by Jon Lackman | 31 January 2008 | Uncategorized
From Harper’s Magazine:
George W. Bush is famous for his attachment to a painting which he acquired after becoming a “born-again Christian.” It’s by W.H.D. Koerner and is entitled A Charge to Keep. Bush was so taken by it, he took the painting’s name for his own official autobiography. And here’s what he says about it:
I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.
… [Jacob Weisberg] gives us the full story in his forthcoming book on Bush, The Bush Tragedy:
[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.
Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”
by Jon Lackman | 29 January 2008 | Conferences
The annual College Art Association conference convenes February 20–23 in Dallas. If you’re going, please consider writing about your experience! We’ve enjoyed hearing from a variety of people in the past, and it’s an opportunity for you to opine before our audience of 1000+ readers per day. Email your write-up(s), which can be brief and informal, to lackmanjon@ arthistorynewsletter.com (with your name, a sentence about yourself, and a contact email address if you’d like that included). Please send all this during the conference, or shortly afterwards. Thanks!
In other CAA News, Paul Jaskot has been elected CAA president:
Paul B. Jaskot, associate professor of art history at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, has been elected president of CAA for a two-year term, beginning May 2008. A member of the Board since 2004, he has served as vice president for publications for the past two years. Jaskot will succeed Nicola M. Courtright, professor of fine arts at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
An art historian who specializes in modern German art and architecture, Jaskot earned his PhD in 1993 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. His dissertation focused on art and political extremism, dealing specifically with how National Socialists mobilized forced-labor concentration camps to produce building materials for the monumental Nazi architecture in Berlin and Nuremberg …
by Jon Lackman | 25 January 2008 | Journals
Citation indexes are often controversial (for one, they can never be comprehensive), but they can be of some interest nonetheless. We recently discovered the citation ranking feature of the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. We typed in a few art-history-related journals to see what their most frequently cited articles are. Here is a sampling:
{FORMAT: Journal: Most-Cited Article in AHCI, vol (year) [Times Cited] }
Renaissance Quarterly: G. W. Pigman, VERSIONS OF IMITATION IN THE RENAISSANCE, 33 (1980) [83]
Art History: M. Camille, SEEING AND READING – SOME VISUAL IMPLICATIONS OF MEDIEVAL LITERACY AND ILLITERACY, 8 (1985) [61]
Art Bulletin: E. Cropper, BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, PARMIGIANINO, ‘PETRARCHISMO’, AND THE VERNACULAR STYLE, 58 (1976) [51]
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism: K. L. Walton, HOW REMOTE ARE FICTIONAL WORLDS FROM REAL WORLD, 37 (1978) [38]
Word & Image: L. G. Duggan, WAS ART REALLY THE BOOK OF THE ILLITERATE, 5 (1989) [30]
Simiolus: C. Harbison, VISIONS AND MEDITATIONS IN EARLY FLEMISH PAINTING, 15 (1985) [26]
Burlington Magazine: L. Campbell, ART MARKET IN THE SOUTHERN NETHERLANDS IN THE 15TH-CENTURY, 118 (1976) [25]
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes: M. Perry, CARDINAL DOMENICO GRIMANI’S LEGACY OF ANCIENT ART TO VENICE, 41 (1978) [20]
Gesta: F. Martin, The St. Francis Master in the upper church of S Francesco Assisi : Some considerations regarding his origins, 35 (1996) [19]
Art Journal: S. Y. Edgerton, Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottednesse’ of the Moon, 44 (1984) [18]
Woman’s Art Journal: L. D. G. Cheney, THE CULT OF SAINT AGATHA, 17 (1996) [17]
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz: M. Seidel, STUDIES ON THE RECEPTION OF ANTIQUITY IN PISANO, NICOLA, 19 (1975) [16]
Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte: J. Gardner, SAINT-LOUIS-OF-TOULOUSE, ROBERT-OF-ANJOU AND SIMONE MARTINI, 39 (1976) [15]
Art in America: L. Nochlin, THE IMAGINARY ORIENT: 19TH-CENTURY FRENCH ORIENTALIST PAINTING, 71 (1983) [14]
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians: D. Howard and M. Longair, HARMONIC PROPORTION AND PALLADIO QUATTRO-LIBRI, 41 (1982) [13]
African Arts: J. Pemberton, ESHU-ELEGBA – THE YORUBA TRICKSTER GOD, 9 (1975) [13]
Art Quarterly: R. Shiff, END OF IMPRESSIONISM – STUDY IN THEORIES OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, 1 (1978) [9]
Oriental Art: J. M. James, PROVISIONAL ICONOLOGY OF WESTERN HAN FUNERARY ART, 25 (1979) [9]
Studies in the History of Art: H. L. Kessler, PICTORIAL NARRATIVE AND CHURCH MISSION IN 6TH-CENTURY GAUL, 16 (1985) [9]
October: A. Sekula, THE BODY AND THE ARCHIVE + PHOTOGRAPHING CRIMINALS, 39 (1986) [8]
Artibus Asiae: WU HUNG, BUDDHIST ELEMENTS IN EARLY CHINESE-ART (2ND-AND-3RD-CENTURIES), 47 (1986) [6]
Oxford Art Journal: S. Harris, COUP D’OEIL (THE LIFE AND WORK OF CLAUDE CAHUN), 24 (2001) [5]
(We spot-checked a bunch of them by clicking on the citation links to make sure things looked OK, but something was weird with Artforum and Print Quarterly—the citations led to a bunch of medical articles etc. Hence those two are not included.)
by Jon Lackman | 24 January 2008 | Uncategorized
Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation continues to attract attention. From the Times of London:
An historian claims to have solved a Renaissance murder mystery by deciphering one of the world’s most enigmatic masterpieces.
The true meaning of Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, kept at the National Gallery of the Marches in Urbino, has been the subject of intense speculation for five centuries. Bernd Roeck, Professor of Early Modern History at Zurich University, argues that the work offers clues about the murder of Oddantonio da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, at the hands of his half-brother.
In Piero della Francesca and the Assassin, just published in Italy, Professor Roeck argues that although the painting appears to represent the flagellation of Jesus Christ before the Crucifixion, the figure tied to the pillar is in fact the murdered duke and the figure seated on the far left of the painting “like Pontius Pilate” is his half-brother, Federico da Montefeltro …
by Jon Lackman | 22 January 2008 | Museums
The Washington Post and CultureGrrl report that Philip Conisbee has died. According to CultureGrrl, “the British-born French paintings expert may be best remembered for two glorious exhibitions: Georges de La Tour and His World, 1996, the first American exhibition devoted to that artist; and the recent blockbuster Cézanne in Provence, 2006.” According to the Post, “Perhaps his most resounding success came in late 1998, when he was co-curator of ‘Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,’ an exhibition of 70 masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands.” “He graduated from the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art in 1968 and received a doctorate in art history from the Courtauld in 1978,” the latter notes.
by Jon Lackman | 21 January 2008 | Theory
Nicolas Slonimsky asserted in his 1953 Lexicon of Musical Invective that the human instinct toward “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar” is usually to blame when critics assail a work of genius. Interestingly, there is a body of empirical work supporting the converse idea, that we tend to like what we’ve seen a lot of. See, for example, this forthcoming article (pdf) by psychologist James E. Cutting, “The Mere Exposure Effect and Aesthetic Preference,” in which he reports on a study he performed. He believes he can show that people prefer the more frequently reproduced Impressionist works over the less frequently reproduced ones, not because the former are better but simply because people have seen them more often in the past. In his conclusion, he writes that
Artistic canons are promoted and maintained by a diffuse but continual broadcast of images to the public by museums, authors and publishers. The repeated presentation of images to the public without direct awareness or memory makes mere exposure a prime vehicle for canon maintenance. Tacitly and incrementally over time, it teaches the public to like the images, to prefer them, eventually to recognize them as part of the canon, and to want to see them again … I do not think this is necessarily a subversive trend, nor one to be denigrated. I claim it is part of the same force that binds a culture. It is part of our human nature, built on an evolutionary substrate that makes very good sense. It helps ensure steadiness in culture more generally, and relative constancy in artistic canons more particularly.
by Jon Lackman | 18 January 2008 | Books
Hol Art Books is a new publisher with an interesting idea:
[We] will allow anyone to suggest titles, form professional-level publishing groups, peer review one another’s work, and collaboratively develop their title to ultimately be published as a Hol book … Hol takes care of printing, marketing and distributing every book, but we turn the rest of the publishing process over to the teams that come together around particular books … Along with the book’s author, all project teams include an editor, graphic designer, publicist, bookstore sponsor, and project manager … For our part, Hol’s share follows a sliding scale based on the number of copies sold. For the rest, we recommend a percentage each team member earns, but it is up to the team to come to a final resolution on how their share is divided.
Hol plans to begin releasing books starting in fall 2009. They’re open to most anything — biography, history, criticism, fiction, etc. — as long it’s art-related and more text than images. So, far most of the ideas they have in the works are re-issues, translations and anthologies:
Art and Common Sense, by Royal Cortissoz
Fake! by Clifford Irving
Gilbert Stuart, by James Thomas Flexner
Guston in Time, by Ross Feld
King of the Confessors, by Thomas Hoving
Manette Salomon, by Edmund and Jules de Goncourt
Painting as a Pastime, by Winston S. Churchill
The Collected [Art] Poems, by Frank O’Hara
The Masterpiece, by Émile Zola
Three Picassos Before Breakfast, by Anne-Marie Stein
by Jon Lackman | 17 January 2008 | Photography
From Le Monde:
It’s a stunning photograph that has caused much ink to be spilled since it was published January 3rd on the cover of the Nouvel Observateur. On the occasion of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir’s birth, the magazine chose an image of the writer, nude, seen from behind, in the middle of fixing her hair. A little known photo, aesthetic to be sure, but also highly salable … Certain feminists didn’t appreciate seeing the author of The Second Sex reduced to a pin-up showing her buttocks. Choisir la cause des femmes, an association created by Simone de Beauvoir, denounced the issue’s “obviously commercial aspect.” Numerous readers mailed tart comments to the weekly while debate raged on blogs.
At the Nouvel Observateur, deputy editorial director Michel Labro says he doesn’t understand the animosity: “This image nicely illustrates our issue which shows her subversive, nonconformist side. There’s nothing gratuitous about it. If we wanted to prostitute ourselves, we wouldn’t do an issue on Simone de Beauvoir!” Except that the magazine has fueled critique by retouching the image in such a way as to trim her figure. “Let’s not get carried away, we didn’t give her a face lift! We toned down the contrasts a bit which were odd around the legs,” Mr. Labro retorts. Inside the magazine, the same photo didn’t receive the same treatment.
See also Philippe De Jonckheere (via ARHV).
by Jon Lackman | 16 January 2008 | Contemporary
When artists fail as marketers, their marketing becomes art that’s easy to market.
by Jon Lackman | 15 January 2008 | Conferences
From The Age:
The fact that Melbourne is hosting the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art [Jan 13-18, 2008] is no small feat. Held every four years, and considered the “Olympics” of art history, the congress has never been staged south of the equator.
The conference, Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, [brings] together more than 600 art historians from 47 countries, including leading museum directors such as Neil McGregor, from the British Museum, the Australian-born Michael Brand, from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Ronald de Leeuw, from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.
Other articles here, here and here.
Events at the “Art History Olympics” will include “wrestling with indexicality,” “100-meter-long-CV writing,” “thin-historical-ice skating,” “synchronized Lacan quoting,” “uneven dissertation bars,” the “high dive into irrelevance,” “pomo,” and “water pomo.”
by Jon Lackman | 14 January 2008 | Uncategorized
The Austrian art historian and longtime director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle has published on Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco de Goya and Edgar Degas, among other artists. Marion Lauschke and Isabella Woldt also won awards.
More here (rough English translation).
by Jon Lackman | 11 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary, Modern
Partha Mitter, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex, has recently published The Triumph Of Modernism: India’s Artists And The Avant-garde, 1922-1947.
One interviewer notes that
He has earlier published Art And Nationalism In Colonial India, 1850-1922 (1994) and Much Maligned Monsters: A History Of European Reactions To Indian Art (1977). He shyly points out that Much Maligned Monsters raised the issue of ‘orientalism’, a year earlier than Edward Said did in a famous book by that name in 1978.
In another interview:
Do critics abroad pay any attention to contemporary Indian art?
Not a lot. European major critics hardly.Why is that? Is it not interesting, or are they not interested?
That’s not the point. The canon, the ideal modernism, is the focus of the centre; the peripheries always come a little later, they don’t have much to say – there is that thinking [among critics], and the market sustains it. I’m afraid this is why. My own work has been trying to erode that, challenge that, try and change it.
by Jon Lackman | 10 January 2008 | Museums
Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello is stepping down. More here:
“Director (and Voice) of Metropolitan Museum to Retire”
“The Legacy of a Pragmatic Custodian of Human Civilization,” by Michael Kimmelman
“Let the Horse Race Begin: The Search for a Successor”
by Jon Lackman | 9 January 2008 | Teaching
From Libération:
“In school, children learn to read but not to see.” In these pages, the day after the presidential election, the painting historian Pierre Rosenberg, former Louvre president, reminded candidate Sarkozy of his promise to introduce art history into the schools. If a report Libération obtained a copy of is to be believed, “starting in the fall of 2008, teaching the history of the arts” will become “compulsory” in secondary school and even elementary school.
See also Le Monde and La Tribune d’Art (“The report’s conclusions are ambiguous and disappointing … Everyone will do art history, which is the best way to ensure that no one will”) and this earlier post.
by Jon Lackman | 8 January 2008 | Ancient, Books
A recent issue of the South African Archaeological Bulletin (62:185) includes a lively exchange of letters. We can’t do them justice here; nonetheless, some excerpts:
J.D. Lewis-Williams writes:
With attacks in (remarkably) two successive issues of the South African Archaeological Bulletin Anne Solomon has raised the boredom rating of her current dispute about San rock art to intolerable levels … Solomon creates the illusion of a lone Lewis-Williams fighting for discredited ideas … I therefore point out that most southern African researchers accept, with whatever reservations and useful, positive additions, that San religious beliefs and practices … demonstrably inform much, but not all, southern African San rock art … Readers will be interested in David Whitley’s account of how pseudo-debates about rock art like the present one are generated and sustained. As he shows, writers make a career out of criticizing hands-on researchers, while offering no, or very little, original, theoretically and empirically sound research of their own …
David Pearce writes:
Anne Solomon published a review of a book David Lewis-Williams and I wrote (San Spirituality: Roots, Expressions, and Social Consequences) … In presenting this rebuttal, I should not like to mislead readers into believing that this is a legitimate debate concerning the arguments we made. Solomon has advanced no empirical methodological or theoretical points of relevance to our arguments. I simply correct some of the many erroneous statements that she made … In both installments of her review, Solomon’s main contention is that Lewis-Williams and I do not sufficiently address the issue of the origins of modern human behaviour, modern human consciousness, the development of language and brain evolution. These are all fascinating issues that deserve discussion. They have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of our book …
Anne Solomon responds:
…. Lewis-Williams and Pearce’s refusal to engage suggests an inability to debate the issues my questions raise. No concession of merit in dissenting views is expected from that quarter, but are these responses scholarly? … Lewis-Williams resorts to frequencies, claiming “most southern African researchers” accept his views … he should know that the size of the fan base (and student cohort) does not prove his interpretation … [Their] neurological determinism masquerading as cultural analysis reduces San history to a biologistic account of stimulus and response, the former overblown, the latter neglected. Dissenting, independent thinking is derided.
The editors conclude:
Discussion of San Spirituality is now closed.
by Jon Lackman | 7 January 2008 | Asia, Contemporary
When every inch of every building is covered in posters, and the posters change daily, how do you find your way home? In a recent issue of South Asian Popular Culture (5:1), Iftikhar Dadi writes on “Political Posters in Karachi: 1988-1999.” During this time, “Pakistan attempted to ‘return’ to parliamentary democracy.” Consequently,
the existence of multiple and competing forces, and the amplification of visual production before each election and during the various crises of the 1990s meant that the struggle for representation acquired a fluid and dynamic visual character … what this theatre enabled was visual and performative participation by interested sections of the public in an arena of competing images in the popular realm. The democracy decade lifted the stifling and boring atmosphere of the Zia years and allowed activities of diverse non-state actors to gather significant momentum in the popular realm.
Tropes of domination and resistance do not capture the polysemy of this popular theater of images. The structural weakness and short-lived duration of the elected governments, each lasting only about two years, meant that the central government was unable to extend its hegemony over the public space of the nation-state … creating unanticipated and dynamic sites for new forms of text and image-based popular politics
Dadi analyzes numerous posters as well as the varying methods of visual intervention in use at this time, for example:
defacement by religious groups of revealing female flesh in billboard advertisements, the covering-over of film hoardings during the month of Ramadan, and the invasive pasting of political posters over formal and informal signage.
Dadi notes also that the explosion of visual stimulus changed the very nature of walking about the city, creating a situation analagous to the one observed by satirist Ahmad Shah Bukhari Patras in 1927:
Announcements of latest inventions, opportunities, and portents of impending revolution that assault the eyes, are pasted on virtually every immovable object, creating such constant variation in the appearance of buildings that it becomes very difficult for even the city residents to situate themselves.
Let alone sort out their politics.
by Jon Lackman | 4 January 2008 | Theory
The September 2007 issue of Social Semiotics is devoted to “Somatechnics: Reconfiguring Body Modification.” The editors, Jessica Cadwallader and Samantha Murray, write in their introduction:
… the term “body modification” has a ring of deviance about it. The heterogeneous practices this rubric encompasses — from piercing, tattooing, suspensions, scarification, [and] branding, to corseting, the splitting of tongues and penises, and the removal of digits or limbs — are implicitly unified in their improperness, and marked for the challenge they pose to the “proper” mainstream body … These practices demonstrate that embodied subjectivity can, and is always already, lived differently — a politically significant move in the face of the discursive construction of bodies as fundamentally and “naturally” the same.
Yet all too often, the term “body modification” is used in a way that perpetuates the designation of these “non-mainstream” practices as entirely separate to the extraordinary array of often invisibilised techniques for altering bodies … from dental hygiene, showering, [and] eating, to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and reliance upon medicine … these all shape the ways that we are embodied.
by Jon Lackman | 3 January 2008 | Photography
A recent issue (29.2) of Studies in American Culture includes an essay by Larry Vonalt (who died in 2005) on “The Dignity of Shelby Lee Adams’s ‘Disturbing’ Family Photograph’:
The photographs in Shelby Lee Adams’s first two monographs, Appalachian Portraits (1993) and Appalachian Legacy (1998), attracted praise and, often in his native Eastern Kentucky, blame. The blame focuses mostly on the subjects of Adams’s photographs and reflects an almost obsessive concern with what his critics might call “stereotyping” … George Brosi, an English professor at Eastern Kentucky University … wrote in Appalachian Heritage:
This is a time when almost all photography books are attempting to portray the dignity of diverse people. A degrading book of photographs focusing on most ethnic or geographical groups would be unthinkable. Appalachian Portraits is a photography book which chooses as its subjects four sometimes overlapping categories of people: the retarded, the disfigured, the poor and snake handling people of faith.
These brief comments comprise Brosi’s entire review.
… What offends in [his work] depends upon the eye of the beholder. Some people simply find pictures of poverty and deformity repulsive; their taste tells them that such scenes are not “beautiful” and need not be depicted. Others are angered because they see this image as another representation of the crimes of capitalism … [others] believe that it belittles them by suggesting that only families such as [these] exist in the Appalachian region … [what many] fail to realize is that it is not just the “outsiders” who stereotype “us.” We “insiders” do a good job of stereotyping other “insiders” …
(In 2002, Jennifer Baichwal released a documentary on Shelby Lee Adams, The True Meaning of Pictures. Interview with the filmmaker here.)
by Jon Lackman | 2 January 2008 | Conservation, Museums
In a recent issue of Studies in Conservation (52:3), Clare Richardson and David Saunders write on “Acceptable Light Damage”:
A panel of observers was presented with pairs of reproductions of figurative and abstract oil and watercolour paintings, regions of which had been altered digitally prior to printing to give a known colour difference from the original. In the first part of the study, the observers were asked if a colour difference could be observed, to assess the scale of a ‘just noticeable difference’ (JND) in these complex scenes. In the second part, observers assessed the acceptability of a change over a period of 10, 50 or 100 years. The results demonstrated that the JND is sometimes larger in complex scenes than in simple colour pairs and that changes in smaller areas, more peripheral areas, or areas in abstract images are less noticeable. In the second phase of the study, changes to the figurative oil painting were generally deemed less acceptable than changes of equivalent magnitude in the abstract or watercolour images. The implications of the findings for museum lighting policy and the concept of a ‘serviceable life’ for objects are explored.
by Jon Lackman | 18 December 2007 | Uncategorized
We’ll return on Wednesday January 2.
