance Italy, Mughal India, and the cultures that lie between in a tale that has been described as a “sumptuous mixture of history and [...]
6 October 2009 | Uncategorized
From Artinfo.com: On Wednesday night, at a benefit to help fund upcoming projects, [The] X [Initiative] honored legendary dealer Paula Cooper and Picasso biographer John Richardson … [Richardson] unleashed a devastating attack on art history professor Rosalind Krauss, a vocal Richardson critic, who — Richardson cheerily noted — once suggested that he would “set Picasso [...]
6 October 2009 | Museums
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