31 December 2010 | Current Events, Museums, Teaching
A post from earlier this month on the Getty’s blog points out some curiosities about how some artworks get viewed online more frequently than others. No surprise that Van Gogh takes first place. However, it is interesting that numbers two (Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime by Pierre Paul Prud’hon, 1805-06) and three (Two Women [...]
28 December 2010 | Uncategorized
As Falmouth Art Gallery director, Brian Stewart “proved that small galleries can have a mighty impact,” writes the Guardian: Supported by a dedicated team, he masterminded groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Surrealists On Holiday (2004), inspired by the time spent in Cornwall by Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, Man Ray and others in 1937, and a [...]
22 December 2010 | Books, Conservation
A new book put out by the Harvard Art Museum explores the Fogg’s role as the first museum to have a scientifically based research department – conceived by Edward Waldo Forbes, director from 1909 to 1944, as a “laboratory for the fine arts”. Forbes was heavily influenced by John Ruskin, and his arguments for the [...]
21 December 2010 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books, Museums
The College Art Association has announced the shortlist for this year’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship: Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds., Mrs. Delany and Her Circle Darielle Mason, ed., Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum [...]
21 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Today I stumbled upon a publication by the “Lighting Research Center” – an organization I was utterly unaware of. Part of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, their mission is “to advance the effective use of lighting and thereby to create a positive legacy for society and the environment.” This type of research is obviously of importance to [...]
20 December 2010 | Uncategorized
I’m interested in the phenomenon of art historians who collect. (Anything been written on it?) A handful of wealthy academics have assembled amazing blue-chip collections, but just as interesting are those who’ve put together quirkier caches on a small budget. I recently came across Louisiana Tech professor Saul Zalesch, who collects almanacs, according to student [...]
17 December 2010 | Books, Islamic, Modern, Museums
Qatar has just opened Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art. Before its opening Meris Lutz wrote in The Los Angeles Times: It will also serve as a research center, an exciting prospect for the regional arts community … The inaugural exhibition, titled, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art,” will include works culled from Mathaf’s [...]
16 December 2010 | Awards, Contemporary
Sounds like a fascinating piece to me, no pun intended. You can read about it here. An interesting conversation which seems to growing from this selection is the question of pushing the definition of art. Sarah Lyall writes in the above NYT article: “The Turner Prize, awarded annually to a British artist 50 or younger, [...]
15 December 2010 | Books, Museums
A current exhibition at LACMA is challenging the notion of “hybridity” in the Indian city of Lucknow. Lucknow was a courtly city of great wealth between the declining Mughal power and the rising British Colonial one. At its height in the mid-nineteenth century, two-thirds of its population were artisans, leaving a vast cultural legacy. Commonly [...]
15 December 2010 | Modern
Museums all over have come under fire in recent weeks for their handling of gay/lesbian subject matter — for their responses (or non-responses) to the controversy over David Wojnarowicz, but also for their general timidity in addressing queerness, for example in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Art historians too have work to [...]
13 December 2010 | Conferences
“CAA has published full session information for the 99th Annual Conference and Centennial Kickoff in New York, taking place February 10–13, 2011.” It looks like a good one. The sessions on “Policing the Sacred: Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Faith” and “Gender and Sexuality in the Art Museum” will certainly have plenty to talk [...]
10 December 2010 | Uncategorized
Two posthumous books by art historian Michael Baxandall reveal him to have been a skilled memoirist and novelist, writes the Prague Post. Teju Cole, who wrote an appreciation of Baxandall in 2008, was (at least at that time) “finishing his Ph.D. in art history at Columbia” in early Netherlandish art. He is also a photographer [...]
9 December 2010 | Ancient, Books
The fascinating new book Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashunasirpal: A Cultural Biography re-evaluates Assyrian art and describes its reception in the Middle East and abroad over three millennia. A well-illustrated set of symposium proceedings edited by Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas, it pays less attention to the best known images, of warring [...]
8 December 2010 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary, Journals
The African art journal Nka celebrated its adoption by Duke University Press by engaging 15 scholars and critics in a debate in print (issue 26) and online over “contemporary African art history and the state of the scholarship.” Editor Salah M. Hassan expresses a certain pessimism of his own about “the political and economic crises [...]
7 December 2010 | Africa, Books, Conferences, Journals
The latest issue of The International Review of African American Art (23:2) is one of the most visually provocative magazine issues I’ve perused in years. It also includes a good mix of writing, including coverage of the most recent Porter Colloquium on African American Art. Summarizing a talk by Jacqueline Francis, Teresia Bush writes: Critical [...]
6 December 2010 | Books
In The New York Times Book Review, designer Steven Heller considers new books on typography. In the latest Journal of the Printing Historical Society (n. 15), Paul Shaw reviews several recent books on Jan Tschichold: The most important and controversial typographer of the twentieth century was Jan Tschichold. He has been championed both by typographic [...]
3 December 2010 | Photography
In a recent issue of History of Photography (August 2010), Jan Baetens reviews Photography and Literature by François Brunet: An Americanist in Paris, François Brunet combines the best of both worlds. It is indeed extremely rare to discover a book that has such a profound knowledge of the Continental as well as the Anglo-Saxon traditions [...]
2 December 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an amusing article, “To Monitor Office Behavior, Colleges Add Windows to Professors’ Doors. And faculty members, to regain their privacy, hang curtains or tape up paperwork.” Surveillance seems omnipresent today in life and in academic scholarship, and our field is no exception. In the September 2010 Journal of [...]
2 December 2010 | Americas, Current Events, Film, Modern, Museums
The National Portrait Gallery’s innovative exhibition of images of and by queer people in America, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, is becoming controversial. The exhibit was altered by pulling a video by David Wojnarowicz and it may close before the scheduled date. The story has been picked up by The Washington Post as well [...]
1 December 2010 | Renaissance
In the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Woman’s Art Journal, the editors write: Even with the rising presence of art by women in museums and on bookstore shelves, Woman’s Art Journal continues to find a receptive audience for its mission: recognition of women artists of the past and present. From the overwhelming number of books and [...]
