CAA News Today

The opening essay of the December 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is Cheng-hua Wang’s examination of Sino-European artistic interaction, the latest in the quarterly journal’s “Whither Art History?” series.

In other essays in the issue: John K. Papadopoulos identifies the Motya Youth, unearthed in 1979, as a kalathiskos dancer and explores the political implications of this new interpretation. In her article “Old Plates, New Impressions,” Alexandra Onuf analyzes editorial interventions in a sixteenth-century print series reissued in seventeenth-century Antwerp as responses to the upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War. In “The Emptiness behind the Mask,” Nóra Veszprémi considers how the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, suffused with contradictory meanings, prompted musings on time, history, and national identity. For the issue’s final essay, Annika Marie reads Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics that ultimately serve to demystify art.

In the Reviews section, Khristaan D. Villela surveys four recent multiauthor books on Maya art, including Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks and Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. Rebecca Zorach reviews two books addressing chromatic subjects: The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800, edited by Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, and Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Closing the December issue is Brian Kane’s review of Whitney Davis’s book, A General Theory of Visual Culture.

CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.

In the next issue of the quarterly journal, March 2015, essays will consider the five members of the Società del 1496 workshop, portraitlike representations of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori, Joshua Reynolds’s use of unstable and unconventional materials, and Marie-Denise Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.