CAA News Today

The September 2013 Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the third issue of the journal’s centennial year. In the opening text, “Regarding Art and Art History,” David Summers traces his career as a trajectory of changing perspectives on art history. For the “Notes from the Field” section, eleven authors—Eric Fischl, Jan Assmann, Malcolm Bull, Darby English, Ludmilla Jordanova, Mary Miller, Steven Nelson, Ajay Sinha, Gloria Sutton, Gerrit Walczak, and David E. Wellbery—ponder the role of time in art. The September “Interview” features Partha Miller and Keith Moxey discussing the emergence of a world art history.

In his essay “Graphic Knowledge,” Peter Parshall analyzes Albrecht Dürer’s treatise on human proportion to reveal a fear of the transgressing power of imagination that, he argues, ultimately hobbled the artist and his legacy. Next, Matthew M. Reeve explores Horace Walpole’s neo-Gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, showing the role of the eighteenth-century Englishman’s sexuality in the design and reception of the house. In “Rhetorics of Place and Empire in the Fountain Sculpture of 1830s Havana,” Paul B. Niell examines the reconfiguration of international forms, iconography, and materials in three public fountains erected in Cuba during the 1830s to show how a burgeoning Atlantic world city negotiated its relation with the Spanish Empire and its emerging distinctiveness as a local setting. Finally, Namiko Kunimoto considers the Japanese artist Tanaka Atsuko’s Electric Dress in relation to a changing urban and industrial context in postwar Japan that provoked shifts in the status of gender, underscoring the frailty of female subjectivity.

In a “Centennial Review Essay,” H. Perry Chapman discusses what she calls the “problem with artists” by reconsidering two influential books: Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (1934); and Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower’s Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists; A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (1963). Then, Jacqueline E. Jung assesses Herbert L. Kessler and David Nirenberg’s edited volume, Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, alongside Nina Rowe’s The Jew, the Cathedral, and the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century. Last, Peter Chametzky considers a recent exhibition and publishing project on a German art critic, which includes Konstanze Rudert’s catalogue, In the Network of Modernism: Kirchner, Braque, Kandinsky, and Klee … Richter, Bacon, Altenbourg, and Their Critic Will Grohmann, and Rudert and Volkmar Billig’s anthology, Will Grohmann: Texte zur Kunst der Moderne.

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 December 2013, will feature essays on the artists Frederic Church and Awa Tsireh, Vasari’s alleged account of Roman Jews “adoring” Michelangelo’s Moses, and the contested status of color in Indian nationalism, among other topics.

As you may already know, 2013 marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s first print publication and a preeminent scholarly journal for the history of art and visual studies. The Art Bulletin covers the full range of art history in essays by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of art. Essays from The Art Bulletin have been staples in art-history courses at colleges and universities for decades, and the journal continues to support exemplary scholarship in all areas of art history.

In honor of this important anniversary, CAA invites you to make a contribution to the Art Bulletin Publication Fund. Contributions of $50 or more made before July 1, 2013, will be acknowledged with a special thank you in the September issue, and contributions of $250 or more will be acknowledged in four consecutive issues and on the CAA website for twelve months.

Please join CAA in celebrating The Art Bulletin’s longstanding excellence as a leader in art-historical scholarship. We look forward to many years to come.

The March 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, launches the celebration of its centennial year. Gracing the cover is a photograph by the artist Martha Rosler that depicts the installation of her traveling library at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2007. Karen Lang, the journal’s editor-in-chief, writes of this image: “These days … it remains unclear whether a ‘library user’ would hunker down with a book or nestle in for a session on a laptop…. Rosler invites us to consider how we interact with books. Her artwork makes us conscious of this activity and of the status of the book itself.”

In a brief essay, Craig Clunas ponders the conditions of seeing and description in “Regarding Art and Art History.” This issue’s “Notes from the Field” features short essays on the topic of materiality by Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. The March interview brings Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, into conversation with her fellow scholar Stephen Melville.

In the opening essay, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Sarah M. Guérin uncovers the strategic use of microarchitectural frames in sacred ivory carvings of thirteenth-century Western Europe. Next, in the evocatively titled “Ingres’s Shadows,” Sarah Betzer demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French artist’s depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication Museé français relate to philosophical considerations of sensory experience, revealing the distinctly modern terms of its allure for the artist.

Paul Smith examines the perspectival distortions in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, that is, the rejection of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life. Yi Gu’s essay “What’s in a Name?” studies the appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911 to trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art. Finally, Leora Maltz-Leca explores relations between William Kentridge’s ambulatory animation process and local imagery of striding figures as allegories of political regime change in South Africa.

The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Robert H. Sharf examines Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache, a collection of lectures delivered by the late scholar Helmut Brinker at the Spencer Museum of Art. An-Yi Pan assesses The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-nin D. Lee, the first book-length study on a well-known handscroll, and Leo G. Mazow evaluates Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturalism in American Art, 1890–1915. John Ott’s review considers three recent books on race and art: Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject; Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller; and Jacqueline Francis’s Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America.

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 June 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of H. W. Janson’s classic survey text History of Art.