CAA News Today

Essays in the June 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Philip Guston, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A fifth essay on aesthetics and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the late Anne L. Schroder, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art; one of her final essays appears in it.

Leading off the issue is Margaret A. Sullivan’s article that uncovers the beginnings of genre in Bruegel’s debt to stoicism, ancient satire, and the art of Pieter Aertsen. Next, Schroder explores Fragonard’s later career through two revived projects, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) and his unfinished painting series, the Progress of Love. For “Hegel’s Contested Legacy,” Jason Gaiger reexamines the Hegelian inheritance in art history in light of newly published transcripts of the lectures on aesthetics and, in doing so, raises broader questions about the concourse between art history and philosophy.

Looking at French art in the nineteenth century, André Dombrowski reveals layered political and historical significations embedded in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters. For his contribution, Robert Slifkin finds that Guston’s unsettling return to figuration in the 1960s, which partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” used the disjunction between two moments to comment on the present.

The June 2011 issue includes reviews of two books on humor in Greek vase painting and Roman visual culture, two on Chinese painting, one on medieval Buddhist sculpture, and one on forgery in premodern German art, as well as an exhibition review of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which appeared in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and Berlin in 2009–10.

Please see the full table of contents for June for more details. The next issue, to be published in September 2011, will feature essays on Roman mosaic floors, an emblematic Michelangelo cartoon for a fresco, portraiture in France after 1789, and the American painter John Sloan.