The Art History Newsletter

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote this in advance of last weekend’s Romare Bearden symposium:

Artist Romare Bearden … is the subject of a symposium … at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture, Downtown. “Bearden in the Public Realm,” include[s] a Friday conversation with novelist John Edgar Wideman … Saturday’s keynote speaker will be Mary Schmidt-Campbell, who was recently named vice chairman of President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities … Among the goals of this symposium are to draw attention to and discover more about the breadth of disciplines Mr. Bearden engaged with and influenced. His collage painting, “The Piano Lesson,” for example, was the inspiration for August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same title … More than 22 national artists and scholars will participate in six panels ranging in topic from “Pittsburgh Memories” to “Printmaking as Practice.”

The New York Times profiles nine emerging curators: Rajendra Roy, Hao Sheng, Jen Mergel, Alison Gass, Diane Waggoner, Scott Rothkopf, Diane Waggoner, Clara Drummond, and Samantha Rippner. MoMA film curator Roy says, “When I first heard they were looking for someone I was convinced I was NOT the person. I was too young, too out there, not academic.” “Fifteen interviews later, he was offered the job.” Eight of the nine have a master’s degree; two also have a PhD.

The University of Western Ontario is launching a new major in Museum and Curatorial Studies, “in response to an increased demand for training in these areas.” The University adds, “While other Canadian universities have similar programs, offering it at the undergraduate level makes Western’s program unique.”

According to the L.A. Times,

a group of USC undergrads who have taken over the [university's] museum in a new approach to hands-on learning. The class project turned them into curators, forcing them to apply art theory to actual practice, and shut down a long-running exhibition in midrun. Over two weeks the students mounted their makeover of the show, employed criticisms of traditional museum exhibits and used contemporary art and multimedia to rethink art history for the intervention … Richard Meyer, a co-professor of the course Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating who is responsible for the takeover, said the idea came from the class using the L.A. museum world as a laboratory. “We wanted them to develop a constant consciousness that everything you see in museums is choreographed.”

In full:

DATE: April 1, 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE GETTY PROVIDES FREE ACCESS TO THE BHA ON ITS WEBSITE

LOS ANGELES—As of April 1, 2010, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) will be available free of charge on the Getty Web site at http://library.getty.edu/bha. Free Web access to BHA is an advantage not only to all traditional users of the database but also to such potential users as institutions in developing countries and independent scholars worldwide, who until now have been unable to afford access to the BHA. Since ending its collaboration with the Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST)–CNRS in December 2007, the Getty has been searching for partners to continue the production and distribution of BHA. This process has been complicated, and with no suitable arrangement immediately available, the Getty decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.

“The Bibliography of the History of Art has been an indispensable resource for scholars and students for many years. We are delighted to announce that BHA will be available on the Getty Web site. We remain firmly committed to making the present BHA accessible to all,” says Thomas Gaehtgens, Director of the Getty Research Institute. BHA on the Getty Web site offers both basic and advanced search modules, and can be searched easily by subject, artist, author, article or journal title, and other elements. To search BHA, please visit, http://library.getty.edu/bha. Note that the database search includes the International Bibliography of Art (IBA), covering the years 2008 and part of 2009. The Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA), one of the predecessors of BHA, with records that cover 1975-1989, will be online by May 1.

According to a Getty press release, it “decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.” Alas, that still leaves open the question of who will continue updating and maintaining the BHA.

The Getty and its research institute are undoubtedly experiencing difficulties adjusting to endowment investment losses. That said, it’s hard to imagine what could be more important to the scholarly community than a healthy Bibliography of the History of Art. The BHA has for decades indexed 20,000-odd records a year, serving thousands of users around the world. As the Getty itself said in a 2008 study (pdf) of the database, “Scholars continue to need research databases” and “users value authoritative content.” The report also asserts, “Quantifying the work helps justify it.” Alas, in this case apparently even numbers couldn’t save the day.

Souren Melikian writes in Art+Auction:

Art is all about perception. The sales of Old Masters at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York in January offered a fascinating illustration of how shifts in perception can influence prices. As greater works become rarer, substitutes of lesser quality are being upgraded in status. At the same time another, more insidious process, rarely acknowledged by professionals, keeps down the prices of some admirable masterpieces. Because buyers have fewer and fewer works on which to train their eyes, a dwindling number of connoisseurs can recognize great paintings.

Re the latter argument, shouldn’t the movement of great paintings from private to public collections provide connoisseurs with more great paintings “on which to train their eyes”? After all, connoisseurs don’t just look at paintings that come up at auction. Melikian writes:

… now that superior versions by Jan Breughel the Elder come up [for sale] only at very distant intervals, his images have become hazy in the minds of collectors, who are no longer in a position to make comparisons that would be unflattering to the son’s imitations.

But any connoisseur who frequents European museums should be familiar with superior paintings by the elder Breughel, right?

From Culturegrrl:

This just in from Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, in response to my query yesterday about the BHA’s fate:

The Getty will send out a press release tomorrow [Thursday] with very good news. The GRI has worked hard to make this possible.

Routledge has announced a new journal World Art, edited by George Lau, Daniel Rycroft, and Veronica Sekules:

In the context of the reassessment of the collecting, display and interpretation of cultures, the study of art as a global human activity challenges categories of mainstream and marginalised arts and allows new histories to emerge, highlighting different standpoints and disciplines. World Art encourages critical reflection at the intersections of theory, method and practice. It provides a forum for redefining the concept of art for scholars, students and practitioners, for rethinking artistic and interpretive categories and for addressing cultural translation of art practices, canons and discourses.

Its first three themed issues will be devoted to “Heritage Futures,” “Museums and the Marginalised,” and “Visualising the Exotic.”

For other news, see David Packwood on symposia dedicated to Hubert Damisch and Svetlana Alpers, and this on the FBI’s “appointment-only display called the Evil Minds Research Museum that displays the letters, art and artefacts of serial killers” (via Wired).

Historian Linda Gordon has been awarded a Bancroft Prize (her second) for her book on the photographer Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. The prize is “awarded annually by the trustees of Columbia [University] to the authors of books of exceptional merit in the fields of American history, biography and diplomacy.”

In this C-Span appearance last October, “Professor Gordon talked about the personal life of Dorothea Lange, the social and political content of her work, and about the content of Dorothea Lange’s photographs as she showed examples of them. Linda Gordon also reflected on the gender issues revealed in her book. She responded to questions from members of the audience.”

Art history now has robust online rumor mills for jobs and salaries (now in their third year) as well as a place to discuss both, although there’s not as much to discuss this year, given the relative lack of openings. A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article about such sites that detailed their potential for misinformation and star-system propagation as well their upsides: “All of the sites are meant to make the inner workings of the faculty job market a bit more transparent. And they offer young scholars a lifeline during the anxiety-laden process of landing a tenure-track job.” Art historians are taking advantage of their site to hold universities accountable for confusingly written job advertisements, time-wasting pseudo-searches (advertisements intended to conceal the fact that a hire has already been chosen) and exploitative contracts. Incidentally, there seems to be general agreement not to post the names of job-seekers (other than one’s own), although there’s been some debate over the utility of refraining after names have already gone public.

ARTnews editor Robin Cembalest writes:

In the United States, the art made in Spain’s Latin American colonies used to be considered artistically minor and politically incorrect. Now, as intellectual trends coincide with demographic realities, it’s on the cutting edge of art history – and the wish lists of top museums … The promise, mystery, and challenge of colonial Latin American art are luring not only a growing number of graduate students but also veteran art historians who built their careers in European art … “It’s an intellectually vibrant field with a whole new set of issues, objects, problems,” says Tom Cummins, chair of Harvard’s department of the history of art and architecture … The rise of interest in colonial Latin American art reflects the influence of fields like anthropology, archeology, and cultural studies on art history … Jonathan Brown, an authority on Spanish art … does see Latin American colonial as the first global art form. “At the bottom of this is a major change in the way that art historians are looking at their subject,” he says. “People are starting to conceive of transnational entities that bring into play areas that have been overlooked by Western art historians. There’s a much broader understanding of how art objects are used as commerce, a means of currying favor, of reinforcing belief” … Meanwhile, at LACMA, [curator Ilona] Katzew is organizing the first major survey of images both of and by indigenous peoples across Latin America. “It’s kind of amazing, but it hasn’t been done in a show or a book” yet, she says. That’s the great thing about the field, she adds. “You can just sink your teeth into practically any subject you like, and you’re going to make a major contribution.”

From Timesonline.co.uk:

Although a serious scholar who made significant contributions in several fields, it is as a great populariser and brilliant lecturer with the ability to hold audiences aged from 9 to 90 entranced that many will remember [Lionel Lambourne] first and foremost … As the [V&A's] unofficial “curator of silly art”, his range of knowledge was unrivalled, embracing so much that was customarily overlooked or dismissed as mere “popular art” … [In recent years, he produced] a steady stream of publications ranging from small books on Victorian Genre Painting, 1982, and Caricature, 1983, to the later mighty compendium Victorian Paintings, 1999. Two substantial studies, The Aesthetic Movement, 1996, and Japonisme, 2005, are both standard works on their subjects in which mature judgment and sparkling wit combine. Curiously, the achievement of which Lambourne was most proud was his creation of the V&A staff pantomime, the first of which was staged in 1981. Based on the classic pantomimes which he adored, he wrote scripts which were daringly satirical of the museum’s management policies … the pantomime became a wonderful tradition that did much — in both difficult and, more recently, in happier times in the museum — to bring staff together and helped to make the V&A what it is today. Few great scholars and curators can also have left such a legacy of laughter.

To add to our last post on this topic, a few more discoveries:

Ivan Gaskell

Steven Zucker

James Elkins

Roja Najafi

Janet Davis

Victoria Osborne

Gina Collia-Suzuki

Also on Twitter (sometimes, anyway): Art History Newsletter contributors Jon Lackman and Benjamin Lima.

From Artdaily: “In celebration of the conferral of her doctorate, art historian and publicist Marjan Unger donated to the Rijksmuseum nearly 500 pieces of Dutch jewellery which she had personally collected over the last few decades.”

Word is going out that the venerable Bibliography of the History of Art will fold at the end of this month, as the result of cost-cutting at the Getty Research Institute. In the words of the Cornell University library, “The BHA is the decisive periodical citation index for art history scholarship, and this is certainly a very unfortunate decision. Many of us had been holding out hope that another entity would be willing to take over the management of the database from the Getty, but apparently those ‘quiet’ negotiations have now failed.”

The Japan Times interviews “Shihoko Iida, who late last year resigned from one of Tokyo’s most progressive contemporary art venues, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, and is now six months into a two-year sojourn at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia”:

Working in Australia has also opened Iida’s eyes to how her nation’s art is viewed from abroad. “Everyone is really interested in Japanese art,” she explained, “but, for them, the dominant discourse is still Takashi Murakami and his Superflat theory.” Murakami’s mid-1990s theory that playfulness, decorativeness and lack of depth are the dominant characteristics of Japanese visual expression — from classical painting and ukiyo-e through to manga, anime and contemporary art — is still, it turns out, the key reference point for the international audience. “It’s really a problem of translation,” Iida explained. “There’s nothing else they can refer to. (Art historian) Shigeo Chiba’s books aren’t translated, and for a long time catalogs and Web sites weren’t bilingual either.”

The “CV Doctor” at The Chronicle of Higher Education has returned and last December ministrated to a soon-to-be-minted art-history PhD who fields two CVs, one for academic jobs and another for nonacademic jobs. “Lucy Scholar,” who specializes in Chinese art, is “applying for tenure-track faculty posts at small teaching universities, and for postdoctoral fellowships at large research universities. Outside of academe, she is looking for museum, media, education, and other arts-related jobs that would make specific use of her Chinese language skills and humanities background.”

According to The Chronicle, “Lucy … had a busy fall, having been on the road for three weeks, and trying to apply for jobs, meet with dissertation advisers, and deliver conference papers … She’s mentioned to us that the tenure-track market for Asian art positions is good this year, and she is excited about her prospects.”

It’s easy enough to discover that “Lucy Scholar” is in fact Harvard graduate student Kristina Kleutghen (pdf of her actual CV is here), despite the changes made to some identifying details, which makes you wonder why she and The Chronicle bothered — no one need apologize for getting help with a CV. She does by the way have a blog (not updated since November) and a Twitter feed.

Art historians appear to be embracing Twitter with all of the unenthusiastic hesitation and hand-wringing with which they greeted the once-novel technology of blogging. Nonetheless, a few have taken the plunge. Tweeting art historians include modernist August Jordan Davis, photography historian William Allen, Roman art scholar Francesca Tronchin, art/garden historian S.E. Gordon-Salway, and Renaissance specialist Alexandra Melissa Korey. Be warned that not all tweets will be art-history-related; some art historians choose to tweet about most everything except their day jobs. A broader list of Twitter users interested in art history can be found here.

In other news, find “twitter art” here and here.

We belatedly take note of another death … From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

John Walker McCoubrey, 86, an emeritus professor in the department of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, died … Dr. McCoubrey became Penn’s first James and Nan Farquhar Professor of the History of Art in 1988, and for several years was the chairman of the department. He retired in 1995 … Dr. McCoubrey wrote widely on American, English, and French art of the 18th through the 20th centuries. His doctoral dissertation was on French still-life painting, and he was an authority on the British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner. He was the editor of American Art 1700-1960 and wrote the influential American Tradition in Painting … When American Tradition in Painting was reissued in 1999, sociologist Richard Sennett wrote, “The reappearance of this book is an event in American studies, the resurrection of a classic” … Dr. McCoubrey served on the boards of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s painting and sculpture committee and its committee for 20th-century art.

We belatedly take note of another death … From the Philadelphia Inquirer: John Walker McCoubrey, 86, an emeritus professor in the department of art history at the University of Pennsylvania, died … Dr. McCoubrey became Penn’s first James and Nan Farquhar Professor of the History of Art in 1988, and for several years was the [...]

From Timesonline.co.uk:

Lesley Lewis made distinguished contributions to the history of art and architecture as an author and by serving on numerous influential heritage bodies … Lesley Lewis was born in 1909 … she was educated at home by governesses, the last of whom introduced her to the study of the history of art. At the age of 17 she was sent to finishing school in Paris … She followed her [Courtauld Institute] undergraduate degree with a postgraduate thesis on the rise of Neo-Classical architecture in England … She exchanged the frugality of English postwar life for the rigours of trekking with [husband] David [Lewis] all over the Sudan [for 11 years], so that he could investigate insects that transmit tropical diseases. Finding that she had time on her hands, she started to read law by correspondence and was called to the Bar in 1956 … she put together a well-received book, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (1961) … Lewis was elected in 1964 to the Society of Antiquaries, which became her spiritual home … She was awarded the society’s medal for outstanding services in 2002.