CAA News Today

Insightful studies that reframe a Raphael fresco, Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, and Kano Hōgai’s best-known work are among the six essays in the December 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. The issue has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The final issue of the year comprises six essays, two of which delve into art from the Italian peninsula. In “Reflections of Imperialism,” Brenda Longfellow examines the Meta Sudans fountain in Rome, built during the Flavian dynasty, as a signifier of imperial legacy in both Rome and its provinces. For her contribution, Patricia Reilly contends that Raphael’s often-maligned Fire in the Borgo presents the artist’s argument for a new theory of painting. Looking across the Atlantic, Angélica Afandor-Pujol studies the illustrated manuscript known as the “Relación de Michoancán” and investigates issues of mimicry and the appropriation of European artistic traditions by indigenous artists in colonial Mexico.

Moving to the modern times, Chelsea Foxwell reconsiders the iconographic and historical significance of Hōgai’s Merciful Mother Kannon (1888), a masterpiece of Japanese painting, and Tom Folland argues that Rauschenberg’s Combines represent a queering of Abstract Expressionism and, by extension, the culture of postwar modernism. In “The State of Art History,” Terry Smith explores ideas of the contemporary within discourse on modern art and proposes a framework for globally considering the art of today.

In the Reviews section, Gabriela Siracusano assesses Veiled Brightness, a multiauthored book on the history of Maya color. Charles Darwin’s relationship to the visual arts is the focus of Rachael Delue four-book analysis, and Erika Naginski reviews The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next issue, to be published in March 2011, will feature essays on the Bocca della Verità in Rome; the “finger-bone” relics of a Buddha found in Shaanxi Province, China; and relationships between German painting and Czech Cubism.