Art History Newsletter

Profile: Mitchell Abdul Karim Crites

14 February 2009 | Asia, Architecture | Add A Comment

From The National of Abu Dhabi:

“Basically, I am an art historian,” he says by way of introduction, but this is a typically modest description. Since the 1970s, he has been one of the world’s leading forces behind the renaissance of traditional Islamic and Indian craftsmanship, arguing continually for their protection and that of those who practise them. He and his team have worked on mammoth projects such as the Federal Territory Mosque in Kuala Lumpur and the Al Masjid al Haram mosque in Mecca … “What I try to do is bring back Indian and classical art to the level of Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal,” he says. That is exactly what he and his team aimed to do with their work on the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque in 2005 … This contract was a huge undertaking: 232 craftsmen worked for 14 months on the 1,050 columns for the entrance and side arcades. In the end, the project used a total of 1,136,212 semi-precious stones for the floral inlay of the columns: lapis lazuli, amethyst, bloodstone, agate and red onyx among them …

At first glance, a life steeped in Indian and Islamic design and architecture seems an unlikely path for someone who was born on the banks of the Mississippi and is a direct descendant of Jesse James. How, exactly, did this intense interest in art begin? “Well, actually I’m part American-Indian, and my grandfather was an amateur archaeologist who used to dig around us for arrowheads when I was a kid. But really, when I was 14 and living in Missouri, a friend came back from India, and that was my first exposure to someone who’d been abroad. “I went to the University of Chicago to study ancient Indian history and then went to India in 1966 to do my thesis in New Delhi. And that was it. I fell in love.”

Obit: Franz-Joachim Verspohl

11 February 2009 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment

Art historian Franz-Joachim Verspohl of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena died last week. Some excerpts from a (alas machine-translated) remembrance:

He was instrumental in the founding of the Art History Department in Jena … Additionally, he initiated lively exhibitions … notably of Paul Klee (1999) and Frank Stella (2001) … After his dissertation on the history of stadium construction, which he completed in 1974 in Marburg under Martin Warnke, he specialized mainly in Michelangelo’s sculpture and the Renaissance in Hungary. His second great passion was, however, the art of the present. Here he wrote, inter alia, studies on Wols and Joseph Beuys.

Simulation Package

10 February 2009 | Theory | Add A Comment

In caa.reviews, Charles G. Salas reviews Victor I. Stoichita’s The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock:

Stoichita shows that simulacra are not quite the alien threat some think they are. It turns out that we have been living with them all along, albeit without attending to them much … The framework of this book would not be so frustrating if the content were not so fascinating … at every stop the remarkable erudition of the author is evident. The works themselves—be they sculptures, paintings, poems, photographs, or film—receive insightful analysis that alone justifies the reader’s effort, and the illustrations are gorgeous. The originality and scope of Stoichita’s thought is sensed in seeming asides, such as his pointing out that later reaction to the Romance of the Rose is unthinkable without the earlier work of van Eyck, or in his comparison of the film Vertigo (1958) to both the multiples of Andy Warhol and the Barbie doll. Historically minded readers may wish for more attention to social and cultural context and for more evidence that earlier works made a difference to later ones, but it is always the relationship of the work to the theme(s) that comes first here. Between stops, however, the trip is a bit of blur. The author jumps from work to work as in a video game, soaring over the abyss on winds of attractive but amorphous concepts impossible to find footing in such as “creativity” and “desire” … Originality and subtlety are expected of Stoichita, and his efforts in The Pygmalion Effect do not disappoint. Whether the book as a whole will satisfy more traditionally historically minded readers is another matter.

Hires per capita and by subfield

9 February 2009 | Career | Add A Comment

Let’s crunch the numbers a bit more. Large departments naturally win more jobs, so let’s see who performed best over the last couple years relative to how many people they graduate. Yale, Harvard, and Princeton win out, each winning a number of top jobs each year roughly equal in size to one-third of an annual graduating class. (This is ignoring departments that only a generate a few graduates per year.)

Now, which subfield gives you the best chance of landing a top teaching job?

We examined the subfields of our 205 assistant professors, and then we compared that with the number of people graduating each year in those subfields (which we calculated using the lists of “dissertations completed” compiled by CAA for 2007, 2006, and 2005).

From best subfield to be in to the worst:

1. African Art
2. Asian
2. Medieval/Byzantine
2. Ancient
3. Renaissance/Baroque
3. Modern

On CultureGrrl

6 February 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

On several occasions, we’ve gotten valuable tips from the CultureGrrl blog, and so if you have the means to do so, we encourage you to consider helping to keep it afloat. There, veteran cultural journalist Lee Rosenbaum frequently reports on art-world controversies from deaccessioning to culture ministers in a timely and tenacious fashion. She is intelligent and blessedly opinionated and we’d hate to see her go.

Assistant Professor Survey Updated

5 February 2009 | Career | Add A Comment

Two years ago, we wrote

Which U.S. art-history departments land the highest number of top professor jobs for their graduates? The Art History Newsletter decided to do some research. To get a snapshot of recent hiring trends, we examined the backgrounds of 137 assistant professors at select U.S. institutions. Where did they get their PhDs?

In subsequent posts, we wrote on which departments landed the most top jobs per graduate, on how the hiring data breaks down by subfield, on the advisors who produce the most job-getters, and on gender equity.

Over the past couple weeks, we reviewed the fate of those 137 individuals and catalogued new members of the assistant-professor club. Here’s what we found:

Of the 137 assistant professors that we originally catalogued, 86 haven’t changed status in the last two years.

Of the 51 who have changed in status, 36 have been promoted to associate professor, while 15 have left their institution. Of the latter 15, five now have new assistant-professor jobs at other top departments.

Sixty-eight new assistant-professor hires have been made at the institutions we study. Seven of the new hires are Yale grads, seven from Harvard, six Columbia, six Princeton, five NYU, four Chicago, three Berkeley, three UCLA, two Northwestern, two Penn, two MIT, two Johns Hopkins, two University of Munich. There’s one grad each from Brown, Bryn Mawr, CUNY, Duke, Emory, IUAV(Venezia)/Sorbonne [joint PhD], London, Oxford, Politecnico di Torino, Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, Stanford (Anthropology Dept), Texas, Toronto, UMASS (Dartmouth), University of East Anglia, and University of Sydney.

Of the 68 new hires, 22 specialize in modern or contemporary topics, ten in Asian art, eight in American and/or Latin American and/or Native American, eight in ancient, six in renaissance or baroque, five in medieval/byzantine, four in African and/or African diaspora. two in Islamic, two in pre-Columbian.

More analysis to come. As always, we invite all suggestions on how to improve our method, which is outlined in the original post.

You Can Now Add Your Comments to this Blog

5 February 2009 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments

When we started the Art History Newsletter three years ago to “synopsize news and opinion of interest to art historians and provide original reporting on conferences, lectures, and other special events,” we hoped to also provide a forum for discussion and so we invited readers to comment on our posts. Alas, spam robots added all kinds of irrelevant comments to the blog, we soon tired of deleting said comments, and so finally we just turned off the option to add comments. Well, art historians still need an online discussion forum, now more than ever perhaps, so we’ve decided to give it another try. Comment away.

the French Caravaggesque

4 February 2009 | Books, Baroque/Neoclassical | Add A Comment

We belatedly take note of Annick Lemoine’s Nicolas Régnier winning the latest book prize of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires. The Art Tribune’s Didier Rykner writes:

… a remarkable monographic study, both erudite and pleasantly readable, which is the fruit of many long years of research and of a very subtle knowledge of the period. This publication offers many new findings on the artist’s life as well as his work. This is one of Arthéna’s best volumes, thus continuing an editorial policy which can never be praised enough …

Along with Valentin de Boulogne, Régnier was one of the main adepts of the Manfrediana Methodus, a term which designates a Caravaggism reinterpreted through the prism of Bartolomeo Manfredi’s style. Régnier quickly oriented his manner towards a pursuit of refinement and gracefulness, which Annick Lemoine calls “a poetics of seduction” or “a Caravaggism of seduction” …

Régnier’s half-brother was Michele Desubleo. The book does not question a rather strange fact: these two artists from the same family, both born in Maubeuge then living in Rome, are considered as having different nationalities, one French, the other Italian … Régnier’s activities as an art dealer and expert are also studied by Annick Lemoine with one amusing anecdote which recounts how the painter commissioned fake paintings from his son-in-law Pietro della Vecchia … Were these pieces sold as copies or were they part of a veritable counterfeiting business? Annick Lemoine does not say either way but seems to favor the second hypothesis …

Thanks to this publication Régnier definitely appears as a major 17th century artist and we feel he deserves to have an exhibition organized in his honor … Since the pioneering exhibition in 1974, the French Caravaggesque have become better known: Valentin has had a monograph devoted to him in Italian, Tournier had an exhibition in Toulouse in 2001 and the Roman Vouet is currently being exhibited at the Musée de Nantes (see article). Annick Lemoine’s book, which benefits from extensive research in Italian archives, is a superb example of the trend to rediscover this school.

Surveying Contemporary Art

2 February 2009 | Modern, Books, Teaching | Add A Comment

Victoria Laurie of The Australian writes about Art & Today, a new survey by Eleanor Heartney of contemporary art from the last three decades, which is organized not by chronology, country, medium, style, or “ism”:

“One of the big changes I would say in the past 25 years is that art is much less about a kind of dialogue with itself and its past and more about a dialogue with the outside world,” she says. Hence the titles of the 16 chapters in her book: Art and Popular Culture, Art and Politics, Art and Time, Art and Technology, Art and Propaganda, and so on … Heartney’s insights are thought-provoking, even if they provoke disagreement. A shorthand summary of a few points goes thus: contemporary artists are more like novelists whose narratives tend not to lead anywhere. Art is no longer reassuring. The feminist art movement is important and does tend to have a narrative, and women artists brought the body back into art …

One might venture to ask why so few South American artists (fewer than a dozen) found their way into the book. Or Germans (fewer than 50), or British (about 45) or Chinese artists (5). Almost half of the 400 featured artists are Americans, while four Australians are listed: Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini, Natalie Jeremijenko and Tracey Moffatt. I suggest to Heartney that the Western art world is yet to overcome its egocentricity, treating other cultural spheres as fertile hunting grounds rather than places where contemporary art with distinctively Islamic, Oriental, Latin American or even Eastern European roots is being produced. “I think American culture has been hugely impacted by the rise of China, of India, of Asia generally,” responds Heartney, perhaps inadvertently proving my point.

‘A colossal mistake?’

30 January 2009 | Modern | Add A Comment

The Times of London writes on the re-attribution of The Colossus:

“After a seven-month investigation, experts at the Prado gallery in Madrid came to the reluctant conclusion that the masterpiece was probably the work of Asensio Juliá, one of Goya’s assistants … the Prado started an investigation last year [upon] the discovery of the initials A. J. in one corner of the canvas … Goya experts have been split for years over the authenticity of the painting. In 2001 Juliet Bareau-Wilson, a British art historian, claimed that The Colossus and another work, The Milkmaid of Bordeaux, had been created by others … The Prado denied the claims at the time and many experts believe the quality of the work means that Goya must have been involved. Nigel Glendinning, a British art historian, doubted that anyone but Goya could have painted the work.

Einstein and Art

29 January 2009 | Modern, Books | Add A Comment

In The American Scientist, a physicist reviews Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture, edited by Peter L. Galison and Gerald Holton and Silvan S. Schweber:

Although Einstein denied a connection between music and his modes of thinking about science, he did claim that his thought patterns were highly visual, something he had in common with a number of other famous and successful scientists. However, this quality makes it even more striking how little interest he seems to have had in the visual arts. Although this volume devotes three essays to Einstein’s influence on the visual arts, each of the essayists (Lynda Dalrymple Henderson, Caroline A. Jones and Matthew Ritchie) is ready to admit that there does not appear to be any causal connection between Einstein and artistic modernism. This finding provides a salutary antidote to the claims that cubism and other artistic movements of the 20th century owed their existence, in some part, to Einstein’s work on relativity and early quantum physics.

The truth is that, insofar as artists may have been influenced by advances in non-Euclidean geometry and talk of time as a fourth dimension of space, these vague ideas were in the air before Einstein made any contributions to their realization in science. And where science influences art, the influence is often of so decidedly nontechnical and nonspecific a nature as to make any proper citation impossible. One may say, for instance, that 20th-century artists have been, at times, focused on the notion of how to treat or portray time in a traditionally static medium. But it is impossible to decide whether they have been influenced by physicists’ evolving understanding of time, much less estimate the influence of one physicist in particular.

(via 3 Quarks Daily)

Fusing Anthropology and Art History

28 January 2009 | Books, Theory | Add A Comment

“We Germanocentrists tend to fetishize the untranslatability of Kulturwissenschaft. But we have our reasons,” writes Michael P. Steinberg in his recent review of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History by Karen Lang and Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion by Philippe-Alain Michaud:

Its practice engages cultural history, analysis, and interpretation according to a depth/surface dialectic where meaning resides and must be coaxed into visibility. The image, according to this model, can be interpreted as a beautiful symptom. The model offers a historical and anthropological challenge to art history, thus throwing a gauntlet first to art-historical scholarship. In recent years, the Warburg approach has been explicitly reclaimed by an argument in favor of a cultural history of the image as part of a continuing critique (Warburg’s critique) of the formalism of art history and in a newer dissatisfaction with the surface-to-surface limitations of semiotically based visual studies. Insofar as the image itself can be extended metonymically into the semiotic surface of the contemporary moment, then the cultural analysis or cultural history of the image becomes a depth analysis of the present, or indeed a depth analysis of the past/present dialectic in any image or any moment at the point of its production. In at least one context, the Warburgian history/analysis of the image has produced a veritable institution; I refer to the Centre CATH (Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History) at the University of Leeds. Warburg’s presence is less explicit but just as present in the institution on which the Centre-CATH is modeled, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) of the University of Amsterdam. In recent years as well, scholarly attention to Warburg’s method and to Warburg himself has increased, though these two agendas are not easy to combine. Anthropology and art history have not yet produced the fusion for which one might hope.

Brandeis to Close Museum, Sell Art

27 January 2009 | Museums | Add A Comment

From the Boston Globe:

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. The move shocked local arts leaders and drew harsh criticism from the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries … “This is not a happy day in the history of Brandeis,” President Jehuda Reinharz said tonight. “The Rose is a jewel. But for the most part it’s a hidden jewel. It does not have great foot traffic and most of the great works we have, we are just not able to exhibit. We felt that, at this point given the recession and the financial crisis, we had no choice.” Brandeis said the museum would be closed late this summer. It was founded in 1961; a new wing designed by celebrated architect Graham Gund was added in 2001 … [T]here is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature.

No New Jobs?

27 January 2009 | Career | Add A Comment

For many attendees at the CAA conference late next month, the point is to find a job. And the outlook is “grim,” writes the Village Voice:

Never mind a hiring freeze. For those seeking jobs in academia, next year is looking more like a nuclear winter.

“Last year, about a quarter of the positions I applied for had their searches canceled, and last year’s market didn’t look as bad as this year’s,” says one aspirant, art historian Sandra Cheng. “I’m wondering how many of these positions I’m applying for are actually real.”

Now a visiting assistant professor at Pratt, Cheng got her Ph.D. in May at the University of Delaware and has a résumé filled with fellowships and grants. She’s seeking a traditional academic livelihood: research, travel, and teaching, at a university with tenure-track positions. But after a year of job-hunting and piecing together part-time positions, Cheng is wondering if the career she envisioned still exists.

“I do sense a permanent change,” she says. “I wonder if this is the last leg for the tenure system” …

[The] odds have Cheng reconsidering her career path. She’s thinking about detouring away from art history and going into academic administration—universities are businesses, and businesses always need managers to run them. But if she does stick with teaching, she’d like to land a school where she can concentrate on undergraduates. Cheng is queasy about the idea of encouraging future art historians along into a field unable to absorb them.

“For Ph.D.’s in the humanities market, it’s almost like we really shouldn’t make any more, because there’s such a backlog of doctorates floating around out there and we don’t have the jobs,” she says. “The programs want more grad students to keep their departments floating, but is it really ethical, I wonder?”

Obit: Olga Raggio

27 January 2009 | Uncategorized | Add A Comment

According to Michele D. Marincola, interim director of NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts:

It is with real sadness that I report the death of Olga Raggio, former Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor at the IFA from 1965-1998. Miss Raggio passed away on Saturday, January 24th. She was 82.

Miss Raggio came to the US in 1950 from Rome, and joined the staff of the Metropolitan Museum, where she remained her entire professional career. Her expertise was in European sculpture from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. She was a valued teacher and mentor to a number of students at the Institute, many of whom now hold leading positions in the museum world and academia.

There will be a funeral mass for Miss Raggio on Tuesday, January 27, 2009 at 10 A.M. at Holy Innocents Roman Catholic Church in Pleasantville, NY.

Raggio co-wrote the two-volume The Gubbio Studiolo and Its Conservation, which won the 2001 Salimbeni Prize for Art History and Critics (awarded to books on Italian topics).

Warner on Gombrich and Barthes

26 January 2009 | Books | Add A Comment

In the New Statesman, Marina Warner explains why Gombrich’s Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Barthes’ Mythologies are “the books that changed my life”:

Hobby Horse is an exuberant book - exuberant with a certain solemnity, like a very large man executing eightsome reels with great seriousness but wonderfully light feet all the same. There, Gombrich passionately reveals that history, politics, philosophy can be condensed into the most ordinary artefacts … The book that truly gave me my “Eureka!” moment was Mythologies by Roland Barthes - in a bookshop in Washington, DC in 1972. I was writing my study of the Virgin Mary, which would appear four years later, and was fumbling towards understanding her cult. Here, in Barthes’s essays about the relations of myth and ideology, and especially in the closing, extended essay, “Myth Today”, he was expressing the ideas I was trying to shape for myself. I reeled and my pulse raced as, standing up in the shop, I began reading it.

To my mind now, Barthes is too swingeing, too implacable, too much of the French revolutionary pur et dur in his denunciation of myth’s collusion with power. But the book did clear the horizon for me then in an utterly elating way. However, I could never have grasped his arguments or even recognised what he was saying without the ground laid by the iconographical decoding work that I’d encountered before, through Wind and, far more importantly, through Gombrich, from whom I learned that there is no stroke of the pen or brush that can be innocent of meanings reaching out into the world.

Art History … Soon Deemed Unnecessary?

23 January 2009 | Career | Add A Comment

Stanley Fish writes on his New York Times blog:

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue … begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things … healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have [already] largely vanished … In “two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce” … “the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability” … have now triumphed … and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”

New Didi-Huberman Book

22 January 2009 | Books, Theory | Add A Comment

Georges Didi-Huberman (winner of this year’s CAA award for lifetime achievement in art writing) has just published a new book, Quand les images prennent position. André Gunthert writes:

In a world where images are proliferating in every way, and where their use-values so often leave us disoriented — [shuttling] between the most vulgar propaganda and the most inaccessible esotericism, between a screen function and the possibility of even destroying this screen — it seems necessary to revisit certain practices where the image’s act has truly accorded with critical activity and the work of the mind. In sum, one would like to consider the conditions for a possible politics of the imagination. This essay, the first in a series titled “L’Oeil de l’histoire,” attempts to analyze the concrete procedures and theoretical choices inherent in the reflections of Bertolt Brecht on war …

Greenberg Fatigue?

21 January 2009 | Modern, Conferences | Add A Comment

Last Friday marked the 100th birthday of Clement Greenberg. You hadn’t heard? Almost no one marked the occasion. In Die Welt, Ulf Poschardt wrote a wistful reminiscence. This April, Harvard will host a two-day symposium, “Clement Greenberg at 100: Looking Back to Modern Art”:

Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to: avant-garde and “kitsch,” distinctions between high and low culture, “decoration,” the Partisan Review, medium specificity, abstraction versus figuration, multiple modernisms, and modernism’s self-reflexivity. Papers may address Greenberg’s critical engagement with abstract expressionism, color field painting, post-painterly abstraction, or his disengagement with “non-art” or postmodernism.

CAA Awards

21 January 2009 | Awards | Add A Comment

Via Artnet:

The College Art Association has announced the winners of its annual awards, in advance of the organization’s 2009 conference in Los Angeles, Feb. 25-28, 2009. Winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism is Boris Groys, the Berlin-born NYU prof whose most recent book is Art Power (MIT, 2008). In one of his more glib pronouncements, Groys likened Osama bin Laden to a video artist.

Other award winners are Mary Heilmann (distinguished body of work), Chris Burden (artist award for lifetime achievement), Guerrilla Girls (distinguished feminist award, a new honor), Georges Didi-Huberman (lifetime achievement for writing on art), Roland Reiss (teaching of art), Charles W. Haxthausen (teaching of art history) and Carol Stringari (scholarship and conservation).

The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award goes to Anthony J. Barbieri-Low for Artisans in Early Imperial China (University of Washington). The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award goes to Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, eds., for Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (Yale). Another new prize, the Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries and Collections, goes to Phillip Earenfight, ed., A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion (University of Washington).

The Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for an article in Art Bulletin goes to Marnin Young for “Heroic Indolence: Realism and the Politics of Time in Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers.” And the Art Journal Award for an article in that publication goes to Richard Meyer for “Artists sometimes have feelings,” a personal essay on working with living artists (in Meyer’s case, Paul McCarthy and Anita Steckel).

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