30 November 2010 | Film
In the summer/fall double issue of Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne devoted to “Cinema Surprised by the Arts,” editor Jean-Pierre Criqui writes: From Eric Rohmer and Nabuhiro Suwa to Albert Lewin and Gus van Sant … the arts that preceded cinema historically – painting and sculpture first of all, but also, among others, [...]
29 November 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Renaissance
The final issue of Decorative Arts includes reviews of two recent books by the new Metropolitan Museum director Thomas Campbell. Hans Hubach considers the exhibition catalogue to Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor: Following the great success of his Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), Thomas Campbell has once again succeeded in [...]
24 November 2010 | Books
In the November Artforum, David Rimanelli handily dismantles Berkeley Art Museum director Lawrence Rinder’s roman à clef Revenge of the Decorated Pigs : … [Rinder’s] astonishing success would seem to be lost, however, on Rinder, who is apparently still mired, almost a decade later, in a sedulously manured soil of anger, hurt feelings, spite, and [...]
23 November 2010 | Theory
Various art historians owe a debt to Jacques Lacan. Did he himself owe one to Russian-icon theorist Pavel Florensky? In the latest issue of Word & Image (Jan-Mar 2010), Joseph Masheck makes the suggestion: [W]hat is most Florenskian, or most conspicuously Florenskian, in Lacan is precisely the sense of an image as but a special [...]
23 November 2010 | Uncategorized
From The Guardian: Rozsika Parker, who has died aged 64 of cancer, was a woman of diverse achievements as a feminist, art historian, psychotherapist and writer … In 1973 Rosie met Griselda Pollock and they formed [a] feminist art history collective, an informal group composed of artists, art historians and journalists … Rosie and Griselda’s [...]
22 November 2010 | Books
In the latest issue of Revue de l’art (n. 169), Marianne Jakobi lauds Cannibalismes disciplinaires. Quand l’histoire de l’art et l’anthropologie se rencontrent, a collection of conference proceedings, for its “ample documentation, rigorous analysis, [and] critical distance.” (Available online: Many of the papers, plus an English translation of the introduction.) In another review in this [...]
19 November 2010 | Books
The recent book Obelisk: A History is an unusual collaboration written by four quite different scholars including the renowned historian Anthony Grafton and published by The Burndy Library, an eccentric collection founded in 1941 in “extra space at the factory of the Burndy Corporation, a manufacturer of electrical connectors,” by Bern Dibner, an obelisk specialist [...]
18 November 2010 | Uncategorized
With a dash of overstatement perhaps, Patricia Cohen writes in The New York Times: A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and [...]
17 November 2010 | Journals
The Fall-Winter 2009-2010 issue of Decorative Arts bears the heading “Final Issue,” with no further explanation as to why its publishers are discontinuing this sixteen-year-old journal that had earned numerous plaudits including the European Science Foundation’s highest rating. Poking around online, I discovered that the Bard Graduate Center plans to replace it with a new [...]
16 November 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical
Dartmouth College professor Angela Rosenthal died Thursday morning, according to her husband, fellow art historian Adrian Randolph. (The cause was cancer, writes Dartblog.) From The Dartmouth, a student newspaper: Born in Trier, Germany, Rosenthal came to the College in 1997. She was an expert on 18th and 19th century art and culture and “British art [...]
16 November 2010 | Africa, Books
Monica Blackmun Visonà, co-author of the celebrated survey A History of Art in Africa, has published a new book, Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire, “an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa,” an attempt “to situate local and regional artistic practices in the [...]
15 November 2010 | Books, Medieval
Roland Recht’s 1999 book Believing and seeing. The art of Gothic cathedrals has finally been published in English, in a translation by the late Mary Writtall. In the July 2010 issue of Metascience Ellen M. Shortell writes: Studies in medieval religion, science, literature, and art, particularly in the past two decades, have focused a great [...]
12 November 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Contemporary, Museums
At the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Jorge Luis Marzo and Tere Badia have put together an exhibition and catalogue titled “THE BAROQUE (D)EF(F)ECT: Politics of the Hispanic Image,” a deconstruction of the words “Baroque” and “Hispanic” and their implication that there is a “homogeneous framework shared by Spain and Latin America”: [W]ho built [...]
11 November 2010 | Books, Renaissance
In the Summer 2010 Representations Christopher Pye writes: In their introduction to the recent volume Renaissance Florence: A Social History, the editors offer a reflection on their own methodological moment … We are poised at an exciting moment in the history of our disciplines when we can with profit consider the ways in which the [...]
9 November 2010 | Architecture
Need a dissertation topic? Turkish journalist Kayber Avc? writes on the forgotten and crumbling yet beautiful “cisterns of Mu?la“: Cisterns whose construction was sponsored by Kanuni Sultan Süleyman (Suleiman the Magnificent) to supply water for his army on a military campaign against Rhodes in 1520 are today trying to survive the destructive effects of time. [...]
8 November 2010 | Modern, Museums
Brett Zongker of the Associated Press writes on “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery: “There’s been an entire history hiding in plain sight,” said Portrait Gallery historian and curator David C. Ward. “Telling the history of art without the history of gay people is like [...]
5 November 2010 | Books, Modern
Will John Richardson finish his multi-volume biography of Picasso? According to a 2008 Artinfo piece, he “freely admits that he may have trouble” but “shows no signs of slowing down.” For a fresh sign of his undiminished fighting spirit and a clue to his thoughts on late Picasso, one might look to his just-published article [...]
4 November 2010 | Books
To keep up on French scholarship, I like to check in on Fabula, which is primarily devoted to literary studies but catholic in its interests. One recent post concerned art criticism: Directed by Françoise Lucbert, the Critique d’art series (published by the Presses universitaires de Rennes) continues collecting and analyzing nineteenth- and twentieth-century art criticism. [...]
3 November 2010 | Americas, Books
In his new book Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War, art historian Alexander Nemerov “takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to … illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived.” Rather than marshal history to explain [...]
2 November 2010 | Books
In recent decades, scholarship across the humanities has challenged the notion that history is the story of great men and women, of queens, kings, kaisers, caliphs, sultans, shahs, tyrants, tycoons, tzars, emperors, celebrities, and CEOs. Postcolonial theory, among other things, has helped to popularize the notion of and focus attention on the “subaltern.” Enacting this [...]
