CAA News Today

The December 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, features essays on the portraiture of nuns in colonial Mexico, the sociological context of Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and Federico Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary.

The December issue publishes four essays on diverse topics. For “Inventing the Exegetical Stained-Glass Window,” Conrad Rudolph studies the reintroduction of allegory in an art program established by Abbot Suger in the twelfth century for St-Denis in France, finding that it culminated in the construction of a new elite art for the literate layperson. In “Ancient Prototypes Reinstated,” Livia Stoenescu demonstrates the self-conscious medievialism in Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary (1594) and the artist’s intention of inscribing its narrative within a Christocentric image. In “Clad in Flowers: Indigenous Arts and Knowledge in Colonial Mexican Convents,” James M. Córdova examines the flowery trappings depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of nuns in New Spain. For her essay, Christine M. E. Guth explores the sociocultural context of Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830–33) to reveal it as a site for Japan’s shifting geopolitical circumstances between the 1790s and the 1860s.

In the Reviews section, two writers consider three books on the history of Asian art. Douglas Osto explores Buddhist visual culture through Andy Rotman’s Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism and Cynthea J. Bogel’s With a Single Glance: Buddhist Icon and Early Mikkyō Vison, and Melanie Trede evaluates Alicia Volk’s In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art. Bissera V. Pentcheva considers acoustics and architecture in Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti’s Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics, while Étienne P. H. Jollet reviews Frank Fehrenbach’s study of Roman Baroque fountains, Compendia Mundi: Gianlorenzo Berninis “Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi” (1648–51) und Nicola Salvis “Fontana di Trevi” (1732–62). Gregory Batchen offers a take on national histories of photography through two recent books: Maria Golia’s Photography and Egypt and Karen Strassler’s Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java.

Please see the full table of contents for December 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 March 2012, will include essays on the Zen monk painter Sesshū Tōyō, the art of Henri Fuseli, the “biography” of a statute sculpted in or near the Lagoon region of Ivory Coast. The issue also inaugurates a new feature, “Regarding Art and Art History,” comprising field notes on the topic of anthropomorphism by various authors and a critical essay on the interview format, followed by a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philip Ursprung.

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.

Essays in the June 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Philip Guston, Edgar Degas, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A fifth essay on aesthetics and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members. The issue is dedicated to the memory of the late Anne L. Schroder, an expert on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art; one of her final essays appears in it.

Leading off the issue is Margaret A. Sullivan’s article that uncovers the beginnings of genre in Bruegel’s debt to stoicism, ancient satire, and the art of Pieter Aertsen. Next, Schroder explores Fragonard’s later career through two revived projects, his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) and his unfinished painting series, the Progress of Love. For “Hegel’s Contested Legacy,” Jason Gaiger reexamines the Hegelian inheritance in art history in light of newly published transcripts of the lectures on aesthetics and, in doing so, raises broader questions about the concourse between art history and philosophy.

Looking at French art in the nineteenth century, André Dombrowski reveals layered political and historical significations embedded in Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters. For his contribution, Robert Slifkin finds that Guston’s unsettling return to figuration in the 1960s, which partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” used the disjunction between two moments to comment on the present.

The June 2011 issue includes reviews of two books on humor in Greek vase painting and Roman visual culture, two on Chinese painting, one on medieval Buddhist sculpture, and one on forgery in premodern German art, as well as an exhibition review of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, which appeared in Los Angeles, Nuremberg, and Berlin in 2009–10.

Please see the full table of contents for June for more details. The next issue, to be published in September 2011, will feature essays on Roman mosaic floors, an emblematic Michelangelo cartoon for a fresco, portraiture in France after 1789, and the American painter John Sloan.

Articles in the March 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, examine a range of topics that include the Bocca della Verità in Rome and German painting and Czech Cubism. Two additional essays and a collection of important book reviews round out the issue, which has been mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

In “The Mouth of Truth and Forum Boarium,” Fabio Barry evaluates the Bocca della Verità in Rome from numerous perspectives to recover its origin as an antique drain cover in the form of the god Oceanus, relating the Bocca to the myth of the Romanized Hercules from the reign of Hadrian. Moving to modern times, Eleanor Moseman uses the case study of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Bohumil Kubiša to explore the relation of German painting and Czech Cubism, revealing “style” as a central issue in the international dialogue of the visual arts of early-twentieth-century Central Europe.

Two essays focus on historical Chinese art and culture. In “The Buddha’s Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism,” Robert H. Sharf argues that the “finger bone” relics of the Buddha, discovered in 1987 in a crypt beneath the Famensi (Dharma Gate Monastery) in Shaanxi Province, China, could be considered as “art.” For her contribution, Jeehee Hong examines the peddler as a skeletal puppeteer in Li Song’s thirteenth-century painting, The Skeletons’ Illusory Performance, to unveil a midimperial Chinese visual commentary on the relations among performance, the everyday world, and death.

In the Reviews section, Robert S. Nelson surveys several books on art, architecture, and urbanism in the Turkish capital from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, including Shirine Hamadeh’s The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century and Murat Gül’s The Emergence of Modern Istanbul. Stephen J. Campbell examines the understudied field of Renaissance portrait medals through a recent book and a two-volume catalogue, while Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom consider the implications of Finbarr Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter, a book about the material culture of the region from western Afghanistan to northern India from the eighth to the thirteenth century. Last, Kirk Ambrose reviews the English translation of Friedrich Kittler’s Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, a theoretical study of visuality and technology that considers such topics as Renaissance perspective, photography, film, and television, and the computer.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next issue, to be published in June 2011, will feature essays on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Edgar Degas, and Philip Guston.