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.

The September 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The issue interweaves three essays that focus on art and visual culture in Europe with three texts exploring works from the Americas. On the Continent, Molly Swetnam-Burland looks at issues of reuse, display, and cross-cultural appropriation through the history of the obelisk in the Piazza Montecitorio in Rome. For his essay “Material Futures,” Richard Taws views Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s print Almanach national (1790) as articulating relations between the materiality expressed in the image and changing conceptions of time in the French Revolution. In his contribution, Darius A. Spieth investigates the “politics of nostalgia” in modern Italian culture through the reception history of Giandomenico Tiepolo’s fresco Il Mondo Nuovo (1791).

Across the Atlantic, “Circles of Creation” is Amara L. Solari’s exploration of how the Maya in early colonial Yucatán invented their own cartographic tradition that allowed for the preservation of community identity during the chaos of colonization. In “Rioting Refigured,” Ross Barrett examines the way in which George Henry Hall’s painting A Dead Rabbit (1858) reframes a mid-nineteenth-century rioter in New York City as an ideal nude, both tempering and exacerbating connotations of violence. Moving into the twentieth century, Ken Allen argues that Ed Ruscha’s experimentations with size and scale in his images of 1960s Los Angeles gave viewers a new experiential understanding of the city.

The reviews section presents four books on diverse topics. Timon Screech evaluates Melissa McCormick’s study of an early member of the Tosa School in Tosa Mitsunobu and the Small Scroll in Medieval Japan, and Charles Dempsey examines Stuart Lingo’s book on Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting. Erika Naginski’s Sculpture and Enlightenment, which looks at how historical forces and philosophical debated affected public funerary monuments in eighteenth-century France, is reviewed by Satish Padiyar. Finally, Karen Beckman considers Flesh of My Flesh, the latest book by the film theorist and art historian Kaja Silverman.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The final Art Bulletin for 2010 will be published in December.

The combined March–June 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The central scene of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas graces the cover and introduces the issue’s Interventions essay series. Byron Ellsworth Hamann applies postcolonial and materialist strategies in “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay” to consider the artist’s masterpiece within a transatlantic visual archive. A group of six scholars from such diverse disciplines as Precolumbian studies, Romance studies and literature, art history, and Aztec and Spanish colonial art respond to Hamann’s article with texts of their own.

The issue features two other major essays. In “Family Space: Buddhist Materiality and Ancestral Fashioning in Mogao Cave 231,” Winston Kyan considers the diverse integration of family references into the visual program of ninth-century Buddhist Mogao caves at Dunhuang, which marked a turning point in the construction of religious space in medieval China. For “Portrait of Luca Pacioli and Disciple: A New, Mathematical Look,” Renzo Baldasso examines the famous painting as a statement about the achievements of mathematical humanists as well as the subject of mathematics as a mode of thinking, as court activity, and as a form of education.

In the reviews section, Rebecca Zorach evaluates Margaret D. Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries, and Jonathan Unglaub examines Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art. In addition, Joel Smith reviews the history and evolution of the notion of objectivity as presented in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next two Art Bulletins for 2010 will appear in September and December.

The December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

For the first time, a work of twenty-first-century art graces the cover of the esteemed journal—Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Andries Stilte (2005). The painting accompanies an essay by Krista Thompson exploring how contemporary artists such as Wiley and Luis Gispert combine the visual language of hip-hop with late Renaissance and Baroque painting techniques.

Four essays precede Thompson’s. Leading off is Michael Schreffler, who analyzes how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards described the practice of Aztec painting by looking through the lens of European art theory. Next, Emma Barker contends that Jean-Baptiste Greuze evokes both the innocence and vulnerability of children in his A Child Playing with a Dog, while implicating the viewer in the child’s fate.

Matthew Rampley’s essay expresses an opposing view of the Vienna school of art history, not as progressive and aesthetically liberal, but as a proponent of an imperialist outlook, related to the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary in the early-twentieth-century. The next contributor is Roberta Wue, who investigates the ways late-nineteenth-century Chinese artists positioned themselves in the marketplace through the classifieds in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. She also examines the changing relationship between artists and urban audiences in the late Qing era.

The December issue of The Art Bulletin also contains six reviews of books about tapestries at the Tudor court, engravings of Native American Indians, the gardens of Versailles and panoramic landscape painting, Buckminster Fuller, Tony Conrad, and issues on museum ownership of antiquities. Please read the full table of contents for more details.

The September 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

Five articles make up the issue. Leading off is Rachel Kousser’s “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” which argues that in the way it was commemorated, the Persians’ sack of the Acropolis in 480 BCE took on paradigmatic significance as an example of “Oriental violence.” Next is a text by Elena Boeck, who in “Simulating the Hippodrome: The Performance of Power in Kiev’s St. Sophia” analyzes strategies of display, appropriation, and simulation of Byzantine imperial symbols by Prince Iaroslav “the Wise” in the paintings of the hippodrome in Kiev’s St. Sophia.

In “Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity,” Lynn F. Jacobs interrogates the miraculous thresholds of this work by Peter Paul Rubens, which negotiate relations between the donors and God and between the meanings inherent in the life and theology of Christ. Her essay is followed by “Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff’s Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses,” in which Brendan Cole examines the work of Fernand Khnopff from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—of duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings.

Last, Phoebe Wolfskill’s “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden” evaluates the perplexing appearance of racial caricature in compositions by these two “New Negro” Renaissance painters and considers how pervasive stereotypes might inform self-perception. Hayden’s Nous quatre à Paris from ca. 1930 is the cover image for this issue.

Also included are seven reviews of books on Romanesque Partheny, Castilian culture, Inigo Jones, Utamaro, science in art, and more. Please read the full table of contents for more details.