CAA News Today

Three new series of features are introduced in the March 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin. They will appear in the next two volume years of the journal, along with the long-form essays and reviews that have made it the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In her introductory editor’s note, Karen Lang writes that she created the new features “to reflect the vibrancy of art history today and to stimulate dialogue across fields and with neighboring disciplines.”

In the first new series, “Regarding Art and Art History,” a leading scholar offers a short personal reflection on what it means to write art history; the inaugural writer is Anne M. Wagner, whose essay takes the form of a letter. “Notes from the Field” will present short texts on a given topic by ten authors from a variety of disciplines; the first topic is anthropomorphism, with texts by the artist Elizabeth King, the philosopher J. M. Bernstein, and eight other scholars, including Finbarr Barry Flood, Jane Garnett, and James Meyer. Each issue will feature an interview as well; the first is a dialogue between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the art historian Philip Ursprung. Julia Gelshorn launches the feature with a critical essay on the techniques, strategies, and study of the artist interview.

The March issue also features three essays on diverse topics. In “Henry Fuseli: Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism,” Andrei Pop examines the art of the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli in relation to the eighteenth-century revival of Greek tragedy and the formation of the modern liberal version of cultural pluralism. Yukio Lippit’s article, “Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495,” explores a single work by the Zen monk painter Sesshū Tōyō in the context of the ink painting tradition and artistic transmission in medieval Japan. In her essay, “Agent Provocateur? The African Origin and American Life of a Statue from Côte d’Ivoire,” Monica Blackmun Visonà studies the “biography” of a statue, sculpted near the Lagoon region of Ivory Coast and later donated to Fisk University by Georgia O’Keeffe, as a microcosm of American art history in the twentieth century.

In the Reviews section, Sheila Dillon evaluates Richard Neer’s book, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, and Julian Gardner considers The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France by Stephen Perkinson. Next, Gerhard Wolf looks at the temporality of Renaissance art as described in Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronistic Renaissance. Finally, Marc Fumaroli reviews Walter S. Melion’s book, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print (1550–1625).

Please see the full table of contents for March to learn more. 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 next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in June 2012, will feature a “Notes from the Field” section on appropriation and an interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin. The long-form essays will examine artifacts from a tenth-century cave in northwestern China, portraiture and narrative in the 1605 Shahnama (Book of Kings), theater architecture in the 1914 Werkbund exhibition, and Pablo Picasso’s 1912 paper construction Guitar. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Caravaggio, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Spanish portraiture, the art of early modern China, and the temporality of architecture.