CAA News Today

The June 2013 Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the second issue of the journal’s centennial year. In “Regarding Art and Art History,” Cecelia F. Klein ponders Precolumbian art and the canon. “Notes from the Field” offers short essays on the subject of mimesis by Dexter Dalwood, Suzanne Preston Blier, Daniela Bohde, Helen C. Evans, Sarah E. Fraser, Thomas Habinek, Tom Huhn, Jeanette Kohl, Niklaus Largier, Peter Mack, and Alex Potts. The June interviewee is Timon Screech, who discusses fantasies and foreign contact in the art history of Japan with Yukio Lippit.

In their essay “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass explore institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of the American career of the German-born author of the classic survey text, History of Art. Emine Fetvaci’s “From Print to Trace” considers why the Ottoman creators of a 1579 book of imperial portraits may have consulted European models, raising questions about the understanding of the portrait as a visual document and the concepts that underpinned it.

Analyzing the intricate iconography of an illustrated thesis print on the system of natural philosophy by the seventeenth-century Franciscan professor Martin Meurisse, Susanna Berger demonstrates the complex uses of imagery in philosophy education in early modern France. Viccy Coltman studies a group of portraits of the Frasers of Reeling, a Scottish Highland family, by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish artist Henry Raeburn to reveal an understanding of portrait likeness as present and prescient in the global British Empire. Finally, in “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke” Martin Powers examines the debates between and among European, American, and Chinese intellectuals over some four centuries in order to deconstruct the seductive rhetoric of the brushstroke as employed in both “East” and “West.”

In the Reviews section, Charles Palermo considers three books on fin-de-siècle culture in Europe: Dario Gamboni’s The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, Linda Goddard’s Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926, and Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Next, Bridget Alsdorf reviews Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner’s edited volume, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, and Bolaji Campbell assesses David T. Doris’s Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria.

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 quarterly publication, to appear in September 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, Albrecht Dürer, Horace Walpole, Tanaka Atsuko, and public fountains in nineteenth-century Havana.