by Jon Lackman | 24 February 2011 | Books, Career, Journals
Those of you still recovering from a marathon four days of conference-going earlier this month may wince at the notion of “100 Years of the College Art Association,” but in the hands of Susan Ball, it’s an appealing subject. She has just published a fine volume she edited on CAA’s history, “The Eye, The Hand, The Mind: 100 Years of the College Art Association.”
This is an official production, edited by a former CAA executive director, and so its overall tone is predictably boosterish. That said, many authors offer good critical commentary along the way, and the book is full of interesting information. To start with a minor example, I didn’t know that CAA board members are required to donate at least $500 to the organization each year. Nor did I know the organization’s true beginnings. As Ball writes:
On more than one occasion art historians have argued incorrectly that CAA was “founded by art historians with the idea of promoting the history of art” … [Rather, CAA] had its origins in drawing and manual training … [in] the teaching of teachers of art.
CAA quickly took on a dual role, aiding artists and art historians — a multiple role, really, as it also serves art librarians, curators, and so on. Consequently, the organization often suffers from an “identity crisis.” That crisis has fueled the most lively of CAA’s internecine battles, but I found myself most interested in Craig Houser’s chapter on “The Changing Face of Scholarly Publishing.” He argues among other things that the importance of European refugees to American art history has been overstated:
[This] argument does not acknowledge that much of the art history of the German-speaking nations was already somewhat familiar to U.S. scholars in the 1930s … In addition, U.S. art historians sometimes challenged the ideas of European scholars … free from the petty scholarly politics and national biases that had been plaguing some of the Europeans’ scholarship.
Of course, American art historians enjoyed their own kind of national pride and played their own kind of politics:
On April 7, 1936, a letter was submitted to the CAA board of directors by sixteen members, including Helen M. Franc, Meiss, and Meyer Schapiro, as well as two editorial board members, Cook and Dinsmoor. Among their varied concerns, they stated that given Art Bulletin was “the only scholarly art periodical in America … it would only be fair to restrict the articles … to the work of American scholars” … [They proposed] that articles by foreigners be limited in number to those who were affiliated with United States institutions or were truly exceptional.
Houser also notes that many early Art Bulletin board members “used their position with the journal as a means to advance their careers” and their favorite subject matter. An interesting table tracks the topics of Art Bulletin articles from 1919 to 1944, during which time a total of zero articles tackled African art, Egyptian art, Ancient Near Eastern Art, Native American Art, Ocean/Australian art, Outsider/Folk Art, Pre-Columbian Art, or Prehistoric art. By contrast, ninety-nine articles treated Early Medieval/Romanesque/Gothic art, and sixty-one Renaissance art. No other topic even came close.
For those of you looking to advance your own career in Art Bulletin, note that it has been accepting just 20-25% of submissions since 1980, but that now is a comparatively good time to try to break in — the annual volume of submissions in recent years is about 10% lower than it was in the 1990s.
Thanks for your thoughtful review.
Susan Ball