by Jon Lackman | 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 and writer, whose novel Open City about a “a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York City” is due out in February and has been praised by Colm Tóibín for the “soft, exquisite rhythms of its prose, the display of sensibility, [and] the lucid intelligence.”
Matt Lodder is not just a scholar of “body art and body modification practices, including tattooing, body piercing and cosmetic surgery,” he is himself a “heavily tattooed academic art historian.” Follow him on Twitter.
The recently deceased Welsh gallerist and art historian Nick Hamer was a retired air-force test pilot, chemical weapons inspector, and Cold War spy, according to the North Wales Weekly News.
Piotr Piotrowski may be a “professor ordinarius,” according to his website, but he’s also the latest winner of the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory. Last year he was a fellow at the Clark, working on New Art – New Democracy, “a book project that aims at the analysis of the relationship between art and politics in post-communist Europe on such levels as gender, historical memory, and the analysis of new institutions.” (FYI: For some reason, “professor ordinarius” seems to be the highest rank in Polish academe, superior to that of “professor extraordinarius.” Reminds me of France’s elite graduate students called Normaliens.)
