CAA News Today

The March 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the first in the editorship of Kirk Ambrose and the first copublished with Taylor & Francis. The issue opens with a new recurring feature, “Whither Art History?” The inaugural essay by Griselda Pollock critically engages interpretive and institutional trends within the discipline.

In the long-form essays that follow, Mary D. Garrard explores the effect of love on Michelangelo’s creativity by analyzing the Renaissance artist’s cryptic drawing Children’s Bacchanal (1532–33) in her essay, “Michelangelo in Love.” For his contribution, titled “Map as Tapestry,” Jesús Escobar argues that Pedro Teixera’s monumental 1656 map of Madrid is not only a remarkable scientific achievement but also a sophisticated art object. Next, in “The Fragrance of the Divine,” Nina Ergin considers the olfactory traditions underlying Ottoman incense burners and discusses their complex meanings. Finally, Edith Wolfe demonstrates in her essay, called “Paris as Periphery,” how the art of Vicente do Rego Monteiro reflects a specifically Brazilian cosmopolitanism at the core of a counternarrative of modernity in the 1920s.

In the Reviews section, an Art Bulletin Centennial review essay by Mariët Westermann assesses the two volumes of De Hollandsche schilderkunst in de zeventiende eeuw, which examine the work of Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Rijn. Tanya Sheehan reviews two books on interdisciplinary subjects: Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, edited by Amy R. W. Myer, and The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan, written by Maki Fukuoka. Three recent books on Mexican art—Mary K. Coffey’s How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture, Adriana Zavala’s Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition, and Shelley E. Garrigan’s Collecting Mexico—are assessed by Rick López. Josh Ellenbogen ruminates on two books on art and technology, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacle by Erkki Huhtamo and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art by Laura U. Marks.

CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the print journal as a benefit of their membership. In addition, online versions of the articles in each issue are available to CAA members who log into the CAA members’ portal. The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in June 2014, will feature the next “Whither Art History?” essay, by Parul Dave Mukherji, and essays on Greek domestic mosaics, death masks produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the architecture of the Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museum, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater.