by Jon Lackman | 8 September 2008 | Uncategorized
We’re back from vacation, untanned and badly rested. It was a surprisingly busy summer for art historians, which we dare not attempt to summarize. Instead, select morsels:
MoMA named Ann Temkin its chief curator of painting and sculpture. Michael Baxandall died at the age of 74. At the Getty Villa in Malibu, “20 art historians, conservators and museum officials theorizing, listening and pondering out loud whose head to put on a headless 1,800-year-old Roman statue … the Roman god Bacchus or the real-life boy lover of the Emperor Hadrian, known as Antinuous, or the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great.” Museum director and “monuments man” Charles Parkhurst died, at 95. The art collection of the late Rubens scholar Julius Held went up for auction; it included works by Max J. Friedlander and Meyer Schapiro. The Art Gallery of Western Australia appointed a new director, Stefano Carboni, an Islamic art curator at the Met (who holds two doctorates and speaks seven languages). Wellesley College’s Davis Museum accidentally threw out a choice Leger painting. Poland named an art historian, Bogdan Klich, as its defense minister.
