CAA News Today

The December 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the fourth installment of a feature series that will continue through at least 2013. In Regarding Art and Art History, Rebecca Zorach reflects on politics and teaching. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is detail, with twelve texts by artists, scholars, professors, conservators, and archaeologists: Susan Hiller, Spike Bucklow, Johannes Endres, Carlo Ginzburg, Joan Kee, Spyros Papapetros, Adrian Rifkin, Joanna Roche, Nina Rowe, Alain Schnapp, Blake Stimson, and Robert Williams. The Interview presents the German art historian Horst Bredekamp in conversation with the American scholar Christopher Wood. An installation view of Hiller’s Witness (2002), as seen as Tate London, appears on the cover.

The opening three long-form essays address the art of Italy. The first, by J. Keith Doherty, offers a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings. Robert Glass’s contribution, “Filarete’s Hilaritas: Claiming Authorship and Status on the Doors of St. Peter’s,” is a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor’s bronze relief on the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. David M. Stone’s article, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood,” considers the artist’s signature in his Beheading of Saint John the Baptist from 1608. Luisa Elena Alcalá’s “‘A Call to Action’: Visual Persuasion in a Spanish American Painting” analyzes a Central American painting from the mid-1680s sent to Madrid from Mexico as a tactic to lobby for continued royal support. Finally, Philip Cottrell explores the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf, who organized the celebrated exhibition Art Treasures of the United Kingdom in Manchester in 1857.

The Reviews section leads off with David J. Roxburgh’s take on the new galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next, Elizabeth Hill Boone considers Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, and Jesús Escobar looks at Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. Nicola Suthor’s book Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei der Frühen Neuzeit is appraised by Andreas Beyer, and Molly Emma Aitken’s study The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, is evaluated by Pika Ghosh. The section concludes with Michael Leja’s assessment of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

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 March 2013, will feature essays on the strategic use of microarchitecture in Christian ivory carvings of the thirteenth century, perspectival “distortions” in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, and appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911, which trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art.

The September 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the third installment of its new feature series that will continue for two more volume years. In Regarding Art and Art History, Richard Shiff analyzes the role of interpretation in writing about art through the prism of Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg’s different approaches to the topic. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is contingency, with texts by eleven artists, scholars, professors, and philosophers: Linda Connor, Giovanna Borradori, Marcia Brennan, Mary Ann Doane, Angus Fletcher, Peter Geimer, Gloria Kury, Mark Ledbury, C. Brian Rose, Frances Spalding, and Chris Spring. A photograph based on Connor’s 2010 film Fireworks for the Virgin, shot in Peru, appears on the cover.

In the issue’s Interview, James Ackerman converses with Cammy Brothers about how recent trips to Turkey, Egypt, and India have affected his outlook on teaching architectural history. Ackerman, editor of The Art Bulletin from 1956 to 1959, also describes his formative years as a student at Yale University and his teaching career at Harvard University.

The September issue also features four essays that cover a wide range of art-historical topics and time periods. Jaś Elsner explores a transformative moment in the eighth century, when the icon was considered entirely as representation, and analyzes the debates that precipitated this moment among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagans. In her essay “Francesco Rosselli’s Lost View of Rome: An Urban Icon and Its Progeny,” Jessica Maier reconstructs Rosselli’s monumental engraving of Rome and analyzes the work as a marker of high innovation in Renaissance print culture. Elizabeth Kindall discusses how the seventeenth-century Chinese artist Huang Xiangjian moved to an experiential reading of the handscroll format and how this shift from a traditional, linear reading culminated in a panoramic “grand view.” In his essay “Architecture and Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the ‘Case,’” Frederic J. Schwartz takes a close look at two widely publicized trials involving the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos, demonstrating the implications of these encounters with criminality for Loos’s architecture practice and theory and their importance in the wider public sphere.

The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Philippe Morel assesses Alessandro Nova’s The Book of the Wind: The Representation of the Invisible, and Carl Brandon Strehlke reviews eight books published within the last seven years on the Italian Renaissance painter Giotto. Ariella Azoulay looks at Martin A. Berger’s Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. Finally, Matthew Simms reviews two new volumes on Willem de Kooning, Richard Shiff’s Between Sense and de Kooning and the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 retrospective of the artist, edited by John Elderfield, the exhibition’s curator.

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 2012, will feature Rebecca Zorach’s reflections on politics and teaching in Regarding Art and Art History, the texts collected in Notes from the Field will be on the topic of detail, and the Interview will feature a conversation between the German art historian Horst Bredekamp and Christopher Wood. The long-form essays include a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings; a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor Filarete’s Hilaritas, a bronze relief on the doors of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican; a consideration of Caravaggio’s signature in Beheading of Saint John the Baptist; an analysis of a Central American painting from the mid-1680s; and an exploration of the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Islamic museum installation, Inka stonework, Andean architecture, European painterly virtuosity, Rajput painting, and a new American museum.

The cover image of the June 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin shows the unmistakable signature style of the contemporary artist Georg Baselitz, who has also written the lead text for the issue’s Notes from the Field. In this section, nine scholars from divergent fields—among them Kirk Ambrose, Elizabeth Edwards, Cordula Grewe, Daniel Heller-Roazen, and Ian McLean—join the artist in writing on the theme of appropriation. The June issue presents the second installment of new features in The Art Bulletin, sections that will continue for several years in the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In Regarding Art and Art History, Andrew Hemingway revisits his early fascination with a John Constable painting, Chain Pier, Brighton (1826–27), and describes how the work has shaped his methodological approach to writing art history. Finally, in a wide-ranging interview with Dan Karlholm, the art historian Linda Nochlin discusses her five-decade career.

The June Art Bulletin features four essays that cover a wide range of topics and time periods in the history of art. Sonya S. Lee examines the role of patronage and appropriation in tenth-century Dunhuang through her analysis of the pictorial program of Cave 61 at Mogao in northwestern China. Kishwar Rizvi’s article explores the dynamic relationship between image and text in the 1605 manuscript Shahnama (Book of Kings) and how the folio’s paintings can be viewed as a surrogate portrait of the charismatic king, Shah ‘Abbas. Next, Katherine M. Kuenzli explores the “total work of art” that is Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theater Building and its role in shaping German modernism and national identity before and after World War I. In “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture: A Tale of Two Guitars,” Christine Poggi analyzes the artist’s 1912 paper Guitar as a modernist masterpiece unto itself, and not merely as the model for subsequent versions made from sheet metal; Poggi’s essay also features unusual new photographs of several paper sculptures that she discusses.

In the Reviews section, Cammy Brothers assesses Marvin Trachtenberg’s book, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion, and Diane H. Bodart reviews two books, Joanna Woodall’s Anthonis Mor: Art and Authority and Laura R. Bass’s The Drama of the Portrait: Theatre and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. Then, Victor I. Stoichita looks at Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio, and Jonathan Hay discusses Craig Clunas’s approach to Chinese art history through a reading of five of his recent books on the subject. Finally, Barbara Wittmann reviews two catalogues—The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Reconsidering Gérôme—that accompanied a 2011 exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Please see the full table of contents for June 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 September 2012, will feature the art historian Richard Shiff on the concept of interpretation in Regarding Art and Art History, “contingency” as the topic in Notes from the Field, and an interview with the architectural historian James S. Ackerman. The long-form essays will examine iconoclasm and the image as representation in the eighth century, Francesco Rosselli’s engravings and the development of print culture in Renaissance Italy, seventeenth-century Chinese handscroll painting, and the trials of the modern Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Giotto, Willem de Kooning, civil rights, photography, and the image of the wind.

Three new series of features are introduced in the March 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin. They will appear in the next two volume years of the journal, along with the long-form essays and reviews that have made it the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship. In her introductory editor’s note, Karen Lang writes that she created the new features “to reflect the vibrancy of art history today and to stimulate dialogue across fields and with neighboring disciplines.”

In the first new series, “Regarding Art and Art History,” a leading scholar offers a short personal reflection on what it means to write art history; the inaugural writer is Anne M. Wagner, whose essay takes the form of a letter. “Notes from the Field” will present short texts on a given topic by ten authors from a variety of disciplines; the first topic is anthropomorphism, with texts by the artist Elizabeth King, the philosopher J. M. Bernstein, and eight other scholars, including Finbarr Barry Flood, Jane Garnett, and James Meyer. Each issue will feature an interview as well; the first is a dialogue between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the art historian Philip Ursprung. Julia Gelshorn launches the feature with a critical essay on the techniques, strategies, and study of the artist interview.

The March issue also features three essays on diverse topics. In “Henry Fuseli: Greek Tragedy and Cultural Pluralism,” Andrei Pop examines the art of the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli in relation to the eighteenth-century revival of Greek tragedy and the formation of the modern liberal version of cultural pluralism. Yukio Lippit’s article, “Of Modes and Manners in Japanese Ink Painting: Sesshū’s Splashed Ink Landscape of 1495,” explores a single work by the Zen monk painter Sesshū Tōyō in the context of the ink painting tradition and artistic transmission in medieval Japan. In her essay, “Agent Provocateur? The African Origin and American Life of a Statue from Côte d’Ivoire,” Monica Blackmun Visonà studies the “biography” of a statue, sculpted near the Lagoon region of Ivory Coast and later donated to Fisk University by Georgia O’Keeffe, as a microcosm of American art history in the twentieth century.

In the Reviews section, Sheila Dillon evaluates Richard Neer’s book, The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, and Julian Gardner considers The Likeness of the King: A Prehistory of Portraiture in Late Medieval France by Stephen Perkinson. Next, Gerhard Wolf looks at the temporality of Renaissance art as described in Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronistic Renaissance. Finally, Marc Fumaroli reviews Walter S. Melion’s book, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print (1550–1625).

Please see the full table of contents for March 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 June 2012, will feature a “Notes from the Field” section on appropriation and an interview with the art historian Linda Nochlin. The long-form essays will examine artifacts from a tenth-century cave in northwestern China, portraiture and narrative in the 1605 Shahnama (Book of Kings), theater architecture in the 1914 Werkbund exhibition, and Pablo Picasso’s 1912 paper construction Guitar. The Reviews section will include analyses of books on Caravaggio, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Spanish portraiture, the art of early modern China, and the temporality of architecture.