30 April 2010 | Books
Using Amazon’s advanced books search, you can get something of a sense for which recent art books are selling best. For books published since January, it seems to be: 1. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century 2. Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline 3. Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 4. Otto Dix 5. Alice Neel [...]
30 April 2010 | Conferences, Theory
From Idearte: The third annual Glasgow Colloquium on Art Historiography will be held in the Institute for Art History of the University of Glasgow 25th – 27th November 2010. Papers lasting 20 minutes are invited on formative moments, movements, institutions and individuals in accordance with the mission statement of the Journal of Art Historiography.
30 April 2010 | Uncategorized
The Winter 2010 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin is given over to a wonderful, amply illustrated article by Elena Phipps, “Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color.” As Met director Thomas Campbell notes in his foreword, “Cultures the world over and throughout history have valued the color red,” and much of the world’s red [...]
28 April 2010 | Ancient, Conferences
From Brown University: Brown University will host the Theoretical Archaeology Group from Friday, April 30 through Sunday, May 2, 2010. [This conference will address] the question of the place of archaeology – literally and figuratively. We have invited renowned scholars [Homi K. Bhabha, for example] from around the world to join with Brown faculty and [...]
28 April 2010 | Awards
Last month, Harvard art historian Joseph Leo Koerner was one of three scholars to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award. “Intended to underscore the decisive contributions the humanities make to the nation’s intellectual life, the awards, amounting to as much as $1.5 million each, honor scholars who have made significant contributions to [...]
27 April 2010 | Uncategorized
Apparently no one’s going to report on the recent art-bibliography conference in New York, alas. The L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight has asserted that the Getty shouldn’t be expected to shoulder the BHA alone: “Outside LA, art folks commonly (& mistakenly) assume the Getty can & should pick up the tab for everything. Get [...]
27 April 2010 | Journals
Apollo‘s new editor, Oscar Humphries, is profiled in The Telegraph: Humphries follows a long line of qualified art historian editors, such as Denys Sutton, Anna Somers Cocks, David Ekserdjian and, most recently, Michael Hall. His background, however, is more in the field of the art trade … and journalism … As such, he is probably [...]
25 April 2010 | Architecture, Renaissance
Three recent reviews and essays on the Renaissance: Colm Tóibín on the stubbornness of Lorenzo Lotto, Rachel Spence on early Renaissance art in Siena, and Nicolai Ouroussoff on “Palladio and His Legacy” at the Morgan Library.
24 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
Neo Rauch, central figure in the so-called Leipzig School of German painting, observes his fiftieth birthday with a double retrospective in Leipzig and Munich. The catalog is from Hatje Cantz.
It doesn’t get much more multicultural than this: an English-language book titled Travelling in a Palimpsest: Finnish Nineteenth-Century Painters’ Encounters with Spanish Art and Culture. It’s by Marie-Sofie Lundström and Clara Marcellán reviews it (in Spanish) in the Jan-Mar 2010 issue of Goya (“una exhaustiva reconstrucción”).
22 April 2010 | Books
In the January 2010 Burlington Magazine, Erika Langmuir reviewed the new edition of Bernardo De Dominici’s 1742 Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani edited by Fiorella Sricchia Santoro and Andrea Zezza: This is a heroic editorial enterprise, that restores to Bernardo De Dominici’s ambitious oeuvre … the dignity it deserves without, however, minimising those [...]
21 April 2010 | Americas, Modern
A catalogue raisonné will appear this fall for the early American abstract artist Manierre Dawson. According to its author, Randy Ploog, Dawson had never traveled further than Michigan, had no contact with progressive artists in Europe, New York or even his native Chicago … What prompted this young civil engineer to produce these groundbreaking paintings [...]
21 April 2010 | Ancient, Journals
As editor Naomi Norman explains in the January 2010 issue, the American Journal of Archaeology has added much more color to its pages and it has moved all of its book reviews online, where they can be read free of charge. Also online: exhibition reviews and a limited selection of journal content. (Off topic: It [...]
21 April 2010 | Books, Contemporary, Museums
Prompted by the opening of Les Promesses du Passé at the Centre Pompidou, some recent work on post-Wall “Eastern European” art (one of the tenets of the exhibition is to demonstrate the irrelevance of this term in light of the polyphony of voices; the exhibition layout is designed to be discontinuous, accordingly): Transitland is a [...]
20 April 2010 | Books
Amongst the many topics covered in The Accademia Seminars: The Accademia di San Luca in Rome, c. 1590-1635 (2009), the second volume of seminar papers from the Centre for Advanced Research in the Visual Arts (CASVA), are the following: the function of notaries within the Accademia, the relationship between philosophy, painting and academic theory, and [...]
20 April 2010 | Africa
A recent issue of African Arts (Winter 2009) carries an obituary of Rosalinde Gregor Wilcox, a scholar of African art who earned her PhD from UCLA in 1994, at the age of 58, after studying with Arnold Rubin, Herbert Cole, and Doran Ross: She was critically aware but cautious in her writing. The canoe prows [...]
19 April 2010 | News
The shaky future of the Bibliography of the History of Art. In the meantime, since April 1, the Getty has announced it would offer free public access to the bibliography through its website.
19 April 2010 | Contemporary, Museums
With the integration of technology and electronic media in art, new issues in contemporary art continue to arise. A recent encounter with such type art has raised a particular question for me. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth currently has on view a FOCUS show of American-born artist Ben Jones: Jones’ work investigates new methods [...]
18 April 2010 | Modern, Museums
In the March 30th issue of the New Republic, Jed Perl reflects on survey exhibitions of Joaquín Torres-García, Arshile Gorky and Anne Truitt.
18 April 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
Roberto Calasso’s book, Tiepolo Pink (translated by Alastair McEwen for Knopf), which proposes the 23 etchings of the Scherzi di fantasia as an interpretive key, has elicited mixed reactions from a number of reviewers.
