The Art History Newsletter

In the March 30th issue of the New Republic, Jed Perl reflects on survey exhibitions of Joaquín Torres-García, Arshile Gorky and Anne Truitt.

On Torres-García (cf. Robert L. Pincus, Douglas Britt):

“His ochres, siennas, and grays-which from time to time achieve a mineral brilliance, approaching Mondrian’s iconographic red, yellow, and blue-are protagonists in the drama of his art, not a means to an end but ends in themselves. His colors are emblematic, symbols of earth, stone, water, fire. His lines, whether drawn in paint or incised in wood, suggest humankind’s first pictographs, the shape of a temple or a god, drawn with a stick on the sand as the water laps at the ancient artist’s feet. At the Menil I felt how strongly this classicism is grounded not in the ideas of some architect or artist, whether Vitruvius or Mondrian, but in the primacy of craft.”

On Gorky (cf. Holland Cotter, Laura Cumming, William Feaver, Richard Dorment):

In the abstracted gardens of his later art-whether they are full of young spring colors, strong summer ones, or charred and bleached winter ones-the equivocations and evasions of the paint handling embody the enigmas of nature, the never entirely predictable patterns of growth and decay, the sudden appearance of new life, the equally quick eviscerations.

On Truitt (cf. Lance Esplund, Tyler Green, Greg Allen, Meaghan Wilson and Talea Miller, James Meyer, Ken Johnson, Blake Gopnik and Anne Byrd):

Nearly every edge is a hard edge, which only underscores the variety she achieves, sometimes carrying a horizontal band of color around the four sides, often giving the top or the bottom of a column a grace note in a different hue. Truitt understands the sensuousness of color, its power to be luxuriant, seductive, hedonistic. Her deep purples and verdant greens and lush oranges, presented on different sides of her columns, or in contrasting blocks and stripes, are so playful, so immediate, as to suggest the formalization of informal feeling. The color on some columns is light and clear, like an early morning optimism. Others are dark nighttime visions. Sometimes she spins a romance of the tropics, sometimes she alludes to the steady light of the Transcendentalists.

Roberto Calasso’s book, Tiepolo Pink (translated by Alastair McEwen for Knopf), which proposes the 23 etchings of the Scherzi di fantasia as an interpretive key, has elicited mixed reactions from a number of reviewers.

Ferdinand Mount in the TLS:

Henry James refers to “a pompous Tiepolo ceiling”, but pompous is the last thing they are. As Calasso points out, “the Würzburg ceiling is an anthropological experiment. For the first time and – until today – the only time, we find assembled here a literally ecumenical humanity, idiosyncratic and in reciprocal contact”. Everyone is whirled round, the bishops and emperors looking somewhat queasy as they are buffeted and jostled by tobacco traders, and blonde bare-breasted divinities, and pageboys with chocolate pots, musicians in spectacles, dogs and alligators and bulls and beggars and soldiers and bales of firewood and of course those impassive Orientals, to whom Orientalism is the last word to apply. This blown-about caravan picks up all sorts, as comprehensive in its intake as Joyce’s Dublin or Dickens’s London.

Arthur Danto in the NYT Book Review:

Pleasure, light and glory are among the defining attributes of Tiepolo as an artist, who depicts beautiful people, magnificently dressed and coiffed, posed in theatrical settings. But Calasso mostly attempts to disclose facets of the artist’s style and personality through bursts of unconnected truths. We find a passage about Tiepolo and Veronese; about Baudelaire and Boudin (since Baudelaire knew nothing about Tiepolo); about Tiepolo’s personality, such as it was; about why the critic Roberto Longhi compared Tiepolo unfavorably with Caravaggio; about Tiepolo’s theatricality; about how Proust refers to Tiepolo’s colors in describing the wardrobe of the three women who embody Proust’s world — the courtesan Odette, the aristocratic Duchess of Guermantes and the eroticist Albertine; about Tiepolo’s vocabulary of forms, followed by a comparison between Veronese’s and Tiepolo’s “Finding of Moses” — touching on “Tiepolo’s most caustic work ‘Danae and Jupiter.’ ”

Peter Conrad in The Observer:

Calasso confidently generalises about Europe yet admits that for him the continent is “an extension of Venice”. Though he praises the “ecumenical humanity” in Tiepolo’s paintings, his own sympathies remain partisan, even xenophobic. He can’t forgive the French for the revolution or for their “feeling of sovereignty”; he pities Tiepolo for having to deal with Spanish patrons who cared only for “honour and dignity”, not “the modality of appearance”; and he rebukes Michael Levey for dismissing the Scherzi as amiable oddities “in a typically English manner”.

Such asides point up the peculiarly national bent of Calasso’s sensibility. His absorption in pre-Christian mysteries is a symptom of Italy’s ­unashamed paganism.

Bartolomeo Piccolomini in Open Letters Monthly:

No, the dread comes from the fact that as a writer, Calasso is so full of cow crap that if you planted seeds in his cerebellum in midsummer, you’d have a bumper crop of pumpkins come autumn. His many admirers have tripped over themselves to excuse – or honor – the fact that in his prose he often seems not to know what he’s doing or what points he’s making, probably because in certain literary circles even pure twaddle will get the laurel as long as it’s ineffable twaddle.

Frédéric Vitoux in BibliObs:

Roberto Longhi, pourtant peu indulgent à son égard, disait qu’il était «un Véronèse après la pluie».

Comme il y a un délire de la fantaisie chez Tiepolo (qui n’a pas admiré son plafond peint de la Residenz de Würzburg ne saura jamais ce qu’est le bonheur fou de la peinture), il existe une même virtuosité de l’interprétation et de l’érudition chez Calasso. Etrange paradoxe!

Dario Olivero in La Repubblica:

Calasso ragiona per pagine e pagine su questo suo concittadino, sulla facilità e la destrezza della sua mano, su come i suoi colori colpirono Proust, su come i suoi contemporanei, pur apprezzandone la grande capacità di far convivere l’intento edificante di certi suoi lavori con la grazia nuda delle forme femminili, lo considerassero poco più di un epigono del Veronese, di come Longhi lo capì ma lo liquidò con insofferenza quasi sospetta, della difficoltà di trovare notizie sulla sua vita al punto che, se non avessimo i suoi dipinti a testimoniarlo, saremmo quasi autorizzati a dubitarne.

Symposium: November 12–14, 2010
Banff International Curatorial Institute
The Banff Centre

Deadline: April 23, 2010

For information: http://bit.ly/c8d3b2

Numerous individuals who write on art received 2010 Guggenheim fellowships, an improvement from last year:

Mr. Joshua Brown, Executive Director, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, CUNY: The visual culture of the American Civil War.

Ms. Sharon E. J. Gerstel, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles: The devotional life and setting of the late Byzantine peasant.

Mr. Alan Govenar, President, Documentary Arts, Inc.: The folk art of community photography.

Mr. Bernard L. Herman, George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Troublesome things in the borderlands of contemporary art.

Mr. Gregory P. A. Levine, Associate Professor of the Art and Architecture of Japan and Buddhist Visual Cultures, University of California, Berkeley: Buddha heads as sculptural fragments in devotional and modern-contemporary imaginations.

Ms. Maggie Nelson, Faculty Member, School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts: Contemporary uses and abuses of cruelty in art, literature, and media.

Mr. Jed Perl, Writer, New York City; Art Critic, The New Republic: A biography of Alexander Calder.

Ms. Elizabeth Sears, George H. Forsyth Jr. Collegiate Professor of History of Art, University of Michigan: Warburg Circles: towards a cultural-historical history of art, 1929-64.

Ms. Mary D. Sheriff, W. R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Art History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Picturing the allure of conquest in 18th-century France.

In Ingeborg Reichle’s Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (Springer, 2009) — a revised and expanded English edition of her PhD thesis, which was published in German in 2004 — she asks, “Is science the new art?” In the same vein, the writer of her preface, Robert Zwijnenberg, asks, “Why do artists openly seek to gain access to the domain of the sciences?” Their questioning resonated for me with a fascinating recent essay by Marco Roth in the journal N + 1:

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel … Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia) … What makes so many writers try their hands and brains at the neuronovel? At the most obvious level, the trend follows a cultural (and, in psychology proper, a disciplinary) shift away from environmental and relational theories of personality back to the study of brains themselves, as the source of who we are. This cultural sea change probably began with the exhaustion of “the linguistic turn” in the humanities, in the 1980s, and with the discredit psychoanalysis suffered, around the same time.

Roth finds this to be a dismaying turn for the novel. He finds that writers of the neuronovel reduce life to biology, a topic that they will never understand as well as today’s scientists, let alone the scientists to come:

It now seems we [novelists have] gone beyond the loss of society and religion to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science. It’s not, of course, that morality, society, and selfhood no longer exist, but they are now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines. So the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview.

More optimistically, in her epilogue Ingeborg Reichle writes,

One should be cautious … about proclaiming the end of art … By adapting and adopting scientific methods, processes, and materials, art – whose audience has since become nebulous and inaccessible – has embarked a course with an uncertain outcome … Ultimately, it is to be hoped that bridges will not only be built between the Two Cultures and between science and art, but also between science and its technologies and our everyday life so that we are better prepared for the emergence of a biocybernetic humanity.

Although not a recent publication (2003), Richard Polsky’s I Bought Andy Warhol is worth a read. As someone who normally focuses more on the museum side of the art world, I enjoyed this insider’s take of the contemporary art market. While his chief pursuit centers on the prolific work of Warhol, Polsky enlightens us “outsiders” more generally on the world of art dealers. Readers learn not only the basic procedures of art auctions and challenges in landing deals, but also encounter the many personalities and characters of the dealers and collectors with whom Polsky interacts. No surprise, money is the theme of this narrative (which makes me cringe).

While a large sum of museums’ collections comprise of gifts from private collectors, I’m curious about the extent to which museums play the art market.

In the spring 2010 issue of X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, Damon Willick writes a memorial to the art historian Henry T. Hopkins (1928-2009):

In 1960, Hopkins directed the Huysman Gallery, which was across the street from the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega. Though Huysman’s history was brief, the gallery offered an alternative to the dominant Ferus Gallery and gave many young artists their first public exhibitions. For example, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ed Ruscha showed work early in their careers at Huysman, and Hopkins’s War Babies exhibition of the work of Bell, Goode, Ed Bereal, and Ron Miyashiro is central to any history of L.A. art.

According to The Forward, in a new book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses Stephen H. Norwood describes the “utter destruction of the academic career of art historian Jerome Klein, one of the most popular teachers at Columbia, for publicly protesting Nazi crimes,” at the hands of Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler. Reviewer Jerome A. Chanes writes, “What can be done to recognize these actions 65 years later? With the luxury of hindsight, it might not be a bad idea, in the first instance, for Columbia to remove the ‘Butler’ from the university’s Butler Library.”

In a recent issue of American Art (23:3), Joshua Shannon writes that the field of contemporary art history is now producing more job openings than “Nineteenth-Century Art and the Art of the United States combined – the two boom fields of a generation ago,” but that it is also changing rapidly. For starters, its center of gravity is shifting away from the postwar period to eras closer to the present, and whereas it once focused heavily on American artists,

Art from around the world is now justly the subject of the discipline [of contemporary art history], with Latin American topics perhaps taking the lead. To date, we have no good textbook to help us reform our courses, but Terry Smith of the University of Pittsburgh is at work on one … [T]he research methods and writing styles in contemporary art history are diversifying, too … [Approaches pioneered in October] clustered around an attention to the unusual forms and structures of artworks and to the radical potential (either for politics or for collective patterns of thought) of those innovations … [Lately there] has been a turn toward more detailed historicization of recent art …

Shannon argues that it is so difficult to define the field – chronologically, geographically and methodologically – that it may not survive as a useful category. He also suggests that it’s impossible for one individual to amass enough regional knowledge to adequately treat each part of the world. Perhaps the subject should be team taught instead, even if this requires historians of earlier periods to brush up on the contemporary scenes in the countries they study.

In the blog Experimental Philosophy, Eric Schwitzgebel writes about recent studies he’s done of conference audiences. He concludes that “most audience members, listening to most academic talks, spend most of their time with some distraction or other at the forefront of their stream of experience. They may not remember this fact because when they think back on their experience of a talk, what is salient to them are those rare occasions when they did make a novel connection or think up an interesting objection.” Most of the time, audience members are more likely to be thinking about their cell phone, an itch, their feelings of confusion, the “skanky taste” of the coffee, or their need to go to the bathroom.

In a recent issue of Open (n. 16) devoted to “The Art Biennial as a Global Phenomenon,” Jorinde Seijdel writes

… the art biennial, which was originally an instrument within a politics of nation-states, is increasingly deployed for developing and marketing cities and regions. In order to compensate for this, biennials often put political issues onto their artist agenda … [but] can biennials really represent an alternative political voice in these neo-political times?

The issue’s contributors include Pascal Gielen, Michael Hardt, Chantal Mouffe, Thierry de Duve, Boris Groys, Simon Sheikh, Brian Holmes, Charles Esche, Maria Hlavajova, and Irit Rogoff.

From the Washington Post:

Toiling in the bowels of the National Gallery, CASVA’s intrepid scholars shape what all the rest of us will someday believe about art. We may think we come at pictures with fresh eyes and ideas, but our everyday insights are likely to echo the thoughts, once esoteric and radical, of some long-dead expert. If we look ahead to an art scene 15 or 20 years in the future, we’ll find that its exhibitions, its wall texts, its college primers, its PBS specials — even its newspaper reviews — are likely to depend on research being done now by the unsung heroes of CASVA. At any given time there are something like 35 of these operatives, based in Washington or scattered overseas. They work in the shadows to find new insights into art — so the rest of us don’t have to. One CASVA scholar has shown that Renaissance patrons had such flexible ideas of time that they could know a bronze of Jesus was brand-new, yet still count it as dating to the time of Christ. A CASVA lecturer made the convincing case that a tame seascape by Edward Hopper — nothing more than a boat, Sunday sailors, water and sky — was in fact all about World War II and radio newscasts … “No one questions that physicists need to operate in a very rarefied and esoteric environment, where they can entertain wild ideas, many of them unprovable,” [Alexander] Nagel says. “But it’s not obvious to everyone that art history needs to get done at that level — so it’s good that a place exists that insists it does.”

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The Guggenheim Museum is digitizing archives and blogging about the highlights. Particularly exciting:

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Reel-to-Reel collection holds recordings of artists’ talks, symposia, lectures, interviews, and performances. Programs highlight artists such as Pablo Picasso, Vassily Kandinsky, Robert Motherwell, Juan Gris, and Vincent Van Gogh. Speakers include Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum (1961–88), and Pulitzer prize-winning author and collector James Michener. The reel-to-reels have valuable content, but are relatively inaccessible in their current format. To preserve the audio content, the Library and Archives Department was awarded a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to digitize the recordings. Safe Sound Archive, a nationally known vendor for audio preservation and reformatting, has been contracted to preserve and digitize the recordings. Once complete, all audio will be accessible for public research on site at the museum and select audio tracks will be available online.

Here’s hoping the online selection will be generous.

(via ArtDaily)

From the introduction of Finbarr Barry Flood’s recently published book Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, 2009):

… I am aware of the paradox inherent in adopting linguistic models for a book that champions the value of material culture. I am also aware that, in doing so, I am to some extent swimming against the tide. The dominance of a linguistic model in the social sciences has sustained recent criticism from a number of scholars, among them the art historian David Summers, who has argued that whereas language is conventional, works of art ‘are embodied under certain conditions, and these are only secondarily conventional” … my own conceptual framework is a bricolage of ideas drawn not only from scholarship on other premodern frontier regions (notably Anatolia, Armenia, Spain, and Sicily) but also from a myriad of disparate disciplines, including art history, anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, and linguistics … [I]mplicit in my use of contemporary theoretical work is a rejection of any notion of a ‘return to the object’ as if it were preexistent or self-subsisting. A subsidiary aim of the book is, therefore, to contribute to a negotiation of the (often-marked) boundaries between empirically driven and theoretically informed scholarship on pre-modernity …

(FYI: This post will remain atop the site for a week. New posts will appear directly underneath.)

Now — for a short time only! — this is your opportunity to join the family of Art History Newsletter contributors.

The Art History Newsletter, until now essentially a one-man operation, will soon become a group blog. Such blogs seem well suited to academe (see for example this one.) Contributors contribute at their leisure. Individual posts are signed by their authors. Freedom is given to contributors to post information, to express opinions, or to do both.

For over four years, The Art History Newsletter has endeavored to synopsize news and opinion of interest to art historians and to provide original reporting on conferences, lectures, and other special events. It seems fair to say that it is now the preeminent site of its kind (setting aside the website of the College Art Association itself). It typically receives over a thousand visitors a day, and judging from the email we’ve received, it is read by many of the field’s most prominent scholars.

To become a contributor, email [email protected].

The online edition of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians is going high tech:

The new illustrations include zoomable color photographs [and] videos, some of which are clips from historic films or works under review, while others represent three-dimensional models in a convenient way. Music, spoken word, and ambient noise are also part of the new JSAH, and panoramic photography, which stitches together many photographs to create a virtual environment, provides an especially valuable complement to traditional tools for the illustration of architecture. JSAH Online will publish maps with embedded GIS coordinates, allowing interconnection with Google Maps. Google Earth will provide the platform for viewing animations, in which the experience of visiting sites and seeing them change through time can be simulated.

The March 2010 issue includes an animation “showing scaled overlay of Melchior Lorichs’s Panorama and digital model of Istanbul, comparing the viewpoints from the Galata Tower and from the sea walls”; a re-creation “of Roman funeral music and ritual lamentation based on experimental archaeology”; a virtual reality image of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye; and Google Earth Model of the Roman Forum that allows you to choose which historical incarnation of the forum you’d like to view.

The Melchior Lorichs article is available free to nonsubscribers as a sample.

The new online edition was developed “in partnership with University of California Press and JSTOR … for more than two years and has been made possible by two grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. SAH is indebted to JSAH Editor, David Brownlee, and JSAH Online Founding Editor, Hilary Ballon.”

Inside Higher Ed reports that non-member subscriptions will be available starting next year, that the online edition

is intended to encourage scholars to explore the use of digital storytelling tools while nudging publishers to renovate their digital journals and e-textbooks to support those tools, says Pauline Saliga, executive director of the society. And she believes the JSAH Online’s influence won’t be limited to architectural history. “I think this development is going to really impact a lot of disciplines,” Saliga says, citing music history and anthropology as examples. “A lot of societies and publishers were waiting for somebody to solve this problem,” she says. “We’ve solved the problem.… Now they can adapt it for their own purposes.”

From CAA News:

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has received a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to convene an international task force of art librarians, scholars, and information specialists from Europe and the United States to discuss the future of art bibliography. Recent events, including discussions of art-library closures, scant funding resources for ongoing support of art libraries and projects internationally, and the cessation of the Getty’s support for the continuation of the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) provide the catalyst to review current practices, take stock of changes, and seriously consider developing more sustainable and collaborative ways of supporting the bibliography of art history in the future.

(via CultureGrrl)

In the Brooklyn Rail, Sasha Suda interviewed Willibald Sauerländer:

… the time will come when you study the art of the other civilizations with equal right as European art. With the global art world there’s one difficulty I spoke with [Hans] Belting about: In a deep structural sense art history was a European project because Europe had arranged a process of secularization where religious art suddenly became aesthetic art. This process, which to my limited knowledge, never happened in Africa, or India, not even in China despite great breaks they’ve made with their past. So, it’s not easy to expand the European concept of art history to the other civilizations because it means bringing European concepts to them. We are in a peculiar situation at the moment because there are still people who pursue traditional research topics and there is also a new interest in what I would even describe as artifacts. It’s a new interest in the signs and monuments of religion, life, and public life that has created what is called cultural studies—not a very beautiful term but a strong trend. How, in the face of this trend, will you save the professional knowledge of traditional art history and expertise? All of these are open questions that are not discussed enough …

We have to ask ourselves what is looking? Is looking a strictly visual process or is it a deep, emotional process? We should test and totally absorb the emotional process in front of a work of art and then, as art historians, we should undergo the critical task of asking ourselves whether the emotional impact of the art is identical with the historical, or original, mission of the object. One must ask oneself what the tension between these two things is and then bring them together. Today in the art history of Bildwissenschaft or media studies people want to throw away the emotional side of art history so that works of art become examples of information. We must defend the emotional effect of art even if, in Germany, we experienced irrationalism among art historians who swam in their emotional impressions alone. So, we have the task of putting our emotional impression through critical enlightenment, but if we remove the emotional side then we can close shop.

Sauerländer subsequently wrote in to clarify a few things.

We recently discovered the audio archives at ArtOnAir.org, which includes interviews with various scholars such as Tom Huhn, David Joselit, Tom McDonough, and Hal Foster, as well as a recording of a Museum of Modern Art panel discussion on the Institutionalization of Feminism.