CAA News Today
CAA Joins Task Force on University Galleries and Museums
posted by Christopher Howard — Sep 01, 2009
In response to troubling trends in university museums and galleries—including the sale of Maier Art Museum paintings by Randolph College, the closure of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the threat of sale of important modernist works at Fisk University—a task force was formed that includes CAA, the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, and the Kress Foundation to address ways to educate university trustees about the educational value of university museums and to explore protective avenues. A petition was circulated to various associations and also set up online, which received several thousand signatures—including many from CAA members. The petition will be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education later this fall. Quiet conversations are continuing with Brandeis trustees, and several university accreditation commissions have been apprised of the concerns of the task force and the visual-arts field.
On the same topic, caa.reviews recently published an essay entitled “Curricular Connections: The College/University Art Museum as Site for Teaching and Learning.” The author, Laurel Bradley, who is director of exhibitions and curator of the College Art Collection at Carleton College, provides a brief history of university museums and galleries since the mid-twentieth century before exploring several recent initiatives—some funded by the Mellon Foundation’s College and University Art Museum Program—that combine academic and curatorial teaching and education in novel, and often successful, ways.
Summer Obituaries in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 12, 2009
CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, art historians, curators, photographers, architects, and other professionals and important figures in the visual arts.
- H. T. Cadbury-Brown, a British modernist architect, died on July 9, 2009. He was 96
- James Conlon, director of the Visual Media Center at Columbia University, died on July 17, 2009, at the age of 37
- Merce Cunningham, an avant-garde choreographer and dancer, died on July 26, 2009. He was 90
- Michael Dailey, a painter and teacher based in Seattle, died on August 9, 2009, at the age of 71
- Julian Dashper, a New Zealand artist, died on July 30, 2009. He was 49
- Heinz Edelmann, an illustrator and professor who worked on the film Yellow Submarine, died on July 21, 2009, at the age of 75
- Kenneth Garlick, a scholar and keeper of Western art at the Ashmolean Museum, died on July 22, 2009, at age 92
- Charles Gwathmey, an American modernist architect, died on August 3, 2009, at the age of 71
- Earl Haig, a British soldier and painter, died on July 9, 2009. He was 91
- Otto Heino, a Californian potter and educator, died on July 16, 2009, at the age of 94
- Francisco Hidalgo, a Spanish-born French cartoonist and photographer, died on July 25, 2009. He was 80
- Ingeborg Hunzinger, a German sculptor, died on July 19, 2009. She was 94
- Marcey Jacobson, a self-taught photographer who worked in Mexico, died on July 26, 2009, at age 97
- Bill Jay, a photographer, writer, and former editor of Creative Camera, died on May 10, 2009, at age 68
- Amos Kenan, an Israeli writer and artist, died on August 4, 2009, at the age of 82
- Tamara Krikorian, a video artist and public-art curator in Wales, died on July 11, 2009. She was 65
- John Lidzey, an English artist and teacher who was known for his watercolors, died on April 5, 2009, at age 74
- Michael Martin, a New York graffiti artist known as Iz the Wiz, died on June 17, 2009. He was 50
- Cecile McCann, a Californian artist and publisher of Artweek magazine, died on July 2, 2009. She was 91
- Tyeb Mehta, a major painter in postcolonial modern art in India, died on July 1, 2009, at the age of 84
- Leo Mol, a renowned Canadian sculptor, died on July 4, 2009, at the age of 94
- Charles Huntley Nelson, an artist and professor of art at Morehouse College, died on July 30, 2009. He was 39
- Joan O’Mara, a professor of art history at Washington and Lee University, died on May 24, 2009, at the age of 63
- Chris Plowman, a British artist and teacher, died in mid-July 2009. He was 56
- Constantine Raitzky, a former exhibition designer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died on June 29, 2009, at age 78
- Julius Shulman, a photographer of modernist architecture, died on July 15, 2009, at the age of 98
- Dash Snow, a New York–based artist, died on July 13, 2009. He was 27
Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.
Getty Posts Session Audio from 2009 CAA Conference
posted by Emmanuel Lemakis — Jul 23, 2009
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has posted free audio recordings from eight 2009 Annual Conference sessions that took place at the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The audio can be streamed online or downloaded for playback on a computer or MP3 player. File sizes range from 41 to 142 MB.
Here are the sessions:
- “That Captured Instant of Time: Realism and Drama in Baroque Sculpture,” chaired by Catherine Hess
- “Luxury Devotional Books and Their Female Owners,” chaired by Thomas Kren and Richard Leson
- “What We Talk about When We Talk about Artist’s Books,” chaired by Marcia Reed
- “European Drawings, 1400–1900,” chaired by Lee Hendrix and Stephanie Schrader
- “Networks and Boundaries,” chaired by Thomas Gaehtgens
- “Cabinet Pictures in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” chaired by Andreas Henning
- “The Medieval Manuscript Transformed,” chaired by Kristen Collins and Christine Sciacca
- “The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria,” chaired by Karol Wight
The sessions are among several Highlights of Past Programs, which also include videos of interviews with the artists Jim Dine and Robert Irwin. The Getty’s Museum Symposia section makes available papers from a 2006 symposium, “Looking at the Landscapes: Courbet and Modernism.”
CAA offers audio recordings from many other 2009 conference sessions, as well as from other recent conferences. Please visit CAA’s Conference Audio Recordings for more information.
Timothy Rub to Direct the Philadelphia Museum of Art
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 29, 2009
Timothy Rub has been named George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rub, who has been director and chief executive officer of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio since 2006, begins work at the Pennsylvania museum in September. The fifty-seven-year-old succeeds Anne d’Harnoncourt, who died on June 1, 2008.
In Cleveland, Rub guided the museum’s comprehensive capital project and fundraising campaign, oversaw the reinstallation of its extensive holdings of European and American art in its renovated 1916 building and new East Wing, and brought to completion the first phase of its seven-year renovation and expansion project designed by the renowned architect Rafael Viñoly. He also initiated a strategic-planning process, managed the development of a touring exhibitions program that sent shows generated from the museum’s collection to Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, Munich, and a number of venues in Canada and the United States.
A specialist in architecture and modern art, Rub also directed the Cincinnati Art Museum from 2000 to 2006, led the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, from 1991 to 1999, and was a Ford Foundation Fellow and then curator at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York from 1983 to 1987.
At the Hood Museum of Art, his exhibitions and catalogues include The Age of the Marvelous; Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens, and Jose Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1928–1934; in Cincinnati, he produced Petra: Lost City of Stone.
Rub received a bachelor’s degree in art history, cum laude with highest honors, from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont; a master’s degree in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University; and a master’s degree in public and private management from Yale University.
Photo: Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photograph by Kelly & Massa and provided by the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Summer 2009 Art Journal Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 17, 2009
The Summer 2009 issue of Art Journal has just been published. It will be mailed to those individual CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.
“The marginalization of time-based projects in histories of twentieth-century art is overdetermined,” writes the editor-in-chief Judith F. Rodenbeck in her introduction, “as has long been recognized, by the movement of the human body and, in the case of dance, by gender.” The five essays in the current issue reconsider those margins and offer more inclusive points of view.
Featured in the order of their appearance are: Juliet Bellow, “Fashioning Cléopâtre: Sonia Delaunay’s New Woman”; Nell Andrew, “Living Art: Akarova and the Belgian Avant-Garde”; Kate Elswit, “Accessing Unison in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility”; Janice Ross, “Atomizing Cause and Effect: Ann Halprin’s 1960s Summer Dance Workshops”; and Philip Glahn, “Brechtian Journeys: Yvonne Rainer’s Film as Counterpublic Art.”
Obama Intends to Nominate Jim Leach as NEH Chairman
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 04, 2009
Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate former Republican Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Obama said, “I am confident that with Jim as its head, the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue on its vital mission of supporting the humanities and giving the American public access to the rich resources of our culture. Jim is a valued and dedicated public servant and I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead.”
Jim Leach served as a member of the US House of Representatives for the state of Iowa for thirty years. He founded and cochaired the Congressional Humanities Caucus, which is dedicated to advocating on behalf of the humanities in the House and to raising the profile of humanities in the United States. The caucus worked to promote and preserve humanities programs and commissions such as the Historical Publications and Records Commission. Leach and his cofounder, Rep. David Price, received the Sidney R. Yates Award for Distinguished Public Service to the Humanities from the National Humanities Alliance in 2005. During his tenure in Congress, Leach also served as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (1995-2001), a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations, and chairman of the committee’s Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (2001-6). In addition, Leach is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the vice chairman of the Century Foundation’s board of trustees and has served on the boards of the Social Sciences Research Council, ProPublica, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Kettering Foundation. Since leaving Congress in 2007, he has taught at Princeton University and served as the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Obama Intends to Nominate Jim Leach as NEH Chairman
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 04, 2009
Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate former Republican Congressman Jim Leach as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Obama said, “I am confident that with Jim as its head, the National Endowment for the Humanities will continue on its vital mission of supporting the humanities and giving the American public access to the rich resources of our culture. Jim is a valued and dedicated public servant and I look forward to working with him in the months and years ahead.”
Jim Leach served as a member of the US House of Representatives for the state of Iowa for thirty years. He founded and cochaired the Congressional Humanities Caucus, which is dedicated to advocating on behalf of the humanities in the House and to raising the profile of humanities in the United States. The caucus worked to promote and preserve humanities programs and commissions such as the Historical Publications and Records Commission. Leach and his cofounder, Rep. David Price, received the Sidney R. Yates Award for Distinguished Public Service to the Humanities from the National Humanities Alliance in 2005. During his tenure in Congress, Leach also served as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (1995-2001), a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations, and chairman of the committee’s Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (2001-6). In addition, Leach is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the vice chairman of the Century Foundation’s board of trustees and has served on the boards of the Social Sciences Research Council, ProPublica, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Kettering Foundation. Since leaving Congress in 2007, he has taught at Princeton University and served as the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
June 2009 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 02, 2009
The June 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.
On the cover is a detail of a pillowcase designed ca. 1916 by the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, which accompanies an essay by Bibiana Obler that considers the difference between Taeuber’s and Hans Arp’s public and private identities through a set of collaborative and closely related works and why they kept their most “advanced” work to themselves.
For her contribution, Stephanie Leitch investigates Hans Burgkmair’s images of non-Western communities in the woodcut frieze The Peoples of Africa and India (1508), which neither played into iconographic presets nor invented new stereotypes. Two more essays round out the issue: Norma Broude explores the political dynamics of gender informing the intentions, subjects, production, and reception of Giambattista Tiepolo’s frescoes for the palazzina of the Villa Valmarana, and Laura Morowitz examines the extraordinary popularity and religious undercurrents of the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy’s paintings Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha in late-nineteenth-century America.
The June issue of The Art Bulletin also contains reviews of books on Chinese epigraphy, Giovanni Bellini, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Marcel Duchamp. Please read the full table of contents for more details.
Call for Art Journal Texts on “the Contemporary”
posted by Christopher Howard — May 05, 2009
Katy Siegel is incoming editor-in-chief of Art Journal and associate professor of art history at Hunter College, City University of New York.
During my tenure as editor-in-chief of Art Journal, I would like to publish a wide-ranging series that assesses contemporary art—its making, exhibition, criticism, history, and social uses. This series could include the kind of state-of-the-field essays that have traditionally been written about historical areas of study for The Art Bulletin. It could also mean more focused historiographic subjects, such as the evolution of “the contemporary” or the rise and fall of postmodernism. Or theoretical discussions of, for example, the relationships between the modern and the contemporary (questions of periodization being of special interest), or more speculative considerations of the changing role of contemporary art in current economic, technological, and social conditions.
I welcome approaches that are ambitious and generalizing, but since “the contemporary” is not really a single unified disciplinary object, I am also seeking writing that is partisan and partial, local and medium-specific. While one person might approach postmodernism from a historical perspective, as an object in the past, another might argue for its continuing validity under current conditions. Different authors might investigate the social meaning of “the contemporary” as opposed to the modern in particular countries at particular moments (the US at midcentury, China today), or for particular institutions, such as the museum, biennial exhibition, or university/college course.
I would like to hear from curators, teachers, critics, and artists about their own concrete experiences in relation to these large, abstract questions. I am interested not only in a wide range of topics, but also a diversity of approaches to those topics: art criticism, discussions, shorter polemical essays, and artists’ projects are all possibilities in addition to the scholarly article.
For more information, please write to katy.siegel@gmail.com.
Hans A. Lüthy: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Apr 09, 2009
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu works in the Department of Art, Music, and Design at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and June Hargrove teaches nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Hans A. Lüthy
With the death of Hans A. Lüthy, on March 8, 2009, art history has lost a scholar and a leader, a catalyst whose vision and philanthropy contributed to the growth of the discipline in Europe and America.
Born in 1932, Lüthy studied art history in Zurich, where he wrote a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Swiss landscape painter Johann Jakob Ulrich II (1965). In 1963, he was appointed director of the Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft (SIK), or Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zürich, a position that he would hold for more than thirty years. Founded in 1951, the SIK became a major research institute under his directorship, the influence of which was felt both at home and abroad. Lüthy, indeed, pursued a two-pronged agenda: one, to research Switzerland’s artistic patrimony and to disseminate that research through exhibitions and publications; and, two, to promote Swiss art abroad, particularly in the United States. He was responsible for the organization of several exhibitions of Swiss art in the US, including From Liotard to Le Corbusier: 200 Years of Swiss Painting, 1730–1930 in the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and monographic exhibitions of the works of Ferdinand Hodler. His energy and commitment brought a new dimension to the awareness of Swiss art here.
Lüthy’s scholarly pursuits were focused on nineteenth-century French art, and he maintained an active publishing career, which included numerous articles for the press, notably the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Since his retirement in 1994, Lüthy remained actively involved in art history. Through a private foundation, he and his wife, Marianne (Mascha), funded several research and writing projects. One of these was Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which would not have come into being if not for his generous start-up grant. For this, the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art owes him a debt of gratitude. The couple also contributed a scholarship to the Centre allemande d’histoire de l’art (Deutsche Forum für Kunstgeschichte) in Paris.
At the same time, he began to collect art. As a collector his taste tended to French neoclassical and Romantic drawings, a predilection that was no doubt related to his life-long interest in the work of Théodore Géricault. He also assembled a small but significant collection of sculpture of the same period. A selection of drawings and sculpture from his collection was exhibited in 2002 in the Kunstmuseum in Bern, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
During the past few years, Lüthy’s ill health prevented him from staying in touch with many former friends and acquaintances. Those who knew him, and I am sure there are many of us in the US, remember him fondly for his genuine kindness, his enthusiasm, and his generosity of spirit. He was a raconteur and bon vivant whose presence enlivened many an occasion, scholarly and otherwise. He will be much missed.