CAA News Today
October Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — October 06, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for October 2011 comprise nine exhibitions on view in the United States and Australia. Of special note are solo museum shows by the celebrated painters Charline von Heyl in Philadelphia and Dana Schutz in Purchase, New York, and a gallery exhibition of work by the sculptor Harmony Hammond. This month the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, wraps up an exhibition, Furniture Divas, of recent functional creations by women artists and designers; and A Different Temporality examines feminism and art in Australia from 1975 to 1985.
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
Image: Vivian Beer, Anchored Candy No. 1, 2008, steel, automotive finish, and patina (photograph by Allison Swiatosha and provided by the artist and the Fuller Craft Museum)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — October 04, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, filmmakers, curators, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note are two texts written for CAA: Amalia Nelson-Croner writes about her mother, Karin Christine Nelson; and Janis Bergman-Carton pays tribute to Karl Kilinski II, her colleague at Southern Methodist University.
- Jordan Belson, a Californian experimental filmmaker who created groundbreaking work in nonobjective cinema, died on September 6, 2011. He was 85
- Bernhard Blume, a German artist who worked in photography with his wife Anna, passed away on September 1, 2011. He was 73
- Nicolas Djandji, an artist born in Egypt who graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art and worked for the Dia Foundation in New York, died on September 2, 2011. He was 24 years old
- John Dobbs, an award-winning New York–based painter who taught at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the New School for Social Research, and John Jay College, passed away on August 9, 2011. He was 80
- Paul Gardère, a Haitian artist who emigrated to the United States in 1959, died on September 2, 2011. Born in 1944, the artist had been showing at Skoto Gallery in New York
- Hugh Gumpel, a New York artist who taught for many years at the National Academy School and at Purchase College, State University of New York, passed away on May 2, 2011, at the age of 85
- Richard Hamilton, an influential British artist who inspired Pop art and whose diverse oeuvre comprises works in painting, found objects, collage, printmaking, graphic design, typography, and digital images, died on September 13, 2011. He was 89
- Michael Hart, a computer engineer who founded Project Gutenberg, which has digitized more than 36,000 books in 60 languages, died on September 6, 2011. He was 64 years old
- Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, a prominent Iraqi sculptor who emerged in the 1960s and who was instrumental in the recovery of looted artworks from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, died on September 12, 2011. He was 82
- John Hoover, an Alaskan artist who drew on indigenous traditions, died on September 3, 2011, at the age of 91. The Anchorage Museum held a retrospective of his work in 2002
- Budd Hopkins, an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor who became obsessed with unidentified flying objects and alien abductions, left this earth for a higher plane on August 21, 2011. He was 80 years old
- Jeanette Ingberman, a curator who cofounded and led Exit Art, an important nonprofit art space in New York, died on August 24, 2011. She was 59 years old
- Harry Jackson, an artist who traded his Abstract Expressionist style for realist depictions of the American West, passed away on April 25, 2011. He was 87
- Beverly Whitney Kean, a Hollywood film star who wrote several books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian art and art patrons, died on July 9, 2011. She was 89 years old
- Karl Kilinski II, a specialist in Greek vase painting and a longtime professor of art history at Southern Methodist University, died on January 6, 2011, at age 64. His colleague Janis Bergman-Carton has written a special text on him
- Wlodzimierz Ksiazek, a Polish artist who lived, worked, and showed his work in the northeastern United States for thirty years, died under mysterious circumstances in May 2011. He was 59
- George Kuchar, an experimental filmmaker who had taught at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1971, died on September 6, 2011, at the age of 69. Among his best-known films are Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked, and Thundercrack!
- Stephen Mueller, a New York–based Color Field painter whose mystical work drew on the art of India, Persia, and Mexico, died on September 16, 2011, at the age of 63
- Vann Nath, a Cambodian painter who survived the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Security Prison 21, known as S21, died on September 5, 2011. He was 65 years old
- Karin Christine Nelson, a Bay Area author, administrator, and curator who specialized in textiles, passed away on June 22, 2011, at the age of 64. Her daughter Amalia Nelson-Croner has contributed an obituary that is published in the CAA website
- Anne Odom, a curator and historian of imperial Russian art who worked for more than thirty years at Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens in Washington, DC, died on August 25, 2011. She was 75 years old
- Margaret Olley, an Australian painter and a generous patron of the arts, died on July 26, 2011. She was 88 years old
- Efrén Ordoñez, a Mexican artist who worked in painting, sculpture, and stained glass, passed away on August 21, 2011. He was 84
- Damian Priour, a Texan sculptor who created public monuments, died on September 14, 2011, at the age of 61. He was also known for his community involvement in Austin
- Phillip Renaud, a Chicagoan artist and teacher who illustrated articles for Playboy in the 1960s, died on June 27, 2011. He was 77 years old
- Susan Shatter, a painter who specialized in watercolor and a regular colonist at Yaddo, died in July 2011. Born in 1953, she had served as secretary and president of the National Academy in New York
- Keith W. Tantlinger, an engineer who invented the modern cargo container, an object that has become increasingly popular with artists and designers, died on August 27, 2011. He was 92
- June Wayne, an accomplished artist who founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which drew artists from around the world, passed away on August 23, 2011. She was 93 years old
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the November listing.
Discount on Marfa Trip for CAA Members
posted by Christopher Howard — September 20, 2011
The Appraisers Association of America, a CAA affiliated society, is extending a special discount to CAA members for an upcoming study trip to Marfa, Texas. The trip will take place from Friday, October 28, to Monday, October 31, 2011. The fee is $1,400 for CAA members ($1,500 for guests and nonmembers), which includes round-trip transportation from El Paso International Airport to Marfa, travel within Marfa, all meals, hotel for three nights, and all tour and entrance fees.
Marfa is home to the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum based on the ideas of its founder, Donald Judd, whose intention was to preserve permanent large-scale installations by a limited number of artists and present them to the public. Also in Marfa is the Judd Foundation, founded by the artist to preserve and maintain his living and working spaces, libraries, and archives. The trip’s itinerary includes visits to both foundations and to local bookstores, cultural spaces, and galleries, including Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Prada Marfa. Participants will also have plenty of time to wind down and enjoy the local fare.
Participants will fly to El Paso International Airport (at their own expense) and then travel to Marfa in private vans. The Hotel Paisano will provide the accommodations. For complete details on the trip, please download the registration form or visit the Appraisers Association of America website. A nonrefundable deposit of $200 is due by Friday, September 23, 2011; the remaining balance is due by Monday, October 3, 2011.
Image: Marfa, Texas (photograph by Tex Toler and provided by VisitMarfa.com)
September Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — September 09, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for September 2011 include an academic conference hosted by Purdue University in Indiana that addresses tenure issues for women professors. The picks also highlight several exhibitions of historical and contemporary art on view in the United States and abroad. In Nashville, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents Travey Snelling’s “Woman on the Run,” and the Philadelphia Museum of Art will soon open the much-anticipated Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion, which looks at the architect’s furniture, objects, and footwear.
In Europe, the Palazzo Reale in Milan is staging Artemisia Gentileschi: Story of a Passion, the Baroque painter’s first-ever survey in Italy. Up north in Brussels, a contemporary art center is showing work by the twentieth-century Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, and Tate Britain in London is presenting a unique group exhibition called Thin Black Line(s).
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
Image: Zaha Hadid, WMF Flatware, 2007, stainless steel, dinner fork, 8¾ in.; salad fork, 6⅝ in.; dinner knife, 9⅛ in.; teaspoon, 5⅞ in.; soup spoon, 8⅞ in. Made by Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik AG, Geislingen, Germany (photograph provided by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Zaha Hadid Architects)
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER REMEMBERED
posted by Christopher Howard — September 09, 2011
The following article originally appeared in the November 2001 issue of CAA News.
Ned Kaufman is a consultant specializing in cultural heritage, historical preservation, and public history. He also teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Kaufman lives and works in Yonkers, New York.
The World Trade Center: a view from the Hudson River (photograph by Don Carroll)
A neighbor of mine said, simply, “I miss them.” If the architecture critic Paul Goldberger missed them, he wasn’t admitting it: “gargantuan and banal, blandness blown up to a gigantic size” was the epitaph he carved into the New Yorker’s tombstone for the World Trade Center (WTC) in the magazine’s September 24, 2001, issue. How different are both assessments from the hopeful words of Minoru Yamasaki, the WTC’s principal architect, who didn’t live long enough to miss it. Writing at the time the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey commissioned him to design the complex, he explained that he sought “a beautiful solution of form and silhouette which fits well into Lower Manhattan,” while giving it “the symbolic importance which it deserves and must have.” He saw that the sheer size of the Port Authority’s commission—ten million square feet of office space set on twelve city blocks—set a double challenge. On the one hand, he would have to “scale it to the human being,” to make it “inviting, friendly, and humane.” On the other hand, the WTC wasn’t just a cluster of buildings: “To be symbolic of its great purpose, of the working together in trade of the Nations of the World, it should have a sense of dignity and pride, and still stand for the humanity and democratic purposes in which we in the United States believe.” The WTC has left a confusing legacy, and if, as Goldberger predicts, “architectural criticism of it will cease altogether,” then we will never get to the bottom of it. But I suspect that its legacy lies somewhere in the territory encircled by these three points of view.
It’s always been hard to pin down the WTC’s significance. One reason is that one’s experience of the street-level plaza and the towers always seemed so different. The plaza was never successful—it was bleak—and when the Port Authority started piping in canned music, the fake cheeriness seemed only to underline its sadness. The failure wasn’t entirely the architect’s. Yamasaki had assumed that the plaza would be lined with restaurants; it wasn’t. Then, the Vista Hotel (built later) claustrophobically slammed shut the view out the southwest corner to the Hudson River, and the bridge to the World Financial Center cramped the northwest corner. But the plaza was bad from the start, indeed from before the start. The assumption (which Yamasaki accepted) that the Port Authority’s twelve-block parcel was not merely a site but a precinct—a giant podium to be lifted off the earth and endowed with a special character distinct from its surroundings—outlined an urban-design challenge that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for any architect in the 1960s to meet gracefully. It played to modernism’s weakest suit.
Actually, the question of whether or not the WTC was modernist is not so easily answered. Those who didn’t like the buildings, or didn’t like modernism, used their critique of one to damn the other. But in 1962, as Yamasaki began work on the WTC, the New York Times’s architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, wrote that this architecture was “shattering” the tradition of modernism, opposing its stripped-down, functionalist manner with an “ornamental style and a conscious historicism” that were “deliberately decorative, and among professionals, highly controversial.” Around the plaza, at any rate, the failures were those of modernism—failures of modernist planning, based on a poor understanding of how people use and animate open spaces; and of modernist architecture, of buildings conceived to float in space, rather than decisively to shape it, of a brittle formal language of metal and glass that seemed averse to hold a corner, and of walls reluctant to meet the ground.
Even the towers didn’t meet the ground well. Part of the problem was that it was very hard to say where the ground was. If the towers didn’t seem to stand firmly on the plaza, if from some angles they seemed rather to be inserted through it, that may have been because the plaza didn’t stand firmly on the ground either. It was not floor but roof—the roof of a spreading, formless underground world of numbered levels, parking garages, shopping concourses, plunging escalators, and train platforms. The towers were rooted deep in this basement world.
If you looked up at the towers from the plaza you got a stiff neck. It was a little like looking up at the stage from the first row of the orchestra, where the actors loom above you. In this case, however, the actors were giants and were playing to the back of a house that was the entire New York harbor and indeed the entire region. From up close, at any rate, you could appreciate some of the design decisions that made the towers work from a distance. And these were not the routine moves of modernism. My own reaction to the vaguely Venetian arcades on which the towers stood changed as I grew to know the buildings better, and as they and I aged. Whereas at first they had seemed insipid, unconvincing, I came to find them graceful and oddly delicate. The towers were clad in a metal that, rare among modern buildings, was truly beautiful: it was a special aluminum alloy that Alcoa had developed for Yamasaki, and the impossibly tall colonettes, flowing up out of the arcades to the very tops of the buildings, flashed silver in a way that was somehow soft and unmetallic. These piers contained the innovative structural system that has garnered such public attention in the wake of the WTC’s destruction: they placed most of the towers’ support around their perimeter, rather than spaced throughout the buildings in an even grid. With these piers, in fact, Yamasaki rewrote not only the structural but also the expressive rules of the steel frame. They were eighteen inches wide and projected a full foot in front of the windows, which were only four inches wider than the piers. The effect was quite different from that of the standard modernist “glass box.” Seen from even a moderate angle, the glass disappeared behind the piers, while from a distance the spaces closed up, so that the towers appeared almost solid. Not solid like stone, but almost solid. It was an unusual and beautiful effect.
Yamasaki was one of a few architects, including Philip Johnson and Edward Durrell Stone, who in the 1960s were departing from the modernist orthodoxy of the curtain wall to create walls of visual weight and real substance. The WTC may have been subtler than many contemporary experiments, which often ran to slabs of stone or crude piles of oversized brick. What it undubitably had was scale. You could see the towers from across the Hudson River in Jersey City, from the harbor, from high places in the Bronx and Westchester County, from the Jersey Meadowlands, from the train tracks somewhere around New Brunswick, and from the far edges of Brooklyn and Queens. Beyond a certain distance, the treatment of the skin probably didn’t matter much; it was the towers’ sheer height, and of course their famous twinness, that projected them across the distant landscape. But from the middle distance, the combination of size, shape, proportion, and surface achieved a remarkable transformation. During two years of living close to the Hudson River in Jersey City, I got to know the towers pretty well, in all of their moods. When crossing the river by ferry or bridge in the morning one slipped into the huge shadows they cast across the water and through the blaze of sun that sprang between them. Late in a spring evening the glow of sunset seemed to rest in them long after the water had become black and the rest of the city resolved into points of light. To the sailor out in the harbor, the towers, one occulting the other, registered an endlessly fascinating play of light and weather. A simple detail—the chamfered corners and roof lines—meant a great deal from this perspective. The corners became strips of light stretching more than a quarter-mile into the sky. And whether you were close enough to perceive the individual floors or far enough away so that the faces of the buildings flattened in the atmospheric haze, the chamfers forced you to accept the towers three-dimensionally, as huge objects. “Sculptural” is the word art historians might choose to describe this effect. Of course the disposition of the two towers, not lined up face-to-face but angled corner-to-corner, was very much a sculptural move. The key, however, was scale. The towers were so big and projected their bigness with such profound simplicity that they seemed to exist in the realm of sky and wind, rather than that of architecture. New York’s harbor is a vast area, filled with air and light and the reflections of moving water, overarched by an immense sky. The towers, sited on the promontory of lower Manhattan, registered the moods of light and weather in a way that only things of great size and immeasurable scale can do—things that are there with a bigness too big to grasp. When you looked at the towers you saw not just buildings but the imprint of the place itself, the sky coming down to earth, the impress of sun, sea, and wind sweeping across a continent. A shadow cast by one of the towers was not just bigger, but qualitatively different from those of ordinary buildings—it didn’t belong to architecture at all; it was a phenomenon of nature. The Washington Monument (another large prismatic object rising into a bowl of sky) offers a similar experience. So does, under certain circumstances, the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. I can’t think of another building that creates this feeling, certainly not in New York. That quality is what I will miss above all else about the towers.
Many people will, of course, miss them just because … they miss them. A lot of memories are attached to the WTC. I don’t mean those that settled there on September 11. Nor those of the people who worked there every day; those memories are vast and complex. I mean the memories of people who visited or looked at the WTC because it was something special. I doubt if many of these memories are attached to the plaza. Again, it was the towers that really worked. In addition to extreme height, they were equipped with memory generators. One was the observation deck. Actually, the views were somewhat disappointing. You were kept well away from the edge, so that you couldn’t look straight down and see the absurdly tiny cars and people and savor the inverted perspective of buildings impossibly tapering toward their bases. As you looked out, the deck seemed almost too high. But going there was an experience, and was most likely shared with friends, a parent, or a child. A Colorado parent remembers her visits there: “Seated before the touchingly beautiful view of the harbor in the evening, we would talk over the day’s events with the daughter who knew her way around. It was there we learned Katy was in love. It was there, after the graduation ceremony, that we saluted her PhD.” Though Katy’s mother found it “odd” to say that she’d “lost a personal, public landmark,” it wasn’t odd at all. It was in the nature of the place. Probably many of the deck’s visitors now regret losing a personal spot—“I can’t go back there anymore.” Windows on the World, the famous 107th-floor restaurant, was another memory generator. The food, as people used to say, was better than it needed to be, because the place itself was the draw. It was not ordinary, certainly not the sort of restaurant you went to just because you were hungry. Most went there, I think, to create a special experience—a memorable experience—with friends or family. Those who had the good fortune to dine there acquired an intimately personal stake in a skyline that could seem profoundly indifferent.
New York’s skyline has been rearranged many, many times, but usually it has been yanked upward. Even when quite large buildings have come down, it was done in order to put up even bigger ones. So the towers’ sudden disappearance is unprecedented and confronts us with a question we were not prepared to think about: What is the next stage of lower Manhattan’s skyline? Is this the end of grand development? Or is this a prelude to something yet unimagined? As we look for that now-shifting, hard-to-locate place in the sky where the towers used to be, it’s helpful to remember that their contribution to the skyline was not always or universally admired. When they were new, many people felt that the Twin Towers dwarfed the older skyline to the north and east; they were isolated and, with their feet practically in the river, seemed to unbalance the entire island. If by last September we no longer felt that way, it may have been in part because we had gotten used to the effect, but also because the skyline had adjusted to the towers. To the west, Battery Park City and the World Financial Center were built on landfill scraped out of the WTC’s foundations; large as they are, they furnished (in the phrase of the World Financial Center’s designer, Cesar Pelli) foothills to the WTC’s mountain range. To the south and toward the East River, the slender towers of the old skyline had been gradually hidden behind a ring of big, boxy buildings—neither “tower” nor “skyscraper” adequately registers their utter stolidity. Now the WTC is gone, but the adjustments are still there—most unhappily so. The World Financial Center seems unfocused and weak, while the “boxes” around the other side of the financial district are just plain ugly. They hide the slender spires of the neighborhood as completely as ever, but now without the redeeming lift of Trade Center 1 and 2. What is to be done?
That, of course, is the question everyone is asking. Proposals for the site have already been floated. Presented for the most part in sound bites, they have, not surprisingly, been one-liners: new office buildings, a replica of the towers, a peace park, ruins, a monument with names of the lost. It’s clear that the site could be redeveloped as office space. Or it could be designed as a memorial. What seems less clear is whether any one of these could ever fulfill both its commercial and its mnemonic potential. Can a functioning part of the city be successfully freighted with the burden of memory, sorrow, and national resolve that people want from the site? As if that weren’t challenge enough, a more difficult question has emerged: How to get beyond the purely personal dimensions of the tragedy of September 11—the sad, agonizing, pathetic, heartbreaking stories that have filled the papers for weeks, piling up into a mound as high and more unscalable than the towers themselves. I do not mean to suggest that we should ignore the individual tragedies, but rather that we must also account for the larger significance to the community of what took place that day, and what is still to come. Community is more than sentiments of empathy for the bereaved, more than neighbors holding hands. September 11 was more, and different, than the sum of five or six or seven thousand individual tragedies. And the WTC was more than a place where people worked, ate, and died. Or was it?
What did the towers stand for, anyway? Since their destruction, we’ve heard often enough that they stood for capitalism, free enterprise, business, or, perhaps, what their designer called “the humanity and democratic purposes in which we in the United States believe.” But the complex’s purposes were more specific. First, of course, it was intended to salvage the real-estate investments of some very influential people. More grandly, in Yamasaki’s words, it was meant to serve and symbolize “the working together in trade of the Nations of the World.” That, after all, is why it was called the World Trade Center. I wonder if its destroyers heard and understood the literal meaning of these words, which we New Yorkers had long ago demoted to a mere sound—Wurltraydsen’r. Had the complex become, unbeknownst to us, a symbol not merely of world trade but of free trade, of the globalism of Seattle and Genoa? Its destroyers, at any rate, seem to have remembered something else that we New Yorkers had largely forgotten. The WTC was not an expression of free enterprise: It was built by Big Government, was roundly criticized for that, and in market terms could not have been called a good investment. It was never, in this sense, practical, and its ideology was not that of the free market. In symbol and substance, it was government projecting a design. That has been easy to forget during these past thirty years of contempt for government and of fawning praise for market capitalism. But in its destruction the WTC put government back at the center of our consciousness: it is to government that injured people and businesses have reflexively turned for help—each level of government looking expectantly to the next—and it is government at the highest level that is now redesigning lives and deaths through decisions that affect us at every level—military deployments, homeland security, and much more.
Symbols are important. They can get us killed. But they are also, in some sense, imaginary, made up by us. For most people who worked in or visited them, the towers were probably never symbols of anything in particular. When they came down on September 11, then they became symbols. But when, a week later, my neighbor said, “I miss them,” she meant the buildings, not the symbols. I miss them too.
Notes
The quotation from Paul Goldberger is taken from the New Yorker, September 24, 2001; those from Minoru Yamasaki and Ada Louise Huxtable are from Anthony Robins’s The World Trade Center (Englewood, FL: Pineapple Press, 1987) and that from Katy’s mother, Marion Stewart, is from High Country News, September 24, 2001.
Summer Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 31, 2011
In its semimonthly roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, curators, collectors, museum directors, and other men and women whose work has had a significant impact on the visual arts. Of special note is Adrian Hicken’s text on the Hungarian-born British art historian George Thomas Noszlopy, written especially for CAA.
- Tadek Beutlich, a teacher, printmaker, and textile artist whose experiments with three-dimensional weaving toured internationally in the 1960s, passed away on April 16, 2011, at 88. Beutlich authored The Technique of Woven Tapestry (1967) and pushed the boundaries of his medium further with “free-warp” tapestries, a technique that created wall hangings and freestanding pieces that resembled living organisms
- Robert Breer, an artist and animator who cofounded the Film-makers’ Cooperative in New York and taught the medium at Cooper Union from 1971 to 2001, passed away on August 13, 2011, at age 84. A major figure in Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Breer began animating his own abstract paintings, which he referred to as “Form Phases,” in the 1950s, successfully derailing narrative and assaulting the viewer with movement and speed through glitchy imagery
- Charles E. Buckley, director of the Currier Museum of Art (1955–64) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (1964–75) who helped enlarge the collections of both institutions with American and European works, furniture, and wares, died on June 26, 2011, at age 86. He served as president of the American Association of Museums from 1972 to 1974, helping to establish the organization’s important accreditation system
- Duncan Campbell, a London art dealer who championed modern British printmaking and promoted the White Stag group of the 1930s, died on February 14, 2011, at the age of 66
- Edmund Carpenter, an archeologist and anthropologist who with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto laid the foundation for modern media studies, died on July 1, 2011, at age 88. Carpenter’s work considered the effects of media on human interactions, supported by investigations of tribal peoples in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s and further research at the Museum of Ethnology in Basel in the 1980s. He also edited the journal Explorations and gathered the papers of the art historian Carl Schuster, published in twelve volumes
- Irene Chou (born Zhou Luyun), a prominent artist of the New Ink Painting movement in Hong Kong who reinvigorated the Zen and Tao-derived “one stroke” technique in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, died on July 1, 2011, at the age of 87. She was a founding member of two collectives, the In Tao Art Association (Yuan Dao huahui) and the One Art Group (Yi huahui), which sought new ways to combine Eastern and Western techniques while maintaining the principles of traditional Chinese art
- Roger Davies, the chief book designer for the British Museum from the 1970s through the 1990s whose work won numerous awards, has passed away at the age of 72
- Biren De, an internationally exhibited Indian artist who depicted universal energies through geometry, light, and traditional Hindu or Buddhist symbols, died on March 12, 2011. He was 85 years old
- Fred Dubery, a figurative painter known for his quietly colorful and off-kilter oils and a longtime professor at the Royal Academy Schools, passed away on April 8, 2011, at the age of 84. He was also a lifetime member of the New English Art Club
- T. Lux Feininger, a painter and photographer who documented the daily lives of the German avant-garde and the Bauhaus in particular, died on July 7, 2011, at the age of 101. After emigrating to the United States in 1936, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Virginia Fields, a distinguished scholar, educator, and the first curator of Precolumbian art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, died on June 15, 2011, at the age of 58. In her twenty two years at the museum, Fields helped acquire more than three thousand ancient objects for the collection, organized blockbuster shows on Mayan and Olmec art, and allocated new resources for the study of ancient American art
- Gunnar Fischer, Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer who shot twelve of the director’s films between 1948 and 1960, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Devil’s Eye (1960), passed away on June 11, 2011. He was 90 years old
- Trevor Frankland, a British painter of abstract scenes who served as president of the Royal Watercolor Society from 2003 to 2006, died on April 17, 2011, at the age of 79
- Lucian Freud, a major twentieth-century artist whose dedication to painting the human figure kept stark realism alive throughout an era of modernist abstraction, died on July 20, 2011. He was 88 years old. He was also the grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
- Ussman Ghauri, a celebrated Pakastani printmaker known for his investigations of alphabets, symbolic narratives, and societal distress, died on April 9, 2011, at the age of 41. Ghauri was also an associate professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and served as a curator for the IVS Gallery and the Koel Gallery
- Selwyn Goldsmith, an advocate for the functional evolution of architecture in England and the author of Universal Design (2000) and Designing for the Disabled (1963), a pioneering guidebook that suggested adjustments for facilities and buildings to better accommodate handicapped people, died on April 3, 2011. He was 78
- Dov Gottesman, the president of the Israel Museum, a collector of art, and the recipient of the 2005 King Solomon Award for art patronage, died on February 22, 2011, at age 82. Gottesman founded the Artist’s Portfolio Project, a program and workshop that published twenty series of prints by Israeli artists and that turned into the Gottesman Etching Center
- Fred Griffin, an artist based in the Pacific Northwest who taught graphic design at the Art Institute of Seattle and the Burnley School of Professional Art, passed away on April 23, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Nancy Hamon, a passionate philanthropist and cultural advocate in Dallas who served on the board of trustees at the Dallas Museum of Art, passed away on July 31, 2011, at age 92. Hamon helped fund the acquisition of the Nora and John Wise Collection of ancient American artworks and objects, the construction of new exhibition spaces and a library at the museum, and the Jake and Nancy Hamon Art Library at Southern Methodist University
- Melissa Hines, the director of cultural partnerships at the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs since 2004 and a member of the King County Arts Commission (now called 4Culture) from 1996 to 2001, died on April 8, 2011. She was 63 years old
- John Hoyland, an English painter and printmaker who created emotionally charged abstract imagery that favored size, pigment, and form over visual references, passed away on July 21, 2011. He was 76 years old
- Freda Koblick, a prominent San Franciscan sculptor who in the 1960s produced abstract work in cast acrylic, passed away June 18, 2011, at the age of 90. Before using the new medium, she designed functional objects in plastic, often collaborating with architects
- Owen Land, an American teacher and filmmaker associated with the Fluxus movement who was keen on disregarding narrative in exchange for a more essentially visual experience of film, died on June 8, 2011, at the age of 67. Born George Landow, he was the founder of the Experimental Theatre Workshop in the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Lawrence Lee, a master glass artisan responsible for creating large public stained-glass compositions throughout Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, died on April 25, 2011, at age 101. He was the author of several books, among them Stained Glass (1967), Stained Glass, an Illustrated Guide (1976), and The Appreciation of Stained Glass (1977)
- Jerome Liebling, a member of the Photo League, a collective of photojournalists documenting the social climate in New York, in the 1930s and 1940s and the founder of photography and film programs at the University of Minnesota and Hampshire College, died on July 27, 2011. He was 87
- Gilbert Luján aka Magú, a teacher, painter, sculptor, muralist, and pioneer of the Chicano art movement in California since the 1960s, died on July 24, 2011, at the age of 70. Magu was a founding member of the art collective Los Four, responsible for enhancing the political and aesthetic aims of Chicano art
- Norma “Duffy” Lyon, the official Iowa State Fair butter cow sculptor from 1960 to 2006, died on June 26, 2011, at the age of 81. Lyon also created likenesses of celebrities and presidents, and even produced a life-size reproduction of Leonardo’s The Last Supper from two thousand pounds of butter
- Ján Mančuška, an experimental writer, painter, and video artist who challenged traditional presentations of art within architectural environments and was notorious for his conceptually playful installations, died on July 1, 2011. He was 39 years old
- Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, a teacher, archaeologist, and president of the British School of Archaeology in the 1990s, died on May 9, 2011, at age 97. A scholar of jewelry, Maxwell-Hyslop wrote extensively on Bronze Age weapons and tools from West Asia
- Eddy G. Nicholson, an industrialist who was an avid collector of early American art and furniture, passed away on June 16, 2011, at the age of 73
- Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, a French Egyptologist who rescued antiquities from southern Nubia in the 1960s and mounted the groundbreaking King Tut exhibition at the Musée du Louvre in 1967, died on June 23, 2011. She was 97 years old
- George Thomas Noszlopy, a Hungarian-born scholar and longtime professor at Birmingham Polytechnic in England who produced novel explorations on early-twentieth-century art, Renaissance art, and British art and crafts, passed away on June 5, 2011, at age 78. Adrian Hicken has written a special text on him for CAA
- Breon O’Casey, a modernist jeweler, weaver, printmaker, painter, and sculptor who was a member of the St. Ives School in England, which included Barbara Hepworth, died on May 22, 2011. He was 83
- Roman Opalka, a Polish painter recognized for his series Opalka 1965/1 — ∞, which numerically annotated his days starting in 1965 with the number one, passed away on August 6, 2011. He was 79 years old
- Ruth Perelman, a cultural patron in Philadelphia who contributed to the expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and funded the Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, died on July 31, 2011. She was 90
- Edward Carlos Plunkett, an Irish abstract painter known as Lord Dunsany who emerged in the 1960s but traded in art for design in the 1980s, died on May 24, 2011, at the age of 71. He helped found de Marsillac Plunkett, for which he created furniture and decorative vessels to complement his wife’s architectural work, yet returned to painting in the 1990s
- Wonil Rhee, a prolific South Korean curator who organized numerous exhibitions and biennials around the world, died on January 11, 2011, at the age of 50. Working at several musuems and independently, Rhee diligently promoted contemporary Asian artists and evoked broader international dialogue via exhibitions such as Thermocline of Art: New Asian Waves (2007) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Germany
- Albert M. Sack, a New York–based antique dealer and the author of Fine Points of American Furniture: Good, Better, Best (1950), an important criterion for aesthetic judgment of furniture for collectors and nonspecialists alike, died on May 29, 2011. He was 96
- Stanley Seeger, a coy patron of art known for a stunning collection of homes in the United Kingdom and an expansive collection of work by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Egon Schiele, and Francis Bacon, died on June 24, 2011. He was 81 years old
- Robert Sklar, a professor of cinema studies at New York University from 1977 to 2009 and the author of several publications exploring how film influences morals, beliefs, and social context, including Movie-Made America: A History of American Movies (1975), died on July 2, 2011, at age 74. An active member of the National Film Preservation Board, Sklar served on the New York Film Festival selection committee during the 1990s
- Geoffrey Squire, a designer and an educator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, both in London, died in June 2011 at the age of 86. Squire was the author of Dress, Art, and Society, 1560–1970 (1974) and The Observer’s Book of European Costumes (1975)
- Alex Steinweiss, an art director at Columbia Records who in 1940 invented the modern album cover when he packaged a Rodgers and Hart 78 RPM record with a grandly lit marquee on the sleeve rather than a flat monochrome packaging, died on July 17, 2011. He was 94
- Zdenek Sykora, a Czech artist whose computer-generated compositions in the 1960s garnered attention for their relentless mathematical method and abstraction within predetermined rules, died on July 12, 2011, at age 91. He was also a professor at Charles University in Prague
- Prince Twins Seven-Seven, a Nigerian painter associated with the Oshogbo School in Ibadan who focused on Yoruban myths through intricate patterns and bright colors, died on June 16, 2011, at the age of 67. His work was shown internationally, including the controversial 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre in Paris
- James Earnest Vivieaere, a New Zealand–based artist whose multimedia and video work demonstrated the multifarious identity of Pacific Islanders outside their enforced exoticism, died on June 3, 2011, at age 63. As a curator, Vivieaere produced the survey exhibitions Bottled Ocean (1994) in his home country and The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm (2009) in Taiwan
- Shelagh Wakeley, an installation artist who focused on integrating continuity and sensation into public spaces in Britain while contrasting nature and artifice, died on March 19, 2011, at the age of 78. She met the Brazilian artist Tunga in 1989 and collaborated with him on video projects in the 1990s
- George White, architect of the American Capitol from 1971 to 1995 who was responsible for maintaining the Supreme Court, Library of Congress, and the surrounding grounds, died on June 17, 2011, at the age of 90. White oversaw the complete restoration of the Capitol Building’s rotunda, renovations of the Supreme Court and Senate Chamber, and the revitalization of the electrical and transportation systems in Congressional office buildings
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the September listing.
2012 Distinguished Scholar Session Honors Rosalind Krauss
posted by Christopher Howard — August 23, 2011
The 2012 Distinguished Scholar Session, taking place at the 100th Annual Conference in Los Angeles, will honor Rosalind Krauss, University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Yve-Alain Bois of the Institute for Advanced Studies will chair a session, called “The Theoretical Turn,” in which five to six participants—among them Harry Cooper, Jonathan Crary, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster—will explore and celebrate Krauss’s many contributions to the history of art. The Distinguished Scholar Session will be held in Room 515B at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Thursday, February 23, 2:30–5:00 PM.
Krauss’s acute observation of twentieth-century art began at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she received her undergraduate degree in 1962. She began writing criticism in 1966, mostly for Artforum, while working on her PhD at Harvard University, which she earned in 1969. MIT Press published an expanded version of her dissertation as Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith in 1971.1
Krauss continued writing criticism and generating art-historical essays that challenged steadfast analyses of Auguste Rodin, the Surrealists, and Jackson Pollock, to name a few topics. She joined the Artforum editorial board in the late 1960s and appeared on the masthead as assistant editor from 1971 to 1974. Krauss and her colleague Annette Michelson left the magazine in 1975 to establish the scholarly October, which strove to forge a relationship between contemporary concerns and scholarship, with particular emphases on the history of modernism, its fundamental premises, and the ability of writing to reinvigorate the era. For Krauss and others, October was an opportunity to integrate artists such as Richard Serra and Sol LeWitt into their theoretical convictions and investigative criticism.
Krauss collected her essays into several influential books, including Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), and Bachelors (1999). She has also written monographs on David Smith and Cindy Sherman, among others, as well as shorter books such as The Optical Unconscious (1993) and A Voyage on the North Sea (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Her curatorial work—which includes Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields (1971) and Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (1994) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Richard Serra/Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986—has resulted in significant advances in art history while relaying her amorous relationship with the provocations of Minimalism and the tactility of sculptural mediums. Most recently, she organized L’Informe: Mode d’emploi with Bois at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1996.
For the last decade, Krauss has battled what she calls the “post-medium condition”—the claim that a momentous shift from a singular artistic medium (such as canvas, plaster wall, or metal armature) to work that amalgamates various materials has only advanced ambiguity in art. In contrast, she suggests that the specificity of the aesthetic medium vitalizes modernism’s strengths, and that contemporary work that integrates text and technology has the capacity to triumph in similar terms. Perpetual Inventory (2011) is Krauss’s most recent publication intent on restoring logic and scrutinizing specificity in the history of art. A personal meditation on the relationships between aesthetics and memory, called Under Blue Cup, is forthcoming.
The integration of literary and philosophical references in her writing, combined with an enthusiasm for ravaging stagnant theories, has made Krauss a tenacious teacher and mentor. She joined Hunter College in New York in 1974, rising to Distinguished Professor both there and at the Graduate Center. In 1995 she transitioned to the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia, where she became Meyer Shapiro Professor of Modern Art and History and then, ten years later, University Professor. Krauss’s experiences as a scholar and educator culminated in the textbook Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), a didactic yet vital interpretation of modern art that was coauthored by Bois, Buchloh, and Foster. (A revised edition is expected soon.) As a further testament to her academic success, Krauss was an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2008 and another from Harvard University in 2011.
CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized the most illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), and Jonathan Brown (2011).
1. MIT Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has published Krauss’s books mentioned in this article, unless indicated otherwise.
September Issue of The Art Bulletin Features Essays on Michelangelo and John Sloan
posted by Christopher Howard — August 17, 2011
The September 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, features an essay on Michelangelo’s drawings, in particular his cartoon for The Battle of Cascina (1504), and an article on urban scenes by the twentieth-century American painter John Sloan. Two additional contributions explore women and portraiture in postrevolutionary France and Roman mosaic labyrinths in North Africa. Book reviews on the art of Byzantium and imperial China, Mamluk culture, and the impact of modernist primitivism round out the issue.
In “Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art,” Joost Keizer uncovers Michelangelo’s zeal for disegno, evasion of iconography, and emphasis on educational models for pupils—all of which contribute to art history via visual commentary on historical moments. In his study, Michael Lobel examines the significant body of work generated by John Sloan in 1907 that experiments with spatial orientation and pigment while challenging the artist’s identity as a painter, illuminated by meditations on New York as a shifting metropolis and his background in illustration.
Amy Freund’s cover essay for The Art Bulletin elucidates the importance of portraiture in France after 1789 in which female portraits, like that of Thérésia Cabarrus by Jean-Louis Laneuville in 1796, incorporated women into the French Revolution’s political presence and momentum toward engaged citizenship in the new republic. In “Roman Labyrinth Mosaics and the Experience of Motion,” Rebecca Molholt explores the effects of a transitory viewing experience within Roman baths in North Africa and the intermingling of architecture, myth, and the spectator.
The Reviews section has a particular emphasis on ancient cultures, starting with Jessica Rawson’s discussion of ancient commercial artists in China and Anthony J. Barbieri-Low’s book, Artisans in Early Imperial China. Charles Barber highlights the complexities of the Byzantine icon through the lens of innovations in fifteenth-century Cretan painting, as well as the sensory experience in Byzantium as described by Clemena Antonova in Space, Time, and Presence in the Icon and Bissera V. Pentcheva’s The Sensual Icon. Several books on the history of the Mamluk period, where military slaves became soldiers and eventually rulers of an empire across Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, and greater Syria, are reviewed by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, including Cairo of the Mamluks by Doris Behrens-Abouseif. The final review is an analysis of the tension between African art and Western modernism by Elizabeth Harney, in which she sites Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens by Wendy A. Grossman and Picasso’s Collection of African and Oceanic Art by Peter Stepan as the newest sources to investigate the legacy of primitivism.
Please see the full table of contents for September 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 December 2011, will feature essays on the portraiture of nuns in colonial Mexico, on the sociological context of Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and on Federico Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary, among other articles and reviews.
CWA Picks for July–August 2011
posted by Christopher Howard — August 16, 2011
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for July–August 2011 shine invigorating spotlights on two momentous forces that supported and inspired international artistic developments in the twentieth century: the Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone, and the writer and impresario Gertrude Stein. The Jewish Museum in New York hosts an exhibition dedicated to the Cones’ stunning collection of modern art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco focuses on the Stein’s life and legacy.
If in New York, CWA also suggests viewing a new multichannel video work by Dara Birnbaum at Marian Goodman Gallery and taking a journey around the world via Ruth Gruber’s photographs at the International Center of Photography. Elsewhere, The Guerrilla Girls Talk Back is a recommended exhibition of newly acquired prints, multiples, and ephemera at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and Claude Cahun’s comprehensive retrospective at Jeu de Paume in Paris, France, addresses issues in feminist scholarship and turning points in the understanding of the female artist.
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
Image: Claribel Cone, Gertrude Stein, and Etta Cone sitting a table in Settignano, Italy, June 26, 1903. Baltimore Museum of Art. Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, CG.12 (photograph provided by the Baltimore Museum of Art)
CAA Members Are Invited to Attend a Symposium on “Re-envisioning Lower Manhattan”
posted by Christopher Howard — August 15, 2011
The Alliance for Downtown New York and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum are offering a special discount to CAA members for an upcoming symposium in New York, “Re-envisioning Lower Manhattan: Downtown after 9/11.” The program will take place on Thursday, September 15, 2011, at 6:30 PM at the Museum of the City of New York, 220 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10029.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001, many feared for the future of lower Manhattan. Today, residential occupancy in the neighborhood has doubled at the same time that commercial tenants have diversified to include creative industries and media, alongside the traditional financial industry of downtown. How will the neighborhood look as developers respond to the increased diversity of both the residential and business sectors? How will the completion of work at the World Trade Center site affect the neighborhood? What is the future of lower Manhattan? Elizabeth Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, will discuss the changes in the landscape of lower Manhattan with a group of planners, developers, and corporate executives who have chosen to relocate downtown.
Reservations are required; please call 917-492-3395 or write to programs@mcny.org to register. Admission is $6 when you mention the College Art Association or CAA; otherwise the symposium will cost $6 for museum members, $8 for seniors and students, and $12 for nonmembers.