CAA News Today

The December 2008 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art history in English, has just been published. Your copy will arrive in the mail in the coming days.

In his essay for the journal’s Interventions series, Partha Mitter interrogates the nexus of power and authority that has effectively marginalized non-Western modernism and proposes a revisionist methodology. Alastair Wright, Rebecca M. Brown, Saloni Mathur, and Ajay Sinha write brief responses to Mitter’s text.

For “The Body of Eve in Andrea Pisano’s Creation Relief,” Jack M. Greenstein examines the artist’s treatment of the figures in the fourteenth-century Creation of Eve panel on the campanile of Florence Cathedral, which set a new standard for naturalism in relief sculpture.

With “In Form We Trust: Neoplatonism, the Gold Standard, and the Machine Art Show,” Jennifer Jane Marshall considers the Museum of Modern Art’s 1934 exhibition as a case study for investigating interwar American modernism’s negotiation between meaning, materiality, and value. Also in twentieth-century art, Claude Cernuschi and Andrzej Herczynski clarify the mechanics of Jackson Pollock’s handling of liquid paint under gravity and the broader implications for the meaning and ethos of his work.

The reviews section includes Ellen T. Baird’s assessment of Elizabeth Hill Boone’s recent book Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate, and Kymberly N. Pinder’s evaluation of the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Walker Art Center, among other reviews. Please read the full table of contents for more details.