22 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Our next post will be on Monday, January 4. “Citing its high cost in a time of severe budget constraints, the University of Illinois will phase out an art history program headquartered in the nation’s capital. Interim Chancellor Robert Easter decided this week to close the ‘Illinois at the Phillips’ program, created in 2006 with [...]
22 December 2009 | Museums, Renaissance
According to ArtDaily, an Italian exhibition that brings together reputed Giorgiones has aroused controversy among scholars and art historians … [Castelfranco Veneto] is staging a wide-ranging exhibition … from December 12 [2009] to April 11, 2010 … The exhibition, a challenge both from the scientific and the organizational points of view … is curated by [...]
20 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Once in a while, an art-history dissertation will land you a job and a spouse: Jessica Maier and Nick M. Camerlenghi were married Saturday evening at the Memorial Church at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. … She is an art history instructor at Tulane University. She graduated from Brown and received a Ph.D. in art [...]
19 December 2009 | Modern
The German abstract painter Rupprecht Geiger, known for his explorations of the color red, has died, aged 101. Nicola Kuhn’s obituary in Die Zeit credits him with inventing the shaped canvas (“before the Americans”) and inspiring later artists including Anselm Reyle, Katharina Grosse, and Anish Kapoor. In 1949, along with Fritz Winter, Willi Baumeister, and [...]
17 December 2009 | Books, Modern
From The Economist For all the books written about artists’ muses and patrons, relatively few explore the role of mentors, perhaps because the presence of a teacher threatens to deprive the artist of his or her status as a self-made genius. In “Tom and Jack”, Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western [...]
16 December 2009 | Museums
Two surprisingly good private collections have recently garnered attention. The New York Times writes about a long-hidden Romanian collection on view in Paris that includes a Massacre of the Innocents, “painted sometime in the late 1580s in the studio of Pieter Breughel the Elder, after his death. Cruel and violent, but painted with extraordinary verve [...]
14 December 2009 | Modern
Novelist, screenwriter and art-world hoaxer William Boyd discusses a new play about Mark Rothko: Like many celebrated artists of his generation – the postwar American abstract expressionists, the so-called New York School – Rothko was at best a mediocre painter, and would have been judged as one, until he found his magic formula. Among his [...]
11 December 2009 | Museums
The former Metropolitan Museum director has died.
11 December 2009 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Gary Schwartz writes of a Jan Steen painting that was cut in pieces long ago but reunited in 1996, and is now in danger of being split up again: Following the U.S. Senate investigations into the Swiss bank holdings of Jewish account holders killed in the Holocaust, attention turned to the art collections of victims [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
From the Telegraph: France’s obsession with the bottom is laid bare this week in a major new documentary and book charting how “les fesses” have shaped history. The highbrow study claims to demonstrate the huge contribution the “derrière” has made to civilisation, mixing the views of top psychoanalysts, philosophers, scientists and artists. The role of [...]
9 December 2009 | Uncategorized
Louis Menand’s forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas is excerpted in Harvard Magazine: Since [in academia] it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of [...]
7 December 2009 | Modern, Museums
Michael J. Lewis writes in the New Criterion: … the Bauhaus is a moving target, and there is no point in its fourteen-year life when it existed in anything like a definitive form. This is one of the insights of “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the spellbinding exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art [...]
7 December 2009 | Contemporary
Carol Yinghua Lu writes in e-flux journal: I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists … As one of the earliest [...]
3 December 2009 | Awards
From the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation: In its 2009 cycle, the Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded a total of $710,000 to twenty-six individual writers. These grants range from $5,000 to $50,000 in five categories—articles, blogs, books, new and alternative media, and short-form writing—and support projects addressing both general and specialized art audiences. Representing [...]
